INTRODUCTION

THERE ARE THOSE WHO COME INTO THE WORLD WITH A SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE
and they seem to achieve it with no difficulty.
These people are rare.
Most however, get involved with what we were doing last
and pursue it without any sense of duty.
We may achieve our ends but with no sense of joy.

The first group are people with a mission;
the second is composed of people without a "face" .
A "face" means a personality, a "heart", according fo a very old Mexican tradition.

Among those with a mission,
there are some unaware that they could be instruments for something valuable.
Grace sometimes touches them later and wakes them to this fact.

Grace can come in the most unexpected manner.
Albert Krassner, a successful lawyer and C.P.A for over 35 years, married
and father of five children, immersed in the legal realm, was to have
at a particular moment of his life, a kind of gentle illumination, a "change of heart".

For a conventional man,
of conventional background and a conventional set of ideas,
entry into a new paradigm must have been a very unconventional shock.

What is a "change of heart"?

Standard values,
the basis of what is recognized as a normal life, are put under observation.
People's conversations, involving life's relationships, are listed to with care.
Past and current experiences are reevaluated.
Behavior, the basis for our moral standards, is assessed with reflection.
The result is that what the heart formerly believed to be valuable
and worth pursuing, has no longer the same appeal.

What do I do now?
What I have already done
Must not be my conceit
Nor regrets, my score.
What is left undone
Seems only all the more.

(JOURNEY TO BE, ALBERT KRASSNER, 1983)

Albert Krassner, given this special awareness, felt it was his mission to write,
to tell others of his new insights and to urge them to turn inward.
He did so, reporting on the way, about his earlier misunderstandings,
failures and successes.

In the prosess he redifined time and silence, flow and order,
discipline and meditation.
His mission was for himself and for others. At the start
he realized he could not help others unless he knew himself first.

Once awakened,
writing began to pour out of an unforseen and seemingly inexhaustible source.

The contents of this book reflect Albert Krassner's concern with the experience of
most humans throughout time.
"So easy to see in another what one cannot see in oneself".
Later on he ends the same poem with
"so easy to go on living never having lived".

There is nothing else Albert Krassner should do but write, mediate and be.
After all, one of his major works is JOURNEY TO BE.
Well, this IS the journey and this is BEING now.

His books are for everybody,
recording and showing
an awakened man's understanding of existence.


Mauro Kunst *