Psychohorror

“Respect only what brings joy, energy and purpose into your life.
Then follow your way, the way of magic and dream.”

„Hypnotherapy and relaxation technics are attractive primarily to those clients
who are looking for trance experiences.”

(quotations from sites of psychologists recommended on pszichologia.lap.hu)

As a Christian psychologist, for a couple of years I have pursued a therapy which integrates the tradition of Christian spiritual guidance with the knowledge of modern psychology. In this September I have included a description of it (at the moment in Hungarian only) on my page, and on the 26th of September I have sent it as a recommended link to a dozen of pertinent psychological pages of the startlap.hu link portal.

When I had sent the links of my gardening pages to the respective subpages of the same portal, about 80% included them, while 20% refused them. The excuses of refusal were not very plausible, but well, not everyone must like my cheek and pages.

Now I expected more or less the same proportion. However, it turned to be quite different. A lot of page owners have not even replied, and among those eight who did, two included my link while the rest refused it.

First I did not understand the reason. And then I, like the vodka in the joke, decided to go out and check who is this Ivan Ivanovich who keeps refusing me.

I found the following:

Conflict management page: “Dear Kata, thank you very much, I have included the link!”	1 esoteric link on the page – Both here and in the rest I only counted the explicitly esoteric links.
Parents page: “Dear link recommender. Thank you for visiting my page and recommending your link. I have included it, but in terms of my editorial principles, I have placed it in a different box.”	5 - 10 esoteric links
Consultation page: “Dear link recommender! The editor, in tems of the guideline concerning link recommendation, preferred not to include the link recommended by you.”	17 esoteric page and portal links
Health page: “Dear link recommender! The content of the page recommended by you does not have the necessary amount or quality of information which would make it really useful for the users visiting the Health page. And as the Health page does not have in view to function as a complete and exhaustive link collection, therefore I am sorry to say that I cannot include your link between the already existing ones.”	16 esoteric page and portal links, with an emphasis on esotericism and homeopathy
Psychological aid page: “Thank you for your recommendation, but the page proposed by you is no site, only a document (sic) which, in terms of the rules of our system, cannot be included in my page.”	50 esoteric page and portal links
Stress page: “Dear link recommender! Thank you for your proposal. Although your web page is pleasant, however, I cannot accept it, because its topic does not match the page edited by me.”	58 esoteric page and portal links
Self-knowledge page: “Dear link recommender! Thank you for your proposal. Although your web page is pleasant, however, I cannot accept it, because its topic does not match the page edited by me.”	66 esoteric page and portal links

All right. Now we already see who Ivan Ivanovich is. It is noteworthy that the better position he has, the more sneaky and insolent he is.

In the Consultation page he still clearly declares that he does not wish to include my page. I understand it well: if I opened a special section for esotericism, I would also not wish to include the link of a Christian on my page.

The editor of the Health page was impertinent enough to write about my exceptionally informative and well edited page (I can justifiably affirm this, after having visited the pages of several hundreds of psychologists) that it does not have the necessary amount and quality of information which would make it useful for the visitors of his page. Of course, if someone is looking for esotericism, the focus of his page, then he or she will certainly not find it on mine.

The editor of the Psychological aid page is more astute, and covers himself by referring to a never seen rule that stands above him. And he has all reason to cover himself, as he promotes oracle pages, horoscope and brain control as psychological aids. The one recommending all this is Imre Farkas, the president of the Győr-Sopron county branch of the Hungarian Psychological Aid by Phone for Children and Youth organization. Let us send oracles on the cell phones of every Hungarian children!

Krisztián Füredi, the editor of the Stress and Self-knowledge pages also edits the Hypnosis, Cognitive, NLP, Psychoanalysis, Psychodrama, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Personality and Social psychology pages. This means that he nailed more or less the complete field of psychology. Whoever is not included in his pages will not enter on the psychological web market which is increasingly covering the whole market.

So he does not strain himself to write that the topic of my site does not match that of the page edited by him. And the topic of his page is not what its title suggests, but what he likes. And he likes esotericism very much. This is not only indicated by the more than a hundred and twenty esoteric links on the Stress and Self-knowledge pages.

After having refused my link on the Psychology page with this excuse:

The content of the recommended page is relevant in every aspect, nevertheless I am sorry to say that I cannot accept it, as this topic is already completely covered by the other links on the page, so your link would not add extra information to the readers,

I thought, how great, if they completely cover it then I will easily find here all the other Christian psychologists. What I found, however, was the following:

About 20% of the psychologists linked by him exclusively follow some traditional clinical method, principally Freudian psychoanalysis. This is that 20% where the patient will suffer probably no injury, apart from eventually paying a lot of money for absolutely nothing. In any case, he or she will encounter a systematic, controlled and transparent method that does not intend to manipulate him or her, but to promote the evolution of his or her personality.

In the case of about 30% of the therapeutes on the page no information is given about their method. They only communicate to their future patient that if he or she will go to them then everything will be very good.

About 40% of the psychologists applies – either exclusively, or as a supplement – some manipulative technique, some sort of autogene training, relaxation, hypnose, katatim imaginative psychotherapy (KIP), neurolinguistic programming (NLP).

These manipulative techniques are usually recommended for a quickly relaxation to people suffering of stress. However, the relaxation basically works like a mild tranquillizer. It does not resolve the problem, only helps one in worrying less about it. If one continuously resorts to this solution, then the unresolved problem will look for another outlet. The patient will change symptoms, and from then on will go see the psychologist not about stress but about indigestion or computer addiction. If the psychologist manages to cure this on the level of symptoms again, then he can perfectly gain his living on a few patients until the end of his life.

The relaxation techniques are similar to mild tranquillizers also in that aspects that they are of no worth in the case of great stress. My psychologist friend who had learned autogene training, replied to me when I asked her why she did not use it in some really hard situation, that she could not relax when she was so nervous…

This is, however, the smaller problem. The bigger one is that what begins with the manipulation of the body, soon becomes the manipulation of the mind. The patient communicates with something – inner images, the subconscious, etc. – like with a person. However, our inner images and subconscious are no persons. There is nothing in your subconscious which was not put there by yourself. The contents of the subconscious can be uncovered, and this has therapic effect indeed. But you cannot communicate with it.

You can only communicate with the psychologist to whom you delivered yourself and who, for example in the case of NLP, applies techniques to go round the conscious resistance of the patient and to bring him in a modified mental state where his subconscious opens to the suggestions of the psychologists. And in the so-called katatim imaginative psychotherapy (KIP) the psychologist moves the patient to directly deliver him- or herself to various spiritual forces.

This means that with about the 40% of the psychologists on the Psychology page you are lucky if you only pay a lot of money for techniques that you cannot use for anything and do not receive hard esotericism by right of “psychology”.

Finally, it is exactly hard esotericism that is offered by a bit more than 10% of the psychologists on the Psychology page. Esotericism in every form, astrology, tarot, gurus and masters.

Everything is clear. No Christian psychologist is necessary here,

“as this topic is already completely covered by the other links on the page.”

The past has begun

The borders of our world are not in the distance, on the horizon or in the depths: they glimmer at the immedite vicinity, at the obscure edges of our intimate spaces. Somebody on a morning finds a wriggling sea star on the damp carpet of the living room, or a statuette of a god with an obstinate look in the eye, bird- and turtle-shaped mechanisms that sometimes hum and a red lamp is gleaming on the place of their eyes, or a book printed with unknown letters that include irised illustrations representing jungle temples and tigers. These things arrived to our shores only by mistakes, and then we enwrap them with some kind of substitutive meanings originating in our own experiences, on the basis of false similarities. We are guarded by the protective arm of the careful and perfidious god of the grammar that conceals from us the face of the monsters. (Michal Ajvaz: Druhé město (The other town), Brno 2005)

As the objects of the obscure, irrational and surreal “other town” hiding behind the usual and everyday Prague which sometimes penetrate by chance into our world and thus open the eyes of Michal Ajvaz to the existence of that one, are not what they appear to be, the sand container in Petřín is in the reality the lighting-window of the dome of an underground pagan cathedral, and the last door of the basement toilet of the Slavia café opens on an immense jungle cut across by a powerful river, in which the members of a tiger-adoring sect are massacring their own heretics; so the Hungarian crown standing in front of the railway station of Dunakeszi and slowly dribbling on the four Stonehenge dolmens supporting it like the clocks of Dalí, thus dissolving and invalidating the time, is not identical with the Hungarian crown that we have seen in the previous two posts, although it bears a striking resemblance to it. For the one we have seen in Iran and Austria, is the insignia of the Hungarian kings since the 12th century which, with its components coming from different countries, with the beautiful enamel images from 11th-century Limoges and 12th-century Byzantium, with the portrait of the Byzantine emperor Michael Dukas inserted on the place of a former icon of the Virgin Mary, with the cross standing obliquely but proudly on its top, and with its history full of vicissitudes is a true portrait of the thousand years old Hungarian statehood. The crown modeled in Dunakeszi, however, is a several thousand or ten thousands year old jewel of Hun or Sumerian origin – anyway, the both are the same –, a magic model of the cosmos, an energy center, sum of an infinite knowledge coming from outside the Earth or from the collective unconscious of mankind, the tabernacle of the religion of the highest order that has ever existed or that can be conceived. At least this is what the members of this esoteric Hungarian sect, unfortunately growing in number, preach of it.


The priests and believers of this religion are among us, like the night high priest of the faith of Dargúz in Ajvaz’s novel who in the daytime is the waiter of the restaurant of Pohořelec. They are stubborn Calvinists holding in contempt all kind of Popist idolatry, but uttering with the utmost respect the name of the Holy Crown. Catholics taking Communion every day, but propagating the Gospel of the Holy Crown every week in the Tuesday prayer meeting with the devote support of the parish priest. Department leaders of the Hungarian National Library who open the halls of the library to the mission of this cult. Architects – a most important order of knighthood of this religion – of whom you hope statically reliable houses and you receive the pattern design of the lines of force of the Holy Crown embracing the universe. Goldsmiths, sculptors and applied artists who on the one hand guarantee with their name for the authenticity of the myth of origin of this cult object, and on the other hand fill with works of art inspired by the myth the cultural centers, public squares, institutions and publications. Their presence is more perceptible in the countryside where I live than in the city where – as Ajvaz puts – the arm of the careful and perfidious god of the grammar conceals from us their network and their communities, on whose regular gatherings the wandering prophets of this faith József Molnár V., Gábor Papp, Lajos Szántai and their disciples steadily provide with spiritual food the believers of this mistery religion.


The crown in Dunakeszi refers to this still hiding world not only with its typical stylistic marks – its stiff, idol-like elaboration, its rustic dolmens and the burial hill heaped up under them –, but also with the fact that it visualizes an important article of faith of this cult: that the angle of inclination of the cross on the top of the crown is exactly identical with the angle of obliquity of the axis of the Earth. The sculptor, in order to emphasize this dogma, slipped the crown on the dolmens so that now everything is oblique on it, except for the only really oblique element, the cross, which thus stands erect perfectly vertically towards the sky, parallel with the axis of the Earth, looking exactly on the North Star like a small magic antenna.

.....

In order to make realistic the implausible hunch on your back, you must simply bend the back of the world on the model of your hunch. Tamás Cseh - Géza Bereményi: Song about the Wily William Shakespeare

Still hiding world, I say. Because if the book of Michal Ajvaz mapped how an “other world” imperceptibly fills in the cavities of the usual everyday reality, another Czech author, Karel Čapek has described in his War with the salamanders what happens when the situation becomes unstable, and that other, dark and surreal world breaks with a great force into ours.


May God save us of such eventuality.

Hen panta einai. All Is One

“Sufi” – wrote an American student in the rubrics “Religion” of the statistical questionnaire distributed at the seminary of phenomenology of religion. “Sufi?” I asked her. “What do you do as a Sufi?” “Well, we perform Sufi dances and read the poems of Rumi.” “That is, you know Persian?” “No, why? Rumi has been translated in English!”

The philologically faithful translation of the great didactic poem Mathnawī of Jalaladdin Rumi in fact renders correctly the content of the work, but it does not convey anything of the beauty of the poem. And in the very free versions made on the basis of English prose translations quite often the original meaning is lost, as well as the wonderful word plays and associations. I breathed a sigh. “Do you also study the Quran?” I asked the Sufi girl. She looked incredulously at me. “Why? We are Sufis, not – how do they say it – Mohammedans!” I shaked my head. “But Sufis are Muslim mystics!” I answered. “Oh no, we love every religion. Love is the most important thing!” she said with shining face. I did a last attempt. “And what do you know about the prophet Mohamed?” As I had suspected, she did not know anything about him who for every Sufi is the starting and focal point of his own chain of masters and disciples, and who, in their eyes, was the first real Sufi. I gave it up.

But what can we do when a very popular author boldly asserts that Goethe, Saint Francis, Napoleon and many others were Sufis? On what basis can we expect of the public a deeper knowledge of the history and essence of Sufism? For it is not easy anyway to answer the question what Sufism is and what makes a Sufi.

(Annemarie Schimmel, Sufismus. Eine Einführung in die islamische Mystik, München: Beck, 2000)