Socrates said , "Know Thyself." Veronica Hughes tells us HOW.
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"Reinventing Your Real is not a self-help guide; it's a self-realization guide!  The practical and fun exercises help you see who you are and who you want to be so that you can achieve your goals. Veronica Hughes weaves interesting stories from her own experience into her ten steps to transformation. Reading her advice, asides, and activities is very much like listening to a sage friend sharing her analysis of life and tips for living it over coffee.

This is a quick read and the activities can be fun. The result is, well...transformational.
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This author is very pragmatic. That is what I liked. In his introduction, what he says is if you don't like some part, ignore it and move ahead. There will definitely be something in the book worth reading. It isn't even necessary for you to implement it. Just imbibe the feelings and the wisdom in the words.

Now there is a sign of a confident author, who knows that spreading goodwill somehow matters more.

The book doesn't have parts which might strike you as "Look at this formula for success he has come up with. Brilliant!" NO. The book states ANCIENT FACTS and BELIEFS in an attractive manner. Since we bind ourselves with RULES, that is the smart way the author has presented this book.

It is so essential for us to know that there is a higher power taking care of us. Sometimes we are directionless and cannot fathom where our life is going. At that point, we need to go back to our roots, find out what our subconscience is telling us to do.

I really liked the part where the author writes about love and friendship. If the person does not have the capacity to accept your love, they do not stay in your life but that does not mean you should stop loving. I'm facing some problem like that and somehow this wisdom found me right when I needed it.

I think this is a book you need to keep reading, or marking out favourite portions so that you can keep coming back. And that is what I am going to do.

I really appreciate the author for putting this book out and indeed coming across to me to get it reviewed. I am grateful to the Universe for bringing this book to me.
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This undervalued and unknown text by Samael Aun Weor has be published kindly for the first time in the English language.  It lays down major principals "for" an education and not of education itself.

Samael explains the factors of learning, the "Why's" and "How's"...NOT "What's".  He argues for the case of Morality and Ethics and gives many facts about the problems of societal education and modern life.

I see this text as a guide for Parents and not school officials...since school officials care more of school as a business and not of spiritual, moral and ethical progress in their assemblies and students, or themselves personally (even though they might say it).

This perhaps is the next best thing after Waldorf Education.  It offers the reader a new path and a goal, and especially a way out of the mess we find ourselves in these current times.

Very inspired, passionate and lucid!
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On my bedside table a tiny smooth stone sits quietly. The word "Believe" is engraved in the beautiful mustard colored stone. When I see this stone I remember to believe in the future and to have faith in my dreams.

To me, Wayne Dyer's words are like smooth stones that "speak out" wisdom. I want to put them all in the pocket of my soul and carry them with me wherever I go. The wisdom is then ready for me to toss into the pool of my own consciousness. The ripples can then move through my life and awaken my soul to move towards enlightenment.

In the first video: "How To Get What You Really, Really, Really, Really Want," you will literally be on the edge of your seat hanging on every word you are hearing. His presence, even on video, is very powerful and awakens something deep inside of you. The craving for truth can be a very powerful emotion which draws us to those who have truth. Wayne has researched truth through the ages and speaks confidently from a wealth of knowledge and personal experience.

Everyone wants to find meaning in life and Wayne explains how we can get what we want by first wishing, then desiring (asking). We then move to a point where we use our "will" to show "intention." In the final stage we develop a passion for life and for our purpose. We simply become what we think we can become.

In this first video I felt that I was a student who was ready to learn and the teacher appeared! You will feel inspired by this wonderful journey of spiritual discovery.

In the second video: "Improve Your Life Using The Wisdom Of The Ages," Wayne explains how "highly functioning" individuals are too busy "being" to worry about what people think of them. They are not controlled by the opinion of others.

I was so captivated by his every word. He explained the philosophy of how people through the ages have all believed in a world beyond the physical and that they have felt spiritually connected to this world.

Wayne also gives an introduction to his book: "Wisdom of the Ages: 60 days to Enlightenment." This is a book filled with quotes and passages from 60 "masters" of life. They did what they loved and loved what they did. They chose to advance confidently in the direction of their own dreams. They lived their lives by cultivating their own garden. They had no concept of failure and lived their lives with enthusiasm. These teachers had profound wisdom to share and Wayne Dyer researched their lives and their writings and then wrote a message to us about what he though they would want us to know in this day and age. He also tells a wonderful fable about a cat in this video.

Do you want to feel blissful in your life? Is there someone in your life who causes you to react in a negative way? Do you want to find the path to peace? As you walk the path of enlightenment with Wayne Dyer, pick up the smooth stones of wisdom along the way. Put them in your pocket. You never know when you might need some inspiration once you get back to walking your own path in life.

It has always been my theory that when you seek out truth and find it, you will know it for what it is.

~The Rebecca Review
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Lots of current information in this book to help us realize how our fundamental thoughts about things, determines our happiness and our success.  Richard explains the learning pyramid and how a person at each level reacts or creates life as they experience it.  The interesting part is those who don't know about these different levels, can be trapped in a lower level without being cognizant of it.  At the pinnacle or level three, a person sees through issues and establishes a purpose for their life.

An interesting idea about meme's is that people will hold steadfast onto their beliefs, and will fight and some have even killed to keep transferring their memes to others.  When we realize the broader scope of ideas through increased awareness, doors open where before they may have seemed closed.  Only when you open your mind, much of this will then make sense.
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A nice story. Sometimes we need to be reminded that while we need to be responsible, we also need to be true to ourselves. And that we need to be open to learning from the most unexpected people.
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John Izzo begins his book: The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die with a question we should form our entire life around:  "Why do some people find wisdom and die happy?"  This query is one that should sit quietly in the back of our minds from birth until death. When we sit with a question like this, we open ourselves to the endless possibilities of the answer.

John Izzo seeks to provide his audience with a roadmap to discovering our own answer to this. Through his book, he invites us to create lives of wisdom and happiness, no matter what our circumstance. Before beginning the five-step lesson, Izzo outlines the greatest challenge of all. He reminds us that time is passing.  In our powerlessness over that, we have huge opportunities.  We can manage our priorities and our choices. We are the stars of this one-person, one-lifetime show.

This book was, in some ways, a collaboration. Four thousand people were nominated by friends or loved ones as being true pillars of wisdom and joy. The author then chose 235 of those candidates between 60 and 105 years old - the most knowledgeable section of our society. These subjects have experienced the most.  They can separate the hard knocks from the great lessons. Through those subjects and their wisdom, Izzo came up with five tenets for a life worth living:

1. Be true to yourself.
2. Leave no regrets
3. Become love.
4. Live in the moment.
5. Give more than you take.

Although each of these is vital and approached with great depth and focus in the book, one or two demand a moment's inspection and are worth implementing this very moment.

*  Living in the moment. If one of the five tenets to living a happy life is to live in the moment, we are literally behind the eightball before we even begin. We are taken out of the "moment" a thousand times each day through our own technology. (Can you say email?) The author recounts taking his dog for a walk one day.  The dog was enjoying that walk so much more than Mr. Izzo himself. The dog paused to enthusiastically enjoy smells or the company of other dogs (friends). The author was simply busy timing himself to accomplish his daily speed walk.

*  Become Love.  Izzo asks us to recognize that love is not an idea, it is an action.  It means choosing to spend time with friends.  (Even dogs do that!)  It means embodying thoughtfulness and a loving tone.  We must not miss an opportunity or spend a day in human disappointment - there simply are no do-overs.  You will pass through today only once, and love will sustain you.

*  Leave no regrets.  The author's grandfather offered him the idea, early in his life, to judge his days by how satisfying they are. Each day will pass, it is simply the law of time and space, but how we live and how fulfilled we are, will become the foundation of great choices.  Quite simply, we get this one chance to create a life that leaves no regrets.  Do what thrills us.

Like all great books on positive psychology, gratitude is the prevailing thought throughout this book.  To be able to rebound every day (if necessary) and choose to live a joyous and meaningful life. To create time to be still and find the timeless beauty hidden behind to do lists and ever-full inboxes.  To author our own sonata, our own academy-award winning existence. That is the good life, and John Izzo wants us to know it. The rewards of each of these five principles are limitless, and amazingly, they are free.  It's the free lottery ticket - your one true life.

To your success every day!

Andrea Goeglein, Ph. D. (aka Dr. Success)
Expert on Positive Psychology and Executive Success Mentor
[...]
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An interesting passage from this book reads, "Some of the most important things I learned came from thinking about my own mistakes and from noticing what I did that lowered or raised my own self-esteem."
This interests me to reread this, because having first read this book in 1994, I wrote so many detailed introspective notes that I too can say, I've learned a lot from thinking and writing about the "learning lessons" of my life.
And this is a life-time process.
So, what are the 6 Pillars of Self-esteem?
First, I'd like to say that a healthy dose of self-esteem is thinking for yourself, no matter what is going on around you; while you maintain the belief that you deserve to be happy.
And happiness is when you can say that you have more joy than pain in your life.
The 6 pillars are:
1.  Live Consciously
  This requires us to be fully in the present moment.  And for
  most, this takes a bit of practice, because many of us are
  conditioned to disown the here and now, to survive what we
  have thought that we cannot handle.

2.  Accept Yourself
  Yes.  You have flaws and attributes.  You also have the
  opportunity to enhance who you are, by accepting everything
  about yourself.  In fact, the only way to enhance who you
  are is to accept yourself.
3.  Take Responsibility for Your Experiences
  Through my journey, I have learned to be in conversations
  where I say to myself, "It comes down to 'this is where you
  end, and I begin,'"
  Saying such an affirmation has helped me to congruently say
  what I will and will not experience.  And this is quite
  liberating not only to myself, but also to my interlocutor
  (most of the time)
4.  Assert Who You Are
  Honor what you think, feel, believe, need and want.  Yes,
  for many readers this may be a challenge.  But the results
  of accepting this challenge are wonderfully fulfilling.
5.  Live Purposefully
  Make an agreement with yourself to reach your highest
  potential, while you maintain balance in your life.
6.  Maintain Your Integrity
  Know exactly what your principles are.  And stick to them,
  no matter what others think or do.
This is an easy to follow book that is also between the caliber of a "self-help" book and a "psychology" book.
Enjoy!
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First, a quote from the writer-philosopher Elbert Hubbard: "Habit writes itself on the face, and the body is an automatic recording machine. To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we ourselves are posterity, and every man is his own ancestor. I am today what I am, because I was yesterday what I was."

Next, my paraphrase of this quote: We are physiologically today what we are, largely because of what we were physiologically 100,000 years ago. But Ms. Gedgaudas makes the case much more scholarly, logically, and thoroughly in the pages of her book. Marry the diet she recommends with a philosophy of life that provides you with healthy self-esteem and you will be living "the good life".
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Within the hour I saw and heard the author for more than an hour on C-SPAN's Book TV. After noting what her book is all about, the author spent most of her time in Q&A.  She listened well to the questions, then practicing what the book is all about, our need to take the otherness of one another seriously.  We need to learn how to argue with one another, not only with our own passion, but also with empathy for that which is other than ourselves. We must educe this capacity for civility in our K-12 schools and colleges, also the mass media and social networking.
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The dialog between Socrates and Meno is fit. While the subject is virtue, it's applications appear wider - The nature of man, etc.
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Almost every one of us believes that we can tap into a greater pool of creativity if we only knew how to use the laws that can unleash our creative powers. This Mindfunda is going to shed a light on where those beliefs originate from.

Magic is everywhere right? In the eyes of a child, filled with promises and unfulfilled potencies. In the sunlight that kisses your skin. In the smile from your lover that left this morning. But we almost all have this uncanny feeling that there is so much more that lies hidden behind secret laws.

Of course we do not believe in magic anymore. We call it sorcery. But give us The Secret, based on wishing and visualization and we go wild. Give us the The Celestine Prophecy and we change our lives. This craving to learn how to control the laws of nature is just the thing what brought about the Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 1800s.

Golden Dawn

Susan Graf talks about the Golden Dawn in her book Talking to the Gods using a very interesting perspective. She reviews four different authors, all still in print today, according to their magic qualities. The magic qualities they all four had learned about in the Secret order of the Golden Dawn.
Her choice of writers to compare: the famous W.B.Yeats, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood belonged to the cultural elite of their days. Dion Fortune did not but she was the one writer who used her books to educate her readers about the magical laws of the Golden Dawn. She got more appreciated in the 60s of the last century when the Goddess movement began its rise. Her book Applied Magic is still one of the best magic introduction books around.

Dion is the last writer to be discussed in the book and the only woman. She is the only one of the four who openly admitted to be occult. The other three men did not do that. But Susan had a different reason to pick them.

Even though all three were secret about their membership and their occult practices, magic was Yeats religion. He had 35 years of involvement in the Golden Dawn and was an established writer rewarded with the Nobel Prize. And even though the occult beliefs of the Golden Dawn are in his work he never openly violated his promise of secrecy.
There was a sense that Yeats had of a greater spiritual mind that he could tap upon using magic. It enabled him to write Fairy and Folk tales of Irish peasantry. And even though he yearned to tell about his encounters with the fairy people he did not mention his magical knowledge to anyone.

Algernon Blackwood, had like Carl Jung, very a religious father who inspired him to search for his own method of experiencing religion. Blackwood did not get the international recognition like Yeats dis, but his John Silence stories are still appealing today. They paint the hero of the Golden Dawn movement.

The concept of God is like an enlightened doctor who travels the world on a healing mission in the service of all that is good and right.

Arthur Machen was, just as Yeats and Blackwood, a member of the literary establishment of England and also kept his membership of the Golden Dawn a secret. But he did not capture the worldwide recognition of Yeats. The Great God Pan still is his most read publication.
And where Yeats was a Golden Dawn adept, Arthur Machen wanted to be inspired by the knowledge within. He already had a lot of spiritual knowledge. Compared to Yeats he was more reserved towards the Golden Dawn.

I have enjoyed reading Talking to the Gods. The perspective of looking at the Golden Dawn influence in the books of the writers gives us a lot of knowledge about the Golden Dawn. Everybody who works with symbols should get their hands on a copy of this book. The use of symbolism by the Golden Dawn has infiltrated todays art, books films and dreams. Reading Talking to the Gods makes you see how the wish for a new era, a new way of living for humanity is a shared vision of generations. This book makes you want to dive into your own rite to communicate with your higher self.
(This review is also published on Mindfunda.com)
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Along with Socrates, Plato and Pythagoras are a necessity to read and understand basically to understand how we as people got to the point we find ourselves on many levels, another book I would send my children, and have. Schools spend little time these days on teaching us what the masters left us.
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Nearly every problem we have in this world can be effectively alleviated by implementing more critical thought and compassion. If you are inclined to agree, and wish to inspire that agreement in others, this is a useful guide.

For a long time now I've known not only that things -can- be known, but that it is desirable to judge the methods we use to reach knowledge. What I lacked before reading this book was proper technique to communicate this - not to argue against faith, but to ask questions that lead people around it so they can see for themselves how unreliable it is.

As of today, I am a street epistemologist. Please join me to help create a better world for the future.
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"The reader who finds Aristotle and Kant no easy country to explore may take heart from the fact that even experts sometimes confess themselves lost." E. L. Allen

Greek Philosophy:
Philosophical writings, assumed to be at the core of western thought, evolve from a concrete historical setting with origins in Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem. The Greek intellectual power, which still amazes us, was lacking the material we have stacked today to practically exercise it. Socrates, whose dedication was to careful reasoning, is the prime intellectual and influential thinker in the entire Western enterprise. Socrates employed the Sophists logical reason for the pursuit of truth. Athens put Socrates on trial, for undermining tradition, in his venture of genuine knowledge. Plato's views of truth proceeded from Socrates moral vision and the sophists' relativism, endorsing them with the study of mathematics.

Pondering Western Thought?
The thought epoques progress as four connected links From Plato to Nietzsche: Plato/Aristotle, Augustine/aquinas/Luther, Decartes/Kant/Rousseau, and Marx/Nietzche. The coaching author advice is always valid, if you really intend to teach yourself, "pass over at the first reading any sections that prove reluctant to yield up their meaning and to return to them later..."  Since these thinkers progress within a tradition, they are often directly related to each other. Within the reading of a particular philosopher, it is interesting to notice the logic in which the knowledge proceeds and thought in one era links up with material from a preceding one.

Conflicting Trends:
In his final appraisal review, Allen seemed uncertain on the outcome of the conflicting trends and which will prevail. He thinks; 'we are back where Kant stood,' with a far reaching science, that abandoned the claim of final truth, like the contour lines which do not reproduce the features of the landscape. He concludes that readiness to admit that ethical and aesthetic, religious and metaphysical statements should be considered on their respective merits. Kierkegaard iterated that life often mocks at logic, a lesson logical analysts admit, calling us back to wonder, the root of all philosophizing!

The Lay Introduced:
In a Teach Yourself serial thought building books, the author, Dr. E. L. Allen of King's College, meticulously attempts to introduce the British 'lay reader,' to western thought, that he develops as a chain reaction from Greek intellect, just a decade after the W.W.II came to an end. Thirty years later, still fundamental reading, the basic guide was reissued under its new more expressing title: From Plato to Nietzsche.
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This book is a reminder about the truth that we all hold within.  I wish all middle & high school students were required to read it.  Our power/truth is not outside of us, it is within us.  We naturally are always seeking to live our truth & when we don't we feel the loss.
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The book is very well written and reflected the author's superior command of vocabulary, and classical background.  His superior communicative intelligence was further reinforced by his many references to Classics, books, authors, events, and more.  I am now re-reading the book with a notepad on hand to expand my knowledge of the references and content.

The message in the book demonstrate the value of being tenacious and goal setting in your pursuits.  Readers can learn  so much and to pursue similar courses when face with life changes.  Perservere, be tenacious, enjoy ones own being, value friends and family and study the arts for personal enjoyment of life.