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The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (book)

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History rhymes: it moves in cycles of growth, destruction and then further growth; we see intense conflict followed by loving peace, leading to complacency and the withering of what brought the beauty and success to begin with, only to give birth to something greater. Another common historical rhyme is that each age has a wealthy establishment which attempts to suppress information or people that threatens its control: Emperors, Tsars and tycoons. Any serious student of world history, mythology and ideas knows these things to be true.                                                                                                               The Nag Hammadi Scriptures have captured the imagination of seekers around the world because their story and content exemplify the points raised above. In brief, they represent a type of Christianity that flourished between approximately 70 AD to 400 AD but ceased to exist thereafter. They are called gnostic which generally means a direct knowledg
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A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality (book)

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The notion of an objective, hierarchical path of personal growth makes many today feel uneasy because the dominant ideology of our time is that everything is subjective and based on power dynamics. American philosopher Ken Wilber argues that humanity has become stuck in this post-modern knowledge system, which has captured much of the political, media and academic class, but inhibits humanity’s ascension into higher developmental levels.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Growth hierarchies, for Wilber, should be differentiated from dominance hierarchies which are indeed based on power and privilege; for example, those higher in a workplace hierarchy may in fact be lower in the growth hierarchy than someone at the bottom of the organization. Human advancement occurs in a spiral pattern within indi
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Ascension: The Art of Soul Perfection and the Attainment of Grace (book)

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For a while now the conception of human life that makes the most sense to me is that we are here on planet earth to learn, and human life is in essence a metaphysical school. I used to dismiss the idea of reincarnation: sure, it was in the works of Plato and Buddha, two towering influences in the history of thought, but I couldn’t see how it was possible. The reason for this was that I had fallen for the trick of believing we are a body that creates a mind through physical processes, rather than a consciousness that manifests a body. It was Immanuel Kant’s classic “Critique of Pure Reason” that convinced me that all is mind, and that space and time are an illusion (confirmed further by my reading of quantum physics). Kant left me with the lingering thought that we never have an experience which is not subjective, first-person awareness. Another way to put it is that there is never a separation between subject and object: the knower and what is known are irrevocably connected. Kant’s ar
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J. G. Bennett on Gurdjieff (book)

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There are two ways in which the ascension (spiritual liberation) argument typically occurs. The first is that humans were once grand or at least at a relatively decent level of peace and stability, but have fallen, and to ascend is to take our rightful place by being and acting in accordance with our designed nature (leaving aside the question of the designer). The other is that we act in alignment with the lowly state we are by nature, and ascension is rising above our lot. Gurdjieff sits in the second category, with the general purpose of human life being to act as an energetic resource for planetary forces in the same way as sheep and cows are resources for humanity; however, just as some animals may avoid capture for food and materials or death by another animal, an individual human may escape their bondage by separating psychologically from the herd.    Gurdjieff states that human beings are in a type of hypnosis, with the added suggestion that this is by design:    "It must
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The Secret of Light (book)

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One of the most beautifully written and accessible mystical texts of our time is The Secret of Light by Walter Russell. It captures the truths of esoteric Christianity (such as that found in the sermons of Meister Eckhart), and the Hindu Upanishads, without getting bogged down in unapproachable terminology or culturally-specific mythology.                                                                                                                                                                                                    The essence of Russell’s text is that each human is an eternal consciousness that both experiences and is the manifestation of a single, eternal God-Mind. A human being is a conscious mind that experiences separate physical forms via waves and pulses of light which create the electrical charges governing her body and thoughts. As Russell puts it, “Electricity expresses the desire in the God-Mind for creative expression by seemingly dividing the One still ligh
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Aristotle's Ethics (book)

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A curious fact about the history of ethical theory is that the ancient Greeks did not have a word for happiness; it made no sense for them to speak about the final goal of human action as individual or general human happiness. The Greeks used the word eudaimonia , which is generally translated as flourishing. To flourish, in the eyes of Aristotle, is to fulfil one’s potential as a human being, or to be excellent at being what one truly is.                                                                                                                                                                                                            For Aristotle, in order to know what it means to flourish, it is essential to have a view of human nature. This means, that to know if an individual has flourished as a human, we must have a notion of what it means to be a human so we can determine what kind of things an exemplar human being would do. Aristotle believed that this answer had to be foun
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Erving Goffman on Stigma (book)

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Erving Goffman established the groundwork for the analysis of the relationship between mental illness and social control in his classic texts Stigma and Asylums. For Goffman, humans live in, and emerge from, interconnected social networks; moreover, individuals within these social networks hold shared expectations about how people will act. Goffman notes that we do not merely expect individuals to live in accordance with these assumptions, but we demand that they do: "We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands."  In this way humans transfer conventions or conveniences into implicit behavioural demands, and thereby regulate each other’s conduct.                                                                                                                                For Goffman, when we meet someone we assume that they are going to be a certain way. The group of attributes that we expect pe
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