THE SPIRIT OF SPINOZA: Healing the Mind

Voorkant
ICRL Press, 2 mei 2014 - 276 pagina's

BENEDICT SPINOZA was a 17th-century philosopher and spiritual psychotherapist. This intellectual self-help book provides important insights from Spinoza’s system of thought in a format accessible to the general reader, as well as to those already familiar with his philosophy. By applying his method to our personal lives, we may free ourselves from bondage to our lower emotions and habitual behaviors and thus begin to enjoy the “continuous, supreme, and unending happiness” promised by Spinoza.

“Those of us who came of age in the twentieth century were taught that we must adopt a crazy-making strategy of compartmentalizing our lives, putting our rational, scientific side into one corner and our psychological/spiritual side in another. The precarious state of our world is evidence enough that this approach to life is a destructive dead end. You are holding an effective alternative in your hand. The Spirit of Spinoza is a brilliant treatise that has been field-tested by Professor Neal Grossman in his own life and that of his students over decades. This book is a master stroke by a master teacher about a master philosopher. It is also delightfully dangerous, for it has the power to shift one’s life onto a new axis, where it becomes possible to blend knowledge and wisdom into an experience that can best be described, quite simply, as waking up.” —Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters

 

Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

Foreword by Huston Smith
8
Who is Spinoza?
19
List of Exercises EXERCISE 1 Practicing removal of guilt
31
THE CAUSALITY OF GOD
41
Practical response dispelling guilt and blame
49
MIND AND BODY
50
SPACE TIME AND ETERNITY
61
The Mind
67
Experiencing our inner dialogue
170
Inner dialogue and the understanding mind
172
Inconsistency of emotional responses
174
Anatomical awareness of physical responses
177
Allowing emotions to be controlled by external events
179
SECOND ORDER AWARENESS
180
Experiencing firstorder awareness
181
Creation and analysis ofa thought log
183

Enhancing feeling of awe
87
RELATIONSHIPS AMONG MINDS
91
Desire and Emotion
103
Understanding feeling desire and behavior
104
Establishing comfort with desire
110
Free will and decision making
113
EXERCISE 7a Holding a thought
114
EXERCISE 7b Choosing thoughts
115
Exercising free choice
122
Accepting circumstances
124
THE DEFINITION OF EMOTIONS
132
Recognizing decrease in power of action
137
Developing sensitivity to our own body
145
Repression of feelings
159
Ownership of emotions
164
Freedom From Bondage
167
Awareness of pleasant and unpleasant sensations
169
RESISTING OUR OWN HAPPINESS
188
Judgment
195
Development of awareness of feelings and behavior
198
Selfimage
199
PROGRAMMED PATTERNS OF FEELING AND BEHAVIOR
207
Awareness of irrational infections of the mind
216
Observation of feelings when touched
221
Recollection and analysis of Childhood
227
Transcendence
228
Conscious awareness of sexual conditioning
234
TRANSCENDENCE OF THE MIND
237
Recollection of emotional and unemotional events
250
Viewing the world as a stage
254
Understanding transcendence of spiritual love
260
Glossary
266
Copyright

Overige edities - Alles bekijken

Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen

Over de auteur (2014)

NEAL GROSSMAN is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Bibliografische gegevens