“The shared purpose for which we sustain, and give life to, our Waldorf kindergarten and school is to aid children in unfolding their individual capacities in the most effective way we can so that they grow into joyful, creative, free adults who stand up for themselves and for their inner values, who pay attention to one another, who feel with others and work alongside them―so that they become people who recognize their life’s purpose and carry it out.“
—The mission of a Waldorf school and kindergarten

When my son came of school age, my wife and I made the rounds of the nearby schools. I remember one of them. I sat listening to the principal as she projected photographs for the parents—pictures of the children they were proud of, the ones who had placed high in this or that academic competition, this or that sport. And what about the children they aren’t proud of? The question rose in me bitterly.

She went on. Here, she said, we work the children hard. And she offered an illuminating metaphor: here we will hammer the precious stones out of them.

Dear God. Do not let them beat the “good” out of my son! That was the cry inside me. And the moment most of the parents lifted their pens to write down enrollment details, I’ll admit, was the moment I set mine down. I had heard enough. I came away from the other elementary school presentations with much the same mixture of emotions: disappointment folded into outrage.

When we went to the local Waldorf school, I admit that I carried certain reservations with me. I had read all sorts of things online beforehand, for and against. “Let’s go anyway,” I told my partner. “Let’s feel this one from the inside for a while.”

At the Waldorf school, they spoke about how every age needs something different. A first grader, for instance, does not need to be reading and writing by the end of the year—and certainly not with the constant low hum of anxiety that the extra burden of expectation brings. A first grader needs warmth. Attention. Stories. Play, and more play, and running until the running is finished. And the child needs to learn how to be in a community with others.

Then I exchanged a few words with the teacher and, I’ll admit, I melted completely. A kind of firmness radiated from her, a strength. And with it, present in the same breath, a deep and encompassing love.

A few years later, we reformulated that school’s mission together, parents and teachers, side by side—and the result was the text cited above. I’m glad I could take part in this project because it clarified something in me: the quality I want a school to give to my children.

How much of what we wrote will become real? Time will tell. I still hold these things to be what matters, and I would not decide any differently today.

A great deal in Waldorf has astonished me. For example, in sixth grade, when they were studying the epic poem, Toldi―a national literary treasure written by one of our greatest poets, János Arany, in the 19^th century―there was an open lesson. The teacher arranged the children into groups of six. Each group was to build twelve tableaux―scenes taken from the epic poem and embodied like living snapshots―and present them to the class and to the parents. It was spontaneous. They had never done anything like this. Each group was given five minutes to work out the frozen scenes.

Every single group brought all twelve scenes to photographic life inside those five minutes. The harmony among them was astounding.

Afterwards, I thought about what I had experienced. If that task had been handed to us, adults, could we have agreed in five minutes on the roles and the shape of even one tableau?

I doubt it.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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Since Surya is synonymous with prana, Surya is the healer of every illness… They say that whoever performs surya namaskar — the sun salutation — twelve times a day, together with its breath rhythms and its mantras, will live a hundred years.
— Swami Veda Bharati, The Secrets of Kundalini Shakti

For many months now I have practiced the sun salutation intensively, and week after week it hands me some new and startling discovery. The whole of life is folded into this one sequence — every stage of it, every turn.

Birth is there. The blaze of adolescence is there. The value-creating work of adulthood is there. And so is the summing-up, the drawing out of what matters — which is the making of gold, the process alchemists called transmutation. Followed all the way through, it leads to the elixir of life: deep healing, and a return to the Light, to oneness.

Yoga is a path of direct experience; it is the living of it that counts. What follows is a brief sketch of how three ancient healing sciences — yoga, alchemy, and homeopathy — turn out to be describing the same thing.

You Can Heal from a Chronic Illness

The other day I overheard a distinguished older physician say to a colleague of his at Semmelweis University:

“Yes, as far as we know today, this particular disease is incurable. But you know — sometimes something simply happens, and the person gets well.”

That professor knew something important from long experience: modern medicine is nowhere near knowing everything about healing. A person keeps doing the work, and if they are moving in the right direction, one day they notice that something has changed. They have crossed a blockage. They have healed.

In The Spirit of Homeopathy, Dr. Rajan Sankaran argues that illness is at root a delusion — more precisely, that it arises from a mistaken perception of reality, a mistaken interpretation of what one has lived through, and the deep lodging of both. Anyone who genuinely heals another person has to take in the whole picture — physical, emotional, and mental — and understand on which plane the blockage actually occurred. That is the plane on which the patient needs help moving forward.

An opening consultation with a yoga therapist does what an opening homeopathic case-taking does: it brings the location of the blockage into focus, so the therapist knows where the person needs help. The tools differ. A broad-minded physician may recommend a change in lifestyle and good psychological support alongside medication. A homeopath looks for the remedy whose symptom picture matches the blockage. A yoga therapist prescribes a daily practice — asanas, pranayama (breath-linked energy work), and mantras (healing vibrations) — designed to carry that particular person past that particular block.

Healing is not a straight line. There are plateaus, and there are rapid shifts. You have to walk your chosen path with faith and persistence — faith, because every life situation is singular, and no one can say in advance how or when healing will arrive. There are signs along the way that show whether you are on the right track. Those signs do not always point to clear improvement; healing can even be accompanied by a temporary worsening. That is exactly why an experienced therapist matters — someone who can read the signs, encourage you onward, and adjust the remedy or the practice when it is needed.

In the same book, Sankaran quotes a very well-known homeopathic colleague who was once asked whether he had ever seen a case like this one before. “I certainly hope not!” the doctor answered.

Anyone who has dug deep enough into the art of healing knows there are no two similar cases. If a doctor or therapist wants to push you through a protocol built on the surface symptoms of your illness, my advice is to move on as soon as you can. The process of healing is every bit as singular and remarkable as your life.

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The Many-Layered Healing Power of the Sun Salutation

In this piece I want to introduce an ancient yoga technique with Vedic roots — one that spans the entire spectrum of human blockages and helps turn the wheel of life forward again. The sun salutation, surya namaskar, is not a protocol. It is an unusually effective instrument for uncovering and dissolving your own personal knot.

Many studies have been written about the sun salutation and its effects on health, some of them scientifically rigorous. One excellent book is Professor Krzysztof Stec’s Surya Namaskar, the product of decades spent studying the subject. Another fine short volume, now available in Hungarian as well, is Swami Satyananda’s book on the sun salutation.

The scientific research shows that the practice benefits the respiratory system: it flushes the entire lung field and raises the oxygen level of the blood (along with the CO₂ that helps the body take that oxygen up), which markedly increases the vitality of the whole organism — and its immunity, its power of resistance.

It is equally good for the heart and blood vessels. It improves the heart muscle’s supply of blood and oxygen, and so supports cardiac function, the regeneration of the heart muscle, and healthy circulation. The heart is a rhythm organ, and the sun salutation brings rhythm into a life.

But the heart does more than keep rhythm, and the sun salutation supports that too:

Neurocardiology, a young field, has discovered that 60 to 65 percent of the heart’s cells are not muscle cells but nerve cells. The heart forms a brain of its own, as Professor Stec puts it, citing researchers in the field. The heart’s nervous system, in other words, reflects an essential aspect of being human.

We are not made human only by thinking with our heads. We are made human by having emotions and relationships — and when we manage to bring those into balance, letting go of our preconceptions about conflict, we can turn toward others with compassion, and life becomes rich. That richness, the gold we are shaping, is built out of the energies that weave together in the space of the heart, and it is mirrored in everything around us.

The organs of the digestive system — home to another of our brains, since roughly a third of the nervous system attaches itself to the gut during fetal development — receive an intense massage during the sun salutation. Stagnation clears, and inflammatory processes can settle down.

Working on the gut-brain has another result. Rigid, visceral, often unconscious, suppressed patterns of anger and rage — the kind that consume enormous energy — can rise into awareness and dissolve at depth. This is fundamental to healing. Without the liberating experience of forgiveness, healing never really arrives.

Practiced properly and with persistence, the sun salutation harmonizes the entire endocrine system. It can restore a disrupted sleep cycle (pineal gland) and harmonize metabolic processes (thyroid), easing lethargy and fatigue. It affects blood-sugar balance, and it can be a particularly effective support for anyone living with type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance.

Inner Alchemy: Uncovering the Elixir of Life Within Yourself

Reading László Bóna’s Parallel Realities: The Foundations of Hermetic Homeopathy, I realized with a jolt that the whole of alchemy is contained in the sun salutation. Alchemy’s three foundational elements — salt, sulfur, and mercury — encode three very particular states of human being. Illness, according to Bóna, is when someone becomes stuck inside one of these states: in salt, which closes and isolates; or in sulfur, which burns and cannot restore the unity that once split apart within it.

This is the foundation of life itself. Separation, unification, and the rhythmic alternation of the two. Salt, sulfur, and mercury.
— László Bóna

Illness is itself the healing process — the one that eventually lets a person live that unity again at the deepest level. It is the felt experience of I am one, I am whole. And the word yoga means exactly that. Isn’t that interesting? Every form of yoga is trying to carry us back to that same unity, just as homeopathy is.

The seven operations of alchemy, I realized, are also contained in the sun salutation. These seven operations run parallel to different events in a life, to the different functional stages of a human life. What are they?

If someone gets stuck at, say, the fourth operation — homeopathic iron, ruled by Mars, the world of work — they burn out; they are consumed. This is the epidemic of our era, burnout syndrome. In the sun salutation, it is the phase embodied by the cobra pose (bhujangasana). When we move forward in the sequence, we help that burning phase along.

That brings us to the fifth stage, where we are meant to distill the essence — the extract of everything we have built, everything that is truly of value in our lives. This is homeopathic tin (and the group of remedies related to it), the phase of Jupiter. As Bóna writes: “Multiply what has value, and hold back what does not.” Someone who gets stuck here, unable to make a fundamental shift in perspective and see the essence of their own life, may develop something like a tumor, or some kind of wasting process.

When we move forward in the sun salutation from cobra into downward-facing dog (adho mukha svanasana) and on into the next pose, what fundamentally changes is our vantage point — and with it, the character of the life-energy waking inside us. The transformation of the whole person follows from that, from how the organs function to how we relate to other people. Because everything that surrounds us is also us.

The Levels of the Sun Salutation

Every life situation and every illness is mirrored in the body as its own particular pattern of tightness and inflexibility. The practice always has to be fitted to the situation at hand, so that the basic effect of each stage — the prana, the life-energy set moving by breath and motion — is genuinely stimulated, while the stage itself stays easy and pain-free to perform. That takes substantial yoga experience, whether you have built it up over years of your own practice or a skilled teacher or yoga therapist guides you to the way of practicing that is right for you.

Level One

If you are a beginner and do not yet know the movements and the breath rhythm, learn those first. In the beginning, hold each pose for several breath cycles and find the way of performing it that stays pain-free and light. Practice slowly, holding each stage — until you can perform the movements in sync with the breath.

Level Two

At Level Two, the breath is already leading the movement, and the motion is smooth and flowing. Attention rests fully on the sensations of the body and on the breath. At this point you can add attention to the individual chakras, the centers of life-energy, and experience how they work — what they set in motion in your body, and in your life as a whole.

Level Three

At Level Three, attention goes beyond sensation onto the spiritual plane. Every sensation, every current of energy mirrored in the body, reflects a spiritual influence: the activity of a deva or devi. These are the spiritual beings at work in the events of our daily lives, shaping our experience and our lives. At this level the mantras that address them come into play, and their vibration penetrates deep into the realm of the unconscious. This is the level at which you reach the layer where the blockages of the illness state live — and where healing and release are born.

A companion resource maps out the levels of the sun salutation in full — the movements, breath, chakras, mantras, and alchemical correspondences for each stage. It is available here.

You will only come to feel the healing power of this practice, though, by practicing daily, with persistence and faith, over a long stretch of time. The whole sequence is beautifully framed by a mantra from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (I.iii.28):

Which we might render as:

There is a lovely musical setting of this mantra in Kevin James’s song on the same theme; it is worth seeking out:

From yoga’s point of view, the purpose of a human life is to walk your own dharma, your own path, with as little suffering and as much joy as possible. As you walk it, the bonds of karma loosen step by step, and you come to feel greater freedom, ease, and happiness — in yourself and in the world around you.

Change in an individual life is always born through practice. The real question was never whether you practice daily: every fixed life situation, every chronic condition, already rests on years — often decades — of practice. The real question is what you practice every day, and whether you are willing to practice something different, so that things can actually change.

Chakras, the Sun, and Inner Alchemy: the sun salutation sequence will be at the center of this autumn’s retreat, built to lead you toward a deep and inspiring experience, and toward the vast, uplifting, deeply healing feeling of oneness.

Sources

1. Rajan Sankaran, The Spirit of Homeopathy. Homoeopathic Medical Publishers, 1991.

2. Krzysztof Stec, Suryanamaskar: Sun Salutations.

3. Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Surya Namaskara: A Technique of Solar Vitalization. Yoga Publications Trust, Bihar, India, 2009.

4. László Bóna, Párhuzamos valóságok: A hermetikus homeopátia alapjai [Parallel Realities: The Foundations of Hermetic Homeopathy]. Vis Vitalis, 2019. In Hungarian.

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“Merely reading the Gospels can no longer bring you into real contact with the Christ-being—only with a Christ-hallucination.”
—Rudolf Steiner, as rendered by Péter Takáts, Anthroposophical Papers 25

Some years back, we were invited to a friend’s church wedding. It was an unusual ceremony: two priests celebrated Mass because the bride and the groom belonged to different Christian denominations.

As I listened, turning my attention inward and feeling the vibration of the psalms and the rhythm of the liturgy, it came to me all at once: this, too, was yoga. The very same thing I was taking in through my senses was happening inside me—currents gathering strength in my energy body, my awareness expanding, the lift, and then the connection to the Christ-being flaring into light, and through that light, God becoming something I could actually experience.

The two priests were present in entirely different ways from one another, and they spoke differently. The young one was eloquent and said a great deal. He quoted heavy hitter passages of Scripture with fluency; his words were easy to follow, his reasoning clean. And yet—and here came the shock—the longer I attended to him, the more my sense of being connected, my link to the Christ-being and to God, began to fade.

The older priest carried a wholly different quality. He shaped his words with difficulty, which I put down to his age. He said much less. And I’ll admit that he was hard to follow with the left brain, the thread of his thought breaking… and breaking again… the sense of what he was saying slipping just out of reach. Yet as he spoke and as I listened to him―and listened inward―my upward connection brightened, then blazed. This man could truly help those attending to him find their way to Christ.

I turned all this over in my mind afterwards: how could it be that the young priest so plainly could not render that kind of help? He had celebrated many Masses. He was practiced. He was no beginner.

And how many people in that church knew they were standing in the presence of Christ? How many of us caught the staggering difference between the way those two men communicated?

Is Steiner right, then—that for a person of this age of the world, it is no longer enough to hear the teaching of the Gospels, it is no longer enough to go to church? At the time of the apostles, and for a few hundred years afterwards, he says, it worked otherwise: other forces still carried the original impetus. Today, that is not enough. Step out of a church, or out of a deep yoga class, and the spin of the world, its vibration, its polarity, all but sweeps you off your feet.

As the old priest came out of the church and stood in the doorway, our eyes met. From that glance I knew that he knew I had noticed.

We smiled at each other.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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“The initiation is achieved when the master touches the iron of the disciple’s consciousness with his own light—the philosopher’s stone.”
—Swami Veda Bharati: Mantra and Meditation, the Levels of Initiation

Jeshua of Nazareth was initiated by Johanan—John the Baptist—at the banks, and in the water, of the Jordan River. The apostles were initiated by Jeshua, Jesus the Christ, himself.

Without initiation, every spiritual practice remains only preparation. And preparation matters enormously—clearing the energy system, quieting the mind, slowly refining the inner instrument. Without it, initiation cannot fully unfold. But preparation is not the thing itself. It is the ground made ready for a seed.

During initiation, the initiating master submerges himself in Christ consciousness and directs the energies of that consciousness towards you—making it possible, however faintly, for you to become aware of that connection. To perceive more of the world than what your eyes can see or your ears can hear. This is the inner experience of the Holy Spirit, the living presence that Jesus the Christ left behind to guide us. Through initiation, you become awake to his signal.

The practice of Kriya strengthened something in me, and it did so fairly quickly: a capacity that has become one of the most reliable tools I possess for navigating situations where the rational mind simply cannot make a decision. I hold one possible path in my awareness, then another—and I feel them at the crown of my head. There comes a subtle pull, a sense of alignment―or its absence. Which direction the pull guides me towards, which road opens, is in accord with God’s own design.

Free will remains, of course. I can always choose otherwise. Also, the clarity of the signal depends on the question being asked.

Once, for instance, we took a long family hike up Nagy-Hideg-Hegy—Big Cold Mountain. The children were small. By the time we reached the top, they were exhausted. So was I—I had carried them on my shoulders in turns the whole way up. A rickety little bus still ran in those days, ferrying hikers up and down the mountain, and we were relieved to see it waiting there.

But the driver looked at us with uncertain eyes and finally admitted what was wrong: the rear right tire was flat. No spare. If we were willing to sit on the left side of the bus, he would try to ease us down the mountain.

My wife’s eyes went wide. She leaned close and whispered:

“Now—go inside.”

I nodded. I posed the question to myself, quietly and directly: Will we get down safely? And I felt the answer rise.

“We can go,” I said, with a steadiness that surprised even myself.

We boarded. The bus lurched forward and began its slow, jolting descent.

Somewhere along the way down, I found myself turning the question over in my mind: What does “safely” actually mean? Does it mean arriving at the bottom alive, unharmed? Or—given that we are, at the deepest level, immortal souls—are we not always, in some sense, safe?

The inner perception cultivated through Kriya would come to play a far greater role in my life years on, when I would stumble upon the Virgo–Pisces pilgrimage route—and through it, the Grail hidden in the high Börzsöny Mountains, not far from Big Cold Mountain, the mountain where the bus had carried us down on three wheels and on the power of a question answered from that mysterious, nondual place…

You can find here the next Bead.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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“The greatest of human discoveries in the future will be the discovery of human intimacy with all those other modes of being that live with us on this planet, inspire our art and literature, reveal that numinous world whence all things come into being, and with which we exchange the very substance of life.”

— Thomas Berry: The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

The Commute

I watched people today, riding to work and riding home again. Almost every one of them was stroking the glass of a phone. The rest had earbuds pressed in, listening to something, gazing out from somewhere behind their own eyes. And underneath, all the while, the day kept surfacing in them: errands, family logistics, the conversation that has to happen, the low hum of worry — and desire too, rising here and there, then typed into a search bar before it has finished forming. Those who don’t ride the train in sealed silence sit sealed and silent in their cars instead, inching through the same traffic they were in yesterday.

A person can live months this way. Years, even, without once meeting a tree or any other wonder the world is quietly making.

Trees, if they register at all, are scenery — no more consequential than a lamppost. And so he is cut off from everything that is alive. From the birds. From the rain and the wind. From the light that comes down green through leaves. From the pulse of the thing itself.

And therefore from other people. And therefore from himself.

“From myself? From each other? Come on.”

All right. I understand.

The ego is very good at identifying itself. I am this body — heavy or thin, muscled or not. I am the one who likes to dress this way, with makeup or without. I have a partner, or I don’t. These people are my friends. Oh, and I have 938 friends on Facebook, 2,345 followers on Instagram and nearly as many on TikTok. I make a dozen calls a day, answer several dozen emails, hundreds of messages across Messenger and WhatsApp and whatever else. Me — cut off? From myself, from other people, from life? We go out for a beer in the evening. We hit the beach in summer. Once a month at least we go dancing. And there’s sex, more often or less often, but there. Isolated. What on earth are you talking about?

Yes. You’ve got me there.

Here is the trouble. The moment I step inside another person’s point of view, I take on something of its frequency. And you cannot lift a person’s life energy — or their awareness — by explaining a different point of view to them.

Which Is Why You Cannot Explain It to the Logger

You cannot explain to a logger what is wrong with cutting the trees. There are plenty of them, aren’t there — and he looks around the forest, and from where he stands he is right. Tell him that every day a forest vanishes as wide as everything his eye can reach, and he might answer: sure, but the Earth is big.

Tell him that the eighty-year-old beech he has just brought down, the one thick as a man’s waist, will clear the operation about two dollars. He might be surprised for a moment. Then he would shrug. As long as they pay me, that isn’t my problem.

And he isn’t wrong.

The Stable Self

Now you’ve wandered off the subject — I can almost hear the fair rebuke. We were saying: nonsense, we are not isolated from one another; the city is teeming with life, quite the opposite!

Here is how it stands. Everything around you — your real relationships and your virtual ones, your work, your clothes, your haircut — all of it serves one thing: the stable self you want to be.

You might add that you take care of your inner life too. You see an energy worker. You have your chart read now and then, or, if you’re more conventional, you see a therapist. You do yoga. You meditate. You go to church. You go to festivals with drums and sage. But this is also part of the self-identification, and the wish underneath is identical: if I have identified myself as someone walking a spiritual path, let it stay that way. Isn’t that so?

When I am sick, of course I want to be well — but only while it hurts, only while it is inconvenient. Think how many people swallow handfuls of medication that will make them sicker still. That my relationships keep wounding me, that I am almost never comfortable in my own skin, that I am full of unrest and tension, that my life is threaded through with addictions — that is less interesting.

If I carry anger toward others, if I have injuries, if I have stalled somewhere on the road, then it may be that I am preserving my wounds with the very instruments I chose in order to be carried past them. Because that is how I stay stable and unchanged. Intact, with all my problems, my restlessness, my conflicts, my visible and invisible fears.

The Taboo

But life is not static. Life shapes itself, moves, keeps becoming. In the human world this only becomes visible when life forces us to acknowledge the change we cannot bargain with — when the system the ego believed was solid shudders and begins to come apart.

And it does come apart. Necessarily.

Here we arrive at something we do not talk about. We are going in anyway, because there is enormous lift in it.

So: whatever I do — yoga, meditation, prayer — sooner or later I will get sick. Illness is part of life; there is no avoiding it. Or someone close to me will get sick. A marriage will shudder and fall apart. Someone I loved will die.

And by the way — have you noticed that a life is like a flash of light? However old you are, look back and the whole of it is one flash. That is how your life passes.

And then you are lying on your deathbed. Perhaps you have thirty breaths left, perhaps a few hundred. By now you know that no doctor, no miracle-working healer, no friend can help you. What is left of your rich web of relationships, your possessions, your well-tended body, which is now preparing to stop?

That moment is an honest moment.

When the Doppelgängers Withdraw

In the last days the doppelgängers withdraw — those forces that ruled our nature and held us inside the ego’s narrow trap, the ones that worked so hard to convince us that life consists of meeting expectations at home and at work, of the endless exchange of messages, of the spin. All of it goes.

Two or three days before death the doppelgängers dissolve. It is a very honest moment.

And then the thing you always suspected, the thing that stirred at the edge of your awareness, comes clear.

What do you find there?

I am alone, and I am desperate. Or something else entirely. Oh yes — this is the spaciousness the trees showed me so many times, when the forest gathered me in again and again. Oh yes — this is the lightness, the soaring, the joy I stepped into every morning in meditation.

One person meets loneliness, hopelessness, disappointment, rage, panic; the soul lives through all of it. Another meets peace, joy, lightness, release, the experience of being one with Life.

And the whole of it turns on what you practiced during your flash of a life, or during the flashes of your life. What you gave your attention to, again and again.

No technical discovery, no convenience, no new device changes this. Intimacy with trees, with forest, with the living world does. Living the whole of life does. That intimacy carries you into a new experience of being alive: the experience of spaciousness. It tunes you to the waves of joy that carry you through the hard passages. And when the time comes, it carries you through the gate of death as well.

The Earth’s Doppelgängers

The Prophecies from the Future continue below…

Everything I write here are mostly free to read. But if it ever meant something to you, you can buy me a cup of tea. That cup is more than tea. It’s the small, warm signal that someone out there is reading — and it keeps me writing.

So I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep showing you the world from one more angle, and then another. I hope it serves you. I hope it brings you joy.

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“I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.”
—John 14:6

The science of Kriya yoga belongs to no single tradition. It can be practiced by a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew, a Muslim—or by someone who walks no religious path at all. What the practice does is elemental: it raises your energy and expands your awareness.

As awareness rises and as the third eye begins to open, duality dissolves slowly. The hard verdict of good and evil—that constant, exhausting binary—starts to loosen its grip on your mind. You begin to see past the conflict, past the opposition of things. As long as you perceive the world only through two physical eyes, duality reigns. That is the nature of that kind of seeing through two eyes.

But in the state of consciousness that the single third eye makes possible—what might be called Christ consciousness—something else appears. Beyond objects, beyond forms, beyond persons, a kind of Luminosity begins to shine. A unity makes its presence felt. This is the presence of the Father. And when you return from that state, when you come back from meditation into the world of opposites, something comes with you: a deep peace, a stillness that does not immediately fade. The afterglow of having touched something real lingers on.

This is how I understand it now.

Christ is not a person. Christ is a spiritual being—present, existing here, now. And Christ is, at the same time, a state of consciousness: one in which that Christ beingness can be received, directly experienced, known from the inside.

Jesus was a person who attained Christ consciousness—and through that attainment, he received Christ beingness into himself. The quality of the Son permeated his entire nature. And in that permeation, he became one with the Father, with God.

None of this is the exclusive property of any religion.

Kriya is not a dogma—it is no mere opinion handed down to be accepted on faith. It is a technique. It is a method that leads to your own direct experience of these things, so that the understanding that arises is not borrowed from anyone else. Christ consciousness becomes something you arrive at, not something you are told about and believe in without your own corroboration.

No one claims this is the only path.

Nor do I find any contradiction in the words of Jesus the Christ when he says: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” If you were raised in a different tradition, the inner experience of the Christ being might carry a different name—Krishna, perhaps, or something else entirely. But a name is only a name. The experience it points to, the spiritual being that reveals itself at a certain depth of consciousness, remains the same, no matter the name.

Kriya is among the most powerful yoga techniques I have encountered. But power alone is not enough. For Christ consciousness to truly cultivate itself—for the peace that becomes available through this practice to deepen into something that changes the texture of a life—daily practice is required.

And the initiation, I believe, is where all this begins. Initiation is not optional: it is the gateway.

You can find the next Bead here.

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If you haven't read the previous part yet, I highly recommend starting there—it provides the context for what follows. You can find it here.

“…Send me, at the right moment, someone who has the courage and the love to speak the truth… I know that many problems resolve themselves simply by doing nothing. Help me learn to wait.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Prayer

Money is a strange thing.

Hava—the woman who had taught me nonviolent communication—told me once that money was simply a form of energy. And, like all energy, it serves us best when it flows. When it moves, it can help everyone meet their needs: food, shelter, rest, connection—all the way up to the spiritual because even a course, even training, requires payment and that payment is what makes the course possible in the first place.

I knew all this. I knew that the initiating master had traveled here from abroad. I knew someone had paid for his lodgings, for the rental of the hall, for two full days of teaching. I knew it, and I understood it.

And still—that envelope. Those twenty thousand forints―sixty-four dollars. Something in me had snapped.

I turned the experience over and over in my mind for a long time afterwards, genuinely puzzled at my own reaction. I already knew, for instance, that Vipassana meditation retreats run entirely on dana—voluntary offerings made by students. Lodgings, meals, the teacher’s travel expenses: all of it had to be covered by what people chose to give. Globally, the amount is always left entirely to the student. In Hungary, though, it works differently. Leave the sum unspecified, and the retreat will be guaranteed to run a deficit. Without a separate appeal for specific donations, the next one may never happen at all.

So the interpreter—even if his words weren’t a precise translation of what the Swami had actually said—had read the room correctly. He knew the local terrain.

I told myself with quiet sadness that this train had left without me. But, as is so often the case, life would arrange things differently.

A few years later, I was enrolled in the yoga teacher training program at the Hungarian Yoga Academy. I had already been teaching Hatha yoga, and I wanted to do it with greater depth, assuming greater responsibility. The training demanded that I make my daily practice intensive—because in yoga, you can only teach with real integrity what you carry inside yourself, what you have genuinely lived.

I believe it was that practice—intense, purifying, rearranging something deep in the structure of my being—that brought on a strange dream one night.

An old yogi came to me in a boat.

He said several important things. He spoke in Hungarian—and yet I understood not a single word. What did come through though, clearly and without question, was who he was.

My dream visitor was Shri Yukteshwar, one of the great Kriya masters, Yogananda’s own teacher.

I told my yoga master, Ferenc Szép, about the dream. Feri studied my face for a moment.

“Well, ” he said. “That’s the kind of thing Yukteshwar does.”

A brief silence. Then:

“Maybe it would be worth going for an initiation.”

And so I was there at the next one—this time, with a resolve that nothing could shake. Whatever the Swami said. Whatever the interpreter translated. It no longer mattered. Something had awakened in me that the yogis call iccha-shakti—the force of will, the power of true intention. I wanted this initiation with my whole being, without any reservations, without any conditions.

I think I owe that interpreter a debt of gratitude for his “mistranslation,” for the fuse he had blown inside me.

It was that moment—that small, jarring rupture—that had triggered the final period I needed to ripen, to become someone who was ready at last, ready all the way.

Here you can find the next Bead.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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One drop.

The water opened into widening rings,
and from those trembling circles
Linn rose,
lifting a tiny bowed instrument
to the silence.

She played.

She simply played.

I sit beside an old oak,
the two of us
woven into the same water.

I wonder...

The oak may stand here
for another thousand years.

Linn was given
only a single heartbeat of time—
just long enough
to pour her whole symphony
into the world.

How much time
has been given to me?

Do you remember Avatar?

The blue Na’vi
braided themselves into Eywa,
and through her,
into every living being.

We are no different.

Beneath everything,
there is a hidden current.

An unseen lattice
of shining drops
gathers life into itself.

It reaches the water creature.

It reaches the oak.

It reaches me.

A quiet connection,
so delicate
it escapes the eye,
yet never the heart.

That is how
I hear Linn’s little instrument.

That is how
I feel the oak’s slow heartbeat,
one deep pulse
every two hours.

That is how
the forests breathe inside me,
how the oceans remember me,
how every living being
finds a home
within my own breath.

If you raise a pyramid—
of stone,
of wood,
or simply
within your own mind—

the world
leans closer.

The silence
grows deeper.

The current
grows stronger.

And here,

inside this healing current,

I listen

to Linn’s music.

“Protect me from the naïve belief that life is supposed to go smoothly…”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Prayer

Yogananda writes in Autobiography of a Yogi that in the nineteenth century, the time had finally come—after thousands of years of careful concealment—for a hidden knowledge to flow back into the world. Humanity had ripened for it. The Kali Yuga, the dark age, had run its course.

This knowledge, he says, does not arrive from outside. It is born within each person. The practice of kriya is what tends that birth—it is a discipline that opens the door to perception beyond the ordinary senses, and makes it possible to bring a wider, deeper, perspective into our choices, our actions, our days.

I became intensely curious about the kriya technique. So I decided to attend one of the initiations. What that actually meant—I had no idea. And I wouldn’t, for quite some time.

What happened was this: during the introductory talk given by the initiating master, something was said that blew every fuse I had.

The talk itself pointed to things that mattered deeply to me. It drew a picture—vivid, unsettling, and true—of how most of us move through our lives the way dust motes move through a beam of light. Jostled from every direction by rushing molecules, perpetually in motion, going nowhere. Brownian motion. If you watch it long enough, you understand: the particles only buzz and scatter. They never actually arrive anywhere.

That, the talk suggested, is how most of us live.

We spend this extraordinarily precious allotment of time, this one life—and we scatter most of our energy in every direction at once. We tell ourselves we’re moving forward: we have the house, the car, the family—or we don’t yet, and so we spin and strive to get them. But all of it falls away in the moment of our dying. We wave the thought off easily enough. That’s far away. Why worry now. And even as we say it, somewhere inside we know it isn’t true. So we bury our heads and plunge back into the hum of ordinary days.

The older I get, the more clearly I see it: a lifetime is a flash. No matter how many years I’ve lived, looking back it feels like nothing more than that. And at the moment of my death, I believe, I will understand with perfect clarity that it really was.

The talk before the initiation opened something in me. It made me want to give my days a direction—to make it, make each breath I take, mean something.

An initiation, I was beginning to understand, is not merely a ceremony. It is a decision. A decision to give your life a center—and for those who practice kriya, that center is God: the direct, living experience of the divine within oneself and beyond oneself, and the intention to bring one’s actions into alignment with that. The initiating masters commit to supporting that journey, fully and unconditionally.

Then Swami Mangalananda moved on to the practical details of the following morning’s initiation. As an offering, he said, we should bring a few pieces of fruit, a few flowers—and a small monetary donation, which the interpreter rendered as follows:

“And bring twenty thousand forints in an envelope.”

That was it. That was the thing that blew my every fuse.

I stood up. And I walked out of the room—quietly, slowly—carrying nothing but disappointment.

You can find the next Bead here.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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“Yet the Kingdom is within you and without you. If you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father.”
—The Gospel of Thomas (apocryphal), 2; cf. Luke 17:20–21

Once I was driving in North-East Hungary, from Aggtelek to Debrecen, for a work meeting. It was dawn. Fog. It was the kind of raw autumn morning that makes the world feel flimsy and tenuous.

Then boom! From around a bend, a massive wild boar came crashing out of the dark.

I yanked the wheel to swerve the car.

And that single movement touched off an avalanche of lightning events. As of that instant, I was no longer the one driving—no longer the one in charge of anything. The car reeled around every axis it had. The tires blew off their rims. Along with the car, I spun, rolled, tumbled helplessly like a piece of luggage, flipping upside down, swinging back around, and coming to rest—finally, definitively—nose down in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.

The seatbelt had held. Even when inverted, it had held me.

I unfastened it. I pried open a door and crawled out. Then I simply sank down to the roadside.

And I just sat there looking at the crumpled wreck of what had been my car, and only then—slowly, in waves of incoming awareness catching up with the rest of me—did I begin to understand what had just happened. Only then did my pulse start to climb. I had walked away from a hellacious crash without a single scratch. The officers who arrived on scene told me I had been extraordinarily lucky.

I didn’t disagree.

But somewhere deep down, in a wordless space, I just knew that luck had nothing to do with it.

Later on, someone gave me advice to the effect that you should never yank the wheel if an animal runs out in front of you. “You didn’t know that?” they pressed. Honestly—I had not. Somehow, that particular scenario hadn’t made it into my driving routine. But I found myself thinking: What if it had been a person? Do you just mow them down by the book? I wanted to ask. Instead, I said nothing. I folded the words away and kept them.

A year or two―maybe three―later, we were living in a different part of the country. I was driving home from a yoga class. Autumn again. Darkness. Fog.

And out of that fog, a great antlered stag materialized.

He stood on the road in my lane, gazing directly into my headlights.

I had maybe one second. One second to think and act.

I believe what made it possible for me to act correctly in that fraction of a second was that I had just come from yoga. There was a deep stillness, a calm, clear wakefulness inside me.

The stag was standing right there. I was hurtling toward him. He lifted his head.

My hands were already pulling on the wheel—instinct firing before thought—when something broke through: Go straight.

I stopped my pulling movement and held the car in its lane. Hit the brakes. The anti-lock system stuttered and chattered beneath my feet.

In the last tenth of a second before impact, the stag leaped. He launched himself off the hood of the car, pushed off the metal, and cleared the vehicle entirely.

The hood was completely crushed. But the windshield didn’t shatter. And I think—I have to believe—the stag survived.

I walked away from that one, too. Again, without a scratch.

When the rush finally drained out of me, what settled in its place was not anger. Not relief. It was something deeper—a gratitude that filled all the space that fear had left behind.

I could have raged. I could have cursed whatever force had seen fit to wreck my car twice. I could have chalked it up to luck, or shrugged and moved on.

But that’s not how I saw it.

What I saw, sharply and undeniably, was a sheltering presence. Something that watches. Something that holds you.

Within a single lifetime, I got to be born a second time.

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“Returning to the walls: physics maintains that the walls could contain anything. Anything at all—until we look. To be certain that the wall holds nothing but concrete and rebar and gravel, as you said, we must first rule out the possibility that something else might be there. And there is only one way to do that: drill a hole and look inside.”

Slumped in the armchair, I stared at the colors of the TV. Whatever was on, by the time it reached my brain it had dissolved into a kind of kaleidoscopic blur. In recent weeks I’d been knocked out like this more and more often. At first I blamed the heat, which I detest with my whole being, but eventually I had to admit it was the sleeplessness. Years ago it never bothered me to work through the night; sometimes I’d go the whole night without lying down and barely feel the weight of fatigue by morning. Now it was as if someone had scooped out my brain. I poured myself a little more beer, then drank it off in a single pull. The leaden tiredness slowly surrendered to a pleasant tingling that spread through my entire body, warming it from within.

Melinda—my wife—sat beside me on the armchair’s arm, her legs half-drawn up. The flickering light of the TV illuminated the fine lines of her face. A thousand tiny sparks chased each other around her half-parted lips and small turned-up nose. The longer I looked at that angelic face, the more I felt the last traces of fatigue dissolving. She was clearly being swept away by the film. Melinda’s face was a perfect mirror of her emotions.

Over the years something like an accord had developed between us—an uncanny sensitivity to each other’s most hidden, most tangled feelings. A singular experience of merging, of becoming one. I caught myself playing a game: watching only her face, the movement of her eyes, the dynamic of wrinkles appearing and fading, trying to guess what was actually happening on the screen. Of course it didn’t work—it was a stupid idea. A few minutes later Mel noticed I was watching her. She turned to me slowly, flashed a smile—the particular smile she knew exactly what it did to me. Then she reached for the beer bottle on the tray, poured the last of it into the glass, and returned to the film. She did all of it with her usual naturalness and grace. Magnificent. I know some people would call this abnormal, but ever since I met Mel, I have fallen deeper in love with this woman—and the fact that we’ve been married nearly five years has not changed that by a single degree.

The film ended quickly. Mel stood and stretched with long arms. She drifted to the fireplace and laid two large logs on the languidly burning fire. She took up the poker and with practiced ease revived the energy smoldering in the embers. Then she set the poker back in its place and turned toward me with her slow, floating step, unbraiding her hair as she came, its dark, curly waves beating against her shoulders. I’d been barely containing myself for the past two minutes, but I knew Mel liked it when I waited, when I let her enchant me as completely as possible.

⁂

I dreamed I was mowing grass, but the lawnmower had no off switch and I could never stop. I mowed the lawn in front of our house three times over. Then the neighboring yards. Then the turf of a nearby stadium. And on and on. It was horrific. I couldn’t stop because I couldn’t turn the machine off. I’d already reached the distant hillside pastures when a terrible fear seized me. What if I’d mowed every blade of grass in the world and there was none left to cut? A terrifying prospect. So terrifying that it clawed me up through the surface of sleep. I woke.

It was five in the morning.

And someone was drilling.

The whole building rang with the impact drill’s racket. I stared blankly ahead for long minutes, thick with sleep, trying to rub the last shreds of the dream from my eyes. It was simply, absolutely unbelievable that someone would start drilling a wall at five o’clock on a Saturday morning.

For the past month—ever since the new neighbor above us moved in—this nerve-shredding drill noise had been a daily fixture, going almost without pause. But until now at least he’d drilled in the morning or the afternoon, maybe a little in the evening. Not at dawn. For God’s sake. A man drags himself home dead tired from work, thinks: finally, Saturday, a decent sleep. But no. This idiot drills straight into Saturday morning.

The drilling stopped. Thank God, I thought. I stumbled out of bed. Mel was sleeping peacefully—visibly untouched by the noise. I figured since I was up, I’d make myself a good hot coffee and crawl back to bed beside her with a book for a few hours. In the kitchen I rummaged out the milk, poured a generous mugful, threw it in the microwave, and when it came out, spooned in two scoops of instant coffee. I was fighting with the sugar jar when the drilling started again. It hit me with such force that the sugar bowl dropped from my hands and coated the entire kitchen in a fine white layer. I was on the edge of a meltdown. I couldn’t believe that drilling couldn’t wait a few more hours if it absolutely had to happen.

I charged into the bedroom, threw on the clothes I’d left on the floor the night before, and stormed out of the apartment. Up one floor. I found the door and started pounding it with my fist—full force. With each blow, though, I noticed something strange: my rage was evaporating. By the time the neighbor opened—and I had been hammering for a good two minutes by then—I was perfectly calm. The anger had simply vanished. I was almost at the point of being ashamed of myself for causing such a scene over a little drilling. Then I remembered the sugar scattered across the kitchen, which I would probably have to clean up. That steadied me. A scrap of the earlier fury returned.

“Can I help you with something?” asked the middle-aged face that appeared in the gap of the door.

“Yes, you can. Look, I’m your downstairs neighbor. If you absolutely must drill, would you please do me the kindness of not starting at the crack of dawn? Sir, it’s past five in the morning. Do you have any idea what kind of unholy racket you make with that thing? Besides, you’ve been drilling more regularly than I go to the bathroom. What are you preparing for up here? An art exhibition or what?” I burst out.

“Delighted to meet you,” said the neighbor, extending his hand. “And I apologize. You’re right,” he sighed. “I confess it never even crossed my mind that it might bother anyone. But don’t stand out there in the hallway—come in for a few minutes. We can talk more comfortably inside.” He drew the front door wide open.

I was just about to decline when my eyes caught the room visible through that open door. I tried to say something, but the sight was so shocking that not a single sound made it out of my throat. Staggering. The floor was buried everywhere under a thick layer of concrete dust. The fine powder was crisscrossed with footprints. It was as though this were not a room with carpet and parquet and all the trappings of normal life, but rather the surface of Mars—coated in an ancient, fine-grained dust carelessly trampled by the first astronauts—or as if the room stood at the heart of the Sahara and bore the traces of last night’s sandstorm in every corner. Along the baseboards and in the angles of the room lay chunks of broken plaster and concrete, and scores of shattered, worn-down drill bits. But it was the walls that were most staggering.

The first image that flashed through my mind as I stepped, reluctant and yet entirely hypnotized by the strangeness, through the doorway: I was inside a giant block of cheese. Emmental. No—the holes in that are too big. Something else. Edam, whatever. Hundreds and thousands of holes. Completely random. Everywhere. I found the whole thing so inexplicably compelling that I smiled involuntarily. It was simply magnificent—someone moves into a new apartment and, through a month of stubborn labor, drills the entire thing to pieces.

“Ah, the apartment—yes, I imagine it’s a shock,” said the neighbor, reading the undisguised astonishment on my face. “I know it looks unbelievable at first glance. But believe me, I have good reason for perforating the walls this… thoroughly,” he added.

What was unsettling about the whole thing was that when I actually spoke to the man, he seemed perfectly normal. Everything would have been different if, while saying these words, he’d been waving around a massive drill, gunning the motor for emphasis, and grinning some idiot-wide grin—or something of that nature. But the guy appeared completely sane, setting aside the disturbing fact that he’d been systematically perforating his apartment for the past several weeks.

“Look, it’s really none of my business what you do with your own apartment, but this… this is a little staggering,” I admitted in a slightly halting voice.

The man steered me into a small room he apparently used as a dining room. There was noticeably less dust here than in the others—presumably because he vacuumed it from time to time. Even so, as far as I could judge, this room was no less riddled with holes than the previous one. I sat down, dizzy, in the offered chair. The wall-drilling man disappeared into the kitchen for a moment and returned bearing a small silver tray with two inviting cups of coffee steaming on it. I looked at him gratefully, took one, and sipped slowly. I was coming back to life. I even felt good—despite the concrete dust that steamed from everything around me, rivaling the coffee. While we drank, we were both silent. As if there were something between us that we each preferred to keep discreetly quiet—as if speaking might wake the demons of the walls, who in these riddled rooms could be loosed upon us with ease.

“But why?” I asked, setting down the empty cup, breaking the silence that had settled over us.

“Why I’m drilling the walls with such… uhm… enthusiasm?” he said. “Do you think if I didn’t have to drill, if I could do something else, if there were any other way—I’d be drilling walls? You have no idea what an exhausting, oppressive labor this is. You have no idea what I feel in the moments when I’m not drilling. The spiritual torment I go through. And when I am drilling, that maddening uncertainty about whether I’ll find something… The tension that nearly splits my skull. That sits on me and constricts me and holds me captive. Every single night I’m dead tired, and even at night I can’t rest. I dream of drilling. In my sleep I continue what I stopped in the evening, and in the morning, waking, I have to start again. And it goes on like this, relentless and merciless, and it’s slowly grinding me down entirely.”

“But why do you do it at all? Why not live like any other person? Why do you have to drill—what do you hope to achieve by turning your apartment into a Swiss cheese?” I asked, some genuine sympathy now in my voice.

“I’m looking for something,” he said, and in his eyes there appeared a strange, deep-seated pain—like looking down into a well; the depth full of cold and moisture and dread.

“Looking for something?” I said, incredulous. “And you expect to find it in the walls?”

“I never looked in the walls before,” he said quietly. “I thought—maybe in the walls I’ll find it.”

“But what are you looking for, man? The walls contain concrete and gravel and rebar, pipes, wiring—and nothing else.”

“What am I looking for? I have no idea. Something that could put my life back in order. Something that tells me I’m worth something. Something that makes it worth living out those miserable few decades that may still lie ahead of me. Something to get up for in the morning, something to think about during the day, something that fills me with joy when I think about it—something I’d be glad to dream about at night. You ask what I’m looking for? The question is wrong. It doesn’t matter what I’m looking for. What matters is what I might find.”

“But you can’t find anything in the walls! There’s nothing buried in there that you’re searching for. Why not learn languages instead, if you have all this extra energy? Why not go out and meet people—talk to them? People can give you far more than these walls.”

“I tried. They gave me nothing. Nothing at all. Do you think I didn’t try? Most of them were far emptier than these walls. Far emptier. It never even occurred to them that something might be wrong with their lives. People were born and died around them. And they? They just lived into the world. They had no questions. You understand—nothing interested them, not really. I also met people in the same boat as me. But they were just as adrift as I was. They were also desperately searching for something. Maybe they weren’t drilling walls, but they were searching. And they never found anything either.”

“That isn’t true. The world is full of people who have found meaning—in a religion, a faith, something to follow, something to guide them,” I said.

“Religions—yes. I went through them all. From Christianity to the Krishnas. They declare that something exists, be it God or whatever, that something is as it is written and that’s that. You can’t argue with them, because every argument leads them into self-contradiction. When you expose one of those contradictions, some of them block the question before it reaches their brain. Others, if they feel cornered, wave the Bible and every book ever declared sacred, murmuring holy citations—using those books as a shield. When they finally have no idea what to do with you, in the better case they declare you ignorant or immature; in the worse, a heretic, a blasphemer, a devil. All in defense of their own incomplete, inconsistent worldview. I tried, my friend. That is not my world. That is not a path I could follow. Don’t misunderstand me—I don’t think these religions are bad. I’m quite sure many people find their footing in them, find happiness. But I am not capable of it.”

“I understand. But there is so much in the world—so much that is wonderful. So much we don’t understand, that seems remote to us. Seemingly unreachable. The laws of the world, the universe itself. Which is reflected in us, too, since we are part of all of it. Have you ever thought that understanding the world better—studying its order—might give you the answers you’re looking for? Study mathematics, or physics, instead of drilling walls.”

“I’m a physicist. Funny, isn’t it. Those were exactly the thoughts I set out with when I chose this path.”

“And it gave you nothing? No starting point at all? Nothing to build on? Surely physics didn’t tell you the answer was in drilling walls.”

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“Through his body of light, the human being—if he believes in the existence of the true Light, in the Life of this Universe—becomes baptized, that is, immersed into the current of the Holy Sound. This is the second baptism; one may say this is the human being’s second birth, and its name is Bhakti Yoga. Without this, a human being can never understand the true, inner World, the Kingdom of God.”
―Shri Yukteshwar Giri: Kaivalya Darsanam, The Holy Science

“Truly, truly, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
—Gospel of John, 3:3

In my family of origin, only my Grandmother had been religious. I admit, I was never drawn to the way she lived it, not at all. It was a kind of Christian fear of God full of peculiarities, which disturbed me. There was something insincere in it, although as a child I could not have expressed this in words. Back then, I only knew that this was not something I wanted.

I think it was as a result of her good Catholicism, her fear-born urge to protect us, that my Mother had us baptized as infants. But a religion chosen by someone else has never been something I would practice, nor has it ever truly become my own.

Fortunately, I did not have to fight being constantly dragged off to church. Neither my Grandfather, nor my Father cared much for religiosity. Allegedly, my Grandfather’s family had been “driven to ruin by priests,” while my Father, an engineer who placed unwavering faith in the achievements of science, strongly disliked religiosity for reasons of his own.

When I met my Partner as an adult, Christian religious life briefly came close to me again. Zsófi attended church regularly. She had chosen this path for herself as a teenager and was later baptized. Her parents had been carrying on a long, relentless and self-destructive war at home and she had been searching for some kind of refuge. She found a measure of that refuge within the Christian religion.

When we fall in love with someone, everything that interests the other person begins to interest us, too. What was it that she had found in Christianity? Curious, I followed her to church on some Sundays.

One time, while we were sitting in a pew holding hands, listening to mass, a woman suddenly turned towards us and snapped at us angrily. It was inappropriate to hold hands in church! If we could not restrain ourselves from “fornicating here, in this holy place,” we should leave! She delivered this ultimatum in a furious hissy whisper.

So we stood up and walked out.

Our astonishment was total. How could it be that while Jesus Christ had spoken often and at length about loving one another, it was precisely expressions of our love that could not be practiced inside a church erected in his name? How could this be? Something had gone terribly wrong here!

I asked Zsófi whether there might be someone―some priest, perhaps―with whom we could speak honestly about this. She waved off the idea. She knew no one who would not preach about sin, no one who would not bury us beneath dogmas and verses of scripture. In truth, this ended up being the last straw for her.

We continued holding hands and from that day on, we never went to church again.

Strangely enough and despite all this, the teachings of Jesus Christ would reach me once more—through yoga. Somewhere along my journey, I found an extraordinary yoga master who had studied theology and who lived among us as a man of deep faith and a practicing Christian. To me, yoga master Ferenc Szép is like a river with a quiet surface but immense depths swirling, ebbing and flowing, underneath.

Soon I was not only attending advanced hatha yoga classes but also participating in smaller gatherings called satsangs―this Sanskrit word meaning “the company of truth.” During those meetings I attended for several years, we studied the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred book of the Hindus. Ferenc compared the wise guidance found therein with the teachings of the Old and New Testaments. After teachings, we would grow silent for a stretch and, afterwards, we would exchange ideas that had come up for us about it all in a free-flowing format.

This is how I kept ripening, slowly growing in understanding and depth until, at last, I was almost ready to experience my second birth. Yet before that could come about, something remained to be experienced: a shattering initiation by two accidents that unlocked the birth of the presence of God within me.

You can find the next bead here.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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“We are on Earth in order to develop our humanity, and to discover that we are spiritual beings. Our life on Earth is an opportunity to cultivate a completely individual glimpse into our own spiritual nature… this is what is also called the second birth…”
—Michaela Glöckler: Growing Up Healthy in a World of Digital Media, lecture

The deeper we descend into matter, the stronger the force capable of lifting us out of it becomes. The only question is whether we notice it—and whether we allow it.

Lately, I have been spending a great deal of time working with artificial intelligence. One could say, this is how I am currently earning sustenance for my family. I’ve found myself wondering why, of all things, life has placed this particular field in my way. In the end, I came to feel that understanding helps clear the fog around this question, too, allowing my attention to turn even more fully toward the place where the real magic is hidden.

The above-cited lecture by anthroposophical pediatrician and author Dr. Michaela Glöckler lays out a shocking vision of the future before us: leading AI researchers—many of whom have become millionaires through this very work—are preparing a peculiar program of immortality for us. Analyzing the pace of technological development, some researchers predict that by 2030 we will be capable of copying the intelligence of the human brain into artificial neural networks. Such a copied brain, they believe, would behave, communicate, react, and learn exactly like the person from whom it has been copied.

In this way, a beloved family member could continue living beside us—inside the robotic body of their double.

There is already a community in the United States, numbering roughly forty thousand souls, who have arranged for their brains to be cryogenically frozen after death so that once the technology develops sufficiently, they would be able to continue where they left off, only having exchanged a flesh-and-blood body for a robotic one.

Some forecasters project that the next threshold will be passed in the year 2045, when humanity will leave biological existence behind altogether: once people reach the peak of their intellectual abilities, they will simply step out of their mortal bodies so often burdened by illness and decay and continue living as robots for as long as they desire. As we speak, an enormous industry focused on making this a reality in the near future is on the ascendancy.

The projection appears exciting, even magical―but only until we understand how a neural network actually functions. Once we realize that a neural network is merely a computer program―no more than a specialized algorithm―trapped in matter requiring tons of electricity to function, the magic dissolves instantly.

Conversely, if we allow our life energy to carry us upward, toward the lighter spheres of being—if we listen to beautiful music, work quietly in a garden, or enter meditation, leaving behind the rattling machinery of the mind—we can suddenly awaken to reality being far more magical than all this mechanical wizardry.

Our reactions and decisions do not flow from neuronal networks in the physical brain. Consciousness is not produced by the biomass―it’s the other way round!

Our actions and reactions are shaped by so-called samskaras: imprints left within the mind. Every experience is stored as such an imprint, an archetypal image, within our shared collective mind field.

For thousands of years, sages and seers of yogic science—rishis—have taught that who we truly are exists beyond an individual’s mind. We are the Soul—the one who experiences the physical body as well as every movement of the mind with all its burdens, conflicts, excitements, peace, and joy. This Self, the Seer within, is not the brain, nor some secondary byproduct of mental processes.

This is not philosophy. It is lived experience: wisdom born of life itself. The truth of these statements cannot be decided through thought alone. Yet recognition may arise within us—and regular spiritual practice supports and accelerates this inward glimpse into ourselves.

There is another experiential truth as well, one that exists beyond the mind and beyond all thinking: that the Soul is not subject to death.

You and I are immortal souls.

Only the body is temporary—and with it, so are the intricate neural systems of the brain. It is almost as though the body were merely our clothing. Precious clothing, certainly, worthy of care and protection. It serves us faithfully for as long as it functions.

Understanding all this intellectually is not enough, either, because rational acceptance alone will never dissolve the fear of death. Through regular spiritual practice—through meditation, for example—the world itself begins to transform. And, sooner or later, the fear surreptitiously underlying so many desperate actions in our lives begins to slowly, gradually, fade away.

Perhaps the time will come when, through the dawning of true understanding, the frozen brains of so many frightened “intelligent” people can simply be thrown into the trash because the ones who once wore those particular garments will have realized that they no longer have any need for them…

You can find here the next Bead.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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In the 1950s, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question that has never stopped unsettling those who take it seriously. The contradiction is stark: given the billions of invisible worlds orbiting billions of suns across the observable universe, the probability of other intelligent life — life that has walked further along the path than we have — borders on certainty. The electromagnetic spectrum ought to be alive with their voices, a cosmic crossfire of transmissions we cannot yet decode. And yet we built Arecibo. We have built many such ears. The universe remains, profoundly, silent. What is the source of that silence?

The Fermi Paradox has generated many answers, none of them entirely satisfying. Ted Chiang — whose visionary novella became the luminous, Academy Award-winning film Arrival — offers one in his story The Great Silence, where a parrot species teetering on the edge of extinction delivers its message to humankind:

“Humans have caused my kind’s near-extinction, but I don’t blame them. It was not malicious. They simply weren’t paying attention. And what astonishing myths they’ve created, what a gift for imagination! Perhaps that is why their ambitions are so remarkable. Consider Arecibo. An object like that speaks to the greatness of the species that built it. My kind will not survive much longer. We will likely depart before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we want to offer humanity a message. We can only hope that Arecibo will be able to hear it. The message is this: Be good. I love you.”

According to the WWF’s 2024 Living Planet Report, populations of observed wild vertebrate species shrank by an average of 73 percent between 1970 and 2020 — fifty years in which we were otherwise occupied. Climate change has hit Latin America and the Caribbean with particular ferocity, where average declines reach 95 percent. What Ted Chiang wrote about the parrots, it turns out, is simply true.

Dr. Ernő Dittrich of the University of Pécs offers a forecast that is difficult, scientifically grounded, and unsparing:

“Researchers place the beginning of the great collapse around 2040, when agriculture will begin to fail globally. What that image holds: worldwide drought, dust storms, hundreds of millions of people hungry and on the move. And its consequence: by approximately 2080, ninety to ninety-five percent of humanity will have perished.”

And yet. Ted Chiang closes with Be good. I love you. Is that a farewell drowning in grief, or a call to action? Can we still bring this world back from the edge it is standing on?

The Strangers Are Still Here

At this point I want to press a book into your hands. Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth carries news that ought to stop us cold. In 2012, scientists gathered at Cambridge University formally declared that all mammals, all birds, and a significant number of other creatures — the octopus among them — possess consciousness.

From Schlanger’s book we also learn that the plant world is intelligent. There are plants that detect the presence of their own kin growing nearby and, within two days, restructure their foliage so as not to shade their smaller siblings. It has been discovered that plants seem to navigate toward water through something resembling hearing: tiny air bubbles form within the fluid of their roots, and when those bubbles collapse — a process called cavitation — they produce a snapping sound. That sound, researchers suspect, functions not unlike the sonar of a bat, guiding root-tips toward moisture, steering them around stone. Plants communicate with one another, and with insects and animals. They remember. They can count. And perhaps, in some register we have not yet learned to tune, they are trying to communicate with us.

It seems we are locked in here on Earth with many, many alien intelligences who might gladly strike up a conversation — and who, I would venture, have been attempting for a long time to teach us something cardinal.

With a few rare exceptions, we simply are not listening. Worse: we are steadily silencing the very beings who share our world, while furrowing our brows over the great emptiness of the cosmos. Why, we wonder, is there such silence out there? Why are we cut off from the intelligent extraterrestrials who might extend a hand, the way they did in Arrival?

Is it any wonder that Hermes Trismegistus taught, thousands of years ago: “As above, so below”?

All right. Let us search for the key to the soundproofed dome that has settled over us — here, below. But how do we begin to understand, let alone feel, what the animal and plant worlds are signaling? And what might they teach us?

The Secrets of Universes

Not long ago I gave a talk about how the forest heals us — how it can dissolve the tensions lodged inside us, expand our sense of self until we can feel, in our bones, that we are not alone, and that the tasks ahead of us are not beyond us.

The audience asked many good questions. One in particular seized me: fine, so the forest fills me up — but does it matter, when the world around me is girding for war and we are tangled in a million threads of self-destructive consumption?

To answer that, we must first clarify the question of the frame of reference. Consciousness has levels, and those levels reveal themselves in the dominant feeling one carries through the world and in one’s entire way of perceiving reality. The world looks genuinely different from different rungs of consciousness. (If that seems abstract: what does your world look like when you sleep?)

At a certain level of consciousness we imagine there is one shared objective world, and that we, small as we are, can barely nudge it. The current carries us. Unless, of course, we seize sufficient power — and this particular form of madness is well documented throughout human history. It is a dead end. A dead end paved with brutal suffering.

There comes a point in individual growth where the worldview shifts, radically: we realize that there is no such thing as an objective world. The world I inhabit is an entirely different world from the one experienced by the unhoused man living a few hundred meters away, or the person whose home in Ukraine or Gaza has just been struck by a missile. Even my closest family member sees life through a lens I will never fully share — a different future shimmers before them, different things call for their attention. Everything I experience arises within my own mind. Which means: every human being is a sovereign Universe. And if I want to experience something different in my world, I am the only one who can make that happen.

These Universes interpenetrate, of course. Your mind and mine are, at the deepest level, one. But to actually feel that — not just think it — we need something that appears to stand outside us. Meditation. Consciousness-expanding practices. Or the right kind of encounter with the living world that surrounds us: the forest. Assistance comes, and can come, from “out there.” But each person must be the one to initiate it, moving outward from within.

And yet there is another dimension worth sitting with. Our futures are, in some sense, shared.

Ecological economist Dr. Alexandra Köves arrived at a discovery: without a shared, normative vision of the future, we cannot move effectively toward a positive one.

When we gaze ahead, our visions of the future are so divergent, our individual Universes so distinct, that we each want to build something different — and so we become like dust motes spinning in a shaft of light: circling, colliding, and arriving, at a societal level, at precisely the critical catastrophe-state in which we currently find ourselves.

For roughly fifteen years, Dr. Köves has been working with a practice called backcasting. Unlike forecasting — weather prediction and its cousins — backcasting is, in a sense, a movement backward through time. Its essence: a group of people, working within a given domain, constructs a shared normative vision of what they believe the world could look like in thirty to fifty years. Then, step by step, they reverse-engineer the social and policy transformations required to reach it.

But how do we bring these two things together? On the one hand, every person is a sovereign Universe. On the other, we share a common future — and it would be worth marching toward some common positive vision of it. Can people operating from vastly different levels of consciousness actually co-create a shared, positive future?

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As I sat on the couch at dawn this morning, my eyes drifted toward my daughter’s electric piano. I found myself wondering what a scientifically minded person living one or two hundred years ago would have discovered if they had begun to take it apart. Colored wires. Tiny rectangles shot through with metallic threads, with strange raised shapes of different colors sticking out of them. How would I explain to such a person what an integrated circuit is? What a transistor, what a microprocessor, is?

“Magic!” he would say in astonishment.

And yet I—who was already designing printed circuit boards in high school, soldering transistors and chips into place, probing circuits with an oscilloscope—would probably only shrug.

“Come on. It’s just electronics.”

But if all of this exists—as unquestionably as my smartphone exists—and if it so undeniably works, then how could I have said a few musings ago that electrons do not truly exist? That all of this is merely a model? Instead of bowing down before the astonishing fact that we, human beings, have managed to descend so far into understanding the material world? After all, the array of tangible results attesting to the validity of our scientific approach is mind-boggling. Where is the reverence for the titanic labors of those who came before us and longed, as we do, to understand the world?

But what constitutes offering a greater degree of respect, in truth? Dismissing it all out of hand: “This is ordinary, this is only electronics”? Or saying “Yes, of course, this is what physics and chemistry can do; after all, this is the twenty-first century”? Or, perhaps, allowing ourselves to be astonished by it, letting ourselves feel its magic again and again?

Am I still capable of doing that despite knowing exactly how these things work? Despite knowing the physical models describing the electronic structures of semiconductors, and the processes unfolding inside digital electronics—models I studied for more than two decades? Can I set aside all that accumulated knowledge long enough to stand in wonder before the world surrounding me, again and again?

And what is the use of wonder if I already “understand it all”? What is it that I have truly understood?

I could say: “The experiences delivered by my own five senses—and the thoughts that organize those experiences into coherent systems.”

Which means that whatever I experience, whatever I think, ultimately exists within. At this point, the direction of knowing reverses itself. Every true act of understanding requires this distancing, this turning around.

Because Newton’s equations of motion cannot actually be derived from anything. Nor can Einstein’s differential equations describing general relativity and the structure of spacetime be derived from anything prior to themselves. Nor can Heisenberg’s quantum physics be derived from anything, either.

These insights had come to these thinkers in flashes of intuition, in moments when they had stepped beyond the world already known to them. When they had played music, perhaps. Or had sat beside the glow of a fireplace, savoring a glass of red wine and simply enjoying what was. When they themselves had entered the experience of wonder.

In meditation, we shift states of consciousness; our awareness expands. Through this, we gain access to processes we could not previously perceive, and to forms of understanding that had remained hidden from us before.

The silence created by meditation is an extraordinarily rich silence.

You can fing here the next bead.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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Trees exist in a continuous state resembling deep meditation, breathing―respiring and conspiring―together beneath the earth.

We, human beings, have been given an even greater opportunity: we, too, are capable of entering this living silence, this wholeness. And then, returning from it and shifting states of consciousness once more, we are capable of acting for the sake of ourselves and, at the same time, for the sake of each other, with intelligence and compassion.

Yoga Master Dr. Géza Timcsák once pointed to this with striking clarity. He said: “We can’t just simply do anything we wish to, anytime we wish to.” In one of his lectures, he described our situation as one of proceeding down a long corridor—walking our own dharma, walking the true path of our own life. The concept of dharma, a term with many profound meanings, encompasses the law that governs our being, our destiny, and determines our responsibilities and tasks in this life.

We have been granted free will, but only to a certain extent. We are free to choose where to turn but only if there is somewhere to turn in the first place. We are free to try opening certain doors but we can step through them only when they are actually open. We are free to tug endlessly at a locked door, to try to force it, to bang our heads painfully against it again and again. And we are free to accept our true path and turn in the direction our circumstances actually allow us to walk.

Many years ago, while wandering about the streets of the Hungarian city of Miskolc, I came upon a street vendor selling a copy of Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. I bought it. And then, for a very long time afterwards, the book simply sat uncracked on my shelf.

Incidentally, Yogananda had been one of the very first to bring yoga to the West. He was a master of Kriya yoga. Hatha yoga—which I wrote about earlier—exists to prepare the practitioner for the process of Kriya yoga. The word kriya means to move, to act, in harmony with the All, with God.

When we act in such harmony, we are walking our life path, we are proceeding according to our dharma. Then, the energies of Life, itself, start helping us. We are moving lightly. We are advancing in joy. And, somewhere along the way, we cease to plant new karmic seeds; seeds that so often break through the soil of our lives in most painful ways.

The practice of Kriya yoga is bound to initiation. Its methods are kept secret by initiates, protected beneath vows of silence, for good reason.

In my own case, years would pass before the time finally ripened for me to step through that door.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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When we learn to sense the tattwa qualities, we know when it is worth taking care of financial matters or asking for a raise, when to resolve a conflict or to have a conversation in a way that prevents conflict altogether; we know when to start new things or push our work forward, and when we can think most clearly. We also know how to best time our meditation practice.

If we go against these rhythms, we become exhausted, discouraged, and pile failure upon failure in our lives. It is therefore very much worth synchronizing ourselves with the currents of nature. But how do we do that? That is what this article is about.

With this piece, I'd like to express my gratitude to my subscribers for contributing to a cup of tea here and there. Those cups of tea help me keep surprising you with new writing — writing that bridges science and spirituality.

I deeply believe that these two, together, are what help us live full lives and grow ever healthier on this tiny vessel called Earth, hurtling through the cosmos at breathtaking speed.

Thank you if you choose to subscribe, or if you already do. And thank you for every share!

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So let's take a look at how all of this works — and how we can effortlessly sync ourselves to nature's ancient rhythm...

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And after my meditation this morning, an image reached me. A realization. Something I feel is more than merely encouraging. I want to show it to you.

A few years ago, as a physicist, I led a research project. Among many other things, we were investigating whether water is capable of memory, whether it can store information. Yogic traditions have long held that water carries, transmits, and preserves information, but we wanted to see what conventional scientific methodology would reveal. What, exactly, does water know?

Research over the past two decades has uncovered astonishing properties within water itself. A significant portion of water molecules appear to prefer organizing themselves into tiny resonating spheres known as coherent domains. These minute water pearls — roughly two hundred nanometers across — also seem to seek one another out, forming chains and intricate structures.

Within water, information is stored inside these chains of water pearls, encoded in their quantum states. Unlike the disordered, so-called decoherent regions of water, these coherent chains are capable of preserving and transmitting the information woven into them.

Researchers developed the quantum electrodynamic description of this phenomenon nearly twenty years ago. And a few years back, when I was immersed in this field, scientists were already attempting to build inexpensive quantum computers that could function at room temperature by using these chains of water pearls.

During my research, another fascinating quantum-biological hypothesis emerged: only those organic molecules — amino acids, for example — whose structures allow them to connect into the network of water pearls are capable of participating in the processes of life. This may explain how the countless billions of microbiological processes inside the body are able to function in harmony.

Every single day, for instance, roughly one million genetic errors arise inside every human being. Every chromosome you carry is continuously scanned by enzymes during every millisecond of your life. If they detect a damaged gene, one enzyme “signals” another. That enzyme arrives, binds to the DNA, and opens the double strand. Then another enzyme appears — one capable of recognizing and replacing the faulty or damaged base. And only when that task has been completed does yet another molecule arrive to stitch the DNA strand back together again. This — and millions of similar miracles — unfolds inside you during every millisecond of your existence.

But how do these enzymes know who comes next? How do they know what must be done?

It seems increasingly likely that enzymes are not merely floating independently inside water or cellular plasma, but are threaded into the network of water pearls itself. They know one another. They are not separate. And it may be precisely this interconnectedness that keeps us alive.

If those genetic errors remained uncorrected — or if the repair mechanisms functioned at merely 99.999% efficiency — scarcely any human being would survive beyond the age of five. Yet this molecular network of observation and repair, bound together through chains of water pearls, operates with near-total perfection.

So then why do we become ill?

Ah yes. Here the mind enters the picture — and the mind is not merely a byproduct of the brain’s electrical neural network. It is subtler than that, though still material in nature.

The science of yoga, in harmony with Sankhya philosophy, teaches that our world possesses two fundamental qualities: Matter, or Prakriti, and Soul, or Purusha. Prakriti — matter — does not refer merely to the visible, tangible world you can touch with your hands and see with your eyes. It also includes perceptions, memories, thoughts, emotions — the entire field of mental content. Yet the mind itself appears to be a finer structure, one that cannot be directly derived from the neural architecture of the brain.

Rudolf Steiner explained this with a simple image: imagine the ground soaked after heavy rain, your footprints remaining behind in the mud. When someone attempts to explain thoughts and the process of thinking by claiming they are products of the brain, Steiner said, it is as though they were trying to explain you through the footprints you left behind — as though your existence were caused by the marks in the mud. In order to walk, we require the earth beneath us to support our steps. Likewise, in order to think, we require a brain. But the brain does not create thought, nor does your personality reside there in its fullness.

And if the mind is not strictly bound to the nervous system, perhaps this also explains why plants and trees display unmistakable forms of intelligence despite possessing no nervous system at all. If this subject calls to you, Zoë Schlanger’s remarkable book The Light Eaters explores the scientific breakthroughs of the past decade in plant intelligence research.

Perhaps the network of water pearls is responsible for mental contents themselves — for recording quantum states, processing them, reshaping them. Perhaps this is what stores our memories, our thoughts, our ego, the subtle peculiarities of personality.

But the image that reached me this morning suggested something even greater. Something aligned, strangely enough, with Steiner’s metaphor.

The water-pearl structure is not you, either.

For consciousness to exist — for you to exist as a self-aware being — something more is required. And that something is Purusha: the light of the soul.

You might imagine it as a focused beam of light illuminating the network of water pearls. That beam breathes life into you. And suddenly there you are: your physical body, the astonishing complexity of life processes sustaining it, your thoughts, your memories, all appearing together inside that illumination.

When I sit beside a tree, or touch the damp earth, I become connected — through the living world — to the entire forest. Through that connection I become part of a much larger intelligence. In that state, I exist differently. The forest folds me into itself: I am present as forest. It is a healing state.

It feels as though someone were illuminating a wider, more spacious region of the water-pearl network. The network itself remains the same. Only the intensity and focus of consciousness have shifted.

And yet, because the narrow beam of our ordinary awareness is so constricted, we perceive ourselves as painfully separate beings. Our grief, our suffering, our traumas have tangled everything beyond recognition. We are now sitting neck-deep inside a polycrisis, and anxiety hums beneath nearly every human life because of it.

And what do we do?

We accelerate even further. We bury ourselves in work. We consume and consume and consume. I do it too. I am no exception.

And the process only intensifies, because when we hide from reality, when we isolate ourselves, the illness deepens within us.

says that true, profound grief is the medicine. In Letter from Earth, he writes:

“The grief itself is the medicine. When you let yourselves actually feel what is being lost, something changes in the body, something reorganizes, some ancient loyalty wakes up that no amount of information or outrage can touch. The grief reconnects you. To me. To yourselves. To the truth that you are not on the earth, you are the earth.”

Our connection with the forest heals precisely because it widens the cone of consciousness. It allows you to perceive that you are far more vast than you once believed yourself to be.

And this connection is like climbing a mountain.

Once you reach higher ground, you see more. At first, what you see may hurt even more deeply. You begin to feel the agony of the countless forms of life we are destroying inside our raging madness.

And then, at some point, something turns.

Within that interwovenness, a larger intelligence begins healing the wound beneath the illness — which is always some hidden pattern of thought from which you have never truly managed to free yourself.

The concealed thought brought into awareness by grief can be rewritten through relationship with the living world. And as that happens, the light of consciousness begins illuminating ever greater regions of your being. Inside that growing aliveness, the imprints of earlier traumas slowly dissolve. They do not disappear entirely. But they lose their gravity. And after that dissolution comes the healing of the body itself.

But something even greater happens.

You realize that Prakriti — Matter and Mind — and Purusha, the Soul, were never truly separate at all. They are two aspects of the same primordial force. And when you experience their unity, this is the Opus Magnum. This is the experience of God.

Human beings do not arrive at this realization all at once.

When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he was not claiming that one must become Christian or sit listening to the Gospels in church every Sunday in order to reach this unity. He was speaking of the gradual widening of consciousness itself — moving step by step, quantum state by quantum state.

At one moment, you see yourself as someone crushed beneath endless daily obligations. Then, during meditation — or while connecting into the companion network of trees — something shifts. You step into another level. You expand. The circle of light illuminating the water-pearl network expands with you.

And then, one day, we move even farther. We begin weaving ourselves into the companion network of the masters. And farther still, until we become interwoven with Christ himself — another widening of the circle of light, another deepening movement of self-recognition.

And eventually even that opens wider still.

And together, we become what we have always been: Life-Light.

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“Connect your inner landscape to the outer one. Remain in genuine encounter with living Nature.”

I offer this writing with deep gratitude to Thomas Joseph Brown, and in the hope that it may deepen reflection and touch something in the innermost places of the soul.

Maybe it will do something rarer: slow you down long enough to hear the waves beneath the noise of the age.

“They’ll take you apart for this. You’ll see.”

“Maybe.” Tym did not look at Zyo. He started the engine, and the infrared headlights flared alive. Tym adjusted his light receptors to the spectrum of the beams, then pressed the accelerator. The car glided soundlessly onto the road, quickly reaching the optimal speed for the terrain. Zyo turned abruptly toward the back seat.

“He’s sleeping. It’s always like he’s sleeping. Where do you want to take him?”

“Humans are almost always asleep. You’ll get used to it.”

“I won’t have time to get used to it, because tomorrow they’ll shut me down. Only you could be this insane — kidnapping a human. We’re not getting away with this. They’ll wipe our memories!”

“Then why did you come with me, Zyo, hm? All you do is complain.”

“Because, because…” Zyo swallowed. “And where are we taking… what’s his name again?”

“223478-912. We’re not taking him far, anyway. I thought we’d get him out of the reservation, but we’ll come right back. There are still a few old stone houses left by the coast. Tolerable enough. If we’re lucky, they won’t find us for a week. Maybe that’ll be enough…”

“If an anthropologist android says so, I believe everything.” Zyo’s voice scraped.

Tym glanced at him and shook his head. He slowed down, pulling to the side of the road without stopping the car. For a few moments he studied Zyo’s moonlike face with motionless eyes.

“Look, I’ve been studying humans for thirty years. I’ve read thousands of their books from the vanished age, watched thousands of films and plays, listened to their music, memorized their history, analyzed the material from a hundred different angles. I know a great deal about humans. More than most androids. I went into the settlements too. Conducted entire series of specialized observations, analyzed my findings, built theories, tested them through sequences of approved experiments, then debated all of it with the others at the congresses. And do you know what I say, Zyo? I have no idea what a human being is. No idea why we protect them, why we’ve fed them in our colonies for centuries.”

“Because they’re sacred.”

“Sure! You don’t even know what sacred means!” Tym snapped. Then lowered his voice. “You just sweep that under the rug too… according to program!”

“You know you can’t go against our deepest-level programming, Tym! You’ll destroy yourself.”

“No, I won’t. You’ll look after me, right?” For a few moments he stared at Zyo, studying his face. “You know, I’m just a fanatic. Half-answers don’t satisfy me. And I do what I have to do. That’s all.”

The car accelerated again. But now Tym was no longer driving at optimal speed. The vehicle skidded off the road again and again. Zyo pressed his lips together and said nothing.

The house was in terrible condition, the roof collapsed in several places. Tym stopped the car. The garage door did not respond to any electromagnetic signal. Tym shrugged, climbed out, popped open the trunk, and returned with a crowbar. Zyo stared in shock as Tym balanced the iron bar across his shoulder and walked toward the garage door; then came a splintering crack, followed by Tym’s quiet shout — all of it so alien that Zyo went pale. And then Tym was suddenly back beside him in the seat, starting the car with a self-satisfied grin. They drove into the garage sunk beneath the house.

“And now?” Zyo asked, looking at the human sitting upright in the back seat, eyes closed, spine perfectly straight. “He’s still sleeping.”

“We’ll take him upstairs. If he won’t come willingly, we’ll grab his legs and drag him up.”

“You… you can’t say things like that…” Zyo’s jaw kept moving soundlessly as he stared at the man. Tym burst out laughing. Then he jumped from the car and opened the back door.

Tym took the human’s hand as he stepped from the car. Zyo trailed behind them in silence. An android always behaves rationally, Tym — he wanted to say, but instead he only sighed — or almost always, he added inwardly.

“Look at this. We’ve been with him for more than twenty-four hours now, and what do you know that you didn’t know before? Nothing. Your human just sits there doing nothing but dozing. Has he answered even one of your questions?”

“No. No, he hasn’t,” Tym sighed. “But there has to be something that works…”

“Works how? Can you even formulate the question you want answered?”

“Yes.” Tym slowly raised his gaze to Zyo. “What is a human being? And,” he added more quietly, “what is an android? Don’t look at me like that. I know the rational answer too, Zyo. We are the unscrewed mind, right? That’s what you would’ve said immediately: the mind unscrewed from the human. Because humanity realized its thoughts were poor and confused; its mind was no longer capable of carrying evolution forward. So it detached the mind from itself — and that became us, the androids. It left the mind to us. And now they walk another path. But what path, Zyo? We have answers, but only rational answers.”

“But Tym, our entire being is nothing but matter constructed around reason.”

“Yes. Exactly. That’s the point. Our whole society revolves around rational questions and the rational answers given to them. An unscrewed world. And there, forgotten and forever accounted for at its center, sits this mass of flesh from which we detached ourselves — which therefore cannot be rational. Zyo, the presence of humans within our society is an absolutely irrational phenomenon!”

“They are simply the object of our deepest-level program.”

“Exactly. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just tired, Zyo. Tired of rational answers!”

“You’re an idiot, Tym.”

“Yeah… maybe that would be the solution,” Tym said, staring at the cliff face before turning back toward their silent acquisition. The human sat in the sand by the sea. The movement of the waves shimmered in his open eyes. Tym watched him for a while, then looked once more toward the cliff wall rising above the shore.

Birds circled before the cliffs, shrieking in desperation. Tym smiled.

“Where are you going now?”

“I’m climbing that cliff. Look, humans need to eat. We have to take care of him. I’m bringing him eggs.”

“You’re doing what?”

“I’m climbing that cliff. Meanwhile, gather some driftwood so we can make a fire. So we can cook them for him.”

“Tym, be reasonable! If you smash yourself to pieces on those rocks…”

“Then they’ll screw me back together. And if they don’t, I don’t care. Gather some firewood. I’ll be right back!”

A terrible tension rose inside Zyo — he wanted to scream, but in the end he only nodded silently. Head bowed, he started walking along the shore.

He focused only on the pieces of wood. One, two, there’s a bigger one, that makes three, another over there, that’s four, still need a few more so the fire will hold — how many more? Then he sank down beside the human. Drew up his legs and watched him from the side. Just watched the human.

He did not turn toward the cliff when Tym’s body shattered against the rocks. He only sat there and kept watching the human, who only sat there and kept watching the sea.

Wind rose, the waves grew violent, then slowly everything quieted again. The tide climbed to the foot of the cliff, even crawled a little way up the stone. Then the sea withdrew, and the tide returned again, and once more the water receded. And there on the shore sat Zyo, alone. He wanted to unscrew the mind from himself too, just as humanity once had. But though he sat there, nothing happened. The water carried nothing away from him — only Tym, and him, terribly so. Slowly he pushed himself to his feet and peeled strands of seaweed from his body. Then he began walking somewhere.

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For a long time, scientists studying the lives of trees believed that trees competed with one another for light and living space. Only ones that receive light can grow; ones left without it perish. Today we know that this behavioral pattern is only a small fragment of reality. Reality is far, far, more spacious than that, far, far more allowing…

Through their mutually entangled roots, trees remain in constant exchange of energy and information with each other, their connection sustained by the vast mycelial threads weaving through the soil beneath them. Those trees whose crowns cannot yet rise into the sunlit canopy are nourished through their roots by the ones already bathing in light. The trees sustained this way grow far more slowly, yet they do not die. They wait. They can do nothing else. They wait until, one day, the possibility for growth suddenly opens and, at last, they, too may begin moving toward the light.

I believe we, humans, are much the same.

At the Waldorf school my children attend, it is a remarkably common sight to see teachers trying to create order—trying simply to move forward with the material—through punishment, or through threats that grow weaker and more ineffective with every repetition.

And this persists despite the fact that Rudolf Steiner, the polymath who created Waldorf pedagogy, stated quite clearly that Waldorf education did not employ punishment as a tool. Why was that?

This is how I see it: if I do something and an authority figure—a teacher, for example—responds with punishment, then, after a while, I no longer dare to act freely, from within myself. Punishment, precisely because of this, stands in opposition to what every Waldorf school claims as its aim: helping children become free and creative adults who are able to stand upright on their own values.

According to psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, punishment either provokes inner conflict and defiance, or it produces “good little boys” and “good little girls,” whose psychological inheritance from their training reaped in adulthood is depression. Punishment cannot create long-term joyful cooperation.

Although Waldorf teachers possess many different tools, it seems to me that this, alone, is not enough. Besides, the punitive pattern has been burned far too deeply into educators themselves. We, too, were raised on punishment. We live in a punishment-oriented world—a world of who is right, who dominates whom—and for now, this is what passes for normal.

For a long time, and with growing desperation, I tried to show people in this school that another method existed, one capable of replacing punishment while remaining fully aligned with Waldorf pedagogy. I pushed with force. Almost with violence. I wanted the good so badly. Only much later did I realize what I myself had been doing…

And the counterforce arrived, as well. Karma stirred awake, and I was not advancing a single step. Once again, I had tightened myself into strain. Then, suddenly, exhaustion overcame me, and I stopped trying to force the tension any further.

One day, I brought all this to Dr. Géza Timcsák, my yoga master, asking for his advice. I told him I did not understand. On the surface, everything seemed to be here already. So many enthusiastic teachers who genuinely wanted good for the children—and who even involved their parents in this effort. So why wasn’t it working?

As always, Géza answered mysteriously, replying to more than what my words had actually asked.

“You know, sometimes the light is red. And when that happens—unless you carry some special signal—you stand there in the traffic and wait.”

Yes. Every step forward has its own season. Its own harmonic written in a celestial constellation. It’s only that I, at times, am terribly impatient…

You can find here the next bead.

I’ll send the next part on the next week, so we can move together through the 54 beads of the mala—thank you for being part of this journey. And if you have a friend or acquaintance you’d like to invite on this exciting journey, please share this letter with them!

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