Böcker utgivna av Archetype

In a world dominated by secular values, where science claims a monopoly on knowledge and truth, it often seems that there is little place for the spiritual explanation. But to reject the religious worldview is to deny answers to questions where science has so far given none. Although it can provide many truths, science, with its varying levels of precision, and continually changing theories, often contains many philosophical and metaphysical dogmas, and does not have the capacity to make a coherent and true worldview. Either implicitly or explicitly, it presents an image of an exclusively material universe, where everything happens by accident, and seems no more than a philosophical extrapolation gleaned from a few selectively chosen pieces of data. It is as a counterweight to this "blind universe" that The Scientist and the Saint, quoting both a wide array of scientists and the revelatory testimonies of centuries of saints and truth-seekers, provides a more nuanced knowledge of the heart of existence. It is a call to the inward dimension, to the mysticism that reflects the heart and the deepest meaning of every religion, and above all a way out of the confusion and lack of direction in today's troubled world.

Behind today's media stereotypes of an apocalyptic 'clash of civilisations, ' could we be witnessing the epochal birth of new spiritual, ethical and cultural forms of communion, of a nascent global civilisation? 'Orientations' begins with those intimately familiar situations of disorientation, painful conflict and confusion whose most dramatic expressions are daily so visible in emblematic images from each Jerusalem or Sarajevo. It presents three Muslim thinkers whose seminal works together provide the inspiration for positive, realistic, and constructive responses to those challenges.

Now in his 80s, Gai Eaton describes how, after a strange childhood completely isolated from other children, followed by a Cambridge education and life as an actor and later as a diplomat, circumstances led him at the age of 30 to Islam. Fascinated by the vagaries of human behavior and the strangeness of human destinies, he has observed the human scene with a novelist's eye and traced the profound changes in attitudes and tastes which have taken place in a single lifetime. He recounts his youthful adventures with the clear-sight and understanding only possible for someone whom age has freed from the passions which once possessed him. What makes this work unique is the juxtaposition of hindsight with diary entries made at the time, which gives a quality of immediacy to a true story that includes reminiscences of the diplomatic life and an outline of the Sufi path.