Bøger af Girard Haven

"The six essays in this book are based on meetings or other events which were held between 2005 and 2010. This was a period of rapid change in the Fellowshipís teaching, and each essay was written in response to a perceived challenge which students faced as a consequence of that change. In effect, this book provides a series of snapshots of the process of one-by-one identifying and overcoming some of those challenges. ... During the three decades following its founding in 1970, the teachings of the Fellowship were based on my Teacher's interpretation of the system expounded in the works of Peter Ouspensky, primarily In Search of Miraculous and The Fourth Way. Although it always had the ultimate aim of awakening higher states of consciousness, the teaching initially focused on the study of the four lower centers and the creation of a steward. By the year 2000, however, as the being of the students grew, the teaching began to move beyond Ouspensky's presentation to focus more on ways in which a mature steward could engage and prolong those higher states, which came to be called presence." From "Author's Introduction", The Art of Presence -- full color edition

"The six essays in this book are based on meetings or other events which were held between 2005 and 2010. This was a period of rapid change in the Fellowshipís teaching, and each essay was written in response to a perceived challenge which students faced as a consequence of that change. In effect, this book provides a series of snapshots of the process of one-by-one identifying and overcoming some of those challenges. ... During the three decades following its founding in 1970, the teachings of the Fellowship were based on my Teacher's interpretation of the system expounded in the works of Peter Ouspensky, primarily In Search of Miraculous and The Fourth Way. Although it always had the ultimate aim of awakening higher states of consciousness, the teaching initially focused on the study of the four lower centers and the creation of a steward. By the year 2000, however, as the being of the students grew, the teaching began to move beyond Ouspensky's presentation to focus more on ways in which a mature steward could engage and prolong those higher states, which came to be called presence." From "Author's Introduction", The Art of Presence

In the Fourth Way, promulgated early in the 20th century by G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, 'soul' has a precise meaning: it is produced by accumulated moments of consciousness, and is defined as an entity that exists apart from the thoughts, feelings, and physical form of man, and hence can survive death. The chief method for intentionally creating such consciousness is 'self-remembering'... For a man who can remember himself, half an hour may record impressions that would take others days, years, perhaps a lifetime to collect. Such a man has a vastly different level of consciousness. In short, he has an operational soul, and is as different from routine consciousness as a man who has risen and goes about his daily work differs from one snoring in bed at night. In this second edition of 'The Prize Is Eternity' the author explores how in order to remember oneself, or one's soul, curiously enough, one must begin to forget oneself. That is, one must be able to sacrifice one's own self-indulgence, one's entrenched feeling of identity, of being at the center of one's own universe. In our modern Age of Self-Indulgence, knowing so much more than the Ancients, we stand in our own light. The author explores how to use self-remembering to move out of our subjective, narrow, internal world, towards an awareness of, and a relation to, an infinitely grander, more objective, more compassionate universe. He explains why the effort to self-remember, if one persists in it, leads to humility, to the creation of a soul that is capable of serving an aim greater than itself. Most will dismiss this book out of hand thinking they already have a soul, and do not need self-remembering to create one or even worse that there is no soul. The truth is, the author explains, there is a soul, but few of us have any direct experience of it because we have not made the effort to remember ourselves. Nevertheless most anticipate that this entity -- the soul -- which they have not experienced directly in life will somehow carry them into a higher plane of experience at death. The author asks two simple questions: "Why? And who is this 'I' that holds such expectations, anyway?"

The long awaited Russian printed edition of Girard Haven's The Art of Presence. A collection of six essays, whose opening paragraph reveals the extraordinary power of metaphor. "In order for a key to be of any value," Mr. Haven reminds us, "One has to know what lock it fits and how to use it to open that lock. One then has to open the door, and finally, one has pass through the door to reach what was inaccessible before." 130 pages later the essays reach their coda: "The advantage of the sequence is that mechanical responses only have to be controlled for thirty seconds at a time; the advantage of passing through death on the larger scale to a state of presence ... is that one need not seek the rather special circumstances of the sequence to experience the state. But our biggest advantage is that by working simultaneously on both scales, each will grow much more rapidly. At death, the scales will merge, and 'now' will become 'forever'" A remarkable vision of consciousness transcending functions worthy of quiet reflection. Beautifully illustrated.