This book reflects on Western humanity's efforts to escape from history and its terrors--from the existential condition and natural disasters to the endless succession of wars and other man-made catastrophes. Drawing on historical episodes ranging from antiquity to the recent past, and combining them with literary examples and personal reflections, Teofilo Ruiz explores the embrace of religious experiences, the pursuit of worldly success and pleasures, and the quest for beauty and knowledge as three primary responses to the individual and collective nightmares of history. The result is a profound meditation on how men and women in Western society sought (and still seek) to make meaning of the world and its disturbing history.

In chapters that range widely across Western history and culture, "The Terror of History" takes up religion, the material world, and the world of art and knowledge. "Religion and the World to Come" examines orthodox and heterodox forms of spirituality, apocalyptic movements, mysticism, supernatural beliefs, and many forms of esotericism, including magic, alchemy, astrology, and witchcraft. "The World of Matter and the Senses" considers material riches, festivals and carnivals, sports, sex, and utopian communities. Finally, "The Lure of Beauty and Knowledge" looks at cultural productions of all sorts, from art to scholarship.

Combining astonishing historical breadth with a personal and accessible narrative style, "The Terror of History" is a moving testimony to the incredibly diverse ways humans have sought to cope with their frightening history.

Use your mantram when you're ill or anxious, tired or restless, and it will guide you and comfort you like a true friend. The Mantram, or mantra, is a short, powerful, spiritual formula from the world's great traditions, repeated silently in the mind, anytime, anywhere. Easwaran, the author of Passage Meditation and the best-selling translations of The Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads and The Dhammapada, taught the use of the mantram for forty years as part of his passage meditation program.The mantram can help you to steady your mind and free it from anxiety, anger or resentment. Easwaran explains how the mantram works, and gives practical guidelines for using it to focus your thoughts and access deeper resources of strength, patience, and love.

"Tessas deep intimacy with Teresa of Avila . . . creates an invitational space for readers of any tradition (or none) to enter into their own transformational relationship with the wild woman of Avila."Mirabai Starr. This fresh, upbeat, and deftly profound book joyfully reconnects the fullness of our lives and the depth of our prayer. Much more than yet another book about a great saint who once was, it actually rekindles something of St. Teresas outrageous spiritual impulse for contemporary readers, particularly those who describe themselves as "spiritual, not religious." Tessa Bielecki is the author of several books on St. Teresa of Avila, as well as a former Abbess. "

This book reflects on Western humanity's efforts to escape from history and its terrors--from the existential condition and natural disasters to the endless succession of wars and other man-made catastrophes. Drawing on historical episodes ranging from antiquity to the recent past, and combining them with literary examples and personal reflections, Teofilo Ruiz explores the embrace of religious experiences, the pursuit of worldly success and pleasures, and the quest for beauty and knowledge as three primary responses to the individual and collective nightmares of history. The result is a profound meditation on how men and women in Western society sought (and still seek) to make meaning of the world and its disturbing history.

In chapters that range widely across Western history and culture, "The Terror of History" takes up religion, the material world, and the world of art and knowledge. "Religion and the World to Come" examines orthodox and heterodox forms of spirituality, apocalyptic movements, mysticism, supernatural beliefs, and many forms of esotericism, including magic, alchemy, astrology, and witchcraft. "The World of Matter and the Senses" considers material riches, festivals and carnivals, sports, sex, and utopian communities. Finally, "The Lure of Beauty and Knowledge" looks at cultural productions of all sorts, from art to scholarship.

Combining astonishing historical breadth with a personal and accessible narrative style, "The Terror of History" is a moving testimony to the incredibly diverse ways humans have sought to cope with their frightening history.

The Inner Eye of Love offers a contemporary theology of mysticism that locates it at the very center of authentic religious experience. It provides as well a practical guide for meditation even as it maps out the oceanic experience toward which meditation points. Johnston begins with the mystical tradition itself, its roots and origins, its appearance and significance in the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the early Church. He explains what mysticism is and is not, and how it is inextricably bound up with love. It is at the level of mysticism, he maintains, that the two traditions of East and West can at last understand one another and begin to work together to heal a broken world. The Inner Eye of Love escorts the reader through the stages of the mystical journey, from initial call to final enlightenment. Johnston compares and contrasts the Oriental and Christian experience, continually revealing new points of commonality The much discussed "dark night of the soul" is seen here in a positive way, as an emptying preliminary to the overbrimming of the soul with the knowledge and love of God. Finally, the author considers the often misunderstood relation between mysticism and practical action.

Aisha al-Ba uniyya (c.1456 1517) was one of the greatest women mystics in Islamic history. A Sufi master and an Arab poet, her religious writings were extensive by any standard and extraordinary for her time. In medieval Islam a number of women were respected scholars and teachers, but they rarely composed works of their own. Aisha al-Ba uniyya, however, was prolific. She composed over twenty works, and likely wrote more Arabic prose and poetry than any other Muslim woman prior to the twentieth century.

The first full-scale biography of al-Ba uniyya in the English language, this volume provides a rare glimpse into the life and writings of a medieval Muslim woman in her own words. Homerin presents her work in the wider context of late-medieval Islamic spirituality, examining the influence of figures such as Ibn al- Arabi, al-Busiri and Ibn al-Farid, and emphasising the role of the person of the Prophet Muhammad in her spirituality. Clearly and beautifully written, Aisha al-Ba uniyya is a fascinating introduction to a figure described by a sixteenth-century biographer as one of the marvels of her age.

Muslim scholars are a vital part of Islam, and are sometimes considered 'heirs to the prophets', continuing Muhammad's work of establishing Islam in the centuries after his death. But this was not always the case: indeed, Muslims survived the turmoil of their first century largely without the help of scholars. In this book, Jonathan Brockopp seeks to determine the nature of Muslim scholarly communities and to account for their emergence from the very beginning of the Muslim story until the mid-tenth century. By analysing coins, papyri and Arabic literary manuscripts from the ancient mosque-library of Kairouan, Tunisia, Brockopp offers a new interpretation of Muslim scholars' rise to positions of power and influence, serving as moral guides and the chief arbiters of Muslim tradition. This book will be of great benefit to scholars of comparative religion and advanced students in Middle Eastern history, Islamic Studies, Islamic Law and early Islamic literature.

Piety and Rebellion examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventional religious practice. Many of the essays exhibit a comparative perspective deployed to better articulate the innovative spirit, and traditional challenges, Hasidism presents to the traditional Jewish world. Piety and Rebellion is an attempt to present Hasidism as one case whereby maximalist religion can yield a rebellious challenge to conventional conceptions of religious thought and practice.

'The greatest living poet of the Arab world' Guardian Cloud, mirror, stone, thunder, eyelid, desert, sea. Through a dead or dying land, Mihyar walks: a figure of heroic individualism and dissent, part-Orpheus, part-Zarathustra. Where he goes, the austere building-blocks of his world become the expressions of passionate emotion, of visionary exaltation and despairing melancholy. The traditions of the Ancient Greeks, the Bible and the Quran flow about and through him. Written in the cosmopolitan Beirut of the early 1960s, Adonis's Songs of Mihyar the Damascene did for Arabic poetry what The Waste Land did for English. These are poems against authoritarianism and dogma, in which a new Noah would abandon his ark to dive with the condemned, and in which surrealism and Sufi mysticism meet and intertwine. The result is a masterpiece of world literature. Translated by Kareem James Abu Zeid and Ivan Eubanks 'The most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity' Edward Said

Highly contested by orthodox circles and literalists who narrow religion to formalism on one hand and victimised by practitioners unable to go beyond traditional boundaries on the other, Islamic Sufism continues to be a beacon enlightening the path of millions of believers around the world. Gulen's approach to Sufism in this collection represents the middle way, an approach that in a sense revives the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, with an awareness of the social realities of the twenty-first century. For Gulen, the marriage of the heart and the mind is necessary for a sensible appreciation of our existence and what we are expected of. He does not confine himself with any typical methodology; he endeavours to reach the water source by opening wells everywhere, for the truth is actually manifested in every single creation and waiting for seekers' drill. This fourth volume of the "Emerald Hills of the Heart" collection concludes a journey - which is textually long, but spiritually endless - towards insan al-kamil, the perfect human, as unfolded stage-by-stage with an escalating scale of concepts that have developed throughout fourteen centuries on the basis of firm roots established in the time of the Prophet by his own practice. Concepts like Tranquility, Secret, Truth of Divinity, Beyond the Physical Realms, Preserved Tablet, Glorified Attributes, and Beautiful Names are delicately explained in this volume.

Is Judaism essentially a religion of laws and commandments? Or do its sources reflect significant attempts at addressing the individual's inner life, existential crises and spiritual experiences? Inner Religion in Jewish Sources offers a comprehensive exploration of inner life in the Jewish sources from the Bible to rabbinic literature, from Medieval Jewish philosophy to Kabbalistic writings and the Hasidic world, where it gained particularly potent expressions. Addressing the issue from the perspective of comparative religion, it seeks to emphasize the commonality of processes of interiorization in various religious traditions, suggesting an innovative angle both in the study of religion and of religious thought. In doing so, it sheds new light on the inner aspect of Jewish religious life, which is all too often hidden behind the external and institutional aspects of the Jewish religion.

The greatest contemporary Kabbalists, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, and his son and successor, Rav Baruch Ashlag provide an eye-opening answers to life's most fundamental question: "What is the meaning of my life?" Based on their interpretations of 'The Book of Zohar', and 'The Tree of Life', we can now learn how to benefit from the wisdom of Kabbalah on a day-to-day basis. In addition to authentic texts by these great Kabbalists, this book offers illustrations that accurately depict the evolution of the Upper Worlds as Kabbalists experience them, as well as several helpful essays to enhance our understanding of the texts. Rav Michael Laitman, Ph.D., Rav Baruch Ashlag's personal assistant and prime student, compiled all the texts a Kabbalah student would need to attain the spiritual worlds. In his daily lessons, Rav Laitman bases his teaching on these inspiring texts, thus helping novices and veterans alike to better understand the spiritual path we undertake on our fascinating journey to the Higher Realms. If you truly seek the meaning of life, your heart will lead you through the writings of these great Kabbalists, who wrote them from their hearts to yours. Through their words, you will discover lifes essence and power, and your own eternal existence.

A collection of lectures on the features of the movement of mysticism that began in antiquity and continues in Hasidism today.