**A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK** In a sophisticated romp through the tribulations and joys of marriage and friendship, a group of college friends reunites two decades after graduation. After the sudden death of Douglas, once the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits, his four best friends are summoned to his Catskills estate to mourn his passing. Responding to a mysterious sense of emergency in the call, Ned flies in from San Francisco with his wife Nina in furious pursuit; they’re at a critical point in their attempts to conceive and she won’t let a funeral get in the way. It is Nina who gives us a pointed, irreverent commentary as the men reconvene, while Ned tries to understand what it was that made this clutch of souls his friends to begin with—before time, sex, work, and the brutal quirks of history reshaped them. Filled with unexpected, funny, telling aperçus, Norman Rush’s Subtle Bodies is also a deeply moving exploration of the meanings of life.

Escape the humdrum of daily life and reawaken your true essential Self with Stephen Sturgess’ sensational Yoga and meditation techniques. Learn about fascinating subtle bodies, chakras, nadis, and kundalini with the in-depth section on Yoga philosophy, then follow Stephen’s variety of practices and techniques for removing any obstacles that may be standing in the way of you uniting with your true nature. The book includes a wealth of Hatha Yoga techniques using asanas, mudras, bandhas, pranayama, and kriya purification, as well as Raja and kriya Yoga techniques – mantras, concentration and meditation.

Subtle-body practices are found particularly in Indian, Indo-Tibetan and East Asian societies, but have become increasingly familiar in Western societies, especially through the various healing and yogic techniques and exercises associated with them. This book explores subtle-body practices from a variety of perspectives, and includes both studies of these practices in Asian and Western contexts. The book discusses how subtle-body practices assume a quasi-material level of human existence that is intermediate between conventional concepts of body and mind. Often, this level is conceived of in terms of an invisible structure of channels, associated with the human body, through which flows of quasi-material substance take place. Contributors look at how subtle-body concepts form the basic explanatory structure for a wide range of practices. These include forms of healing, modes of exercise and martial arts as well as religious practices aimed at the refinement and transformation of the human mindbody complex. By highlighting how subtle-body practices of many kinds have been introduced into Western societies in recent years, the book explores the possibilities for new models of understanding which these concepts open up. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Religion and Philosophy.

What has Dark Matter got to do with your Afterlife? In 2006 Jay proposed that dark matter (which comprises about 85 per cent of the matter in the universe) could include self-interacting dark plasma. Subsequently, this proposal received support in the scientific literature. This has significant implications not only for the universe as a whole, but also planet Earth and its inhabitants. In recent years, scientists have pointed out to the life-like characteristics of plasma. How has this life-like dark plasma participated in human evolution? Does dark plasma provide the physical basis for your afterlife? Do we have dark plasma bodies which co-evolved with our ordinary matter bodies but are currently invisible to us? This book explores this in detail, while adhering to experimental data, with some surprising conclusions.

Throughout the course of Byzantine history, Christian doctrine taught that angels have a powerful place in cosmology. It also taught that angels were immaterial, bodiless, invisible beings. But if that were the case, how could they be visualized and depicted in icons and other works of art? This book describes the strategies used by Byzantine artists to represent the incorporeal forms of angels and the rationalizations in defense of their representations mustered by theologians in the face of iconoclastic opposition. Glenn Peers demonstrates that these problems of representation provide a unique window on Late Antique thought in general.

Discusses the mythological properties assigned to geometric forms, and covers the Golden Section, gnomonic spirals, music, and the squaring of the circle.

With his expert teachings, philosophical insights, and pragmatic imagery, world-class yoga instructor Tias Little turns the anatomy of the physical body into a tool for navigating the subtle body If you spend considerable time doing yoga, you begin to see that it is about much more than just the body—the practice of yoga in fact reveals that the body is in no way separate from the psychospiritual forces that animate it. Here, Tias Little provides a way to understand these forces as they relate to an integrated yoga of body, mind, and spirit. He unites somatic concepts and wisdom teachings in this practical guide to the anatomy of the physical, mental, emotional, and subtle (or energetic) body. Little is a master teacher who offers us a guided tour of the body’s structure and physical anatomy, then uses this new structural awareness as the basis for exploring the subtle body. In a meaningful and pragmatic way, the book maps the connection between the body and the rich symbolism that pervades the yogic imagination, including the chakras, nadis, and koshas. Further, Little offers readers clear, insightful yoga, pranayama, and meditation exercises that apply these body-mind principles.