VOLUME 2 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2016

snout for so long, till they get, for example, to a heap of grain – and then their inner life already ceases. This usually does not occur in people. I recall that in one village, there lived a person called Beerlover. He was generally considered to be a person internally underdeveloped and, precisely due to this, he was, in his inner life, very similar to rats. Nonetheless, when he learned that in the fourth village from his, a new pub had opened, he sensed that right there, he could drink beer and thought that it would be a better beer than the one in the old pub, he didn’t “scour” the ground with his snout for so long until he could “sniff out” a house stinking of beer, but, metaphorically speaking, he stretched the thread of his thinking from his place of residence to this new pub and then went unerringly, straight to it. If these facts of the laboratory and the usual psychology were to be judged by the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu, he would say that “precisely due to this difference, the inner life of humans is different from the inner life of rats”. With regard to the fact that mysticism is nearer to Lao Tzu than to the “scientific”, or laboratory, psychology, it rather investigates the influence of that which has an effect on a person when they occupy their mind with it, than analogies of influence of fodder on the human and animal inner life. Mysticism is thus predominantly based on the self-evident knowledge that, when the mind is occupied with abstract things and dreaming, then the consciousness no longer abides on the ground, but somewhere in the vagueness, and this rules out the arising of a high quality mystical knowledge. However, if the mind never rises above the “soil”, a person is incapable of the abstract knowledge which, by substitution of the respective terms of this equation of the inner life, becomes wisdom which is close to redemption. Let us think simply: if the students of mysticism are to avoid the danger of development of unproductive thinking and speculations, they must not fill their mind with purely abstract perceptions, but with the concrete ones. Out of these, the closest thing is their own body. For, it is the body that is the carrier of the animal, emotional and inner life; these psychological phenomena then correspond to precise places in the body. For example, the reason certainly resides in the head and not in the legs; the procreative drive resides at the base of the trunk; in the spinal cord, which is the very origin of the brain matter, there is a primitive sense of touch, by which the lowest of organisms react to food. The fact, that these psychological phenomena have their headquarters of awareness in the head, is not decisive. This is confirmed by research which is based on the concentration of attention. Concentration, in particular an adequately intensive concentration which is able to bring about the reactions of those places in the body, on which it is focused, always brings about only the relevant, and not various, reactions. Concentration on feet and legs as a whole, with a special focus on their flesh, has an effect on the development of the intellect and deepening of the sensory discernment, because right here, in the legs, in the flesh of the body, the basis of the inner life is situated. The same concentration with a special focus on their bones – and in particular to the bones of knees – eliminates the instability 66 Květoslav Minařík

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