Seeing Ourselves

Seeing Ourselves
Author: Raymond Tallis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Philosophical anthropology
ISBN: 9781788212311

In Seeing Ourselves, philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis goes in search of what kind of beings we are, and where we might find meaning in our lives. Showcasing a remarkably detailed engagement with a huge range of disciplines, Tallis shows the unique nature of human consciousness.

Where We Find Ourselves

Where We Find Ourselves
Author: Margaret Sartor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1469648326

Self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum was born in 1877 in Durham, North Carolina, as its burgeoning tobacco economy put the frontier-like boomtown on the map. As an itinerant portraitist working primarily in North Carolina and Virginia during the rise of Jim Crow, Mangum welcomed into his temporary studios a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse. After his death in 1922, his glass plate negatives remained stored in his darkroom, a tobacco barn, for fifty years. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, the barn was saved at the last moment--and with it, this surprising and unparalleled document of life at the turn of the twentieth century, a turbulent time in the history of the American South. Hugh Mangum's multiple-image, glass plate negatives reveal the open-door policy of his studio to show us lives marked both by notable affluence and hard work, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality, self-creation, and often joy. Seen and experienced in the present, the portraits hint at unexpected relationships and histories and also confirm how historical photographs have the power to subvert familiar narratives. Mangum's photographs are not only images; they are objects that have survived a history of their own and exist within the larger political and cultural history of the American South, demonstrating the unpredictable alchemy that often characterizes the best art--its ability over time to evolve with and absorb life and meaning beyond the intentions or expectations of the artist.

We Are Pilgrims

We Are Pilgrims
Author: VICTORIA. PRESTON
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-04-23
Genre:
ISBN: 9781787383036

Like the migrating animals that our ancient ancestors once followed, we have been making planned long-distance journeys for millennia. What was first a matter of survival in time became a celebration of seasonal abundance--even today, many pilgrim festivals remain tied to the solar-lunar cycle that guided small bands of hunter-gatherers to come together at special times and places. The era when we were all nomads is long gone, but the impulse to undertake a ritual journey remains: each year, 200 million of us embark on a pilgrimage of some kind. These journeys of purpose may involve great hardship, great danger, or half a lifetime of waiting just to begin. Ranging from the Stone Age pilgrims of Anatolia to the New Age pilgrims of California, We Are Pilgrims is a quest to understand what drives this rich and varied human behaviour, unbounded by time or space, faith or identity. Victoria Preston discovers that, whether we set forth in search of comfort or liberation, as an expression of gratitude or devotion, journeys of meaning and purpose are always a powerful reminder that we are each part of something much greater than ourselves.

By self In search of Oneself

By self In search of Oneself
Author: Nitesh Shetty
Publisher: One Align Publisher
Total Pages: 164
Release:
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN:

We all are well aware that birth and death are an undeniable truth, which you can also understand as two sides of a coin. Surely death is certain after birth and after leaving that body, the soul enters into another body and takes birth again, which is predetermined, this is also the rule of law and once the soul leaves the body, it never enters that body again. It enters another body only, that's why it is always said that the one who has left cannot come back. However, birth and death are the play of God, as we all are aware that nothing can happen outside the will of God. I want to let you know through this book that the breathings which we inhale and exhale every moment is a great achievement and miracle for us, but we are not conscious and aware of our breath, we always ignore our this little yet important thing. Because our mind is always busy with the materiality of the outside world, so we have less awareness of our breath. Our breath always serves us inside our body between our birth and death, and always gives us the feeling that I am a body and this body is mine. Every moment in our life, the movement of our breath keeps on changing, but do you know that through our breath, we can go inside our own mind and experience each and every negative and positive disorders of the mind with depth, and can destroy those negative disorders automatically from within. By the constant practice of meditation, being alert and aware of your breath, enter into the depths of your body and know yourself that who am I, what is my work on this earth, am I a guest on this earth for a few years, or am I the permanent owner. If you are excited to know all these questions, then you have to learn the art of meditation and be aware of your breath. If you become aware, then you can feel that wonderful power and connect with universe (God) through your inner energy. By the way, neither I nor anybody has seen God. But the real witness that is with us is our breath, which we feel every moment, but still, we ignore it by not giving importance to it. To know the secret of this breath, we must take millions of births again and again on this earth. But still, we are not able to know our own existence due to the influence of this delusion. Whatever is the subject in this book, some are my own experiences which I have learned, understood, and known, some from others, understood and researched lot. Through this book, I have tried to make you a little aware and tried to explain that what is the importance of our own breath? What is meditation? Why is this meditation needed in our daily life? Meditation is an art that helps to be alert and aware of our breath and through this art, if we practice continuously then we can know ourselves like who I am, where I came from, and what my purpose of being in this life is and how am I related to God. After all, this should be the only aim of all of us and this is possible only through meditation. Our elders always used to say that we should wake up in the morning and firstly thank God, if we remember we have been taught from childhood to start our day by thanking God in the morning. This is a good thing and also a habit. But till today we have neither seen nor tried to know God, yet we thank him because we have full faith in him. But our breath that stays with us from birth till death and breath is our life, can't we wake up in the morning and thank our breath? You can and this is what you have to do. This is what you have to know. The one on whom we have been fully believing till now, through our breath, by going into meditation, we have to search within ourselves with the spirit of witnessing and get a real darshan. When we will see him inside through our breath every day, automatically welfare will start happening in our life. To understand all these topics, one must read this book. And understand all the methods of meditation, one has to discover oneself from oneself and one has to understand and know the truth of life. Otherwise life is wasted and death occurs……………..

The Deep History of Ourselves

The Deep History of Ourselves
Author: Joseph LeDoux
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0735223858

Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.

We are All Completely Beside Ourselves

We are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2013
Genre: Bloomington (Ind.)
ISBN: 0399162097

From the "New York Times"-bestselling author of "The Jane Austen Book Club," the story of an American family, ordinary in every way but one--their close family relative was a chimpanzee.

Being No One

Being No One
Author: Thomas Metzinger
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 896
Release: 2004-08-20
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0262263807

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.

A Scientific Search for Altruism

A Scientific Search for Altruism
Author: C. Daniel Batson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-10-19
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0190651385

For centuries, the egoism-altruism debate has echoed through Western thought. Egoism says that the motivation for everything we do, including our seemingly selfless acts of care for others, is to gain one or another self-benefit. Altruism, while not denying the force of self-interest, says that under certain circumstances we can care for others for their sakes, not our own. Over the past half-century, social psychologists have turned to laboratory experiments on humans to provide a scientific resolution of this debate about our nature. The experiments have focused on the possibility that empathic concern-other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need-produces altruistic motivation to remove that need. With carefully constructed experimental designs, these scientists have tested the nature of the motivation produced by empathic concern, determining whether it is egoistic or altruistic and, thereby, providing an answer to a fundamental question about what makes us tick. Framed as a detective story, this book traces the scientific search for altruism through numerous studies and attempts to examine various motivational suspects, reaching the improbable conclusion that empathy-induced altruism is indeed part of our nature. The book then considers the implications of this conclusion both for our understanding of who we are as humans (the bad news as well as the good) and for how we might create a more humane society.

The Voices Within

The Voices Within
Author: Charles Fernyhough
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1782830782

We all hear voices. Ordinary thinking is often a kind of conversation, filling our heads with speech: the voices of reason, of memory, of self-encouragement and rebuke, the inner dialogue that helps us with tough decisions or complicated problems. For others - voice-hearers, trauma-sufferers and prophets - the voices seem to come from outside: friendly voices, malicious ones, the voice of God or the Devil, the muses of art and literature. In The Voices Within, Royal Society Prize shortlisted psychologist Charles Fernyhough draws on extensive original research and a wealth of cultural touchpoints to reveal the workings of our inner voices, and how those voices link to creativity and development. From Virginia Woolf to the modern Hearing Voices Movement, Fernyhough also transforms our understanding of voice-hearers past and present. Building on the latest theories, including the new 'dialogic thinking' model, and employing state-of-the-art neuroimaging and other ground-breaking research techniques, Fernyhough has written an authoritative and engaging guide to the voices in our heads. WELLCOME COLLECTION Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we think and feel about health. Inspired by the medical objects and curiosities collected by Henry Wellcome, it connects science, medicine, life and art. Wellcome Collection exhibitions, events and books explore a diverse range of subjects, including consciousness, forensic medicine, emotions, sexology, identity and death. Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive, funding over 14,000 researchers and projects in more than 70 countries. wellcomecollection.org

The Politics and Ethics of Identity

The Politics and Ethics of Identity
Author: Richard Ned Lebow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2012-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107027659

Challenges the notion of consistent unitary identities, arguing that we are multiple, changing selves, shaped by social contexts and processes.