"THE OPINION VOICED IN THE FILM IS NATURALLY JUST ONE OF MANY," "HOWEVER THE AUTORS STILL THINK" "IT'S IMPORTANT TO TELL THE AUDIENCE" "ABOUT THE LEGAL IMPLICATIONS RELATING TO DRUGS." "Take a deep breath, look deep into my eyes and relax." "Start at the top of your head, relax the muscles in your forehead," "and those of your face, your eyelids." "Concentrate on your eyelids." "They'll become heavier and heavier." "Heavier and heavier." "If I were to continue like this, you'd fall into such a deep trance that if I were to say that I will now burn your hands with a cigarette, but only touch it with a pencil," "you'd still get a burn mark." "So imagine how powerful this order, this suggestion is, and how much more powerful it would be if you were really little, say three or five years old and your dad or mom would constantly say" ""Andras you're abnormal, you're insane. "" "PRESENTATIONS BY ANDRÁS FELDMÁR" "THE REAL QUESTION IS NOT IF THERE IS LIFE AFTER DEATH," "BUT WHETHER THERE IS DEATH AFTER LIFE." "IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH?" "So as much as we are hypnotized, we are dead." "To that extent are we not living the way we should be." "But it is very unpleasant to wake up when everybody is asleep around you." "I noticed that when my kids were small, they were always trying to get their mom and me to stay awake." "They never wanted to go to bed, and they were the first to wake up." "We wanted them to sleep longer and go to bed before they wanted to." "And then I realized that this struggle between adults and kids happens not just with sleep, but also with perception, visions and dreams." "The adults always want the kids to go to bed, and the kids always want the adults to wake up." "Because children are still awake and feel lonely when adults sleep." "So it's loneliness that scares a person when they wake up and everyone is asleep around them." "And if I have just woken up and I want to wake everyone else up they will hate me or lock me up." "Tell me to go to hell because they want to get a good sleep!" "The so-called education in Hungary and elsewhere in the world consists of teaching children the roles" "that they will need to play in life." "Sadly, there is not much energy in our societies, here or in America or Canada" "to raise kids so that we encourage them to become who they want to be." "Without roles," "without telling them what they will have to say." "So what happens to a person who is always role playing?" "He hopes to have 5 minutes without having to role play, or be on stage." "But life is often like a 24-hour soap opera." "If I was the star of such a soap opera," "I'd never have time to live my life." "I'd have to always be 'in character'." "A lot of people have such lives." "Parents hypnotize a child into the soap opera and he may stay in it until death." "He'll never find out that life is something else." "We have to be born." "Even if I'm actually 30, it doesn't mean that I am alive." "Often, what is handled by psychiatrists is someone's need and clumsy attempt to be born." "To maybe live before death." "In that case the person needs no drugs, just someone to take care of them so that he can be who he is." "Without pretending they know what to do better than the person himself." "The psychology departments of medical schools are actually acting studios." "They teach how to play a psychiatrist, as the 'psychiatrist' doesn't exist." "It's only a role." "I've never read reports by psychiatrists that say what we should do when we don't know what to do." "Psychiatrists cannot ask this." "This is what they are taught in school, in the acting school, where they are taught to know exactly what to do, or else they are bad doctors." "So if a doctor asks himself and others what to do when someone doesn't know what to do, then other psychiatrists say:" ""He's nuts, he can't be a psychiatrist." "He's crazy." ""But if he comes to me I'll cure him. "" "The best shamans are the ones who've been very ill themselves." "Those shamans who went to shaman school just to earn money, never having been sick themselves, are never as good as those who were cured by the shaman and who become shamans themselves, as a means for staying healthy." "The best shaman is one who knows that if I hadn't been ill or suffered, if I got nothing out of psychotherapy, I would not believe in it either." "I don't know how it is here, but in North America, 98% of all psychiatrists have never had psychotherapy treatment." "So naturally, they do not believe in it." "My mother never loved me." "It's not easy to talk about this." "But let me talk about it in more detail." "Because my mother always said she adored me, she loved me." "I had to realize she was hungry," "and she was eating me." "She loved me the same way I love what I eat." "Oh, I love this piece of meat." "Oh, I love this plate of porridge." "Language is such a fascinating thing." "Of course I love porridge and meat, but I probably don't love the animal whose carcass supplied the meat." "If I loved it, I wouldn't be involved in its slaughter and consumption." "So this is how language tells lies" "My mother didn't eat me in a cannibalistic way, don't get me wrong..." "But she had dreams and needs and she produced me" "to have someone fulfill these needs." "I needed to become someone she needed." "So this is like incest, right?" "Sexual desire is only desire." "So if she needed me for that, you'd call it incest." "But it doesn't matter what kind of desire a mother or father has for a child, it's all incestuous." "Only not quite as straightforward..." "it's a little hidden." "Because true love can be defined as love that doesn't want anything." "If my mother had loved me, she would've let me be who I wanted to be, to be who I was." "Not tell me whenever I was being myself that I was a naughty boy." "Or that I was a good boy whenever I was how she wanted me to be." "When I was about fifteen years old," "I fell in love for the first time." "My mother became very jealous." "I never understood why." "She wasn't my wife or lover." "Why couldn't she just be happy for me?" "She said things like: "This girl has a face like flat dough. "" "And also, that she was a whore." "My mother also told me" "I was such an awful guy that no woman would ever love me and neither would she, if she weren't my mother, and the only reason she stuck around was that she was my mother." "Otherwise if she weren't, even she wouldn't talk to me!" "It took about twenty years to understand why she did this." "She did it so that I'd never leave her, so that she'd never be alone." "She thought if she could convince me she was the only woman I could be with," "I would never leave her alone." "This isn't love, is it?" "When R.D. Laing was crossing the globe he asked everyone he met what they were most frightened of." "After some reflection, almost everyone in every country replied that they were afraid of love." "They weren't afraid of being able to love someone else, but of being loved." "The most scary thing is surrendering yourself to someone's love." "Why is this?" "If I love you, I can turn away whenever I want." "I don't have to give anything up." "I am in control." "But if you love me, I trust you to hold me and love me and I risk you dumping me anytime." "It is essential for people to speak from their own perspective." "For example, if my mother, or someone like my mother, came to me for therapy, I would empathize with her pain." "But if I'm a child, and someone tells me why mother is the way she is, that only serves to avoid me coming to terms with my own problems." "So as a child, I need someone on my side." "I hope someone's on my mother's side too and I hope that one day, we'll have a good relationship." "But it can't be fake." "It is fake until a child needs to think, "Oh, but mommy has it tough too. "" "That is not the child's problem." "The child cannot be burdened with mom's problems." "Of course I understand why my mother did it." "She wasn't a bad person." "As Ferenczi often said, quietly," ""They would have loved to love each other," ""but they didn't know how."" "My mother would have loved to love me, but sadly she didn't know how." "And I would have wanted her to, and I still want someone to help her find a way to love me." "I am a bachelor, but I could get married, but I don't want to change my life, I want to remain what I am." "I think like a woman:" ""I am an independent woman, and want to live my life" ""the same as before, but with a partner. "" "If people get together on these terms, then it isn't a marriage." "In Sanskrit, the word for marriage is the word used for death." "So marriage and death are the same word, because if one doesn't want to die, they shouldn't get married." "If I really wish to live with someone, my independent self needs to die." "And someone will be born from me, something larger than "I": the "us"." "If there is a real us, I and he/she becomes "we are"." "In order for us to be born, both I and he/she need to die." "Because if he/she doesn't die and I don't die, there is no us, only a he/she and an I." "Then we might as well be roommates and share meals, but there wouldn't be an us." "The moment "us" is born, she and I are part of it" "and we are therefore changed." "So if she becomes pregnant and we keep leading our lives as before, and the kid is born and we don't want to die as we were," "or be reborn as a threesome, the kid will feel unwelcome." "So the child will not feel at home, it will feel it's a burden for the two who live their lives as if nothing had happened." "So the couple needs to die and a new "us" has to be born, which is large enough to include three people." "This either happens or it doesn't." "Just because a child is born doesn't mean that the "us" is born." "And we can continue:" "when the second child is born, the threesome has to die and a foursome has to be born." "In reality, there is no bee and there is no ant." "There is only the beehive and the anthill." "It's only an illusion that there are individual bees and ants." "Because without a queen they would all die." "So the group is the community:" "the anthill is for the ant and the beehive is for the bee what a family is for a human being." "Nothing is better than a good family." "But nothing is worse than a bad family." "It is a momentous moment when a person from one family comes to the point of starting his own." "My role was to..." "I never liked being at home." "So in a way I was homeless." "It is important to realize this." "Tamás Szász said that homelessness is a major cause of mental illnesses." "If you have no roof over your head, you are in big trouble." "It's not only poor people who are homeless, but so are those who don't want to be at home." "They measured in big American cities that traffic is slower in the evening than in the morning," "because people would rather leave than return home." "This is really sad." "So my task was to form a family so that the ones I had to be with would be the ones I most wanted to be with on this earth." "When Christ said, "You cannot be my disciple" ""until you turn your back on your father and mother, etc. "" "He didn't tell us to hate our father or mother, he simply meant that we can't be divine if we role play." "Until then we won't know ourselves." "All roles have to be abandoned." "Motherhood is a role." "Fatherhood is a role." "Being my mother's son is a role." "Being a psychiatrist is a role." "Being my son's father is a role." "Buddha, Christ and LSD all show that you can be someone outside all roles." "And this is very dangerous." "Normally, we look for security by playing these roles." "I guess you are now wondering whether I am now in a role or not." "And maybe thinking about how to find that out." "I will not give you a recipe for this, but it's interesting to think about." "If I talk about it while role playing, I am wasting my life and yours." "Because each minute I'm here is my life and each minute we sit here is yours." "And if you're bored or think I'm talking nonsense, then it would be better for you to go home and do something worthwhile." "Because if it's not worthwhile, than why do it?" "The main cause of depression, I think, is if someone suddenly realizes he has been playing roles all his life and doesn't know who he is, doesn't want to play those roles, but has no idea what to do about it." "This is depression." "It's not chemical but existential." "No one to this day has proven that schizophrenia has a biological or genetic basis." "They've tried, but looking at the literature, nothing is conclusive." "But others, many in the past 30 years, have tried to show that schizophrenia is just a word" "for an illness." "If we were to find out the reality of the illness, we'd be very ashamed." "Or maybe the person's family should be very ashamed." "Or our entire society should be ashamed." "So to avoid this, it is better to say it is genetic, or a mental illness." "And that we have a cure for it." "Then nobody has to feel ashamed." "It's not the so-called schizophrenics who are helpless, it's psychiatry." "Psychiatry is like..." "Like black magic?" "Like black magic." "Because it is the psychiatrist who tells parents, society, and the so-called schizophrenic that the condition cannot be cured." "And he says this with the authority of science." "He says this in a way that cannot be questioned." "So this is a profound suggestion, the highest form of hypnosis." "If someone comes to you with a problem, saying, "I am suffering,"" "and a person wearing a big black hat says," ""It will always be like this, take these pills. "" "It is as if you were a diabetic taking insulin until your days end." "Not true." "It's an absolute lie." "If you look at the literature, it is all written there, that this is not true, but nobody wants to believe this." "It is very interesting why." "Whose interest is it to hypnotize folk?" "Whose?" "For example, those who make millions by manufacturing medicine." "The whole world over, there are psychiatrists saying there are incurable illnesses for which medicine is necessary." "Anthropologists were the first to say that this is not true." "But psychiatrists don't listen to anthropologists, seeing as they aren't psychiatrists." "It has been mentioned many times that schizophrenia is the illness of rich countries, a side-effect of capitalism." "For example, in India or Sri Lanka, if someone shows symptoms of what we'd call schizophrenia," "these days the family has a choice:" "take him to a traditional shaman or a psychiatrist with a western diploma." "Anthropologists have compared what happens to these patients." "The shamans say that it's not illness, and all it needs is for the relatives and eat and drink together for 3 days." "Then the shaman goes and asks about problems and personal disputes, encouraging discussion and forgiveness." "And then he instills faith that the boy will get better and be able to keep working as before," "and that this won't ever happen again." "And believe me, this is what happens." "Anthropologists have observed this." "Those who choose this path resume work, don't hallucinate anymore and it never happens to them again." "If this person goes to a psychiatrist, he will tell the family that this will be a lifelong problem, and tell them to take medicine, that they'll never work again" "and the parents have to learn to deal with such a child." "Believe me, this is what happens." "A lot of youngsters are taken to psychiatrists because they sit for hours watching a wall." "But nobody takes the parents away when they stare at a TV screen in the same manner." "If you look up my name on the internet, you can find a story about when I was in England." "I worked with four young people who who had all tried to kill themselves." "They didn't know each other, they didn't all arrange it together." "They all just simply found me." "For example, there was one who always tried to commit suicide in April." "I wondered when he was born, and started counting 9 months backwards." "I saw that the date of conception was around april for all four of them." "And I thought, what if these suicidal youths were remembering something?" "Maybe their mothers wanted an abortion but it had failed." "So they wanted to kill themselves as their mothers had wanted, but failed." "So a 'repetition compulsion':" "compulsive behavior." "I asked the mothers to come in and tell me if they had wanted to abort their child." "All four admitted they did, and three had never told anyone so they cried a lot." "Not only was this true, but those trying to abort mechanically, with a knitting needle, for example, may have injured the embryo." "The one whose mother used a knitting needle, always used razors to cut her veins." "The one whose mother took medicine, wanted to O.D. on medication." "So the abortion method was the same as that of the suicide." "All four mothers agreed to tell their children, and they did." "There was a lot of crying." "After this, none of them attempted suicide again." "Although one woman, after thirty years," "is still depressed around April, but she doesn't attempt suicide, because she knows what it is." "Instead she sends me a postcard, which is much better." "She depends on me, but isn't this better than for her to slash her veins open?" "Success..." "Ferenczi once said, that you can only be a good therapist if you have no ambition." "He probably said this because ambition puts pressure on the patient." "If I want success and you're my patient, then I have a desire." "And I direct this desire toward your healing, so that I can feel better." "This can again be false." "It is hard to be true." "So if the therapist has desires toward the patient, he is no different from the patient's parents, who wanted a child to make them proud." "So it is important for a therapist not to be proud of his patients." "So I'd rather have them think I never helped them, than to hear them say, "I couldn't do it without Feldmár."" "Because that's dependence." "So if you ask me what my biggest achievement is," "I'd say the fact that none of my patients have killed themselves." "This might be just luck, but at least their lives" "have not worsened since they met me." "If I went home, and went to bed and shit myself and just lay in it..." "Can you imagine?" "I bet if I continued like that I'd piss in my bed within a week." "They'd take me to a hospital, and all the doctors would diagnose schizophrenia." "It's that easy to start a career as a schizophrenic, you can do it too!" "But there are other ways." "This is the fastest way." "Everyone can become a schizophrenic." "We want everyone to be like us." "Psychiatry, more than other branch of medical science, resembles inquisition." "The Malleus Maleficarum, the hammer of the witches, was used by monks." "They'd look up whether something a woman was doing was written in the Malleus Maleficarum." "If it was, she was a witch." "Otherwise not." "The Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders, in its fourth edition, is such a codex, and every psychiatrist owns one, all around the world:" "in India, South America, New York, even Budapest." "It says that if the psychiatrist meets you and you're too silent or talk too much or you're too dirty or too clean," "too slow or too fast, that this can lead to a diagnosis of an illness." "I think there's absolutely no difference between the medieval Malleus Maleficarum and the DSM-4." "If I am hallucinating, and I see a dragon around me, that is also why I don't want to be locked up and given medication." "What I find interesting in my own experience, is my business, but what I do, my actions, are important for the community and might interest you." "I think it's important to feel free, to have experiences the way I want them." "If I see angels, I don't want someone to say I am stupid, esoteric, a mystic." "If I see angels, no one should take that away from me." "But if I hit you because the angel told me to, that's different." "There cannot be anarchy there." "Medical science is greedy." "If you read how doctors claimed birth and crazy people as their own..." "That wasn't always the case, they greedily said, "That's ours."" "I think the French king Louis XIV was the first who wanted to see his child come out of his wife." "He just thought he'd like to see it when it arrived." "And what a king says must be obeyed." "This was the first woman who lay down so he could watch from behind a curtain." "Before that, a woman never gave birth lying on her back." "So somehow... we are crazy this way..." "it became a trend." "And woman gave away the responsibility." "They knew that gravity helps, it doesn't help to be reclined, it's better to be standing or crouching." "But somehow doctors have authority." ""What does the pregnant woman know?"" "The doctor went to university, right?" "So he must know better than us, and we must obey him, no matter what." "Because we are scared of being abandoned if we say that we want to do it differently." "It is awful, when a person doesn't know where he or she will sleep." "Offering shelter helps a lot." "The other thing we can offer each other is a perspective." "A perspective through which we can unravel what we call mystification." "If you don't know exactly what is happening to you or who does what to you, or what you do to someone else, then someone else, through conversation, can help you figure out what exactly is happening to you." "So that it is not such a mystery." "This can be very helpful." "The third thing is that we can encourage one another." "Besides this, we cannot offer each other anything." "We must be free, no matter how much we fight." "This means, that whatever I am told, I listen to everything, and say. "Yes, maybe. "" "If I had to be classified," "I'd say I'm a skeptic, as the Greeks said." "There was the Skeptic School." "This means that if someone tells me something," "I ask, "Really?" in an assured voice." "And I expect the same for what I say." "Because Wittgenstein, for example, said that assuredness is only in a person's voice." "There's nothing else." "So I don't even know how to interpret my own experiences." "I am sure that it was my experience, but I'm not sure what it means." "If I have a patient who complains a lot," "I tell him to move to a cottage in an isolated place and to leave radios, TV and books behind," "so that he can be by himself for ten or twelve days." "He can write, sing, hike, do anything, as long as he's by himself and has something he could kill himself with." "A gun, poison, a knife a razor..." "whatever he wants." "And he should decide that if life is really that bad, he shouldn't return." "He should kill himself right there." "But if he returns, he should stop complaining." "This is what's important." "There exists a pre- and post-suicidal character." "Those who have never considered suicide are the ones who always complain." "A person who understands that he or she can commit suicide, has nothing to complain about." "Those who complain see the world as a kind of a prison." "They have been convicted for life and there is no way out." "I think we have grown accustomed to using our will, to the point that we have become stubborn." "And the sweetest things in life happen when we don't want anything." "But we don't dare to not want anything." "For example, we don't dare to believe that we are not here because we're smart and clever, because we're heroes, but because there's something alive inside," "something flowing through me, which is stronger and greater and more valuable than I will ever be." "If a person realizes this, it protects him from a lot of fear." "But until a person realizes this, he is extremely frightened of it." "So if a person realizes that he can let go, and that he lives not because "I am such a smart boy"," "but despite being such a smart boy, then he doesn't have to fight as hard." "Then a woman could give birth without any complications, knowing she needn't do anything, because life is doing it for her." "And there is no need to get a doctor for death, as life creates death too." "Sadly, what happens with lots of people is that when they don't have to survive they get used to surviving and don't know how to live." "I mean when the moment comes to live, a person should live." "There is, for example, a North Brazilian tribe." "Its members live near a glade in the middle of the rainforest" "and they use two words for a good man:" ""hantan" and "membek"." "Hantan means hard and membek soft, so a good man is soft and also tough." "But he has to watch out, when he is soft and when he is tough." "Inside he should be soft and play with the children and also be tender with the women." "Outside, he must be very tough." "If you touch the shoulder of such a man, outside he can kill you, but inside, he plays with you." "Outside is survival, but inside is living." "It's a miracle that we have experiences at all." "Even great pain and extreme depression are experiences, miracles." "It's a miracle that I can feel bad." "Who am I to choose between good and bad experiences?" "Man should be grateful for having these experiences." "There is a Buddhist exercise, in which, if you are already here, why not be grateful?" "You're not a coward but a lowly ingrate." "If I tell you I'm coming, I will come, even if it rains, or snows." "I just need to dress properly." "And I won't say, "The weather is bad, I am not coming. "" "I just disregard it." "I can still do what I want." "And when I understood this, I knew that, on my deathbed," "I wouldn't think that I was a coward." "This doesn't mean I am not afraid, it just means I can do what I want." "I dealt a lot with hypnosis, not because I want to hypnotize people, but I wanted to learn how to undo it." "It's perfectly easy for a hypnotizer to hypnotize you deeply, to transmit a post-hypnotic impulse so that you react a certain way after you come out of the trance, when I or someone else does something." "And I'll say, "Forget that I said this," and "Forget that I told you to forget."" "This is usually how they shut down memory." "I might suggest that someone blinks" "each time I touch my nose," "Then I'll say, "Forget about it" and "Forget I said forget about it."" "I bring them out of the trance and give them two weeks to figure out the suggestion left with them." "I leave it up to them to guess what it is and awake from it." "And as I'm saying this I touch my nose to see if it's there, and of course they blink without realizing, only subconsciously aware of what's going on." "And you go home with the thought of "What has this Feldmár done to me?"" "And you live for three weeks." "So what would be the best way to solve this problem?" "If one knows the answer, one knows how to come out of a hypnosis." "So if this were my task, I'd only see one way, and I don't know if three weeks would be enough for this." "That is, to meditate." "Meditation is about a slow expansion of one's consciousness, so that nothing can happen that one is not aware of." "It starts with a person sitting, doing nothing willfully, but, for example, listening to the air going in and out of the nostrils, feeling what can be felt, but nothing else." "So, if I somehow reach this level..." "In India for example, one way to meditate, is to move slowly." "A person just sits for months." "They allow him to move, for example, when eating a bowl of rice, which you can eat with these three fingers." "But you must eat it by taking the bowl into your hands, chewing and swallowing the rice, and it has to be a movement which is not initiated by you." "It has to be done this slowly." "You have to go to the restroom, brush your teeth, this slowly." "So if we attain this and speak to someone about the nose touch, the moment we blink we will feel that it was against our will, and say, "What is going on here?"" "Then one notices." "And when I realize that I blink every time someone touches his nose," "I already know that this is Feldmár's doing." "But hypnosis is so strong that even if I know what's up, I can't resist it." "Even after I find out what's up, I'll still blink the next time." "So insight is not enough to change." "What is needed?" "For me to say, with all my might, that I will not blink." "And maybe, I have to practice this for months when people touch their nose." "And everything in me wants to blink." "So a new habit needs to form." "An old habit can only be broken if an new one replaces it." "Those with experience of hypnosis really don't believe much anymore." "Because under hypnosis I've had experiences like just standing here." "So under hypnosis, I felt a reality as real as this one right here." "When the voice told me to do something else, the reality faded around me." "In my state of mind, I wouldn't be surprised if in 2 minutes, this reality vanished, and I'd realize that someone suggested this sense of standing in front of a crowd, speaking nonsense." "PART 2" "Many of us pray for some addiction." "Without an addiction life is nothing." "For me, anyway." "And yet, when a person has an addiction, it's considered bad, as if we need to get rid of it." "Well this is like psychotherapy." "Psychotherapy is like a passion." "One goes into it, and then wants to end it." "For those who get into real therapy, it never ends." "So therapy itself becomes a lifelong passion." "This whole thing already implies that addiction can only be cured by a different addiction." "That, for example, harmful addictions surface when the person can't find a better addiction than the harmful one." "So those wanting to get rid of their addictions should die now." "I cannot imagine my life without devotion." "When my son and daughter were little, it seemed that their passion was TV." "Then, and still today, people talk about making sure our kids don't get addicted to TV." "I always found that the moment they had something better to do, they abandoned the television." "They only watched it when there was nothing more exciting to do." "I don't think anyone is stupid." "If there is something more exciting than what is available at the moment, people will abandon what they're doing." "Only this way can one understand how a person could sacrifice his life to heroin or alcohol." "Or anything else we're afraid of." "People probably do that because they have nothing better to do in life." "It's more engaging than anything else in their lives." "These questions need to be addressed, or one can't really talk with people who have chosen this lifestyle." "For example, if someone has never used heroin, they can't understand why a person would devote his life to taking heroin again, again and again." "But if a person has similar experience, then they can relate to it." "A few seconds after the first intake of heroin one understands how life is without pain." "And one also realizes how much pain and suffering we have in our bodies, without even noticing it." "From morning till noon, we carry pain in our bodies and souls." "And with heroin, one realizes how life could be without this pain." "One can understand why, when this ends, people want to start over again." "Why not?" "Returning to a painful life is awful and heroin made me realize it that I didn't know how much I hurt before." "How much I suffered." "Can you just tell someone to stop?" "He'd laugh at you." "Why should he stop?" "You don't even know what you're saying, when you're telling him to stop." "Because you're telling him to return to suffering." "I understand why Freud loved cocaine." "His writings consist of 24 volumes." "Had he not used cocaine, he would not have written so much." "Five minutes after snorting cocaine, thought processes speed up 10,000 times." "The associations become opulent." "One sees connections as never before, and if he feels smart in general, then he feels like a genius." "The conversation deepens, the thought-process fastens, it is all very exciting." "Sexual pleasures become 10,000 times more intense." "So it's understandable why one could become addicted to it." "But both have awful consequences for the body." "And I also understand why a long life is necessary." "But if someone wants an exuberant life and die when they are thirty, instead of a boring life," "living into their nineties, well, I understand that too." "When I started experimenting with LSD in 1967-1966," "what interested me was the possibility of dying under the influence of LSD." "And not only dying, but being born again." "And it's a very interesting experience." "The Greeks said we are here on earth to practice dying." "We have to die, why not practice it?" "Then at least we can die beautifully." "Because we all think about how we are going to die." "Because there's the chance that you'll die an ugly death." "When one first does anything, one can't know how it will go." "For example if you shit yourself, before dying." "Not just the shit, but let's say you're extremely scared, and you shout and try to grab people around you." "One is ashamed in advance about dying "badly"." "Or is that only my problem?" "And not yours?" "Are you already over this?" "It's interesting, that Aldous Huxley, when he knew he was about to die, asked his wife for some LSD, to see clearly what it was about." "Here is a chance to practice what Greeks thought of as the meaning of life." "So let's practice dying." "Stanislav Grof showed that dying is the experience of rebirth, which is what stops the pain." "So thereafter, no need for heroin, or alcohol or morphine." "He worked with cancer patients who, according to doctors, had only one or two weeks to live and he gave them 1200 micrograms of LSD." "He got permission to do this as they were hopeless." "So the US A gave him permission to test LSD on about 40 people." "About 30 of them had a death and rebirth experience, ten didn't." "The same way that not everyone has an orgasm when having sex." "Those who didn't have the experience needed morphine, as they had done before the LSD." "It didn't work, it didn't get better or worse." "The thirty who succeeded, who were reborn, did not need painkillers again." "There was a hospital, Hollywood hospital, where I worked." "They worked with alcoholics that psychotherapists had given up on." "Incurable alcoholics were given a big dose of LSD with the same effects." "Those alcoholics who had the death and rebirth experience never drank again." "Without any problems, they just didn't need it any longer." "So what is death and rebirth about?" "It's about the death experience resulting in the letting go of things." "Of everything." "And it includes all habits, letting go of the person too." "So LSD and 5-MEO-DMT, toad venom, allows people to let go." "So they realize" "that their habit is an illusion." "That they don't need what they were used to," "and when a person is reborn, it's a very powerful symbol of how each second is essential, and how one can change every single second." "That it is an illusion that we are the slaves of our habits." "It's an excuse for lack of change." "But we are free, and the decision is reality and we can do whatever we want." "This is what LSD shows us, this is what 5-MEO-DMT shows us." "One can restart without any habits." "One can learn new ones." "There is no such thing as being addicted to LSD." "There is no such thing as a person's desire to take it," "because there is nothing better to do than to take LSD." "It's impossible to get addicted to it." "And if one decides to stop taking it, there are no side effects." "It's interesting how it became illegal because there are plenty of medicines which are legal." "Those are the psychiatric drugs which calm people so that they can be controlled and told what to do, and accept that they are programmed by these drugs." "The drugs that wake people up, so that they cannot be controlled, so that they won't do in hypnosis what their parents want them to do and they'll do their jobs as usual..." "The drugs that wake people up are the ones they make illegal." "After a person learns what LSD has to offer, he doesn't accept domination." "So he becomes a bad worker." "He won't allow people to say what he needs to do for money, in order to be able to work there." "They'd rather do nothing after that." "From certain perspectives, it is scary when someone's child takes LSD, thinking" ""How will he survive in our society?"" "Because in our societies one can only survive if one allows domination." "I pay you to give in and if you don't, I won't give you money." "So if someone understands, and says they'd rather die, then those who have given up will send them to psychiatrists and say:" ""Something needs to be done," ""because if this is allowed, then why am I doing what I am doing?"" "I am not doing anything illegal, just thinking and conversing." "When I'm working with patients and LSD, the LSD doesn't come from me." "They get it somewhere and they'd take it anyway, so it's safer with me there." "This is why I don't get arrested." "If someone asks me to take care of them when taking LSD, to sit next to them," "I sometimes say, "No, thank you"." "I do this when my intuition tells me they want LSD as an alibi for insanity." "And I don't want to be a part of that." "If you wanted to go insane, wouldn't this be perfect, just taking loads of LSD, so that people could say:" ""Poor kid went crazy because of LSD." Maybe he took it to be able to go nuts." "Regarding so-called "bad trips"," "Grof suggested that if a trip ends" "and you feel bad, you should take more." "There are four states of mind." "Imagine that there is an embryo in a mother's belly." "This is the first phase, Bliss Inside, everything nice and beautiful." "As contractions start, the second phase begins," "which is called No Exit." "There, a person feels pressure as if they have nowhere to go, a very depressing feeling that many of us spend our lives in." "The third is when the cervix opens up and there is a lot of friction on the baby's head, which is called the Bloody Battle, because we feel we are about to be born and nothing can stand in our way." "So the third is Bloody Battle." "The fourth is Bliss Outside." "So Bliss Inside, No Exit, Bloody Battle, Bliss Outside." "Then the outside is inside again, and we can go through it once more." "Our lives are this spiral, and our lives can be analyzed through movements between these four spheres." "Whoever comes out of an LSD trip is in one of these." "In Bliss Inside or Bliss Outside, there is no problem, he feels fine." "But Bloody Battle or No Exit are awful." "That is why Grof says to take more LSD, because it's like roulette, you start and don't know where it will stop." "If it's bad, you need to spin again, until it stops at a good spot." "And this is exactly what happens." "It's also interesting why I tried it, when a friend said," ""I have some 5-MEO-DMT, do you want to try it?"" "Why did I say yes?" "Because he had done it many times and he'd take care of me, he knew what could happen." "So I needed to decide if I trusted him or not, and I did." "The worst that could happen was for me to die, or get really ill." "So what?" "He put some marijuana in a small pipe, and some white powder, just a little, less than 9mg, as if he had poured salt in it." "Then he covered it with marijuana, to protect it from the flame, so that it could evaporate." "Then he lit it, and said, "Take a drag. "" "I did, and seconds later I felt it, it had a tremendous effect." "I think it's the strongest hallucinogen in the world." "It's stronger than LSD and takes you there much faster." "Those who know what LSD is good for take it because it takes you to where you die in 5 minutes." "You can't resist, it takes you to death." "So this feeling was as strong as having a vision of God." "But I don't believe just anything, I'm a skeptic." "And if God were to present himself, I'd say, "Prove that you're God. "" "Maybe you're the devil, what do I know?" "So I'll resist you until I can." "If you're almighty, conquer me." "This was my attitude at first." "Of course he conquered me." "So I tried to keep him away and then it was like a bubble which suddenly burst, and I was the bubble..." "and then I died." "Which means that I became nothing." "And I felt nothing, I knew nothing and I, the ego, was not there." "And as I was going towards it, it wasn't clear if it was my body, my being or my ego that would die." "The part of me which wants to control my life." "The ego never wants to die, it always wants to stay." "But at that moment there was no ego." "What happened was exactly what Easterners describe as Nirvana." "Nir means nothing, vana means to spin." "So Nirvana means the spinning stops." "Of course, as I said, I'm skeptical, maybe it doesn't mean anything, maybe it's just the hallucinations of a polluted mind and it's meaningless in a cosmic sense." "I'm not stupid, but nevertheless, it's a great experience." "So what does this ayahuasca tea do, for example?" "I ask this, because every addiction is like a ritual." "Ayahuasca can only be taken as a ritual, unless one steals it and then one can do anything with it." "Otherwise it can only be taken ritually, with a ayahuasca shaman making the tea, gathering some people who want it and drinking it that night." "In the evening, when the sun sets, the group gathers, he brews the tea and starts singing." "3 religions have sprung from this tea." "For now." "Maybe there's more to come." "They are all Catholic, all centered on Jesus." "This may be accidental, and if Buddhists had discovered it, maybe Buddha would appear, but they are South American Catholics, so it's Jesus who appears." "And then they sing hymns and psalms." "When the tea is ready, they give thanks and drink it." "It tastes like a muddy pond." "It's awful." "You feel like throwing up, but eventually you drink it" "and sit back among the others, and in a few minutes, it's as if a spirit were in your body." "It's not like a different state of being, but as if you were possessed, as if someone had entered you." "A living something coming into me." "And it starts to run through my body and soul." "Some sense it like a tiger, a gigantic tiger running inside." "It smells and looks at everything, for example, my liver, belly, my mind." "It inspects me physiologically and psychologically, and then it speaks." "One can wrestle, argue and talk to him." "So it's unlike LSD 25, which changes one's state of mind." "Then there you are, all alone." "Here you are with someone or something." "Not alone." "And if the feeling weakens, you go and drink some more." "And you do this all night long until sunrise." "And then you sing some and go home." "In the meantime, many throw up, including you maybe." "There's a lot of vomit but it's not bad." "It feels as if everything that is wrong with a person will come out." "So all the bad things are vomited out." "Usually, the message of this spirit is:" ""I will be your friend, all will be OK."" ""All I ask is that you don't lie." "Don't lie to yourself or others. "" "And this is very hard to do." "It is a very difficult task." "Some drink this tea a few times every week." "So that they're reminded and encouraged that one can live without lying." "So the United Nations wanted to see if this was a good thing." "Whether it was bad, stupid, whatever, whether it was really a new religion." "In brazil, it was easy to examine, as there are villages where everyone has been using ayahuasca for 30 years," "where families gather as a community to drink the tea weekly." "And there are neighbouring villages which don't." "So a bunch of doctors, sociologists and psychiatrists travelled there to examine these people." "People who came from a village where they drank the tea" "and people who came from a village where they didn't." "They compared them using 120 questions and the tea drinkers did better." "They were more physically healthy and more mentally happy and healthy." "They were morally purer and kinder to each other." "In each possible section, the tea drinkers fared better." "So in brazil, they couldn't make it illegal, because they had no reason." "So in brazil, Portugal and maybe in Denmark, this is legal." "In the rest of the world it is illegal." "So the question of what is legal and what isn't is not a scientific issue, but a political one." "More and more people from the US and Canada are starting to participate in this ayahuasca ritual." "Those who cannot be helped in any other way to stop heroin or alcohol abuse." "After 3 months of ayahuasca use," "they overcame their addictions." "So if I can trade the habit which draws me to alcohol with one draws me to ayahuasca, which is like air, then I have an air addiction." "I use it all the time, air, but it does me good." "It seems that ayahuasca is good for people, it helps, it doesn't destroy." "So if I were to become addicted to it, why would that be bad?" "Why would I be a better man if I didn't use ayahuasca?" "Would I be a better person if I could live without air?" "There is a nonsense theory that the height of human development is independence." "But it doesn't seem as if we're a species that wants to be independent." "So the whole theory that one has to free oneself from addiction is stupid." "Rather, we need to free ourselves from letting others take our liberty." "So we should never allow others to rule over us." "People for whom meditation is important know that the states of mind achieved with LSD or 5-MeO-DMTm or other drugs can be attained through meditation." "I recently read something by R.D. Laing and he said that the most important decision in a person's life is whether they will meditate seriously or not." "But I, for example, would never have meditated, had I not seen into the place that meditation can take you." "So through LSD, it was like getting to the top of a mountain, and I knew that this was a fantastic experience." "Now if I wanted to live on top of a mountain," "I know it wouldn't be possible with LSD, I would have to learn how to meditate." "And then I could live there." "But had I not known, I would have had to believe that this is how it is, and it would not have been my personal experience." "What I would now like to draw your attention to is:" "never believe anything whoever may be saying it." "My brother, who is a psychologist, was the first one who told me about András." "then I forgot about him, but I remember him now because you always remember in hindsight." "All he said was, there's this Canadian-Hungarian psychologist in Debrecen who's a psychotherapist, and all his lectures are so packed there wouldn't be space to drop a pin even, and the people tape the lectures." "the whole thing was very romantic." "But then I forgot about it until I happened to spot his book" "Rainbow of Consciousness, which had just been published then, on a book stand." "I read it and that very night I knew that I would look him up and make a bio-documentary about him." "I sent him faxes and emails from the offices of Duna TV or TV2, and surreal places like that, so he must have thought that I was some TV reporter who wanted to do a talk show with him," "like you see on Fókusz or Napló." "On a tabloid level l mean." "And I don't think he felt like doing it." "Because in Canada, he was probably in lots of shows like that." "In talk shows where, I know it sounds silly, but you have to explain what goes on in a person's head when they strap on a 20-inch dildo and run around the house in it." "So he didn't want to be a TV psychologist at all." "He was suspicious while he thought I was going to do something like that, but the moment he realized I was serious... I was going to do in-depth discussions and then we followed him around with a camera from the second he got up in the morning, till he went to bed." "When he saw that this is how it would be, we were quick to establish a close relationship." "His work falls under the category of transpersonal psychology." "If you're not too familiar with psychology, you might think that what András is saying is his own invention," "that he just thought it up a minute ago." "If you look at this documentary out of its cultural context" " and this is a documentary without cultural context - you might think that this just popped out of his head." "In truth, he's really, truly, honestly explaining an intellectual tradition" "that can be linked to the '60s counter-culture, when intellectual trends started to intensify in America." "And not just R.D ." "Laing, whom András often mentions because of their personal master-student relationship," "but also thomas Szasz, Alan Watts," "Stanislav Grof and his wife, and Ken Wilber." "So this is an intellectual current that must have really grasped him." "this is his life, and he embodies it very authentically." "When he talks about entheogens, like LSD and other stimulating drugs," "I doubt he's trying to persuade anyone to use these drugs." "He's just relating his own experiences and the experiences of others when they used these drugs." "And I don't think he's doing it to offer it as a sole alternative, saying that this is the only thing that you can do to really authentically be yourself, while at other times you're not." "It's more like a very productive provocation." "And you can see this from the feelings his ideas provoke." "the other reason is" "that you can actually measure rational intelligence" " everyone knows about the iq test - and you can measure emotional intelligence, and some people say there's a kind of spiritual intelligence that can be measured too, that there are methods of mapping it." "And when András talks about drugs, I always feel that these are the types of feelings he evokes." "Because drugs have the capacity to give you a fast and sudden glimpse into a place that only those with developed spiritual intelligence can see." "He is very skeptical about drugs, along with everything else in life." "And it's all based on first-hand experience." "He's not even interested in interpretations, or about what your opinion or analysis of your own experience is." "All he's interested in is your actual experience." "At the beginning of Hamlet you can see that everyone in Hamlet's environment is sane and he's the one that's mad." "And as the play progresses, you see that everyone's crazy and false around him, and Hamlet's the only one who's normal." "And somehow András always sees situations like this." "I think that when he looks at a family, as a therapist, it's always the patient who is really sane" "and it's his surroundings that are crazy and out of whack." "And it seems that this equation is very common in András's life." "this Hamlet metaphor reminds me of something else, and that is adolescence." "What I see is that András is like a teenager, not only in disposition, but also in looks." "It's as if his body had suddenly grown and there's no synchronicity between his movements and his limbs yet." "It's as if he was a teenager living inside the body of a sixty-ish man, and it's interesting to see him kind of frozen into his teenage existence." "I think it's great." "It's an alert and open state," "and I think he feels good about it." "they used to call them shamans, these people who tried to rouse their environment" "and awaken people to the true nature of things." "they're like gurus today in India." "this is their raison d'etre." "When they get up in the morning, this is what they start to do." "And I think it's a remarkable thing that András is, in this sense, a guru." "A shaman." "He's the type of person" "who does everything to stop the people around him from playing the petty games that they usually do." "András leads you into the here and now." "that which is present at the moment." "Not what was and not what will be." "But the present." "And this is very, very important." "I have to tell you, I can't imagine anything more beautiful than someone" "who spends their life trying to stir people into consciousness, to show them that there is a boundless and intelligent universe all around us." "And there is nothing else." "the good thing about András is that he doesn't have moments when he's "out of character," so to say. I'm not saying he acts the exact same way he does when he's talking in front of an audience," "but the two are similar." "And this is a good sign of clear self-identity." "there's this film taboo that says that you don't cut a face onto a face, especially not the face of the same person at the same angle." "It's very amateur." "Still, to me, his way of thinking is so important, we have to follow his face and see it." "I thought that if we cut in other images like, I don't know, a fluttering feather, a leaf in the wind, a tap dripping, or whatever, as they usually do in such cases," "it would just be annoying." "these things tend to bother me in documentaries." "As director István Szabó said, the face is the most important surface." "I can agree with that." "Especially if we make a film about people" " and I consider András a person." "I think this is very true, and for me, there is nothing more interesting than the face of a person who thinks in an exciting way." "Forget his foot, or the falling leaf, or whatever." "So that's why this film was made in this manner." "the film, ls there life before death?" "has an added benefit in the sense that with a little attention, people who are interested" "in this topic can find volumes of information." "And I think this film is good for breaking open the hard nut:" "that locked place that people live inside." "It cracks this nut open and makes you much more open to Eastern tradition." "Because the esoteric boom that unexpectedly pounced on Hungarian society after the change in regime, really inflated or depreciated," "devalued and discredited the ideas that András talks about." "But the way he talks about these things, even to people who are skeptical or desperately clinging to the rationality around us, makes it all authentic.. ." "the way he talks about the true nature of things." "On my part, I'm glad I made this film." "Created by:" "When a baby latches onto its mother's breast and sucks it like there's no tomorrow," "the baby does not love its mother." "Definitely not." "When it's very tiny, it doesn't even know she exists at first." "Actually, babies just use their mothers." "If you've had children, you might have noticed that as the baby grows," "there's a moment of recognition." "You can see it when the baby is sucking like crazy and suddenly it looks into its mother's eyes." "And it stops sucking and appears to realize at that moment that this face is somehow connected to the breast." "that the breast is not separate." "And that is the moment when love is born." "And from that moment on, the baby protects the mother's breast, whereas before it didn't ." "throughout his life, Jean-Paul Sartre said that love does not exist." "that love is a kind of lie." "He even said that no matter what the setup is" " man-woman. woman-woman." "man-man" " the relationship between two people is always based on domination and submission." "One partner immediately tries to dominate the other, and when they've decided on the roles, that's when the relationship begins." "that's how he saw it, and this is what he wrote about." "He said that if you can make the other person believe they love you, it's the easiest way to dominate them." "that's what he believed, almost till the end of his life." "And a little before he died, he had an experience which he wrote down in a small book." "He made sure that the book would only be published posthumously, because he was so ashamed." "He wrote that during his whole life he was wrong." "It was because he didn't see love." "Because he lived on the level where there was only domination and submission, and it was exactly like the saying that goes:" "show Buddha to a pick-pocket and all he'll see is pockets." "And that's just what happened to Sartre." "Even when he was shown love, he couldn't see it." "All he saw was domination and submission." "And then, the way he defined love was that no matter what people say," "someone only loves you if you can feel freer in their presence than if you are alone." "In my own life story, there was a very important moment." "When I was 3 and a half - this was back in 1 943" " my mother was deported to Auschwitz, my father was taken to a labor camp, and my grandmother was put in the ghetto." "A young Catholic woman, 21 years old, said I could live with her, but I had to lie that my last name was lgaz ("true" in Hungarian)." "Because that was her last name." "And for a year and a half, I lived with her and sometimes her husband too." "At age 3 and half, I had to adapt to a completely new family." "I was like an anthropologist." "Even back then." "You either sink or swim in situations like this." "Luckily, I learned how to swim." "the reason I'm telling you this is because I realized probably, that I'm like a rat or a cockroach." "I'm a person who has to make sure he doesn't get exterminated." "I suppose I became a therapist, because if I could help people, they wouldn't exterminate me." "So if I make people rely on me, and let's say, the Germans come again, then someone is sure to hide me." "So again, I'm doing this whole thing out of pure fear." "In 1 967, I switched from mathematics to psychology," "and one day my professor says to me that he has an interesting medication he's been playing around with." "He was from Saskatchewan, and that's where they first experimented with LSD25 in the world." "And he was there, then." "We met one fine day and he gave me this tiny tablet." "I swallowed it and thus experienced the greatest surprise of my life." "He just sat there, checked on me sometimes," "read, and didn't speak to me unless I spoke." "the whole world changed before my eyes." "Suddenly, I saw everything differently." "the colors changed - what I would say is that there are physiological explanations that are known to us now." "there is a bridge between the right and the left hemisphere of the brain called corpus calosum, and LSD stops the information from traveling from one side to the other." "And if my verbal center is in one hemisphere and my feelings, sight, and hearing are in the other," "then everything that is verbal will be blocked." "So a person who's taken LSD will experience things like a baby who doesn't have any verbal capacities yet." "And this is an amazing gift." "there I was at 3 7," "and I was given the gift of being able to see the world again without words blocking that which I saw." "Everything blurred together." "If I didn't know that that is a table, or that is a window, then it would look like an abstract painting." "the moment we can speak, we can no longer see." "We can't see the same way as someone who cannot speak." "I saw things like an animal, or like a baby." "It can be terrifying, but also beautiful." "And for me it was beautiful." "I enjoyed it a lot." "My professor gave me a lovely hyacinth." "He put it in my hand." "And the moment he put it in my hand, I started to cry." "Because there it was, alive in my hand." "And I had to be very gentle with it." "I didn't know how to make sure I wouldn't hurt it." "It was so beautiful." "I had many other experiences." "Something happened between my professor and me." "He didn't talk to me at all." "He was reading a newspaper, because an LSD trip lasts about 8-1 0 hours." "A long time." "But what happened was, at a certain moment, my mind connected with his." "Not verbally, but it just did." "And I knew everything about him." "I knew how he held his dick when he relieved himself." "I knew what he felt when he embraced his wife." "I knew what he thought of me." "I felt that he couldn't hide anything from me." "Our minds merged completely." "Later I asked him if he knew about this, but he didn't , because he hadn't taken LSD." "I really connected with his mind, and I knew everything about him intimately." "When I returned to my normal state of consciousness, it was hard to adjust to our conventional relationship again." "I almost felt ashamed, because we had been as intimate as if we would have had sexual relations." "So it took a few months for me to forget a little and to be able to have a normal conversation with him again." "If someone comes to me under the effect, I tell them to go home." "Let's say an alcoholic comes to me, someone who still drinks, and comes for therapy, I tell him the only way to stop drinking is to stop." "there's no trick, no therapy." "You're free to quit, so quit." "Let's not play games, him saying he wants to quit and can't , and asking you to help him." "Because then I'm put into a false position." "You can't do therapy with someone who drinks or uses heroin." "I tell these people that substance abuse is their problem, not mine." "But I promise that if they decide to quit drinking," "then I'll be there and therapy can begin." "From the moment they decide that they're not doing this any more, I'll be there instead of alcohol." "A psychologist and his students - ten or twelve of them - decided they would walk into the biggest hospitals in the US" "and say they were hearing voices." "they would tell the absolute truth, except for lying that they heard voices." "Otherwise they would tell true stories." "All of them were locked up, without exception." "the diagnosis was schizophrenia." "One of them wrote in a notebook," "but the nurses didn't sit down to talk and ask what he was writing, but made their own notes that claimed" "that he suffered from graphomania." "they were looked upon as if they were ill." "the moment they were cataloged as ill, no matter what they did, they were analyzed in this context." "I was supervising six therapists who worked with families." "In one case," "there were two young men, aged 22-24." "they were brothers still living at home." "they were really suffering, trying to commit suicide on several occasions." "they still crawled into their mother's bed so they wouldn't have to cry so much." "So they could cling to their mother." "their father is a very successful, famous man, but at home he's a tyrant." "So that's the basic situation." "I suggested that they immediately kidnap the two boys and not let the parents near them for at least three years." "they were shocked." "they thought I was nuts." "And they scolded me like my mother." "that I was a very bad man." "And they asked me why I thought they should do this." "Well, I said, I've been working at this for 32 years, I've had a lot of experience, and I've come to the conclusion" "that when there's any sort of aggression in the family," "like if a teenager wants to beat up his father, or if he slaps his mother, so the moment when aggression mounts," "I believe this is the moment when they have to part ways." "the metaphor is that these two boys are still in their mother's womb." "And the idea that the family has to stay together would be like a midwife telling a woman in labor:" "no, don't push, keep the baby inside, don't give birth." "Let's say they're twins, keep them inside." "those kids will die if they can't come out and the umbilical cord isn't cut." "With kids like that aggression is directed against themselves." "It's not their parents they scare or hurt, but themselves." "But that's the same thing." "Exactly the same." "And then I approached the problem from a different angle:" "I told the therapists that there are cultures where the men come and steal the boys" " who are 12 or 13 at the oldest - and take the boys from their mother's house." "And from that moment on, they live among the men and never return to their mothers." "there is a point where a boy becomes a man." "Despite the fact that these two men were around 24, they were still little boys." "the father's a tyrant, so he's not going to tell the boys:" "you're men now, so from now on we are equal... he's never going to say that." "the father is totally unable to welcome his sons" "among the ranks of men." "Once, I got to thinking about" "how if I was an alien coming to earth from another galaxy," "and I'd arrive to Italy, for example, and I'd look around and see all these wooden crosses," "I'd be astounded and wouldn't be able to understand what all these reoccurring symbols meant," "that this revered man is nailed to this cross." "the Jewish part of the Bible says:" "an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth." "Meaning that revenge is the order of life." "Christ was the first one who said, let's stop this." "It leads to nothing." "Here's this man who is deeply hurt, crucified, and still he forgives humanity." "Now if you can believe this, that's great." "In my opinion, this is a lie." "this is the biggest lie in the world." "this means that there's something terrible here." "A man is nailed to a cross and they lie that this can be forgiven." "Well, if you can forgive that, then you can forgive anything." "But I think that deep in your heart, you can't ." "It's a lie." "If you'd crucify me, I guarantee that I'd never ever forgive you." "I left Budapest when I was 1 6, alone, without my parents, with a small bag, about this size." "I left everything behind." "It was exactly as if I would have died." "Because what happens when you imagine your death?" "It means that you leave everything behind." "And you never ever have to think about what you'll do tomorrow." "that's death." "It means you never have to plan anything again." "the end of planning:" "that is death." "And you realize that everything you claimed is yours doesn't exist." "Nothing is yours." "Everything is on loan." "All things..." "let's say this is mine." "This is my coat." "But there's this little alarm clock inside, which could sound off at any minute, saying, I'm outa here." "I had a scarf, I lost it yesterday." "It's dead. lt's gone." "there's a psychiatrist of Hungarian descent, his name is George Devereux." "His name doesn't sound Hungarian." "He lived in France and made his name more French, but he was of Hungarian descent." "He discovered, or rather, initiated a branch of psychiatry that compares psychiatry in various cultures." "He explained that he believed that you fight for freedom only once." "And when you obtain that freedom, things are good from there." "You're free from then on." "And then he realized that this is impossible." "that you constantly have to fight for your freedom." "Because there is always someone who comes along and wants to take it." "He became very unhappy and almost committed suicide." "Because he said that if this is life, if I have to fight for my freedom till the grave, then I'd rather die." "Or maybe not." "He had this idea" " and practiced it for a few years - that if life and fighting for freedom are one and the same, and I want to enjoy my life, then I have to learn how to enjoy fighting for my freedom." "And a few years later he said:" "I'm waiting for someone to try and take away my freedom." "And he said that he would ask someone else to fight for his freedom as willingly as he would ask someone else to sleep with his wife." "Well, he really learned that you can learn to love fighting for your freedom." "Each and every moment of it." "All the time. till the moment you die." "Created by:"