MSI Press Blog

  Spiritual Fitness and the Quiet Power of July 2 Some dates announce themselves with fireworks. Others hum with a quieter, steadier power—like July 2. Long before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, July 2 marked the vote that set a nation’s soul in motion. A century and a half later, it bore witness to the Civil Rights Act of 1964—where dignity defied division and conscience reshaped law. From the unification of Vietnam to the birth of voices like Thurgood Marshall and Medgar Evers, July 2 is a day braided with ethical resolve, moral imagination, and collective rebirth. These milestones didn’t just alter policy. They transformed people. They carved deeper grooves of spiritual and psychological fitness—teaching us how to rise, reckon, and rebuild from within. At MSI Press, we believe in that kind of transformation—the kind that begins not in spectacle, but in quiet personal revolution. Many of our books echo this evolution; to wit: The Rose and the Sword (Bach ...

  Excerpt from Typhoon Honey (Girrell & Sjogren) -  Defining transformation The nature of everything in this world we know of and in which we live is change. Nothing is static and immutable—nothing. Neither concrete buildings nor stones. Not mountains nor oceans. Nothing lasts forever without changing. Not only is everything in a constant state of flux (though admittedly at different rates and speeds), but the nature of those changes is purely chaotic. The universe is chaos that moves in patterned forms which we call fractals (self-repeating patterns). So when we begin to talk about change and what change is, we start with the idea that change is natural and continual.   This is no new concept. The ancient sages observed changes happening around them and sought to understand the nature of change and changing systems more than three thousand years ago. The “Book of Changes,” called the I Ching , is probably the most widely known of the systems for understanding change...

  Perception Is Not Reality In nearly every liberal arts college offering psychology as a major, you can find an advanced course labeled something like “Sensation and Perception.” This course studies how the brain reads information sent to it from the five senses and how these data are recognized and converted into thoughts, sensations, images, sounds, and memories. To make the point that it is the brain that sees and hears and then interprets the information it receives, the instructor will often show a video of a famous video experiment [1] wherein a student is given a pair of glasses fitted with a prism in front of each eye, functionally inverting the image that is sent to the brain. Through the inverting prism glasses the world looks upside down. At first the student has difficulty knowing up and down, but then she successfully pours milk into a tea cup. After a day, the student walks about quite a bit more easily but still at times reaches up for something that is low down....