The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home is a 2001 collection of essays by Pico Iyer, reflecting on the increasingly globalized world and the ramifications that this has for him personally. The book belongs in the corpus of travel writing, though its series of chapters often offer a highly introspective view of the author's person-hood.
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer, known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born American essayist and novelist, best known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and other publications.
Iyer travels through California, the Los Angeles airport (a microcosm of a city), Hong Kong, Toronto, Britain, Japan, and discusses the Olympic Games as a force of and for globalism. Through the book, Iyer identifies himself as a global soul, which is an uprooted person who cannot fully adopt a single nationality and often finds themselves going through life as a tourist. The book discusses ideas of marginalized cultures, loss of the Real, and the shifting sense of identity that modernity offers.
California is a state in the Pacific Region of the United States. With 39.6 million residents, California is the most populous U.S. state and the third-largest by area. The state capital is Sacramento. The Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions, with 18.7 million and 8.8 million residents respectively. Los Angeles is California's most populous city, and the country's second most populous, after New York City. California also has the nation's most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The City and County of San Francisco is both the country's second-most densely populated major city after New York and the fifth-most densely populated county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs.
Los Angeles International Airport, locally referred to as LAX, is the primary international airport serving Los Angeles, California.
Macrocosm and microcosm refers to a vision of cosmos where the part (microcosm) reflects the whole (macrocosm) and vice versa. It is a feature "present in all esoteric schools of thinking", according to scholar Pierre A. Riffard. It is closely associated with Hermeticism and underlies practices such as astrology, alchemy and sacred geometry with its premise of "As Above, So Below".
The last rites, in Roman Catholicism, are the last prayers and ministrations given to an individual of the faith, when possible, shortly before death. The last rites go by various names. They may be administered to those awaiting execution, mortally injured, or terminally ill.
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is a book by the Canadian author Naomi Klein. First published by Knopf Canada and Picador in December 1999, shortly after the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle had generated media attention around such issues, it became one of the most influential books about the alter-globalization movement and an international bestseller.
The veneration of the dead, including one's ancestors, is based on love and respect for the deceased. In some cultures, it is related to beliefs that the dead have a continued existence, and may possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living. Some groups venerate their direct, familial ancestors. Certain sects and religions, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, venerate saints as intercessors with God, as well as pray for departed souls in Purgatory.
Derek Antony Parfit, FBA was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The ancient Egyptians believed that a soul was made up of many parts. In addition to these components of the soul, there was the human body.
The New York Times International Edition is an English-language newspaper printed at 38 sites throughout the world and sold in more than 160 countries and territories. Founded under the title Paris Herald in 1887 in Paris as the European edition of the New York Herald, it changed owners and was renamed several times: it became the Paris Herald Tribune, global edition of the New York Herald Tribune in 1924, then the International Herald Tribune in 1967, with The Washington Post and The New York Times as joint parent newspapers.
Iyer is a caste of Hindu Brahmin communities of Tamil origin. Most Iyers are followers of the Advaita philosophy propounded by Adi Shankara. The majority reside in Tamil Nadu, India.
The Nicomachean Ethics is the name normally given to Aristotle's best-known work on ethics. The work, which plays a pre-eminent role in defining Aristotelian ethics, consists of ten books, originally separate scrolls, and is understood to be based on notes from his lectures at the Lyceum. The title is often assumed to refer to his son Nicomachus, to whom the work was dedicated or who may have edited it. Alternatively, the work may have been dedicated to his father, who was also called Nicomachus.
Consecration is the solemn dedication to a special purpose or service, usually religious. The word consecration literally means "association with the sacred". Persons, places, or things can be consecrated, and the term is used in various ways by different groups. The origin of the word comes from the Latin word consecrat, which means dedicated, devoted, and sacred. A synonym for to consecrate is to sanctify; a distinct antonym is to desecrate.
A deal with the devil is a cultural motif, best exemplified by the legend of Faust and the figure of Mephistopheles, as well as being elemental to many Christian traditions. According to traditional Christian belief about witchcraft, the pact is between a person and Satan or a lesser demon. The person offers their soul in exchange for diabolical favours. Those favours vary by the tale, but tend to include youth, knowledge, wealth, fame, or power.
In religion and folklore, Hell is an afterlife location, sometimes a place of torment and punishment. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as eternal destinations while religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations. Typically these traditions locate hell in another dimension or under the Earth's surface and often include entrances to Hell from the land of the living. Other afterlife destinations include Heaven, Purgatory, Paradise, and Limbo.
In Christian theology, conditionalism or conditional immortality is a concept in which the gift of immortality is attached to belief in Jesus Christ. This doctrine is based in part upon another theological argument, that the human soul is naturally mortal, immortality is therefore granted by God as a gift. This viewpoint stands in contrast to the more popular doctrine of the "natural immortality" of the soul. Conditionalism is usually paired with mortalism and annihilationism, the belief that the unsaved will be ultimately destroyed and cease to exist, rather than suffer unending torment in hell. The view is also connected with the idea of soul sleep, in which the dead sleep unconscious until the Resurrection of the Dead to stand for a Last Judgment before the World to Come.
A farbrengen is a Hasidic gathering. This term is only used by Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, as other Hasidim have a tish or a botteh. It may consist of explanations of general Torah subjects, with an emphasis on Hasidic philosophy, relating of Hasidic stories, and lively Hasidic melodies, with refreshments being served. It is regarded as a time of great holiness. Farbrengens are public events open to non-Hasidim as well.
Death, due to its prominent place in human culture, is frequently imagined as a personified force, also known as the Grim Reaper. In some mythologies, the Grim Reaper causes the victim's death by coming to collect that person. In turn, people in some stories try to hold on to life by avoiding Death's visit, or by fending Death off with bribery or tricks. Other beliefs hold that the Spectre of Death is only a psychopomp, serving to sever the last ties between the soul and the body, and to guide the deceased to the afterlife, without having any control over when or how the victim dies. Death is most often personified in male form, although in certain cultures Death is perceived as female.
Latin soul was a short lived musical genre which developed in the 1960s in New York City. It consisted of a blend of Cuban mambo with elements of Latin jazz and soul music. Although short-lived, the genre had a great influence on the growing Salsa movement which would dominate the New York Latin music scene in the 1970s. Today, the term is typically used by Hispanic artists producing R&B or soul music.
A. Vaidyanatha Iyer (1890–1955), also known as Madurai Vaidyanatha Iyer or Ayyar was an Indian activist, politician and freedom-fighter who spearheaded the temple entry movement in Madras Presidency in 1939.
Purgatory is an intermediate state after physical death for expiatory purification. Roman Catholic doctrine holds that this state exists and that those being purified can be helped by the prayers of the living. In the speculation of theologians and in popular imagination, purgatory is a place where this purification is done by the agency of fire, a notion of purgatory that according to Jacques Le Goff came into existence in Western Europe towards the end of the twelfth century, but which has not been declared official doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The Church of England officially denounces what it calls "the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory", but the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches and elements of the Anglican and Methodist traditions hold that for some there is cleansing after death and pray for the dead. Judaism also believes in the possibility of after-death purification and may even use the word "purgatory" to present its understanding of the meaning of Gehenna.
In philosophy, eternal oblivion is the permanent cessation of one's consciousness upon death. This concept is often associated with religious skepticism and atheism.
Ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs were centered around a variety of complex rituals, that were influenced by many aspects of Egyptian culture. Religion was a major contributor, since it was an important social practice that bound all Egyptians together. For instance, many of the Egyptian gods played roles in guiding the souls of the dead through the afterlife. With the evolution of writing, religious ideals were recorded and quickly spread throughout the Egyptian community. The solidification and commencement of these doctrines were formed in the creation of afterlife texts which illustrated and explained what the dead would need to know in order to complete the journey safely.