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"A brilliant fantasy." -- Manchester Guardian. What would you do if you could re-live your life? In his only novel, occultist P. D. Ouspensky expands upon his concept of eternal recurrence, telling of a man who travels back in time and attempts to correct the mistakes of his schooldays and early manhood, including his romantic misadventures. Set in Moscow and Paris, the story served as an inspiration for the movie Groundhog Day.
“I will tell you a fairy tale,” said the Devil, “on one condition: you must not ask me the moral. You may draw any conclusion you like, but please do not question me. As it is, far too many follies are laid at our door, yet we, strictly speaking, do not even exist. It is you who create us.” My story takes place in New York some twenty-five years ago. There lived then a young man by the name of Hugh B.; I will not tell you his full name, but you will soon guess it for yourself. His name is known now to people in all five parts of the globe. But then he was completely unknown. I will start at a tragic moment in the life of this young man, when he was travelling from one of the suburbs of New York to Manhattan, with the intention of buying a revolver and then shooting himself on a lonely shore on Long Island; in a spot which had remained in his memory from the times of boyhood excursions, when he and his playmates, pretending to be explorers, had discovered unknown countries around New York. His intention was very definite and the decision final. All in all, it was a very common occurrence in the life of a big city, something encountered repeatedly; in fact, to be frank, I have had to arrange similar events thousands and tens of thousands of times. However, this time such a common beginning had a quite uncommon sequel and a most uncommon result. Nevertheless before turning to the outcome of the day, I must tell you in detail all that led up to it. Hugh was a born inventor. From early childhood, when walking with his mother in the park or playing with other children, or simply sitting quietly in a comer building with bricks or drawing monsters, he invented incessantly, constructing in his mind a variety of extraordinary contrivances, improvements for everything in the world. He derived a special satisfaction from inventing improvements and adaptations for his aunt. He would draw her with a chimney, or on wheels. For one drawing, in which this not young maiden was portrayed with six legs and other variations, the little Hugh was severely punished. It was one of his first memories. Not long after this Hugh learned first to design and then to make models of his inventions. By this time he had learnt that live people cannot be improved upon. Nevertheless his inventions were, of course, all pure fantasy: when he was fourteen, he nearly drowned himself trying out home-made water skis of his own design.
2013 Reprint of 1931 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this classic work, Ouspenky analyzes certain of the older schools of thought from the East and the West, connecting them with modern ideas and explaining them in light of the most recent discoveries and speculations in newer schools of philosophy and religion. In the course of his research he integrates the theories of relativity, the fourth dimension and current psychological theories. The book closes with a consideration of the sex problem from the perspective of sex in relation to the evolution of man toward superman.
In this introduction to the foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin concentrates on the ideas and practices which constitute the common heritage of the different traditions of Buddhism (Thervada, Tibetan and Eastern) which exist in the world today.
This book recounts P. D. Ouspensky's first meeting and subsequent association with George Gurdjieff. It is widely regarded as perhaps the most comprehensive account of Gurdjieff's system of thought available. Many followers regard it as a "fundamental textbook" of Gurdjieff's teachings and it is often used as a means of introducing new students to Gurdjieff's system of self-development.
First published in 1962, Bruce Jay Friedman’s acclaimed first fiction novel, Stern, tells the story of a young Jewish man who relocates his family from the city to the suburbs, where they are besieged by voracious caterpillars and a bigotry that ranges from the genteel snub to outright confrontation. “An iridescent tour de force...Mr. Friedman’s style is pure delight-supple, carnal, humorous and at times slightly surrealistic.”—The New York Times Book Review “What makes Friedman more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth and Bellow is the sense he affords of possibilities larger than the doings and undoings of the Jewish urban bourgeois... What makes him more important is that he writes out of viscera instead of cerebrum.”—Nelson Algren in The Nation “A strange and touching novel...funny and sad at the same time...in the tradition of a Charlie Chaplin movie.”—Time
I SHALL speak about the study of psychology, but I must warn you that the psychology about which I speak is very different from anything you may know under this name. To begin with I must say that practically never in history has psychology stood at so low a level as at the present time. It has lost all touch with its origin and its meaning so that now it is even difficult to define the term psychology: that is, to say what psychology is and what it studies. And this is so in spite of the fact that never in history have there been so many psychological theories and so many psychological writings. Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science. In order to understand how psychology can be denned it is necessary to realise that psychology except in modern times has never existed under its own name. For one reason or another psychology always was suspected of wrong or subversive tendencies either religious or political or moral and had to use different disguises. For thousands of years psychology existed under the name of philosophy. In India all forms of Yoga, which are essentially psychology, are described as one of the six systems of philosophy. Sufi teachings. which again are chiefly psychological, are regarded as partly religious and partly metaphysical. In Europe, even quite recently in the last decades of the nineteenth century, many works on psychology were referred to as philosophy. And in spite of the fact that almost all sub-divisions of philosophy such as logic, the theory of cognition, ethics, aesthetics, referred to the work of the human mind or senses, psychology was regarded as inferior to philosophy and as relating only to the lower or more trivial sides of human nature. Parallel with its existence under the name of philosophy, psychology existed even longer connected with one or another religion. It does not mean that religion and psychology ever were one and the same thing, or that the fact of the connection between religion and psychology was recognised. But there is no doubt that almost every known religion—certainly I do not mean modern sham religions—developed one or another kind of psychological teaching connected often with a certain practice, so that the study of religion very often included in itself the study of psychology. There are many excellent works on psychology in quite orthodox religious literature of different countries and epochs. For instance, in early Christianity there was a collection of books of different authors under the general name of Philokalia, used in our time in the Eastern Church, especially for the instruction of monks. During the time when psychology was connected with philosophy and religion it also existed in the form of Art. Poetry, Drama, Sculpture, Dancing, even Architecture, were means for transmitting psychological knowledge. For instance, the Gothic Cathedrals were in their chief meaning works on psychology. In the ancient times before philosophy, religion and art had taken their separate forms as we now know them, psychology had existed in the form of Mysteries, such as those of Egypt and of ancient Greece. Later, after the disappearance of the Mysteries, psychology existed in the form of Symbolical Teachings which were sometimes connected with the religion of the period and sometimes not connected, such as Astrology, Alchemy, Magic, and the more modern: Masonry, Occultism and Theosophy. And here it is necessary to note that all psychological systems and doctrines, those that exist or existed openly and those that were hidden or disguised, can be divided into two chief categories. First: systems which study man as they find him, or such as they suppose or imagine him to be. Modern ‘scientific’ psychology or what is known under that name belongs to this category. Second: systems which study man not from the point of view of what he is, or what he seems to be, but from the point of view of what he may become; that is, from the point of view of his possible evolution.
P. D. Ouspensky's classic work In Search of the Miraculous was the first to disseminate the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff, the mysterious master of esoteric thought in the early twentieth century who still commands a following today. Gurdjieff's mystique has long eclipsed Ouspensky, once described by Gurdjieff as "nice to drink vodka with, but a weak man." Yet Ouspensky was a brilliant, accomplished philosopher in his own right, and some consider his meeting with the charismatic "Mr. G." the catastrophe of his life. Indeed, in subsequent years Ouspensky tried hard, with limited success, to break away. This book moves Ouspensky's own story center stage, against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, the dervishes of Constantinople, and a cosmopolitan Europe entre deux guerres. The archetypal encounter it describes echoes that of Don Juan and Castaneda, or perhaps Mephistopheles and Faust. One of the great mystical adventures of our time, it will fascinate everyone interested in the farthest reaches of what it means to be human. The paperback edition includes a new chapter on Gary Lachman's own former work in Gurdjieff's psychology.
"No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that occurs in this universe is illusory... And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own—whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes..." So speaks a character in Two Strange Tales, a pair of novellas in which Westerners are caught up in the uncanny realm of Eastern religion and magic. In "Nights at Serampore," three European scholars, traveling deep into the forests of Bengal, are inexplicably cast into another time and space where they witness the violent murder of a young Hindu wife. In "The Secret of Dr. Honingberger," a respectable Rumanian physician vanishes without a trace after experimenting with yogic techniques in his quest for the legendary invisible world called Shambhala. In Two Strange Tales, author Mircea Eliade combined yogic folklore with the literary genre of the supernatural suspense tale so as to reveal dimensions of experience that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches. These well-crafted stories will appeal to both lovers of the supernatural and those fascinated by mysticism of the East.
In The Symbolism of the Tarot the great Russian mystic P.D. Ouspensky synthesizes ideas from the ancient sciences of Astrology, Kabbalah, Alchemy and Magic to create a profound guide to the symbolic nature of the Tarot. The Book focuses on the specialized faculty of mind that can be developed through the use of the cards. In these pages you will discover that the key to understanding the Tarot lies in the imagination because reading and interpreting the cards requires "a special cast of mind" and a developed power of creative thought. Ouspensky sees the Tarot first and foremost as a means of developing the higher sensitivity that allows us to see the symbolic language of esoteric traditions. P. D. Ouspensky also offers his own interpretive vision of each of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana revealing the hidden realities they represent. He asks us to remember that the meaning of authentic symbols is never fixed. The wisdom they contain is constantly shifting and moving and reading the cards is an art form. By practicing the art of the Tarot we can learn how to bring ourselves into direct contact with the secret worlds of inner wisdom that always lie beneath our ordinary perceptions of reality.