Author: Ali Ansari
Publisher: Mapin
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 148
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185822727
Description
You want to know why you are here?
You are here to find out what is real.
-A Sufi Quote
For millennia the sages of the East have proclaimed that the world is illusion (Maya). It is possible to make sense of this notion? Drawing on theories of sensory perception from physics, psychology and biology, the author shows that all products of perception are artifacts. The most dramatic of these artifacts is the familiar notion and experience of being an individual a separate self. In spiritual growth the power of this artifact is diluted. Enlightenment is an event or process in which the artifact of the self is completely shattered.
The book discusses the precise set of mechanism through which the artifact of the separate self arises and is perpetuated. It considers the enormous implications of the psychological existence and non-existence of the separate self. The author argues that the primate-human brain, rooted in the me-thou dichotomy, based on deep illusion, has outlived its usefulness and must now be transformed if the species is to survive. This illusion can be gradually dispelled. The book shows how we can set ourselves free.
New Sufi thought, in the spirit of the Renaissance, is a framework where art, science, philosophy and authentic spiritual impulse merge into a single unified, potent sense and sensibility the ingredients of a metaprimate mind.
Contents
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
PART I
Non-Duality and Positive Duality
Chapter I: The Creation of Self
Chapter II: The Evolutionary Impulse
Chapter III
Spirituality and Self-Unconcern
Chapter IV
The I and Its Apparent Disassembly
Chapter V
First-hand Experience of Reality
Chapter VI
The Human Being-Reconceived
PART II
Chapter VII
Consciousness and Free Will
Chapter VIII
Enlightenment vs Evolution
Chapter IX
The Energy Paradigm
PART III
Chapter X: Afterthoughts on Parts I And II
Chapter XI: Spirit Blues
Chapter XII: Deep Questions for Neuropsychology
Chaper XIII: The Making of a Metaprimate Human
Nearly Final Thoughts
The Power of a Metaphor
A D 2000: A Mathnawi in English
BIBLIOGRAPHY