This story of friendship, love, and the darkest nights of the soul, follows a young spiritual seeker who drops out of graduate school and spends the next decade in a spiritual search that leads from a Zen master in the wilds of West Virginia, to an iconoclastic Christian mystic in the heart of Los Angeles, and an architect-turned-sage in England. Entertaining storytelling combined with practical tips and lessons from the path of spiritual awakening make this a must-have edition for those both curious and passionate about the mysteries of life, death, and enlightenment.

This collection contains some of the best spiritual essays, poems, photographs and humor from seven years of the TAT Forum online magazine. These are practical, inspiring and challenging works of spiritual insight for anyone drawn to the silent spaces of life. With selections from over thirty contributors, including: William Samuel, Bob Fergeson, Douglas Harding, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Art Ticknor, Bart Marshall, Coleman Barks, Bob Cergol and Bernadette Roberts; this book will be a valuable companion in that space where the questions of meaning, identity, ultimate reality and truth arise. Where, as Shakespeare said, "I have immortal longings in me."

Bob Fergeson distills the best of his advice on the practical matters of the spiritual search in this little book of self-knowledge. Unafraid to speak of his own difficulties and realizations, Bob offers an everyman's guide to self-realization: not through believing the words of another, but through seeking within; cultivating what he calls the Listening Attention.

“An academic memoir . . . addresses topics as diverse as Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism, American counterculture, and the history of the paranormal.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Over the course of his twenty-five-year career, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s study of religion has had two major areas of focus: the erotic expression of mystical experience and the rise of the paranormal in American culture. This book brings these two halves together in surprising ways through a blend of memoir, manifesto, and anthology, drawing new connections between these two realms of human experience and revealing Kripal’s body of work to be a dynamic whole that has the potential to renew and reshape the study of religion. Kripal tells his story, biographically, historically and politically contextualizing each of the six books of his Chicago corpus, from Kali’s Child to Mutants and Mystics, all the while answering his censors and critics and exploring new implications of his thought. In the process, he begins to sketch out a speculative “new comparativism” in twenty theses. The result is a new vision for the study of religion, one that takes in the best of the past, engages with outside critiques from the sciences and the humanities, and begins to blaze a new positive path forward. A major work decades in the making, Secret Body will become a landmark in the study of religion. “Kripal presents us with a compilation of theories, cultural references and anecdotes making up an impassioned thesis about the future of religious studies and ‘what human beings may become’ . . . For all its eccentricities, Kripal’s work is playful, engaging and original.” —Times Higher Education

Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics offers a detailed but accessible account of a wide range of mathematical ideas. Starting with elementary concepts, it leads the reader towards aspects of current mathematical research. The book explains how conceptual hurdles in the development of numbers and number systems were overcome in the course of history, from Babylon to Classical Greece, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and so to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrative moves from the Pythagorean insistence on positive multiples to the gradual acceptance of negative numbers, irrationals and complex numbers as essential tools in quantitative analysis. Within this chronological framework, chapters are organised thematically, covering a variety of topics and contexts: writing and solving equations, geometric construction, coordinates and complex numbers, perceptions of ‘infinity’ and its permissible uses in mathematics, number systems, and evolving views of the role of axioms. Through this approach, the author demonstrates that changes in our understanding of numbers have often relied on the breaking of long-held conventions to make way for new inventions at once providing greater clarity and widening mathematical horizons. Viewed from this historical perspective, mathematical abstraction emerges as neither mysterious nor immutable, but as a contingent, developing human activity. Making up Numbers will be of great interest to undergraduate and A-level students of mathematics, as well as secondary school teachers of the subject. In virtue of its detailed treatment of mathematical ideas, it will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more about the development of the subject.

Contains more than four hundred math definitions that will help students solve many of the math challenges they face. Includes instructions for basic operations and tables of commonly-used facts and equivalents.

Erudite and entertaining overview follows development of mathematics from ancient Greeks to present. Topics include logic and mathematics, the fundamental concept, differential calculus, probability theory, much more. Exercises and problems.