An Interview

The following is an interview I did for an occult web site in Serbia run by Neven Bijelic.

URL: http://home.drenik.net/neven/

ZS: Hi. Could you, at the beginning of this interview, introduce yourself to visitors of the site Zacarana Suma?

I am 53 years old and have lived in Honolulu, Hawaii in the U.S.A. since 1982. I studied business and philosophy at college and went on to get a masters degree in linguistics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. I have done volunteer work as a mediator for a local conflict resolution, non-profit organization. I did divorce meditation, parent-child meditation, and so forth. I was a victim witness counselor for the local prosecutor's office. I have worked as a facilitator in anger management classes, drug-alcohol prevention, domestic violence classes and overall enjoy working as a facilitator of groups of people who are involved in working through various problems.

I grew up as a Baptist in the Protestant tradition and early on began to think seriously about studying spiritual practices around the world to gain a better insight into what I call spiritual anthropology. I am interested in those universal skills and insights each religion and esoteric tradition has to offer mankind as a whole. I have studied with Buddhist masters in all three main Buddhist traditions, Taoist masters, Hindus, Sufis, and with a Hopi Indian Medicineman while studying the Hopi Indian language.

I found a reference to Franz Bardon's work in a book by Gareth Knight in 1975 and at that point began a serious pursuit of Bardon's practices. My relation to this tradition is to introduce some art and psychology into the system so that it blends a little more easily into Western culture.

ZS: Could you tell us when did your interest toward occult start and for how many years have you been practicing? What systems have you used?

My mother tells me that immediately before each of her children were conceived my father prayed to God to have a spiritual child. There is a strong line of faith among the fathers of my family line reaching back several hundred years. When I was age four an angel visited me and asked me for what I wished. Iwas immersed in religion by my father as a child. This contrasted to my awareness of the world being in a state of nuclear brinkmanship during my formative years. It was quite natural that at some point I would attempt to relate the prophetic experience of the Old Testament whereby an individual is able to contact God directly to the current political situation of the world.

This perspective, of course, requires more than a little experience and knowledge to succeed and so I have been absolutely thrilled to find Bardon's work in which there are such detailed explanations and instructions for working with the divine world. Just about everyone in my family is involved in business, science, or architecture and I think I bring a kind of pragmatic--"how do you get the job done" or "how do you accomplish the mission"--approach to my practice of magick.

I have been willing to study with any master who has unique abilities and try out what part of the system is helpful for my own objectives. For example, one day when looking through a catalogue of about sixty spiritual teachers at the Omega Institute in New York, I notice that the aura of one of the individuals was the most balanced I had every perceived in terms of the four elements. I did not really care what this individual was teaching but rather if he could teach that elemental balance to his students as well.

This individual is Philip Carr-Gomm who is a modern druid, the chosen chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids. I have worked through their correspondence course and attended some of their seminars in Scotland and Philip has spent six days with me at my house here in Hawaii. It is not that I am a druid but it is very delightful for me to associate with individuals who did not find it strange for someone like myself who talks to with trees, meditates for days in stone circles, and has long conversations with elemental beings. I fit right in.

But overall, my objective in studying Druidry has been to answer the question, "What are the teaching methods this organization uses to introduce modern individuals to explore the spiritual worlds in a way harmonious with the individual's personality and in a way that empowers the individual rather than promoting a set of doctrines or maintaining the power structure of an organization?" I think Philip has done an excellent job in these areas and I have learned much from him.

However, it was actually in 1969 that I was first introduced to any kind of esoteric or magical training. I had a girl friend who was a hereditary witch. She was being pursued by a Wiccan coven that was trying to coerce and force her against her will through magical means into becoming the queen of that coven. Naturally I wanted to assist her in retaining her independence and personal freedom. But when I went around to various spiritual teachers in the Christian religion I discovered they knew less than nothing about the occult, about the Wiccan religion, or about various methods for psychic protection.

This young lady also introduced me to one of the largest occult libraries in the world at the time which is located in Wheaton, Illinois--a world center of Theosophy. I subsequently read about 80 books or so over a nine month period on various aspects of the occult in order to familiarize myself with the idea of esoteric and magical traditions.

About that time I began a life long study of esoteric oral traditions, seeking the oldest, intact lineages from around the world. I went to learn the Hopi language since they have the oldest continuously occupied native American village in the United States going back about 900 years. I next studied in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in California with an unbroken lineage also going back about 900 years.

After that I studied with a large number of very gifted psychics and ocultists living in Tucson, Arizona. I moved to Hawaii to study with a Taoist master who was the head of a Chinese monastery that has an unbroken lineage of teaching chi kung and magick for over 2,200 years.

But it was in 1975 that I began practicing Bardon's books and I have been working with them steadily since then. Before starting an internet page, I had only met about five practitioners of Bardon's system and I have had very few conversations with any of those individuals about Bardon.

ZS: What is your opinion on Franz Bardon's books and his system of magical initiation. How do you see it compared with other systems?

My personal opinion is that Bardon is revealing a set of magical practices that belong to about five hundred years in mankind's future. He is introducing into our world a level of power far in advance of the cultural and religious understanding of our society.

I want to be very careful on this point. I am not saying that the content of his books is so unique. I have found just about every exercise in Initiation into Hermetics in some other book or system. But it is the overall objective and level of commitment to universal service that is so unusual. Bardon trains you to be a spirit with the powers and authority of one of the 360 earthzone spirits which he describes in his second book, The Practice of Magical Evocation. As a consequence and as a magician, you learn to move among spirits as an equal and as one of them while also remaining a human being.

You cannot put aside working on your own karma as an individual when you pursue such a system of training. You remain fully a human being with human limitations. There is no aura of guru about this. In fact, if there were a global guru society that officially recognizes "masters" or "gurus" I would be immediately rejected. I see myself as a life long student and I am disqualified from ever being a guru because I do not see myself as "more important" than other people.

Yet the system does develop a spiritual identity--a capacity to move as a divine being among other divine beings and on occasion to participate directly in the divine workshop engaging in highly creative activity. When you do this kind of stuff, you take the tools of the world that you find around you and you apply them in new or unusual ways. And so it is not the content of Bardon's books that is so remarkable as much as the implication that as a magician you serve directly under the authority of Divine Providence.

This is neither like the prophet Jonah who whines and complains when he discovers what God's purpose is nor like Balaam who never did understand what was in God's heart. Rather, it is your inner union and level of personal inspiration from within that enables you to select and to accomplish on your own initiative something that otherwise would never have happened and which benefits mankind.

For me, the really nice thing about Bardon's system is that it is self-initiation, self-empowering, and the end goal is to put you in direct contact with divinity without the mediation or overshadowing of some guru or tradition. As far as I can tell, Bardon's system is completely universal and consistent with cosmic laws. You might have practiced it successfully thirty thousand years ago in a civilization such as Atlantis and you could practice the exact same system thirty thousand years from now in some other solar system and accomplish your spiritual objectives.

I think the closest system to this is that demonstrated in the person of the Dalai Lama who says, "As long as suffering remains to sentient beings, I will remain to serve." You can take a high level Buddhist with a religion on this level of inspiration and place him or her anywhere in the universe and that practice remains effective and indeed finds a way to serve whatever forms of intelligent life may be present.

ZS: Have you got "favorite" elemental spirit? (If yes why that particular spirit?)

I have a great affinity for Cargoste, a sylph who seems to comprehend the entire atmosphere of the earth. I am at home when I work with him. The air element is like second nature for me--I love harmony and the openness of mind to cosmic wisdom and Cargoste has that very vibration.

But I have a great fondness for Istiphul who is an undine who has one of the most profound visions of personal love I have encountered. Ecstasy has got to be one of her names. She knows that deep in my heart I wish to learn all she can teach about magnetic love and the heart of the seas. Still, Itumo, a salamander who specializes in lightning seems to think I am just like him--that the quest for power, not personal power, but the mystery of creative power, is the essence of who I am. I am not thrilled with the idea of seeking power but you could almost say I am under orders by Divine Providence to explore cosmic power far more than what I would ever consider doing on my own initiative.

ZS: For how long have you been practicing evocation? What one can learn from the elementals ?

I put off contacting spirits for about four years into the Bardon system. At that time, I found I could just tune into a spirit and read or study it aura and qualities exactly in the same that I can do that with a human being. There was no danger, seemingly no effort, and it seemed all perfectly natural and familiar to me.

From a technical viewpoint, the elementals according to Bardon represent the powers and qualities of consciousness belonging to the astral and etheric worlds. If you have a divine ideal or mental conception that you wish to introduce into our world or make real, you inevitably have to gather and focus the energies of the astral and etheric planes in order to materialize your dreams and purposes.

If you fail to do this, you can become like many Christians who have an incredibly high ideal of love and self-less service. But they lack genuine empathy--they lack an undine's natural feeling for giving and renewing the life within others. They lack the sylph's open-mindedness, a fondness for comprehending from a detached and perfectly clear perspective how something works and what it is. They lack pure, unadulterated joy and exuberance in the exploration and expression of power that belongs to salamanders. And they lack the gnomes inner silence and nearly infinite patience and endurance when it comes to immersing yourself in your work. I do not mean to pick on Christians because I am still one. All fundamentalists in all religions, traditions, and among atheists as well share pretty much the same mental perspectives.

I enjoy immensely working and meditating with elemental beings partly because I am entranced by the beauty of nature and these beings know exactly what I feel when I am overcome with this beauty and the ecstasies of the four elements. On the other hand, in my experience, it is not at all easy to communicate or share with others my experiences with elementals. I mean, it is not like going to church Wednesday night and getting up and offering your personal testimony on your experiences with sylphs or undines during the last week and how much they inspired you and helped you gain insight or better appreciate your life. I haven't quite found any groups like that where such sharing and appreciation of the subject is naturally expressed.

ZC: How people around react when you say that you are very familiar with occult ideas and magic?

I am not at all an evangelist. I have no desire to convert to my point of view. I am willing to share my experiences but I am not selling anything (other than a few books). I learned early on not to talk with the wrong people at the wrong time about religion or politics. I do know how to talk with just about anyone about religion or politics but it takes a lot of energy and I do not like to waste my time or energy in situations where someone's mind is not receptive to the information I have to give.

I really do not like arguments. I am in the camp of those who live and let live. I am far more interested in sharing one on one direct and personal experience rather than debating ideas or trying to affirm a tradition or set of doctrines. But there are very special circumstances where if someone is intentionally harming other people I will become very involved for the sake of harmony and justice.

ZS: If you are familiar with Kabbalah, what do you think about the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Holy Bible?

I like the Kabbalah. I think it is the best esoteric system on the earth but very poorly explored by its practitioners. It is not interesting to me to talk or argue about God's names or how to pronounce or spell them. It is more interesting to me to attempt to enter directly into God's presence or interact directly with an archangel and then report as fairly as possible on my experiences.

If someone says, "Our tradition owns these two square feet of the beach by the sea of truth and divine ecstasy," that is fine with me. They may be able to teach well and effectively a little bit about the mystery of creation. But the sea is infinite. I am content to walk a few feet further down the beach and swim out into that sea. The human race in my opinion does not have a whole lot of spiritual knowledge yet. We are just at the beginning of exploring the spiritual universe and there is no end to this universe.

ZS: Do you think that every spiritual, magical, religious path leads to the God it self?

I think that individuals can find God and the right individual can do so within any tradition. Yet it is my nature to itemize, give an account, study the balance sheet--the assets and liabilities, the history and performance--of each tradition to determine at least for my self its worth and its special understandings, methods, and insights.

The locus of power in a post industrial, pluralistic, and democratic world is not tradition but the individual. If you want great teaching, find a teacher who empowers you individually. I like to say the only way to tell who the teacher is in any group of people is by observing the individual who is learning the most. For me, therefore, it is your individual purpose, your goal, your ideal, your connection to divinity, and your level of inspiration that determines how you use one or more traditions. The traditions for me do not understand that inspiration is something unique and special within each person's heart and that no tradition can comprehend the way and the purpose behind how Divine Providence chooses to awaken within the heart of a human being.

ZS: How would you explain Bardon's words " The greatest magician our Lord Jesus "?

I think Christ was outstanding. As far as I can tell, he is the one world teacher who did the best job of demonstrating how to live as a human being who at the same time is united with divinity. You do this by example. You live with people and you go out and show them how God would love if He were incarnated as a human being. I think that is why the Gospels tend to speak for themselves. They capture that incredible level of inspiration that is like unto the spirits of the sun who each are in direct union with God.

There is cosmic law but there is also a sense in which those in union with God are a law unto themselves because they create after the fashion God--it is this level of inspiration that can speak and witness from out of direct personal experience that the ecstasy of this inner union with God completely outweighs the entirety of the suffering, loss, and sorrow that accompanies the journey of life. Christ's life is a perfect example of one who chose to follow a divine mission, to accomplish it here on earth, to share both in the full suffering of mankind and at the same time to live with an inspiration of giving and love that derives from the highest ecstasy of being in union with God from within.

As I mentioned in the introduction of one of my books, Christ attempted to teach siddhis such as how to walk on water to Peter, but Peter's faith failed and the Western world in that moment lost a powerful connection to nature. You can only teach what others are willing to receive--that seems to be a rule governing all world teachers.

ZS: Your site is very useful to all of us walking the path of magic. Having started the site "Zacarana suma" about occult on Yugoslavian web I have met numerous people who have show open hatred and labeled me, and others familiar with magic - antichrists and Satanists. Explanation that Bardon got nothing familiar with black magic, OTO and similar didn't change their opinion a bit. What do you think the reason is?

I personally think that in Atlantis magick was severely abused. The requirement to have to start civilization over from scratch and proceed though many millennia of development due to this abuse remains as a racial memory. There are of course individuals who seek the power of the inner planes to gain advantage in life for themselves. They have no problem with this.

But many individuals, especially with the onset of the Christian era, feel that exploring the inner planes is taboo. It is identical with abuse of power because as a matter of fact there are no obvious constraints on the use of this power. The test offered by Christianity is this: do you believe beyond all doubt that you are free of the temptations of power, either worldly or occult, and can you act in a totally selfless manner? If you can do this and believe that you can correct by yourself any errors you make, then you are indeed free to explore the inner planes for you will not abuse or be abuse by the dark powers of Atlantis when they return again and offer you their gifts and their ancient temptations.

I pretty much agree with this view. But this age in which we live offers so incredibly many avenues for acquiring and expressing power in the external world that it is almost a total mistake to think of magick as offering an individual powers he might not otherwise acquire in this life. In fact, I think many of the high Atlantean magicians have incarnated in our world as house wives, firemen, simple people. It is not that they could not do anything they wanted or be Bill Gates. It is rather that they genuinely wish to develop the feelings and thoughts of a unique individual's personality which is something all ancient religious and magical traditions pretty much were never able to offer.

So, it is a racial memory of horror and terror and terrible abuse which generates fear of the occult in any expression. And it is the spirit of this age that is quite ready to label occult explorations as stupid or a waste of time. Both of these tend to combine.

ZS: Speaking about the web, we can find all the sorts of material there - from black to white magic, astral projection.... Some of those sites are very commercial. Could you give us your opinion about this?

The web offers everything all at once. If you become familiar with the web, you learn to evaluate for yourself the worth of what you find. You can immediately find others to share with you your interests and you can communicate and offer your experiences and abilities to others around the planet.

This part is good. There will naturally also be an opportunity, with this level of openness and communication, for very dark and menacing movements to arise. It is exactly the same with meditation. If you open your mind or emotions to receive impressions from within your subconscious, within the collective unconscious, or cosmic unconscious, you will find the highest inspiration and also the most malicious intelligences. This is the way it works.

Internet is like a direct gift of magick from the sphere of Uranus to mankind. If you use the gift wisely, you advance far beyond what you can imagine. If the gift is abused, the magick is withdrawn and saved for another age of the world. It is for us, all of us, to use this gift with great skill and wisdom and to assume full responsibility for serious abuses so that we do not allow them to get out of hand.

A typical way to deal with abuses of power is to discuss them openly and even to invite those abusing their power into the discussion. This spreads information around and lets individuals determine for themselves what is going on. It is like democracy--you have to always remain vigilant. No matter how evolved the society, there is always the chance that power will be abused in some new and completely unexpected way. For this reason, in a democracy, you try to decentralize power and maintain constant scrutiny of motives and actions.

ZS: Do you think that men have more chance to make a spiritual progress than women do?

I think a magician, male or female, is forced by necessity, by the nature of the art, to study his opposite in consciousness--that is the weakest thing in himself--as well as the opposite gender--in order to master its essence.

If you wish to create, you have to attract, court, mate, envision, intensity, procreate, carry and give birth, nurture, monitor, watch over, educate, empower, and release--these stages of the process of creation and of creativity require both masculine and feminine, and as of this date in time, male and female also. If you cut short, abort, underestimate, or underutilize either gender's mysterious powers, your creative result is flawed, unstable, and without enduring effects.

You cannot get around this. Women do not have to study magick nor do men have to study magick. But a magician has to study both men and women as well as masculine and feminine. The bottom line is that a great magician is free to incarnate as male or female. It is a personal thing and has absolutely nothing to do with how successful you are with magick though of course in any society specific genders will carry with them certain advantages and disadvantages.

ZS: What do you think about work of Alister Crowley, and O.T.O.?

I enjoyed reading Crowley's autobiography back in 1971. I love it when individuals are willing to share the details of their personal lives and the experiences that have made them who they are. I really like that part of his personality. But other than a few evocations he wrote about, I really have had no personal interest in Crowley's work.

This may be because I am from the other end of the universe when it comes to ceremonial or ritual magick. I am content to sit down with a few cups of coffee over a period of four or five hours and work directly with specific spirits. If I were to burn candles, use a magick mirror, a wand, a cap, a magick belt, a robe, etc. I would feel absolutely ridiculous and it is something which is totally inappropriate for me.

I think I have done far too much ceremonial magick in other lives and so it falls upon me at this point in time to move as quickly as I can, again, to the bottom line--what do I wish to accomplish and what is the best method for me individually to use to accomplish this.

If I want power, I would probably turn to the cosmic language of the Kabbalah. If I want knowledge, I would probably petition a spirit to give it to me. If I want love, I have to join my heart and spirit with a spirit who specializes in love or else commune directly with God or the impersonal aspect of God's presence in the universe--Divine Providence. But if I want results, I have to stay focused and figure the best way to get something done and, again, this is a matter of personal preference and individual experience.

ZS: As an experienced magician, can you give some advice to all people taking the path of magic, using Bardon's system, and to those who are using some other? What are the most important points? What are the most common mistakes?

In a nutshell, I think each individual has to determine how much time and effort to give to the practice of a spiritual or magical system. If you give too much time to the spiritual, you then fail to develop your own personal interests and discover your place in history and your role in the society where you live. The net result is that you end up becoming like or a part of someone else's ideals and spiritual goals rather than those which express who you are. You serve a purpose or organization but it is not the one you could have discovered and which underlies your reason for incarnating.

And if you give too little to your training and practices, you limit the creativity and influence you could have in the world by being motivated from a higher level and gaining access to insights only possible to those who see the world through divine eyes.

Again, I think our age is a great place for discovering what works best for you as an individual and you as an individual get to make your own decision and delight in pursuing your own path of life.

It took me a long time to figure out that I have to do my own work in life. All the spiritual masters I met for the first decade or so, though very powerful, they were also flawed and often abused their powers. But this is part of my karma. I am meant to specialize in understanding natural and spiritual power both in its wise use and how to overcome its abuse.

ZS: Did you have problems during your life (occult) and how did you deal with them?

My main problem has been that my level of concentration can easily burn up my vitality and create imbalances for my health. To avoid serious headaches, I have had to learn to relax and throw in some art and creative writing so the concentration serves a useful purpose and my magical experiences can then be shared with others.

I am not gifted as a healer. I can gather huge amounts of energy but to use these for healing purposes would exhaust me. They are far more useful serving other purposes. I think this is part karmic--I am not supposed to present the radiant guru kind of aura. It is far more my nature to keep track of what is occurring around the planet--this is more the work of an intelligence agent than that of a medical doctor. I do not need a lot of energy to accomplish my purposes. I just need to use correctly the energy I have at my disposal.

This too took me a long time to learn. Like many students, I was attracted in the beginning to the idea of gaining magical powers over matter that could be easily demonstrated. Anyone who spends decades training seriously as a magician can probably do some very remarkable things. But the nature of power is very interesting. If you have had sufficient experience with it, seen it from many sides, then you understand what it is good for and what it is not good for. You do not attach to it and you never use it to build up your ego. It is just a tool among others that you use for the specific task you have at hand. Those who have never had a great deal of power often become enchanted with it as if it will solve all their problems. And they are entitled to learn through their own experience what power is good for.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for me to learn was that it is ok to have a lot of power. You can use it freely and also simply put it aside when you do not have need of it. Like I said, I tended to meet individuals who were abusing their power and so I had to develop on my own a conception of using power which serves the light and which is completely free from abuse.

ZS: Zacarana Suma, is not the only occult site in YU, but I can say it is the biggest one :), in Serbian language. What do you think of a design, and the idea for the site, I mean daily update, serious texts, thought I am paying more attention to the theoretical part? Do you think that it's wise to put practical texts on the site?

I think the more information you can offer others through a web site can only be beneficial. I like and really enjoy your site. If you wish to develop more communication with the conservative elements, religious, political, social, artistic, etc. in your language and culture, you might do interviews with them somewhat similar to what you are doing with me. I often would spend seven hours with Catholic priests, educators, politicians, etc. discussing the issues which they felt important from their perspective.

By offering a forum that is fair, open, and interesting to others, you establish your own reputation and make yourself valuable as a neutral and reliable presence in your society.

ZS: Do you think that homosexuals (gay, lesbians) are in a way distanced from spiritual/magical life, and is the progress to God available to them too? Do you think that it is more important that you love, than who you love, of course if you are not breaking in any way freedom of other people

To answer your question, I find there are no spirits or beings guarding the gates to God's Presence. God is certainly available to everyone who makes the effort to seek Him out. And I think that those who are truly inspired by love will always find themselves at odds with the world around them. Love demands total responsibility rather than conformity or complacency.

Unlike God, however, different societies place great restrictions on individuals at different points in history. In Saudi Arabia, those who violate the gender roles are often severely and brutally punished. But the question of gender roles can be seen in a larger context. Consider the issue of slavery. The North and South American Baptist Organizations separated originally over the issue of slavery. The Southern Christian ministers proclaimed that the Bible stated that slavery was God's law. In the North where slavery was not part of the economy, there were ministers who to were ready to use violence to overcome the institution of slavery.

When the blacks were freed after the American civil war, it still took a century before they gained the right to vote because of restrictions placed on voter registration. But even with the right to vote, an economic form of slavery continued in the United States because in some cases blacks were forced to live in ghettoes. And some of our towns used to place greater restrictions on blacks than those which existed in S. Africa. It has taken another fifty years in addition to the previous hundred years for these restrictions to be overcome.

Consider women's rights. For women to gain the right to vote in the United States, some had to become terrorists. They attacked government officials with knives, burnt down buildings, committed suicide in public places, and went on hunger strikes in prisons. After gaining the vote, again, it took another fifty years for a women's movement to develop that insisted on equal opportunity in gaining access to jobs and education.

Recently, two lesbians were thrown out of a baseball game because they were kissing. Heterosexual couples in the same stadium who were kissing were not thrown out. After complaining, the stadium officials apologized and agreed to donate 5,000 baseball tickets to gay and lesbian organization. The officials said the stadium is open to everyone.

Again, in a democracy, there is a concerted effort to limit the power of government, whether religious or secular, from interfering with the rights of individuals. And there is an equal awareness that the morality and the views of the majority shall not be imposed upon minorities. Power is derived from the people and is limited to specific stated purposes. Power and rights not expressly granted to the Federal government are reserved to states and to individuals.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The point is, who gets to decide what is moral or right for others? The Protestant Reformation began with the idea of conscience--that each individual has a conscience that is capable of being directly inspired by God. If you grant a religious or governmental authority the power and right to restrict individual preferences on sexual or personal forms of expression that are not harming others, then you are inevitably interfering with Divine Providence. Political and religious power of any kind will always be abused unless it is continuously scrutinized.

Each individual is responsible for his or her own behavior and his or her own mistakes, difficulties, and errors. Those who are socially different and who are engaged in great struggles, such as striving for equality, freedom, and personal expression, will no doubt find themselves at times very confused and disoriented. Not only do they suffer from social rejection and even persecution, but they may have great internal conflicts involved with "coming out of the closet," accepting themselves, or acquiring the wisdom and experience necessary to understand what they are going through.

But freedom is one of the ultimate goals of life in our solar system. To attain it, you have to recognize and master your limitations rather than fleeing from them or blindly accepting them. Social and political freedom may be very messy because it allows non-conformity, but it is worth the price. Christ put it this way: Judge not that you be not judged.

ZS: Mr. Mistele, thank you for your time for this interview, I hope that the questions haven't been boring. Were you surprised to receive letter from Yugoslavia?

I am delighted to hear from you. Obviously Europeans have a much better appreciation of tradition and history than those in a country that is still young and new like the United States. This certainly means that traditions are perhaps more of a problem for you but it also means that you have in your own history individuals who have spent their lives in spiritual pursuits.