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MENTORS

We don’t get very excited about athletes or actors, but when it comes to authors and lecturers we have our fair share of heroes. This is the short end of a long list of those who have inspired Transpyre into existence. Click on anyone of interest to learn of their influence on us, from there you can learn more about them and their impact on humanity.

 

Author

Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle is widely recognized as one of the most inspiring and visionary spiritual teachers in the world today. At the age of 29, an intense inner transformation radically changed the course of his life. He devoted the next several years to understanding, integrating, and deepening that transformation. With his international bestsellers, The Power of Now and A New Earth—translated into 52 languages—he has introduced millions to the joy and freedom of living life in the present moment.

His profound yet simple teachings focus on the significance and power of Presence, the awakened state of consciousness that transcends ego and discursive thinking. Eckhart sees this awakening as the essential next step in human evolution. The New York Times has described him as “the most popular spiritual author in the United States,” and Watkins Review has named him “the most spiritually influential person in the world.”

Spiritual Guide

Lao Tzu

In the mid-twentieth century, a consensus emerged among scholars that the historicity of the person known as Laozi is doubtful and that the Tao Te Ching was "a compilation of Taoist sayings by many hands".[23] The earliest certain reference to the present figure of Laozi is found in the 1st‑century BC Records of the Grand Historian collected by the historian Sima Qian from earlier accounts. In one account, Laozi was said to be a contemporary of Confucius during the 6th or 5th century BC. His surname was Li and his personal name was Er or Dan. He was an official in the imperial archives and wrote a book in two parts before departing to the west. In another, Laozi was a different contemporary of Confucius titled Lao Laizi (老莱子) and wrote a book in 15 parts. In a third, he was the court astrologer Lao Dan who lived during the 4th century BC reign of Duke Xian of the Qin Dynasty.[24][25] The oldest text of the Tao Te Ching so far recovered was part of the Guodian Chu Slips. It was written on bamboo slips, and dates to the late 4th century BC.[6]
Author & Speaker

Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was a British writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularising Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York.
Author & Mythicist

Dorothy Murdock

Dorothy Milne Murdock[1][2][3] (March 27, 1960 – December 25, 2015),[4] better known by her pen names Acharya S and D. M. Murdock,[5][6] was an American writer supporting the Christ myth theory that Jesus never existed as a historical person, but was rather a mingling of various pre-Christian myths, Sun deities and dying-and-rising deities.[7]

She wrote and operated a website focused on history, religion and spirituality, and astro-theology. She asserted the pre-Christian religious civilizations understood their myths as allegorical, but Christians obliterated evidence by destroying suppressing literature after they attained control of the Roman Empire, leading to widespread illiteracy in the ancient world, ensuring the mythical nature of Christ's story was hidden. She argued the Christian canon, as well as its important figures, were based on Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and other cultures' myths.[8] Her theories are variously received by mainstream scholars; for instance, Robert M. Price criticized her first book while praising later writing.

She also wrote against the ancient astronauts theories, asserting they "may be prompted by the same type of motivation that produced the Bible, a chronicle largely-consisting of the plagiarized myths of other cultures" re-fashioned as 'fact' concerning purported legend-based characterizations, and may be driven by the attempt to validate biblical myth as historical under a different 'interpretation'.[9]

Linguist & Educator

Laurel Airica

My abiding fascination with the English language has enabled me to develop great skill in using it to express ideas that make a positive difference in people’s lives.
I specialize in making difficult subjects accessible and dull material interesting; in finding new perspectives from which to view otherwise familiar ideas; in perceiving and articulating previously unseen connections as well as that which seems beyond description; and in conducting penetrating interviews with innovative voices in any given field.
Proficient at organizing and distilling large amounts of information into readily accessible sentences and sound bites, I use my sensitivity to linguistic nuance and understanding of human nature to produce written material that is both highly refined and powerfully persuasive.
When turning spoken word into printed page, I combine my intuitive abilities with my writing skills to convey the character of the speaker as well as the depth and essence of his or her message -- through the written word.
I have written on a great many topics in a variety of forms for a diverse clientele and audience. My work ranges from well-researched substantive material to light and clever promotional pieces; from serious speeches and seminars to humorous articles and verse.
Client requirements determine my level of involvement in the writing process – from surface editing to the creation of original drafts. Many clients have excellent ideas to convey and important services to offer but limited time or facility to communicate effectively.
I require only minimal involvement on the part of those initiating a project and have transformed many vague concepts into finished pieces that have more than fulfilled my clients’ often unspoken intentions.
Author & Speaker

Esther Hicks

Esther Hicks (née Weaver, born March 5, 1948), often credited as Abraham Hicks, is an American inspirational speaker and author. She has co-written nine books with her late husband Jerry Hicks, presented numerous workshops on the law of attraction with Abraham Hicks Publications and appeared in the original version of the 2006 film The Secret.[1] The Hicks' books, including the series The Law of Attraction, are — according to Esther Hicks — "translated from a group of non-physical entities called Abraham." Hicks describes what she is doing as tapping into "infinite intelligence".[2][3]
Author

Bruce Lipton

Lipton has said, "When I first started back in the '70s and my research was coming out, it was the golden age of genes. My research irritated a lot of people. I always thought of them as lemmings running off the cliff of DNA, and I'm standing there on the side with the results from my stem-cell studies thinking, 'Oh my God, you're all going the wrong way.' At some point I realised that they marginalised my work because it didn’t conform to their conventional beliefs and I thought, well, they’re not even being scientists. And I just left the system. I realised the message is more important for the average person than it is to argue in the halls of science".
Author

Ernest Becker

Becker's work, particularly as expressed in his later books, The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, have had a significant impact on social psychology and the psychology of religion. Terror management theory, an important research programme in social psychology that has spawned over 200 published studies[11] has turned Becker's views on the cultural influence of death anxiety into a scientific theory that helps to explain such diverse human phenomena as self-esteem, prejudice,[12] and religion.[13]
Author

Leonard Mlodinow

Mlodinow was born in Chicago, Illinois, of parents who were both Holocaust survivors. His father, who spent more than a year in the Buchenwald concentration camp, had been a leader in the Jewish resistance in his hometown of Częstochowa, in Nazi Germany-occupied Poland.[1] As a child, Mlodinow was interested in both mathematics and chemistry, and while in high school was tutored in organic chemistry by a professor from the University of Illinois. As recounted in his book Feynman's Rainbow, his interest turned to physics during a semester he took off from college to spend on a kibbutz in Israel, during which he had little to do at night besides reading The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which was one of the few English books he found in the kibbutz library.[2]
Author

Marianne Williamson

Marianne Deborah Williamson (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, spiritual leader, politician, and activist. She has written 13 books, including four New York Times number one bestsellers in the "Advice, How To, and Miscellaneous" category.[1][2][3][4][5][6] She is the founder of Project Angel Food, a volunteer food delivery program that serves home-bound people with HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses.[7] She is also the co-founder of the Peace Alliance, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization supporting peace-building projects.[8] She has received national attention as a result of her frequent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was known as Oprah's "spiritual adviser."[9]
Primatologist

Jane Goodall

Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE (/ˈɡʊdɔːl/; born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall on 3 April 1934),[3] formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist.[4] Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960.[5]

She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. She has served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project since its founding in 1996.[6][7] In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council.

Author

Brené Brown

Brown has spent decades studying the topics of courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She is, to date, the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers, namely The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and Dare to Lead. Brené hosts the Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead podcasts. Her TED talk, "The Power of Vulnerability", has been widely viewed.[9][10][11] Her filmed lecture, Brené Brown: The Call to Courage, debuted on Netflix in 2019.

Brown has spent her research career as a professor at her alma mater, the University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work.[12] With research focused on the themes of authentic leadership and wholeheartedness in families, schools, and organizations, she has presented a 2012 TED talk and two 2010 TEDx talks.[13][14] In March 2013, she talked with Oprah Winfrey on Super Soul Sunday about her book, Daring Greatly.[15] Brown says she drew the title of that book from a 1910 Theodore Roosevelt speech "Citizenship in a Republic", given at the Sorbonne.[16] Brown is CEO of "The Daring Way," a professional training and certification program on the topics of vulnerability, courage, shame, and empathy.[17]

Linguist

Noam Chomsky

The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited.[149] As such he argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences.[150] In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species.[151][152] Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism",[153] which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli.[148]
Evolutionary Biologist

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. With his book The Extended Phenotype (1982), he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Dawkins is known as an atheist. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.[25] In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer. In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion. Dawkins' atheist stances have sometimes attracted controversy.[26][27][28]

Mathematician | Astronomer

Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus (/koʊˈpɜːrnɪkəs, kə-/;[2][3][4] Polish: Mikołaj Kopernik;[b] German: Niclas Koppernigk, modern: Nikolaus Kopernikus; 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance-era mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at the center of the universe. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.[5][c][d]

The publication of Copernicus' model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.[7]

Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money—a key concept in economics—and in 1519 he formulated an economic principle that later came to be called Gresham's law.[e]

This blog is still under development with many more to come.