Weöres Sándor

If you abstract yourself from everything you know as your being: that's actually where your being begins.
Do not confuse your body, your mind, your person with your being, with yourself. It is only your auxiliary; it is only your baggage, which is also the guardian of your needs, also a stooping burden.
Your body is not you, for it is only a substance that is constantly changing: at the age of forty, there is not a single part of your twenty-year-old body. But neither are you your emotions and your intellect, for you were not yet, when you looked at them from the cradle. Who art you? the boundless that appeared between the boundaries at your conception.
If you consider your bounded person as yourself, do a Copernican inversion: consider the boundless totality as yourself, and your person as a temporary bound, a mere apparition, a "not-self".
Where sensation, impassivity, thought, thoughtlessness, change, immutability cease; where you would think there is nothing: there your very being begins.

Stepping on and being trampled, eating and being eaten: that's life.
To wear stepping on and being trampled, eating and being gobbled up: that is existence.
To follow his whim is to wrap oneself in life. He who follows his need, wraps himself in existence.
He who loves, hates, craves, is disgusted: this is the living. He who bears the coherent calmly: this is the existent.

The purgatory: the battle of heaven and hell, full of changing shapes, full of fleeting features. Heaven and hell are final, undivided, unseparated: one is infinite fullness, beyond "much", beyond all richness; the other is infinite lack, beyond "little", beyond all misery.

There are no differences in heaven and hell, everything in them is the same; yet we can speak of the circles and sub-circles, the divisions, of heaven and hell: for different for every saved and for every damned person is the stairway which connects him with the phenomenal world; for each stairway is formed according to the way in which its owner functions in the phenomenal world. He who is saved or damned is no longer an individual, no longer a separate being; but his staircase is just as individual as he is an individual in his relation to the phenomenal world. No two staircases are the same, but there are group similarities: they are the sections of heaven and hell.

Heaven, hell, purgatory are not just post-death states: everyone, dead or alive, wears one or the other.
All that is peculiarly finite, distinctive: it suffers in purgatory. Pleasures grow only in purgatory; and because all pleasures are finite and the lack of pleasure around them is infinite: therefore purgatory is torment.
In hell there is neither torment nor pleasure. He who is so dulled by his passions that he enjoys nothing more than to drink a great deal of water, and can only agonize as a machine creaks, has reached hell in his life.
In heaven there is neither pleasure nor torment. He who has no more need of pleasure can be stirred up by nothing, his whole being is opened like a blessing: he has reached heaven in his life.
The world of space and time is a purging fire; rare is the man who reaches heaven or hell in his lifetime. Your individuality is nothing but the sum of your finite needs; therefore only by losing your individuality can you reach the infinite state: heaven or hell.

If, breaking through your fleeting individuality, you penetrate deep within yourself into the eternal soul: you conquer wholeness like a general conquering a castle.
There are easier paths to wholeness. Not only by breaking through all temporalities and pushing into the impermanent you can be united with God. Through prayer and sacrifice, you can enrich your feelings in such a way that they reach God. Church-walking, ritual, devotion, supplication, penance, chastity, if done with a whole heart and not seeking to beg earthly goods from heavenly power, all lead to God: by them God bends to you, you feel his kiss, and you become more and more one with him.

Modern science knows suggestion: the instrumentless, coercive influence of the human soul on the other human soul; yet it regards the power of spell, grace, prayer as superstition.
The spell, incantation; a spiritual effect to help or harm someone.
Grace, spirit-invocation, spirit-alerting; a spiritual influence exerted on a being that has escaped from life.
Prayer; tapping into the power of life-superior to life; by it we increase our own faculty many times over. A social institution, established and maintained by money, power, authority, seldom lasts a few lifetimes; and monastic orders persist, though they are created by a single praying beggar.

There are two ways in which man can be relieved of his individuality: he can either sink below it or rise above it.
There are men who are so absorbed in the shapelessness of the mass-soul, or in the undercurrent of some debauchery of the intellect, that they are completely dissolved in it, are blunted, and their separateness is only an appearance. And their death is only the death of this appearance: with the dissolution of their bodies, the last sign of their separateness disappears, they are finally merged in the dark, sticky currents. This is damnation.
And there are some who, rising above their individuality, make impersonal, eternal measure their true being; in death, they crumble down their separateness like a prison wall and flow from their temporal, closed life into timeless, boundless wholeness. This is salvation.
Most people retain their individuality until death. His plans, his circumstances, his little pleasures are the meaning of life to him, and he shrinks from the timeless infinity, the salvation, which is revealed in the moments of his dying, as much as from the vague attraction, the damnation, which rises from under the fading consciousness; in none of these is there feeling, sense, change, articulation, which are necessary to his pleasures; his disintegrating instinct clings to the final wreck of life, and this no longer offers him shelter.
Life, change, time slips away from him, he is terrified of unchanging eternity: he is in a frozen state, lacking both the fragmentation of life and the fullness of being. His fate after death depends in a small measure on how he is remembered, whether he is prayed for, whether he is helped by earthly and non-earthly good intentions; and above all on whether there was in his life a general virtue, above the individual, which belongs not to the personality but to the eternal measure of the character, which does not perish with the destruction of the personality and which sustains him. This is the purifying fire.

Break down the stones of your face within you: your rocky summit lights you up! Flesh and blood are false and greedy, but true and gentle is the skeleton.
If you cherish your individuality in the depths of your being: as if you wore the garment in your belly and warm it with your chilling naked body.
If you hope for happiness in the changing, not in the unchanging, if you hope for eternity in the changing, not in the unchanging: as if you wanted to feed and clothe your mirror image, so this will keep skinny and naked your body and your reflection.

Public discourse does not distinguish between good and pleasant: God is good, scratching an itch is good. Most people think of heaven as pleasure, and hell as torment.
Pleasure, pain and all dissection, even the purest, belong to the flesh. Happiness is only accompanied by joy in the body, unhappiness is only accompanied by pain in the body. With death, joy, anguish and all dismemberment pass away.
To the sentimentalist, the boundless is like frost; to the hoarder, like plunder; to the individual, like annihilation.

The man you see coming and going: closed, individual; yet the deepest layer of the human being is not closed, not individual, is interconnected with everything, is identical with the single existence lying at the bottom of all forms.
The timeless infinity unfolding from behind the finite personality in time: the soul. The timeless infinity that does not need to unfold: the God.
Separate boundaries exist only in space and time; that which is spaceless, timeless: it is unbroken. The human soul emerging from the shell of personality is identical with God, as silence is with silence, but as the cessation of noise is with silence.
Man, when freed from his enclosure, sees God in three ways: as a being beyond the "is", without reference; as love enveloping and radiating the universe; and as an infinite soul shining forth after the disintegration of finite personality.
For the God-immersed man, there is no longer anything desirable or undesirable, no longer any degree; everything is infinite and desireless love. For him all is the same: all is the Absolute Unchanging, from which flows the myriad changing phenomena. God contains all, and the liberated soul contains all in God.

Is there a God? In that which is independent of space, time and all illusions: the Is and the Is Not are the same.
Do I have eternity? Beyond space, time and all illusions: being and non-being are the same.
All your knowledge is only good to guide you through the variables, but it offers no certainty of the unchanging. There is knowledge only in the variable and only about the variable, for in it are separately ascertainable the Is and the Is Not, right and wrong, convex and concave; but in the totality all these are indivisibly identical, and therefore there is nothing in it to be named. Totality is not one and not more, not I and not other, not something and not nothing.
If you want to know the totality, ask no questions, for all 'yes' and 'no' referring to it mean the same thing; but dive into yourself, beneath yourself, and where there is nothing more, where everything is identical with everything else: this is the totality.

Descend into the depths of yourself as into a well; and as at the bottom of the bounded well you will find boundless groundwater: beneath your changing individuality you will find unchanging existence.
Most people believe that at death they will be annihilated, or will live on disembodied in space and time. Death is not an annihilation, nor is it a continuation of life; with death all that is the temporal, changing part of man is dissolved: the body, the feeling, the intellect, the whole personality; and the basic layer remains naked, in which there is no possibility of change, of creation, of destruction.
It is not man's being, but his separate being, that ceases. Today man can hardly distinguish between the cessation of his being and the cessation of his separate being: he can only imagine his being without his separateness, without his body, his feelings, his consciousness, his temporality, his changeability, as a state of fainting, of deep sleep. But the transition from separate existence to impersonal, real existence is not a diminution, or even an infinite intensification; it is not a deep sleep, but rather a fullness of wakefulness, compared to which even the most awake state of life is only a dazzling hesitation.
The one who descends into his own basic layer leaves behind all feelings of life, all thoughts and possibilities, and is where he will be after death, in the timeless, unchanging, where there is no more "I" and "not-I", but the identity of everything with everything, an indivisible infinity. It is not a swooning darkness, but a luminous radiance, a radiant action without action, a total love without feeling; an eternal changelessness, yet not a frozen state, but a supernaturalness of change, in which all variables are included, like the possibility of sleep in wakefulness.

The Earth is the purgatory of lies; here everything around us is a lie: the fake-ness of space, the fake-ness of things, the fake-ness of ourselves. And in the human brain even truth dances: at once everything is true, and at once nothing is true. The only way out of the flood of lies is precisely the one that seems to be the most truthful: imagination. In the midst of all this fake reality, it is up to your imagination to restore the true reality.
It is not the mountain and not the valley that is real, but the beauty which your imagination enjoys in the forms of the mountains and valleys; and from the pseudo-endlessness of the phenomenal world, the way leads through your imagination to the true infinity within you.
Imagination is one thing and fancy another, as speech is another and chatter another. Imagination works according to the law of life and feeds the hungry desires with mist; imagination works according to the law of being and what it creates, work of art, deed, thought: real and true.
On earth, all that comes into being and passes away is called reality; only imagination seems to draw its creatures out of nothing. The pseudo-nothing from which imagination draws is reality; and in the many separate pseudo-realities that exist, only what in them seems to be nothing, imagination, is real: their imperceptible, common essence, the unchanging existence behind their changing manifestations.

Look at a rock, a hammer, a bush, a horse, a man: all created, decaying, bounded, individual, separate-existing. Existence is the same in all.
The many forms that arise and decay: that is life.
The eternal succession, of which each form is only a stage: this is existence.
Man is the only one who seeks in the variables what can be fixed by name: he has meaning.
Man is the only one who digs beneath the individual and conditional in himself, to the common and unconditional existence: he has a soul.

The journey into yourself: the journey into the universe. The spatial world is to the universe as a pocket of cloth is to the living body.
At night, under the starry sky, you cry out: how big the world is! But behold: a single thought of yours can pass the farthest sky in an instant.
The journey from one thought to another is infinitely longer than from star to star.
One feels space to be infinite, but in reality one is confined in space as in a prison cell, the length and width of which are not one full step. He who has reached to the infinite currents of his being has made a small gap in the wall of the chamber; he who has dissolved his personality has made a gap in the wall of the chamber so wide that he can reach out.

Full wisdom is for the stone and the naked soul. The knowledge of nothing is the same as the knowledge of everything.
Go to the light, but ask it nothing. He who has no need to ask, is common with the answer.
As soon as you are smarter than anyone: you are dumber than everyone. To be wiser, this can rightly be done only by the master, who is aware of the stupidity of his "wiser" and on whose part teaching is humility: the wise listener is subordinated to the fool who speaks.
Truth, once spoken, is no longer truth; at best it is a feeble approximation of truth. The wise man is wise only as long as he remains silent; as soon as he speaks, he is a fool, for he can only give the indigestible husk of his nourishing knowledge. "Whatever fits into this miserable shell: look for it, eat it" - that's all he can do.
If you want to possess the truth, you can only use the teachings as a help, you have to find it deep within yourself.

May my joy be multiplied in your joy.
May my imperfection become goodness in you.

There is only one command, the rest is advice: try to feel, think, act in such a way that you will be for the good of all.
There is only one knowledge, the rest is only addition: the earth beneath you, the sky above you, the ladder is within you.

The truth is not in sentences, but in undistorted existence.
Eternity is not in time, but in the state of harmony.

Spread your treasures - let yourself become wealth.
Spread your ornaments - let yourself become beauty.
Forget your entertainments - let yourself become merriment.
Burn your books - let yourself become wisdom.
Waste your muscles - let yourself become strength.
Extinguish your flames - let yourself become love.
Banish your pity - let yourself become goodness.
Shed your beliefs - let yourself become faith.
Break through your barriers - let yourself become the world.
Unite your life and death - let wholeness become you yourself.

The only real learning is to awaken to life the dormant ancient knowledge in our being.
The primal wisdom inherent in the human being is essentially the same in everyone, its validity is complete. Ancestral knowledge is the only suitable foundation; that which is based on it is incorruptible, that which is based on thought is decayable.
Ancestral knowledge is infinitely simple, so simple that it cannot be put into words. It is agreed with all that is necessary, calm, solid; it is opposed to all that is seductive, exciting, teeming.
Ten armies, a hundred coffers, a thousand deeds are destroyed; what the possessors of the primal study create without any help is preserved.
He who has conquered for himself the ancestral knowledge inherent in his being has attained all that is humanly attainable; life and death can only superficially wound him, he is essentially inviolable and complete.

"I thank Béla Hamvas, my master, for allowing me to write this book: he created harmony in me.

This book is for you to know the harmony of the soul and, if it is any business of yours, to take possession of it.

What follows is neither new nor old: it bears the markings of an age, but its essence is not originated and not transient. He who walks beside the spring always picks his bouquet from the same flowers."

Towards wholeness

"Solvere volo et solvi volo.

Salvare volo et salvari volo.

Generare volo et generari volo.

Cantare volo et cantari volo.

Saltate cuncti!

Ornare volo et ornari volo.

Lucerna sum tibi, ille qui me vides.

Janua sum tibi, quicunque me pulsas.

Qui vides quod ago, tace opera mea.

(I want to dissolve and I want to dissolved.

I long to redeem and I long to be redeemed.

I desire to conceive and I desire to be conceived.

I long to sing and I long to become a melody.

Dance, all of you!

I long to adorn and I long to be adorned.

I am your lamp when you see me.

I am your door when you knock on me.

Who sees what I do, hear my work.)

From an apocryphal Gospel of John"