検索キーワード： 意識・思考

To know your true calling - your dharma, as the yogis say - is perhaps the greatest desire within each of us. And yet, few can say we know our purpose with absolute certainty. Fortunately, there is a time-tested guide - an ancient map - for discovering and fulfilling your unique calling. In The Great Work of Your Life, Stephen Cope walks you through each step of the journey.

How does the brain work? How different is a human brain from other creatures' brains? Is the human brain still evolving? In this fascinating book, Michael O'Shea provides a non-technical introduction to the main issues and findings in current brain research, and gives a sense of how neuroscience addresses questions about the relationship between the brain and the mind. 

Drawing together many histories - of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores - Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers.

"Le titre de cette conférence est "L'âme et le corps", c'est-à-dire la matière et l'esprit, c'est-à-dire tout ce qui existe et même, s'il faut en croire une philosophie dont nous parlerons tout à l'heure, quelque chose aussi qui n'existerait pas. Mais rassurez-vous. Notre intention n'est pas d'approfondir la nature de la matière, pas plus d'ailleurs que la nature de l'esprit. On peut distinguer deux choses l'une de l'autre, et en déterminer jusqu'à un certain point les rapports, sans pour cela connaître la nature de chacune d'elles.

We are creatures of habit, living most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of more or less comfortable routine. But sometimes outside forces compel us to adjust, and sometimes we must make changes ourselves. What happens when change disrupts our lives? This book is the first in a trilogy which offers an insight unlike any other into the human mind and heart: how we are, how we break, and how we mend. It is about all of us, humbly figuring out how to live.

The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied, and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful, and focused on the essentials. But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming.

Told through stories from a remarkable career and fascinating research, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? And for the first time, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope: from living through World War II, to her years in Gombe, to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice.

The writings and lectures of Swami Vivekananda on meditation, its advantages, and its practices are collected in this book. It is a book that offers lessons drawn from Swami Vivekananda's life to help audiences navigate their own personal turbulence. According to Swami Ji, meditation should be unfavorable. Consider everything. By using your will alone, analyze anything that comes to mind. Next, declare ourselves and what we truly are: beings of existence, wisdom, and happiness. His entire philosophy on meditation and its practices is covered in this book.

B.K.S. Iyengar, whose teachings on yoga are followed throughout the world, reflects upon his lifetime's experience on the yoga path. The structure of the book follows the different aspects of that path (from Freedom Awaits, through The Physical Body, The Energy Body, The Mental Body, The Intellectual Body, and The Divine Body, to Living in Freedom) and provides a learning framework for yoga as well as an invaluable discourse on life.  

How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

The national bestseller chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 1991 is now available as an audiobook. The author of Brainstorms, Daniel C. Dennett replaces our traditional vision of consciousness with a new model based on a wealth of fact and theory from the latest scientific research.

Matter and Memory, (Matière et Mémoire), published in 1896, was the second book written by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), one of the leading French philosophers of his age. It followed Time and Free Will (1889) and helped to establish him as a major force in anti-mechanistic thought, opposing the trend towards uncompromisingly secular and scientific views. However, when Matter and Memory appeared, Bergson was 39 and had yet to become the hugely influential figure he became in the first decades of the 20th century. 

Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra", beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved.

Whether it's the Protestant work ethic or the capitalist need for productivity, most of us in the English-speaking world believe that in order to achieve anything worthwhile, we must first expend huge amounts of effort and energy. In fact, just the opposite is true, as French philosopher Ollivier Pourriol shows in The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard.

We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain - an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is "a virtual self in a virtual reality." But if the self is not "real," why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it?

This is an audiobook about everything you were never taught at school. It's about how to understand your emotions, find and sustain love, succeed in your career, fail well and overcome shame and guilt. It's also about letting go of the myth of a perfect life in order to achieve genuine emotional maturity. Written in a hugely accessible, warm and humane style, The School of Life is the ultimate guide to the emotionally fulfilled lives we all long for - and deserve.  

Joan Halifax has enriched thousands of lives around the world through her work as a humanitarian, a social activist, and an anthropologist and as a Buddhist teacher. Over many decades, she has also collaborated with neuroscientists, clinicians, and psychologists to understand how contemplative practice can be a vehicle for social transformation. Through her unusual background, she developed an understanding of how our greatest challenges can become the most valuable source of our wisdom.

This addition to Oxford's Very Short Introductions series traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether it is the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today. 

Now, more than ever, we are so often lost within a cycle of negativity - from comparing ourselves to others and doom scrolling on social media, to a paralysis of choice and chasing external gratification that does nothing to nurture authentic happiness. We need confidence to master our true ambitions, realise our genuine strengths and achieve the life we need, but might not know we want. Luckily, with his candid, no-nonsense advice, experience and passion, James is here to lead the way. 

The Analysis of the Mind by Bertrand Russell is a collection of 15 lectures he delivered in 1920. Russell was a highly reputed philosopher, mathematician, and social critic, and would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.