Albert Low – författare

Kensho is the Zen experience of waking up to one’s own true nature—of understanding oneself to be not different from the Buddha-nature that pervades all existence. The Japanese Zen Master Hakuin (1689–1769) considered the experience to be essential. In his autobiography he says: "Anyone who would call himself a member of the Zen family must first achieve kensho-realization of the Buddha’s way. If a person who has not achieved kensho says he is a follower of Zen, he is an outrageous fraud. A swindler pure and simple." Hakuin’s short text on kensho, "Four Ways of Knowing of an Awakened Person," is a little-known Zen classic. The "four ways" he describes include the way of knowing of the Great Perfect Mirror, the way of knowing equality, the way of knowing by differentiation, and the way of the perfection of action. Rather than simply being methods for "checking" for enlightenment in oneself, these ways ultimately exemplify Zen practice. Albert Low has provided careful, line-by-line commentary for the text that illuminates its profound wisdom and makes it an inspiration for deeper spiritual practice.

Offers an original and fertile way to integrate spiritual and scientific views of human evolution. It offers a new and refreshing alternative to the way we think about our origins: random mutation (mechanistic neo-Darwinism), Genesis (God did it all personally), and Intelligent Design (God personally does what we can't otherwise account for). The result is an invigorating perspective on how our best qualities -- our capacity for love, our appreciation of beauty, our altruistic capability, our creativity and intelligence -- have come into being and evolved. How we think about our origin matters: if we think we are machines living among other machines, we will act accordingly. By showing evolution as a creative and intelligent process with its own inherent logic, THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN NATURE resolves the dilemma of how to have, at the same time, both truth and ethics. Instead of starting in an imagined remote and 'uncertain past' and moving to the present, this book starts at the certain and 'immediate present' and works back. That consciousness, creativity, and intelligence exist is certain. The question is: how can these have evolved? Dr Albert Low has made a study of human nature throughout his life. To write this book he draws on his prolonged meditations on creativity and the human condition, his years of providing psychological and spiritual counseling, and a wide-ranging knowledge of Western psychology, philosophy, and science.

Contributes to the tide of activism that is calling for higher ethical standards and corporate social responsibility within the corporate world. It offers a new way to look at a company, work, a product and company organization. Nobel prizewinner Milton Friedman says that the only social responsibility a company has is to make a profit. Albert Low questions this basic assumption and provides an alternative view: a company is a complex field of interacting and conflicting forces out of which a product emerges. The interests of the stockholder make up just one set of these forces. The corporate system arises out of the natural creativity of human beings and is expressed in the work that we do. Therefore to understand a company, its organisation and its reason for being, we must understand creativity and work -- what they involve, and their importance to our mental health. This new understanding of social responsibility is imperative for the very survival of our way of life. 'Business Ethics' quotes Thomas Donahue, US Chamber of Commerce President, as saying, "There is something fundamentally out of balance when short-term considerations become so dominant." The book offers a new way to look at the corporate system and long-term corporate social responsibility. Depression is widespread throughout western society. A contributing factor is the way the corporate system operates. People are now adjuncts to the system and the result is alienation and impotence. China and India are looming as major industrial competitors, and their employees are very well motivated. To compete in the West we must revise the present antiquated corporate philosophy that asserts that the interests of the stockholder are the only interests that the corporation can legally serve and adopt policies that promote corporate social responsibility.