Tom Stone

A perfect book to read in anticipation of a trip to Greece. This memoir is set on the island of Patmos, where one man opened a restaurant in partnership with a local Greek. He learned so much about the culture, including their hospitality and clear lines between locals and foreigners. His naïveté and openness is blatantly American, but so is his enthusiasm for cooking and the island. I can’t wait to visit the shores he describes.

“There are places that seem to be waiting for you out there somewhere, like unmet lovers, and when (and if) you come upon them, you know, instantly and unquestioningly, that they are the ones.”

“She was full of vim and vigor, and when she spoke, she barked out her words, slapping you on the back with them.”… (plus d'informations)

This is a book on Greek mythology, but it's also a biography and a history. So Tom Stone retells the myths, as you might expect, but he limits himself to the ones featuring Zeus, and the retelling is shaped to tell us about Zeus as a character (or person or god, whichever works best); this is the biography. And while he's telling readers about Zeus, he's also telling us about the Greeks—and this is the history. So he starts, not in Greece, but on the Russian steppes, where the people who would eventually migrate to Greece first imagined him as a disembodied sky god. The story follows the god and the people to Greece, and traces Zeus's development through what the Greeks wanted and needed from their gods. They begin to see Zeus as less of a force of nature and more as a god with a personality, Zeus reinforces their spread through Greece by his liaisons/rapes in myth, and as their sense of themselves strengthens, human heroes become more prominent in myth and Zeus and the other gods become more remote.

This could have been a dry, academic treatise, but Stone is a good storyteller as well, so I enjoyed rereading the book. (Happy to find out I liked it just as much the second time around: not all books hold up to a rereading.) The subtitle makes it sound like you'll be reading a travelogue, and there are bits of one: Stone and his wife traveled through Greece to various sites important in Zeus's mythology, and he talks about that trip as well. But the focus is mainly on the historical Zeus and how the Greeks influenced his development, which is a different approach than many books on mythology, and I found it really interesting.… (plus d'informations)

The Power of How provides the missing ingredient to many spiritual teachings and personal development programs - HOW! This book teaches you how to debug and upgrade your inner human software for gaining and maintaining spiritual enlightenment more easily and quickly than you ever thought was possible. Use these fast, easy processes to free yourself from the limiting influences of your conditioning, your ego and your pain-body permanently. You will discover:
* The barriers to living in a state of Pure Awareness;
* The Eight Pure Awareness Techniques;
* How to debug the identifications that form your ego
* How to debug unresolved emotional pain held in your body;
* How to free yourself from conditioned self-sabotaging thoughts and habits;
* The penetrating insights of the 12 Core Dynamics of Human Conditioning;
* How to cultivate a state of pure knowing and certainty;
* How to directly experience Pure Awareness instead of just understanding it.… (plus d'informations)