Emil Páleš
(Czech conference, Kutná hora, 20 October 2018)
Like every age, this one too needs heroes who will stand up to the dragon. Only today we need to be able to conceive of our struggle spiritually, not physically, in order to fight it. We are in a culture war. Every true idea, every ethical principle must be defended like a fortress and a castle that must not be forfeited to the enemy. For this we need the sword of clear discernment, the spear of goodwill and the shield of pure feeling, so as not to be assailable. We must wage verbal and mental battles as if our lives were at stake, for if we do not fight them mentally, physical blood will flow. We must be prepared to risk and sacrifice or we will lose everything including eternity.
All my work revolves around the causal connection between the invisible and visible worlds. How are our mental images, thoughts, emotional movements related to our health, the state of the economy, politics, or the emergence of new creatures in evolution? Everything in the world that has human significance for us has two aspects: the material and the spiritual, the external and the internal. By combining the two, things come into being and endure.
Evil thoughts must first weaken the immunity in order for the body to open the gates to germs. Microbes do not cause disease, they only make it visible. Cocaine itself does not cause addiction. Only he who has not found the source of mental sweetness in mystical love is dependent on psychoactive substances.
Economic laws did not cause the financial crisis. The laws of economics are just the repeated behaviour of a large number of people. They will change if we change our priorities. We invoke money daily as a synonym for the hardest reality. But money is just a belief system. Gold has almost no utilitarian value, and the longstanding belief in gold over millennia is pure religion. In the same way, the digital money in Wall Street computers would lose all power if the shared belief that they have it were to vanish.
The world is materialized values. Even technology is just a materialized spirit. Mechanics, for example, was born out of a religious impulse. In the mid-16th century, church preachers came forward with fatalism and predestination. Everything was said to be irreversibly predestined. This volitional attitude turned into a dramatic artistic mood in feeling, a deterministic worldview in thinking, and within a hundred years led to the founding of mechanics as a new science. We were surrounded by pulleys and gears. But it was not clockwork and steam engines that created deterministically minded man, but the Calvinist believer in an inexorable God who built the machines.
For millennia before Christ, pharaohs and kings took names derived from solar deities in the rhythm of the archangel of the Sun, Michael. After the advent of Christianity, the same rhythm continued with saints whose iconographic attribute is a lantern, candle or other luminary. When Michael reappeared in 1879, Edison and Swan independently invented the light bulb and had it patented. The light bulb does not consist only of glass, metal and tungsten filament. The light bulb is a materialized mystical light!
Let's take no excuses from reality that the world is such and such – we make the world. What do we want it to be? Let us be interested in the values from which it springs. Reality springs from values. New cultural epochs are brought into being by the transfiguration of the value ladder. Give preference to a different spiritual intuition and a new type of science, art and cult and political constitution will come. Everything eventually grows out of unscientific intuitions, among which the heart chooses, the ugly ones or the beautiful ones. What naiveté that religion can be abolished! The whole secular world, including atheism, is a crypto-religion. Everyone has some faith because he prefers something.
So the question is not whether or not to believe, but what kind of faith do we have? Is it good and true? What kind of world does it create? And do we know how it happens? Do we know the basic elements and laws of supernature? Invisible nature also consists of elemental forces interacting with each other. There exists a sort of mental physics and chemistry. For example, the law of conversion and conservation of mental energy. There are seven basic affects, seven types of intelligence, seven moral matrices (approximately). They are similar to the periodic table of chemical elements. Each has its own unique quality, and their combination produces a rich variety of compounds.
Our forefathers bequeathed to us a condensed knowledge of this in the images of the seven archangels. Archangels are the prototypes of virtues, the ideals of ennobled mental forces. The Bible compares them to the letters of the divine Word through which the world came into being. But they are also opposed by the seven arch-demons, who are distorted images, fallen forms of the same spiritual gifts. Do we know them? Can we discern spirits? If not, we are guaranteed to succumb to them. Do we know what spiritual ingredient needs to be added where to bring about flourishing? And what to remove lest an explosive mixture be created that will raze lands to the ground?
The modern age began with the discovery by Western Europeans of a new form of consciousness ¬– the ability to discover, through active experimentation under controlled conditions, truths previously hidden. But they exercised this ability only extrovertedly, in the external world. They created modern science and technology, with which they conquered and changed the world. Eastern Europeans should complete this development and unfold the same ability inwardly, introvertedly. The dramatic imbalance between external and internal knowledge makes this globe a planet of apes. We fly in spaceships and the motivational structures of our psyche are at the level of animals.
True progress can only proceed in balance. In such an imbalance, no technical innovation contributes any more to progress, but only creates new vices and social ills that absorb and nullify its positive effects. According to a study by the Post Bank, the median real income in Slovakia has not increased in the quarter of century since the end of socialism. An ordinary Slovak has to work the same number of hours and minutes for his or her shopping basket as before. How is it possible that capitalism and robotics have not contributed to an increase in wages? So that the surplus product all went into social inequality, drained abroad and was wasted on previously unknown seductions.
Why do we count tenths of a percent of GDP? Net income could be tripled if people wanted to. All they would have to do is stop lying, stealing and harming each other. Human potential is bound by the forces of evil like the vast energy in the nucleus of an atom. It is possible to unleash tremendous energy from within matter and create a sun on Earth by sheer intelligent geometric arrangement of material elements. From the depths of the soul even greater power can be summoned when order is made within it. Eastern Europe will take over cultural initiative once it discovers its original capacity, which history has raised it to. Once it realises that technical and legal measures can be substituted by virtues, it will discover 'moral technology'.
The Slavic talent for moral imagination is reflected, among other things, in the literature of the science-fiction genre. The writer has to imagine the future and aliens about whom we really know nothing. It is a task comparable to the Rorschach test in psychology. Whoever imagines something is only telling about the psychic structures of his own unconscious. Let us recall some well-known works: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, War of the Worlds by Herbert G. Wells, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem or Noon by the Strugatsky brothers. Hard science fiction predominates in the West and soft science fiction in the East. Western man does not evolve morally, instead he surrounds himself with technology. Progress is outward, externalized into inventions. Slavic science fiction is more interested in psychology, philosophy, ethics, visions of an ideal society. Progress here is more internalized in the education and refinement of man himself.
Spiritual knowledge is the task of the present. Therefore the demon of the age is everywhere proclaiming that truth does not exist and everything is relative. Certainly, the twentieth century has seen ideologies to which millions have been sacrificed. But we must not react out of trauma and fall into the opposite extreme. Values are knowable, they just cannot be imposed collectively from the outside – they are the result of personal struggle, of inner growth, and must be freely glimpsed by each individual in dialogue. Selfish circles would prefer to keep humanity at this stage of development: hypnotized by technology and morally as incapable as a child. They therefore want to limit the human capacity of thinking to the material world. So that in the spiritual realm there is no thinking, only blind faith in something vague. But a vague spirituality cannot be carried out. It is just as useless as would be a foggy physics, chemistry, or medicine. Even those who don't acknowledge Newton will be crushed when they fall from the fifth floor. Just so, spiritual laws will grind us down, regardless of whether we believe in them.
The world is waiting for heroes who will show the reality of spiritual powers by making them effective in practice. They will make spiritual realities into driving social forces. Viktor Frankl discovered the meaning of life; but not as a philosophical conjecture, but as a real force that allowed survival in the death camps. Mahatma Gandhi honestly experimented with truth and discovered the courage for non-violence; again, not as wishful thinking, but as a political force that moved the British Empire. Tomáš Baťa stood out because he stopped seeing business in single-minded terms as profit at the expense of everything else. Alexander Dubček exercised his humanity and a miracle happened – the whole country stood united behind its supreme leader.
Václav Klaus says it is time to leave the European Union because Brussels is imposing nonsense on us. I will not leave, I myself am European! I live the values that made Europe great. Acropolis and Gothic cathedrals were built by me and my spiritual ancestors. I will not abandon them, I want to defend them. Western Europe lifted us up technically – now let us save her morally from decline. Let us at last find our own spiritual North and take the initiative! The minority can prevail over the majority if it has the Truth on its side. But she must speak it out and she must stand for it.
In the extreme case, we must not be afraid of sanctions and a reduction in living standards. Cowards do not win their freedom. Spiritually, we will benefit if we must do everything ourselves – our own strengths and abilities will grow. The youth will again study for something real and not just for hucksters and traffickers. At least we won't be stricken with welfare dementia. Let's not run away from the battlefield, let's not leave the EU, let's get thrown out instead. In fact, it will be us who throw them out of Europe.
Those who know history cannot fail to see the parallel with the end of the Roman Empire. The West Roman Empire collapsed, but the East Roman Empire persisted (in altered form) for another thousand years. It carried the torch of culture through the Dark Ages. Let us save Western Europe and, if not, at least not let ourselves be dragged down into decay. Are we too incompetent to do that? Then let's start working on our abilities. One grows with the tasks. Real life begins by choosing a star to serve and bowing down to it.
Moral knowledge as a task of Eastern Europe
