Penetrating commentary on the Job story as a numinous, archetypal event, and as a paradigm for conflicts of duty that can lead to enhanced consciousness.

This is a story of hope, but also of peril. It began when our nation’s polarized political class started conscripting everyday citizens into its culture war. From their commanding heights in political parties, media, academia, and government, these partisans have attacked one another for years, but increasingly they’ve convinced everyday Americans to join the fray. Why should we feel such animosity toward our fellow citizens, our neighbors, even our own kin? Because we’ve fallen for the false narrative, eagerly promoted by pundits on the Left and the Right, that citizens who happen to vote Democrat or Republican are enthusiastic supporters of Team Blue or Team Red. Aside from a minority of party activists and partisans, however, most voters are simply trying to choose the lesser of two evils. The real threat to our union isn’t Red vs. Blue America, it’s the quiet collusion within our nation’s political class to take away that most American of freedoms: our right to self-governance. Even as partisans work overtime to divide Americans against one another, they’ve erected a system under which we ordinary citizens don’t have a voice in the decisions that affect our lives. From foreign wars to how local libraries are run, authority no longer resides with We the People, but amongst unaccountable officials. The political class has stolen our birthright and set us at one another’s throats. This is the story of how that happened and what we can do about it. America stands at a precipice, but there’s still time to reclaim authority over our lives and communities.

This book explains in detail Identity Oriented Psychotrauma Theory (IoPT) and the method of therapy that goes along with it (The Intention Method). Illustrated through numerous examples, the book shows the amazing abilities our human psyche has to resonate with the psyche of others and how we can help bring unconscious processes to light. This is an extremely effective therapeutic process for genuine change.

Our life is a highly nonlinear process. It starts with birth and ends with death; in between there are a lot of ups and downs. Quite often, we believe that stable and steady situations, probably easy to capture by linearization, are paradisiacal, but already after a short period of everyday routine we usually become bored and seek change, that is, nonlinearities. If we reflect for a while, we notice that our life and our perceptions are mainly determined by nonlinear phenomena, for example, events occurring suddenly and unexpectedly. One may be surprised by how long scientists tried to explain our world by models based on a linear ansatz. Due to the lack of typical nonlinear patterns, although everybody experienced nonlinearities, nobody could classify them and, thus,· study them further. The discoveries of the last few decades have finally provided access to the world of nonlinear phenomena and have initiated a unique inter disciplinary field of research: nonlinear science. In contrast to the general tendency of science to become more branched out and specialized as the result of any progress, nonlinear science has brought together many different disciplines. This has been motivated not only by the immense importance of nonlinearities for science, but also by the wonderful simplicity ohhe concepts. Models like the logistic map can be easily understood by high school students and have brought revolutionary new insights into our scientific under standing.

In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind. Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

About the philosophical aspects of solitude.

Winner of the 2016 Marfield Prize In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke—then a struggling poet in Germany—went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet.