Despite apparent differences and varied origins, this issue's books are surprisingly similar. If one has an open mind, I say if, they will provide meaningful pondering and food for thought. They corroborate each other, in terms of knowledge conveyed or attitude taken.

Mutant Message Down Under, by Marlo Morgan, first published privately, was republished by media giant Time/Warner. Apparently the editorial staff shrunk in their merger, for the book contains easily rectified grammatical and syntactical errors. Nevertheless, Mutant Message is worthwhile and seems authentic to me. The ideas conveyed to Ms. Morgan by the Real People, a small isolated Aboriginal tribe of 62, are sensible, compelling and insightful.

Ms. Morgan, in Australia by virtue of her profession, had agreed to an award banquet, or so she thought. After a four-hour ride into the Australian outback wasteland, she learned that she'd been invited to spend time with one of the few remaining Aboriginal tribes in the entire country. All her belongings were burned in a ritual shortly after her arrival and her new life began abruptly. This life was to be arduous but essential, rich but demanding, educational but frightening. It was so different, powerful and extraordinary, she muses late in the book, she doubted that people would believe her tale. What happened there that she thought exceeded the limits of our credulity?

Perhaps most astoundingly, she found that the Real People communicated telepathically. They appeared to function as an organism comprised of 62 inter-communicating cells. Rarely did they speak as they walked daily, barefoot, through the desert in 100 degree heat. They anticipated necessary tasks and deeds for one another; they sat around campfires, looking into the eyes of the person opposite in the circle; they revered truth and kept no personal secrets. Once, she was hushed up, as a message was being sent back by a young member of the tribe who had gone far ahead. He had killed a kangaroo and wanted permission to return with the carcass minus the tail, a heavy but useful kangaroo part. Permission was granted and some hours later he returned to the place where the tribe was now with a tailless kangaroo.

The Real People see us as mutants, degenerates who have lost sight of the true nature, organization, meaning and purpose of life. We've succumbed to fear, they think. They are sad about this, not haughty and arrogant. They respect Ms. Morgan and us but have no desire to live as we do. Theirs is a life of accommodating, not dominating nature, of using what is necessary to survive and no more, of investing daily activity with spiritual values: of living their philosophy of the oneness of all creation and a moment-by-moment appreciation of the Creator. In truth, it takes great courage to live as they do.

This tribe, in a special ceremony in their most sacred site, a cave, stated to Ms. Morgan their intention to live celibately until all members had died off. They said they were the earliest beings on earth, and had assisted in maintaining her for millennia. But the Mutant's impact on earth, poisoning her waters and fouling her atmosphere, was proving insurmountable for them: they'd asked for and been granted permission to leave. Ms. Morgan was to carry a message that we Mutants must change how we relate to the earth and to one another if our life is to continue.

Anecdotes that display great wisdom concerning every aspect of life enrich Mutant Message. These Real People understood intuitively and avoided enhancing ordinary intelligence at the price of their intuitive intelligence. It seems true, as they said: we have lost touch with our True Selves, lost touch with Mother Earth and lost the essential love for the Creator, the One, of whom we are inextricably merely a part.

Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff, will, even more, challenge your ordinary intelligence and its open-mindedness. If you persist, you will be handsomely rewarded, for in the 39 talks is expressed truth in abundance as well as occasional means of working on oneself. The talks include only the years 1917 through 1933. They are still timely, relevant and deeply insightful into today's ills. The book was composed by various pupils who discussed the talks among themselves and committed to writing their understanding of what he'd said. There is, in this process, margin for error as well as provision for a clear expression and focus on the ideas conveyed.

The topics of these talks vary widely, yet are practical and potentially useful to readers. They can be appreciated by anyone, because they transcend individual spiritual paths and consider questions of interest to thoughtful people, regardless of their concern for spiritual life.

Consider the talk Is there a way of prolonging life? Here we are told that, Time is subjective; it is measured by associations. and Time is, ... proportionate to the flow of associations. The trick to prolonging one's life consists in expending energy intentionally and consciously, learning to gain attention and to concentrate it, during which time passes slowly. Concentration, it seems, is more important than food.

In How can we gain attention? Gurdjieff states that people have no attention, that they do things automatically. To gain attention, just as in a skill such as piano playing, practice is necessary. Do you know people who think they have little or no attention? Or who accept the idea that practice is necessary to have it? They couldn't be many. It strikes me as true: years ago I did some experiments on college freshmen, whose average attention span, then, was below 30 sec. How much longer than a football play is the typical young man's attention span today? And, how much control over their attention do people have these days? The Real People (Mutant Message) recognize inwards as a true direction, one among seven. The inward directing of attention is beneficial, yet not natural. In part, the capability differentiates humanity from other creatures who cannot choose to do it.

In another talk ("The Education of Children) Gurdjieff tells us that the sorry state of humanity can be attributed to faulty education. Modern education is lop-sided, oriented to conditioning the intellect (Gurdjieff used the term formatory apparatus) and far too narrow also. Concerning sex, he especially denigrates modern society which has, through its education, produced warped and twisted generations of young people. Does this seem to you to be true? Have I heard correctly that in the United States there are many millions of unwed teen-age mothers? Does this phenomenon benefit someone or the country?

Man is a plural being, (third talk) governed entirely by external circumstances. We have no real I, he says, but rather hundreds of little ones that each gain momentary ascendance in specific circumstances, then give way to another: one I makes promises that another cannot keep. This is man-the-machine. Man-the-machine can have no integrity. To have integrity, man must become aware of his machine: for that moment one is self-conscious. This is the proper, albeit uncommon, state for humanity.

Gurdjieff used many aphorisms in his teaching. The last pages of VIEWS contain 38 of these, especially selected by him. One can ascertain for oneself whether they work or are accurate descriptions of things as they are. By teaching others you will learn yourself. Any sincere teacher knows this to be both important and true. Like what it does not like will free one from the tyranny of narrow-mindedness.

Several references are made to the Law of Three and the three forces. These forces, a positive force, a resisting or negative force and an equalizing force are responsible for all natural phenomena. Ordinary intelligence, i.e., brain intelligence, constitutes the resistance against which the positive, affirming force, arising out of one's wish for psychological evolution, acted. The result is growth of one's astral body, the Higher Being Body. Since everything in the world is material (talk #30) including thought, which varies in mass and density (today's politicians excepted, whose always light thoughts vary in opacity), development of the Higher being body occurs as the lawful consequence of that friction between the two forces as they manifest in one human's psychological experience.

The only book (beside Gurdjieff's) I've ever seen that discusses at length this law of three is one entitled Cosmic Forces of Mu by Colonel James Churchward. From 1934, it's now published by Be Books, a small American publisher. So many ideas in this book contradict the modern scientific view; to fully consider them one needs to consult geologists, physicists, astronomers and biologists.

Mu was an alleged ancient continent (now beneath the Pacific) from which several thousand tablets inscribed with symbolic writings have survived. Churchward spent years attempting to understand them. It is he who attributes them to the ancient Muanf scientists who, he said, understood Cosmic science. On many subjects considered, modern science has little to say. But on others, its pronouncements differ diametrically.

The universe is maintained by various forces. Any force changes a body or a body's position. There exist positive and negative forces and these arise in pairs. Forces move by vibrations of different frequencies, some of which we can sense.

If a celestial body is alive it will revolve on its axis; what makes this possible is a hard crust and soft center, without which it will neither revolve nor generate any forces on its own: it will be dead.

Four primary forces exist and emanate from the great infinite force. They induce a universal clockwise rotation in every celestial body. Of course, the liquid center of a body cannot move as rapidly as the hard, outer shell. The result is friction, between the shell and its core. As the result of this friction, two subsequent forces arise, the centrifugal force and a gyroscopic force. It could become tedious to describe the origination of other forces including magnetism, electromagnetic forces and our favorite, the force of gravity. So let this bit suffice.

Interacting opposing forces establish neutral zones between them. They also have affinities, as, for example, the sun's magnetic forces attract the earth's magnetic forces. According to these tablets, the sun does not heat earth: rather it draws heat out from the earth. A stable equilibrium is established and maintained, producing, in the above case, an atmosphere.

Life arises through the interaction of specific forces. These include electricity, a vital/life force, magnetism, heat and light. These forces, earth forces all, are activated by forces from the sun: without this interaction by radiation from the sun, there would be no life.

In this book, common scientific assumptions are put aside. The substituted explanation sometimes appears to be more complex, possibly violating a valuable scientific guideline, the principle of parsimony. Nevertheless, a reasonable explanation for gravity, for the revolution of stellar bodies and for other phenomena that are regularly passed over could cause one to ponder.

There are little experiments described in the book, many of which one can do in the kitchen. Those on magnetism are particularly interesting and fun to do. If I didn't know that electricity, magnetism, orientation of the magnetic poles and sundry other phenomena discussed in this book were not fully understood, it would not have interested me. But there are intriguing ideas in it which can really rearrange one's thinking. Consider friction.

Friction isn't a force or an element: it arises from the interaction of these and, ...has the faculty of collecting and concentrating the heat force. A volume of heat force can be collected. Since oxygen has a great affinity for the heat force, we get fire. There is in this other way of thinking about forces (and their derivatives), a chemical friction. According to Churchward, Friction is nature's agent for the accumulation and concentration of forces.

There are ideas in this book that seem to me to be wrong. But there are numerous others that place a different, not unreasonable slant on things. It seems to me that ancient philosopher-scientists (e.g., ancient Egypt) did not think in the manner we do. One wonders whether a science developed according to the form of thought presented in Cosmic Forces... might have reasonably enabled moving gigantic quantities of earth, carving millions of mammoth limestone blocks to extraordinary accuracy and precisely situating these with more ease than locomotive movers can move a locomotive today. Or are we to believe that the only possible body of scientific knowledge is the one we have today? That's as reasonable as a one-ended stick.