For those who carry this book you shall always be protected from smoke, ash, fire and all from harm and evil. For this is the book of knowledge and wisdom. You shall always have a friend indeed. Blessed be love and light

In this profound book, William Chittick examines the demise of the Sufi academic tradition, questioning how Islamic thought can be reclaimed from ideology and commercialism.

The Ellipse: The Fall and Rise of the Human Soul, Secrets of the Cosmos describes the cosmic laws of the universe ruling the reality of the human experience and the destiny of humanity. It is an in depth study of the spiritual science that is the source of all religion, and the cause of the human condition. The term ellipse which means imperfect circle, as opposed to the perfect circle, is the updated metaphor that replaces the traditional concepts of God and the devil, and good and evil as the human race evolves out of the age of mythology to the era of the merging of science and spirituality. This spiritual saga describes the inner and outer soul of the universe, the apocalypse, and the destiny of the human race. Delving deeper than any metaphysical writer of the past or present, the book reveals new insights about the fall of man and the soul's journey to its ultimate destiny in unraveling the mysteries of its existence. It also clarifies pervasive distortions and misconceptions within religion and metaphysics.

With elegance and clarity, Wolfgang Smith leads the reader, step by step, to the realization that the specifically 'modern' world is based intellectually, not indeed upon scientific facts, but ultimately on nothing more substantial than a syndrome of Promethean myths. And this 'opening' enables him to recover and reaffirm the deep metaphysical insights that have come down to us through the teachings of Christianity: having broken the grip of scientistic presuppositions, the author succeeds in bringing to view universal truths which had long been obscured.

We stand at the threshold of a revolutionary and empowering new vision of the world. The discoveries of leading-edge science and the insights of spirituality are converging to reveal that the CosMos and all that we term reality is wholly integrated, and that at its most fundamental level, it is a field of information. This is the elemental cosmic mind from which everything emanates, is manifested, and to which all ultimately returns. Research is also demonstrating what the mystics of all traditions have discerned: that we have the innate ability to envision, understand, and experience the CosMos at levels far beyond the limitations of our human persona. CosMos is co-authored by two explorers who combine almost a century of seeking to understand not only how the world is as it is, but why. Philosopher Ervin Laszlo, Ph. D., and healer and scientist Jude Currivan, Ph. D., offer a revisioned view of the world that is no longer fragmented, but is at last, whole. Theirs is a perception of a meaningful and co-creative world that is exquisitely tuned to be ''as simple as it can be'' for consciousness to explore itself. In these momentous times, the vision shared in Cosmos invites us to open our hearts and minds to re-member who we really are and to take our places as conscious co-creators of our realities and of our evolving cosmic destiny.

Perhaps inadvertently, historians have often eliminated the religious chapters--those episodes in history during which human insights into transcendence and divinity have shaped human consciousness--from our planet's story. This book tells the story of cosmic history as big historians tell it, beginning with the big bang, and explores the question of God hidden beneath this story. The book pauses on the Axial Age of human history: a moment during the first millennium BCE in which questions of transcendence first simultaneously arose in distinct locations around the world. By exploring this threshold in cosmic history, the author demonstrates the way the arrival of the God question marked a radical new human consciousness, one that ultimately laid the groundwork for the modern age.--

Wolfgang Smith, drawing upon a rare combination of expertise in mathematical physics, philosophy and traditional metaphysics, has written extensively on interdisciplinary problems relating to these respective domains. The present book has evolved out of a key ontological recognition consonant with time-honored metaphysical doctrine. In keeping with a realist view of cognitive sense perception, it rejects the Cartesian dichotomy of res extensa and res cogitans, and obviates what Whitehead referred to as the fallacy of bifurcation. In an earlier book (The Quantum Enigma, 1995) the author established two facts: first, that a consistent non-bifurcationist interpretation of physics can be formulated; and second, that this eliminates at one stroke the various forms of "quantum paradox" resulting from superposition and the so-called collapse of the state vector. The crucial ingredient of the new approach, mandated by the aforesaid recognition, is an ontological distinction between the physical domain, accessed via measurement, and the corporeal, accessed by way of cognitive sense perception. In the present book the author extends this metaphysically-based interpretation from fundamental physics to contemporary cosmology. With the aid of a few additional conceptions consonant, say, with the Thomistic doctrine-such as the concept of what he terms "the extrapolated universe," or the notion of "vertical causation" relating to intelligent design-he treats a broad range of issues from a unified metaphysical point of view. Not surprisingly, his conclusions tent to be radically at odds with the prevailing interpretations of scientific data, regardless of whether these are based upon naturalistic or scientistically theistic presuppositions. The author's approach may thus be characterized as the third alternative: the sole option, it appears, consistent with the Aristotelian and Platonist traditions, and with the wisdom of Christianity, as delineated especially in the Patristic writings.

"The highest honor a philosopher can receive is to be nominated by his peers for inclusion in the series of The Library of Living Philosophers [for which the] latest entry is The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. And the highest honor a theologian can receive is to be invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow, Scotland. Seyyed Hossein Nasr is the only person ever to have received both of these honors.... This valuable book distills the essence of the thought of one of the most important thinkers or our times." Book jacket.

A foremost thinker on science and religion argues that an adequate understanding of cosmic history requires attention to the emergence of interiority, including religious aspiration Over the past two centuries scientific advances have made it clear that the universe is a story still unfolding. In this thought-provoking book, John F. Haught considers the deeper implications of this discovery. He contends that many others who have written books on life and the universe--including Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins--have overlooked a crucial aspect of cosmic history: the drama of life's awakening to interiority and religious awareness. Science may illuminate the outside story of the universe, but a full telling of the cosmic story cannot ignore the inside development that interiority represents. Haught addresses two primary questions: what does the arrival of religion tell us about the universe, and what does our understanding of the cosmos as an unfinished drama tell us about religion? The history of religion may be ambiguous and sometimes even barbarous, he asserts, but its role in the story of cosmic emergence and awakening must be taken into account.