The authors also make an important contribution to the interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. They show that it is concerned not with the dead, but with the living. The last section of the manual provides instructions for an actual psychedelic session, under adequate safeguards.The authors were engaged in a program of experiments with LSD and other psychedelic drugs at Harvard University until sensational national publicity unfairly concentrating on student interest in the drugs, led to the suspension of the experiments. Since then, the authors have continued their work without academic auspices.

    But it is clear that Socrates contributed three new ideas to the development of philosophy: that goodness consists not in helping friends and harming enemies, but in not harming anybody at all; that goodness and knowledge are one and the same thing; and that for progress to be made in argument, there must be step-by-step agreement between those arguing.The similarity to Jesus goes further. Socrates too was put to death for defying the conventions of his day; and he too sets us, by the manner of his life and his death, an example which is at the same time an inspiration and an impossible ideal.Socrates was born in Athens in 469bce, and spent much of his life pointing out the absurdities of current beliefs. Though he played no part in political life, he antagonized both the democratic and oligarchic factions in Athens, and in 399bce was put to death on a charge of atheism and corrupting the young. By the manner of his life and death he became the inspiration for the philosopher Plato.

    The story of Stephen Hawking's relentless quest for the secret of the origins of the universe will change forever the way you look at the stars . . . and your place among them.

    Matthew Arnold called Emerson’s essays “the most important work done in prose.”   INCLUDES A MODERN LIBRARY READING GROUP GUIDE

    They are wide ranging and inventive: A young Jewish man's inexplicable transformation into a very large, blond, tattooed goy ends with an argument over whether or not his father can beat his unclean son with a copy of the Talmud. A pious man having a near-death experience discovers that God is actually a chicken, and he's forced to reconsider his life -- and his diet. At God's insistence, Leo Schwartzman searches Home Depot for supplies for an ark. And a young boy mistakes Holocaust Remembrance Day as emergency preparedness training for the future. Auslander draws upon his upbringing in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York State to craft stories that are filled with shame, sex, God, and death, but also manage to be wickedly funny and poignant.