Title: True Friendship, by Ronald E. Puhek
Author: Ronald E. Puhek
[$5, postpaid. A huge discount off of retail to get you to see what it’s all about!] Half the fun of doing anything is doing it with someone—this includes all the wild outdoor action I’ve ever done. Bonds are created when people train for bike racing for years together, for instance. But what kind of bonds? And there’s solidarity in a race quite often. But what kind? I recently had a guy who I suffered for miles with on a long hard ride who I’d never met before say “Those who suffer together are brothers.” That seemed pretty cool. There’s a sense in which that’s true. But there’s another sense. Think of all the sports friends you never saw again after the sport. Or who never had any interest in doing the slightest thing outside the sport, even in stopping for ice cream. Today, you can have “tight knit” groups who panic at the thought of having a beer in a park at the end of a ride. Their worlds don’t mix. Then, too, worlds collide, as Seinfeld said. There’s more to friends than our culture lets us know. Here’s a real exploration of friendship, for a change. In only 100 pages…
Here’s a link to get an eBook edition for $3.95 (our Jack Kerouac “On The Road” 50th Annivesary Tribute special low price!):
From the Back Cover…
“Among the most delightful, rewarding, and beautiful things in life is true friendship. It is the highest form of love between two individuals. Even the bonds of marriage are blessed to the highest degree when a partner is a friend. All friendship is spiritual in the sense that it is based not on what others can do for us, nor on what they are in themselves, but on what they mean to us. It’s the meaning that stimulates the spirit. The quality of the friendship depends on the quality of the spirit, but the quality of the spirit depends in turn on the quality of the meaning. This book explores the highest kind of spirit and the truest form of friendship — and how we can reach them both.”
About the Author…
Ronald E. Puhek is a professor of Integrative Studies at Michigan State University, teaching there since 1966. He has written 16 books exploring the Fifth Way. Until recently, these works were part of a ‘samizdat’ movement, spread by word of mouth and photocopier. Puhek also conducts an on-going seminar which has been meeting weekly for 30 years. Its goal is the search for “truth which can be lived in a modern age.”
Background
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. His reflections integrate and build on many works, especially Plato, Sartre, Jung and Freud.
