Title: The Powers of Knowledge
[$5, postpaid. A huge discount off of retail to get you to see what it’s all about!] Modern culture is the source of a crisis in civilization. This now world-wide culture is generating increasingly intolerable conditions of human life mostly because of the faulty assumptions built into it that concern our powers of knowledge. Because of these assumptions, we fail today to develop and use the whole range of our powers. Consequently, we find ourselves increasingly unable to perceive, let alone understand, the forces flowing into and out of our lives. We can see that things are bad but not why they are so. We do not see this because the very tools of perception we use are the flawed victims of a culture that renders them inadequate. “The Powers of Knowledge” (Book I of the two-book series “The Crisis of Modern Culture”) explores our powers of knowledge—both those we only partly or wrongly develop and those we entirely neglect. It shows how we may expand our awareness by actualizing all our powers in a more integrated way. It illustrates how we can turn aside the forces of destruction that today are reaching critical mass everywhere, even in places we thought were protected. (83 pages, 5.5×8.5, paper.)
This title is a Fifth Way Press imprint from OYB. It is sponsored by the MIEM, the Michigan Institute of Educational Metapsychology—a fancy somewhat tongue-in-cheek way of saying “studying and teaching a philosophy for living today, inspired by the best of the past.” The institute has been represented for 30 years by weekly meetings of quiet, polite folk, who passed around these writings in a form of samizdat prior to this publication. These are often people from the ‘helping’ professions who see that their ways need help. It also includes students who need help to stay true to what they are learning. They are all in desparate straits. Due to modernism. The ‘Fifth Way’ concept comes from ‘the Fourth Way’ of Gurdjieff. The traditional three ways to contact reality were: the emotional way of the monk, the intellectual way of the yogi, and the physical way of the fakir. These were recently joined by the fourth way of the householder, one who learns from everyday life, who does not withdraw. The Fifth Way takes the best of all ways without leaving any behind, transcending them all: count your fingers: thumbs up! If you like Simone Weil and St. Theresa of Avila, you’ll like Puhek. It’s plainly written but intense philosophy for a modern age. These reflections integrate and build on many works, especially Plato, Sartre, Jung and Freud.
