"To be one, whole in the face of life, is all that matters. So long as I remain conscious of this, I feel a life within me and a peace that nothing else can give." The words are Madame de Salzmann's, from the final page of her book The Reality of Being. I read them and feel good. For a moment I experience "the peace that passeth understanding." At that same moment I realize my incapacity and my non-comprehension and I feel bad. Stabbed in the heart by "the sword of gnosis" I want to run away, fall back into complacency. I see how I am, divided. Do I care? So long as I remain trapped in passivity, nothing new can appear: no Newness, no New Man, no New World. Do I really wish to explore the Unknown? Or am I only an armchair adventurer, a dreamer vicariously gaining the experience from another's travels? How can I know myself? My journey to inaccessible places begins with seeing that I am two: I wish, I do not wish. The act of seeing itself is the appearance of I." Not the ordinary "I" that is deeply afraid and wishes only for security, but the real "I," pure, uncontaminated by fear, grounded in love. "Without it I will never know what is true, never enter a world entirely new." Her words convey deep meaning, far deeper than we ordinarily realize. To discover the New World requires knowing how to measure. Without the science of measures I cannot go far. "It is my measure, the measure both of my capacity and of the quality of my moment of work." Knowing the code of measures, I can decipher the reality of who I am. This book provides the keys to the code.

In this engaging and mind-stretching book, Vlatko Vedral explores the nature of information and looks at quantum computing, discussing the bizarre effects that arise from the quantum world. He concludes by asking the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from?

To be one, whole in the face of life, is all that matters. So long as I remain conscious of this, I feel a life within me and a peace that nothing else can give. The words are Madame de Salzmanns, from the final page of her book The Reality of Being. I read them and feel good. For a moment I experience the peace that passeth understanding. At that same moment I realize my incapacity and my non-comprehension and I feel bad. Stabbed in the heart by the sword of gnosis I want to run away, fall back into complacency. I see how I am, divided. Do I care? So long as I remain trapped in passivity, nothing new can appear: no Newness, no New Man, no New World. Do I really wish to explore the Unknown? Or am I only an armchair adventurer, a dreamer vicariously gaining the experience from anothers travels? How can I know myself? My journey to inaccessible places begins with seeing that I am two: I wish, I do not wish. The act of seeing itself is the appearance of I. Not the ordinary I that is deeply afraid and wishes only for security, but the real I, pure, uncontaminated by fear, grounded in love. Without it I will never know what is true, never enter a world entirely new. Her words convey deep meaning, far deeper than we ordinarily realize. To discover the New World requires knowing how to measure. Without the science of measures I cannot go far. It is my measure, the measure both of my capacity and of the quality of my moment of work. Knowing the code of measures, I can decipher the reality of who I am. This book provides the keys to the code.

How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences. Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences—offering the solution to a social paradox that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Communication has always been the force that makes a collection of people more than the sum of individuals, but only now can we explain why: digital technologies have made it possible to parse the information we generate by being social in new, imaginative ways. And yet we must look at that data, González-Bailón argues, through the lens of theories that capture the nature of social life. The technologies we use, in the end, are also a manifestation of the social world we inhabit. González-Bailón discusses how the unpredictability of social life relates to communication networks, social influence, and the unintended effects that derive from individual decisions. She describes how communication generates social dynamics in aggregate (leading to episodes of “collective effervescence”) and discusses the mechanisms that underlie large-scale diffusion, when information and behavior spread “like wildfire.” She applies the theory of networks to illuminate why collective outcomes can differ drastically even when they arise from the same individual actions. By opening the black box of unintended effects, González-Bailón identifies strategies for social intervention and discusses the policy implications—and how data science and evidence-based research embolden critical thinking in a world that is constantly changing.

More than an insightful psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung was the twentieth century's greatest articulator of the primacy of mind in nature, a view whose origins vanish behind the mists of time. Underlying Jung's extraordinary body of work, and providing a foundation for it, there is a broad and sophisticated system of metaphysical thought. This system, however, is only implied in Jung's writings, so as to shield his scientific persona from accusations of philosophical speculation. The present book scrutinizes Jung’s work to distil and reveal that extraordinary, hidden metaphysical treasure: for Jung, mind and world are one and the same entity; reality is fundamentally experiential, not material; the psyche builds and maintains its body, not the other way around; and the ultimate meaning of our sacrificial lives is to serve God by providing a reflecting mirror to God’s own instinctive mentation. Embodied in this compact volume is a journey of discovery through Jungian thoughtscapes never before revealed with the depth, force and scholarly rigor you are about to encounter.

In this groundbreaking book Phil Barden reveals what decision science explains about people’s purchase behaviour, and specifically demonstrates its value to marketing. He shares the latest research on the motivations behind consumers’ choices and what happens in the human brain as buyers make their decisions. He deciphers the ‘secret codes’ of products, services and brands to explain why people buy them. And finally he shows how to apply this knowledge in day to day marketing to great effect by dramatically improving key factors such as relevance, differentiation and credibility. Shows how the latest insights from the fields of Behavioural Economics, psychology and neuro-economics explain why we buy what we buy Offers a pragmatic framework and guidelines for day-to-day marketing practice on how to employ this knowledge for more effective brand management - from strategy to implementation and NPD. The first book to apply Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning work to marketing and advertising Packed with case studies, this is a must-read for marketers, advertising professionals, web designers, R&D managers, industrial designers, graphic designers in fact anyone whose role or interest focuses on the ‘why’ behind consumer behaviour. Foreword by Rory Sutherland, Executive Creative Director and Vice-Chairman, OgilvyOne London and Vice-Chairman,Ogilvy Group UK Full colour throughout

INTRODUCTION. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? We had the experience but missed the meaning —T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets What does it mean? How many times we ask ourselves that question! Frankl wrote that to find meaning in one’s life was the primary motivational force in man. Gurdjieff’s fundamental question was ”What is the meaning and purpose of man’s life on earth?” Without meaning, life becomes only a dreary disillusionment, a mere stopgap between birth and death. Since our human nature abhors a vacuum, our common search turns toward filling the ever-present inner void. Our humanity urges us to fill in the empty space between the two points. What urges us is the will to meaning: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? The Mysteries not only address these wrenching human questions, but afford them objective, mathematically provable answers. The Mystery teachings are all about the science of mediation. Mediation means the mean between the extremes. Without the calculable knowledge of the mean, we are the halt leading the blind; and all fall into the ditch of ignorance and discord. From ancient times, the keynote of the special training into the Mysteries concerned the vibratory laws of harmonics. Harmonics is the language of initiates. Even today, our scientists, peering into the ineluctable mysteries of Nature, recognize how the knowledge harmonics unveils the hidden, mysterious, underlying substructure of the visible material world in which we live. They call it string theory. However, they see only the tip of the iceberg and fail to comprehend the vastness of the structure lying below the surface. Consequently, their results give no real meaning to their discoveries. As ancient cultures well knew, unless understood with a special cast of mind, the arid and secular (Ital. secco, dry) knowledge of mathematical harmonic ratios lead only to pedantic factual data that no one, except perhaps the pedants themselves, care to peruse. The sacred meaning is lost. Meaning, one might say, is the value computed by dividing the sum of two extremes of a range of values by 2? Both means and meaning are valuable as the connectors that join together the proverbial two ends of the octave stick. Means are what come in between. As the ancient musicians were at pains to point out, means provide the middle position. As the reconciling force, they represent the distinctive and valuable aspects of our human nature. In the Timaeus, Plato expresses the importance of the mean that mediates between the two incommensurable things: mind and body, allegorized as fire and earth. However, the universal frame was not simply a surface plane (for which a single mean would have sufficed). Rather, it was a solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two. Therefore, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible(as fire is to air, so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of harmonia, having been reconciled to itself,