Issue #46 November, 2025
“Patience is the mother of will. If you have no mother, how can you be born.”
Gurdjieff
Dear ALL
It almost feels as though the year is over, although here in America, we have yet to have yet to navigate Thanksgiving and the run-up to Christmas that inevitably follows in its wake. Perhaps 2026 is casting its show on these final months of 2025. I’m reminded for some reason of that immense poem The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats.
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
On a lighter note, Stephen Aronson has published a second book, in a series of three, entitled As Outside, So Inside, As Above, So Below. You can find it here on Amazon
Regards
RB
The Dog Catchers of Tiflis
In The Tales, we read:
“The duty of this barber-surgeon friend of mine consisted in going at a certain time through the town accompanied by an assistant with a specially constructed carriage and seizing all the stray dogs whose collars were without the metl plates distributed by the local authorities on payment of the tax and taking these dogs …
A New Perspective on Geology
You may have wondered how mountains form. The standard “Geology Creed” claims that mountain building is solely the result of tectonic plates and millions of years of gradual erosion by wind, water, and plants. And yet, there is a distinct lack of physical evidence for this slow-motion narrative. In this compelling presentation, Andrew …
Chief Feature
The following essay, written by Keith Buzzell, many years ago was forwarded to us by Stephen Aronson. It is included here with the permission of his wife, Marlena. Stephen noted that, outside of Ouspensky’s account of Chief Feature in his book, In Search of the Miraculous, it represented the only discussion of this topic he had ever found.
The Reflection in the Mirror
The epic poem The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq at-Tayr) describes a journey where thirty birds of the world, led by the wise Hoopoe, set out to find the mysterious Simurgh, the legendary “King of the Birds.” One of the most beautiful and profound passages from Farid ud-Din Attar’s masterpiece is this excerpt which describes the moment the birds (representing human souls) …