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This essay explores the cultural ethos and uses of meaning in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), a relatively new religion that displays a syncretistic postmodern assortment of religious traditions and spiritual innovation: Christianity, Sant Mat practices, and typical esoteric pursuits found in New Age groups. The controversial side of MSIA lies in its awkward relations with the wider society; as such, the analysis provides an insider’s portrait and outsider’s assessment of what is unproductively labeled a “cult”.

Scientology is especially important for its role in destroying the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). This chapter provides an historical overview of this conflict, particularly focusing on the events that led to the demise of the Cult Awareness Network. It describes their respective public strategies, tactics, and entanglements over a ten-year period until CAN, buried under a barrage of resource-consuming lawsuits, succumbed to bankruptcy.

A 1963 op-ed piece in the ruling party newspaper by an American graduate student listing incivilities and breaches of public morality became a call to develop civility in Taiwan that almost immediately spurred the formation by two university students of the China Youth Self-Awareness Movement. It was active for several years, recruiting youths to encourage civil behavior in society, but it was disbanded in 1969 when one of its leaders was arrested for rebellion. This chapter defines and operationalizes civility as it is perceived in Taiwan and China and how it will be applied in this book and enumerates the behaviors regarded as uncivil, noting also that, after Taiwan began its democratization process, its level of civility manifestly increased. It also explains the methodology and sources of information used in the study and outlines the chapters.

This chapter examines the social implications of concealed carry policies, including the process for obtaining a CHL in Texas. One of the key features of that training is the development of situational awareness—the practice of being alert to potential danger in public places. While carrying a firearm in public is often explained as a no-cost self-defence strategy, this analysis suggests that CHL training might heighten feelings of risk while also making license holders feel more prepared. One of the most significant social costs of CHLs as a response to violent crime, including mass shootings, is that they focus a disproportionate amount of attention on people who are least likely to be victims of crime while ignoring the effects of violent crime on the communities that need the most help. In this way, CHLs impede the pursuit of social justice, suggesting a need to reimagine the “good guy.”

Is minimal selfhood a build-in feature of our experiential life (Gallagher 2005; Zahavi 2005, 2014; Legrand 2006) or a later socio-culturally determined acquisition, emerging in the process of social exchanges and mutual interactions (Fonagy et al. 2004; Prinz 2012; Schmid 2014)? This chapter, building mainly on empirical research on affective touch and interoception, argues in favor of a reconceptualization of minimal selfhood that surpasses such debates, and their tacitly “detached,” visuo-spatial models of selfhood and otherness. Instead, the relational origins of the self are traced on fundamental principles and regularities of the human embodied condition, such as the amodal properties that govern the organization of sensorimotor signals into distinct perceptual experiences. Interactive experiences with effects on “within” and “on” the physical boundaries of the body (e.g., skin-to-skin touch) are necessary for such organization in early infancy when the motor system is not as yet developed. Therefore, an experiencing subject is not primarily understood as facing another subject “there.” Instead, the minimal self is by necessity co-constituted by other bodies in physical contact and proximal interaction.

Focusing on three national case studies this chapter explores the comparative empirical data on public knowledge and understanding of human trafficking, examining the link between public knowledge and public policies. It highlights how public understanding of the issues are shaped by pervading state neoliberal governmentalities, focusing largely on vulnerable victims and perpetrators, but rarely located in personal lives as ‘consumer-citizens’.

According to Brentano, enjoying an activity is loving or liking it. Brentano’s conception of love and hate is expounded by way of the analogies he draws with positive and negative judgement and I compare Brentano’s view with its main competitors: enjoying is appraisive attention to (Ryle, Gallie), propositional pleasure that something is the case (Feldman), or desire for the occurrence of a sensation (Heathwood). I discuss Hamilton’s Argument from Temporal Direction against the desire view of enjoyment and propose that a modified version of the argument, the Argument from Awareness of Satisfaction, speaks in favour of Brentano’s view of enjoyment.

This chapter concerns how the sense of touch relates to the various forms of bodily awareness—including kinesthesis, proprioception, and the sense of agency. In particular, it addresses the question of whether perceptual touch depends on bodily awareness. Several possible notions of dependence are considered and rejected. Finally, a novel notion of experiential dependence is described and defended. This “informational dependence” holds that perceptual touch depends on bodily awareness in that the body itself is an essential node in the extraction of sensory information from the environment.

Casey O’Callaghan’s chapter concerns a core variety of multisensory perceptual experience and argues that there is perceptually apparent intermodal feature binding. Just as one thing may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear several features associated with the same sense modality, one thing also may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear features associated with different sense modalities. The main lessons are that perceiving is not just co-consciously seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling at the same time, and that perceptual phenomenal character is not on each occasion exhausted by that which is distinctive to or associated with each respective modality, along with that which accrues thanks to simple co-consciousness. Therefore, not all ways of perceiving are modality specific.

Public anxiety has recently centred on the exchange of sexual messages among teenagers via the internet or mobile phones. This chapter examines the incidence, antecedents and consequences of ‘sexting’ among 11- to 16-year-olds. Although only 15% say they have received a sexual message, and only a quarter of those were upset by it, it is shown that those who are more vulnerable offline (i.e., those with more psychological problems) are more likely to receive such messages and to find them upsetting.

Archaeology, before the birth of psychiatry, was the preeminent nineteenth-century science to embody both the act and the concept of delving. Strikingly, those two major interpreters of Western humanistic and scientific traditions, Hans Blumenberg and Alfred North Whitehead, similarly invoke a sublime archaeology of unearthing. Making the submerged emerge permits that which is excessive, or mentally beyond reach, to loom into view. This essay argues that what makes this version of the multifaceted non-conscious, or involuntary, Sublime still relevant across current disciplinary divides is that it integrates what otherwise remains, in Whitehead’s apt word, “bifurcated.” It does this by bringing to the surface separated, buried “causes,” thus allowing them to become attached in the process of entering our unifying awareness. By the Sublime, I refer specifically to that overwhelming psychophysiological intrusion, which—like love’s fury—transiently manages to merge the personal awareness of our affective and cognitive states with the otherwise concealed and impersonal neurophysiological mechanisms underlying them. With our resistance undone, we begin to understand how this raw subjective experience is actually conjoined with objective nature, that is, bound up with the tumultuous environment to which it intuitively corresponds.

This chapter brackets the question of whether research has sufficiently demonstrated the advantages of breastfeeding in order to ask whether, even if proven, such benefits would be strong enough to justify the rhetoric of contemporary advocacy. A case study of the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign (NBAC), sponsored in 2004–2006 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reveals that the campaign distorted both the putative risks of bottle feeding and the costs or trade-offs of breastfeeding. The campaign, and particularly its fear-based approach, exploited the dynamics of a culture consumed by risk and total motherhood. Based on weak and inconsistent research, it capitalized on the public's misunderstanding of risk and risk assessment by portraying infant nutrition as a matter of safety versus danger and then creating misleading analogies. Crucially, it ignored the risks and trade-offs of breastfeeding itself, costs that are overwhelmingly shouldered by mothers.

This chapter discusses the change from the dominant biomedical model of dementia, with its emphasis on disease and loss, towards the humanistic approach - on which Tom Kitwood had an important influence - where the person with dementia is no longer neglected and personhood maintained. Although improvements in care have appeared since then, the stigma in society surrounding dementia is still very strong. And despite all sorts of initiatives and ideas, like that of social citizenship which - among others - is discussed here, the story of people with dementia remains unheard. Raising awareness is done by many organisations, but not always from the person's point of view. This chapter concludes that more needs to be done; awareness raised, stories listened to, and people with dementia recognized as full human beings, deserving dignity and respect.

The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA) is a contemporary religious group which represents a blend of New Age, Metaphysical Christianity, and the Sant Mat (Radhasoami) tradition. This chapter surveys MSIA and its schism-prone predecessor movements, provides a brief history, and glances at Movement beliefs and practices. It also examines the claim that MSIA and Eckankar (the latter is a related group) are plagiarisms of prior movements. It concludes by further explicating the theme of the educational discourse and the educational practices that inform this brand of spirituality.

Epidemic processes are relevant to studying the propagation of infectious diseases, but their current use extends also to the study of propagation of ideas in the society or memes and news in online social media. In most of the relevant applications epidemic spreading does not actually take place on a single network but propagates in a multilayer network where different types of interaction play different roles. This chapter provides a comprehensive view of the effect that multilayer network structures have on epidemic processes. The Susceptible–Infected–Susceptible (SIS) Model and the Susceptible–Infected–Removed (SIR) Model are characterized on multilayer networks. Additionally, it is shown that the multilayer networks framework can also allow us to study interacting Awareness and epidemic spreading, competing networks and epidemics in temporal networks.

Consciousness is a term rarely applied to other animals and never to plants but Margulis indicates its likely ubiquity in all organisms. Assessment of signalling may be the clearest indication of conscious activity but assessment in plants is not understood. In bacterial swimming, assessment and memory involves a limited number of proteins whose interactions and modifications by phosphorylation or methylation construct a simple assessment system. This simple system is obviously a model for more complex organisms with much greater numbers of proteins involved. ‘Do cells think’ is the title of a paper that examines some unusual behaviour of yeast in response to two distinct signals given at the same time. The authors indicate a higher order of control is operative in such cells, which is not presently understood. However the recognition of awareness in other organisms is disguised by the imposition of human criteria on their behaviour. Can social insect colonies be considered conscious? Since nervous systems are strongly associated with consciousness in animals the plant nervous system characterised by Bose is briefly described. Action potentials are not uncommon transduction pathways in plants. They lead to changes in cytosolic calcium that can mediate the response and provide for long-term learning and memory. Herbivore damage induces electrical signals, which initiate defence mechanisms. Are immune systems conscious? They learn and remember and are aware in the Margulis conscious sense. Are they the consciousness of the body?

This chapter extends explorations of representations of the human body into an examination of two prominent discursive sites concerning contemporary practices of breastfeeding, the US government’s 2004 National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign and La Leche League International. It suggests, against expectation, that Hannah Rosin’s controversial piece in The Atlantic, “The Case Against Breastfeeding,” (2009) might turn out to provide one of the most compelling public accounts of how breastfeeding can be appreciated for its engagement with the Real. Here, rather than in an overt engagement with reality and deception, we encounter the way in which the Real haunts accounts of the body that aim to firmly ground themselves within the Symbolic realm (the national campaign) and the Imaginary realm (La Leche).

For over fifty years, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) spoke on a wide array of topics, but primarily directed his teachings at the problem of human suffering. He taught that all conflict is intrinsically tied to our psyches, which have been heavily conditioned by our upbringing. Aligned with other renowned Western and Eastern thinkers on the wisdom of self-discovery, Krishnamurti presents a distinctive vision for learning that encourages self-understanding through sensitive observation and choiceless awareness. He calls for a radical transformation of human consciousness, thereby enabling pliant minds to blossom. This flowering of intelligence, through a liberating insight into the mechanisms of conditioning, is at the heart of his educational philosophy. Institutions that embrace his approach must be vigilant not to succumb to the traditional modes of academic training and norms of success, lest they perpetuate the structures of fear, violence, and conformity that continue to stifle the creativity of human spirit.