Where do writers go for distraction? For me it’s usually into the work of other writers and, when I’m done escaping into fiction, I turn to nonfiction and particularly those writers who write about writing. Why? Because it helps refresh my own writing to read those writing with clarity, insight, and coherence when my own process is in danger of fragmenting. What’s more, many writers write so well about the components of writing - voice, structure, narrative or even something as prosaic as getting started - that I am reassured about what I’m trying to do with my own writing.
Even if you don’t want to be a poet, there’s something about playing with poetic form that I think is useful to any writer because it enables you to explore the use of rhythm, metaphor, simile and other ways of honing your consciousness into literary and written form. It demands specificity of description and uniqueness of voice, and Kate Clanchy’s book - she is herself a published poet, writer but also a teacher - gets to the nub of it through examples and exercise, to emerge a more fluent and confident writer, and in whichever form you choose.
Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you 'how to grow your own poem' . . .
Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written - their own poem.
Kate's big secret is a simple one: is to share other…
I’ve read a lot of horror fiction over the years. It has been something I’ve come back to again and again over the years. Horror is a great way of exploring our fears and dread of what is around us. Sometimes we can’t look at these directly but through the medium of horror stories we can catch a glimpse and gain some understanding.
I’m a 70s kid so the Six Million Dollar Man was a staple of TV viewing but Deathlok, a cyborg created from dying/dead soldier Luther Manning, chilled and thrilled me in equal measures. The idea of waking up in the remains of your shattered body with cold metal taking the place of most flesh and a computer talking in your head: your consciousness, a voice forever trapped in a dead but unable-to-die body was something that struck deep. ‘Alert: human personality reasserting itself. Repress immediately before…’
Col. Luther Manning has been locked in a state of living death. He is no longer a man, but a mockery of a man. He has become an amalgam of reanimated flesh and computer circuitry, stripped of his family, his humanity -- but not his will. He has become Deathlok the Demolisher -- a weapon of war programmed solely for destruction.
Somehow, electrical impulses shoot through our brains to generate a surround sound, 3D-movie experience of the world. How on earth is this possible? When I was a college student, this question burrowed into my brain and wouldn’t get out. So I decided to make a living thinking about it. Now it’s 20 years later, I’m a philosophy professor at Yale-NUS College, and I still don’t know the answer!
Most things are ultimately explained by physics, but what if consciousness isn't? David Chalmers explores the idea that consciousness can't be explained in terms of bits of matter and energy scattered across spacetime; instead, consciousness is another basic part of the universe.
I’m impressed by how Chalmers’s arguments are extremely rigorous, but he also makes them accessible to ordinary people. It’s no surprise that this has become a classic of recent philosophy.
What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning?
David J. Chalmers unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain. Writing in a thought-provoking style, Chalmers proposes that conscious experience must be understood as an irreducible entity similar to such physical properties as time, mass, and space that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the…
Having graduated as a teacher before undertaking an art degree has made me think that art is not just the kind of stuff we encounter in galleries, but it is about creativity in a much broader sense. Two decades in art education and galleries across London have taught me that as creatives and teachers, we do not only teach others, but we all teach each other on our journeys through life. Creativity is intricately woven into the fabric of our lives and the list of books here are some of my favourite books on the subject.
History has had mixed perceptions of Chogyam Trungpa, yet as is implicit in this book, one should not mistake great art for the artist. It is often said that to make it commercially as an artist, you need to be very assertive, yet Trungpa argues that as we insist on asserting our expectations to what we want from ourselves and others in the creative process we become blind to inspiration. He calls such a mindset one of aggression and instead advocates the creative process as being one of non-aggression.
"Dharma art" refers to creative works that spring from the awakened meditative state, characterized by directness, unselfconsciousness, and nonaggression. Trungpa Rinpoche shows that dharma art provides a vehicle to appreciate the nature of things as they are and express it without any struggle or desire to achieve.
As a clinical psychologist I know how critical it is to have someone help you see beyond where you can see yourself. Authors have served that role for me at every stage of my development. It boils down to a pretty simple equation, how we think and feel determines how we behave. The path to different starts in your mind, and books are one of the most successful activators of your thoughts. My path of self-discovery led me to these books and the wisdom within them continue to expand my opportunities. I hope they serve as a launch pad for you.
This book brought me valuable mindset and skillset shifts as promised, but one of the unexpected jewels was the language that it gave me for valuing work.
I have never been good at negotiating the highest salary and therefore had to learn pretty early in my career not to equate my pay with my worth. I received from this book the language that I needed to represent that money is not the only form of payment in a job.
The reader learns that wages are the first paycheck and there are three more. I have learned along the way that my greatest earnings have come from the emotional rewards from my work in the nonprofit sector (2nd paycheck) and the added skills and professional growth gained (3rd paycheck).
It’s Time for a More Conscious Approach to Work. Every day, in offices around the world, people long for a fulfilling career that makes a positive difference. Purpose-driven professionals struggle to connect the dots between what they do every day and the larger impact they want to make in life. If that describes you, no matter the type of organization you work for or your role in it, you can begin growing toward that kind of influence. You can take charge of your day-to-day experiences and radically transform your life at work—all by learning to leverage daily opportunities to grow…
Who knows why, but I have always been enticed by absurdities, paradoxes, incongruities — I use them in my talks, articles, and books — of everyday lives, our humanity, and mysteries of our ‘going on.’ Reflections on being human can be triggered by humour such as Cambridge’sBeyond the Fringe and New York’s sitcom Seinfeld— within which I wallow — as well as by lengthy philosophical works and novels. My work draws on bafflements: for example, shampoo instructions “Lather, rinse, repeat” (making shampoo-ing infinite?); Barmaid to Peter Cook, “Bitter?”, reply being “Just tired”— and Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Yes, I go on.
Many of us, when young, read Looking-Glasswith Carroll’s first work, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it was as an adult, eager to reflect philosophically, that I began to appreciate deep puzzles within our language and consciousness – and these are more prominent in Looking-Glass.
I taught philosophy for many years –oops, not true, I don’t think philosophy can be taught. Rather, I encourage people to step back and think philosophically by confronting paradoxes, using their imagination, and looking beyond appearances. I often recommend Looking-Glassto achieve a sense of bewilderment and the delicious desire to dig into and question everyday assumptions of living.
Alice, who is bored, falls asleep in a chair and dream that it happens on the other side of the mirror of the show. The mirror of the world is both the English countryside, a chessboard, and the upside down world, where you have to run very fast to stay put. Alice came across chess pieces (queen, knight) and characters of children's culture of the Victorian era. One finds in this novel the mix of poetry, humor and nonsense that makes the charm of Lewis Carroll. It is better to know the basic rules of chess to appreciate the subtleties…
I'm a PEN Award-winning historian of alternative spirituality and a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library. I track the impact and substance of supernatural beliefs—a source of fascination since my Queens, NY, boyhood—in books including Occult America, The Miracle Club, and Uncertain Places. I often say that if you do not write your own history, it gets written for you—usually by people who may not care about or even understand the values that emanate from your work. Given my personal dedication to the spiritual search, I call myself a believing historian (which most historians of religion actually are). I labor to explore the lives, ideas, and practices behind esoteric spirituality.
If, after all this, you remain a skeptic—and skeptic, in its classical sense, is a noble term that any of us should gladly claim—scientist Radin sorts out the issues in a manner that reflects both his integrity as a researcher (something that most critics are not) and his humor and skills as a communicator. Radin is, in my estimation, the inheritor of JB Rhine and a tireless seeker after truth in a clinical setting. He is the generational voice of many contemporary parapsychologists and philosophers of consciousness. Radin has personally rescued me from more errors than I can enumerate and in this book he impeccably surveys some of parapsychology’s evidence-based insights—and the social reasons for resistance to them.
Radin draws from his own work at Princeton, Stanford Research Institute, and Fortune 500 companies, as well as his research for the U.S. government, to demonstrate the surprising extent to which the truth of psi has already been tacitly acknowledged and exploited. "The Conscious Universe" also sifts the data for tantalizing hints of how mind and matter are linked. Finally, Radin takes a bold look ahead, to the inevitable social, economic, academic, and spiritual consequences of the mass realization that mind and matter can influence each other without having physical contact.
I am inspired and driven by a lifelong curiosity about the larger framework of complexities and interconnectedness of evolution and its impact on our environment. Since childhood, this fascination has fueled my science career and compelled me to explore various viewpoints on the subject. My aim is not merely to grasp the direction of evolution but to unveil aspects of its driving force, empowering us to become more aware of the diverse avenues available for personal development. I appreciate these books for their valuable insights, which contribute to demystifying our evolutionary path and enriching the importance of mindfulness, intention, and emotional awareness as key components of our growth.
This book holds a prominent place on my most accessible shelf. Veda’s mesmerizing imagery, engaging descriptions, and exploration of knowledge on water-focused activities involving intention, vibration, and consciousness are truly thought-provoking.
I had the pleasure of participating in one of Veda’s workshops, where I experienced water readings through frozen crystallography firsthand. This technique greatly influenced my research and deepened my fascination with water. The underscoring idea that water holds wisdom and life-giving essences paves the way for a new frontier of knowledge and understanding in the future.
The Secret Intelligence of Water takes a quantum leap from the spring board of Masaru Emoto's microscopic work with ice crystals. Through macroscopic photography, and a groundbreaking new technique, researcher Veda Austin, allows us to view water as an intelligent force, with the power to respond to human consciousness in ways never before thought possible.
Focused on the stage between liquid and ice, Veda has spent the last eight years photographing water in a state of 'creation'. She uses influences such as words, thoughts, pictures or music pre freezing, and then captures water's liquid crystal response minutes later. For example,…
Over the past 25 years, I have spent half of my time as a professor of psychology at Cornell University and the second half as a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced. The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science invites a much wider range of methods, theories, and perspectives in studying the mind. My work employs dynamical systems theory, neural network simulations, eye-tracking, and other dense-sampling measures of cognitive processes to reveal how the brain, body, and environment cooperate to generate mental activity. In 2010, I was awarded the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. I have authored two books, The Continuity of Mind, and Who You Are.
Where Andy Clark leaves off, claiming that cognition is extended into the environment via the tools that we use, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein take up claiming that consciousness itself may also be extended into the environment under certain circumstances. Consider that moment when you and someone close to you are both trying to remember the name of some actor from a movie. You both feel like the name is on the tip of your tongues but can’t quite come to a realization. You manage to blurt out the first name but nothing else and then your partner blurts out the last name. As per Andy Clark, this is clearly a case of extended cognition between two people. But is it perhaps also a case of a momentary shared consciousness?
Kirchhoff and Kiverstein first provide a scholarly analytical philosophical treatment of recent iterations of the extended cognition hypothesis primarily to draw the…
In this jointly authored book, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein defend the controversial thesis that phenomenal consciousness is realised by more than just the brain. They argue that the mechanisms and processes that realise phenomenal consciousness can at times extend across brain, body, and the social, material, and cultural world. Kirchhoff and Kiverstein offer a state-of-the-art tour of current arguments for and against extended consciousness. They aim to persuade you that it is possible to develop and defend the thesis of extended consciousness through the increasingly influential predictive processing theory developed in cognitive neuroscience. They show how predictive processing can be given…
I’m an award-winning and bestselling novelist known for writing in a wide variety of genres. My most popular work to date is Lovecraft Country, a supernatural horror novel that served as the basis for the acclaimed HBO series of the same name.
I also love books that combine thrilling adventure stories with the thoughtful exploration of ideas.
The protagonists of this haunting sci-fi/existential horror novel make contact with an alien species that, while highly intelligent, appears to lack any sense of self-awareness. This leads to the scary question: Are the aliens the weird ones in this scenario, or is human consciousness a unique mutation in a universe filled with zombies?
Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us.Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?Send a linguist with multiple - personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his…
