Some Old Books

Checking for Thomas Wold's books on internet I was surprised to find a couple of copies of old "earth probe" books on Amazon.com and the best part is: they are both around a hundred bucks! My! I'd never imagine. I wonder how many they sold.

Well, we are not going to charge you nearly that much. The old copy has historic value but that's about it. It is hand-written, although in a very clear handwriting, but still might be a problem for modern people who don't even know how to use a pen instead of a keyboard. The cover varies with edition. The old edition is also divided in three part and one of them cost a hundred dollars. A hundred bucks just for one third of the book!

Like I said before, we are going to keep the price very reasonable. And you will get complete copy, with all three parts included. (The book can be roughly divided in three sections or parts: South America, Africa and Asia). Also included in this updated edition are all the original pictures drawn by the author. And the whole book is now printed in easy-to-read font. It also has a new gorgeous cover, courtesy of our printing press.

Oh, and we also changed the name to "earthprobe".

And to get your juices really running, we have one more book coming (it's almost done): Imhotep Construction Company. Tom wrote lots of it on his blogs but this time the material will be edited and organized in a better way. Imhotep is basically a collection of short stories, essays and poems. Pretty good read.

Stay tuned.

Alice

Way to Altotting

Hello,

Our next book, Way to Altotting by Thomas Wold is available for sale. It describes adventures of a pilgrim on old pilgrims' trail in Germany. Thomas has a talent to describe what it really feels to be a pilgrim. This story is a sort of sequel to Holy Mountain, though these two pilgrimages are more then a decade apart. If you enjoyed reading Holy Mountain, you will like this one as well. This book includes some color photographs that the author took while on pilgrimage in Germany. By the way the book explains why real pilgrims do not carry a camera.

Click here to order Way to Altotting!

 

Publication Date: Mar 22 2012

Page Count: 26

Trim Size: 5.5" x 8.5"

Language: English

Color: Full Color

Related Categories:Travel / Road Travel

Read the excerpt from the book:


Two women were responsible for directing my love of travel and adventure and my latent spiritual longings into the path of pilgrimage. An older German woman concerned herself with my education in the cultural/religious traditions of Europe when I was living in Germany. She was the one who first told me about the old pilgrim’s path to Santiago de Campostella in Spain and later asked me to undertake a pilgrimage to that holy place on her behalf since she felt herself too old to make the journey. The other woman was a devout Greek Orthodox Christian I met in California.  When she found I was contemplating a pilgrimage to Campostella, she asked me to extend that pilgrimage on her behalf to Holy Mountain Athos, in Greece, since women are not permitted to visit that monastic province but may commission a male to make a pilgrimage there as their proxy.

This Orthodox woman also introduced me to a little book written by an anonymous Russian more than a hundred years ago: The Way of the Pilgrim. In this book I read for the first time about the Prayer of the Heart, also called The Jesus Prayer, a short mantra-type prayer recommended to the devout seeker as an important spiritual exercise to be done while making a pilgrimage. Oddly enough, this book and this prayer captured my interest and I began to repeat the mantra—at first more or less as a joke with no seriousness, but gradually, recognizing in it a foundation technique for possible spiritual growth I became user of the prayer.

I had abandoned the religious activities of my youth in a reaction against not only the hypocrisy I saw in the church, but even more to the hypocrisy I saw in myself. Regarding the “Jesus Prayer”, for example––at first I could not even recite the words comfortably in English, so I learned to repeat it in the original Greek—the meaningless sounds of that language: “Kyrie Jesu Christe eleson mas” were less repulsive to me than  “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us”.

The author of The Way of the Pilgrim recommended that a sincere pilgrim should repeat this simple formula continually as he walks, and since he walks all day, he repeats the prayer several thousand times daily. After a few days or weeks of this, he no longer needs to articulate the prayer—he repeats it silently as he walks, and eventually, he will discover that the prayer has become, quite literally, the “Prayer of the Heart” since it is being repeated automatically night and day, awake or asleep, in his heart. I found through experience, that for myself at any rate, this is absolutely true. During a pilgrimage I would awaken in the middle of the night, for example, in strange surroundings and experience the subtle comfort of the repeating prayer rather than the fear of the unknown. The prayer thus seems to help sustain equilibrium of the pilgrim’s psychic condition.

From The Way to Altotting by Thomas Wold

 

 

 

 

Click here to order the paper copy.

Holy Mountain

Hello!

We are pleased to announce to all our friends and followers that our first book is available for sale! It's title is "Holy Mountain" and it describes the pilgrimage made by Thomas Wold to Holy Mountain, a province in Greece where no woman has set her foot for hundreds of years. Of course, monasteries are famous to be gender-specific but in this case this whole province is male-only area of Greece.

Holy Mountain is Agion Oros in Greek and it is a special place. Read about the unique experience of an American pilgrim who made a pilgrimage there on behalf of a woman. 

Page Count: 36

Trim Size: 5.5" x 8.5"

Language: English

Color: Black and White

Related Categories: Travel / Road Travel

Click here to order a paper copy of this book.




Read the excerpt from the book:

Kalogiros is a young man that I would describe as “typically Greek”. He is fairly short and stocky and wears longish black hair, a thick black beard and moustache. He is muscular with thick workingman’s fingers so I suspect he is a mechanic or construction worker but he turns out to be a certified repairman of expensive foreign cameras—which work he does at home on his small kitchen table. 

He plies his trade for several hours every day and while he works we talk. This may seem  strange because I know only the five words of the Jesus prayer in Greek and he speaks very little English, but the simple fact is that we seem to understand each other quite well anyway. 

Besides, he has such an unusual way of working that it is really edifying to watch.

First he takes the malfunctioning camera completely apart, scattering tiny bits and screws all over the small table with what seems to be total abandon. As he destroys the camera he will suddenly say: “There is the problem!” but will continue taking the apparatus apart until it is just a heap of pieces. Then he immediately begins to re-assemble the camera, picking up the tiny screws and joining together the bits of metal and plastic with his thick, sausage-like fingers—until it is perfectly whole and fixed. And perhaps most odd of all, though he has documents pinned to his wall which prove that he is a certified technician, authorized by their factories to repair even the most expensive Haselblad cameras from Germany or Nikons from Japan, he says he never has been trained for this work at all—just always knows instinctively exactly what must be done. Camera shops all over Thessalonica bring their broken fine cameras to him to fix and he says that he always has more work than he wants.

After I get to know him better and we have spent several afternoons “talking” in our peculiar way, he shows me something else he says he had learned to do—and something he said I should never try since acquiring the skill and knowledge had almost cost him his life. He took two strands of bare copper wire—one in each hand— and stuck them into the open holes of an electric wall socket—taking what should have been a fatal shock in stride—not even blinking or pausing in his conversation. He said that he had learned, through meditation and other occult techniques, to offer no resistance to the flowing electric current, but to allow it to pass freely through his body. He said that this was the true meaning of the biblical injunction to “resist not evil”. “If you resist the current (or the evil), you’ll get fried. You have to just let it flow through you without any resistance.” He said in Greek and I understood.

While he was elaborating on this dangerous practice, Kalogiros suggested that I read a book called “The Secret of the Golden Flower” when I could locate a copy in English. (A few years later, I found a copy of this opaque book, but never understood enough of it to try this experiment.)

Kalogiros accompanies me to the visa office of the Holy Mountain government when I apply and makes sure that they know I am especially interested in the painting of icons since I too am an artist. He tells me that if you are a foreigner interested in some particular aspect of Greek culture, history or art, there is a better chance of being granted a visa than if you merely want  to satisfy touristic curiosity. I am indeed very interested in the icons produced on Holy Mountain–their meaning, use and manufacture.

From "Holy Mountain" by Thomas Wold

Click here to order a paper copy of this book.

The Books are Coming

Well, they are coming. I have ordered proofs of two books already. The books are going to be self-published through CreateSpace company and be available for sale through Amazon. com.

So far we have:

The Book of Cakes
Holy Mountain

Coming soon:

earthprobe
The Way to Altotting