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Growing up in Southern Illinois in the 1960s, Addison Albright appears to be a typical mischievous teen - even though the manner in which birds flit from branch to branch in the placid suburb troubles him. Oddities in his childhood memories also cause him to wonder if things are really as they seem in "Little Egypt"? The one person who might know is the town villain, Maxx "Molewhisker" Schaufler - a former undertaker with a hotrod hearse who Addison encounters in a private cemetery with curious grave markers. Not only is the old codger''s appearance unusual, there''s something peculiar about his ramshackle Victorian that Addison soon comes to realize. ∩╗┐As a series of perplexing events has him teetering on the brink of insanity, someone else is attracted to Molewhisker''s afflicted mirror: a scholarly biker named Zerrill who claims to be a member of an epigraphic society. After involving himself in the strange relationship between the enigmatic Schaufler and the boy struggling to free himself from his mysterious control, his true agenda is called into question. Exploiting the town folk to achieve his cryptic objective, the narrative darkens when Addison becomes infatuated with a gorgeous college girl with esoteric interests. As the three match wits while attempting to unravel a local legend that could revise world history, their lives will be forever changed when they discover the shocking truth revealed in the othering.

The Powers of Ancient and Sacred Places provides an informed, wide-ranging survey of a variety of intriguing properties of ancient sites, ranging from the material to the subtle. These enigmatic monuments are where we come face to face with our human story through time, and where we can also sometimes even catch the whispers of our planet itself - the places of power that gave us our first sense of the holy.

When cryptic messages begin to appear in the blog threads of a noted skeptic of fringe-ologists (especially the pseudoscientific ideas of ancient astronaut theorists), at first the cyber-attacks are dismissed as esoteric jabberwocky trumpeted by the latest Bay Area cult. Before long, podcasts debunking UFO super-believers are also breached with a strikingly futuristic aesthetic that's as puzzling as the abstruse content. While dealing with these intrusions, there are further problems to contend with at his Silicon Valley condo: the teenage son of his live-in girlfriend has transhuman aspirations and his gorgeous bae (who likes to wear silver spandex bodysuits and perfumes with curious metallic notes) is constantly feeding him a series of mind-melting scenarios, including rumors that his geneticist mom is engaged in covert experiments involving more radical edits to the human genome than are included in Cellectech's glossy brochure for designer babies. Add to this the shadowy secret society that's convinced the phantom web messages pertain to forbidden knowledge redacted from the condensed Garden of Eden myth. For reasons known only by the inner circle of Phoenix Orientum, they suspect the zealously guarded means for rejuvenating humanity has been implanted in the skeptic's head, secured by a nearly impenetrable mind-lock. Being pursued by those with a sinister veneer, while at the same time looking for more prosaic explanations for the paranormal episodes that now plague his daily existence, it's while reluctantly participating as the "balance" in a documentary by startup Paragon Makings that high strangeness challenges any rational interpretations. What awaits is a fateful discovery that even the blogsite weirdies, paleo-contact luminaries and a mischievous pair of bio-hackers could never have imagined.

From flying saucer crashes to underground alien bases, a number of modern mythologies have come into being since the advent of the UFO era in the 1940s. But how much of these myths is real, versus being the invention of either government agencies or deluded conspiracy theorists? Saucers, Spooks and Kooks provides an eye-opening survey of the history behind these stories, and the individuals promoting them.

The Contemplative Brain offers a comprehensive exploration of the cultural neurophenomenology of contemplation. The book is written by a neuroanthropologist who spent years as a Tibetan Tantric Buddhist monk and who has practiced many different traditions of contemplation, including Buddhist vipassana, Tantric arising yoga, Zen Buddhist zazen, Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, Western Mysteries esoteric Tarot, dream meditation, shamanic journeys, and other approaches to self-discovery. Over the course of half a century of contemplative experience, the author has learned to separate the practices and experiences of meditation traditions from their cultural, ideological, and religious trappings. He discovered that the brain-mind that seeks truth about the external world can be redirected to an exploration of the vast world of the inner Self-the truth-seeking brain in its contemplative mode. The book explains how the brain works to penetrate, understand, and eventually realize its own internal processes. This includes a detailed account of how the brain's sensorium portrays the world and the Self to itself in various alternative states of consciousness. A cross-cultural examination of methods and institutions used by contemplatives in the past and present to achieve self-awareness shows that humans have been interested in phenomenology for thousands of years. Methods for calming, centering, focusing and realization may or may not involve the use of entheogens (psychoactive drugs), ordeals, quests, ascetic lifestyles, hyper-awareness in dream states, and pursuit of mystical episodes, but all involve inherent capacity of the contemplative brain to discover its own nature.

Stranger Than Fiction brings together, for the first time, Mike Jay's distinctive and immensely readable forays into the twilight zones of history, culture and the human mind. Beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated, Stranger Than Fiction is a unique compendium of forgotten histories, untold stories and unexplored worlds.

The Power of Ritual describes the characteristics of ritual from which its power and efficacy in the world and in human bodies and minds derive. This book is about ritual itself-what it is, how it works to influence human belief and behavior, what makes it powerful, what makes it dangerous, and most of all, what makes it useful to contemporary humans. The authors draw often on their own personal experiences with ritual to illuminate its potential for generating and perpetuating group belief and individual transformation, making the book an engaging read. Professors teaching about ritual will find this to be a useful resource, while students and scholars seeking to study ritual will find much to interest them, as will all those interested in designing and performing rituals, and understanding the rituals they choose to participate in or perform.

Talking With the Spirits is a cross-cultural survey of contemporary spirit mediumship. The diverse contributions to this volume cover a wide-range of ethnographic contexts, from Spiritualist séances in the United Kingdom to self-mortification rituals in Singapore and Taiwan, from psychedelic spirit incorporation in the Amazonian rainforest, to psychic readings in online social spaces, and more. By taking a broad perspective the book highlights both the variety of culturally specific manifestations of spirit communication, and key cross-cultural features suggestive of underlying core-processes and experiences. Rather than attempting to reduce or dismiss such experiences, the authors featured in this collection take the experiences of their informants seriously and explore their effects at personal, social and cultural levels.

Did Steve Jobs have a vision of the afterlife on his death-bed? Does quantum physics suggest that our mind might survive the physical death of our body? How do some near-death experiencers 'see' outside of their bodies at a time when they are supposed to be dead? In 'Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife', author Greg Taylor covers all these questions and more. From Victorian seance rooms through to modern scientific laboratories, Taylor surveys the fascinating history of research into the survival of human consciousness, and returns with a stunning conclusion: that maybe we should stop worrying so much about death, because there probably is an afterlife.

Communing with the Gods presents the most comprehensive account of culture and dreaming available in the anthropology of dreaming, and is written by an anthropologist who is also trained in neuroscience, and who is himself a lucid dreamer and Tibetan Tantric dream yoga practitioner. ¬The book examines the place of dreaming in the experience of peoples from diverse cultures and historical backgrounds. ¬Communing with the Gods surveys anthropological theories of dreaming, what we know about how the brain produces dreams and why, and lucid dream research and how the notion of lucidity applies to dreaming of traditional societies. It explores the ways that societies encourage, evoke, experience and interpret dreams, as well as how people act in response to information obtained in the dream state. A comprehensive theory of brain, culture and dreaming is presented that explains the neurobiological functions of sleep and dreaming, the evolution of dreaming, the universality of, and cultural variation in dream elements, and the role of dreaming as a system of intra-psychic communication. ¬This theory is then applied to an examination of dreaming in modern society. The book discusses how modern dream-work may ameliorate wide-spread alienation, spiritual exhaustion and despair in modern society.

"Forget your 3D cinema and TV, and your virtual cyber-worlds - these are but pale electronic imitations of what you can access through your own mind. This book shows you how to dream lucidly, which means waking up inside dreams while still physiologically asleep. Lucid dreaming is a genuine altered state of consciousness, not merely vivid dreaming, in which you can find yourself in other realities that seem as real as waking consciousness. There is no limit to the creations you can explore, because the biological wonder that is your brain is the most complex thing we know of. You can have fun, meet departed friends and relatives as if they were still alive, rehearse actions you have to undertake in the normal world of daily reality, experience mystical and paranormal mind states, and much more. A third of our life is spent asleep, and in an average lifetime we experience about half a million dreams. Yet for most of us that part of our existence is like a closed book. We might remember an occasional vivid dream, but usually our dreams are just vague, fragmented shadows that evaporate in our minds as soon as we open our eyes. This book explains the history and nature of dreams and lucid dreams, and then presents a uniquely comprehensive range of techniques, tools and aids for attaining lucid dreaming. So leave your 3D glasses behind and train yourself to plunge into the inner virtual worlds that lie beyond your dreams."