Here are 100 books that Notes on Complexity fans have personally recommended if you like
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I started practicing meditation while I was in high school and within 2 months of starting I had a metaphysical experience. That experience led me to become a scientist, I wanted to learn ways to study the spiritual using the methodologies of science. I've had a successful career with over 400 scientific publications and have had my work featured in the media and presented at hundreds of conferences and workshops around the world, including at the United Nations. Many scientists today are working to bridge the so-called gap between science and spirit and the positive effects they are having on increasing our understanding of what it is to be human.
For several decades Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has been prodding us to awaken beyond the limitations of western science as we know it.
Trained as a scientist at some of the world’s top institutions, he began to understand that science itself needed to be set free from its own dogma that has accumulated over the centuries. He shows the ways in which science is being constricted by its own assumptions that are not only limiting but dangerous for the future of humanity.
Should science be a belief system or simply a method of inquiry? In the skeptical spirit of true science, Dr. Sheldrake turns the 10 fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions and shows how all of them open to startling new possibilities for discovery.
The bestselling author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home offers an intriguing new assessment of modern day science that will radically change the way we view what is possible.
In Science Set Free (originally published to acclaim in the UK as The Science Delusion), Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows the ways in which science is being constricted by assumptions that have, over the years, hardened into dogmas. Such dogmas are not only limiting, but dangerous for the future of humanity.
According to these principles, all of reality is material…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I started practicing meditation while I was in high school and within 2 months of starting I had a metaphysical experience. That experience led me to become a scientist, I wanted to learn ways to study the spiritual using the methodologies of science. I've had a successful career with over 400 scientific publications and have had my work featured in the media and presented at hundreds of conferences and workshops around the world, including at the United Nations. Many scientists today are working to bridge the so-called gap between science and spirit and the positive effects they are having on increasing our understanding of what it is to be human.
Marjorie Woollacott is a top-tier neuroscientist who started her scientific career believing that our minds, the brain, was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. That all changed one day when she experimented with meditation for the first time - her world changed.
Over the years, as she continued with her meditation practice, she was faced with changing her belief about the mind, about what human consciousness really is. Her book pairs her research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, Dr. Woollacott investigates the existence of a non-physical and infinitely powerful mind.
Book Award of the Parapsychological Association, 2017 Winner of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards 2017 (Spiritual) First Place, Nautilus Book Awards 2017 (Science, Cosmology and Expanding Consciousness) First Place, International Excellence Mind, Body Spirit Book Awards, 2017 (Human Consciousness) Bronze Medal, Feathered Quill Book Awards, 2017 (Best Religious/Spiritual) First Place, Great Northwest Book Festival, 2017 (Spiritual Books) First Place, New England Book Festival, 2016 (Spiritual Books)
As a neuroscientist, Marjorie Woollacott had no doubts that the brain was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. When she experimented with meditation for the first time, however, her entire…
I started practicing meditation while I was in high school and within 2 months of starting I had a metaphysical experience. That experience led me to become a scientist, I wanted to learn ways to study the spiritual using the methodologies of science. I've had a successful career with over 400 scientific publications and have had my work featured in the media and presented at hundreds of conferences and workshops around the world, including at the United Nations. Many scientists today are working to bridge the so-called gap between science and spirit and the positive effects they are having on increasing our understanding of what it is to be human.
While there have been many books written about the spiritual side of the human being, few books have proposed the specific ways in which the spiritual interfaces with the human body.
In this book Dr. Tiffany Jean Barsotti proposes a new axis in human anatomy, the Reticular Activating System-Vagus Nerve-Alta Major Chakra Axis as the nexus of communication from higher consciousness to the physical and subtle energy bodies of the human being. She draws extensively on existing neuroscience research as well as the teachings of esoteric traditions, including Tibetan.
With the goal of creating a foundation and stimulating thought regarding energy physiology, the body-mind connection, and how our intention shapes our health and environment, this provides a new perspective on awakening awareness and consciousness.
There are many important axes in human anatomy, including the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis, the Liver Triad Axis, and the Gut-Brain Axis. Less well known to Western medical scientists is a parallel system that can develop in the subtle energy body of the human being. This energy body, while not visible with our current technology, is well known in esoteric healing traditions. In The Biology of Transformation, author Tiffany Jean Barsotti proposes a new axis in human anatomy, the Reticular Activating System-Vagus Nerve-Alta Major Chakra Axis as the nexus of communication from Higher Consciousness to the physical and subtle energy bodies of…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I started practicing meditation while I was in high school and within 2 months of starting I had a metaphysical experience. That experience led me to become a scientist, I wanted to learn ways to study the spiritual using the methodologies of science. I've had a successful career with over 400 scientific publications and have had my work featured in the media and presented at hundreds of conferences and workshops around the world, including at the United Nations. Many scientists today are working to bridge the so-called gap between science and spirit and the positive effects they are having on increasing our understanding of what it is to be human.
For many years the Science and Nonduality (SANDs) conferences have been bringing together scientists and mystics to discuss where science and spirituality meet.
This beautifully arranged collection of essays and insights highlight SANDs topics on the convergence of spirituality and science, weaving scientific theory and spiritual wisdom from some of the most influential thinkers of our time, with pieces that get straight to the heart of the matter. This volume offers timeless wisdom and new insight into humanity’s age-old questions that encourage our spirit and challenge our mind.
Who are we? What is our place in this vast and ever-evolving universe? Where do science and spirituality meet?
If you've pondered these questions, you're not alone. Join some of the most spiritually curious and renowned minds of our time for an exploration into the mystery of being. From founders of the Science and Nonduality (SAND) conference, Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo, On the Mystery of Being brings together an array of visionary spiritual leaders, psychologists, philosophers, scientists, teachers, authors, and healers to celebrate and explore what it means to be human.
This beautifully arranged collection of essays and insights highlight…
I’ve always had equally balanced interests in the arts/humanities and the natural sciences. I started as a physics major in college but added a second major in philosophy after encountering the evolutionary theories of Hegel, Bergson, Alexander, Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin. This interest continued in graduate school at Northwestern, where my first year coincided with the arrival of Prof. Errol E. Harris, who had a similar focus and would direct my doctoral dissertation in philosophy, whose title was From Ontology to Praxis: A Metaphilosophical Inquiry into Two Philosophical Paradigms. One of the “paradigms” was reductionist; the other was emergentist.
Clayton and Davies selected the diverse essays by various experts in this area of research to show the relevance of the emergentist paradigm to diverse areas of inquiry–including quantum physics, astronomy, cell biology, and primatology.
These lines of inquiry converge on the more provocative question of the emergence of consciousness from the brain...with an added discussion of the relevance of theological questions, including the relation between God and the world.
The thirteen essays of this study are divided into four broad areas: (1) The Physical Sciences, (2) The Biological Sciences, (3) Consciousness and Emergence, and (4) Religion and Emergence. Contributing authors include Jaegwon Kim, David J. Chalmers, and Arthur Peacocke. Here again, my perspective on this subject was broadened by the diversity of these treatments.
Much of the modern period was dominated by a `reductionist' theory of science. On this view, to explain any event in the world is to reduce it down to fundamental particles, laws, and forces. In recent years reductionism has been dramatically challenged by a radically new paradigm called `emergence'. According to this new theory, natural history reveals the continuous emergence of novel phenomena: new structures and new organisms with new causal powers. Consciousness is yet one more emergent level in the natural hierarchy. Many theologians and religious scholars believe that this new paradigm may offer new insights into the nature…
At age sixteen, I traveled from Pennsylvania to Alaska’s wilderness to live for three months. I took Einstein’s book on relativity. My mind swirled and expanded. The next year, I wrote a paper for high school titled My Universe in Four Realities. Seven years later, I read Julian Jaynes’ book on consciousness. The epiphanies rolled in. The reality we’re taught to believe in always rang false to me. When I learned the inside tricks lawmakers use to stop Americans from blocking environmentally harmful industrial actions, I wrote a book about it. I’m passionate about exposing deceit, whether cultural or legal. These books helped.
Here’s a book that rearranged my thinking mind and opened a whole new universe of wonder to me. Digging deep for some way to understand how and why my conscious mind can construct a subjectively experienced universe in which I live and move was made a less lonely task when I encountered Julian Jaynes’ mind-blowing archaeology of subjective experience.
I was grateful to have some knowledge of ancient literature because I was taken on a tour not only of the words of the ancients but of the world they seem to have experienced subjectively, as revealed in their way of expressing themselves. The notion that subjective consciousness has not always existed as it does now for humans never seemed controversial to me, but the theory outlined here about HOW that evolution happened had me recommending this book frequently.
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.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I am a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. I studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and Munich (Germany) and have a Ph.D. in Medical Psychology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Between 2004 and 2009 I was Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego. My research in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience is focused on the perception of time in ordinary and altered states of consciousness. The investigation concerning the riddle of subjective time as based on the embodied self leads me to answers of what matters most, the nature of our existence as self-conscious beings.
I think that Nicholas Humphrey with this book comes closest to an explanation of how consciousness might have evolved. Present-moment awareness of what we subjectively feel as happening “now” might stem from the constant feedback processing of perception-and-action cycles which extend over time. In his brilliantly accessible language Humphrey convinces the reader that consciousness is “thick” sensory-motor activity of what you feel as extended over time, phenomenal present-moment experience.
How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? And why do we value it so highly? In Soul Dust, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, a leading figure in consciousness research, proposes a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the "soul niche." Tightly…
I am a writer, a hypnotherapist, and a consciousness researcher. Ever since I was a baby, I had the memory and the sense that there was more to our existence than meets the eye. Even though I started my career as a lawyer in Vienna, Austria, after a transformative illness and a series of spiritually awakening experiences, I left for Mexico to pursue my calling as a metaphysical explorer and writer. Ever since, I’ve spent my life mapping out various dimensions of the psyche. When I’m not traveling, I like to retreat into my small highland cottage with Marius, the border collie, and Kasiopea, the black magic cat.
This book is so amazing because it describes the real-life spiritual adventures of the legendary transpersonal psychologist, Dr. Stan Grof, who has taken many journeys into non-ordinary states of consciousness.
The book describes what becomes possible when we shift our awareness away from a mere materialist outlook on the world and give consciousness a fundamental role. I like to refer back to it, again and again, to remind myself that the limitations of my perception are the limitations of my mind: If I open up my mind, even the so-called impossible will begin to happen.
Feelings of oneness with other people, nature, and the universe. Encounters with extraterrestrials, deities, and demons. Out-of-body experiences and past-life memories. Science casts a skeptical eye. But Dr. Stanislav Grof-the psychiatric researcher who cofounded transpersonal psychology-believes otherwise.
When the Impossible Happens presents Dr. Grof 's mesmerizing firsthand account of over 50 years of inquiry into waters uncharted by classical psychology, one that will leave readers questioning the very fabric of our existence.
From his first LSD session that gave him a glimpse of cosmic consciousness to his latest work with Holotropic Breathwork, When the Impossible Happens will amaze readers with…
Somehow, electrical impulses shoot through our brains to generate a surround sound, 3D-movie experience of the world. How on earth is this possible? When I was a college student, this question burrowed into my brain and wouldn’t get out. So I decided to make a living thinking about it. Now it’s 20 years later, I’m a philosophy professor at Yale-NUS College, and I still don’t know the answer!
What if consciousness is the story our minds tell us about the world? Books are written in black ink but can tell stories about red roses. So maybe neurons in your brain can also tell you stories about red roses–maybe that’s what’s happening when you see a red rose.
Michael Tye explores this idea in an incredibly fruitful way, and the theory that he helped to develop, representationalism, is a juggernaut in the contemporary philosophy of perception.
Can neurophysiology ever reveal to us what it is like to smell a skunk or to experience pain? In what does the feeling of happiness consist? How is it that changes in the white and gray matter composing our brains generate subjective sensations and feelings? These are several of the questions that Michael Tye addresses, while formulating a new and enlightening theory about the phenomenal "what it feels like" aspect of consciousness. The test of any such theory, according to Tye, lies in how well it handles ten critical problems of consciousness. Tye argues that all experiences and all feelings…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
The world as we know it is coming to an end, so humanity can take a quantum leap into a new consciousness. The books we recommend offer information on why this is happening and how to become part of the change to a New Earth. Humanity is living in an amazing time. We feel we have something to say on this based on our combined experiences as psychologists, therapists, trainers, and authors, and giving new consciousness workshops internationally since 2012.
What we like about the book is it offers a glimpse of the new global society to come, a renewed humanity for the 21st century, and how each of us can best participate during the process of planetary transformation.
The book looks at our collective consciousness and the history of radical waves of transformation, and how this relates to the current changes humanity faces, such as climate change, economic meltdowns, and increasing political polarization.
Kingsley suggests a paradigm shift in human thinking and perception is required—a consciousness evolution in recognition of the interconnectedness of all things.
