Understanding Human Life

This is a collection of pithy and accessible essays on the nature and implications of human embodiment which explore the concept of ‘human being’ in the most unprecedented manner through seemingly disparate academic disciplines. With contributions from key researchers from around the world, this book engages with embodiment through the lens of "new materialism". It eschews the view that human beings are debased by materiality and creates a vision of humans as fully embodied creatures situated in a richly populated living planet. The essays in this volume will illustrate and foster new materialist thought in areas including psychology, astrophysics, geology, biology, sociology, philosophy, and the performing arts. The book’s engaging and enlightening content is made accessible to readers with relatively little background in the various academic disciplines. This is an important and fascinating text which invites readers to explore and expand their understanding and experience of embodiment. It will be particularly useful for postgraduate students and scholars of theoretical and philosophical psychology, philosophy of the mind, and social and cultural anthropology.

Understanding Human Nature brings together twenty-five years of Richard Brook’s experiences in yoga and meditation, acupuncture and Chinese medicine, dance and movement, Native American mysticism, tantra and community living.

Understanding Human Conduct: The Innate and Acquired Meaning of Life presents a new and provocative model of life-meaning. The Consciousness-Meaning (CM) model is founded on two major assumptions: (a) consciousness is a necessary condition for meaning and understanding, and (b) there are two types of life-meaning, innate and acquired. The latter is divided into ordinary and extreme meanings. The CM model successfully deals with human behavior (e.g., crisis of life and suicide) as well as alternative approaches based on philosophy (e.g., existentialism) and science (e.g., evolution).

The best introduction to biologist Jeremy Griffith’s world-saving explanation of the human condition! The transcript of acclaimed British actor and broadcaster Craig Conway’s astonishing, world-changing and world-saving 2020 interview with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith about his book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition which presents the completely redeeming, uplifting and healing understanding of the core mystery and problem about human behaviour of our so-called good and evil -stricken human condition thus ending all the conflict and suffering in human life at its source, and providing the now urgently needed road map for the complete rehabilitation and transformation of our lives and world! In fact, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Professor Harry Prosen, has described it as the most important interview of all time! This world-saving interview was broadcast across the UK in 2020 and is being replayed on radio & TV stations around the world. This book is supported by a very informative website at www.humancondition.com, where you can watch the video of the interview.

Originally published in 1928 this book was an attempt to acquaint the general public with the fundamentals of Individual Psychology. At the same time it is a demonstration of the practical application of these principles to the conduct of everyday relationships, and the organization of our personal life. Based upon a years’ lectures to audiences at the People’s Institute in Vienna, the purpose of the book was to point out how the mistaken behaviour of the individual affects harmony of our social and communal life; to teach the individual to recognize their own mistakes; and finally, to show them how they may effect a harmonious adjustment to the communal life. Adler felt that mistakes in business or in science were costly and deplorable, but mistakes in the conduct of life are usually dangerous to life itself. This book is dedicated by the author in his preface ‘to the task of illuminating man’s progress toward a better understanding of human nature.’

Uses a question and answer format to discuss the anatomy and function of the human body.

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham.