Why we need a materialist spirituality for the secular left, and how to build one. The left commonly rejects religion and spirituality as counter-revolutionary forces, citing Marx’s famous dictum that "religion is the opium of the people." Yet forms of spirituality have motivated struggles throughout history, ranging from medieval peasant uprisings and colonial slave revolts, to South American liberation theology and the US civil rights movement. And in a world where religion is growing, and political movements are ridden with conflict, burnout, and failure, what can the left learn from religion? Red Enlightenment argues not only for a deepened understanding of religious matters, but calls for the secular left to develop its own spiritual perspectives. It proposes a materialist spirituality built from socialist and scientific sources, finding points of contact with the global history of philosophy and religion. From cybernetics to liberation theology, from ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy to Marxist dialectical materialism, from traditional religious practices to contemporary art, music, and film, Red Enlightenment sets out a plausible secular spirituality, a new socialist praxis, and a utopian vision.

Fictions of Enlightenment is the first book to examine the fascinating and intricate relationship between Buddhism and the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. Qiancheng Li brings Buddhist models to bear on the vision, structure, and narrative form of three classics of late imperial literature—Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber—arguing that by fashioning their plots after the narratives of certain Mahāyāna sutras, the novelists transformed Buddhist concepts into narrative structures. Within the traditional Chinese novel Li even defines a new genre: the fiction of enlightenment.

Shocks, from natural disasters to military catastrophes, have long been exploited by the state to impose privatization, cuts and rampant free markets. This book argues that the left can use such moments of chaos to achieve emancipation. Graham Jones illustrates how everyone can help to exploit these shocks and bring about a new world of compassion and care. He examines how combining mutually reinforcing strategies of ‘smashing, building, healing and taming’ can become the basis of a unified left. His vivid personal experience underpins a compelling, practical vision for activism, from the scale of the individual body to the global social movement. This bold book is a toolkit for revolution for activists and radical millennials everywhere.

What if one day you discover everything you have ever believed about world and relationships was a lie? Imagine everything you have ever been taught concerning women and how to engage them was fabricated? What if you discovered your family, the media, the film industry, the music industry, women, as well as the government were greatly invested in your miseducation? The Gentlemen's Book Of Enlightenment seeks to explore these questions and reveal a truth that has been hidden in plain sight. Men were bred to be utilities and are disposable. Weather through war, taxes, marriage, children, divorce, alimony, or child support men are forced to sacrifice their happiness and live a life of servitude in many if not all these areas. The reality is men are not valued as people. Men receive value based on what they can provide. This book is a guide to help men avoid the pitfalls of a society who has laid various traps in the minefield we call life. Join us on this journey as we discover the truth in chapters like "Love Vs. Respect", "What Does She Have To Offer You", and "You Will Never Make Her Happy". This book seeks to enlighten men and help start their journey to true happiness and walk away from system that only wants to keep them in bondage.

An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.

How to strengthen our spiritual bodies to experience a direct connection to the ultimate oneness and thereby illuminate the world.

A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.