Our Final Hour: A Scientist's warning - How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century — On Earth and Beyond


Martin J. Rees - 2003
    Rees's vision of our immediate future is both a work of stunning scientific originality and a humanistic clarion call on behalf of the future of life.

Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities


Dean Radin - 2013
    He takes us on a thrilling scientific journey and challenges outdated assumptions that these abilities are mere superstition. Focusing on Patanjali's mysterious Yoga Sutras -- 2,000 year-old meditation practices believed to release our extraordinary powers -- Radin offers powerful evidence confirming that sometimes fact is much stranger, spookier, and more wonderful than the wildest fiction.

Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity


Loren R. Graham - 2009
    Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping--and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements.Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin--who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics--were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite--and led to the founding of descriptive set theory.The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and -creativity.

Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation


David Rohl - 1998
    This work aims to reveal the historical truth which lies at the heart of the Book of Genesis.

The Book of Stones: Who They Are & What They Teach


Robert Simmons - 2005
    Two introductory chapters detail the authors’ theories about how to work with crystals and stones—including the concept of crystal resonance and the scientific observation that living organisms (such as ourselves) are liquid crystalline structures. An illuminating alphabetical journey through the mineral kingdom, stone by stone, follows.Each entry begins with the stone name and photo, plus its elemental and chakra correspondences, as well as keywords that indicate its properties. Next comes a description of the crystal structure, hardness, history, and known locations of each mineral, plus any relevant legend or lore from the past. Each author then offers an essay on the subtle energy properties and spiritual applications of the stone. The entries conclude with summaries of the spiritual, emotional, and physical healing qualities of the stone, and an affirmation for evoking its potential benefits. The book’s presentation is straightforward enough to make it an excellent introduction for beginners, yet the level of detail and the depth of research make it an invaluable resource for the most experienced stone practitioners.

Big History: The Big Bang, Life On Earth, And The Rise Of Humanity


David Christian - 2008
    David Christian, professor of history at San Diego State University, surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the universal scales of cosmology.

The Perennial Philosophy


Aldous Huxley - 1944
    The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.

A Short History of Progress


Ronald Wright - 2004
    The twentieth century—a time of unprecedented progress—has produced a tremendous strain on the very elements that comprise life itself: This raises the key question of the twenty-first century: How much longer can this go on? With wit and erudition, Ronald Wright lays out a-convincing case that history has always provided an answer, whether we care to notice or not. From Neanderthal man to the Sumerians to the Roman Empire, A Short History of Progress dissects the cyclical nature of humanity's development and demise, the 10,000-year old experiment that we've unleashed but have yet to control. It is Wright's contention that only by understanding and ultimately breaking from the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we avoid the onset of a new Dark Age. Wright illustrates how various cultures throughout history have literally manufactured their own end by producing an overabundance of innovation and stripping bare the very elements that allowed them to initially advance. Wright's book is brilliant; a fascinating rumination on the hubris at the heart of human development and the pitfalls we still may have time to avoid.

Easter Island


Thor Heyerdahl - 1989
    Over thirty years ago, the man who did such important, pioneering work in Kon-Tiki wrote another best-selling book, Aku-Aku, about Easter Island. More recently, Heyerdahl was invited to return to Easter Island and there confronted the conundrum of the famous, haunting statues that stud the lovely island, massive and mysterious.How were they made? How were they moved? What did the natives mean when they had said, those many years earlier, that "the statues walked"? Who made them--and where did the Easter Islanders themselves come from? What did earlier visitors discover--or believe?It is characteristic of Dr. Heyerdahl's many explorations that his research, his theories, his conclusions all are entwined with objectives greater than mere adventure. Just as his expeditions have been partly in pursuit and proof of his theories that early man traveled further (and faster) than others had previously suspected, and that the peoples of many cultures can work together peacefully, his probes into the past are coupled with an enduring, endearing conviction--never before displayed better than in this volume--that just as we must avoid prejudice in the present, we should not look down on the people of the past--for they and we have more in common than it might seem.

The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians: A Lost Classic by Magus Incognito


William Walker Atkinson - 1949
    In the 1600s they issued a set of manifestos calling for an enlightened revolution that would reshape society into a more democratic ideal. Even the American Founding Fathers were influenced by these manifestos.Writing as Magus Incognito, William Walker Atkinson reintroduces a new generation of readers to the Rosicrucian ideals, as well as to a myriad of connections between occult concepts as varied as alchemy, reincarnation, the astral plane, auras, Eastern and Western mysticism, and the "evolution of mankind" among seven esoteric versions of planets in our solar system.There are more than two dozen organizations of Rosicrucians, with local groups in nearly every state--more than 100 in all--and half a million or more followers. Interest continues to be high in this group.

Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth


Adam Frank - 2018
    Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life and intelligence from the ancient Greeks to the leading thinkers of our own time, and shows how we as a civilization can only hope to survive climate change if we recognize what science has recently discovered: that we are just one of ten billion trillion planets in the Universe, and it’s highly likely that many of those planets hosted technologically advanced alien civilizations. What’s more, each of those civilizations must have faced the same challenge of civilization-driven climate change.Written with great clarity and conviction, Light of the Stars builds on the inspiring work of pioneering scientists such as Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, whose work at the dawn of the space age began building the new science of astrobiology; Jack James, the Texas-born engineer who drove NASA’s first planetary missions to success; Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian geochemist who first envisioned the Earth’s biosphere; and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who invented Gaia theory. Frank recounts the perilous journey NASA undertook across millions of miles of deep space to get its probes to Venus and Mars, yielding our first view of the cosmic laws of planets and climate that changed our understanding of our place in the universe.Thrilling science at the grandest of scales, Light of the Stars explores what may be the largest question of all: What can the likely presence of life on other worlds tell us about our own fate?

Why the Universe Is the Way It Is


Hugh Ross - 2008
    Yet these researchers--along with countless ordinary folks--resist belief in the biblical Creator. Why? They say a loving God would have made a better home for us, one without trouble and tragedy. In Why the Universe Is the Way It Is, Hugh Ross draws from his depth of study in both science and Scripture to explain how the universe's design fulfills several distinct purposes. He also reveals God's surpassing love and ultimate purposes for each individual. Why the Universe Is the Way It Is will interest anyone who wonders where and how the universe came to be, what or who is responsible for it, why we are here, or how and when the universe ends. Far from leaving the reader at this philosophical jumping-off point, Ross builds toward answering the big question of human destiny and the specific question of each reader's personal destiny.

God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction


Dan Barker - 2016
    Barker combs through both the Old and New Testament (as well as thirteen different editions of the “Good Book”), presenting powerful evidence for why the Scripture shouldn’t govern our everyday lives. This witty, well-researched book suggests that we should move past the Bible and clear a path to a kinder and more thoughtful world.

Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe


Simon Singh - 2004
    In this amazingly comprehensible history of the universe, Simon Singh decodes the mystery behind the Big Bang theory, lading us through the development of one of the most extraordinary, important, and awe-inspiring theories in science.

The Occult


Colin Wilson - 1971
    He produces a wonderfully skillful synthesis of the available material—one that sees the occult in the light of reason and reason in the light of the mystical and paranormal. The result is a wide-ranging survey of the subject that provides a comprehensive history of magic, an insightful exploration of our latent powers, and a journey of enlightenment. “I am very impressed by this book, not only by its erudition but…above all for the good-natured, unaffected charm of the author whose reasoning is never too far-fetched, who is never carried away by preposterous theories.”—Sunday Times