Garland of Visions explores the generative relationships between artistic intelligence and tantric vision practices in the construction and circulation of visual knowledge in medieval South Asia. Shifting away from the traditional connoisseur approach, Jinah Kim instead focuses on the materiality of painting: its mediums, its visions, and especially its colors. She argues that the adoption of a special type of manuscript called pothi enabled the material translation of a private and internal experience of "seeing" into a portable device. These mobile and intimate objects then became important conveyors of many forms of knowledge—ritual, artistic, social, scientific, and religious—and spurred the spread of visual knowledge of Indic Buddhism to distant lands. By taking color as the material link between a vision and its artistic output, Garland of Visions presents a fresh approach to the history of Indian painting.

In His Most Important Sanskrit Work Darshanamala, Narayana Guru Adopts Uncharted Method Of Viewing The Non-Dual Brahman Leaving The Student-Seeker To Intuitively Perceive One Ineffable Reality. The Ancient Upanishadic Wisdom Is Thus Condensed And Restated By The Guru In The Age Of Science. How Brahmavidya Naturally Becomes The Science Of All Sciences.

First Published in 1993. The present volume covers the currently identified Christian visions of heaven and hell (excluding D ante’s Divine Comedy) from western Europe during the Middle Ages from the late sixth through the fourteenth century.

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters?Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem?this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

Imagining the divine as female is rare—even controversial—in most religions. Hinduism, by contrast, preserves a rich and continuous tradition of goddess worship. A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses conveys the diversity of this tradition by bringing together a fresh array of captivating and largely overlooked Hindu goddess tales from different regions. As the first such anthology of goddess narratives in translation, this collection highlights a range of sources from ancient myths to modern lore. The goddesses featured here battle demons, perform miracles, and grant rare Tantric visions to their devotees. Each translation is paired with a short essay that explains the goddess’s historical and social context, elucidating the ways religion adapts to changing times.

The Book Presents The Darsana Mala Comprising Hundred Sanskrit Verses Of Mystic-Poet Narayana Guru, Along With Its Transliteration In Roman Script And Its English Translation, Word Meanings, And Extensive Commentaries. Nataraja Guru Spells Out His Mentor S Visions Of The Absolute In Contemporary Idiom And Shows That They Are Validated By Modern Science.

In eighth century India, Andal is born into a world where girls are married and with child by fourteen. Defying the mores of her time, she refuses marriage to a mortal man. Only a god will do. Andal’s imagination is boundless and her antics set the town’s tongues wagging. As Andal becomes more and more absorbed by her visions, she composes songs to her divine lover. Saisha discovers Andal’s songs in a book on a trip to India with her partner Marcus. The verses are confronting and unearth memories Saisha thought were long ago buried. Not only is she unable to conceive, for the past two decades Marcus has chosen celibacy. What defines her as a woman when these two primal desires remain unfulfilled? Andal’s words are deceptively simple, yet shine a lamp on the labyrinths of Saisha’s sexuality and her quest to find peace with the choices she has made.

A Commentary on the Book of Revelation - Volume 2 The author presents a detailed study of the Book of Revelation emphasizing prophetic themes from the rest of the Bible which find their fulfillment in Revelation. To understand this controversial book, the author explores the many connections between the visions seen by the Apostle John and previous prophetic revelation given to Old Testament prophets such as Daniel, Ezekiel, and others. It is the author's conviction that an understanding of related passages elsewhere in the Bible is the most important key to unlocking the bewildering variety of interpretations which often accompany the study of the last book of the Bible. The commentary can be used in conjunction with a free companion internet course providing an additional 70 hours of audio instruction linked to almost 1,000 slides.

The irresistible novel that was adapted into a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The Khao San Road, Bangkok -- first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach." The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden. Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck -- the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man -- and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents. Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach by Alex Garland -- both a national bestseller and his debut -- is a highly accomplished and suspenseful novel that fixates on a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.

Medieval attempts to capture a glimpse of heaven range from the ethereal to the mundane, utilizing media as diverse as maps, cathedrals, songs, treatises, poems, visions and sewer systems. Heaven was at once the goal of the individual Christian life and the end of the cosmic plan. It was, simply stated, perfection. But interpretations varied from the traditional to the dangerously unique as artists and authors, theologians and visionaries struggled to define that perfection. Depending on the source, heaven's attributes vary from height to depth, darkness to light, silence to symphony; the souls within it from activity to passivity, experience to essence, participation to distant admiration. Questions addressed in this anthology include: Are erotic and spiritual love mutually exclusive? Does the soul's happiness depend on the resurrection of the body? What will be the nature of the transfigured body? Will it retain its gender? Will it have senses? Will it know desire? How can desire and fulfillment exist together? Can the human soul ever know God? Contributors to this volume examine well-known and previously unexplored texts and artefacts from historical and art historical, theological, philosophical, and literary perspectives, to complement and challenge more general surveys of the history of heaven, and above all to illuminate the richness and variety of medieval Christian ideas on heaven.