Parabola's Fall 1990 issue: Liberation Nothing is more basic to the human condition than the wish to be free. But what is that wish, and where does it come from? Perhaps it is innate, springing from our true nature, which we have somehow lost touch with but which keeps calling out to us. This inner voice reminds us that our real slavery is not to outside forces, but to something much closer to home: our habits, our appetites, our desires, the dictates of our egoism. The more these are observed, the more dissatisfied we become: the wish for something higher and more open grows stronger, and we begin to understand the struggle towards freedom, the process of liberation. --from the editorial Focus Cover: Stained glass window of Jonah and the whale, fourteenth century Church of St. vâtienne, Mulhouse, France Photograph copyright Sonia Halliday Photographs In this issue:

• "The Voice of the Master" by Karlfried Graf Dvºrckheim
  - Listening, responding, and letting go
• "Testimony at Seventy" by Marvin Barrett
  - Two moments of real change
• "Inner Slavery": an early talk of G. I. Gurdjieff
  - Mrs. Vanity and Mr. Self-Love
• "Unknown Childhood" by P. L. Travers
  - Stories, loss, and self-recovery
• "The Freedom of Children"
  - A conversation with Henry Barnes and Margaret Flinsch
• "Leaving the Known for the Unknown" by Marie Milis
  - The inner dimension of mathematical problem-solving
• ARCS: "A Dim Capacity for Wings"
  - selected by Hanna M. Loewy
• "The Sleeping Dragon" by Peter Brook
  - The parabolic curve of myth
• "Renunciation of Liberation" by Stuart Smithers
  - The path of radical non-attachment to results
• "The Body and the Machine" by Wendell Berry
  - Back to the basics of shared needs
• "Rethinking Jonah" by James L. Bull
  - The denial of addictive slavery
• "Living Liberation at a Passover Seder" by Philip J. Bentley
  - The Exodus as a rite of passage
• "The Ten Oxherding Pictures": a commentary by William Segal
  - The straying and reharnessing of the self

Tangents - Reviews

• "Not at Home: The Search for the Father" by David Appelbaum
  - Thoughts on a conversation between Bill Moyers and Robert Bly

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "Joseph in Egypt" / Biblical - retold by Paul Jordan-Smith
• "Three Parables of Liberation" / Hindu and Jewish - by Heinrich Zimmer
• "The Legend of Cola Pesce" / Sicilian - by Anthony Fragola
• "Tam Lin" / Scottish - by Kevin Crossley-Holland