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Related Books and Publications
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Index to Related Authors
Click on the links below to access reviews of each of the books.
Books by Anne Harrington
Books by Daniel Goleman
Books by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Books by Matthieu Ricard
Books by Francisco J. Varela
Books by B. Alan Wallace
Books by Anne Harrington:
NEW: The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine
Hardcover: 354 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton; 1 edition (January 21, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393065634
ISBN-13: 978-0393065633
Lays bare the history behind mind-body healing. People suffering from serious illnesses improve their survival chances by adopting a positive attitude and refusing to believe in the worst. Stress is the great killer of modern life.
Ancient Eastern mind-body techniques can bring us balance and healing. We've all heard claims like these, and many find them plausible. When it comes to disease and healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter.
But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant history describes our commitments to mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories that have allowed people to make new sense of their suffering, express discontent with existing care, and rationalize new treatments and lifestyles. These stories are sometimes supported by science, sometimes quarrel with science, but are all ultimately about much more than just science. 36 illustrations.
Anne Harrington, professor and chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard University, is the author of Reenchanted Science and the editor of The Placebo Effect and The Dalai Lama at MIT. She is a Mind and Life Institute board member and lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
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Books by Daniel Goleman:
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationshipss
Hardcover: 403 pages
Publisher: New York, Bantam
1st edition (August 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-553-80352-5
Now, once again, Daniel Goleman, author of the international phenomenon, Emotional Intelligence, has written a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest findings in biology and brain science, revealing that we are "wired to connect" and the surprisingly deep impact of our relationships on every aspect of our lives.
In Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explores an emerging new science with startling implications for our interpersonal world. Its most fundamental discovery: we are designed for sociability, constantly engaged in a "neural ballet" that connects us brain to brain with those around us.
Goleman explains the surprising accuracy of first impressions, the basis of charisma and emotional power, the complexity of sexual attraction, and how we detect lies. He describes the "dark side" of social intelligence, from narcissism to Machiavellianism and psychopathy. He also reveals our astonishing capacity for "mindsight," as well as the tragedy of those, like autistic children, whose mindsight is impaired. Goleman delivers his most heartening news with powerful conviction: we humans have a built-in bias toward empathy, cooperation, and altruism-provided we develop the social intelligence to nurture these capacities in ourselves and others.
Books by Jon Kabat-Zinn:
NEW: Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World
Through Mindfulness
Hyperion, $24.95 (640p) ISBN 0-7868-6756-6
"For any of us, perhaps our greatest potential regret may be that of not seizing the moment and honoring it for what it is when it is here," writes Kabat-Zinn, author of such bestselling works as Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go, There You Are and others.
The scientist who pioneered the use of the Buddhist technique of mindfulness (or moment-by-moment awareness) to help patients cope with the stress and pain of illness arrived at this poignant lesson after seeing the way his father, an eminent immunologist who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, lost all sense of who he was and what was happening to him. In a passionate tour de force that blends personal experience with cutting-edge science (his own and others'), poetry and insights culled from many traditions, Kabat-Zinn sets out to awaken us to the true potential and value of a gift that most of us take for granted: sentience. Our lack of awareness of our impact on the rest of the world amounts to "a kind of auto-immune disease of the earth."
Borrowing an analogy made by the neuroscientist Francisco Varela, Kabat-Zinn compares the way our immune system senses the whole of our bodily self to our potential for a mindful awareness. That is, the practice of cultivating this conscious, heightened sentience leads to the realization of our wholeness, as we begin to realize that we don't live just within the envelope of our own senses, sensations and thoughts but within the whole of all that is. Kabat-Zinn illuminates the many facets of this selfless way of being, not just with Buddhist understanding and verse but with quotes from Einstein ("A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'"), Dickinson, Rilke and many other Western greats. Ardent, personal, frankly opinionated in places, this book seeks to wake up as individuals and as a culture. It is a treasure trove of contemporary wisdom.
Books by Matthieu Ricard:
The Monk and the Philosopher (with Jean-François Revel)
Schocken Books, 1998
Jean-François Revel is a well-known French philosopher and political commentator. Matthieu Ricard, his son, a PhD in molecular genetics at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where he worked under the supervision of the Nobel Laureate François Jacob, abandoned his promising scientific career to study Tibetan Buddhism in the Himalayas, where he immersed himself in its practices under the guidance of some of its greatest living masters.
Twenty-five years later, now a monk, Ricard and his philosopher father met in Nepal for ten days for a deep and lively discussion on the meaning of life, the quest for true happiness, the place of science, philosophy, and religion, and all the other great questions. The book that was born from their discussions, The Monk and the Philosopher, brings the living wisdom and experience of the East within reach of Western ways of thinking.
The Quantum and the Lotus (with Trinh Xuan Thuan)
Crown, 2001
In this book French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard and Vietnamese-born astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan explore how Buddhism and modern science address fundamental questions about the nature of reality. Is the notion of a beginning of time and the universe perhaps fundamentally flawed?
In what way and to what degree are the universe's phenomena interconnected? Does the world around us has a solid existence? Should we adopt a radically revised notion of cause and effect based on interdependence and global reality? What is consciousness, and where does it come from? Is mathematics the invisible web that underlies reality, or is it simply the product of our intellect?
Will science ever be able to reveal an "ultimate truth?" How is one to verify the validity of contemplative science, given that it rests on introspection and subjective experience? How does contemplation, pursued as a commitment with a view to inner transformation, differ from the theories of natural science, which imply no such engagement? Both authors argue against reductionist views of nature and provide plenty of data that support Albert Einstein's declaration that "if there is any religion that could correspond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism."
Books by Francisco J. Varela:
The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
(with Humberto R. Maturana)
Shambhala Press/New Science Library, 1987.
In this book, Maturana and Varela present a radical view of the life processes by which human beings attain knowledge of the world around them.
With abundant illustrations and examples, the authors argue that the act of cognition does not simply mirror an objective reality "out there," but instead is an active process, rooted in our biological structure, by which we actually create our world of experience. In supporting this view, they explore topics such as the nature of scientific explanation, the organization of living things, evolution, linguistics, and the emergence of self-awareness.
Their view of cognition, the authors believe, has important social and ethical implications, for the only world that we humans can have is one that we create together through the actions of our co-existence. Written for a general audience as well as for scientists and scholars, The Tree of Knowledge invites readers to let go of their preconceptions and gain fresh insights into what it means to be human.
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
(with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch)
The MIT Press, 1991
A pioneering book on several fronts, The Embodied Mind was one of the first books to discuss the relationship between Buddhist psychology and Western cognitive science, to articulate the "embodied" view of cognition, and to make the relationship between the sciences of the mind and human experience a topic of discussion in science and philosophy. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch argue that it is only by having a sense of common ground between mind in science and mind in experience that our understanding of cognition can be more complete.
To create this common ground, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate this dialogue in relation to other traditions, such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition
Stanford University Press, 1999
How can science be brought to connect with experience?
This book addresses two challenges facing contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science: understanding how we unconsciously execute habitual actions as a result of neurological and cognitive processes that are not actions of conscious judgment but part of a nexus of self-organization, and creating an ethics adequate to our present awareness that there is no transcendental self, stable subject, or soul. In earlier modes of cognitive science, cognition was conceptualized according to representation and abstract reasoning.
In ethics, this corresponded to the philosophical tenet that to do what is ethical is to do what corresponds to a set of abstract rules. In Ethical Know-How, Varela places the central emphasis on what he terms "enaction"-cognition as the ability to negotiate embodied, everyday living in a world that is inseparable from our sensory-motor capacities. Apart from cognitive science, the bodies of thought that enable this link are phenomenology and the "wisdom traditions"-Confucian ethics and Buddhist epistemology.
From the Confucian comes an ethics of praxis, one in which ethical action is conceived as a project of being rather than as a system of judgment. The Buddhist contribution encompasses "the embodiment of the void" and the "pragmatics of a virtual self." In sum, Varela proposes an ethics founded on "savoir faire" that is based on a constant recognition of the "virtual" nature of ourselves in the actual operations of our mental lives.
The View from Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of
Consciousness (edited with Jonathan Shear)
Imprint Academic, 1999
Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the scientific study of consciousness, an area that has largely been neglected since the time of William James.
This renaissance has primarily been stimulated by developments in PET, fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies that enable scientists to pinpoint the neural correlates of conscious experience with ever-increasing accuracy. However, the study of conscious experience itself has not kept pace with these advances in third-person methodologies. If anything, the standard approaches to examining the "view from within" involve little more than cataloguing its readily accessible components. Thus the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science. This has led many to deny that there could possibly be such a thing as a truly scientific study of conscious experience, or at least to ask: can one be objective about the subjective? Drawing on a wide range of approaches-from phenomenology to meditation-The View from Within examines the possibility of a disciplined approach to the study of subjective states. The focus is on the practical issues involved.
Books by Alan Wallace:
NEW: Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converges
Hardcover: 256 pages, $29.50
Publisher: Columbia University Press
1st edition (February 2007)
Language: English
ISBN: 0-231-13834-2
Science has long treated religion as a set of personal beliefs that have little to do with a rational understanding of the mind and the universe.
In Contemplative Science, Alan Wallace attempts to bridge this gap by launching an unbiased investigation into the history and practices of science and Buddhist contemplative disciplines. His surprising findings show that the two are actually quite compatible. Wallace examines how both Christianity and science came to regard the inner sanctum as inaccessible and how a strict distinction between the objective, material world and the subjective, immaterial mind was developed. By examining these historical roots, Wallace is led toward a possible reconciliation between the two modes of inquiry. Just as scientists make observations and conduct experiments with the aid of technology, contemplatives have long tested their own theories with the help of highly developed meditative skills and an elastic imagination. Wallace demonstrates how contemplative science, which integrates these two methods, has the potential to be of enormous benefit by successfully combining the strengths of each. In this book, he outlines the dimensions of this discipline, showing how it can help us achieve a deeper knowledge of our physical and spiritual existence.
Balancing the Mind: A Tibetan Buddhist Approach to Refining Attention
B. Alan Wallace
Snow Lion Publications, June 2005
352 pages, $18.95 paper
ISBN: 1-55939-230-4
For centuries Tibetan Buddhist contemplatives have directly explored consciousness through carefully honed techniques of meditation.
B. Alan Wallace, widely recognized as one of the clearest facilitators of the dialogue between science and Buddhism, explains the methods and experiences of those Tibetan practitioners and compares these with investigations of consciousness by Western scientists and philosophers. Balancing the Mind includes a translation of a classic discussion by the fifteenth-century Tibetan contemplative Tsongkhapa of methods for developing exceptionally high degrees of attentional stability and clarity.
"The most important book on Buddhist meditation to appear in over a decade." -- Roger Jackson, Carleton College
"Stop in your tracks — this is an extraordinary book!" — David Galin, M.D., University of California San Francisco School of Medicine
"A spectacular cross-cultural presentation of techniques for achieving meditative states." — Jeffrey Hopkins, author of Cultivating Compassion and Maps of the Profound
"Alan Wallace is one of the great Western Buddhist thinkers of our day." — Howard Cutler, co-author with H.H. the Dalai Lama of The Art of Happiness
The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness
Oxford University Press, 2000
The core of this volume is a careful analysis of the distinctions among
science, scientific realism, scientific materialism, and scientism.
Arguing
that scientific materialism has taken on all the major characteristics of a
religious creed, the author shows how it has constrained the scientific study
of subjective experience, including consciousness itself. He then presents an
alternative approach to the study of the mind that fully incorporates
rigorous, first-person methodologies.
Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground
Columbia University Press, Publ. fall, 2002
This volume of essays by prominent Buddhist scholars, cognitive scientists,
and physicists begins with an analysis of Buddhism within the context of
religion, science, and philosophy, arguing that it presents an alternative to
the dogmas of scientific materialism and postmodernism.
The rest of this
anthology consists of essays on the historical interface between Buddhism and
science, and selected themes from the cognitive sciences and physics.
Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind
Snow Lion, 1996
In this volume the author takes up the topic of the zero-point energy of the
electromagnetic vacuum-the innate energy of empty space-then looks at the
problems of interpretation of this fascinating phenomenon.
Arguing that both
metaphysical realism and instrumentalism fall to philosophical extremes, he
presents the Buddhist "Centrist Philosophy" (Madhyamaka) as a viable
alternative to understanding the relation between scientific theory and
reality.
© Copyright 2008 Mind and Life Institute, Boulder, CO, USA. All rights reserved.
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