"Come fly with me," says the wasp to the flower.
"Cling to the branch beside me," says the flower to the wasp.
The young face, with its alternating fairies of joy and sadness: a moving, sparkling, swirling, seductive beauty.
The old face, with its firm forms, its even network of wrinkles: an uninviting, introspective, majestic, serene beauty.
Today's man is attracted by sensuality, he knows only the seductive-beautiful, and has few eyes for the great beauty of the old face.
And they mostly despise their young faces, make them the poster of their sex: and they despise their old faces, for they keep the miserable wreck of youth upon them.
In nature, there are always beautiful shapes and groups of colours. Look at a worm or a piece of manure: it too has a beautiful colour and shape.
If man takes something from nature to mould it to his own wishes, he more or less eclipses the original beauty, and makes it sometimes beautiful, mostly ugly.
Nature is the infinite creator of infinite beauty. Human creations are works of finite creation of varying beauty.
I heard it from my painter friend Árpád Illés:
- There is nothing distasteful in nature. In fact: it even corrects and repairs human bad taste. Look at a tramcar: a yellowed, hideous box.
But if you look at the city from the hill, the colours match and the moving little yellow trams enrich the view. Or buy an ugly chandelier, the kind you see in most bourgeois homes: take it out to the woods, bury it in the ground among the roots, go get it in a few months and you'll see nature beautify it as much as possible.
I have heard this from him and other painters:
- It's worth contemplating the patches and cracks forming on damp, decaying walls. There are no nicer drawings, no nicer groups of colours anywhere. The solid or thousand-spined lines of the stains are in a perfect harmony that human art can only attain in its purest periods. And of the most varied colours, the greens, blues, yellowish tints of grey, reds, dull-greens, rust-colours, always in simple and vast harmony. But the human eye is accustomed to fairground junk and has difficulty adjusting to the divine-beautiful.
The potential to create is within man and his means, but artistic creation is a superhuman miracle.
What makes beautiful works of art beautiful, we search in vain among the facts of the phenomenal world. Masterpieces may be simple, complex, ordered, personal, perfect, primitive; so too are works of contemplation. It is only that the masterpiece has that wonderful elasticity which is lacking in the contemporaneous work and which cannot be deduced from the circumstances of the phenomenal world.
In the masterpiece, through the imagination of the creator and the artist, the timeless is transcended into the temporal world.
"Is jasmine gentle, or do I have the gentleness that jasmine evokes? Is the marigold insidious, or do I have the insidiousness that the marigold evokes?" "The outside and the inside are essentially the same."
"Is the grain of dust small, or is there in me the smallness that the grain of dust evokes? Is the mountain large, or do I have the greatness that the mountain recalls?"
"The outer and the inner are essentially the same."
Read poems in languages you don't understand. Not a lot, just a few lines at a time, but several in a row. Ignore their meanings, but if possible know their original pronunciation and sound.
This way you will get to know the music of languages and the inner music of the creative souls. And you can come to the point where you can read the texts of your mother tongue independently of their content; only in this way can you experience the inner, true beauty of the poem, its disembodied dance.
The imagination links the temporal with the timeless, which is why its contents are half-measures: they have a temporal, changing mode of appearance and a timeless, unchanging essence. The contents of the imagination: a religious concept, a moral law, an artistic creation, change their mode of appearance and eventually perish; their essence is non-existent and non-vanishing.
Religions, myths, methods of divination are created by the human imagination, like works of art. Which does not mean that they are invalid; in fact, it means that they are valid. Because imagination, unlike emotion and reason, does not operate according to the contingency of the temporal world, but according to the law of the timeless.
Take care whether you think light or dark; for what you have thought you have created.
Nature creates in the natural world, the soul in the spiritual world. When you make a garment, furniture, whatever, you first think it out, that is, you create it in the world of the soul, and only then do you make it in the world of nature, with your natural tools. Your true creation is not in nature, but in the soul; one is sooner or later destroyed, another is ingrained in the moment of its creation. And he who exists not in the present, nor in time, but pervades the whole of time: he watches your creation.
In the phenomenal, God is only an idea; in God, the phenomenal is only a ghost.
God is not present in the perceptibility of things. Things turn their backs to perception and their colours to God. God is present in the common essence of things, but is not present in the many perceptible manifestations of things, where a host of phenomena ripple.
There are no two worlds, only one, showing to our external perception the changing series of symptoms, to our internal cognition the constant essence.
In the temporal and changing, it is perception that adjusts us; in the timeless and unchanging, it is imagination.
He who immerses himself in the basic layer of himself, the unchanging: no matter how many times he repeats it, no matter how much he knows the unchanging, he still has no perception of it. What he knows there: he does not experience, but imagines; only the unchanging leads the imagination just as the changing series of symptoms leads the perception.
Sensory experience is possible only of the variable, solid knowledge only of the constant. There is no sensory experience of the essence, only knowledge based on inner cognition; there is no solid knowledge of the phenomena, only temporary knowledge.
If the variable "is", the constant is only an idea; if the constant "is", the variable is only a ghost. "There is eternity" and "there is no eternity", "God is" and "God is not", are equally valid, whether viewed from the constant or from the variable.
What is articulated is perceived by the soul between the boundaries; and what is unarticulated is an idea. To the boundless soul, that which is undivided is perceptible; and that which is divided is a phenomenon. To the complete soul, stumpiness is that which is dissected or unsectioned; reality is that which is beyond naming.
Table and non-table, long and short, good and bad, eternal and ephemeral - The double Names are perfect guides to man. And he who sees beyond them: glimpses the Unnamable.
Just as day and night are halved around the globe, so are the namable dualities halved around the unnamable soul. In sleep, death and contemplation, there is no day and night, and where separation ceases, there also cease the namable dualities.
"I am the variable and I am the unchangeable."
For those who don't know: creation can justly be called cruel.
The agony of change is the inhalation of unchanging. The joy of change is the exhalation of unchanging.
Calmness is incessantly achieved in the struggle. Reality sings unceasingly through appearances. Song rests incessantly in the unchanging.
Not a single point fits in the space. Space seems limitless only to the senses; in fact, it is narrower than a point.
That which is boundless is without coverage; that which is without coverage has the same infinite greatness and infinite smallness.
God is not only infinitely great, but also infinitely small: there is no smallness in which he is not fully contained.
God and the universe are within a single point.
You experience the change of days and seasons: this is the external time, measured by the steady movement of the clock.
You experience the change of the disembodied contents of your person: this is the inner time, for which you have no measuring instrument, passing quickly or slowly compared to the outer time.
Inner time is also played out in the animal, the plant, the mineral, as their changing phenomena are cast like shadow-lace upon unchanging existence.
The succession of inanimate forces at work: world-flow-time.
The ebb and flow of the universal current of humanity: historical time.
These are all phenomenon-times, but they are formed by a series of changing and finite phenomena. Of a different nature is total-time, which contains the unchanging, infinite divine operation. World-creation, world-process and world-end are contained in total-time; in phenomena-time the end will never come, just as creation never occurred in it, and just as existence does not fit into it, but only its innumerable arising and passing manifestations. In every minute of the phenomena-time, creation, continuation, destruction are equally present as a finite mimesis of the infinite creation, existence, judgment; but creation, survival, judgment is not there. Phenomenon-time is not infinite, nor does it have a beginning and an end, like the circle. In total-time, creation is the beginning, survival is the middle, and judgment is the end, and they coincide just as the plus and minus infinities coincide in the point, and the infinite distance between them. Total-time, what all unchanging-endless, is point-like; and the myriad kinds of phenomena-time are encircled as nearer or farther circles.
The model of total-time in phenomenon-time: the idea-time. A person's life in idea-time does not begin with birth and does not end with death. Your vague, irresponsible acts in idea-time are always 'youthful', and your mature, responsible moments are 'old age', whether they occur at the age of twenty or seventy.
In ideal-time, the life of the one-man is always moving from the weaker to the different, and the life of humanity from the different to the weaker. For only the one-man always rises above the state of life; mankind as a whole is a formless mass that darkens.
The four main epochs of humanity in the time of ideas:
First, the Golden Age. The first Age of Man. The life of man is silent-virtuous, simple, mystery-less, in perfect harmony with disembodied forces and nature.
Second is the Silver Age. The unchanging base-layer and the changing personality are separated in man. Eternity radiates into the ephemeral in three ways: as being, as unqualified validity, as truth; as goodness drawing the temporal towards the timeless; and as the formal factor of the former two, as beauty. Human life is characterised by the proliferation of faculties, by the achievement of greatness without great difficulty. Heavenly help multiplies man's strength, and man does not always use his strength in the service of the one from whom he has received it. The rebellious man of the Silver Age is so powerful that disembodied forces can defeat him only in severe, alternate struggles.
Third is Ore Age. In human beings, the link between the unchanging and the changing is loosened, in need of constant reinforcement. Truth, goodness, beauty are no longer self-evident, but must be sought. The search for truth is science, goodness is law, beauty is art. The man of the Age of Ore is tenacious, hard-working, courageous, passionate, unyielding, vindictive; his stubborn diligence usually brings results. If he rebels, he has little strength to be a menace, but he is so tenacious that disembodied forces can only drain him with a torrent of fire and water.
Fourth is the Iron Age. In man there is no longer any connection between the unchanging and the changing, except in glimpses, in dreams. They know only the variable and lose their sense of the unchanging. They live entirely in a disjointed phenomenal world of space and time, and what is unbroken, transcendent of space and time: God, eternity, incorporeal forces, are all imagined separately in space and time, in the manner of phenomena in motion: thus human primordial knowledge becomes a confused fable. Some see the absurdity of this fable, and therefore deny God and the immortality of the soul and the afterlife; others, out of cowardice, want at all costs to believe in the impossible fable. The tragedy of the Iron Age is that the Iron Age man is a fool if he is an unbeliever and a greater fool if he is a believer. The good will to strive for truth, goodness and beauty is mostly there, but it is as hopeless as the flight of a bird without wings. Truth is replaced by a hundred different views, science by data-crunching and popularising mass-cultivation. Goodness has been replaced by sentimentality, which, while in one place it is moved to tears and dispenses sugar and honey, in another it is hateful and mercilessly strips. The law is replaced by all sorts of decrees which have nothing to do with morality, they are dictated by the interests of the ruling party; if the ruling party changes, what a day before you were in prison for, now you are placed by the meat pot for the same thing, and what a day before you were decorated, now you are hanged for the same thing. In the Iron Age, there are only guards and prisoners, and every time there is a change of regime, these two castes are exchanged. Beauty is replaced by desirability, art by entertainment and home decoration. The man of the Iron Age is as violent as he is helpless; he organizes, arranges, controls everything, but it becomes a mess; everything he tries to build is a pothole. He never turns against the higher power, for he does not know it; he does not need a flood to destroy it: if he lives up to his potential, he is ruined.
These four epochs exist in idea-time, not in historical time; but every stage of historical time bears the stamp of one of these four epochs.
Examine whether you yourself belong to the Golden, Silver, Ore or Iron Age?
"Give back the unit of measure to man". Introduce in prayers.
If you strive to follow the eternal standard, do not be offended at those who do not strive to do so, unless their efforts are fluctuating between many finite and changing standards. Look not at what they have not, but at what they have: for even the most miserable have spiritual treasures which you lack. Anyone can make excuses, anyone can be superior; learn to learn from everyone.
Don't expect a miracle. Because the promise of a miracle is fulfilled without a miracle.
If you want to penetrate into the world of the larger-than-life, larger-than-self, or into your real being (here "I" and "other" cannot be separated): be careful not to get involved in illusions, "miracles" instead of reality. Frequent prayer, frequent introspection, is the protection against this. Nowhere are vigilance and sobriety so necessary as here, where the standards of life are not applicable.
If you want to know your timeless base-layer, you must first grapple with your layered over temporal person, which hides the base from you. Dismantle your person and see it as a stranger. Let nothing remain hidden, unexamined, unconscious. Let nothing remain in it that you cling to or hate, because both clinging and hating are falsifying.
The simplest way of self-examination is prayer. If in prayer you confess your faults to God, you will have penetrated every nook and cranny of your person, because man, in prayer, is honest before God; he is always lying to himself, but he dares not lie to God. And if you have asked God's help, you bring into operation the help that is unknown under your person.
He who begins to dismantle his individuality loses more and more the boundary between his own soul and the souls of others. When he looks into the eyes of his fellow man, he senses his feelings and recognises: 'this is me'; when he strokes a dog, he senses its world merging into one: 'this is me'; when he touches a piece of furniture for a long time, he takes in its indivisible silence: 'this is me'. His own soul is no longer his own, and the soul of everything is his own; everything is transparent, as if it were made of crystal; at once immensely rich, his body and soul are refreshed and filled with the same joy of work, rest, company, solitude.
Dismantle your character and the world will come into you.
Dissolve the world that has become your character and wholeness will come into you.
If you arrange the contents of your inner being; if you separate within yourself the changing transitory elements of your person and the unchanging, eternal world of your being: the transitory elements appear to you as objects, plants, animals, so to speak, and you can interact with the factors of the eternal world. Suddenly you notice in your solitude that you are learning from someone without the use of mouth or ears; and at first you do not know whether you are imagining it or whether a disembodied being has descended to you. Your invisible teacher is not a mirage, nor a spirit descended to you, but one of the infinite currents that lie beneath your person. The infinite currents are the formers and guides of the personality, which can be accessed and interrogated after the personality has been broken through. Anyone can be in touch with them, only not everyone knows it; intuition, the sudden realization without precedent, is always a suggestion of one of the infinite currents.
The infinite currents behind the personality are called angels by Christians, gods by the ancient Greeks, and devas by the Indians. Who are these angels, gods, and devas? They are not persons; they are the soul-powers pervading the universe; they are not spirits outside our own being and descending to us, nor are they parts of our own being, but they are the forces of the naked soul emerging from under the cloak of personality; the soul which is not 'my soul' or a 'separate soul', but the 'soul', without limit.
The individuality-obsessed man of today has lost the knowledge of angels; he does not believe in invisible winged creatures descending from the air, and he is right. But he does not know that his personality and his soul are not identical; that behind his temporal personality lies the non-temporal soul, which is not one's soul, but is undivided, boundless; and that the various manifestations of the soul are angels; they are hidden in him like a multitude of colors in a colorless sunbeam. And he who penetrates beneath his transitory person, comes into contact with the angels, as a prisoner who breaks the prison window comes into contact with the pure air.
There are other kinds of angels: an angel of a landscape, an angel of a family, an angel of a nation and many more. And there are devils. An angel or devil is not a person, but it is not a symbol. If you notice in any of your manifestations that which is not temporal, not enclosed, not your own: it is the angel or the devil.
A general human frailty: greed, frivolity, avarice, etc., is as unenclosed and unindividual as the soul. From profligate to profligate, from miser to miser, an invisible current runs, not in space, yet almost palpable: this current is the devil.
Between angel and devil there is no more sharp boundary than between good and bad man. The infinite currents behind your personality, if you access them, behave like angels; if you pile the dross of life on top of them, they behave like devils.
Angels and devils of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms: fairies, elves. They are not beings; they are not in time, but in the unchanging.
Observe a group of sparrows soaring above: what in their wing-noise is not the sound of nature, but some sweet simplicity: this is the fairy of the sparrow-flock. Or observe a walnut-tree: if you pluck it, it bears its fruit reluctantly and grudgingly; and if you approach it gently and respectfully, it will willingly give, and you will see on the lower branches, which seem to be stripped, the most available and hitherto unnoticed nuts: this is the fairy of the walnut-tree.
Whoever reaches out to the infinite currents behind his person will gradually notice that his bodily senses are being peculiarly enriched. Whomever you pay close attention to with your eyes, ears, or in any other way, his form and present state are almost reflected in you, and also that of the phenomena that are passing or persisting. When you speak to someone, you perceive not only their words, but what emanates from their being; and they think you are a mind-reader. And all that is reflected in you in this way is as if it were colour; not only does your eye see colour, but an inner, hidden eye does too.
The souls of inanimate objects are dark purple, of plants green, of animals dark yellow, brown, reddish. The dullness is brown, the spiritual richness is the play of grey in bright light colours. The colour of agile souls is paler, more articulated, more variable; that of ponderous souls is darker, more uniform, more constant. The basic colour of a child's soul is like a luminous pearl; that of a man is a cold greyish-blue, which is mostly darkened, faded, browned, reddened; that of a woman is purplish-red, and this is mostly inclined very early to the colour of a withered petal. The few men who grow old in such a way that their old age is a noble withering, not a forced fading: all the colour of ore, silver, bronze, gold.
The spiritual sense of colour is in fact there for everyone, but not everyone takes care of it and not everyone develops it in themselves. One can feel flaring anger as red, helpless anger as poison green and bright lemon yellow, daydreaming as purple and pink, broad cheerfulness as red, quiet cheerfulness as metallic light, boredom as pale grey, sorrow as dark blue, hopelessness as black.
Whenever you can free yourself from your circumstances: the final state, in which life and death are identical, unfolds in you like a boundless radiance.
The ultimate gift: a motionless dance, a sweetness beyond taste, beyond measure.
The reason thinks by turning thoughts into a series of words. Whoever penetrates behind his intellect, into the world of infinite currents, here comes to a different form of thought, which may be called "angelic intellect": the spiritual contents do not appear as words, but as stationary and moving figures in an otherworldly space; here are not happy, sad, pleasant, unpleasant thoughts, but round, angular, smooth, strong, monochrome, variegated thoughts. There is an unnameable blend of sharpness and dullness, of brilliance and gloom, which covers everything, which may best be called 'music without sound'; it is the music of the angels, the music of the spheres.
And beyond the infinite currents, in the union of totality, there is another form of thought: this is the "divine intellect" in which the thinker, the object of thought, and the thought are identical.
For those who want to reach wholeness: the most stubborn obstacle that clings like a thistle: vanity. The man who consciously approaches wholeness feels excellence, superiority. And as long as he has a feeling of superiority, his individuality cannot dissolve, because only the individual can be superior or inferior, there are no differences in wholeness. The way to perfection is not the way of the excellent, but of all that are different: it is the way of all, even if they are unaware of it. And if you feel yourself to be different from those who are at the beginning of the path, and different from those who have already reached the end: you will be deceived by the delusion of time; for whether one is at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the path, is only a difference of date.