The textbook of life. The laws of the mind. Martin Kojc

       FOREWORD BY SIMON BORUT POGAČNIK

      During the journey from the womb to the grave -- the journey we call life --everyone is, despite apparent companionship, in fact responsibly, inescapably and fatedly alone. In this existential reality lies the tragicalness, the challenge and the way of living that is bound to the endless asking of the question: WHO AM I? C. G. Jung says that a person knows that he is not an animal, vegetable or mineral, but that he does not know who he is. In order for a man to get to know and to recognize himself he needs many mirrors. Because he does not know himself, he does not know if perhaps concave or convex mirrors also do not show his real self. He constantly needs definers, regardless of whether they define him as bad or good. Everywhere and in everyone he sees only the dual nature between good and evil, warm and cold, youth and old age, birth and death. Polarization is fatal for human life, it shows life as unfulfilled, to be fulfilled only by yearning to overcome polarization. In knowing that the height of happiness is followed by a fall, there can be no wholeness, and it is hard to shake off the thought that perhaps hell exists already, here and now.

      Precisely because of this need, it appears that the Absolute decided to help the predestined being to travel easier, with less troubles on the road between mother's and Earth's mantle. This help manifests itself in the sending of Teachers, founders of great religions or schools of Philosophy. It is true that sometimes religions contradict each other in minor ways, but in essence they answer even the unspoken questions of people who follow them. If they do not, the people choose another, different religion. The position of each individual in this moment and in this choice corresponds to his maturity...

      The time has come when we again need the thoughts, teachings and originality of our native Slovene Teachers. One such Teacher is Martin Kojc, a Slovene, who by the year 1935 had written and published his Textbook of Life. This work had been previously published abroad, and the Slovene edition was a translation from German. The necessity of this journey of Martin Kojc's thought to German, and then from German to Slovene, confirmed the Biblical saying that a prophet is not honored in his own land.

      Because we have heard so little about Martin Kojc, and because a full fifty-four years passed before the first Slovene publication of the Textbook of Life, one wonders if his ideas were ahead of his time, alien and incomprehensible to the spirit of his time -- or perhaps a one-day fad which could not survive the dawn of the next day. The Hindus have a saying: When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. These past years we are experiencing a