An Ironic Approach to the Absolute: Schlegel's Poetic Mysticism brings Friedrich Schlegel's ironic fragments in dialogue with the Dao De Jing and John Ashbery's Flow Chart to argue that poetic texts offer an intuition of the whole because they resist the reader's desire to comprehend them fully. Karolin Mirzakhan argues that although Schlegel's ironic fragments proclaim their incompleteness in both their form and their content, they are the primary means for facilitating an intuition of the Absolute. Focusing on the techniques by which texts remain open, empty, or ungraspable, Mirzakhan's analysis uncovers the methods that authors use to cultivate the agility of mind necessary for their readers to intuit the Absolute. Mirzakhan develops the term "poetic mysticism" to describe the experience of the Absolute made possible by particular textual moments,examining the Dao De Jing and Flow Chart to provide an original account of the striving to know the Absolute that is non-linear, non-totalizing, and attuned to non-presence. This conversation with ancient and contemporary poetic texts enacts the romantic imperative to join philosophy with poetry and advances a clearer communication of the notion of the Absolute that emerges from Schlegel's romantic philosophy.

The Holy Quran presents an irrefutable basis and belief system for the establishment of a stable and harmonious life in this world, and a triumphant return to Paradise in the Next. There are misunderstandings about the very source-springs of human well-being the belief in the spiritual realities of existence, the infinite love for the Holy Messenger, and the unity regarding the implementation of the divinely revealed programme for human society.Young people all over the world, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, are brought up and educated in an environment permeated by scientific materialism. It is modern learning which programmes their minds and causes them to reject anything they find incompatible with what they have been taught about man and life on the earth. This book will clarify the misunderstandings and confusions about Islamic spirituality on scientific grounds.Scientific orthodoxy refers to magnetic sensitivity in human beings, electromagnetic energies that permeate our atmosphere, the flow of positive and negative ions in the atmosphere affecting human brain activity, the function of the pineal gland and many other empirical sources of transcendent experience that are yet to be investigated. This magnetic energy basis of spiritual experience, which the scientific camp has been forced into revealing, has proved to be a welcome development of modern science from the point of view of Islamic spirituality.The younger generation of modern times will have their belief reconfirmed by the study of the scientific facts cited in this book. The scientific reality of Islamic spirituality is demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt.

The Accidental Immigrant is the capstone work of world-renown author Professor Kyriacos C. Markides, based on his over fifty-year-quest for an authentic understanding of the true nature of Reality. As a teenager he arrived at the docs of New York in 1960 with the purported aim of earning a business degree and returning to his native Cyprus. Thanks to a string of uncanny coincidences he soon realized that the real meaning and purpose of his Atlantic crossing was not the acquisition of practical skills but the development of his social awareness and spiritual consciousness. This is the story, among other things, of his valiant struggles to assimilate within American society and culture, of his peace activism to help heal the wounds of ethnic strife in his native Island, and of his relentless quest for spiritual fulfillment within the challenging confines of the secular and agnostic world of modern academia. As a sociologist and a field researcher he shares with us his encounters with a variety of remarkable people that include colorful Christian shamans and healers possessors of paranormal gifts as well as charismatic monks and ascetics who exposed him to the magnificent spiritual wisdom of Eastern mystical Christianity. It is, among other things, these kinds of experiences that step by step led him to realize that there is a deeper Truth over and beyond our physical and sensate universe that is the foundation and wellspring of everything that happens in our lives within the three-dimensional world. And it is this awareness that could eventually lead towards the integration of the best of science with the best of religion for the long-term survival of the human race.