Peter Russell M.A., D.C.S., is a British author of ten books and producer of three films on consciousness, spiritual awakening and their role in the future development of humanity. He has designed and taught personal development programs for businesses, and has remained a popular public speaker. In 1965 he was awarded an Open Exhibition to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study Mathematics. In 1969, he gained a First Class Honours in Theoretical Physics and Experimental Psychology. He then went to Rishikesh, India, where he trained as a teacher of Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In 1971, he gained a post-graduate degree in Computer Science. From 1971 to 1974, he studied for a Ph.D. on the psychophysiology of meditation at Bristol University.

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work. Courbet's paintings of the late 1840s and early 1850s brought him his first recognition. They challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects. Courbet's subsequent paintings were mostly of a less overtly political character: landscapes, seascapes, hunting scenes, nudes, and still lifes. Courbet, a socialist, was active in the political developments of France. He was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his involvement with the Paris Commune and lived in exile in Switzerland from 1873 until his death four years later.