CIIS Faculty Publications
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A Western Approach to Reincarnation and Karma: Selected Lectures & Writings (Vista)
Robert McDermott
The soul’s immortality and its repeated earthly births are not new ideas in Western thought. They are implicit in the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, as well as in some branches of esoteric Judaism and Cabbala. But it was not until the early years of this century that the West was given a detailed, modern, evolutionary philosophy of human life based on the reality of reincarnation and karma. This turning point occurred when Rudolf Steiner began to make public the results of his spiritual scientific researches. He viewed the revelation of reincarnation and karma as one of his most important life tasks. Steiner’s contribution, however, remains unique in its understanding of the human being as an evolving, developing being of body, soul, and spirit. On the basis of his researches―presented in numerous books and lectures―we begin to understand how the complex interaction of human lives between birth and death and between death and a new birth gives new meaning not only to individual lives lived on Earth in community with others, but also to human history and evolution and to earthly and cosmic events. This book collects many of Steiner’s major statements on reincarnation and karma. The primary purpose of this volume is to help readers meet the challenge of spiritual research in the area of individual evolution of the soul and spirit in the context of cultural and universal evolution. Such a study can be tremendously revealing and provide spiritual understanding in a time of increasing intellectual confusion and spiritual poverty. The notion of reincarnation and karma is generally associated in most minds with spiritual traditions of the East, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. René Querido’s in-depth, sixty-page introduction, however, places these concepts within the context of Western spiritual development and esoteric tradition, showing us a panoramic view of how such ideas have developed over the centuries in the West.
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Changing Visions
Ervin Laszlo, Robert Artigiani, Allan Combs, and Vilmos Csanyi
The four authors of this book recognize that no one on the common human journey to the 21st century can pick the best route without consulting a map―that is to say, an interconnected set of understandings about what in a given situation is important, what demands action and attention, and what does not. The problem, they contend, is that the picture of the world we each carry in our mind may not be a true mapping of the reality that surrounds us. This picture, the cognitive map, could always be sharper. The authors prompt us to become more conscious of our own cognitive map, and explain how it can be adapted to the exigencies of our changing world so that it can be better-used to guide our steps toward the 21st century. We all carry a picture of the world in our mind, but is that map an assuredly true layout of the reality that surrounds us? If not, how can we use it to guide our steps toward the 21st century and beyond without creating shocks and surprises that impair our well-being and threaten our survival?
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Unusual Associates: A Festschrift for Frank Barron
Alfonso Montuori
A volume of essays in honor of legendary creativity researcher Frank Barron. Contributors include Teresa Amabile, Richard Baker, Hans Eysenck, Howard Gardner, Charles Hampden-Turner, Willis Harman, Stanley Krippner, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Michael Murphy, Claudio Naranjo, and others.
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Persephone Returns: Victims, Heroes and the Journey from the Underworld
Tanya Wilkinson
Jungian psychologist Tanya Wilkinson takes a balanced and compassionate look at the issue of victimization. In an engaging and entertaining style, she explore myths and fairy tales involving victims and heroes and encourages individuals to reach a new level of spiritual and emotional maturity. In modern society we sympathize only with the purest of victims, those who are hurt and entirely blameless. However, why is it that victims of rape, alcoholic and dysfunctional families have to plead for understanding and mercy? This book takes a balanced and compassionate look at victimization. It explores myths and fairy tales involving victims and heroes and encourages individuals to reach a new level of spiritual and emotional security.
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Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment Volume 1
Don Johnson
This book is a collection of writings on principles and techniques by the pioneers of bodywork and body awareness disciplines. Together, they represent a historical record of the field of somatics. Ranging from hands-on workers like Ida Rolf to phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke, their lives span this century. In these lectures, writings, and interviews, editor Don Hanlon Johnson has sought to revel the unbroken lineage, theoretical differences, and major similarities of these originators.
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Body, Spirit and Democracy
Don Johnson
Body, Spirit and Democracy addresses how can we, of different ethical values, spiritual commitments, and ethnic backgrounds, work together to create a more humane world. The unique perspective on this common concern is from the author's lifetime of work within the family of body-therapies, exercise and movement disciplines that emerged in Northern Europe and the United States during the middle of the 19th Century. In the spirit of 12-step meetings and Native American circles, the author tells a number of stories of his and others' journeys, which illustrate how the most seemingly abstract spiritual notions about life are distilled from dense bodily experience. By connecting the flesh of stories with the abstractions of spiritual and philosophical viewpoints, the author situates himself among the many activists, intellectuals, artists, and religious workers who are working towards accustoming people to embracing spiritual diversity as more healing than the monistic alternatives.
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The Universe Story : From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era--A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos
Brian Swimme
From the big bang to the present and into the next millenium, The Universe Story unites science and the humanities in a dramatic exploration of the unfolding of the universe, humanity's evolving place in the cosmos, and the boundless possibilities for our future.
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Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path Toward Wholeness
Sean Kelly
Sean Kelly offers an original and compelling vision of human selfhood as guided by the quest for meaning and wholeness, a quest which extends beyond the individual to encompass the sweep of world history itself. It is a creative synthesis of the core ideas of two of the modern west's greatest minds, Jung and Hegel. Informed throughout by his notion of "complex holism," Kelly explores the dialectical relations between ego and unconscious, self and other, the individual and the absolute. Review: A ground-breaking work! Sea Kelly demonstrates convincingly that Hegel is Jung's philosopher and that Jung is Hegel's psychologist. Kelly's comparative and synthetic efforts unveil the common origin of philosophy, psychology, and religious experience in the deeper psyche.
John Dourley, author of The Illness That We Are
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Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path Toward Wholeness (Jung and Spirituality)
Sean Kelly
Sean Kelly offers an original and compelling vision of human selfhood as guided by the quest for meaning and wholeness, a quest which extends beyond the individual to encompass the sweep of world history itself. It is a creative synthesis of the core ideas of two of the modern west's greatest minds, Jung and Hegel. Informed throughout by his notion of "complex holism," Kelly explores the dialectical relations between ego and unconscious, self and other, the individual and the absolute.
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From Power to Partnership: Creating the Future of Love, Work, and Community
Alfonso Montuori and Isabella Conti
This book describes how individuals and corporations are using a model in which women, men and nature are linked, not ranked, to improve their relationships, communities, productivity and working environments. Executives, scientists, entrepreneurs, writers and others give voice to the ways they have successfully applied the principles of balance and partnership in their professional and personal lives. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, ecologists John and Nancy Todd, novelists Ishmael Reed and Isabel Allende, and astronaut Edgar Mitchell are among those who offer practical examples for creating the future.
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Cooperation: Beyond the Age of Competition
Allan Combs
In an increasingly interdependent world where once antagonishtc societies and economies now exist within a global network, theneed to foster and maintain cooperation has never been more vital. Cooperation explores an extraordinary growing awareness of the centrality of cooperation from the perspectives of a variety of disciplines, including biology, ecoscience, psychology, political science, business and economics. The essays question the age-old maxim that our existence is dependent on, and even prospers via competition, and offer keen insight into the far-reaching challenges of this fascinating, uncharted period in world history.
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Body: Recovering Our Sensual Wisdom
Don Johnson
Body: Recovering Our Sensual Wisdom outlines a plan for reclaiming unity among our body movements, senses, and thought processes. It describes how we are pressured to mold ourselves to fit others' needs by attitudes fostered in religions, schools, the workplace, and the military. It gives special attention to how gender ideals shape us. Interweaving personal experiences, anatomical analyses, and the stories of men and women from various walks of life, the book explores how the mind/body split, concretized in our social institutions, coaxes us to distrust what our own senses tell us. In marked contrast to the individualistic aura of books in a similar vein, this book argues that individual awareness alone is not enough to correct the social scars left by mind-body dualisms. Real change can only come about when we join together to alter the shapes of our social body: schools, churches, political organizations, businesses, and health-care practices. Throughout the book, there are practical yet sensitive exercises offered for bringing about a reunion of abstract ideas and flesh, a recovery of our forgotten genius embedded in the cells of our bodies.
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Evolutionary Competence: Creating the Future
Alfonso Montuori
An exploration of social change and approaches to the future with a specific focus on the importance of interconnectedness, gender, and creativity
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Essays in Psychical Research (The Works of William James)
Robert McDermott
The more than fifty articles, essays, and reviews in this volume, collected here for the first time, were published by William James over a span of some twenty-five years. The record of a sustained interest in phenomena of a highly controversial nature, they make it amply clear that James's work in psychical research was not an eccentric hobby but a serious and sympathetic concern. James was broad-minded in his approach but tough-minded in his demand that investigations be conducted in rigorous scientific terms. He hoped his study of psychic phenomena would strengthen the philosophy of an open-ended, pluralistic universe that he was formulating during the same period, and he looked forward to the new horizons for human experience that a successful outcome of his research would create.
Robert A. McDermott, in his Introduction, discusses the relation of these essays to James's other work in philosophy, psychology, and religion.
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The Universe Is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story
Brian Swimme
Communicating his ideas in the form of a classical dialogue between a youth and a wise elder, cosmologist Brian Swimme crafts a fascinating exploration into the creativity suffusing the universe. His explication of the fundamental powers of the cosmos is mystical and ecstatic and points directly to the need to activate one’s own creative powers.
