The long awaited Russian printed edition of Girard Haven's The Art of Presence. A collection of six essays, whose opening paragraph reveals the extraordinary power of metaphor. "In order for a key to be of any value," Mr. Haven reminds us, "One has to know what lock it fits and how to use it to open that lock. One then has to open the door, and finally, one has pass through the door to reach what was inaccessible before." 130 pages later the essays reach their coda: "The advantage of the sequence is that mechanical responses only have to be controlled for thirty seconds at a time; the advantage of passing through death on the larger scale to a state of presence ... is that one need not seek the rather special circumstances of the sequence to experience the state. But our biggest advantage is that by working simultaneously on both scales, each will grow much more rapidly. At death, the scales will merge, and 'now' will become 'forever'" A remarkable vision of consciousness transcending functions worthy of quiet reflection. Beautifully illustrated.