This book is a record of one and a half years of workdays at the GroupÕs Loft workspace in lower Manhattan during the late 1980Õs and early 1990Õs. It is documentation of the way Jerry worked with his groups during that time. Every generation must find a new way of working. What woke up one generation will not necessarily wake up the next. When we came to the work these ideas were new and fresh - now the ideas are taught in psychology classes in universities. But there is a process to waking up and rules that govern it. Gurdjieff says ""Many alarm clocks are necessary and always new ones."" This book is a testament to the practice of these rules. The fourth way requires working together, working on yourself, and making the ideas your own.

The story of an intrepid voyage of epic proportion with a hero unequaled in the annals of literature. Gorey is "a man of enormous erudition . . . an artist and writer of genius" ("The New Yorker").

Jean Toomer's adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In "To Make a New Race" Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie--Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman--and, through them, the mystic's influence on many of the notables in African American literature. Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel "Cane" became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff's philosophy in the United States. Woodson's is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of objective literature. He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff's philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene. Jon Woodson, an associate professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C., is a contributor to the collection, "Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960." He has published articles in "African American Review" and other journals.

In the few months before his death in Paris on October 29th, 1949, Gurdjieff's flat in the Rue des Colonels Rénard became the centre of his teaching. Followers of his ideas came to be with him at his table. They came to work - but in a way they could not expect. At the centre of what happened were the meals with their extraordinary rituals. Of these rituals, perhaps the most significant was the one known as the 'toast of the idiots'. The 'science of idiotism' that Gurdjieff taught portrayed the whole human situation and the hazards of attaining liberation. Day after day, Elizabeth Bennett sat with Gurdjieff, often as 'Director', having the task of declaring the right toast at the correct moment and proposing the health of corresponding individuals. Her observations are meticulously recorded in these diaries and woven together with J.G. Bennett's own commentary. The record of Mr. Bennett's struggles are a teaching in itself. There are few explanations, because this is how it really was. We are afforded a unique glimpse into the methods of a Master and much that can shatter our illusions about the nature of the spiritual life. Gurdjieff subtly revealed his mission to those who could know it. To each he gave according to capacity, never failing to strike at the very roots of self-deception in his followers. Elizabeth Bennett was born in 1918, and died 1991. The present work is a direct transcript of a diary she kept during the last 3 months of Gurdjieff's life in 1949. A fuller account of her own life is provided in her memoirs, entitled "My Life: J.G. Bennett and G.I. Gurdjieff" written in the years before her own death. Although she taught many people in her later years, she refused the title of teacher and taught by the example of humility, courage and common sense in the hard and demanding path she chose for herself.

Before venturing to unfold the very substance of my first appeal to contemporary humanity, I count it essential and even in every way my duty, to set forth—even if only approximately—the motives which compelled me to assume the whole burden of such an artificial life. This protracted and, for me, absolutely unnatural life. absolutely irreconcilable, too, in every way with the traits that had entrenched themselves in my individuality by the time of my maturity, was the direct consequence of my decision, founded upon the results of my previous study of a whole series of historic precedents with a view, first of all,—to preventing, by to a certain degree unnatural outward manifestations of myself, the formation, in relation to me, of that already noted from ancient times ” something “, termed by the great Solomon, King of “ Juda, ” Tzvarnoharno , which, as was set out by our ancestors, forms itself by a natural process in the communal life of people as an outcome of a conjunction of the evil actions of so-called ” common people ” and leads to the destruction of both him that tries to achieve something for general human welfare and of all that he has already accomplished to this end. Secondly, with a view,—to counteracting the manifestation in people with whom I came in contact of that inherent trait which, embedded as it is in the psyche of people and acting as an impediment to the realization of my aims, evokes from them, when confronted with other more or less prominent people, the functioning of the feeling of enslavement, paralysing once and for all their capacity for displaying the personal initiative of which I then stood in particular need. My aim at that time was concentrated upon the creation of conditions permitting the comprehensive elucidation of one complicated and with difficulty explicable aspect of the question which had, already long before the beginning of this my artificial life, inhered in my being, and the necessity of whose final solution has, whether by the will of fate or thanks to the inscrutable laws of heredity, become and would, at the moment, appear to be the fundamental aim of my whole life and of the force motivating my activity. I find myself obliged—in this, so to say, definitive statement as a writer, which will also have to serve among other things as a sort of ” prospectus ” of the new phase of my unremitting activity for the welfare of my neighbours,—to give a brief outline of the history of the rise and development of those events and causes which were responsible for the formation in my individuality of the unquenchable striving to solve this question, which had, in the end, become for me what modern psychologists might term an ” irresistible Mania “ This mania began to impose itself upon my being at the time of my youth when I was on the point of attaining responsible age and consisted in what I would now term an ” irrepressible striving ” to understand clearly the precise significance, in general, of the life process on earth of all the outward forms of breathing creatures and, in particular, of the aim of human life in the light of this interpretation. Although a multitude of very specific factors, conditioned by my upbringing and education, had served as the primal cause for the formation in my being of the ground giving rise to such, for contemporary man, unusual striving, yet, as I understood later upon giving thought to the matter, the principal cause must in the end be attributed to those entirely accidental circumstances of my life which coincided precisely with the aforesaid transition from preparatory age to responsible age, and which may all be summed up in the fact that all my contacts at the time were almost exclusively with such persons of my age or my seniors who were either in the process of being formed themselves or who had already been formed into precisely that, of late increased amongst us, ” psychic typicality ” of people, the formation of which, as I myself have statistically established during the existence of my foundation, “The Institute For Man’s Harmonious Development” , is due to the fact that the future representatives of this ” typicality ” have never, either with a view to the real understanding of actuality, or in the period of their preparatory age, or, again, in the period of their responsible life, absolutely never, and in spite of the obvious necessity of such a step, laid themselves open to experience, but have contented themselves with other people’s fantasies, forming from them illusory conceptions and, at the same time, limiting themselves to intercourse with those like them, and have automatised themselves to a point of engaging upon authoritative discussions of all kinds of seemingly scientific, but, for the most part, abstract themes.

Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra—aka Herman Blount—was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed's readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place.