248 research outputs found

    Art for healing; Art for consciousness change

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    From a very early age I have been drawn to create art. I have followed this passion closely throughout my entire life. After acquiring a master\u27s degree in art education, and subsequently, teaching high school art for 3 years I was compelled to enter the MFA program at Rochester Institute of Technology with a concentration in painting and new forms. Through this process, I discovered a great calling. After the first year of study in the MFA program I traveled to Tibet. This journey was instrumental in the formation of my thesis: Art for Healing, Art for Consciousness Change, as was my marriage to my partner Daixin whom I met in China 3 years ago. With her as the narrative model found in each painting, I created an installation of 8, 4x8 ft paintings based upon a myriad of concepts taken from Tibetan Buddhism, my personal insights and experiences, and the book Prometheus Rising, by Robert Anton Wilson, which outlines his 8-Circuits of Human Consciousness. The installation I created, Daixin\u27s 8-Circuit Path to Light, followed a symbolic model of the human Chakra system as a guide for each of the 8-Circuits to explore imagery evoked in my mind through the correlations I drew as I progressed through my understanding of the human body as an energy system. During this process I was able to bring myself from a very graphic and unsure use of oil paint, to a masterful level, capable of captivating audiences, and stimulating the minds of those who viewed my work. Such is the effect of the work of visionary artist Alex Grey, who is the single greatest western influence on my artistic path. The experience of completing this work brought me balance in terms of my perceptions of religion, spirituality, and my artistic pursuits. I gained a deep desire to create art that is supportive of the Tibetan culture and their prophetic understanding of consciousness. This calling is supported by my everlasting desire to create works inspired by all my travels throughout the world for the purpose of bringing healing elements to the areas in which my work is displayed

    Studies in Hinduism

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    This is a collection of articles by established scholars in the fields of History, Philosophy, Literature and Religious Studies. These are original essays which address the issues and concerns that now dominate the study of religion in its multiple dimensions with a fresh approach. They critique settled opinions and raise new and engaging questions concerning cultural hermeneutics and the academic study of religion. Embellished with a substantive and topical introduction by the editor, this collection of articles will be of abiding interest to scholars and interested lay persons alike

    Geopolitics as palimpsest: Contextual inscriptions of the global war on terror

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    This article aims to develop the agenda of a grounded, contextual critical geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the interaction between local and hegemonic geopolitics. This is achieved by examining the local reception of the geopolitics of the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) in the context of the establishment of US bases on Romanian territory following the 2004 US Global Posture Review. A close reading of this context reveals a complex and ambiguous relationship, simultaneously assertive and subversive, between the GWOT's sui generis, territorially non-specific geopolitics of transit, and Romania's exceptionalist geopolitics of place, significance, and convergence. Not only did the GWOT geopolitics fail to erase local geopolitics, but it also became muddied, contaminated, and inadvertently destroyed by the ‘old’ local geopolitical knowledge. This suggests an understanding of geopolitics as a palimpsest, the product of serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings-over that produce geopolitical knowledge of, and in different contexts. In broader conceptual terms, this study highlights the heteroglossia of geopolitical knowledge, the resilience of local geopolitics, and the importance of contextual sensitivity in the pursuit of the normative mission of critical geopolitics

    Aesthetic Mind-Meditative Mind: Reflections On Art As Yoga And Contemplative Practice

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    This dissertation examines visual art as a form of yoga and contemplative practice through the lens of art-based research (ABR) and methods of meditation. Essentially, yoga joins together cognitive, somatic, and socially engaged practices that illuminate a synergistic view of our finite physical self with our infinite Self (Atman) as embodied consciousness. Included in this discussion are contemplative seeing (darshan), art as worship (rasa), the Shaivite view of creation (spanda), theophanic imagination, and the origins of images. This research was further catalyzed by the author’s diagnosis of prostate cancer. As physical disease progressed from diagnosis through treatment, art and meditation became applied methods for studying these events. Consequently, a deeper understanding of how art is yoga and contemplative practice resulted. Note to the reader: The Sanskrit words in this dissertation are spelled out in English rather than with the proper diacritical marks. The author acknowledges the importance of accurate pronunciation in the Sanskrit language; however, this paper is not attempting to address matters of language as much as the importance of specific theoretical concepts and connections. The author therefore has made an effort to make this work accessible to a wider audience than religious studies scholars of language and philosophies related to Yoga traditions

    Fast talk & flush times : the confidence man as a literary convention

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    Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-232) and index.Lenz provides a historical overview of the American confidence man, and its role as a literary convention.The new country -- The early tradition of confidence games -- The emergence of the confidence-man convention -- Four variations of the confidence man -- The war, Mark Twain, and the flush-times confidence man -- From the new country to the twentieth century.Digitized at the University of Missouri--Columbia MU Libraries Digitization Lab in 2012. Digitized at 600 dpi with Zeutschel, OS 15000 scanner. Access copy, available in MOspace, is 400 dpi, grayscale

    Belonging and Narrative

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    Why did the novel become so popular in the past three centuries, and how did the American novel contribute to this trend? As a key provider of the narrative frames and formulas needed by modern individuals to give meaning and mooring to their lives. Drawing on phenomenological hermeneutics, human geography and social psychology, Laura Bieger contends that belonging is not a given; it is continuously produced by narrative. Against the current emphasis on metaphors of movement and destabilization, she explores the salience and significance of home. Challenging views of narrative as a mechanism of ideology, she approaches narrative as a practical component of dwelling in the world - and the novel a primary place-making agent

    Thinking Literature across Continents

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    'Thinking Literature across Continents' finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. This book highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways

    Walking "the same path" : Indian voices and the issues of removal

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    The Congressional debate over the Indian Removal Act in the spring of 1830 represented a synthesis of the arguments that had focused national attention throughout the 1820s on the Indians' rights and capacity for becoming part of "the American family." The defining of the issues is evident from a survey of three prominent journals of the 1820s, North American Review, Niles' Weekly Register, and The National Intelligencer. Journalists, academicians, government officials, and clergy considered the fate of the Indians in light of three recurring questions: Who had the rights to the land? Could Indians and whites co-exist? What role should the Indian play in the historical and literary narrating of America

    A Passage from Brooklyn to Ithaca: The Sea, the City and the Body in the Poetics of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy

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    This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation to such a degree that a comparative examination of their poetics reveals two minds, and two narratives, closer than their continents. The textual approach of my subject includes the examination of poetry, prose writings, and autobiographical documentation, as well as biographical testimony. The thematic approach is organized around three key subjects that I see as integral and consistent in the poetics of Whitman and Cavafy: the sea, the city and the body

    The Progress of Tastein Mid-Nineteenth Century England: Art in Wilkie Collins' Early Writing

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    This dissertation shows the extent to which Wilkie Collins reflected the changing mid-Victorian perceptions on aesthetic discrimination in his early body of work. A producer of literary commodities for a middle-class public, Collins had an acute understanding of the pivotal changes brought by capitalist development in what concerned the acquisition of taste: once a matter restricted to a selected few and now, as his career in the field of letters progressed, a right demanded by many. Following a close reading of his literary production, essays and correspondence during the 1850s, Collins emerges as an author thoroughly aware of the democratisation of taste that pervaded a crucial decade of the nineteenth century
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