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1. In your novel “The School for Gods“ you transformed your own personal path into a narration. A path that led from an ordinary job to the insight what is lacking in our economic system and further on to the crucial moment where you discovered that it is your mission to found a School that puts into practice the central philosophical statements voiced in your book like “Wealth is the extention of one’s Being”or “The ability to create wealth can only be the effect of an inner state of freedom”. Can you describe the turning points in your life that gave rise to the idea of writing this novel?

The School for Gods could never have come to be had I not encountered the Dreamer and His teaching. The Dreamer asked me to write the Book and gave me the Title. I started collecting notes from the very first day of my encounter with the Dreamer and I continued virtually without interruptions throughout the 20 years of my apprentship. Even when the notes started to aggregate in the form of a book it took me years to complete it. The book is a philosophy novel based on my biography. It has been difficult and painful to write it as it called for great sincerity on my part. In a way this long gestation was unavoidable and necessary as the ideas and the principles of the Dreamer needed time to show their effect in my own life. In it I play the double role of the scientist-observer and of the guinea pig, the observed.

The same applies to the European School of Economics. I never thought of creating a School of Economics, of a planetary breath. A school of Being. The Dreamer asked me to, and I did though I had no idea of how to do it and I was scared to death to the mere idea of such an endeavour.

I’ve dreamed of a revolution.
I’ve dreamed of a School which ‘remembers’
that the ‘dream’ is the most concrete thing that exists.
I’ve dreamed of a new generation of leaders…

Only when the Book was finished I realized that it had always existed, that any event, each fragment of my life, each cell of my existence was nothing else that a line, a section, a chapter of the Book.

2. The “European School of Economics” is meant to fulfil a moral education that helps the individual to no longer see himself as an employee who is delegating responsibility to his supervisor but as a leader who is grounded in a huge integrity, taking decisions that are not manipulated by any ideology but connected to an inner truth that is incorruptible. Reading your book, one has the impression that the sick emotionality and conflictual thinking of mankind are like a seed for a majority of global problems. Do you think that modern European society is at a point where this step into self-responsibility seems realistic?

ESE educational activities and pedagogy could never be classed as a moral education. Morality is made of principles, codes and values which change in time and space. What is moral here and in a certain time, could well be not moral somewhere else or in another time. The ideas and principles I received from the Dreamer, and that I reported in the Book, are timeless, not affected by time and geography. Responsibility is not a collective quality, as well as courage, creativity, integrity. Only an individual can be reponsible and only an individual can be happy and create wealth.

Behind every human achievement, at the origin of every intuition, of every scientific or social conquest, behind the world’s largest financial and industrial corporations, and all that is, beautiful, meaningfull, rich, there is invariably one man an individual and his dream. The life of an organization, of an entire civilization depends on the existence of visionaries, men and women, pragmatic dreamers, individuals. Without them no progress is possible. The mission I received from the Dreamer has been to create a School to prepare them, through individual attention, one by one. They are the precious cells of a healed humanity – healed from negative emotions and conflictual thinking – and the capacity to produce them is the only chance for our species to not succumb.

3. Especially in Germany, the word “leader” provokes some discomfort as German history bears an example in which leadership has perverted itself from its roots and led to a cruel development. What can be done to avoid that leadership is distancing itself from the commitment to collective benefit, to boundless wisdom? Can you explain the elite that is formed at the “School of Gods”?  And how is this ideal applied in the functioning of the “European School of Economics”?

Humanity thinks and feels negatively. It is only apparent that man wishes himself wealth, health and good fortune. In reality all education can be seen as the life-long acquisition of a set of beliefs and habits to dammage one’s body, to be unhappy, get old, sick and die. Man is his worst enemy. The planetary sport of mankind is self-sabotage.

Hitler is not a case of a perverted leadership but a person elected to materialize a self-distructive thinking, a collective suicide that happens in a nation’s psychology and finds a way to become a terrible reality. We should enlarge the understanding of the ancient saying, Homo homini lupus, the Latin phrase meaning “man is a wolf to his fellow man”, drawn on by Thomas Hobbes in the dedication of his work De cive (1651). Before being a wolf to others, man is wolf to himself.

Hitler is not out there, he is a black hole in our being. He is not a monster born out of the perversion of a leader but the materialization of a nightmare. The Shoah was not an accident of history nor the result of the mercilessness of a regime, nation or, even worse, a man or tyrant − the Dreamer said − It was the materialization of the vision of people who still had not forgiven themselves inside; the mirror image of a divided and conflictual way of thinking.

Only the Deamer can be so mercilessly true: Victim is always guilty.

And I think it is time for Germans to forgive themselves inside. They were only the mirror image of the ennemy that we – and the jews – bring inside.

4. The protagonist in your book is meeting a strong teaching figure called “The Dreamer” who is introducing him to the art of dreaming – can you describe this quality of dreaming? And how is it possible to invite this sort of dreaming into everyday-life?  Does everyone have access to his own “Dreamer”?

I was lucky to meet the remarkable man that in the Book I call the Dreamer. I offer all my gratitude to Him for forcing me to face my own horror and incompleteness. I wish that every man could encounter the Dreamer but it can only happen when a man is hopelessly disappointed by his life… when he realizes its incompleteness, and his impotence; when existence grips him in a vice so he cannot breathe… only then will the School appear.

There is a constant confusion between wishing and dreaming. We can wish for things and be lost in our wishful thinking all our life without never achieving them. From the Dreamer I have learned that Dream is the most real think there is and what we dream is already reality. Wishing is in time, Dreaming can only be in absence of time. It is built in the individual, cannot be created but only revealed. I DREAM = I AM. I am my dream. A man cannot dream more than he is. Dreams measure our level of being, our level of responsibility. Tell me your dream, I’ll tell you who you are.

Dreaming is the most distinctive feature of being human. One day may be machines will think, they will do all that we do and even laugh, but they will never be able to dream.

Descartes’ phrase “Cogito ergo sum” must be emended in “Somnio ergo sum”. I dream therefore I am.

The art of dreaming means the elimination of all that hampers our capacity of dreaming and be the conscious creator of our reality. This is the task of a “second education” and the mission of a School of Being.

5. In Turkey your book has had a huge success, with more than 100,000 copies sold. Throughout the world, it has been translated in 12 languages, including chinese.  What explains that also people belonging to such different cultures, who have perhaps rarely been in touch with a sort of literature that stimulates self-reflexion and self-development are attracted by your work?

For a number of reasons:

a) for the Dreamer, who is a complete new literary character, real, vibrant and at the same time unseizable. He is modern and timeless, he is wise but doesn’t belong to any religion or philosophy. His love is merciless. He is the living promise that one day we can all become the Dreamer, masters of our own destiny.

b) for the protagonist who is an ordinary man. The readers identify with the guinea pig, and sympathize with the protagonist for all the troubles and endless efforts he goes through to apply the words of the Dreamer to his own life.

c) The Book is also a map, an escape plan. The readers take spontaneously side with a man who takes to flight, a man who is dreaming his freedom. He is giving reality to a dream that belongs to all of us: transforming our life in a portable paradise.