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I explain you the secret.

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Books radiate a frequency.

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So, initiation

is to be opened for information.

(gong rings)

Welcome to the Museum

Embassy of the Free Mind.

We are in the beautiful
House with the Heads

on the Keizersgracht 123 in Amsterdam.

The Embassy of the Free Mind is also

the house of the Bibliotheca Philosophica

Hermetica Collection.

A very special rare book collection

consisting of over 28,000 books

written by free thinkers.

This is actually part of the reason

why we received last November.

The UNESCO status, we're now on the.

UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

Because of the fact that these authors

here in this library,

who were banned and burned

and forbidden over the centuries,

were actually the most progressive voices.

And calling for, you know,
change, social change

in ways that even today
still sometimes are contested.

And so, the books you are having here,

the last time that you
were in the Bloemstraat,

now you are in the House with the Heads.

And the House with the Heads is a gift

of me and my wife

to the world.

I think that

whoever comes here

in the Embassy of the Free Mind,

or visits our treasures there

in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica

for the first time,

they have already a journey ahead.

And they are actually born

with what I call intuition.

And that guided them their whole life.

Even if they are not religious

or not this, they are actually

on their path already.

And so, I don't think it only starts

when they enter, for example, here

the Embassy of the Free
Mind or another place.

I think it's a place

where the books tell a story.

And,

what the people can recognize

is that actually the books

and the wisdom is about themselves.

My father and my grandfather,

they always told me stories.

And in that way, more and more, I learned

to understand the stories

and the richness of all these

different books and people.

And that's, I think, why the stories have

meaning to me, because it's something

that is academically researched,

but it's also something
that is very personal.

Every book, every story
is a mirror of yourself.

At least that's what my family always says.

And I think that's what makes it valuable,

because it's not a story
in history very far away,

but it's actually a story

very close to you, very personal.

It's about your own inner quest to try

and understand the world.

My library is a mirror

of human curiosity,

research and growing awareness.

The wisdom is a mirror of

what we can find in ourselves.

And what we can find in ourselves is also

a mirror of what we find
in nature in the world.

And, yeah, there are many
ways to connect with it.

The sky is the limit, actually.

My life is destination.

And I can tell you that the real gift

I got was to be the baby of my mother.

She gave me the first, I would say,

entry in this world, and
it always came back.

So my mother was a really female principal

in my life, an open heart,

an open mind, an open love.

And as a matter of fact,

she was as curious as I am in books.

She was always going in Amsterdam

through antiquarian bookshops.

And at a certain moment,

she came across with Jacob Böhme.

And at that moment, she thought,

this is a gift to my son, Joost.

And that is this book here, once again.

And as a matter of fact,

for me, it was not a surprise.

I had the idea

that I had the connection already

with this field of
inspiration and intuition.

And as a matter of fact,

if you see the title page,

Aurora, and there you
see the globe of the world.

And this sphere of what I call

the cycle of eternity.

And that comes between the Zodiac

and Mother Earth, so
the planets that we are.

So I can say Jacob Böhme,

he was a visionary man

who had also that absolute entry

to what he called the revelation,

the genesis

of the beginning of what I say creation.

So if you look to an image of Jacob Böhme,

then once you understand the picture,

it actually tells,

then you know that the story that is told

on the picture or in the book

is actually also your story.

We call that teaching by images,

where we use the
images to tell the stories.

We selected these books that we think

speak to the imagination most,

because there is this Dutch saying that

one image can speak a thousand words.

And that is something that we try to do.

And we use this visual way of telling

the stories to speak to the imagination.

It is an information of

witnesses who belong to mankind.

And that was my fascination

to share this, I would say, this field of

hermetic philosophy,

alchemy, magic, mysticism,

Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism.

They are now all, they are here.

I'm a Rosicrucian myself

from the Lectorium Rosicrucianum.

And that is a form today.

Of course, they have their
roots in the 17th century.

The publication of the
Rosicrucian documents

in the early 17th century,

this very perennial hermetic tradition,

is a study of a huge historical focus.

However, you know, these documents say

that, you know, there is this

organization called the
Rosicrucian Brotherhood

who are here to reform all of

education and society and religion.

They were really

following in Luther's Reformation.

After the Reformation,
the Protestant Reformation,

we have many people,

especially about a hundred years later,

reevaluating the Reformation.

And they're noticing that the goals of

the Reformation weren't really met.

The church is still corrupt.

There are still lots of
problems in the world

that the church doesn't
seem to be able to solve.

So people want to
complete the Reformation.

And they look around and they see

there are all these other problems.

We don't just need to reform the church,

we need to reform everything.

So you have the rise of many
different kinds of societies.

Around 1600, we have the idea of a.

Rosicrucian Brotherhood.

And it's not actually a real group.

It's a fictional group.

And these calls,

these written stories about Rosicrucians

were so inspiring to people

that people all over Europe

wanted to get involved.

And they said, yes, I want to join.

And it really set off a wave of reform,

attempts to reform, new
societies being formed,

tons of new societies with new names.

And these develop further.

You have conventicals,
little groups of Christians

meeting to read the Bible, to sing,

maybe to work in their community.

You have groups inspired
by the Rosicrucians forming.

You have finally, a bit
later, Freemasons forming.

And they have their own rituals,

which you can say
they're grounded in religion,

but there may be also a step away from it

because they're including the

thoughts of the Enlightenment.

So the Enlightenment philosophy,

you know ideas about
democracy, and so forth.

So they're very much
coming out of this tradition.

These documents, which emerged from this

18th century Rosicrucian order,

the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross,

which you can read about,

this organization,

if you wanted to attend
these lodge meetings

to encounter these images, these documents,

you had to be a master mason in good

standing with your lodge before you could

even attend these meetings, before you

could encounter these images.

So ordinarily, you would never even see

images like these unless you were steeped

in this tradition for years.

However long it took to
become a master mason

in that local context, which we have

sort of on our walls here and available

for visitors to the library.

In Amsterdam, we are now very close

to the 400 years celebration

of the Rosicrucian Manifestos,

who were printed here in Amsterdam.

The Fama, the Confessio,
and the Alchemical wedding.

So what you see, what they call so nice:

[Speaking Dutch]

The history always comes back.

Historically, there has
never been any evidence

that has emerged that indicates

there was an organization

called the Rosicrucians
in the 17th century.

We know who authored the manifestos now,

and we assume that the extent of his

ambition was that it would encourage

people to imagine there was

this organization called the Rosicrucians.

And so it would sort of become real

in people's imagination.

I like all traditions,

but the form that fits
me most, is for me today,

I'm a Rosicrucian. I'm born that way.

Later in the 18th
century, the 19th century,

20th century, and even today,

you do have formal

organizations called the Rosicrucians.

And this document that I'll take a look

at now is from one of these 18th century

organizations called the.

Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross,

which features some
of their secret symbols.

It's called the
"Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer".

So the secret symbols of the Rosicrucians.

It's a manuscript,

and the title page

indicates that it is here,

and it will reveal all
secrets of a physical,

metaphysical, and hyper-physical nature.

Now, this is a motif that actually occurs

in the 16th century in the
work of Heinrich Khunrath

where you find the same

concepts indicated in his work,

"The Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom".

"Omnia ab uno"

at the top.

That's a very nice idea.

This is a concept that
you find in a lot of the,

not just Rosicrucian
material, but in a lot of.

Western esoteric material,

which emerges from Neoplatonism.

So the idea is that everything emerges

from a unity, from a monad,

at the beginning of time.

And "Omnia ab uno",

everything from one,

that's what it's communicating, and

it's an emanationist idea.

And emanationism is one of these ideas

that is shared by a lot of.

Western esoteric material,

virtually universal emanationism.

The idea that creation
is an outflowing of God.

It pours out of this

unity at the beginning of time.

So "Omnia ab uno", everything from one, and

from the one, nature emerges.

Prima Materia, so primal matter.

The symbol for sulfur here,

the symbol for mercury here,

and sulfur and mercury were

posited to be the primal ingredients of

the philosopher's stone.

The fiery, masculine sulfur

mixed with the watery, feminine mercury,

this conjunction of opposites,

which is often depicted
with a hermaphroditic figure,

a combination of Hermes and Aphrodite.

For the Rosicrucians,

they used these alchemical symbols,

although not all of the
Rosicrucian traditions

were practicing laboratory chemists.

And so this is what you would understand

as a psychologization or spiritualization

of the concepts of alchemy.

It's one of the treasures
of the collection.

It's from this enigmatic, you know,

Western mystery tradition
called the Rosicrucians.

That's my life.

And I think that is important

in this library as well.

But it's just an element
in the whole library

because the library is about

the hermetic philosophy.

And the Rosicrucians are a moment in time

until today as well.

But you have many
traditions in the Americas,

in all cultures all over the world.

Our house is, first of
all, a national monument.

It's a famous canal house

from the 17th century

with these beautiful
sculptural heads on it.

So everybody who visits Amsterdam usually

and takes a tour finds out about

the "House with the Heads",

which has these Greek heads on it.

And this is referring, obviously, back to

the Renaissance idea of

getting back to ancient knowledge.

And it's interesting because in the time

that the house was
built in the 17th century,

this house also served as a refuge

for many of the
spiritualists who fled here.

So this house became a center

for religious exchange,

for artistic and cultural exchange.

But the owner of the house at the time

also supported many of the dissidents.

And he had a library

that had many of the same books

that we have today.

So we like to think that

we're following in that tradition.

And here in this house,

400 years ago,

there was also Comenius.

Comenius was working here.

Comenius,

the pedagogue and teacher.

And he was also the bishop

of the Bohemian Brothers.

And he came here in Amsterdam

and he was invited by
the owner of this house,

Lawrence de Geer.

The "House with the Heads" had many

interesting people visiting,

but also living in here.

And one of the owners was Mr. De Geer.

And Mr. De Geer invited the Czech

pedagogue, Mr. Comenius,

to come live with him in this house.

Comenius had lost his wife

and his daughter in the Thirty Year War

and he became a pacifist.

And he came live here in Amsterdam

in the 17th century

with all these different people

coming to Amsterdam,

fleeing from the rest of Europe

because the Thirty Year War was going on.

And while he was in this house,

he wrote his masterpiece

and changed the whole

school system in the Netherlands.

And because of this,

girls could go to school.

What is nice is that
Comenius lived in this house

and his ideas of Pansophy

were already a way to look to the world

in a new way, how culture

and how everything is connected.

And that has become also one of

the pillars of the UNESCO World Heritage.

And it's, of course, fantastic
that our book collection,

the Library of Hermetic Philosophy,

is now part of what they call

the "Memory of the World".

It's a beautiful name,

the "Memory of the World" of the UNESCO.

So our library really starts with

the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum

in the middle of the
15th century into Latin.

And it helps spur a little movement

that we normally call the Renaissance.

But people usually think of

the Renaissance is
only trying to get back to

Greek and Roman ideas.

But actually with the Corpus Hermeticum,

we also have Egyptian
ideas and Arabic ideas.

And all of these ideas

are flowing then into Europe

and into our different collecting areas.

And those collecting areas are things like.

Kabbalah,

both Jewish and Christian Kabbalah,

alchemy, astrology,

and our largest collecting area actually

is simply Christian mysticism.

And the key ideas that are in there

are the idea that the divine or God

or the universe

flows through everything

and connects everything.

And this really has a lot of

consequences for our authors.

Now within mysticism, the largest body of

the mystics we have are spiritualists,

so-called spiritualists who were active

in the 16th and 17th century.

And many of them coming from

German-speaking countries were exiled,

were not allowed to speak, their books

were not allowed to be published,

and they came to the Netherlands,

which was much freer.

And because of that, because of the fact

that their books were printed here,

we then are the natural inheritors

in a way of these books.

Many of them were
printed here in Amsterdam.

And so I think the Netherlands

has this tradition, and because it accepted

all of these outsiders

with these so-called radical ideas,

the people here also
absorbed many of those ideas.

So it's not an accident that the Dutch

are known for being quite progressive

in things like care for the earth,

gender flexibility, human rights,

because our authors, although they were

considered crazy in the period,

those are exactly the
kinds of positions they hold.

So we have someone like Sebastian Frank

already in the 16th century saying,

"Wait a minute,

if everything is connected,

what does that mean about

"the way we treat animals?"

We have an author like Jakob Böhme

and all of the many, many people

who followed him saying

that male and female are equal elements,

are equal characteristics

in the universe.

And of course, these
thinkers draw all kinds of

consequences out of that,

chief among them that women

should be able to write,

that women should be able to

speak about religious things.

For example, one of our authors is.

Antoinette Bourignon.

She was a Catholic who
was accused of witchcraft,

fled to Amsterdam,

started her own community,

started doing writing here.

She published her writings
in multiple languages

and had hundreds, thousands

even followers all over Europe.

And this was really only
possible in Amsterdam.

And her thought, by the way,

continues to be relevant.

You know, even in the 19th century,

there were arguments about

her thought in Scotland.

So we have this tradition embodied

here in our library.

It's a library of banned and burned books.

They've almost all been banned

at some point because
of their progressive ideas,

because they caused fear

on the part of the official churches

or on the part of secular authorities

who feared people

stepping out of the old boundaries.

And that's what we have preserved here.

All these books, these 28,000 books,

they were in my hands.

And that is what you feel here

also in this building.

And at the moment that Dan Brown

opened this library,

you know, all the information

in a modern understanding,

they say information is always,

you can bring it into a cloud,

a cloud of information.

And at the moment that Dan Brown

came here to open the library,

the cloud broke.

Understand?

And the radiation you feel here

in this building is the radiation

of books who have this eternal information

of witness of wisdom.

The basic idea of the contemporary

artificial intelligences like chat GPT

is that they have been trained

on all of the books that
have ever been written

and all of the web pages on the Internet.

And there are enough
books in that collection

that involve translations

between Latin and English.

And there is enough material in there

and there's been enough
training that almost

that almost magically

these systems developed the ability

to translate on their own.

They weren't programmed to translate books,

but with enough training,

they developed this emergent ability

to be able to translate.

And to be clear, scientists
don't entirely know

how they have this ability, but they do.

And so what I can do
now, provided that I have

something that's OCR

where the letters have
actually been converted

into a digital tax like a Word document,

if I have that now in
Latin, I can copy paste it,

put it into GPT-4,

and it can make an
almost perfect translation,

or at least a very good one.

And so by next year,

GPT-4 will have the ability to see.

So I'll be able to take a picture

and it will be able to analyze the words

in that picture,

and it will be able to give me

multiple translations, if I like,

of the material that's in here.

And while right now,

these artificial intelligences

are only able to read a
couple of pages at a time,

they have a certain limited attention span.

By next year,

they're likely to be able to

have an attention span that could

translate an entire book like this.

So this is how quickly
technology is moving,

and how technologies like

artificial intelligence
are going to open up

some of the wisdom

that exists within the
books of the library.

This whole body of literature

that we call Hermetic philosophy,

because it's tied together

by these Hermetic discourses,

you know, it's just the surface

that's been scratched in studying it now.

We have around the
world, I think now, three

universities where you can study it.

But this library really helped form

the idea of this field,

so of helping establish
it as a field of study.

Hermetica is for me

interesting because it's holistic.

And I think any author from Ibn Arabi to

indeed Blavatsky or.

Jan van Rijckenborgh from the Rosicrucians,

they all talk about this.

Hermetic philosophy, that holistic wisdom,

this spiritual tradition,

and this possibility to connect with it.

And I think all the
books that speak about it

are interesting for me,

but I find it also in sacred geometry,

but also in music or
in architecture or in art.

You can find it everywhere.

I like architecture

and also the architecture of life.

We are now in the Grote Sael,

and one of my favorite pieces is called.

The Rivers of Life.

The Rivers of Life is a research project

by James Forlong.

You can see that it started 10,000 years

before Christ,

and it goes all the
way till he died in 1907.

And we take a close look at the fold out.

You can see that
all the big wisdom currents in the world

all have influenced each other,

and they all come from the same source.

What is one of my favorite images is.

The Rivers of Life.

It showcases this 12,000
years of gathered wisdom.

You can see so much overlap and so much

different influences.

And I think that's really intriguing to me

because religion, although

everyone has their own religion

and everyone, every religion is different.

It's almost like this source of this,

if you would go all the
way back to the origins,

that connects people

within religion.

Again, you see this "All is One"

coming back into the Rivers of Life.

It's a very visual way of

portraying how religions are connected

and how people from over the world

have always been connected.

"All is One."

To me, it means that everything is

connected and we are
all part of a bigger whole.

It may look like we
are all separate entities,

but in fact, there's one bigger body

where we are all a big part of,

just like drops in the ocean

are all part of a bigger ocean.

And for that reason, we decided

to not divide the rooms
or the images on the walls

with Arabic philosophy here and.

Eastern philosophy there

and Western philosophy there.

I mean, all the books,
they all tell a different story,

but together they show

the interconnectedness of everything.

"All is One" is for me,

the Golden Thread that connects everything.

It is

something that is

the connection between

the religion, the science
and the philosophy

and something that

connects all the people

from all the ages and all the books.

Because it connects this,

this big thing, the cosmos and the God.

Might it be in whatever form you prefer

to the individual,

to nature, to you as a person in your own

place in this world.

And that's something that

you can see in every single book,

although every single book is different

and every single book

has these different perspectives.

They all try to understand the world

that we're a part of.

And I think that's what this.

"All is One" principle is about.

How everything is connected,

that's for me interesting.

But my particular interest is

many, of course,

but it's the Egyptian wisdom

and its roots.

But actually the influence in

all over the world.

I like also

what happened before the flood,

all the zodiacal traditions

from indeed Africa or

the Far East, the Middle East,

all over the globe.

This pre-Diluvian cultures,

what do we know about it?

What do we accept as true?

And I think

these traditions have

influenced as much more as we think.

I live now here in the
West, in a Christian

based culture, although
Amsterdam is a place where

there are many cultures, many

many nice restaurants.

So,

I think,

the deeper you go back
in time, ad fontes, to the

source, but not only in history,

but also what the spirit
of this period was about,

that have influenced us more

than we realize.

And I like

the forms of today in science, in art,

in everything, but also

how can I trace back

the deepest roots of this wisdom currents?

So we have this
combination of old and new,

and we have people
trying to get back to sources.

There's a huge movement
in the early modern period

with people learning the ancient languages

because they want to
find out what the Bible

really said.

So, they want to learn Hebrew and Greek

and even languages like Chaldaic.

And they want to know about

knowledge from Egypt and from.

Arabic lands and even
from further, from Far East.

So people are trying to
draw on this knowledge

and the idea is always

a bit different than our idea today.

Our idea today is that

with time we get smarter and smarter

and we know more and more, we advance.

But in this period people thought

that at the beginning of time

in the Garden of Eden,

everything was perfect.

And since then everything
has been decaying.

And what we need is to get back to that

purity,

to that time before
everything got corrupted,

that time when everything was connected,

before the Tower of Babel,

when everybody spoke one language.

So that's the idea.

And, so we have the rise,
for example, of Kabbalah.

And then we have Christian.

Kabbalah, where Christians read Jewish

mystical writings and think, "Ah,

this is a bridge."

Jewish mysticism and
Christian mysticism are so

similar,

they're probably talking
about the same thing.

And that's what people want to believe.

You might have heard of
Christian Kabbalah before.

And Christian Kabbalah

emerged in the 15th century.

The founding father of Christian Kabbalah

was Pico della Mirandola.

And in the 15th century

a lot of Christians started to read.

Kabbalistic text and Latin translation.

On the one hand they were fascinated

by a Prisca Theologica,

the idea that all religions

have same roots and go back

into the same direction.

On the other hand,
loads of some also wanted

to prove that Christianity is right,

that Kabbalah would
say that Christ is holy,

or even to convert Jews,
or to say Jews are wrong.

So it really depends on
which author you look at.

This is a Christian Kabbalistic book

by Wilhelm Christian Kriegsmann.

And you can also see that Kabbalah

is written here with a C.

Loads of times, if you would refer to

Christian Kabbalah,

it would be spelled with a C.

And if it's Jewish.

Kabbalah, it would be spelled with a K.

(deep breath)

In this time,

people were also very keen

on combining different traditions

and combining old wisdom with new wisdom,

the idea of biblical wisdom with new ideas

about the cosmos and planets,

and they loved charts.

Correspondence charts, where you would

see all those different
traditions interconnected.

And here we can see one of those

correspondence charts by Kriegsmann.

And it shows the cosmos

in a certain way as an onion.

In the center you have the Earth,

then you have the seven planets,

which are also connected
to different angels,

and then the planets around it.

This is one of the correspondence charts

and tables where Kriegsmann tried to show

the connections of different traditions.

For example, here you have the Spheroid,

but what is curious is that

there are 11 instead of 10.

He actually puts Ensoph,

so the eternal unknown god,

as one of the emanations in here.

He also gives a
transcription of the Hebrew,

and the correspondence which

character of god it shows,

and then which angel is connected to it,

and then which star and
planet rules these aspects,

including the Hebrew
name of the star and planet.

So, everything is connected in that way,

according to Kriegsmann.

We really see in the early modern

period a wish to somehow bridge

Christianity and Judaism,

and it's partly a wish to

reconcile the Old and the New Testament,

and also with even more
modern forms of knowledge.

So again, this striving for universalism.

And what we typically see

in these so-called Christian

Kabbalistic books

is they will take a passage
of Hebrew scripture

from the Old Testament,

and then you have a from lot of explanation

about why they were really talking

about Christian things.

[chuckles]

You know, because that's what they wanted.

They wanted to bring these two together.

And you do have meetings
of Jews and Christians

and interest from both sides.

This book is another example of

Christian Kabbalah.

It was written by the
Christian Kabbalist Gaffarel,

and it shows a map of the cosmos.

They believed

that God created the world

by speaking in Hebrew.

If you look at the Hebrew Bible,

God creates a world by speaking.

While he speaks and the
universe comes into being,

Hebrew words are scattered

all around the universe.

So, this is a map

to show how, according to him,

the Hebrew letters

landed all over the cosmos.

This is connected to a certain

celestial Hebrew alphabet.

Though the idea is
that by connecting stars,

basically connecting the dots,

you can make letters.

The Bible is for me a very important book.

And it has also

an Old Testament,

and that is the pre-Christian

period

of, I would say, the Mosaic

and also the Hemetic philosophy

that started 2,500 years

before the Christian era.

Abraham,

I would say the father

of the 12

roots

of the Jews, the 12 different things.

But you have it also

in Egypt the same.

You have it in India the same.

You have it in China the same.

Many of the central ideas in our library

are coming from what we call the.

Corpus Haemeticum, or from other writings

that are really, you know, probably

shortly after the time of Christ,

or possibly during or slightly

before the time of Christ.

But we're talking about the Middle East.

We're talking about a time when

Egypt was ruled by the Greeks.

So you have a mixing of different cultures

and ideas coming together.

And all of this gets

translated in the middle
of the 15th century

into Latin

and makes a big impact in Europe.

Now, for a long time, historians focused

on the Greeks, and they had this idea,

"Ah, the Renaissance was all about

"the Greeks," and to a
certain extent the Romans.

And it's certainly true that, you know,

actually I don't call it Hermetic thought.

I call it Platonic Hermetic thought

because much of it is coming from

Plato and from these Platonic sources.

But because historians focus so much on

this Greek part, they neglected

the Arabic and the
Egyptian and the Persian.

And we know that that's in there,

but the truth is we don't
know very much about it.

And this is a big job for historians

in the coming decades to dig out more of

this knowledge and find out

what these roots of transmission were.

Some of them we know better than others.

For example, we know quite a bit about

the transmission of

chemical knowledge from the East.

So, for example, there are a lot of

early modern German
books about someone called.

Gerber, or Geber, but this Geber

was actually called Jabir.

[chuckles]

It was an Arab name

who is a legendary figure

in chemistry and alchemy,

which of course in this period

were not really separate disciplines.

So we know that this
knowledge is coming to us,

but we don't know so much about

the modes of transmission.

And this is something that needs to be

be worked on a lot more.

But as I say, these key ideas

that are contained in these

texts that are transmitted

and translated in the middle

of the 15th century just become incredibly

influential in Western thought.

They become central
to Christian mysticism,

you know, to early
chemistry, to early astronomy,

to interactions with Jews,

later on to the formation
of these societies.

So all of these threads continue

to the present undergoing, of course,

massive transformations.

So it's a big Ark here

in our little library.

In Egypt they had their own philosophy,

but also in Asia and also with the Mayas

it goes back thousands of years

in different places in the world.

But everywhere you see this,

people try to understand the world

and try to understand it

in their own ways

with a lot of overlap.

And this "All is One" principle,

this connection between

the cosmos and the Macrocosmos

and the Microcosmos.

We all have a microcosmic past.

Our soul

has gone through time.

And I'm walking around now

in this world as Joseph.

And

any other person has
its own roots and its own

ways to come to the
place where you are today.

And

a country can be a very

unique place, where there is,

in Holland, there is a certain openness.

There was always, it was actually all this

river, this delta of
rivers that came here.

And it was often not accessible.

So, also many people did hide in there

and they respected each
other keeping distance

but also worked together.

So there was a kind of tolerance.

So that is also a little
bit the roots of this.

So I think every

country has its own character.

You can live in the
mountains or in the forest

or close to the ocean.

And in all these

places there is always wisdom

and wisdom traditions
with their own forms.

And some people relate to

one or the other.

But I think it's beyond form.

It's about what the wisdom is about.

And then you see

that you can find it in any place,

in any kind of culture,

in any religion.

And actually what we are about is not

saying that this religion

is okay and this is not okay.

It's just

making people aware of...

yeah, what it really is about.

It's not about the form but it's about

the thoughts behind that.

And that's what Pansophism was about.

And you have the Rivers of Life poster

with all these different
currents of religion.

And actually it's about

what is,

yeah, the content,

not the form, not the way you do it,

but why you do it.

And that's important.

And I think that's universal.

Everybody is

thinking about the same questions.

Where do we come from?

Where are we going to?

Why are we here?

What is the meaning of it all?

And you find this in Eastern religions,

you find this in western religions.

And if we can focus on that

and not on the forms, like, well,

I fast every year and
you don't show you're

a bad believer.

If you can focus on
what it really is about,

I think then, yeah, you have gained a lot.

So I think what we try to
do also in the embassy,

we don't collect

special

traditions.

Like an alchemy tradition or Kabbalah.

But actually there are circles

that we, want to take away borders

and

let them all

interconnect to each other.

They have always inspired each other.

All these traditions through people,

wherever you go in the globe.

If you're more in.

Constantinople or Istanbul today,

there you have the
influences from the region.

But you have it also

in the African region or the Americas.

So,

all these traditions are all connected.

And I think we come now to a moment in time

where

everything is connected

and everybody has access

to all these different connections.

And that can be a form,

but also a tradition that can be

any form.

And I think, it's nice also within

the Embassy of the Free Mind that you

can connect to all this different

collecting areas, as we call them.

And that they are all connected.

That's also what makes
our collection unique.

That it's not just about
this or just about that.

It's hermetically
connecting a lot of wisdom.

Not all wisdom, but...

our tradition is about
hermetic philosophy.

And of course we could
have also focused on.

Buddhism,

but then we need another life

to collect that.

But there are already these traditions.

So with this digital

platform, we want to connect all these

libraries to a big one world library.

And that everybody and everyone

can be connected and have access

to all these traditions.

A key feature, I think,

of much of our library
is that we have authors

trying to combine

old knowledge with new knowledge.

So, in the early modern period,

let's say from the 15th
to the 18th century,

you very much have
an old biblical worldview.

But at the same time, you have an

explosion of new
knowledge about the world,

about the stars,

about microscopic things
that you can see, about

continents that you
didn't know about before,

about peoples and languages that Europeans

didn't know about before.

Or indeed people in those continents

didn't know either.

So you have people coming into contact

who were never in contact before.

And all these new languages,

and people want to integrate it somehow.

Now, the mainstream church often

the mainstream churches
often rejected this new

knowledge.

So for example, we know that, you know,

Giordano Bruno was burned

because of his ideas about,

partly because of his
ideas about astronomy,

also about some of his religious ideas

that were not acceptable.

But also.

Copernicus' ideas were rejected.

Martin Luther also
said, no, the Bible says

the world

is in the center.

And by that he meant Earth.

So the heliocentric

worldview, the idea that the sun

that the sun could be in the center,

he just rejected.

Somebody like Jacob Böhme,

a simple shoemaker,

is not studying the stars at all,

but he could accept the possibility.

And, you know, he said,

probably, it's true, I accept what this new

science of the stars is telling us,

but it just simply means

that we haven't understood.

Scripture up until now.

So he wanted also to
integrate the new and the old.

And that's what we find throughout

the collecting areas in our library.

So.

Alchemists, for example,

when new knowledge starts surfacing

about how chemicals mix

and produce new substances,

they want to combine that with knowledge

about spirituality.

And they see parallels everywhere.

So, for example,

spiritual rebirth,

going through a rebirth process

on the inside of a person,

is, they think,

similar to what happens
in an alchemical oven

when impurities are burned away

to leave some pure substance.

Behind me on the stairs, you see the seven

steps in the alchemical process.

And when you do all of them in the end,

you get the tincture,

which is the philosopher's stone.

It's actually based on a painting

that you find in our cafe by.

Michelspacher.

The alchemical process
is not only about changing

lead into gold, it's also
about your personal

transformation process,
finding the gold inside.

And also,

the message was always a gift.

It made me absolutely,

yeah, I would say, I said that.

And there is a secret with that.

We have also the soul
body, we spoke about the

personal body,

and you have the soul, and that is this

absolute energy.

And there is one key word,

this is love.

Love.

And, that has to do

with the good

and the better.

Theosophical reading circles,

spiritualist reading groups,

a group that I've done a lot of work on is

the Philadelphia Society,
who lived around 1700.

And they take Böhme's
work even a step further,

and they say, not only

do all human beings have the capacity

for good and bad,

and not only can they all be saved.

So Böhme was so
radical that he talked about

Jews, Turks, and Muslims

being also part of God's plan.

But Jane Lead, the leader
of the Philadelphians,

says, not only are they
a part of God's plan,

they will all be saved.

Even

Satan himself,

yeah, because a loving God

cannot condemn anyone for eternity.

And we have these religious groups,

this idea that's coming from Philadelphia,

and the word Philadelphia

actually means brotherly love,

so a city of brotherly love.

So we have this idea

then inspiring also secular experiments.

So the idea that people can

cooperate internationally,

even though they have different

languages and different

ethnicities and
different religious beliefs.

So it's this idea

there can be good people everywhere

who can cooperate for the common good.

We did it, my wife and myself.

We gave this library

to the foundation.

But,

I only can say I was one, only one,

of the witnesses

of the witnesses of wisdom, only one.

But if you look around yourself

and what's happening in this moment,

the people who are born

today,

they will,

I hope, change this world

in this real balance

that it lost.

I think

it was very valuable to be raised

with all this information, all this wisdom.

I think

what I value about it
most is that my parents

taught me to not only

look at one truth or one wisdom,

they taught me to look

all these different ones from

either the East or the West or

different religions,

maybe Christianity or Buddhism.

Islam, Islamic beliefs.

They taught me that there is so much

wisdom and so much

to explore in the world and that

it is this connection,

this overlaps and also these differences

that makes it beautiful.

I think that's something that has shaped me

as a person as well,

to be able to

be connected to all these books

and all these wisdoms,

but also have this openness to

all these different perspectives

and all these different

people who,

as their own person, looked

at it in their own ways.

And that is what I call

this incredible story

that we are all sinners,

that we are this and that.

Or you going to heaven

or are you going to hell? No.

No.

It is

the

value of a human being

that you have the right to live,

but also the responsibility to act.

Within mystical and spiritual traditions,

inherent to it

is the idea of seeking, of always seeking.

So you're not just, you know,

taking some dogmas
that someone is telling you,

you're seeking.

And the other thing, of course,

is this exchange that took place in these

groups and societies.

So you're sitting with a group of

like-minded people and
you're discussing things.

So, one example I can
give is the is the so-called

illuminati.

So most people have heard, you know,

conspiracy theories,

the illuminati tried to control the world.

No.

It was a group of men,

most of whom were
also activists freemasons,

and they formed this
new group, the illuminati.

And they met and they read essays aloud.

And the essays were
addressing social problems.

What do we do about unmarried pregnancies

in society in the 18th century?

What do we do about poverty?

What do we do about drunkenness?

You know, so,

it's many of the same social problems

that we have today, but
there was an exchange.

And so out of these
early spiritualist groups

that I've talked quite a bit about,

we have other groups forming,

like Rosicrucians, freemasons,

even the illuminati.

And, you know, these
groups are doing what they can

to make society better,

starting with themselves.

We improve ourselves and in turn

the world.

That's the core idea.

Freemasonry is, of course, also one of our

collecting areas because freemasons

were very much inspired

by hermetic thought.

You find that still
in the rituals, a lot of

influences from.

Kabbalah, from alchemy,
from hermetic thought.

And freemasonry, well, it's originated

somewhere in the late 16th century.

And in the 18th century,
it became an organized

institution in England.

Then the first Grand
Lodge was founded in 1770.

And then it caught on in Europe.

It came to France

and then it came to the Netherlands.

And then in the 19th century

in France, a mixed lodge was started

and a mixed order so that women could

also join freemasonry.

And it's still very much alive today.

And actually, it's one of the

reforming societies, you know,

much is said about freemasons

wanting to rule the world and

well, being a sort of

very suspicious secret society.

But actually freemasonry is about

improving yourself, and
by improving yourself,

becoming a better member of,

well, society and thus improving society.

Actually,

it's known as a secret society,

but actually it's not so very secret.

The secret is the way your own personal

path that you go in freemasonry.

You cannot talk to other people about that.

So that's what we don't talk about

if we talk about freemasonry.

But you can find anything online.

All the rituals that we do,

all the things, all the degrees,

it's all online, so...

That's not really a secret.

The secret is that it's actually, yeah,

the lodge is a safe place
where you can share

your opinions, your views, and

that stays within the lodge.

So that's the secret part of it.

It has to have an
atmosphere of security, of

safety, where you can be the person,

yeah, that you want to be

and express your thoughts freely

to, well, your fellow lodge members.

It was also very much
influenced by theosophy.

Annie Besant came to the Netherlands

and she worked with

freemasons on freemasonry rituals.

So a lot of these early rituals

have many theosophic elements.

The secret teachings by Blavatsky

I had already.

But I had, and as an other important

person, was Gustav Meyrink.

Gustav Meyrink, he was a man

with very special writings.

And he wrote also a
book, The White Dominican.

And I

this manuscript copy,

in his handwriting,

in my library.

What it's maybe important to say

is that our library is very much

super confessional.

So we have,

you know, the Rhineland Catholic mystics

who were very much
part of the Catholic Church.

We have people like Jacob Böhme who,

you know, he considered himself

a good Lutheran, even though he,

you know, had his battles
with church authorities.

We have people like Antoinette Bourignon

coming from Catholicism.

We have lots of people
here in the Netherlands

coming from a Calvinist direction.

Because of course the.

Lutheranism in Germany,

Calvinism in the Netherlands

and in Switzerland and
in France, parts of France,

these were of course
the majority religions.

But in all of those religions,

people are reading the same books.

And the interesting thing is that

people saw no barrier

to their regular church going, to.

Also go after church

to a Theosophical reading group, or

to meet with friends from another group.

And by the way, lots of people from

different Christian confessions

were also trying to bring

Jews and Christians together.

And some of the most radical,

like the Philadelphians that I mentioned,

also wanted to include Muslims.

So there was this real idea of connection

and let's try to find the commonalities.

Let's try to build a bridge.

A hundred years ago,

it was a city of Theosophists.

Theosophy, they had a temple in Amsterdam.

Cinetol, it's now theater.

But then it was their library,

the Theosophical library.

And what.

Madame Blavatsky said,

"Everything is already known,

but the only thing what you have to do

"is to discover."

Dis - cover.

And that's what I always did.

You have to be open,
and that is for a spiritual

and that is for a spiritual frequency.

You have to be a person

who has an absolute,

I would say, a compass

to this world of information.

And indeed, our authors have

a wide range of education.

So many of them were
trained as theologians

and were highly educated.

And many of our books are in Latin

for that reason.

But then we have others who, like

Jacob Böhme, who were self-educated

or did not have a university education,

but who nonetheless

were able to write very complex writings.

And of course, we
have a lot of lay authors

in our library, and they were not accepted

because they were lay authors.

So, yeah, it's a variety.

Not that you know it from yourself,

but it is always a message,

a message.

And therefore, we say here in this library,

every being in the world,

he has wisdom.

And wisdom is what I call the seed

to every person in this world,

a seed of growing,

growing into the inside

and the information of this field.

The idea of rebirth or
self-improvement is really

a key idea that runs through our library.

And people understand
it in different ways.

There's a lot of talk
about the imagination and

how if we use our imagination correctly,

we will not be thinking about,

you know, what would
I do if I had a million

dollars or something.

We would be thinking about,

you know, how to improve myself,

how to improve the
world, how to help others,

this kind of thing.

So there's a lot of discussion about this,

about right thinking, wrong thinking,

improving things.

And people discuss openly and have

disagreements about these things too.

It is also a famous,

I would say, incident that book printing

was in Amsterdam

already 400 years ago

a very famous country for what I call

for what I call

neglected or forbidden books.

Books were printed
everywhere in Amsterdam.

Forbidden books were
the most wanted books.

So people could print their ideas

even though

for the central government it was
forbidden.

The Amsterdam government
said, we respect you,

but we won't give any

follow up to your orders.

And that is the Amsterdam double attitude.

We respect the government,

but we will not give the follow up.

And here we have many books

that were printed here

and they were the witnesses of wisdom.

We have the Corpus Hermeticum

and the ideas there go into alchemy

and they go into Kabbalah.

They go into mysticism,
they go into astrology,

they go into magic.

So there are different collecting areas

and spiritualists are
one part of mysticism.

And even within mysticism or spiritualism

we have people having many different

theological beliefs.

I think that any wisdom form,

Christianity, whatever tradition,

has its roots, its origin in a momentum.

And through time it develops

in different branches, in different

countries

and

they crystallize.

It's like an eruption from

a volcano and it becomes

a form and it's

fixed in a place.

And.
I think

a form can be good for a person

or for a moment in time

for a country, for a culture.

My message is

with this library,

be free, feel free and act free.

And that has to do

with a spiritual frequency.

It's not only an intellectual,

not only an intellectual, knowledge,

but it has to do

what you can call Gnosis.

And Gnosis was also in Egypt already

the wisdom of the heart.

The wisdom of the heart.

And the wisdom of the heart

is to be

a central example

of.

Open, to be open to everybody

and not between the two
ears and the five senses

and that you dominate

your neighbors, etc.

So, I personally avoid the word "gnostic"

because it's been used too many different

ways by different scholars.

So, the classic definition of Gnosticism

is kind of a world-denying

ideology and

some of our authors

denied the world and
thought the world was bad and

wanted to just, you know, kind of wait on

the next world.

But the great majority
of them didn't think that.

The great majority of them

wanted to improve the world,

they wanted to work on the world,

they wanted to work on themselves.

In terms of what you're calling.

"Gnosticism", of course

we have this influence coming

from the Middle East,

from Egyptian sources and Persian sources

and Greek and Roman sources.

And there are these older,

mystical religious elements in there,

whether you call them "Gnosticism"

or something else.

And that does flow throughout our authors.

And certainly

authors like Sebastian Frank

were reading the Corpus Hermeticum

and were being influenced by it.

So when the Corpus Hermeticum says,

"What is above is as that below."

So, what's on the inside of us

is reflected in the whole cosmos.

So those kinds of ideas were

very much coming from antiquity.

I would say that

most people were not so aware of it,

but some were, as I say, some were.

We know that two-thirds of the people

around the globe are in some way

connected to something like a soul

or spiritual life,

but only one-third

is.

Comfortable with the
form they can find it in.

So that means that we have to renew

the way

people look at it.

The essence

will always be the same

in all these different forms.

But let's be open for renewal

in new people, because

we don't have to change the form.

People that are part

of a tradition are the change.

But they also should respect

the essence of what a tradition is about.

Last year we had the exhibition

of the Rosicrucianism
tradition and renewal.

And we were here in this building

with seven,

seven, I would say,

the Freemasons were there

theosophy was there,

anthroposophy was there,

Sufism was there.

So all this famous world,

what I call wisdom,

wisdom,

I would say communities,

they were here.

So we were with seven,

and we spoke about

tradition and renewal.

So keep the value

and hold that value, and renew value.

Most of our authors didn't think

that they were doing something different.

So, if you look at people like Jacob Böhme

or Sebastian Frank, many of these figures,

many of these figures,

they actually wanted to continue

the Reformation started by Luther.

They thought that they were completing it.

But they not only wanted to reform

the Church, they looked around and saw

that all of society needed to be reformed.

So in particular, around 1600,

we have an explosion of
new societies, new groups

who want to reform medicine, science,

the universities, the churches, government,

public life.

And they see it all connected.

And they think that
because it's all connected,

one way to do this
might be to go back to this

universal, this old wisdom.

What I like about this library

and also about the Hermetica,

that's when they speak about God

or life,

or energy, or

whatever you want to call it,

they say it's a sphere

where from the center is everywhere

and the circumference nowhere.

So it includes everything

always everywhere at the same time.

And that is for me, Hermetic philosophy.

Of course, you have the Hermetica from

the time of

Egypt

in the Hellenistic period.

But this holistic wisdom,

you can find in all cultures.

And you can find it in
every book here, although

it can be a Jewish book or.

Whatever book about.

Da Vinci or modern science

or Kepler,

Robert Fludd, you name them all.

They all are looking for this,

for the mystery of life.

And I think,
that's also the symbol of the Grail.

From

the beginning that we were

collecting the books of the library,

we were always interested in the Grail

because in the symbol of the Grail,

you can bring all the streamings of

philosophy and religion together.

I see the Grail as

the search for the mystery of life.

If you have a cup as a receptive symbol

and you fill it with pure water,

then it is reflecting

the heavenly world

by day and by night.

And you see the movements of the stars,

not only the stars, but also the planets.

And we are all looking
for the mystery of life

in our own form.

And,

I think

you can find it everywhere.

We are already part of it.

The inner being of God

was reflected in nature

and in the heavenly world,

with the planets and the stars,

and in our visible world too,

and in fact in every living being.

We only have to connect it to

where we are, what we do.

We are being lived

by the circumstances around us.

They teach us

what, how we can use our

possibilities.

But we

have to be open for inspiration

to use our

capabilities

to do something good.

And we do it here to share
wisdom through books,

through the library,

through the museum, the research institute.

We want to share this wisdom for everyone.

For me, it is very important

to share

that,

not for myself, but to share it

but to share

it with,

I would say, the community

of the world.

The core of our collection is really

this reception in the Renaissance

of this.

Hermetic thinking.

But we also look at later movements,

and we look at parallel movements

in other societies.

So, for example, we have a small but

significant collection
of Islamic manuscripts

coming from the Sufi tradition.

And it is a different history,

but it has many, many parallels

to what we are talking about

with Hermetic philosophy.

And the same thing is true of Daoism,

for example.

So we do find these parallels,

and they are not our main focus

as far as collecting goes.

But our library has around 30,000 books.

We have about 5,000 of the old rare books,

and the rest are secondary

literature and modern literature.

And within those areas,

we try to cover all of the areas

of Hermetic philosophy.

"Esoteric", it is something we use

in the 1920s, esoteric traditions.

But for me,

when there were now esoteric traditions,

in the sense we know today,

you had

the Egyptian wisdom or

the wisdom in India, in whatever culture,

in China, in the Americas.

In the Americas.

But in all these traditions,
you have always had

an outside, a form.

In Christianity, you have to go to church

you are baptized.

In Islam, you have to go to Mecca.

And, you have always
all these form traditions,

which are brilliant because they

explain you and they guide you

in a certain development of

what the culture is about

and what religion is about.

But in all these religions, you have also

an inner experience.

In Christianity, you have mysticism.

In Islam, you have Sufism.

And.

Kabbalah, in the Jewish tradition.

So in all these traditions, you
have always an inner tradition.

Even if you are not religious,

but maybe spiritual,

it's always a personal,

a personal

journey you go through.

Gnosis,

inner wisdom.

And,

I'm interested in this inner wisdom

because we all have

this gnosis

in whatever form we live.

And I think that's also what we can

recognize in everyone and everything.

And that's only if you meet another person

or another group of people

that is

really experiencing this mystical

way of a

form of religion or wisdom,

then you recognize each other.

And then there is no...

it's not important

from whatever background you are.

You meet each other from soul to soul.

And that they call in
that time in all kinds of

languages and images.

"Gnosis".

And gnosis you can translate it as

a knowledge of the heart.

It is a possibility to be aware

not from our

mortal point of view, but

from inside.

What is good? What is true?

For me gnosis is about finding the truth

that resonates within that

place inside yourself when you know,

"Oh, this is true."

Like your basic instinct telling you,

"This is true."

That principle,

they

tell already about it in the Corpus.

Hermeticum.

And, there is said

in one of the

tractates

that

on a certain moment

is coming a cup

or a vessel or a mixing vessel

from heaven

descending.

And there is a voice that is saying,

"You people or hearts or souls

we know where you are coming from

and who believe

that there is a possibility

to turn back to your origin.

Put yourself in this vessel

"and you will have gnosis."

And when that gnosis awaits in yourself

and you turn yourself to this inner voice,

then you have an inner guide.

And if you follow that inner guide,

you become free of all the limitations

of egocentrism.

And I think this library is more

important than ever because

I feel we live in a kind of society

where traditional structures are crumbling

and people are not open to

other people telling them

what to think, what to do,

like, yeah, what has been

normal in the past,

it's like more people

want to start thinking for themselves

and finding their own truths.

And our library

offers a huge treasure

for thinking about spirituality

because, well, here in the Netherlands,

the churches are emptying.

People don't want to be
part of a church anymore

because they feel it's restrictive and it

doesn't give them the inspiration.

But still, they're
looking for inspiration.

They're still spiritual people.

And, well, they come
here and they can find,

they can find different ideas

and form their own ideas about,

well, what does it mean
to be a human being?

So when we talk about

freedom of the mind,

one of the first things
that pop up in my mind

is actually

saying that a German
prisoner or a Jewish prisoner

that went to a German
concentration camp said,

and he said he had a little song

and it goes something like,

"Der Gedachte sieht frei."

And it was,

"No matter what you do to me,

in my head, my thoughts are always free."

This was fascinating.

This person was conscious

about the fact that
whatever happens outside

in this world and whatever

loath or horrible things

somebody may involve you in,

in your mind, you are free.

And,

I think the Embassy of the Free Mind

is a place where

all the knowledge about
this mind is being studied

and it's being stored here.

So, I think, the fact that
we in the Netherlands

can freely study the mind

without, for example, churches

or governments really
interfering with that,

I think that's really

a very valuable thing that we have

here in Amsterdam.

So,

you know, going on this

story of learning your own mind eventually,

you can come to such great insights.

And I'm on that journey myself.

And I come here a lot to study

how other philosophers think

about the mind and what
they think about the mind.

And all I conclude so far

is that I think "All is One".

The people and the groups whose writings

we have in our library
had very, very different

theologies from one another.

So there are things that connect them,

but also things that separate them.

So, for example,

even within 17th century
German spiritualists,

we have people like Gichtel,

who thought that you
should just stay home and

silently pray

and be in contemplation all the time.

And then we have people
like Johanna Peterson

and her husband, Johan Wilhelm Peterson,

who believed that you have to

go out into the world

and you have to try to change it

and you have to talk to people.

So, those are two absolutely
opposite approaches,

even though they

you know, they both considered themselves

followers in a sense of the same

stream of thought,

but very different interpretations.

Religion

is also a weapon of domination

to break the freedom of the mind in

in pieces.

And therefore, these books

that you see around here,

they are all

the written witnesses of
independent awareness

and action.

It's an interesting history to look at

mysticism in the West,

because,

of course, within the Catholic Church,

it was, you know, the idea of

some sort of unity with God was

one of the main goals for centuries.

And people used

devotional books to
meditate and to contemplate

and to try to experience God in some way.

But there was always a tension,

because if people went too far

with having their own
visions or their own ideas,

or if people started
saying, "I feel led by God

to do this, this, and this,"

then authority started to worry.

So that's when you have a moment,

you know,

a potential for conflict.

So we see sometimes these people are

being raised up as saints by the church,

somebody like Bridget of Sweden.

But other times we have people,

of course, being labeled as heretics

and burned or put in prison.

And this, of course, becomes even worse

with Protestantism,

because Protestantism

is really all about the
word and the sermon,

and it's not at all about

any kind of mystical elements.

So it's really suppressed

in the Protestant countries,

for the most part.

Of course, it continues to exist, and

that's, I think, why we have

these spiritualist groups arising.

They came here to be free,

to act free,

to feel free,

and to communicate free.

Many of these individuals and groups,

they paved the way for
modern human rights.

But at the same time,

it was a different view of human rights

than what we typically have today,

particularly in the.

West, because it's not the idea that an

isolated individual has
these autonomous rights,

and if these rights are not fulfilled,

you can, you know, sue somebody,

make a court case about it.

It's more the idea that

we're all part of a bigger plan.

And I think that this is actually a view

for humanity that really holds promise.

I think in a museum experience we want to

not only teach people about the content

of the collection

but we also want to
make them experience it,

experience the meaning and the value

and the stories and how it influenced

people back in the day, but

also inspire them to
take it into their own lives

and to look at themselves
and see how they can

take this

wisdom, these ideas, and

make it their own and maybe

add something to tomorrow.

And I think that's what's

the true value of our museum experience

that we want to learn, experience, inspire

all these different

people.

I think it's also something that is very

influential

among young people.

There is this movement

where people

have all these different things

going on in the world.

We have pandemics, wars.

I think

there is this research done

that

besides all the

dualities and all the

different things going
on in our current day,

all the moving times,

they help young people to

look for meaning and look for

understanding of the world

and that we're a part of.

And I think that this collection

has such a unique gathering of

all these different
perspectives that it can add

a lot of dimension to
this quest for people.

And it can be

a huge surge for
inspiration for young people

who try to understand
the world and who try to

also understand
themselves within this world.

And Jacob Böhme, he said,

"Make peace no war."

So there you have our house.

You have our library, our library, which

just was added to the UNESCO registry.

And it is the central institution.

People can come here to study.

We also do exhibitions about the books.

And we have a museum to explain to people

these streams of thought.

Then we have something called an academy,

which is a program of

lectures and masterclasses and so forth.

And we even have a café

and we have children's programs.

So we have a lot going on here.

And all of that is within one house.

I hope more people discover this hidden

gem in the city of Amsterdam.

This café is a beautiful
place to meet other

like-minded individuals,

free thinkers who are shaping the

world today as well.

When I'm inside this café,

when I talk to someone else,

it's always an interesting conversation.

Our whole life is an initiation.

And of course it can
help within a community

that there is set up a system or a form

that resonates with you.

But I think

if you live only in nature,

it's also an initiation.

And,

you can study nature,
you can walk in nature,

you climb mountains, whatever you do.

But at the end it's also
a mystical experience.

So form and matter

are always connected.

They are hermetically

connected

everywhere with no end.

This is a key idea that
we have in theosophy

that you can access God through nature.

So by studying nature,

and this is what we have also in alchemy,

by studying nature

you can somehow learn about God.

So, nature is actually
a form of revelation.

And we can think of all of creation

as a form of revelation
that's constantly ongoing.

One of my favorite rooms is the outdoors,

this room:

the garden.

The garden changes every season.

In springtime we have
2000 tulips that pop up

in all different colors.

And it looks like there's a whole tapestry

of confetti in our garden.

When the tulips go away,

the summer bouquet comes up

with beautiful flowers and plants.

Some have alchemical value,

and we place signs next to the plants

so you can learn

what this plant does and how it is used
in alchemy.

When talking about
theosophy, it's important to

distinguish between

the Christian theosophy

of the 16th and 17th centuries

and later theosophy when
we talk today about the.

Theosophical Society, for example.

So, the Christian theosophy

of the 16th and 17th centuries

was simply an attempt

by Christians

to combine Christianity
with the study of nature.

So, the very first sentence

of Jakob Böhme's very first book,

he says,

"I want to combine"

astrology,

theology, "and philosophy."

So those three.

And those were the three

branches of thought in his time.

So the bringing together
of those is what we call

theosophy.

So Böhme says, "If you
want to know about God,

walk across a blooming meadow."

He loves nature.

People who come here for the first time

are are busy with absorbing
the energy and looking

at the images.

But if you really wanna know more,

there are six trails to follow.

We have one about alchemy,

one about hermetic philosophy,

one about Kabbalah,

Rosicrucians, the Grail

and the House with the Heads.

These are self-guided tour booklets.

If you then wanna know
more, you can go to our

modern reading room with books

from 1900 onwards.

We have so many books,

we can't all put them on display.

So, part of our collection is digitalized.

But you can go inside

this room

and find books about.

Taoism, Sufism, Freemasonry,
Mysticism, Gnosis,

Hermetic philosophy, of course, alchemy.

Our library really helped establish

the field of Hermetic
philosophy as a discipline.

And I think we can
continue to play a key role

in discussions about what that

tradition is and what it can mean.

Of course, our library is

perhaps the most important library

for people to come to,
to study this tradition.

It's such a big accomplishment
that we have this

beautiful building with
this amazing garden.

And this beautiful
building is just filled,

as I said before, crammed with so much

intelligence, so much books, so much

paintings.

And so forth about the human mind.

The fact that we have this collection,

this dense collection of material

that represents

so many years of research, it's amazing.

There's not a lot of
places that have that.

So I think
it's worth a big compliment that we

have managed to get

such a nice collection here in Amsterdam.

The embassy is our museum.

And the museum draws on the books

in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica,

which I always have
to translate for people.

That is the library of
Hermetic philosophy.

So, the library is the key collection

of the embassy,

which then

does exhibitions and teaching

about those traditions.

And we're in the middle of a renovation.

Our house is going to open two additional

floors in the coming years where we can

have seminars and workshops and so forth.

So we see our programs expanding.

We want to develop the museum

in such a way that it becomes

an independent institute, independent

independent of the Ritman family,

independent of the cash flow

that comes from the family.

It must develop strategies to survive

for a long term on its own.

It's not just a book collection,

but it's really something special.

And there is a lot to find there.

And it's part of our cultural heritage.

And, we invite many more people

to support the Embassy of the Free Mind

in whatever way,

in academic way, financial way, to

financial

to recognize the spirit that is behind

all this wisdom

all this wisdom in all these traditions,

in all these wisdom currents.

And are also

focused in this library.

And,

people are invited to support that,

to embrace it and to make it possible

for the coming years

because it has been always an initiative

founded by my father,

and also financed by my father.

I was in the airline industry,

so we were

around the world.

We made

350 customers.

Our company

is still a leading company

in the airline industry.

And I sold

in the 90s.

I sold my shares.

And with that capital,

I invested that in my library.

And, I hope that many
people will find the embassy

and that they find value,

inner value

in this and that they can use it

and support it in their own way.

To share something,

you have to have something.

And to have to have something,

you have to do something.

So it is a matter to do something,

to have something,

to share something.

And this library

is the proof

is the proof in the eating of the pudding

that everybody can eat

and share

this wisdom.

(Gong rings)
(Soft music)

(music continues)

(music fades)