Questions and answers

on The School for Gods bestseller

The School for Gods is a beautiful experiment

 

The interview begins with some questions from the audience about the figure of Stefano D’Anna and the reason why ‘The School for Gods’ came out with the same title but apparently with two different authors…

Elio.: Professor Stefano D’Anna was a student of mine and also a brother, I believe many of you have already met him. As is often the case there are obedient students and others who are not. Stefano never was and, as you will have also read in the book, you will know how difficult it is for an ordinary person to follow an extraordinary being, especially when he has met him by chance or by a stroke of luck.

On ‘The school for Gods, the disobedience of an ordinary man is calculated and part of what I would call a beautiful experiment. The task of being the spokesperson for the Book had been entrusted to an ordinary person, this commitment became increasingly impossible to sustain to the point that he could no longer follow the pace and breath of the Dreamer who was inspiring him.

(the Dreamer smiles, there is a kind of compassion in the smile and a kind of an embrace as he says the following words)

With a play on words I could say that the experiment was a failure of Success.

It is impossible to eliminate a person’s limitations, from the outside. Nothing and no one can do that to you!

Sometimes we pray to God or a higher being to intervene in one’ s life in the belief that some sort of magic can change our surroundings… but this is a lie that is told to ourselves.

You are also convinced that you have a will that can change and transform the things that happen….

(the tone of his voice becomes almost a whisper as he is about to reveal the true facts …)

In reality you are a prisoner of your own projections …

What I am going to say today you will not like, I will not deal with spiritual topics, nor will there be teachings from a master or guru, shaman or whatever form of esotericism you can expect from me. I am here today for a very practical reason, I am a practical man, I am a firm believer in practicality and pragmatism.

(the voice is now stern and leaves no room for doubt)

Which is not to say that I believe in external reality, “external reality serves you.” That means being practical!

When you govern yourself, reality follows.

On ‘The School for Gods’ it is clear that reality is not perceived but projected, we are Creators of our own reality that is then projected into the so-called ‘real’ world.

(makes a gesture with his hands to make it clear that we are not passive receivers of what comes to us from outside),

My words and books are not addressed to the masses, they are directed to the individual, I am addressing you and not the multitude A journalist wrote that he had never read in my words anything popular and in fact I have no intention of making the Book popular, the Book is by its nature unpopular

‘The school for Gods’was published in Turkey thanks to a student from the European School of Economics, I warned him that it would not be a best-seller and he agreed to take the risk. No one could have predicted it but the text exploded and has been one of the biggest hits in foreign fiction since 2005 in Turkey!

The reason for the unpopularity of my words or teachings becomes clear the moment you try to follow or understand its laws, you will easily realize that you cannot apply what is talked about in the book to yourself. So I invite you and suggest that you rather follow a religion, an ideology, a political or economic idea, instead of trying to transform your own nature and your own being. This is the most difficult task you will ever try your hand at.

Now let a beautiful game happen, we are here and you can ask me some questions, you will see that in a few minutes we will be ready to navigate and go into the ocean, transforming ourselves into one person and, if you give me your attention, you will rejoice in these hours that we will spend together, conversing about the topics of the Book.

Two days ago I was invited to an international forum on the world economy, broadcasted by the Bloomberg channel, the conference was held in Turkey and were invited many gurus of the world economy including some Nobel laureates … all trying to expose their opinion about the apparent solutions to the critical conditions that afflict the world economy but their ideas seemed to be all spoken with the same language and with the same meaning.

When they asked me what I thought about the crisis we are experiencing, I answered them: ‘What crisis? I don’t know any crisis, the crisis is not something objective, the crisis is the fall of the inner values of a person, it is the product of the inner being. There is no external economic or political or health crisis that is really happening now in the world, and I am referring to great nations like Italy or Greece…

The only solution is to understand that the crisis is subjective and as such belongs only to the individual. Only the individual can resolve it, understanding that external reality is a projection.

It is the dream that comes from within the individual and is projected into the external world with events and circumstances that are the result of his own creativity. The crisis apparently afflicting the Western world is just self hypnotism!

Beginning with heads of state or industry experts, people choose not to feel responsible, and I’m referring primarily to inner responsibility, of the individual.

Now it will be clear to you why these words cannot be popular they destroy the comfortable illusion of depending on someone, on a government, on others, on time, on politics, on economics, on God, on a teacher, on various teachers but never on yourself.

Observe yourself and you’ll see that you don’t tell yourself that you are the one and only person responsible! Responsible for everything that happens in your life.

In Latin to be responsible means, ‘to answer’ to be able to give an answer to all questions. If you realize that everything comes from within, that’s when your fears disappear, and when fears vanish, all possibilities are accessible and opportunities open up. If you understand, if you can catch the glimmers of this understanding you will be able to feel safe, to feel responsible for everything and anything. You will no longer have any fear, doubt, suffering, any lowering in being, any falling away within yourself because you will know ‘the answer’.

Get into yourself or what you believe to be yourself….

(an expression of disappointment touches the amused features of the Dreamer)

you will encounter what you are NOT and that is why your life is a mess and ninety-nine percent driven by what you are not. That’s why you always meet with a multitude, with chaos. The multitude is hidden in you and you believe that you are one manifestation, that you are yourself. This lie this misunderstanding of who you are and who you are not, creates all the chaos and problems you see in your life.

(a few moments of silence)

Listen to the silence, feel the silence in you, the responsibility to sustain the silence, the inner responsibility that surfaces and allows you to get in touch with who you really are. This is the only interesting thing ….

(more silence)

In order to understand what’s going on in your life, you have to be able to see the kind of mask you wear at all times without your knowledge, believing you are the mask, identifying with the mask, believing you can get rid of it at will, when in fact throwing away the mask is impossible.

You came here for an answer…

The only answer is ‘be responsible’.

All the crises in the world fall if you understand that you are the real cause of the problems and difficulties you will find in your reality. I don’t see any crisis and no bankruptcy, because when you don’t have any crack in your being, you can’t see the crisis in the outside world, not even the economic crisis.

If you believe in the media, in television, in the news, you are doomed, you forget yourself and enter into a sort of confusion, everything slips from your hands starting with your life because you are not able to master yourself.

One of the fundamental principles of ‘The School for Gods’ is self-observation and self-management and is also one of the most difficult actions ever because everyone thinks they can observe themselves.

It only takes a few seconds of sincere self-observation to dispel the internal shadows and make all the problems concerning you disappear, starting from the problems of your own organization to the planetary problems.

(With a dramatic gesture involves all present)

You: But how is it possible that in me there is so much power…. why me? it is impossible that everything depends on me, a lot of combinations, millions and millions of thoughts, of problems…

Elio.: These questions arise because you have hypnotized yourself, created a prison that contains you, and you project the events and attacks you receive from the outside without ever feeling responsible for what happens to you.

Experiencing a moment of absolute pain that leads you to the desperate certainty that there is nothing more to do, opens the door to a great opportunity, is a blessing because it is precisely that pain, that fear the propellant to make the big jump!

Unfortunately, when that pain assaults you you try every way you can to escape it, call some friends, go to a restaurant, look for a partner for some sex, just to run away from the internal suffering. Yet circumscribing the pain would allow you to conquer the impossible. There is no other technique, no meditation or prayer that more than self-observation can like a powerful laser enter the inner pain, removing it.

You.: How is it possible that self-observation is enough to change the reality around us?

Elio.: To change first oneself and then the external reality, self-observation is necessary. Everyone thinks they know how to observe themselves but no one can really observe themselves, mostly the ordinary man, that’s why self observation is really difficult to practice. Self-observation penetrates all the limitations and obstacles you impose on yourself, lays bare all the lies you carefully cover yourself with. It’s a battle against yourself …. the greatest difficulty is the attachment to what you believe to be ‘you’, because you are in love with your encrustations.

You.: How do I practice self-observation?

Elio.: Self-observation is being able to observe your own states of being.

What are you feeling right now? Right now, here? How many of you can tell what is going on in yourselves?

All this changes politics, influences the economy, the fate of nations to the entire universe.

This is my experience, these are my words ‘The World is as you dream it’, ‘the world is as it is because you are as you are’. Your limits produce and project out of you the limits of the world. Not only are you responsible for everything that happens externally to you, you are at fault and unaware of it. You are prey to guilt and in this way you do violence to your life unknowingly, unconsciously. You live in terrible guilt about your negative emotions without knowing it, you suffer and kill yourself all the time and the natural condition of your life becomes a kind of unconscious self-sabotage.

If I asked you ‘Would you like to live an infinite life forever without death?”, I’m sure not only you, no one else would. In life as you know it there are too many difficulties, contrasts, enemies and struggles, which create desperate living conditions that can only be escaped by dying.

But death is not the way out; death represents the escape route of the irresponsible. When you become responsible for your life and understand that you can change it at will, that’s when everything turns into a Paradise …. And you don’t want to leave.

You.: Would I no longer want to go to heaven or would I no longer want to live on earth?

Elio.: You no longer want to escape to a phantom Paradise because life itself becomes Paradise.

What you have triggered is a perverse mechanism that you enact at every moment, continually dying internally until physical death becomes a natural conclusion.

Some of you have asked if there is such a thing as immortality, but who really cares about immortality? …

There is too much fear in you to let go of your fears, plus you certainly wouldn’t want to suffer even more than what is already being suffered!

For you, immortality is an endless and relentless prolongation of your suffering, that’s why I tell you that you are not ready for immortality, because to abandon and eliminate internal death, is even more painful than death itself.

You: What happens when you get rid of your fears? Is that the way to heaven?

(A smile still grazes the Dreamer’s face, as if he had to decline to a child the complexity of the formula of relativity…)

Elio.: Try, try to get rid of all your ghosts first, you will see that it is one of the hardest tasks ever .. you want to know what happens when you get rid of your fears and what is Heaven? First of all throw away your fears, you can easily see how you are killing yourself ten thousand times a day and self observation is the tool that allows you to see how you are treating yourself.

Self-observation allows you to see that inside you are miserable but you don’t like that. You don’t want to see what you’re not. What you are not is a ghost, your suffering is worship to non-existent ghosts that you follow like a sleepwalker, letting the shadows influence you.

These are the phrases you can read in the Book and, anyone who has read it says ‘but what a coincidence, it’s just what I always thought! What I’m reading is just what I’ve been looking for all my life…’

But watch out! This is also another lie, people such as Stefano, my brother, are liars, they need an audience to adore them, fame and notoriety … it happens to everyone ….

I am here to tell you that it is possible to get out of ordinary life, there is a shortcut, which allows you inner understanding and, if you stay close to me, I will be able to show you the way … but without your inner participation, without understanding you will be destined to curve and die.

… What is happening here today during this meeting? I believe that something really interesting is happening, today here you can see and touch the walls of this prison that everyone creates voluntarily, a prison that you have built yourself. nothing to do with the romantic escape from a special prison that someone has built and in which they have segregated us … It is you who created the trap, you are always the prisoner and also the guard who has the task of preventing you from escaping! How can you even imagine running away from what you call the self or yourself?

Here, in this very nation, Socrates said ‘know thyself’. , what I’m bringing to you today instead is ‘know who you are not’, ‘know what you are not’ …

You.: Yes, but Socrates also died, and at the hands of his students!

(a laugh from the audience greets the question, dissolving the tension that the Dreamer has managed to create in the audience)

Elio.: Good point, poor man, even he didn’t realize he should have known what he wasn’t first … so he died. A man of integrity, cannot be condemned and imprisoned, a man of integrity, a creator can never be killed by his own creatures.

Novels have been written, such as Frankenstein, in which the protagonist builds a monstrous creature that represents his own disaster, and the tale culminates in the killing of the creator by his creature… Observe the writer’s great insight, you need it to understand that the monster is none other than your own life that will kill you.

Don’t misunderstand, the world is not evil and doesn’t want to kill you, it is you who arms its hand, you are the one who projects what surrounds you through conflict and inner warfare and it is this that ultimately makes you a victim of your own creation.

I am sure that now, at this very moment everything is perfectly clear to you and that you are able to understand what I am telling you, but I assure you that in 5 minutes you will have forgotten everything.

You should be living and guiding your life as you are in this moment, in this way, with this focus, always having with an arrow pointing towards others and an arrow pointing towards yourself. This is the double attention, the outward attention and at the same time a second the attention to self.

This second attention can be practiced with the Art of Acting!

There is a great tool that can be found in ancient Greek theater, the mask is the useful tool with which to enter the world. After an entire life spent glued to a mask, I am here to invite you to a U-turn, in which you act consciously and wear the masks you usually wore without being aware of it. Acting out the variety of emotions, the range of roles, father, mother, son and facing the expectations of society by playing the role of an entrepreneur or an employee…

If you start acting consciously you will literally ‘consume’ the role and mask to the point where you can throw it away so you can move on. Act, or be stuck in the role!!!

Right now, I am acting but I am aware of it, there is not a single moment when I am not aware, in this way I can contain all of you. Each of you in this moment can do this, can sustain this attention, this lucidity, and transfer it to every moment of your life. If you can do this, reality can never show you its hardest side. It is this attention that transforms the reality around you. Everything you need will come to you because you will be responsible for everything and anything, for yourself above all, master of yourself and of the whole world.

You: But how can I be myself if I have to play a role?

(Before he could even finish his question, and only at this precise moment, two cell phones began to ring in different parts of the room and the buzz of the audience almost did not allow the interlocutor to state his question, to the point that he almost had to shout it out…)

Elio.: How can you be yourself if you don’t know who you are first? Your question, then, is whether to be yourself or act yourself? How can you say ‘being me’? What does this affirmation mean to you? Observe yourself to see what you ‘are not’, your life is exactly a reflection of what you are not, everyone’s life, is 99% what is not how can you be yourself? You believe you are yourself, as does everyone else, just ask anyone here….

You.: How can we tell when we are us or when we are not?

Elio.: Exactly, it is not possible to understand it when one is locked in one’s own prison which can be defined as a ‘psychological prison’ if it can be used for a better understanding …

( the same person does not wait for the end of the answer and already interrupts the Dreamer to better explain what he intended to say just now, an amused smile is cleverly hidden by the index finger resting on the glasses)

You: How can I be the one to create the horrors, the wars, the world hunger, I practice meditation …

(another voice rises up and towers over all the others, with a certain overbearance, to make its own contribution)

Elio.: Meditation is another way to indulge I can’t do anything but say good for you but I think it’s another way to fall asleep.

You: I reject your judgment!

Elio.: I know, because meditation is a job, it represents an occupation or a profession, that’s why initially I warned you that you should abandon all the teachers, religions and teachings of your spiritual guides, because they are the way you choose to lie to yourself, to tell you lies. It is only a substitution of earthly desires for other heavenly desires, but they remain only and always desires!

Be careful, this is wishing, not dreaming. I repeat, it is not dreaming!

Desiring God or desiring money, is the very same thing! You go into meditation and contemplation for your whole life, or for many and many years, but you always remain in your same confusion, believing that you have changed and unfortunately nothing has happened… nothing has changed…

If you could live near me, all it would take is a touch, I would scratch the surface a little to bring out your true nature, to bring out the beast that is hidden inside. Meditation is another way to fall asleep and escape responsibility.

You.: Just now you said that remaining silent is very important, could this be a form of meditation?

Elio.: The silence I mentioned is not running away from your thoughts, meditation teaches you to cancel thoughts, to empty your mind but I assure you that you can spend years in a meditative state without being able to understand what this really means and how you can be in the absence of thoughts.

Silence, on the other hand, is witnessing everything that is happening inside of you, unlike meditation it is not an effort that you impose on yourself, a stress from the outside that leads you to get worse and worse. There are people who live with yoga, with meditation, but it is a continuous indulging, nothing happens, nothing changes

You.: He tells us to abandon any master or spiritual entity but is the Dreamer a spiritual reality or is he an individual?

Elio.: The Dreamer is neither real nor spiritual, it is something you have to understand within yourself. I can only respond to the interiority within you and every answer I give is for you, dedicated to yourself and only you can know yourself… the theoretical answer you might find in a book is useless and inaccurate.

The relationship is one to one, the Book is personal, it is dialogue with the reader. Many times I have attended meetings like this but as I said at the beginning, my desire is not to be popular nor to speak to crowds, I address humanity through the individual that represents Humanity.

The questions must be personal, that’s what I’m here for, to give the answer to the question that belongs to your life, to yourself … you cannot ask on behalf of others. I am here before you to answer your life …

You.: I would like to expand on the previous question, for many years I have dedicated myself to self-awareness meditation and have been in contact with some masters. I can say that I have healed myself and freed myself from my fears….

Elio.: This search has allowed you to meet what you are not, be in touch and observe your fear, stay close to yourself, if the phone rings, don’t answer it, if there is a problem in you, you will see that the whole world, when you are still in yourself, will try to take you away from this attention. Be still and you will see that you will not need any masters, teachers, spiritual guides, because you yourself are the answer to all and everything. Many masters say this same thing, but no one tells you with this determination and with this clarity … you are the creator and producer of the reality in which you live.

You.: I have read your book and I have recommended it to many friends, I think this book is important for me but now it tells us that we don’t need any external tool… I think doing everything by ourselves is very difficult…. There are passages in the book where there is a need for the Dreamer’s presence, even about food, there are concepts that are difficult to accept. We need a guide, the Dreamer…. How do we do everything ourselves if we can’t do it ourselves?

Elio.: You must learn to be free from necessity, from need. When you have learned to do without everything, it means that you are no longer in the state of being of needing something.

Be carefull! does not mean that you have no need, it means that you have to be free from the state of being that corresponds to need… you have to undo the state of need, you have to throw away meditation, in order to enter into yourself, you have to abandon God, because you have to be free from the need to have a God.

God is also part of our creation, he is our projection, he too is a part of what we are not. You eat food mechanically, so if you can eliminate the need to take food, you will be able to eat mindfully and to sustain yourself you will find that you need very little food.

Before I came here to you, I didn’t touch anything, because I wanted to be ready for you, ready to contain you. You need to be free of that sense of emptiness, lack and need.

If you understand that the external reality is your own invention, your own product, you will not ask anyone for anything, even asking for help is another way of wishing and wishing is not dreaming.

You.: What is the difference between desire and dream?

Elio.: If I desire, for example, to obtain a loan from the bank, the desire never comes true while the dream always comes true. The dream of wanting a loan comes true, because you are dreaming of wanting a loan, this dream comes true and your inner power takes over and orders the bank not to give you the loan, thus your dream of wanting a loan comes true perfectly. Your dream comes true because you’ve dreamed of wishing you had a loan!

That’s why the dream comes true, the desire is your dream, not the money which is the object of your desire. If the object of the dream had been money, the dream would have come true with certainty, which is why the Dreamer says never desire.