Living.
Devoted to Man and His Transcendental Nature.
1936--1938 Monthly (10 issues a year)
New York, NY.
Editor: May Benzenberg Mayer ("MBM").
Publisher: Living Associates.
1/1, June 1936-2/10, December 1938.
8 pp. 8 1/2 x 11, $2.00 a year.

The journal was typewritten in double columns and mimeographed. It was published in the interests of the teachings of May Benzenberg Mayer (1880-1952) and the School of Applied Philosophy that she ran in Connecticut and on the East Side of New York. She claimed to have studied with both Freud and Jung, and as Marc Demarest has determined there is some possibility that she did since she was in Europe from 1904 to 1906 and again in 1921. She did for a period in the 1920s run "Study Groups in the Implications and Background of Jungian Psychoanalysis." In the 1930s, like so many other purveyors of uplift and enlightenment, she ran afoul of the laws prohibiting the practice of medicine without a license, apparently on the basis of extracting $3,000 from a dissatisfied patient. The School of Applied Philosophy offered courses on "Subjective Exercises," full semester $12.00, "New Philosophy Applies to You," three lectures, $2.00, etc. Mayer’s teachings combined commonplace assertions of the value of conscious living and living in the present, with a heavy overlay of the occult and astrology, and seem to have been structured in layers and intended to stimulate "drawing out latent capacities in material, vital, psychic, mental and spiritual living." The teachings were highly optimistic, both for society and for the individual, about the effect of the coming of the Age of Aquarius. The journal offered both practical teachings on exercises leading to "Cultivation of the Interior Life" and doctrinal articles on "Latent Extra-Sensory Faculties." It featured a recurring series of articles by "An Initiate of many Milleniums Past" on "Instructions from Teh-Khufa Tei." This enigmatic being (whom MBM was said to have contacted "mentally") was actually "a group of evolved Beings, who with one exemption [MBM?] lived last in the flesh some six thousand years ago." Only some of the introductory public work is available, online at mbmteachings.wordpress.com, and the Library of Congress has digitized a lot of her public teachings and some of her beautiful graphics, and has produced a good finding aid to its holdings. https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchCode=LCCN&searchArg=mm2022086484&searchType=1&permalink=y and https://blogs.loc.gov/manuscripts/2022/10/behind-the-scenes-collecting-enigmas/ An initial exploration of Mayer’s work can be found in "The Source Teachings Society" by Albert R. Vogeler in Theosophical History, July 2011. Stanford University; NYPL.

IAPSOP materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
IAPSOP respects people's privacy and personal data rights.