“Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art” by Stephen Nachmanovitch (2024 edition)

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "This book is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about where art in the widest sense comes from. It is about why we create and what we learn while doing so. It is about the flow of unhindered creative energy: the joy of making art in all its varied forms. Free Play is directed towards people in any field who want to contact, honour and strengthen their own creative powers. It reveals how inspiration arises within us, how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life. How it can finally be liberated — how we can be liberated — to speak or sing, write or...>>

“The Dreaming Mind: Understanding Consciousness During Sleep” by Melanie G. Rosen

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "The Dreaming Mind provides an insightful, interdisciplinary approach to the study of dreaming, exploring its nature and examining some of the implications of dream states for theories of consciousness, cognition, and the self. Drawing on research from philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology, the book reveals new insights into the sleeping and waking mind. It considers philosophical thinking such as extended mind theory, theories of consciousness and theories of the self, applying these to empirical dream research. The book embraces a pluralistic account of dreaming, showing how dream experiences can be highly varied in content and cognition and discusses the implications of dreaming for a variety of influential consciousness theories, including higher-order thought theory, global...>>

“Undines: Lessons from the Realm of the Water Spirits” by William R. Mistele

"Undines—from the Latin root unda, which means "wave"— are water elementals, or spirits of the water world. Like their fellow elementals—salamanders (fire), sylphs (air), and gnomes (earth)—undines are united with, and personify, their element. First mentioned in the alchemical works of medieval botanist Paracelsus, undines appear throughout European folklore. Who are these mysterious creatures of lakes, oceans, and waterfalls? Undines takes readers directly into the water spirits’ realm through stories, personal encounters, and interviews with such luminaries as Istiphul, the undine queen whose presence embodies the magical essence of the feminine. Whether seen as fact or fairy tale, Undines presents archetypal truths and insights into human nature. The powers and abilities that undines display are...>>

“Fortuna: The Sacred and Profane Faces of Luck” by Nigel Pennick

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "Traces the history of good fortune traditions from sacred divination to modern gambling • Reveals how dice were originally considered sacred objects of divination and details the techniques and meanings of a dice oracle • Looks at medieval grimoires for fortune-telling and other divination traditions, including those using cowrie shells, bones, coins, cards, sticks, and stones • Examines how dice became a means of gaming and gambling and how gambling gave rise to specialized lucky charms Some believe that our future is predetermined, while others assert that we have free will and our future can take many different courses depending on our actions. In ancient times, it was believed that the will of the gods determined people’s...>>

“Cult of the Stars: A Handbook of Egyptian Astrology” by Travis McHenry (2nd edition)

"Cult of the Stars combines the best of scientific rigor (there are nearly 100 cited academic works in the bibliography) with a spiritual mindset. Over 5,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians looked up at the same stars we see over our heads each night. Just like many of us, they believed these stars impacted events on earth: politics, agriculture, and even our own physical bodies. In this book, author and occultist Travis McHenry examines evidence concerning the decans from the pre-dynastic period to the late Roman era, and beyond. He also provides practical tools so you can utilize authentic Egyptian astrology in your everyday life. The Egyptians approached astronomy with a religious perspective, one that is still...>>