Sacred Ruins is a book about two journeys: the soul's journey from spiritual sleep to awakening and its journey within this awakening. The first of these has been well-documented, the latter equally significant, is rarely mentioned -- perhaps because most of us have little or no experience with it. It eludes ordinary comprehension. In this two-volume work, author-publisher Gilbert Moore attempts to reconstruct the nature of those journeys from the fragmentary evidence left behind in two sources -- the so-called Book of the Amduat inside the tombs of Thutmosis III and Ramses VI and the less well-known Book of the Two Ways duplicated inside the lids of thousands of coffins of Ancient Egyptian nobles. Standing on the shoulders of two giants of Egyptology -- Alexandre Piankoff and Richard Faulkner-- Dr. Moore takes the unprecendented and daring step of mapping onto the sacred texts themselves the schema of the cartoon-like stick figures depicted on the tomb walls. Enigmatic until now, the text and images suddenly become transparent, voices can be heard. And then as if this were not radical surgery enough, the author identifies and decodes the voices. Nothing so controversial in its implications has been done before.

Imagine you've just entered the parking garage of your office building one morning, you step out of the car, still a little sleepy-eyed, lock the door with your remote and turn around: There staring in your face is a camel, with profoundly soft, gentle eyes, silhouetted against a setting sun. The parking lot? Gone. Your office building? Doesn't exist anymore. And your hum-drum 9-to-5? Gone too. No, this is not the Twilight Zone, it's what this book Through the Eye of A Needle is about: The transformation of our hum-drum existence into the miraculous -- and you don't even have to buy expensive tickets and fly to Egypt for it to happen, the transformation can begin right in the middle of this sentence you're reading -- like turning around in a parking garage one hum-drum morning and staring at a camel. And if that were not not good enough, the book won't even cost you that much: $39.95 (and as everybody knows if you wait long enough, Amazon will sell it to you for a third of that price.) So what's this book about again? Read the inside flap of the dust cover, it will tell you: It's about "the union of the sacred and the profane. Beginning with a brief reconnaisance of prehistoric caves at Chauvet and winding its way through ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the book] asks a simple question: What do these images really mean?" The book's punchline (which you won't find here) relating to the secret teachings of Lao Tzu, Buddha, Moses, Christ and Plato will simply astonish you -- and (depending on your type -- negative, positive, neutral) maybe even please you.

The Struggle of the Magicians. Choreographed and staged by Georg Gurdjieff for the first time more than a century ago, this ballet became a magnet attracting thousands of spiritually disillusioned men and women to performances in Europe and the U.S. after WW I, then it simply vanished from sight after WW II. Its reappearance in print commemorates the birthday of Mr. Gurdjieff 131 years ago (Jan 13, 1872)

AS IT IS now played in both hemispheres on this planet, chess is war, total war, a war of annihilation. The opposing player is not just the opponent, he becomes the enemy who must be destroyed. Was it always like this? The thesis of this book is that it was not, that in its origins, in a faintly remembered time, chess was primarily a game of self-revelation used by initiates to the priesthood to study and transcend the internal warfare going on inside all of us all the time. Invented thousands of years ago, chess was played to teach initiates the art of esoteric warfare.