The topic I want to touch upon today is the mysterious or difficult art of victory. When I say victory, I don’t mean triumphing over someone, breaking down doors, jumping over walls, or feeling superior to others, but rather something much deeper. Many years ago, I had a Teacher who told me that the art of achieving happiness is about accomplishing goals, but not at the expense of others, not through their misery. In a way, the art of victory consists of reaching our goals without using others as stepping stones, without elemen lies this difficult and mysterious art of victory?
There are those who, it seems, are born under a lucky star and everything comes easily to them. There are also those who find it very difficult to achieve anything. And sometimes we encounter chosen ones in history who, with their mere presence, can create true miracles.
And how many times, my dear friends, do we find ourselves in a situation where we want to do something heroic, something magnificent, wanting to stand out in such a way that everyone sees us, everyone follows us, but in reality we are only capable of taking small steps. How many times have we wanted to sing like nightingales, but only weak, indistinct sounds would come out of our throats. How many times have we wanted to fly, only to become aware of how limited we are when it comes to reaching the unreachable horizon. Therefore, we ask ourselves from the depths of our souls, like philosophers, what lies at the core of this difficult and mysterious art of victory? What does the art of victory consist of? Why do some succeed while others don’t? Perhaps, my dear friends, life is like the cable of this microphone that I hold in my hand. We don’t know its exact length, so we must be prepared and attentive to feel how far we can go.
To win, we don’t need to become Alexander, because not everyone can be Alexander, nor can Alexander become one of us. Everyone is what they are, and the art lies in being what we truly are, in our own dimension, regardless of our size.
Today, we look at everything through formulas, we seek all successes and solutions within the system. If someone is doing badly, the political system is to blame; if we have economic problems, it’s the administration’s fault, and we never ask ourselves: isn’t it about the person, or rather about myself? How far does the importance of the system go? Where does the true importance of that dear little crumb called human being begin?
A person has their fundamental value. In ancient times, people did not try to transmit any special secrets to him, but rather tried to purify him from all worldly things, to rid him of his own animality, his fears, everything that could hinder his progress, so that he could, like a white lotus, touch the heart of things and ascend to epopteia, the contemplation of everything. It is depicted by pillars whose capitals open high above the ground. No pillar opens its capital downwards, but upwards. The ancient peoples have left us their knowledge stored in their depictions.
Ancient civilizations generally had four great groups of temptations: the temptations of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. From an external perspective, this may be related to land, water, air, and fire, but from an internal perspective, it is related to specific components of our personality, i.e., our physical body, as well as the energetic, psychological, and mental transmitter from which all the things we receive, achieve, and give originate. But temptations themselves also have have a real physical character, and they were real, very real.
One of the big mistakes we make in front of the staircase is that we look at it as a whole and imagine the entire ascent. This is not a psychological position adequate for facing difficulty, instead we need to plan the climb step by step. What is my immediate problem? This step, not that one or any other! If our gaze is focused excessively upwards, which often happens to many idealists and spiritual people, it can easily happen that we stumble already on the first steps and fall into the abyss. We need to know where we want to get, but step by step, slowly, and without, we could say, too much planning. If we know how to extend our hand, there will always be some good angel, real or dreamt, who will accept our hand and help us on our way.
Everyone is what they are, and art consists in being what we really are, in our real, our own dimension, whatever our size may be.
You know that the best swords can only be forged through
They are made by forging, they have to go from hot to cold, from cold to hot, in an extremely rough way. Shouldn’t we also temper ourselves? Receive the blows of life as a sword receives blows on the anvil. Anyone who has seen a blacksmith at work knows that besides the blows of the hammer, another sound can be heard. That is the echo of the metal being shaped. Yes, the sword wails, but endures, wails and endures until in the end, this iron, which was nothing more than a simple piece of metal, through the blows, immersion in cold water, and with the help of secret alloys – transforms into a blade of steel and thus gains hardness, sharpness, and elasticity. Isn’t that somewhat similar to the process of our own forging in life?
We need to try to raise our hand, detach it a little from the world of things by putting it under the control of our will, a will that doesn’t have to be something exceptional, but must act independently and naturally.
When you encounter a serious difficulty, always try to endure one minute more. Don’t think about enduring one hour, one day, one year, a whole lifetime. No, just one minute more, nothing more than that one minute, and then another minute more. And so, little by little, a much greater number of minutes will accumulate. The power of our mind is immense. Make another experiment: measure the psychological duration of one minute. Imagine that when the second hand returns to the same place, when it makes a full circle, some great reward, immense happiness (let everyone imagine what they want) awaits you. Sometimes the clock moves so slowly that it almost seems like it’s standing still. Now, let’s try the opposite experiment: imagine that a bomb will explode beneath us in a minute. You will see how the clock races from dot to dot, someone might say that the clock has gone mad. However, the clock always ticks at the same rhythm.
What has changed? Our perspective. If we desire something passionately, the wait seems endless.
We need to learn to appreciate life for its true value, then we will gain a much more credible dimension to everything that happens to us. Nowadays, we generally chase after money, fame, recognition: a better car, a bigger apartment, the latest model of a refrigerator that produces round ice cubes… And so we are constantly tense, it is never enough for us, because we constantly feel like we have too little and that we always need something new. This is a great specter of consumer mentality that has crept into our souls and is one of the worst forms of materialism.
Let’s learn to be satisfied with the little things. I’m not saying that we should refuse to have more, but simply I say that one needs to be at peace with their own heart and then see how we can grow a little more. The secret is to realize what it is that we can truly do and then put all our attention and strength into it.
In fact, we have much more strength than we think. Each of us, no matter how small, has great potential. Some may think, “I won’t write poems because, after all…who will publish them? I’m not that good.” Let’s forget about this need for comparison, for competition, this kind of unhealthy sport that we’ve been pushed into. Let’s abandon that mindset and do things for the sake of the things themselves. If our soul is filled with a song, if songs come to us like birds landing in a nest, let’s receive them, accept them, let them fly… It doesn’t matter if they don’t get published.
And what did the poets do before there was printing? What did Sappho, this exceptional poetess, do to spread her work to the whole world, even though it was mercilessly destroyed in the middle ages? There were no printers. There were no publishers, only poems, and these poems were passed from hand to hand, little by little. We don’t need big media for our works and discoveries to become real. I started writing my favorite book when I was nineteen and never thought it would be published, I simply wrote it because I felt that way.
Each one of us, even the smallest one who feels weak, even the one who thinks they’re alone, has the ability to triumph. They have the ability to move forward through small successes, through small steps that will gradually take them further.
Perhaps you’d like to paint or draw? Go ahead!
It doesn’t matter whether people acknowledge it or not. Far away from people, far from the environment, there is another judge, a great Judge, so great that we cannot adequately describe His magnitude. He is so benevolent that it’s beyond imagination, and so just that He doesn’t judge based on actions, but rather on what inspired those actions – the heart.
And this great Judge, in a way, covers us with His cloak and protects our small successes, our small dreams: the verses we never finished, the drawings we never made, the love we never experienced, the opportunities that slipped away from us. They somehow exist in that magnificent world and will accompany us for thousands of years until our inner and complete fulfillment.
Each of us, even the smallest and weakest, even those who think they are alone, have the capacity for Victory. They have the ability to move forward through small successes, through small steps that will gradually take them further.
No formulas or special assistance are needed. One can always go further, continually improving oneself. Each of us needs to seek our own light, our own place, and if we are happy where we are – great! If we are not happy, we can be somewhere else. It is important not to harm anyone. It is important to burn our own candle, not to waste someone else’s. It is important to possess Light. It is necessary to choose: let’s assume we have one candle, what do we want to have? A candle or light? If you want a candle, you will be whole o matter how dark life may be, if you want light, you have to spend a candle, take a match, light it, use it and let the light ignite, that light that is always vertical, like a lightsaber.
However, material things decay, break, and disappear. The elders say omnia transit, “everything passes”, “everything is in motion”. Everything goes to the sea as the waters do. Everything has one destiny. Let’s join it. Let’s look at the singing waters flowing down the mountains. Which waters are the purest? Those that collide the most with stones, those that fall in waterfalls and aerate themselves in a magnificent display of white foam. Other shy waters that remain stagnant in a side stream become stagnant slowly, and no living creature can dwell in them.
Make your world a world of great ideas. Let good thoughts and feelings live in you and sing like birds in the treetops, like colorful fish in the depths of the sea. Let great beings live freely within us.
Where are these people if not within us? In the forgotten, they haven’t disappeared. Simply, they are deeply buried under our fears and insecurity.
Let’s remove all this and we will rediscover the adorned helmets, and through the ruined walls, we will see the light of the sky again. We will feel our steps again, in rhythm with the heartbeat in our chests: victory, victory, victory!
Lecture held in Madrid, October 1990