Richard L. Haight is the founder of the Total Embodiment Method (TEM), which is an awareness training system designed to integrate meditation into one’s daily life. Richard is the author of five bestselling titles, most notably The Warrior’s Meditation, Unshakable Awareness, and The Unbound Soul, and he is a master-level instructor of martial, meditation and healing arts. Richard began formal martial arts training at age 12 and moved to Japan at the age of 24 to advance his training with master’s of the sword, staff, and aiki-jujutsu. During his 15 years in Japan, Richard was awarded masters licenses in four samurai arts as well as a traditional healing art called sotai-ho. Richard is one of the world’s foremost experts in the traditional Japanese martial arts. Through his books, his meditation, and martial arts seminars, Richard Haight is helping to ignite a worldwide movement for personal transformation that is free of all constraints and open to anyone of any level. He now lives and teaches in southern Oregon, U.S.A. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
Whenever we worry about what to eat, how to love, or simply how to be happy, we are worrying about how to lead a good life. No goal is more elusive. In How to Be a Stoic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers Stoicism, the ancient philosophy that inspired the great emperor Marcus Aurelius, as the best way to attain it. Stoicism is a pragmatic philosophy that focuses our attention on what is possible and gives us perspective on what is unimportant. By understanding Stoicism, we can learn to answer crucial questions: Should we get married or divorced? How should we handle our money in a world nearly destroyed by a financial crisis? How can we survive great personal tragedy? Whoever we are, Stoicism has something for us–and How to Be a Stoic is the essential guide. Prof. Pigliucci has a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tennessee. He currently is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His research interests include the philosophy of science, the relationship between science and philosophy, the nature of pseudoscience, and the practical philosophy of Stoicism. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
Berit Brogaard, PhD, and Kristian Marlow, MA, study people with astonishing talents—memory champions, human echolocators, musical virtuosos, math geniuses, and synesthetes who taste colors and hear faces. But as amazing as these abilities are, they are not mysterious. Our brains constantly process a huge amount of information below our awareness, and what these gifted individuals have in common is that through practice, injury, an innate brain disorder, or even more unusual circumstances, they have managed to gain a degree of conscious access to this potent processing power. The Superhuman Mind takes us inside the lives and brains of geniuses, savants, virtuosos, and a wide variety of ordinary people who have acquired truly extraordinary talents, one way or another. Delving into the neurological underpinnings of these abilities, the authors even reveal how we can acquire some of them ourselves—from perfect pitch and lightning fast math skills to supercharged creativity. The Superh...
A smart, research-driven case for why optimism, kindness, and strong social networks will help us live to 100. From the day her daughter was born, science journalist Marta Zaraska fretted about what she and her family were eating. She fasted, considered adopting the keto diet, and ran a half-marathon. She bought goji berries and chia seeds and ate organic food.˽ But then her research brought her to read countless scientific papers and to interview dozens of experts in various fields of study, including molecular biochemistry, epidemiology and neuroscience. What Marta discovered shattered her long-held beliefs about aging and longevity. A strong support network of family and friends, she learned, lowers mortality risk by about 45 percent, while exercise only lowers it by about 23 percent. Volunteering your free time lowers it by 22 percent or so, while certain health fads like turmeric haven’t been shown to help at all. These revelations led Marta Zaraska to a simple conclusion: In addition to healthy nutrition and physical activity, deepening friendships, practicing empathy and contemplating your purpose in life can improve your lifespan.˽ Through eleven chapters that take her around the world, from catching wild mice in the woods of central England to flower arranging with octogenarians in Japan, from laboratories to “hugging centres,” Marta embarks on an absorbing, entertaining and insightful journey to determine the habits that will have the greatest impact on our longevity.˽ Deeply researched and expertly reported, Growing Young will dramatically change the way you seek a longer, happier life. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
From a leading philosopher of the mind comes this lucid, provocative argument that offers a radically new picture of human consciousness—panpsychism. Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something “extra,” beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some even suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved. Decades have been spent trying to explain consciousness from within our current scientific paradigm, but little progress has been made. Now, Philip Goff offers an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward. Rooted in an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of modern science and based on the early twentieth-century work of Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell, Goff makes the case for panpsychism, a theory which posits that consciousness is not confined to biological entities but is a fundamental feature of all physical matter—from subatomic particles to the human brain. In Galileo’s Error, he has provided the first step on a new path to the final theory of human consciousness. Philip Goff is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. His research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview. He has authored an academic book with Oxford University Press, called ‘Consciousness and Fundamental Reality’ and a book aimed at a general audience called ‘Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness’. Dr Goff has published over 40 academic articles as well as writing extensively for newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American, The Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. Goff’s interview by Pulitzer Prize winning author Gareth Cook was one of the most viewed of the most viewed articles in Scientific American of 2020. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
Why was the mission to the Moon named after the God of the Sun, and not after a Moon Goddess or God? In this unconventional work, Philippe Sibaud explores the symbolism behind the 1969 landing on the Moon. More than fifty years after this seminal event, and whilst the Moon is attracting renewed interest, the author offers a bold new interpretation of the iconic Apollo mission. Was the Apollo landing the ultimate triumph of solar consciousness over the ancient lunar ways, a concrete enactment of the god Apollo mythically slaying the mother dragon at Delphi, or can the whole venture be seen as the sacred union of Sun and Moon, birthing a new vision at a time of great need? By weaving his own personal story with a greater cultural and symbolic narrative, Philippe Sibaud invites us to reflect on the importance of myths and the power of the Imagination to unlock the deeper meaning of our individual and collective experiences. You will never look at the Moon with the same eyes again. Philippe is a Trustee and a writer for the Gaia Foundation, an international London-based NGO which has been working for 35 years with indigenous people to uphold Earth-centred perspectives. He co-runs Umunthu Microfinance, an NGO that he set up in 2010 to provide small-scale loans to disadvantaged women in Malawi (currently 1,000 clients). He holds an MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred (with Distinction) from Canterbury Christ Church University and has been a dedicated student of astrology for many a solar return. He was born at night under a crisp February Full Moon. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
Did a tiny bird in Texas really communicate with a horse and convince him it was okay to load on a trailer he’d never been on? Did a horse, after a three-year absence, know that its previous owner was present by hearing a harmonica being played? Did a horse, who had never acted up, hurt its owner on purpose so she would go to the doctor, where she discovered cancer had returned? Richard D. Rowland seeks the answer to fascinating questions as he explores the connection between humans and animals. As someone who was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer and given three years to live (more than twelve years ago), the human-animal bond is a subject he knows well. Animals caused him to rethink life and showed him things he never thought possible-and they led him to write his previous book, Unspoken Messages: Spiritual Lessons I learned from Horses and Other Earthbound Souls. Based on his interviews with people throughout the world, this book expands on how animals are misunderstood-and how they’re much smarter than most people believe. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
The gap between the state of fusion energy research and public understanding is vast. In an entertaining and engaging narrative, this popular science book gives readers the basic tools to understand how fusion works, its potential, and contemporary research problems. Written by two young researchers in the field, The Future of Fusion Energy explains how physical laws and the Earth’s energy resources motivate the current fusion program — a program that is approaching a critical point. The world’s largest science project and biggest ever fusion reactor, ITER, is nearing completion. Its success could trigger a worldwide race to build a power plant, but failure could delay fusion by decades. To these ends, this book details how ITER’s results could be used to design an economically competitive power plant as well as some of the many alternative fusion concepts. Jason Parisi is a theoretical physicist studying turbulence in fusion plasmas at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, a fusion laboratory in the UK. He obtained his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2020, and his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 2016. As well as fusion energy, Jason also has interests in general relativity and cosmology. In his spare time, he enjoys triathlon and gliding. Justin Ball is an American scientist studying theoretical plasma physics and nuclear fusion energy. He works at the Swiss Plasma Center, a fusion laboratory in Switzerland, where he researches turbulence in tokamak plasmas. Justin holds a Master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford. He has a broad interest in all things nuclear, having previously worked at a nuclear power plant, a nuclear navy research laboratory, and a nuclear weapons laboratory. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
We are bombarded every day by reports of bad behavior, from sexual harassment to political corruption and bullying belligerence. It’s tempting to blame evil acts on evil people, but that leaves the rest us off the hook. Silence, after all, can perpetuate cruelty. Why We Act draws on the latest developments in psychology and neuroscience to tackle an urgent question: Why do so many of us fail to intervene when we’re needed―and what would it take to make us step up? A renowned psychologist who has done pioneering research on social norms, Catherine Sanderson was inspired to write this book when a freshman in her son’s dorm died twenty hours after a bad fall while drinking. There were many points along the way when a decision to seek help could have saved his life. Why did no one act sooner? Cutting-edge neuroscience offers part of the answer, showing how deviating from the group activates the same receptors in the brain that are triggered by pain. But Sanderson also points to many ways in which our faulty assumptions about what other people are thinking can paralyze us. And she shares surprisingly effective and simple strategies for resisting the pressure to conform. Moral courage, it turns out, is not innate. Small details and the right training can make a big difference. Inspiring and potentially life transforming, Why We Act reveals that while the urge to do nothing is deeply ingrained, even the most hesitant would-be bystander can learn to be a moral rebel. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com
You care about the greater good, but you want to define it for yourself. What if you disagree with the politically correct view? You fear ridicule, shunning and attack, so you tell yourself it’s not worth it and find a way to conform. Until one day you can’t. I was politically correct until the day I heard myself lie about a simple fact because the truth didn’t sound progressive. I froze– in the middle of a lecture to 150 students. Enough! I decided to take back my brain. I gave myself permission to see what I see and know what I know instead of living in fear. It cost me, but the benefits outweighed the costs. Here is the story of my transition. You can do it too. To learn more about Provocative Enlightenment Radio, go to http://www.provocativeenlightenment.com