This reader's guide to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings offers a journey into the world of Middle-earth, exploring the grand themes and hidden nuances of Tolkien's epic story, connecting The Lord of the Rings to the larger mythology of Middle-earth, and situating Tolkien's process of writing within his own powerful experiences of the imaginal realm. The Lord of the Rings has been a beloved story to several generations since its publication in the mid-1950s. The story has a timeless quality to it, and engages with a complex struggle between good and evil, death and immortality, power and freedom. The Lord of the Rings is a book treated by many as a sacred text, one to be returned to year after year, or read aloud with loved ones. The Lord of the Rings has become a myth for our time. Journey to the Imaginal Realm guides the reader through each chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien's magnum opus, drawing attention to the subtle details, recalling moments of foreshadowing, and illuminating underlying patterns and narrative threads throughout the story. The close reading of the text is paired with relevant biographical information from Tolkien's life, including the loss of both his parents at a young age, the central role of friendship in his life, his participation in the First World War, and his exquisite romance with his wife Edith. Tolkien was a lover of language and a philologist by profession, and his invented languages form the heart of his tales. In some of his letters, Tolkien described his process of writing as one of discovery, in which he waited to find out "what really happened," feeling as though he was "recording what was already 'there, ' somewhere." This reader's guide seeks to understand the imaginal experiences Tolkien may have encountered that led to the writing of his stories. The guide explores Tolkien's theory of sub-creation, the immersive experience of Faërian Dramas, and most importantly, his notion of the realm of Faërie. Journey to the Imaginal Realm is a celebration of Tolkien's work, and an inquiry into the profound nature of imagination, which is capable of bringing forth a world as vast as Middle-earth.

• Examines the therapeutic potential of expanded states, underground psychedelic psychotherapy, harm reduction, new approaches for healing individual and collective trauma, and training considerations • Addresses challenging psychedelic experiences, spiritual emergencies, and the central importance of the therapeutic relationship • Details the use of cannabis as a psychedelic tool, spiritual exploration with LSD, micro-dosing with Iboga, and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD Exploring the latest developments in the flourishing field of modern psychedelic psycho-therapy, this book shares practical experiences and insights from both elders and newer research voices in the psychedelic research and clinical communities. The contributors examine new findings on safe and skillful work with psychedelic and expanded states for therapeutic, personal, and spiritual growth. They explain the dual process of opening and healing. They explore new approaches for individual inner work as well as for the healing of ancestral and collective trauma. They examine the power of expanded states for reparative attachment work and offer insights on the integration process through the lens of Holotropic Breathwork. The contributors also examine the use of cannabis as a psychedelic tool, spiritual exploration with LSD, microdosing with Iboga, treating depression with psilocybin, and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. Revealing diverse ways of working with psychedelics in terms of set, setting, and type of substance, the book concludes with discussions of ethics and professional development for those working in the field as well as explores considerations for training the next generation of psychedelic therapists.

Mythic Imagination Today is an illustrated guide to the interpenetration of mythology and science throughout the ages. This monograph brings alive our collective need for story as a guide to the rules, roles, and relationships of everyday life.

How do we know if we're following our true callings? How do we sharpen our senses to cut through the distractions of everyday reality and hear the calls that are beckoning us? is the first book to examine the many kinds of calls we receive and the great variety of channels through which they come to us. A calling may be to do something (change careers, go back to school, have a child) or to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving). While honoring a calling's essential mystery, this book also guides readers to ask and answer the fundamental questions that arise from any calling: How do we recognize it? How do we distinguish the true call from the siren song? How do we handle our resistance to a call? What happens when we say yes? What happens when we say no? Drawing on the hard-won wisdom and powerful stories of people who have followed their own calls, Gregg Levoy shows us the many ways to translate a calling into action. In a style that is poetic, exuberant, and keenly insightful, he presents an illuminating and ultimately practical inquiry into how we listen and respond to our calls, whether at work or at home, in our relationships or in service. Callings is a compassionate guide to discovering your own callings and negotiating the tight passages to personal power and authenticity.

"This book explores their lives, unfolding the extraordinary story of their complex friendship that lasted, with its ups and downs, until Lewis's death in 1963. Despite their differences - of temperament, spiritual emphasis, and storytelling style - what united them was much stronger: A shared vision that continues to inspire their millions of readers throughout the world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Compelling tips and tricks to improve your mental skills Don't you wish you were just a little smarter? Ron and Marty Hale-Evans can help with a vast array of witty, practical techniques that tune your brain to peak performance. Founded in current research, Mindhacker features 60 tips, tricks, and games to develop your mental potential. This accessible compilation helps improve memory, accelerate learning, manage time, spark creativity, hone math and logic skills, communicate better, think more clearly, and keep your mind strong and flexible.

• Outlines a set of clear principles to help guide dreamworkers, illustrated through real precognitive dream experiences • Shows how to detect precognitive dreams through their characteristic features, explaining how dreams relate to memory and why dreams about future experiences are often symbolic or distorted • Explores the mind-blowing implications of precognition for our lives, including how our present thoughts actually shape--or shaped--our past Once only the stuff of science fiction, evidence has grown that precognition--glimpses of your future in dreams and visions and being influenced subtly in waking life by what is to come--is real. Your future thoughts and feelings shape who you are now. And your present thoughts and feelings shape--or shaped--your past. In this accessible exploration of precognition, precognitive dreamwork, and a radically new biographical sensibility, the Long Self, that precognition awakens us to, Eric Wargo shows how dreamworkers can play the role of citizen scientists, adding to our understanding of this fascinating, almost unexplored dimension of human life. Wargo outlines a set of clear principles to guide dreamworkers, each illustrated through real dreamers’ experiences. Drawing on psychoanalysis and contemporary sleep science, he explores how precognition relates to memory, explaining why dreams of future experiences are often distorted and what those distortions probably mean. He discusses never-before-described dream features, including “time gimmicks” (symbols hinting at time distortion) and “calendrical resonance” (the tendency of dreams to foretell experiences exactly a year or years later). He describes why an understanding of precognition augments Jung’s theory of synchronicity by highlighting our own role in producing meaningful coincidences in our waking lives. He also shows how precognition manifests in other states of consciousness like lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, trance states, sleep paralysis, meditation, and hypnagogia. We are at a major turning point in science’s understanding of time, causality, and the self. We are more than who we think we are from moment to moment--we are our past, present, and future simultaneously. When we understand this, a dream journal becomes a personal time machine, with mind-blowing discoveries in store for the traveler.

Tolkien's concern with time - past and present, real and faerie - captures the wonder of travel into other worlds and other times. This work shows that he was not just a mythmaker and writer of escapist fantasy but a man whose relationship to his own century was troubled and critical.

The Cosmic Doctrine is a condensed blueprint outline of God's manifestation in this creation. Complex indeed! But what has tended to bother some about the Cosmic Doctrine teaching has been the almost total emphasis in explaining evolution simply as being the psychic nuts and bolts of God. Leaving one with the impression that God may be reduced from a Great and Infinite Being to a kind of mechanical Newtonian clockwork. However there is much more to it than that. The higher up the planes you go, although esoteric theory tends to describe it as all more abstract, in actual fact things become so much more complex, vibrant, vivid, bursting, and brimming with life in incredible profusion. It is another form of experience however. The broadest, though simple, analogy would be to liken the existence on the higher levels as something after the order of a Bach fugue - which could indeed seem to some a rather dry abstraction, but which to the attuned and educated ear is a revelation of divinity, harmony and celestial order. The reality is not easy to describe in concepts, let alone in words. How best to describe a rainbow to a blind man? Contens Introduction Section I. THE EVOLUTION OF THE COSMOS. - 1. The First Manifestation. - 2. The First Trinity. - 3. The Building of the Atom. - 4. The Evolution of the Atom. - 5. The Genesis of a Solar System. - 6. Cosmic Influences on a Solar System. Section II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE LOGOS AND HIS REGENTS. - 7. The Evolution of a Great Entity. - 8. The Relation of a Great Entity to the Cosmos. - 9. The Projection of the Concept of the Universe. - 10. The Relation between the Projected Image and the Logoidal Consciousness. - 11. Auto-reactions and Cosmic Memory. - 12. The Birth of consciousness in the Universe. - 13. The Beginnings of Mind and Group Consciousness. - 14. The Seed-atom Building a Seventh Plane Body. - 15. Evolution of the First Planetary Form. - 16. Evolution of the Lords of Flame, Form and Mind. - 17. The Influence of the Regents upon the Globes. - 18. The Goal of Evolution of a Life Swarm. Section. Section III. INFLUENCES UNDER WHICH THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY IS CONDUCTED. - 19. Tabulated Summary of Influences. - 20. Cosmic Influences. - 21. The Logoidal Relation to the Manifested Universe. - 22. Influences of the Manifested Universe. - 23. Teaching Concerning Other Evolutions inhabiting a Planet Simultaneously. - 24. Influences which Humanity exerts upon Itself. - 25. The Law of Action and Reaction. - 26. The Law of Limitation. - 27. The Law of Seven Deaths. - 28. The Law of Impactation, or the Transmission of Action from one Plane to another. - 29. The Law of the Aspects of Force, or Polarity. - 30. The Law of the Attraction of Outer Space. - 31. The Law of the Attraction of the Centre

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. "To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation," Jung inscribed in his Red Book. The essays in this volume continue what was begun in Volume 1 of Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions by further contextualizing The Red Book culturally and interpreting it for our time. It is significant that this long sequestered work was published during a period in human history marked by disruption, cultural disintegration, broken boundaries, and acute anxiety. The Red Book offers an antidote for this collective illness and can be seen as a link in the aurea catena, the "golden chain" of spiritual wisdom extending down through the ages from biblical times, ancient Greek philosophy, early Christian and Jewish Gnosis, and alchemy. The Red Book is itself a work of creation that gives birth to the old in a new time. This is the second volume of a three-volume series set up on a global und multicultural level and includes essays from the following distinguished Jungian analysts and scholars: - Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt Introduction - John Beebe The Way Cultural Attitudes are Developed in Jung's Red Book - An "Interview" - Kate Burns Soul's Desire to become New: Jung's Journey, Our Initiation - QiRe Ching Aging with The Red Book - Al Collins Dreaming The Red Book Onward: What Do the Dead Seek Today? - Lionel Corbett The Red Book as a Religious d104 - John Dourley Jung, the Nothing and the All - Randy Fertel Trickster, His Apocalyptic Brother, and a World's Unmaking: An Archetypal Reading of Donald Trump - Noa Schwartz Feuerstein India in The Red Book Overtones and Undertones - Grazina Gudaite Integrating Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions of Experience under Postmodern Conditions - Lev Khegai The Red Book of C.G. Jung and Russian Thought - Günter Langwieler A Lesson in Peacemaking: The Mystery of Self-Sacrifice in The Red Book - Keiron Le Grice The Metamorphosis of the Gods: Archetypal Astrology and the Transforma­tion of the God-Image in The Red Book - Ann Chia-Yi Li The Receptive and the Creative: Jung's Red Book for Our Time in Light of Daoist Alchemy - Romano Màdera The Quest for Meaning after God's Death in an Era of Chaos - Joerg Rasche On Salome and the Emancipation of Woman in The Red Book - J. Gary Sparks Abraxas: Then and Now - David Tacey The Return of the Sacred in an Age of Terror - Ann Belford Ulanov Blundering into the Work of Redemption