From ancient Taoist sages and Sufi mystics to Christian contemplatives and contemporary Zen masters, Seeing, Knowing, Being explores the profound truth behind all the world’s mystic traditions: Living a spiritual life has nothing to do with fixing ourselves. It is simply a matter of awakening to what we already are. The real work of self-discovery-and the answer to our suffering, emptiness, and loss of meaning-is learning to see in a different way. “The mystical adventure is all in the seeing, says John Greer. “From departure to arrival, nothing changes but our eyes. But the process isn’t that simple. In this all-embracing work that is destined to become a classic, Greer artfully traces the steps and stages of the delicate process of awakening. He shows how we can move from society’s hand-me-down version of reality to the wonder of our true nature-from conceptual, habitual patterns of thinking to knowing the truth by being. Like a master artist who captures an image and stirs something deep inside of us, Greer also highlights nearly one hundred evocative metaphors, as varied and colorful as the sages themselves, to kindle your imagination and spark your intuition-to shift your perspective and shake you into an awareness that no amount of explanation can. What Greer shows, with great wisdom and compassion, is that when you put aside the map of the mind, you can follow the compass of your heart. You can move through the details of life-going to work, raising a family, throwing out the garbage-and still experience the wonders and oneness of life with deep reverence, gratitude, and joy. “Books often describe journeys. Seeing, Knowing, Being actually takes you on one. . . . A profound expedition into the true nature of life. -MATTHEW FLICKSTEIN, author and producer of the award-winning film With One Voice

"This book is a philosophical treatment of sense perception and examines the work of cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. This text includes theories of perceptual similarity, content, and realism"--Provided by publisher.

Barry Stroud presents nineteen of his philosophical essays written since 2001, on topics to do with knowing, seeing, and understanding. He discusses the nature of philosophy, sense experience, the possibility of perceptual knowledge, intentional action and self-knowledge, the reality of the colours of things, alien thought and the limits of understanding, moral knowledge, meaning, use, and understanding of language.

What is knowledge? What, if anything, can we know? In Knowing and Seeing, Michael Ayers recovers the insight in the traditional distinction between knowledge and belief, according to which 'knowledge' stems from direct and perspicuous cognitive contact with ('seeing') its object, whereas 'belief' relies on 'extraneous' justification. He conducts a careful phenomenological analysis of what it is to perceive one's environment as one's environment, the result of which is not only direct realism, but recognition that in being perceptually aware of anything we are at the same time perceptually aware of how we are aware of it. Perceptual knowing comes with knowing how you know. Some other forms of knowledge are similarly direct and perspicuous, but not all; a distinction is accordingly drawn between primary and secondary knowledge, and Ayers argues that no secondary knowledge is possible without some primary knowledge. Perceptual knowledge supplies the paradigm to which other cases of knowledge are diversely analogous - hence the notorious difficulty of defining knowledge. These conclusions, supported by a detailed examination of the relations between different grammatical constructions in which 'know', 'believe' and 'see' occur, fuel extended critiques of two lines of thought influential in contemporary epistemology: John McDowell's conceptualist and intellectualist account of perceptual knowledge, and Fred Dretske's 'externalist' employment of sceptical argument. Ayers unpicks the arguments for these other views, explains the failure of recent attempts at a comprehensive definition of knowledge, explores the tight relation between knowledge and certainty, and gives an account of how 'defeasibility' should and should not be understood in epistemology.

This book provides an overall theory of perception and much of a theory of knowledge. It explains how we can have justified beliefs and knowledge concerning the physical world, the abstract realm, and the normative domain of right and wrong.

According to Putnam to talk of “facts” without specifying the language to be used is to talk of nothing; “object” itself has many uses and as we creatively invent new uses of words “we find that we can speak of ‘objects’that were not ‘values of any variable’in 1 any language we previously spoke” . The notion of object becomes, then, like the notion of reference, a sort of open land, an unknown territory. The exploration of this land - pears to be constrained by use and invention. But, we may wonder, is it possible to guide invention and control use? In what way, in particular, is it possible, at the level of na- ral language, to link together program expressions and natural evolution? To give an answer to these onerous questions we should immediately point out that cognition (as well as natural language) has to be considered first of all as a peculiar fu- tion of active biosystems and that it results from complex interactions between the - ganism and its surroundings. “In the moment an organism perceives an object of wh- ever kind, it immediately begins to ‘interpret’this object in order to react properly to it . . . It is not necessary for the monkey to perceive the tree in itself. . . What counts is sur- 2 vival” .

The Sedona method is a tried and tested 25-year-old guide to quickly releasing the emotional baggage that imposes limitations on life.