Flex Mentallo

This one as well. Three stunning books!

What a wonderful cover!

Not me. I'm an anchorite.

And she is naked too! That's funny, so am I.

I read the Dumarest novels when I was young and loved 'em. Kalin and Derai in particular.

That's fab, well done Russ. As for you Bill, it's like you decided to try on a new collection. Suits you sir! If the collection fits, wear it. Tremendous stuff.

I like the feather torture on the #53 cover. Reminds me of Daredevil Comics #11.

I own copies of both and I'd not've made that connection, but now that I see it, I have to wonder if one was the inspiration for the other.

No sir - loving the shoes would make you a prevert!

May life go to immortal life, and the body go to ashes, OM. O my soul, remember past strivings, remember! O my soul, remember past strivings, remember!

O life-giving sun, off-spring of the Lord of creation, solitary seer of heaven! Spread thy light and withdraw thy blinding splendour that I may behold my radiant form: that Spirit far away within thee is my own inmost Spirit.

The face of truth remains hidden behind a circle of gold. Unveil it, O god of light, that I who love the true may see!

He who knows both the transcendent and the immanent, with the immanent overcomes death and with the transcendent reaches immortality.

The Spirit filled all with his radiance. He is incorporeal and invulnerable, pure and untouched by evil. He is the Supreme seer and thinker, immanent and transcendent. He placed all things in the path of Eternity.

When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?

Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings loses all fear.

The Spirit moves and moves not. He is far, and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all.

There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness. Whoever in life denies the spirit falls into that darkness of death.

Working thus, a man may wish for a life of a hundred years. Only actions done in God bind not the soul of man.

Isa Upanishad (circa 600 B.C.) Behold the universe in the glory of God: and all that lives and moves on earth. Leaving the transient, find joy in the Eternal: set not your heart on another's possession.

Since my tribal friends revived it, the dance has become a world wide phenomenon, spreading first to Bombay, with sometimes hundreds of dancers performing before crowds of many thousands. But of course I preferred it when it was only us...

All we students got the opportunity to learn and perform it. We even got invited to perform in other venues. For many years I timed my later visits to coincide with the festival, and danced the nights away. My obligatory bare feet became so blistered, at times I could barely hobble when not dancing. Yet while dancing I barely noticed, because the tempo increases as the dance progresses, faster and faster, spinning and stepping, forward, sideways, forward, reverse; the same pattern of fourteen moves repeating and repeating and repeating, until you become quite lost in it. On one occasion after a long night of dancing, on my way to the student hostel where I lived, I found myself in a very poor quarter where servant families lived. They were trying to perform garba in the dead of night long after everyone else had gone to bed, but didn't know how to do it properly, so I taught them until the sun came up.

The Upanishads are comparable to the New Testament, but taken as a whole are as long as the Bible. Here is the shortest of the Upanishads by way of example as translated by Mascaró. It is also perhaps the most beautiful. I have chosen to illustrate the stanzas with some dance photographs. (When I was a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda from 1980 to 1982, students from a tribal district revived a dying dance form called garba, an intricate circle dance performed during the nine nights of the harvest moon, a festival known as Navratri.)

The Upanishads