The only real learning is to awaken the knowledge that lies dormant in our being.
The primal learning inherent in the human being is essentially the same in everyone, its validity is complete. Ancestral learning is the only suitable foundation; that which is based on it is incorruptible, and that which is based on a concept is meant to rot.
The ancestral study is infinitely simple, so simple that it cannot be put into words. It is agreed with all that is necessary, calm, and solid; it is opposed to all that is seductive, exciting, and teeming.
Ten armies, a hundred coffers, and a thousand deeds are destroyed; what the possessors of the primal study create without any help is preserved.
He who has conquered for himself the guardian study inherent in his being has attained all that is humanly attainable; life and death can only superficially wound him, he is essentially inviolable and complete.
I thank Béla Hamvas, my master, for allowing me to write this book: he created harmony in me.
This book is for you to get to know the harmony of the soul, and if it belongs to you, you can also take possession of it.
The following are neither new nor old: their wording bears the marks of an era, but their essence is non-originated and non-passing. Those who visit the spring region always pick their bouquets from the same flowers.
Towards wholeness
Solvere volo et solvi volo.
Salvare volo et salvari volo.
Generare volo et generari volo.
Cantare volo et cantari volo.
Saltate cuncti!
Ornare volo et ornari volo.
Lucerna sum tibi, ille qui me vides.
Janua sum tibi, quicunque me pulsas.
Qui vides quod ago, tace opera mea.
(I desire to dissolve and I desire to dissolve.
I want to save and I want to be saved.
I want to give birth and I want to conceive.
I want to sing and I want to sing.
Everyone dance!
I want to beautify and I want to beautify.
I am your lamp when you see me.
I'm your door if you knock on it.
You see what I do, listen to my work.)
From an apocryphal Gospel of John
Scatter your treasures - let the wealth be you.
Spread out your decorations - let the beauty be you.
Forget about your entertainment - let the fun be you.
Burn your books - wisdom is to be yourself.
Waste your muscles - be yourself.
Put out your flames - let love be you.
Get rid of your pity - the goodness is to be yourself.
Shake up your beliefs - let faith be you.
Break through your barriers - be yourself in the world.
Take your life and death together - the completeness, be yourself.
May my joy be multiplied in your joy.
Let my shortcomings become goodness in you.
There is only one command, the rest are just advice: try to feel, think and act in such a way that you are in the best interest of everything.
There is only one knowledge, the rest are just extensions: Below you is the earth, above you is the sky, within you is the ladder.
Truth does not lie in sentences, but in undistorted existence.
Eternal existence does not lie in time, but in the state of harmony.
Complete wisdom belongs to the stone and the naked soul. Knowing nothing is the same as knowing everything.
Go to the light, but don't ask it anything. Those who do not need to ask: share the answer.
As soon as you are smarter than anyone, you are stupider than everyone else. In order to become smarter, only the master can legitimately do this, who is aware of his stupidity resulting from his "smarterness" and on whose part teaching is humility: the listener subordinates the wise to the speaking fool.
The truth, as soon as you have said it, is no longer truth; at best it is only a paltry approach to the truth. A wise man is only wise as long as he listens; as soon as he speaks, he is a fool, because he can only give the indigestible shell of his nourishing knowledge."Whatever fits into this unfortunate shell: look for that, eat that" - he can do no more.
If you want to own the truth, you can only use the teachings as a help, you have to find it deep within yourself.
The journey into yourself: the journey into everything. The spatial world relates to the universe as a garment pocket relates to a living body.
At night, under the starry sky, you dream: How big the world is! But look: your single thought can pass even the most distant celestial body in an instant.
The journey from one thought to another is infinitely longer than from star to star.
Man feels that space is infinite, but in reality he is cramped in space like a prison cell, which neither has a full step in length nor width. He who in his being penetrates to the infinite currents, made a small gap in the wall of the chamber; who unlocked his personality, punched a hole in the wall of the chamber big enough to fit through.
Look at a piece of stone, a hammer, a bush, a stilt, a person: each one is created, decaying, bounded, individual, separate. Existence is the same in everything.
The many forms that arise and perish: this is life.
The eternal succession, of which each form is only one station: this is existence.
Humans are the only ones who look for something in variables that can be recorded with a name: it makes sense.
Man is the only one who digs beneath individual and conditional things in himself, to common and unconditional existence: he has a soul.
Earth is the purgatory of lies; everything around us is a lie here: the pseudo-infinity of space, the pseudo-reality of things, the pseudo-multiplicity of ourselves. And even the truth dances in the human brain: everything is true at the same time, and nothing is true at the same time. The only way out of the flood of lies is the one that seems the most false: imagination. Among the many false realities, it is up to your imagination to restore the true reality.
It is not the mountain or the valley that is real, but the beauty that your imagination enjoys in the forms of mountains and valleys; and the way from the pseudo-infinity of the world of phenomena leads through your imagination to the real infinity within you.
Imagination and imagination are different, just as speech and chatter are different. Imagination works according to the law of life and feeds the starved desires with fog; imagination works according to the law of being and what it creates, a work of art, an act, a thought: real and true.
Everything that arises and passes away on Earth is called reality; it is just the imagination that seems to draw its creatures out of nowhere. The pseudo-nothing from which the imagination draws: reality; and in the many separate pseudo-realities, only that which lies in them as nothing, as imagination, is real: their imperceptible, common essence, the unchanging existence behind the changing manifestations.
Descend into the depths of yourself as into a well; and just as you find the boundless groundwater at the bottom of the bounded well: beneath your changing individuality you find the unchanging existence.
Most people believe that they will be destroyed when they die, or that they will continue to live disembodied in space and time. Death is not annihilation, nor is it a continuation of life; with death, everything that is a temporary, changing part of a person dissolves: the body, the feeling, the intellect, the whole personality; and the base layer remains naked, in which there is no possibility of change, creation, or destruction.
It is not man's existence that ceases, but his separate existence. Today's man can hardly distinguish between his own existence and the cessation of his separate existence: he can only imagine his own existence without his separate existence, without his body, feelings, consciousness, temporality, changeability, as a fainting-like, deep dream-like state. However, the transition from separate existence to impersonal, real existence is not a decrease, but rather an infinite increase; not a deep sleep, but rather the fullness of alertness, compared to which even the most awake state of life is only a dazzling hesitation.
The person who descends to his own base layer leaves behind him all the feelings of life, all thoughts and possibilities, and is where he will be after his death, in the timeless, unchanging, where there is no more "me" and "not-me", but everything with everything identity, undivided infinity. This is not a faint darkness, but a radiance beyond light, a radiant action without action, an insensible complete love; eternal immutability, yet not freezing, but transcendence of change, in which all changes are included, even the possibility of sleep while awake.
Is there a God? There is no God? - In that which is independent of space, time and all illusions: Being and Nothingness are the same.
Do I have an inheritance? I have no inheritance? - Beyond space, time and all illusions: being and non-being are the same.
All your knowledge is only good for guiding you through the variables, but it does not provide any certainty about the unchanging. Knowledge is only in the variable and only about the variable, because in it can be examined separately What is and Is not, right and wrong, convex and concave; but in its totality it is all the same inextricably, therefore there is nothing in it that can be named. Wholeness is not one and not more, not me and not another, not something and not nothing.
If you want to know completeness, don't ask anything, because in relation to it, all "yes" and "no" mean the same thing; but dive into yourself, under your person, and where there is no more, where everything is the same as everything else: this is completeness.
The person you see coming and going: closed, individual; and the deepest layer of the human form is not closed, not individual, connected to everything, identical to the single existence that lies deep in all forms.
The timeless infinity emerging from behind the temporally finite personality: the soul. Timeless infinity that does not need to unfold: God.
Separate boundaries exist only in space and time; what is eternal, timeless: unopened. The human soul emerging from the sheath of personality is identical with God, as silence is with silence, but as the cessation of noise is with silence.
When a person is freed from confinement, he sees God in three ways: as an essence beyond "is", without reference; as the love that envelops and radiates everything: and as the infinite soul that shines after the collapse of the finite personality.
For the man who merges into God, there is no longer desirable and undesirable, there is no longer any degree; everything loves infinitely and without desire. For him, everything is the same: everything is the Complete-Unchanged, from which countless changing phenomena flow. God contains everything, and the liberated soul contains everything in God.
Public speaking does not distinguish between good and pleasant: God is good, scratching an itch is also good. Most people think of heaven as pleasure and hell as torment.
Pleasure, pain, and every division, even the purest, belong to the body. Happiness is accompanied by joy only in the body, unhappiness is accompanied by pain only in the body. With death, joy, pain and all divisions disappear.
Boundless to the sentimental, like frost; for those who want to collect, like looting; to individuality as annihilation.
Break down the stones of your face in yourself: your soil shines on you! Flesh and blood are liars and greedy, but the skeleton is true and gentle.
If you cherish your individuality in the depths of your being: like if you wore the dress in your stomach and warmed it with your cold bare body.
If you hope for happiness from the changing, not from the unchanging, if you hope for eternity in the changing, not in the unchanging: just like if you wanted to feed and clothe your reflection, and your body and your reflection would remain emaciated and naked.
A person can be freed from his individuality in two ways: either he sinks below him, or he rises above him.
There are people who get so immersed in the formlessness of the mass-soul, or in the undercurrent of some depravity, that they completely dissolve in it, become dull and their separateness is only an appearance. And their death is only the death of this appearance: with the disintegration of their bodies, the last sign of their separate existence ceases, they completely merge into the dark, sticky flood. This is damnation.
And there are those who, rising above their individuality, make the impersonal, eternal measure their true being; in their death, separate existence collapses from them like a prison wall and they pour out of their temporal, closed life into timeless, boundless wholeness. This is salvation.
Most people keep their individuality until they die. His plans, circumstances, and small pleasures represent the meaning of life for him, and he recoils from the timeless infinity and salvation revealed in the moments of his death, just as much as from the vague attraction and damnation that emerges from under the dissipating consciousness; in none of them is the feeling, the sense, the change, the articulation, which are necessary for his pleasures; his disintegrating instinct clings to the ultimate wreckage of life, and it no longer provides shelter.
Life, change, and time slip out from under him, he pulls away in horror from the unchanging eternal existence: he falls into a frozen state, from which the division of life and the completeness of existence are equally absent. His fate after death depends to a small extent on how he is remembered, whether he is prayed for, whether earthly and non-earthly good intentions help him; and above all, whether there was a supra-individual, general virtue in his life, which does not belong to the personality, but to the eternal measure that lies in the depths of the constitution, does not perish with the destruction of the personality and is able to support him. This is purgatory.
Contemporary science knows the suggestion: the toolless, coercive influence of the human-soul on the other human-soul; however, he considers the efficacy of reading, grace, and prayer to be superstition.
The reading, spell; a spiritual effect that helps or harms someone.
The grace, spirit-summoning, spirit-alert; a spiritual effect that flows towards the being that has come out of life.
The prayer; connection to the supernatural force; through it, we multiply our own ability. A social institution established and nurtured by money, power, and authority rarely lives a few human beings; and the monastic orders remain, even though they are created by only one praying beggar.
If, breaking through your transitory individuality, you penetrate deep within yourself into the eternal soul: you conquer wholeness like a general conquers a castle.
There are also easier paths to perfection. You can only unite with God if you break through everything temporary and push into the eternal. With the help of prayer and sacrifice, you can solve your feelings in such a way that they reach God. Going to church, ceremony, devotion, supplication, repentance, virtue, if you do it with all your heart and do not want to beg earthly goods from the heavenly power, all lead to God: through them God leans towards you, you feel his kiss and you become more and more one with him.
Heaven, hell, and purgatory are not only states after death: everyone carries one of them, whether dead or alive.
Everything that is specific is finite, specific: it suffers in purgatory. Pleasures are produced only in purgatory; and because all pleasure is limited and the unpleasure surrounding it is limitless: that is why purgatory is torment.
There is no torment or pleasure in hell. Whose passions are so dulled, That he delights in nothing more than to drink plenty of water; and he can only suffer like a machine screeching: he has reached hell in his life.
There is neither pleasure nor torment in heaven. The one who no longer needs pleasure can't be disturbed by anything, his whole being opens up like a blessing: he has reached heaven in his lifetime.
The world of space and time is purgatory; it is a rare person who goes to heaven or hell in his lifetime. Your individuality is nothing more than the sum of your finite needs; therefore, only by losing your individuality can you reach the infinite state: heaven or hell.
Purgatory: the battle of heaven and hell, full of changing shape, full of transient characteristics, Heaven and hell are final, undivided, unbroken: one is infinite completeness, beyond "many", all wealth; another is endless lack, beyond "little", beyond all misery.
There are no differences in heaven and hell, everything is the same in them; yet we can talk about the circles and sub-circles and divisions of heaven and hell: because the staircase that connects him to the world of phenomena is different for all saved and all damned; since each step develops according to the way its master operates in the world of phenomena. Whoever is saved or damned is no longer an individual, no longer a separate being; but his step is just as individual as he is individual in his relation to the world of phenomena. No two steps are alike, but there are group similarities between them: these are the divisions of heaven and hell.
Trampling and trampling, devouring and devouring: this is life.
To wear trampling and trampling, devouring and devouring as clothes: this is existence.
He who follows his whim is enveloped in life. He who follows his need is enveloped in existence.
He who violently loves, hates, longs, disgusts: this is the living. He who calmly wears the connected: this is the existent.
If you abstract yourself from everything you know as your being: actually your being begins there.
Don't confuse your body, mind, and personality with your being, yourself. Just your aid; only batyu, which is both the guardian of your needs and a hunching burden.
Your body is not you, as it is only material that is constantly changing: at the age of forty, there is not a single bit of the body of your twenties. But your world of emotions and reason are not you either, since they were not there when you were watching from the cradle. Who you are? the limitless, which appeared between the limits at your conception.
If you consider your delimited person to be yourself, do a Copernican turn: consider the boundless totality as yourself, and your person as a temporary constraint, a mere symptom, a "not-me".
Where feeling, insensibility, thought, thoughtlessness, change, immutability cease; where you would think there is nothing: your true being begins there.
Examine all the contents of your individuality one by one and arrange them. Observe your habits: where they come from, what they do, where they are going.
Break apart your individuality and all its contents will appear foreign to you.
Break apart your individuality and don't be afraid of impoverishment: because it will be replaced by the richness of boundless connection.
Break down your individuality and don't be afraid of losing anything: because if you expel the unwashed, you will find the washed in its place.
Disintegrate your individuality and the infinite currents of your soul become free, which are neither inside you nor outside you, they permeate everything.
A person whose individuality rules: if he gets ahead, he becomes a puffer, if he lags behind, he becomes a rag. And those who control their individuality: in fact, they are not affected by luck and bad luck.
Don't give up on anything: because whoever gave up on something, he withered away. But don't be a slave to your wishes.
Wandering around with repressed passions is just as bitter as crumbling among unleashed passions.
If you indulge your desires: they will marry and have children. If you kill your desires: they come back as ghosts. If you tame your desires: you can yoke them and plow and sow with dragons like perfect power itself.
Most men, when they happen to catch a glimpse of some monster of their own depth, push it back into obscurity with disgust; from now on, the monster is even more restless and slowly cracks the wall. If you see one or another of your monsters, don't be disgusted and don't be afraid and don't lie to yourself, rather be glad that you recognized it; take care of it, because it is easy to tame and will become a good pet.
You basically don't have good or bad qualities. Your cultivated qualities are good; your nicknamed or neglected qualities are bad.
Think of life like a giant snake. If you keep it away from you, you can admire its dancing movements and the rhythmic pattern of its skin, and you can care for it and feed it. If you let it on you, it will wrap around you and you will no longer enjoy it, and it will not be fed by you, but by your flesh and blood.
Don't keep life away from you by hiding from it, because it creeps up on you unnoticed or crushes your hiding place unexpectedly. There is no escaping it, not even in death.
Keep life away from you in such a way that you can rule over it: as the snake charmer rules over the snake with his whistle music.
What music makes the snake of life tame and obey? which emanates from the naked, limitless soul, shedding its finite demands.
Neither in idle hermitage nor in activity can you conquer life; only in yourself, if you arrange your frail qualities so that they are adjusted to the perfect measure.
If you achieve this: your inactivity is also active, like a sunbeam; your activity is also idle, like the change of weather.
If you have separately recognized your unchanging base layer: your timeless, limitless being, in which lies the eternal measure; and its temporal, finite garment: your multi-faceted individuality, in which the occasional needs lie: it is your way to be guided by your eternal being and not by your ever-changing individuality.
Then you can recognize the true role of your individuality: only a signaling device that guides you in the world of phenomena. Desires will no longer be violent, but like marks on a map: how you adjust to them depends on your discretion, they are not demanding. Physical suffering no longer affects you: your body writhes and wails in any amount of agony, your being watches over and cares for you like a strange, sick animal. Hunger and thirst will no longer affect you, nor sensuality, nor joy and sorrow, nor the desire for knowledge: you perceive and repair the deficiencies of your body, your feelings, and your understanding as foreign as wrinkles, stains, and tears on your clothes, Everything that seems desirable in life: wealth, success, power, health, for you are no more than childhood toys for adults; it's not your cravings, but your situation that determines what to wear. Your eternal being desires nothing, not even salvation: it desires only as steam desires to rise and stone to fall: not according to its personal desire, but according to the law of its situation.
If you took the light source of your existence out of your individuality and placed it in your eternal being: you became invulnerable, you took your destiny into your hands. You can no longer be harmed, nor benefit, nor do you operate without the need for reward, just as the river rolls sand, brings fish to life, and carries a ship.
I traveled by train, third class. A nun took off with a lot of luggage: things she was taking to furnish a new children's shelter.
To the eye, there was nothing remarkable about him, but his being shone: he was no longer affected by earthly life, which did not prevent him from being more active than those who want a hundred and fifty from life.
Did I address you? Do you have all the packages? He thought about it and started counting: "One, two, three... eight, nine" then he pointed to himself: "ten". Even his own body was just baggage for him. This single-minded, helpless, absent-minded little servant has more power than all the weapons of the earth put together.
As soon as you no longer need pleasure: you will learn the way of uninterrupted pleasure and you will not live with it.
As soon as it doesn't matter how long you live: you learn the way of eternal life on earth and you don't live with it.
As soon as you realize that humanity does not need to be made happy, peaceful, and wise: you will find out the way to do this and you will not live with it.
All that seems most desirable: the strongest poison. It would throw the world to hell.
"As soon as you don't need it: everything is yours" - this is the inscription of the market hall of life.
The unchanging existence does not long for the changing life, nor does it hate it, but embraces it, like a nest, without feeling and yet with infinite love.
Just so, he who has placed his root from life to being; he does not rejoice over the progressive, he does not mourn the loser; does not wish to help anyone; he loves everything equally, without feeling and infinitely.
He praises without fanfare and criticizes without disgust, because every thing in life is ultimately neither good nor bad; nothing is different from anything else, only there are different sections of the road.
Do not suppress your bad tendencies, but polish them into good ones. Any harmful, sick, malicious tendency you come across: remember that the state of anything can be bad, but not its basic nature.
Do not reject anything from the outside world; do not hate, do not abhor, do not abhor. If you dislike something, it's a sign that you don't know it well enough. Everything that is dirty in the world is dirty only in relation to you and not in itself; pull yourself out of it and it is no longer dirt, but a neutral phenomenon.
If you ate soup from a plate, you say to the empty plate: dirty; and nothing sticks to it but the rest of the soup that you just ate. Manure is filth in the middle of the room, life force in the grain field. So it is with everything that seems clean or dirty; nothing is good or bad in itself, only according to its situation.
What is clear in relation to you: accept it; that which is unclean in relation to you: do not touch it; but love what belongs to you and what is untouchable equally. Don't hate, don't loathe, don't be disgusted. If you feel an aversion to something, this is a sign of your limited ability to understand on the one hand, and on the other hand, that the object of your aversion is also present in you in some form. Do you hate rich people? purify your desire for wealth and you will not hate. Do you hate women conquerors? purify your sensual desire and you will not hate. In such cases, you do not have to stigmatize the object of your dislike or try to improve it, but you should find its equivalent in yourself and refine it until the dislike dissipates within you.
Try to correct other people's mistakes only if you see this mistake clearly, without it being repulsive to you; and if you know for sure that your intervention is not an intrusion or a hopeless attempt.
Don't wish for anyone's love. Don't reject anyone's love.
May your love flow like the light and warmth of a fire: equally for everything. May those who come close to you receive more of your light and warmth than those who do not need you. Let your family members, everyday companions and those who turn to you be like the room they are assigned to heat to the stove.
Your love should not be like hunger, which greedily chooses between edible and inedible; but like the light that single-mindedly pours out on everything before it.
When your love begins to choose, it is no longer love, but a duality of longing and disgust. And this: the feeling that is more dangerous than anything these days; its sugary secretion anoints humanity.
Of all human emotions, sentimentality is the most miserable. You can love in one direction only when you hate in another direction; his affection smears with saliva, his hatred spits. It has no fixed measure, it measures everything by its own swirling formlessness; no matter where he turns, no good comes of it.
The most dangerous devil's marriage of the present time: The union of Mistress Sensuality and Mr. Propaganda. Whatever impossibility the propaganda wants to make accepted, it shapes it in such a way that the sentimentality of the crowd provokes emotion on the one hand, indignation on the other, and it has won the case.
Emotionality is a two-headed female: one head smiles sweetly and kisses eagerly, the other sheds tears, bites and gets dirty. Almost everyone now confuses his kissing head with goodness, love, morality, familiarity, taste, ideal spirit, and his biting head with law, law, retribution, and justice.
The disease of our time, the lack of spiritual ground and general confusion, originates from this: from the smile and tears of the two-headed beast. It did more harm than any other passion: it confused the common sense of humanity.