This book presents important topics regarding the more mystical trend of Kabbalah—the ecstatic Kabbalah. It includes the mystical union, the world of imagination, and concentration as a spiritual technique. The emphasis in the text is on the interaction between the "original" Spanish stage of Kabbalah and Muslim mysticism in the East, mainly in the Galilee. The influence of the Kabbalistic-Sufic synthesis on the later developments of Jewish mysticism is traced, thereby providing a more precise understanding of the history of Kabbalah as an interplay between the theosophical and ecstatic mystical experiences.

What if your dearest friends were trapped in a world that was dying? Mehera Beatrice Crosby has one great love—and it's not following the latest health fads (like her school friend Celeste), and it's definitely not Andrew Suarez (even if he does have a ridiculous crush on her). It's Imaginalis, her favorite book series. When she learns that the long-awaited last book in the series has been canceled, Mehera is devastated—until strange events begin unfolding, and she realizes that her Imaginalian friends are counting on her to rescue them from their fading existence. Soon Mehera finds herself traveling between her world and the kingdom of Imaginalis. But what will happen when she accidentally brings the villain of the series, Pralaya, back to Earth, along with Prince Imagos and his Companions? Has Mehera doomed both worlds beyond repair, or is there a way to save Mehera's world—and Imaginalis, too? Expert storyteller J. M. DeMatteis's richly imagined fantasy is a fast-paced adventure and a testament to the power of loyal friendship, creativity, and imagination.

Over the last several decades, the boundaries of languages and national and ethnic identities have been shifting, altering the notion of borders around the world. Borderland areas, such as East and West Europe, the US/Mexican frontera, and the Middle East, serve as places of cultural transfer and exchange, as well as arenas of violent conflict and segregation. As communities around the world merge across national borders, new multi-ethnic and multicultural countries have become ever more common. Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film offers an overview of global cinema that addresses borders as spaces of hybridity and change. In this collection of essays, contributors examine how cinema portrays conceptions of borderlands informed by knowledge, politics, art, memory, and lived experience, and how these constructions contribute to a changing global community. These essays analyze a variety of international feature films and documentaries that focus on the lives, cultures, and politics of borderlands. The essays discuss the ways in which conflicts and their resolutions occur in borderlands and how they are portrayed on film. The volume pays special attention to contemporary Europe, where the topic of shifting border identities is one of the main driving forces in the processes of European unification. Among the filmmakers whose work is discussed in this volume are Fatih Akin, Montxo Armendàriz, Cary Fukunaga, Christoph Hochhäusler, Holger Jancke, Emir Kusturica, Laila Pakalnina, Alex Rivera, Larissa Shepitko, Andrea Staka, Elia Suleiman, and István Szabó. A significant contribution to the dialogue on global cinema, Border Visions will be of interest to students and scholars of film, but also to scholars in border studies, gender studies, sociology, and political science.

This volume addresses three fundamental questions about the interplay between the ethics of globality and spirituality: What are the practical implications of spirituality for the condition of life in a turbulent era of violent religious/non-religious extremism? In what way can spirituality, the view of love, compassion, tolerance, and mutual recognition encounter mistrust, enmity, separateness, and violence? How, and in what way, can spirituality contribute to the newly emerging global ethics? Religious scholars distinguish between the esoteric and exoteric sides of belief systems. Esotericism centres on the inner awareness, and conceals a certain spirituality that is only transmittable to those who could successfully pass through a process of initiatic preparation and transpersonal practices to understand the mystical dimensions of existence. In contrast, exotericism takes the outer dimension of every day consciousness into account and favours the possibility of the popular understanding of the essence of existence. In this perspective, truth could be grasped by the public without the need of any transpersonal initiative and transformation of consciousness. Esotericism extends beyond religion and has become the spiritual philosophy of life without the need of being essentially religious. It has become common, notably in the West, to identify oneself as spiritualist without having religious affiliations. The condition of globality has provided an unprecedented opportunity for spiritual perspectives to grow. Ideas, perspectives, beliefs, and philosophies of life are growing outside local/national containers to express themselves in different global settings, while the forces of globalisation are influencing local identities and cultures. While evolving global transformations strengthen people’s capability to leave institutionally ordered belief systems, it simultaneously enables them to rearrange themselves around alternative perspectives. These fundamental transformations cultivate a fabulous landscape for the growth of spirituality.

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other. In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Rancière, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

With the great merit of Aristotle's Poetics , poetic logic became a theoretical activity endowed with a philosophical nature allowing it to be more philosophical than the pure representation of existence. Today, however, the theoretical status of poetic logic has been greatly demoted. The Angel's Corpse restores to poetic logic (or lyric philosophy) the cognitive and epistemological significance attributed to it by Aristotle. The Angel's corpse (the central metaphor in this restoration) is a sign-post beyond which there exists an uncharted terrain of human signification. This terrain is expressed in terms of lyric philosophy and its universal trait is a shocking into reawakening, which is linked to the dissolution of the repetitive logic of history. With this book, Colilli aims to bring to life the traits that are close to the Angel and which amount to a new philosophy of culture and interpretation. This philosophy is free from the ideological burden of previous systems, but pivots its cognito-epistemological premises on the idea of reawakening.

Edited by Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt, the essays in the series Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions are geared to the recognition that the posthumous publication of The Red Book: Liber Novus by C.G. Jung in 2009 was a meaningful gift to our contemporary world. The Red Book can be considered as a contribution to the "Golden Chain" (aurea catena) of the world's imaginative literature reaching back to the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. As Jung describes this tradition in a letter to Max Rychner, "Faust is the most recent pillar in that bridge of the spirit which spans the morass of world history, beginning with the Gilgamesh epic, the I Ching, the Upanishads, the Tao-te-Ching, the fragments of Heraclitus, and continuing in the Gospel of St. John, the letters of St. Paul, in Meister Eckhart and in Dante." The Red Book extends the "Golden Chain" into our era. Each of the 18 essays in this third volume of the series, Jung's Red Book for Our Time, is unique, and all of them converge on the central theme of the relevance of The Red Book for people today in search of soul under postmodern conditions. This is the third volume of a multi-volume series set up on a global and multicultural level and includes essays from the following distinguished Jungian analysts and scholars:

'Why is there something, rather than nothing?' From the ancient text found on The Emerald Tablet, the motion implicit in achieving higher levels of consciousness is explored through questions surrounding whether evolution proceeds through natural selection or by controlled design and whether the nature of evolution itself is changing. Along our journey we ask whether Gaia theory can by extended beyond an earthly arena, whether science and religion are really incompatible and how do paranormal experiences, such as clairvoyance, actually arise. Considerations of free will, choice, the nature of time and virtue will lead us to identify the obstacles to be found in the way of our survival and whether, or not, we are capable of developing the means to prevent the extinction of the human race.