This book presents important topics regarding the more mystical trend of Kabbalah—the ecstatic Kabbalah. It includes the mystical union, the world of imagination, and concentration as a spiritual technique. The emphasis in the text is on the interaction between the "original" Spanish stage of Kabbalah and Muslim mysticism in the East, mainly in the Galilee. The influence of the Kabbalistic-Sufic synthesis on the later developments of Jewish mysticism is traced, thereby providing a more precise understanding of the history of Kabbalah as an interplay between the theosophical and ecstatic mystical experiences.

This reader's guide to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings offers a journey into the world of Middle-earth, exploring the grand themes and hidden nuances of Tolkien's epic story, connecting The Lord of the Rings to the larger mythology of Middle-earth, and situating Tolkien's process of writing within his own powerful experiences of the imaginal realm. The Lord of the Rings has been a beloved story to several generations since its publication in the mid-1950s. The story has a timeless quality to it, and engages with a complex struggle between good and evil, death and immortality, power and freedom. The Lord of the Rings is a book treated by many as a sacred text, one to be returned to year after year, or read aloud with loved ones. The Lord of the Rings has become a myth for our time. Journey to the Imaginal Realm guides the reader through each chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien's magnum opus, drawing attention to the subtle details, recalling moments of foreshadowing, and illuminating underlying patterns and narrative threads throughout the story. The close reading of the text is paired with relevant biographical information from Tolkien's life, including the loss of both his parents at a young age, the central role of friendship in his life, his participation in the First World War, and his exquisite romance with his wife Edith. Tolkien was a lover of language and a philologist by profession, and his invented languages form the heart of his tales. In some of his letters, Tolkien described his process of writing as one of discovery, in which he waited to find out "what really happened," feeling as though he was "recording what was already 'there, ' somewhere." This reader's guide seeks to understand the imaginal experiences Tolkien may have encountered that led to the writing of his stories. The guide explores Tolkien's theory of sub-creation, the immersive experience of Faërian Dramas, and most importantly, his notion of the realm of Faërie. Journey to the Imaginal Realm is a celebration of Tolkien's work, and an inquiry into the profound nature of imagination, which is capable of bringing forth a world as vast as Middle-earth.

This first English translation contains two essays by the eminent French Islamic scholar Henry Corbin: "Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal" and "Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics." Corbin called Emanuel Swedenborg "the prophet of the internal sense of the Bible" and compared his biblical symbolism to the Quranic interpretations of the great Islamic mystics.

This volume addresses three fundamental questions about the interplay between the ethics of globality and spirituality: What are the practical implications of spirituality for the condition of life in a turbulent era of violent religious/non-religious extremism? In what way can spirituality, the view of love, compassion, tolerance, and mutual recognition encounter mistrust, enmity, separateness, and violence? How, and in what way, can spirituality contribute to the newly emerging global ethics? Religious scholars distinguish between the esoteric and exoteric sides of belief systems. Esotericism centres on the inner awareness, and conceals a certain spirituality that is only transmittable to those who could successfully pass through a process of initiatic preparation and transpersonal practices to understand the mystical dimensions of existence. In contrast, exotericism takes the outer dimension of every day consciousness into account and favours the possibility of the popular understanding of the essence of existence. In this perspective, truth could be grasped by the public without the need of any transpersonal initiative and transformation of consciousness. Esotericism extends beyond religion and has become the spiritual philosophy of life without the need of being essentially religious. It has become common, notably in the West, to identify oneself as spiritualist without having religious affiliations. The condition of globality has provided an unprecedented opportunity for spiritual perspectives to grow. Ideas, perspectives, beliefs, and philosophies of life are growing outside local/national containers to express themselves in different global settings, while the forces of globalisation are influencing local identities and cultures. While evolving global transformations strengthen people’s capability to leave institutionally ordered belief systems, it simultaneously enables them to rearrange themselves around alternative perspectives. These fundamental transformations cultivate a fabulous landscape for the growth of spirituality.

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other. In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Rancière, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.