Reveals diverse notions of distributed cognition in the early Greek and Roman worlds

From a master biographer and longtime Gurdjieff practitioner, a brilliant new exploration of the quintessential Western esoteric teacher of the twentieth-century. The Greek-Armenian teacher G.I. Gurdjieff was one of the most original and provocative spiritual teachers in the twentieth-century West. Whereas much work on Gurdjieff has been either fawning or blindly critical, acclaimed scholar and writer Roger Lipsey balances sympathic interest in Gurdjieff and his "Fourth Way" teachings with a historian's sense of context and a biographer's feel for personality and relationships. Using a wide-range of published and unpublished sources, Lipsey explores Gurdjieff's formative travels in Central Asia, his famed teaching institution in France, the development of the Gurdjieff Movements and music, and, above all, Gurdjieff's fascinating continuous evolution as a teacher. Published on the 70th anniversary of Gurdjieff's death, Gurdjieff Reconsidered delves deeply into Gurdjieff's writings and those of his most important students, including P. D. Ouspensky and Jeanne de Salzmann. Lipsey's comprehensive approach and unerring sense of the subject make this a must-read for anyone with a serious intention to explore Gurdjieff's life, teachings, and reputation.

A fictionalized biography of the life of Katherine Mansfield, the prominent short story writer, with special emphasis on the last months of her life as a student of G.I. Gurdjieff and A.R. Orage.

One of the most important books ever written on Uylsses, Dublin's Joyce established Hugh Kenner as a significant modernist critic. This pathbreaking analysis presents Uylsses as a "bit of anti-matter that Joyce sent out to eat the world." The author assumes that Joyce wasn't a man with a box of mysteries, but a writer with a subject: his native European metropolis of Dublin. Dublin's Joyce provides the reader with a perspective of Joyce as a superemely important literary figure without considering him to be the revealer of a secret doctrine.

In the spiritual language of the 20th century few names raise such varied reactions as that of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949). Much of what is considered New Age spirituality can be attributed to Gurdjieff. This book is a tribute not only to the scope and power of Gurdjieff's ideas, but to the special "atmosphere" that surrounded his work with pupils.

A dramatic and literate introduction to one of the twentieth century's most influential and intriguing spiritual teachers. Born in the shifting border between Turkey and Russia in 1866, G. I. Gurdjieff is a man who would continually straddle borders-between East and West, between man and something higher than man, between the ancient teachings of esoteric schools and the modern application of those ideas in contemporary life. In many respects-from the concept of group meetings to the mysterious workings of the enneagram to his critique of humanity as existing in a state of sleep-Gurdjieff pioneered the culture of spiritual search that has taken root in the West today. While many of Gurdjieff's students-including Frank Lloyd Wright, Katharine Mansfield, and P. D. Ouspensky-are well known, few understand this figure possessed of complex writings and sometimes confounding methods. In Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, the acclaimed novelist John Shirley-one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre-presents a lively, reliable explanation of how to approach the sage and his ideas. In accessible, dramatic prose Shirley retells that which we know of Gurdjieff's life; he surveys the teacher's methods and the lives of his key students; and he helps readers to enter the unparalleled originality of this remarkable teacher.