Souls-EBOO

Monday, May 23, 2016

The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries [Audiobook]

The New York Times comes each morning and never fails to deliver news of the important dead. Every day is new; every day is fraught with significance. I arrange my cup of tea, prop up my slippers. Obituaries are history as it is happening. Whose time am I living in? Was he a success or a failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the secret of a good life!Where else can you celebrate the life of the pharmacist who moonlighted as a spy, the genius behind Sea Monkeys, the school lunch lady who spent her evenings as a ballroom hostess? No wonder so many readers skip the news and the sports and go directly to the obituary page.

The Dead Beat is the story of how these stories get told. Enthralled by the fascinating lives that were marching out of this world, Marilyn Johnson tumbled into the obits page to find out what made it so lively. She sought out the best obits in the English language and chased the people who spent their lives writing about the dead. Surveying the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, surviving a mass gathering of obituarists, and making a pilgrimage to London to savor the most caustic and literate obits of all, Marilyn Johnson leads us into the cult and culture behind the obituary page. The result is a rare combination of scrapbook and compelling read, a trip through recent history and the unusual lives we don’t quite appreciate until they’re gone.

Monday, May 16, 2016

Deepak Chopra - How to Know God: The Soul"s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries [Repost]

The best-selling author of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success has written his most ambitious and important work yet – an exploration of the idea that everyone can have the direct experience of divinity. According to Chopra, the brain is hardwired to know God. The human nervous system has seven biological responses that correspond to seven levels of divine experience. These are shaped not by any one religion (they are shared by all), but by the brain’s need to take an infinite, chaotic universe and find meaning in it. As we make sense of the swirling “quantum soup,” we inevitably find the face of God. In this remarkable book Chopra shows us how. And along the way we delve into such mysteries as religious awakening, ecstasy, genius, telepathy, multiple personality, and clairvoyance – all parts of the “mind field” that quantum physics discovered almost a hundred years ago. This invisible place, although it appears to be an empty void, is actually the womb of creation. Here God is our co-creator in the constant process of self-creation that is life itself. As we come to know God better, we gain direct access to healing, love, and miracles. How to Know God is Deepak Chopra’s writing at its very best, an internationally celebrated blend of philosophy and science applied to the greatest subject of all. This is the quest each of us is on, whether we realize it or not. For, as Chopra writes, “God is our highest instinct to know ourselves.” This book makes a dramatic and enduring contribution to that knowledge.