In this book-length sonnet sequence, Kelly Cherry explores the philosophical domain, addressing classic questions, raising new ones, and sometimes doing philosophy in fourteen lines. A former philosophy student in graduate school, she retains a deep love of philosophical inquiry and maintains that our lives are intimately bound to the philosophical choices we make. Conscious study of our choices, Cherry believes, can lead to greater freedom. Passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry, these succinct poems concern themselves with very large matters--the nature of time, the definitions of go.

Chan—or in Japanese, Zen—involves studying, practicing, acting, and being, but beyond words and ideas, the true Chan cannot be described, only learned. Under the guidance of authentic teachers like Chan Master Sheng Yen, many students in the West have learned how to follow the path. Collected from a series of talks given during Chan retreats, Getting the Buddha Mind presents the teachings of this esteemed spiritual guide and brings the intimacy of the retreat experience into the reader's living room.

Kelly Cherry, who studied philosophy in graduate school at the University of Virginia, has never lost her deep love of the subject; The Retreats of Thought takes the reader through the philosophical domain. What do we really know of our world? Why is there anything at all? What is time? What is a person? What is mind? What are goodness and beauty? What does the artist seek? These and other problems are shrewdly examined in Cherry’s passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry poems. Cherry places herself in the pragmatic tradition of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce but admits to Platonic longings.

Essentially clinical in its approach, Psychic Retreats discusses the problem of patients who are 'stuck' and with whom it is difficult to make meaningful contact. John Steiner, an experienced psychoanalyst, uses new developments in Kleinian theory to explain how this happens. He examines the way object relationships and defences can be organized into complex structures which lead to a personality and an analysis becoming rigid and stuck, with little opportunity for development or change. These systems of defences are pathological organisations of the personality: John Steiner describes them as 'psychic retreats', into which the patient can withdraw to avoid contact both with the analyst and with reality. To provide a background to these original and controversial concepts, the author builds on more established ideas such as Klein's distinction between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and briefly reviews previous work on pathological organizations of the personality. He illustrates his discussion with detailed clinical material, with examples of the way psychic retreats operate to provide a respite from both paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxieties. He looks at the way such organizations function as a defence against unbearable guilt and describes the mechanism by which fragmentation of the personality can be reversed so the lost parts of the self can be regained and reintegrated in to the personality. Psychic Retreats is written with the practising psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in mind. The emphasis is therefore clinical throughout the book, which concludes with a chapter on the technical problems which arise in the treatment of such severely ill patients.

Excerpt from Waters That Go Softly: Or Thoughts for Time of Retreat I have made many private retreats myself, one at least every year since 1862, and have given public retreats not a few, all on the scheme of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which, as is well known, are composed to occupy the Exercitant for a period of thirty days, and are divided accordingly into four 'weeks', answering to what are known as the Great Truths', and thereupon to the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary. On this plan I have arranged these Thoughts, accord ing to four Weeks. But the book makes no pretence to being a systematic commentary on the Spiritual Exercises. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In the spring of 2004, Eckhart Tolle lead an extraordinary weekend retreat at Findhord, Scotland, a spiritual community on the leading edge of personal and global transformation. The whole retreat was captured on video and edited to create two DVDs.