This project is maintained by family members of Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn, founder of the Chicago School of Psychology and an important figure in the publishing history of the Yogi Publication Society.
Our connection to this history is deeply personal, although for most of our lives we had no idea that the connection existed. Herbert A. Parkyn is our great-granduncle and a cousin. We grew up knowing only fragments of this Parkyn-Jackson family history. Because of circumstances within the family, much of the earlier history had not been passed down to us, and we knew virtually nothing about Herbert, his work, or the extraordinary world in which he had been involved.
As young teenagers, my brother and I developed a deep interest in occult and esoteric knowledge and in searching for the hidden traditions behind it. Around the ages of fifteen and sixteen, we began visiting the Yes! Bookshop in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., where we explored books on these subjects. There, we discovered the little blue books published by the YPS. I became deeply attached to The Kybalion and The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians, while my brother was drawn especially to the works of Yogi Ramacharaka.
What is remarkable to us now is how completely those books became part of our lives. As we grew older, our paths took us far from where they had begun. We both traveled through Europe and eventually found our way to the West Coast, beginning years in which our lives were anything but settled. Through all the traveling, moving, and constant changes of those years, somehow those little blue books stayed with us. Of everything that could have been lost, discarded, or left behind, they remained among our most treasured possessions. We still have our original copies today, displayed among the objects that have meant the most to us throughout our lives.
Only much later, after we had families of our own, did we begin seriously investigating our ancestry. We discovered that genealogy had long been a tradition within the Parkyn-Jackson family and that extensive records had survived among different branches. As our connection with the extended family deepened, pieces of that history began making their way back to us. Family Knights Templar Mason swords, pocket watches, photographs, books, documents, and other possessions that had been preserved across generations. Among these materials were Parkyn’s own books and publications, his correspondence course, copies of Auto-Suggestion, and a collection of his Suggestion magazines, preserved and signed by his father, our great-great-grandfather.
Discovering Herbert’s work was remarkable enough. Here was a member of our own family deeply involved more than a century earlier in many of the same subjects that had fascinated us since we were teenagers. But nothing prepared us for discovering that his history also led directly into the world of those little blue YPS books we had carried with us for so many years.
It was difficult for us to experience that discovery as simply a coincidence. Long before we knew Parkyn’s story, before we knew what he had taught, and before we knew anything about his relationship to the people and organizations surrounding the YPS, we had somehow been drawn to these books and had carried them through the most formative years of our lives. Whether understood as lineage, inheritance, intuition, or simply one of those extraordinary patterns that can appear when a family begins recovering its past, we felt there was a deeper connection worth following.
Researching that connection has led us far beyond anything we imagined when we began. What started as genealogy became an effort to recover the parts of Parkyn’s history that had been overlooked or forgotten and to understand his place within the mental science and New Thought world of his time. As the evidence accumulated, connections that initially seemed improbable became increasingly visible. Ideas and language we had first encountered in those little blue books began appearing in Parkyn’s earlier teachings and publications, while the people, institutions, and publishing enterprises around him led directly into the world from which the YPS arose.
Our family connection to Herbert gives this research its personal meaning, but it is not the basis upon which we ask readers to accept its conclusions. The history presented on this website is built from original books, magazines, correspondence courses, advertisements, newspapers, legal and business records, genealogical records, and other contemporary sources. We make that evidence visible throughout the site so that readers can examine it, follow the connections for themselves, and reach their own conclusions.
For us, that is what makes this project different from an ordinary historical investigation. We came to the YPS first through its books, without knowing anything about our family connection to their history. We came to Herbert A. Parkyn decades later through our family. Only then did we discover that the two paths we had been following for much of our lives were connected.
The original little blue books that began that journey are still on our special shelves. Today they sit alongside the surviving books, magazines, courses, photographs, and family materials of Herbert A. Parkyn. There is something deeply meaningful to us in that simple fact. The books we carried while searching for answers when we were young eventually helped lead us back to a history within our own family that had been almost completely forgotten. This website grew from our determination to follow that connection wherever the evidence led, to recover our relatives' forgotten contributions, and to return his life and work to the historical record.
