Showing results by author "Boris Kriger" in All Categories

This book takes the listener on an extraordinary journey through the invisible architecture of reality — from the quiet pull that keeps our feet on the ground to the roaring gravity wells of black holes and the earliest tremors of spacetime itself. It explores how gravity, more than any other force, reveals the unity of all things — connecting atoms, stars, and even consciousness in one continuous fabric of being.

Between Emptiness and Being: The Buddha and the Western Mind is a profound dialogue between two civilizations of thought — the contemplative East and the analytic West. Where Buddhism dissolves the illusion of permanence, Western philosophy constructs systems to preserve it. Between the silence of the Buddha and the speech of metaphysics lies the forgotten middle ground where awareness itself becomes understanding.

Why does addiction look the same everywhere — whether the substance is heroin or the behavior is scrolling a screen? Why does recovery follow the same agonizing cycle of hope and relapse, regardless of what a person is addicted to? And why does the boundary between "addicts" and "everyone else" feel so uncomfortably thin? Boris Kriger spent three decades in the world of addiction — as a young paramedic in the Soviet Union, a rehabilitation worker in Jerusalem, and a clergyman running a shelter in Canada.

Five centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a book that still disturbs us. The Prince offered rulers a cold calculus of power: how to acquire it, how to maintain it, how to eliminate threats not by hope or goodwill but by making one’s overthrow structurally impossible. In this profound meditation on security, systems, and the nature of protection, Boris Kriger confronts his own ambivalence toward Machiavelli’s legacy. He is horrified by the cruelty the Florentine counseled—and captivated by the logic beneath it.

Consciousness Unmasked is a fearless exploration of the most elusive machinery within us — the restless mind, the hidden subconscious, and the mysterious inner forces that shape our thoughts, dreams, and choices. Rejecting romanticized portraits of the human psyche, the authors examine consciousness as a flawed evolutionary tool: ingenious, yet inconsistent; powerful, yet often beyond our control.

What if human life has no secure foundation—no ultimate law, no necessity, no rational guarantee? For Lev Shestov (1866–1938), the most unsettling of Russian existential thinkers, philosophy’s dream of certainty was an illusion born of fear. Against the entire Western tradition from Plato to Kant and Hegel, he proclaimed that existence is groundless: fragile, paradoxical, exposed to the abyss of uncertainty. This book presents Shestov’s thought as a radical alternative to systems of reason and necessity.

Why do empires fall? Why do startups fail? Why does micromanagement kill innovation while total freedom produces chaos? Why do some relationships flourish while others suffocate or dissolve? The answer is a law as old as the universe and as relevant as tomorrow’s headlines.

This audiobook proposes a radical yet disciplined thesis: the Gospel is not only interpretable, but formally expressible, and its internal structure requires formalization if it is to remain stable, transmissible, and intelligible across radically different forms of intelligence.

This audiobook offers a clear, unvarnished look into a profession often wrapped in myth yet lived in exhaustion, responsibility, and quiet meaning. Moving through the early motivations that draw people toward nursing, it follows the listener into the reality of clinical environments, the demands of education, the shock of a first job, and the complex financial and ethical terrain that shapes a nurse’s everyday life.

Your cat is watching you right now. It knows your schedule, your footsteps, your moods. And you have no reliable way to know what it knows. For centuries, we have tried to communicate with animals by asking the wrong question: what are they thinking? In this bold, rigorous, and deeply original book, Boris Kriger argues that this question is not merely unanswerable—it is incoherent. The interior of any complex system, from a cat to a human brain to an AI chatbot, is permanently inaccessible. But the exterior—behavior—is observable, predictable, and measurable.

Why does love fade? Not because you chose the wrong person, and not because you failed to try hard enough. The fading of romantic passion is a structurally predictable consequence of human biology operating inside cultural institutions that demand permanence from a system designed for impermanence.

What is the connection between the expansion of the universe and sadomasochism? Why is everything in the world striving for decay? How can one realize this and effectively resist self-destruction, at least on an individual level? The peculiarity of this audiobook is that the author tries to make broad generalizations, referring to various scientific disciplines. This audiobook discusses self-destruction at all levels, from cosmology to the human psyche, in which self-destruction is considered a deviation from the norm.

At the center of our Milky Way lies one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic objects in the Universe — Sagittarius A *, a supermassive black hole four million times more massive than the Sun. Invisible to the human eye yet governing the motion of stars and gas across tens of thousands of light-years, it is both a gravitational anchor and a cosmic mystery. In A Hungry Giant in the Heart of Our Galaxy, science writer and philosopher Boris Kriger takes readers on a journey through three decades of discovery at the frontiers of astrophysics.

If François Rabelais were alive today, he would not be “problematic” — he would be impossible. His books would not be debated, contextualized, or gently criticized; they would be reported, flagged, algorithmically buried, and ceremoniously uninvited from public life. Rabelais laughed too loudly, ate too much, spoke too freely, and trusted the body more than moral panic. That alone would be unforgivable. Cancel culture, for all its modern vocabulary, is an old story.

For a century, physicists and philosophers have treated quantum mechanics as an anomaly—a realm where particles tunnel through barriers, exist in multiple states at once, and refuse to reveal their properties until observed. The quantum world has been called bizarre, counterintuitive, and fundamentally strange. But what if this strangeness was never in the world at all? What if it was only ever in our expectations? Nothing Strange About Quantum Strangeness offers a radical reframing.

Modern cities are the most complex and fragile structures ever built. A single power failure can cascade into chaos. A single pandemic can turn density into a death sentence. A single metre of sea-level rise can displace hundreds of millions. But for the first time in ten thousand years, there is an alternative. THE LAST CITY describes a civilisation in which every home generates its own energy, harvests its own water, grows a portion of its own food, recycles its own waste, monitors its own health, and connects to the world by satellite.

Measuring distances in the Universe is one of the most demanding intellectual achievements in the history of science. The objects studied by astronomy are separated from us by such vast expanses that no direct measurement is possible. Every number describing the scale of the cosmos must therefore be inferred indirectly, through light, motion, geometry, and carefully constructed physical models.

Every parent, teacher, manager, and policymaker faces the same hidden trap: the instinct to protect can quietly destroy the very strength it hopes to build. In this wide-ranging and deeply personal book, Boris Kriger reveals a universal pattern that connects the anxious parent hovering over a child’s homework to the safety engineer constraining an autonomous vehicle, the micromanager stifling a team’s creativity, and even the laws of physics that govern our universe.

In an era dominated by digital technology, we have long assumed that our devices—smartphones, computers, and networks—operate on the solid ground of classical physics. Yet the truth is far more profound: modern microelectronics has always rested on quantum foundations. Boris Kriger reveals how quantum mechanics quietly shaped the transistor from its inception, how effects like tunneling, interference, and decoherence were not later intrusions but essential enablers of function.

For a century, the collective unconscious has been one of the most provocative and most dismissed ideas in the history of psychology. Carl Gustav Jung claimed that human beings share a deep symbolic substrate set of recurring patterns he called archetypes that shapes our dreams, myths, and stories with a regularity no single culture invented. Science rejected the claim. The theory was vague, unfalsifiable, and steeped in mysticism. The verdict seemed final.