Whispers from the Woods

Whispers from the Woods
Author: Sandra Kynes
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2006
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0738707813

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Wealth of information on fifty trees, including their attributes, lore, powers, and seasonal correspondences. Book jacket.

Breaking Open the Head

Breaking Open the Head
Author: Daniel Pinchbeck
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2003-08-12
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0767907434

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A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival. Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2000-08-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0547527543

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook

The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook
Author: James Green
Publisher: Crossing Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2000-09-01
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0895949903

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THE HERBAL MEDICINE-MAKER'¬?S HANDBOOK is an entertaining compilation of natural home remedies written by one of the great herbalists, James Green, author of the best-selling THE MALE HERBAL. Writing in a delightfully personal and down-home style, Green emphasizes the point that herbal medicine-making is fundamental to every culture on the planet and is accessible to everyone. So, first head into the garden and learn to harvest your own herbs, and then head into your kitchen and whip up a batch of raspberry cough syrup, or perhaps a soothing elixir to erase the daily stresses of modern life.

The Faerie Way

The Faerie Way
Author: Hugh Mynne
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide Limited
Total Pages: 133
Release: 1996
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781567184839

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The Faerie are not just little sprites with wings. They are an entire spiritual race of beings that exists on another level of reality, the Faerie realms. In The Faerie Way by Hugh Mynne you will not only find out the truth about these peaceful people, but also you will learn the practical techniques you need to visit them and obtain wisdom that can change your life. If the idea of journeying to a spiritual world sounds shamanic, it is because shamanism is at the core of the Faerie faith. The methods for traveling to their world involve altering your consciousness through relaxation, visualization, prayer, and knowledge. To the Faerie initiate, darkness and light, life and death, male and female are aspects of one totality ó and every tree, flower, and blade of grass sings with its own spirit. This book will help you look under the Faerie mounds and open you to the holiness of all life's cycles and chances, and the eternal beauty underlying all. For guidance on your path, you will read about four previous explorers of the Faerie realms, one of whom is George "A.E." Russell who not only wrote about the Faerie, but also painted pictures of them. The book includes five of his paintings, in full color, which have never been published before. The journey you can take is magical. Through contact with immensely powerful allies and animal helpers in the Faerie world you'll reunite with your Faerie "Co-Walker" to heal old wounds, overcome personal demons, and even help rebuild our shattered world. Start working with this book now.

The Secret of Our Success

The Secret of Our Success
Author: Joseph Henrich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0691178437

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How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.

Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples

Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples
Author: Harriet Kuhnlein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 745
Release: 2020-10-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1000092321

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First published in 1991, Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples details the nutritional properties, botanical characteristics and ethnic uses of a wide variety of traditional plant foods used by the Indigenous Peoples of Canada. Comprehensive and detailed, this volume explores both the technical use of plants and their cultural connections. It will be of interest to scholars from a variety of backgrounds, including Indigenous Peoples with their specific cultural worldviews; nutritionists and other health professionals who work with Indigenous Peoples and other rural people; other biologists, ethnologists, and organizations that address understanding of the resources of the natural world; and academic audiences from a variety of disciplines.

Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic

Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic
Author: Jenny Blain
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 113451915X

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This accessible study of Northern European shamanistic practice, or seidr, explores the way in which the ancient Norse belief systems evoked in the Icelandic Sagas and Eddas have been rediscovered and reinvented by groups in Europe and North America. The book examines the phenomenon of altered consciousness and the interactions of seid-workers or shamanic practitioners with their spirit worlds. Written by a follower of seidr, it investigates new communities involved in a postmodern quest for spiritual meaning.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth
Author: David Wallace-Wells
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 052557672X

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books