This unique new book addresses the rise of death studies as an academic discipline, and serves those who work in the anthropology of death and loss. It gives a perspective on death, with reference to Maoists politics and violence in Nepal, so will also appeal to scholars of the region, and its Maoists movements. This work aims to add and contribute to cultural and regional perspective in death studies. There has been little written on death studies in conflict situations, from a South Asian perspective. Therefore, this book extends the current literature in death and bereavement perspectives beyond western academic exploration.

Alan Watts introduced millions of Western readers to Zen and other Eastern philosophies. But he is also recognized as a brilliant commentator on Judeo-Christian traditions, as well as a celebrity philosopher who exemplified the ideas — and lifestyle — of the 1960s counterculture. In this compilation of controversial lectures that Watts delivered at American universities throughout the sixties, he challenges readers to reevaluate Western culture's most hallowed constructs. Watts treads the familiar ground of interpreting Eastern traditions, but he also covers new territory, exploring the counterculture's basis in the ancient tribal and shamanic cultures of Asia, Siberia, and the Americas. In the process, he addresses some of the era's most important questions: What is the nature of reality? How does an individual's relationship to society affect this reality? Filled with Watts's playful, provocative style, the talks show the remarkable scope of a philosopher at his prime, exploring and defining the sixties counterculture as only Alan Watts could.

The world's leading expert on near-death experiences reveals his journey toward rethinking the nature of death, life, and the continuity of consciousness. Cases of remarkable experiences on the threshold of death have been reported since ancient times, and are described today by 10% of people whose hearts stop. The medical world has generally ignored these “near-death experiences,” dismissing them as “tricks of the brain” or wishful thinking. But after his patients started describing events that he could not just sweep under the rug, Dr. Bruce Greyson began to investigate. As a physician without a religious belief system, he approached near-death experiences from a scientific perspective. In After, he shares the transformative lessons he has learned over four decades of research. Our culture has tended to view dying as the end of our consciousness, the end of our existence—a dreaded prospect that for many people evokes fear and anxiety. But Dr. Greyson shows how scientific revelations about the dying process can support an alternative theory. Dying could be the threshold between one form of consciousness and another, not an ending but a transition. This new perspective on the nature of death can transform the fear of dying that pervades our culture into a healthy view of it as one more milestone in the course of our lives. After challenges us to open our minds to these experiences and to what they can teach us, and in so doing, expand our understanding of consciousness and of what it means to be human.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! "I had the choice to come back ... or not. I chose to return when I realized that 'heaven' is a state, not a place" In this truly inspirational memoir, Anita Moorjani relates how, after fighting cancer for almost four years, her body began shutting down—overwhelmed by the malignant cells spreading throughout her system. As her organs failed, she entered into an extraordinary near-death experience where she realized her inherent worth . . . and the actual cause of her disease. Upon regaining consciousness, Anita found that her condition had improved so rapidly that she was released from the hospital within weeks—without a trace of cancer in her body! Within this enhanced e-book, Anita recounts—in words and on video—stories of her childhood in Hong Kong, her challenge to establish her career and find true love, as well as how she eventually ended up in that hospital bed where she defied all medical knowledge. In "Dying to Be Me," Anita Freely shares all she has learned about illness, healing, fear, "being love," and the true magnificence of each and every human being!

A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit. Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.

In the ancient Indian epic, Mahabharata, the Lord of Death asks, "What is the most wondrous thing in the world?", and his son answers, "It is that all around us people can be dying and we don't believe it can happen to us." This refusal to face the inevitability of death is especially prevalent in modern Western societies. We look to science to tell us how things are but biomedicine and neuroscience divest death of any personal significance by presenting it as just the breakdown of the body and the cessation of consciousness. The Tibetan Buddhist perspective stands in sharp contrast to this modern scientific notion of death. This tradition conceives dying not as the mere termination of living processes within the body, but as a rite of passage and transformation of consciousness. Physical death, in this tradition, initiates a transition from one of the six bardos ("in-between states") of consciousness to an opportunity for total enlightenment. In Dying: What Happens When We Die?, Evan Thompson establishes a middle ground between the depersonalized, scientific account of death and the highly ritualized notion of death found in Tibetan Buddhism. Thompson's depiction of death and dying offers an insightful neurobiological analysis while also delving into the phenomenology of death, examining the psychological and spiritual effects of dying on human consciousness. In a trenchant critique of the near-death experience literature, he shows that these experiences do not provide evidence for the continuation of consciousness after death, but also that they must be understood phenomenologically and not in purely neuroscience terms. We must learn to tolerate the "ultimate ungraspability of death" by bearing witness to dying and death instead of turning away from them. We can learn to face the experience of dying through meditative practice, and to view the final moments of life not as a frightening inevitability to be shunned or ignored, but as a deeply personal experience to be accepted and even embraced.

This historic collection of all of Sri Chinmoy’s university lectures in eBook form has been released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Sri Chinmoy’s arrival in the West on 13 April 1964. Sri Chinmoy’s very first university lecture was given at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, on 10 January 1968. It was entitled “Spirituality: What It Is and What It Is Not.” This inaugurated a whole era of talks which saw Sri Chinmoy travelling ceaselessly across the length and breadth of America and around the world to address the youth of each country. He would spend countless hours travelling by car or train to reach far- flung universities, sometimes visiting two or even three in the course of a single day. After many of these sublimely inspiring discourses, he would answer questions from the audience or spend time instructing sincere seekers in the age-old practices of concentration, meditation and contemplation. By the mid-seventies, Sri Chinmoy had spoken volumes and he began to include longer and longer periods of silent meditation in his lectures. Then, in 1984, in a significant departure from the spoken word, he introduced the theme of Peace Concerts. At these concerts, Sri Chinmoy would play his own soulful and devotional compositions on a variety of instruments of both Eastern and Western origin, meditating between each instrument and sometimes giving aphorisms on peace and related themes. In 2003 yet another form of Sri Chinmoy’s self-offering unfolded when he travelled to a number of universities to honour distinguished professors for their significant contributions to the betterment of humanity by physically lifting them overhead. This remarkable endeavour was part of his “Lifting Up the World With a Oneness-Heart” award programme. Thus, through words, silence, music and a combination of physical and spiritual upliftment, Sri Chinmoy has shared his profound spiritual message with the aspiring Truth- seekers and God-lovers of the university-world for four decades. Sri Chinmoy’s words are mantras for the modern age, reverberating in our hearts with their timeless and truly life-transforming wisdom. In his exquisite prose, which is suffused with the very breath and cadence of poetry, Sri Chinmoy has revealed all the many stages of the seeker’s journey towards the Golden Shores of the ever-transcending Beyond. For generations to come these three volumes will awaken the inner mounting cry of seekers everywhere to achieve the highest Goal of Yoga—union with God—in this life.

Everybody understands the five consciousnesses which are recognized by the five organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) contacting the five objects (color (light), sound, smell, taste, and tactile objects), respectively. To human being, even sentient being, that is not all. Everybody knows about the sixth consciousness, namely, mind. In Buddhism, the sixth consciousness is explained to be generated from contacting between the sixth organ and the sixth object (dharma). What is the sixth organ? What is the sixth object? No more detailed explanation in Buddhism yet. However, this book provides very clear understanding on the sixth organ, sixth object, and further, mechanism of all consciousnesses. Finally you will become to know about "Who am I?" and get Enlightenment. In addition, this book will contribute to the scientific progress on consciousness. One of the author's friends, Mr. Anjan Sen, Patent Attorney in Calcutta, reviewed about this book, "I am really grateful to you for giving me this special opportunity to go through this excellent analytical and logically driven work of yours. You deserve special praise and credit for creating such a work inspite of your busy professional schedule which I found not only highly thought provoking but also directional and, most importantly, has been written in such a lucid form that would make it a ready treat for one and all to read and appreciate the discourse. I am overwhelmed by your stupendous efforts."

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry