Zen (3)

Like many other religious and self-realization organizations Zen tends to focus on rightbrain abilities and functions, rather than those of the left. Holistic perspective (non-duality) is primary to the rightbrain.

Buddha taught serious Non-Duality in Zen's foundational text, the Lankavatara Sutra. These books look at modern rightbrain research, as well as teachings about non-duality from koans, recorded stories and sayings of Buddha himself and other ancient masters mostly from the Tang Dynasty.

Pataphysics (6)

Pataphysics is an influential anti-linear-thinking movement started by Alfred Jarry a century ago. Its admirers and adherents include a host of important artists, writers and philosophers including Picasso, Duchamp, Breton, Joyce, Foucault and Beaudrillard. Modernist musician John Cage said "it influenced everybody". Paul McCartney was a big fan, and his Beatles song Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a pataphysics allegory, mentions pataphysics, features pataphysic themes, and was modeled after Jarry's pataphysic anthem: the Debraining Song.

Kabbalah (1)

Kabbalah is an ancient system of knowledge very different from that of contemporary Western culture. This book is a collection of ten traditional allegorical tales highlighting some of Kabbalah's main perspectives on the world and the archetypal structures operating beneath most peoples' notice. The title story and a couple of others are attributed to Nachman of Breslov in the Eighteenth Century, reportedly after he spent a considerable time in Jerusalem smoking herbs and confabulating with a group of Sufi scholars.

Elizabethan Renaissance (1)

A collection of four-century-old woodcut illustrations, texts, histories, quotes, sayings, and aphorisms, from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England (the English Renaissance); and snippets of Elizabethan history from various important years.

Shortly after the time of Columbus and Copernicus, Renaissance England was a main source of our modern Western culture, mores, and manners of speaking: empiricism, rationality, public education, liberty, individual rights; Frances Bacon, Elizabeth, and Shakespeare...