Growing Consciousness

Growing Consciousness explores the links between spirituality and the garden with a focus on Ayurvedic techniques and meditation. Through simple daily meditation practices coupled with gardening, you can marry spiritual growth and plant-based consumption to cultivate a more gratifying existence. This book forges an accessible path to self-discovery and truth; one that can apply to a small herb garden on the windowsill just as well as it would to a Buddhist Zen garden. Growing Consciousness will outline simple practices and explorations into the spiritual qualities of gardening and how one can marry spiritual growth and plant-based consumption to cultivate a more conscious and satisfying existence.

To meet the needs of the fast growing numbers of Latino/a English learners, this volume presents an approach to secondary education teacher preparation based on the work of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP). Renowned scholar and educator Angela Valenzuela, together with an impressive roster of contributors, provides a critical framework for educating culturally responsive teachers. They examine the knowledge, skills, and predisposition required for higher education institutions to create curricula for educating Latino/a children, children of color, and language minority youth. Growing Critically Conscious Teachers illuminates why growing our own teachers makes sense as an approach for not only addressing the achievement gap, but for also enhancing the well-being of our communities as a whole. Book Features: A community-based, university- and district-connected partnership model that fosters students’ critical consciousness. A framework for participatory action research (PAR) within teacher preparation that promotes community and societal transformation. A curriculum premised on sociocultural and sociopolitical awareness. The wisdom, experiences, and lessons learned from educators who have been change agents in their own schools, communities, and college classrooms across the country. “An enormous contribution to the field. It will also be a cherished resource and guide for Latino/a and non-Latino/a teachers alike, and for the university faculty and school- and community-based facilitators who help prepare them.” —From the Foreword by Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture, College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst “Provides the elemental sparks for essential conversations about culturally responsive teaching and the well-being of youth in our communities. Through a variety of critical perspectives this volume raises significant questions that must be at the forefront of Latino/a education. This excellent volume is a must read for teachers truly committed to educational practices of social justice in schools today.” —Antonia Darder, Leavey Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership, Loyola Marymount University

To meet the needs of the fast growing numbers of Latino/a English learners, this volume presents an approach to secondary education teacher preparation based on the work of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP). Renowned scholar and educator Angela Valenzuela, together with an impressive roster of contributors, provides a critical framework for educating culturally responsive teachers. They examine the knowledge, skills, and predisposition required for higher education institutions to create curricula for educating Latino/a children, children of colour, and language minority youth. Growing Critically Conscious Teachers illuminates why growing our own teachers makes sense as an approach for not only addressing the achievement gap, but for also enhancing the well-being of our communities as a whole.

This collection of previously published papers can be viewed as a story of the gradual emergence of an overarching idea through the course of a life’s work. The idea concerns the way emerging knowledge of developmental processes, biological systems, and therapeutic process can be integrated in terms of basic principles that govern the living system as an ongoing creative process – a process in which there is a continuing impetus, both energizing and motivational, that moves the living system toward an enhanced coherence in its engagement with its surround as it achieves an ever-increasing inclusiveness of complexity. The papers have been selected in a roughly chronological order from a career of early developmental research within the background of psychoanalytic thinking. The biological underpinnings of psychoanalysis can be extended by systems thinking. Our notions of the evolution of consciousness can also be extended from this simple level of a neural machinery essential for adaptation and survival to the capacity for the awareness of one’s own inner state within the flow of one’s engagement with one’s surround. From this enrichment of inner experiencing through evolving self-awareness, the unique organization of the "person" emerges within the developmental process – from expectancies and emotions, to values, meaning, purpose, goals, and "direction". The title of the book has been chosen to capture this sequence. Further evolution of conscious organization will enable the human species to achieve the state of being "together-with" and yet "distinct-from" as the system as a whole, on a wider, more global level, gains increasing coherence as it complexity increases. Hopefully, the implications of this idea will emerge in the reader’s thinking, as the chapters move from the level of adaptation to recognition.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

This book is about feelings, and the ways that we, as individuals and as a culture, have numbed ourselves against them. It is about unleashing the possibility of conscious feelings to re-make our lives into what really matters to us. The Power of Conscious Feelings introduces readers to the concept of the "personal numbness bar"--a measure set high by modern culture as a way of keeping everything "cool," under control, and consequently out of touch. This book provides the insight and the means for lowering that numbness bar. "You can feel more," the author asserts. You can regain the intelligence and energy of your feelings, so long denied and dressed up to appear acceptable. "Being cool," Callahan states, "allows you to look the other way about torture, invasion, pollution and injustice," and to accept the generic malaise that characterizes so many relationships. The central framework of the book is built with the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling, including: * Learning the potent difference between thoughts and feelings, which most people confuse * Sorting out feelings (based in present) from emotions (based in the past or in somebody else's life) * Fully allowing that feelings are absolutely-neutral energy and information, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Each chapter is enriched with THOUGHTMAPS-clear diagrams of ways we presently think and ways we could possibly think-and supported by an abundance of practical experiments to try. The Power of Conscious Feelings is so much more than a book of self-help or inspiration. Ultimately, it is about our connection with and responsibility for the fate of the Earth. When we are no longer numb, we are freed from solitary confinement in our private world of thoughts and beliefs. We emerge, already connected with other human beings, connected in the world of feelings we all have in common. This book actually guides the reader through four distinct evolutionary stages: from Personal, to Relational, to Transformational, to Cultural, in showing us how to use our adult feelings as the fuel for living our destiny as creators of sustainable culture. Choosing numbness was probably unconscious for most of us. But, Callahan is committed to showing us, step by step, in this moment, how we can change the mind and learn to consciously feel.

This book explores the importance of the conscious self, and of the `conscious collectively', in the construction and interpretation of social relations and process.