„Beauty is the harmony and concord of all parts, achieved in such a manner that nothing could be added or taken away or altered except for the worse.“ These are the words of Leon Battista Alberti, an architect and author of a famous treatise on architecture.

The human body has the potential for such harmony and beauty. This is obvious in the graceful movements of an accomplished ballet dancer, for instance. The American Heritage Dictionary gives as the first meaning of the word „grace“: „seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form or proportion“. Ballet is certainly anything but effortless, like any other form of art, but there is freedom of movement in ballet that appears miraculously easy. This freedom turns upon order, the order of discipline that prepares and sustains all great accomplishmnets.

One of the secrets of this order in ballet is the support of the body‘s entire weight upon a single point: the centre of gravity in the sacrum, which is upheld by only one outstreched leg on the tip of the toes. Growth, gravity and grace concentrated in one point of our sacrum is the power of limits enshrined in our bones.

Simone Weil, whose thoughts about grace and gravity were mentioned earlier, notes in another volume of her notebooks: „Something infinitely small, under certain conditions, operates in a decisive manner. There is no mass so heavy but to a given point is equal to it; for a mass will not fail if a single point in it is upheld, provided that this point be the centre of gravity.“ She added – and this was during the days of the Nazi occupation in France – „brute force is not sovereign in this world….what is sovereign…is limit….Every visible and palpable force is subject to an invisible limit, which it shall never cross. In the sea a wave mounts higher and higher, but to a certain point…it is arrested and forced to descend….That is the truth which bites at our hearts every time we are penetrated by the beauty of the world. That is the truth which bursts forth in matchless accents of joy in the beautiful and pure parts of the Old Testamnet, in Greece among the Pythagoreans and all the sages, in China, with Lao Tzu, in the Hindu scriptures, in Egyptian remains.“

The truth of these words has been one of the main inspirations of this book. These words reveal the other, traditional meaning of the word grace: mercy and the divine gift of Love, springing from the relatedness of all that exists.

The ballet dancer‘s visible grace is a symbol of the other, invisible grace: the potential of harmony and grace that exists within every human being, for indeed all of us, not only accomplished dancers, have an inner centre, a sacrum, both in a physical and a spiritual sense.“

Excerpt from „The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture” by György Doczi

Doctor Lozanov wanted a different world. He worked for it, he fought for it and taught it until the last days of his life on this Earth. He created an educational system where knowledge, intuition, logic and emotion would have equal value of importance in the understanding of a teaching-learning process. He devised a safe way to tap the potential of the human being and he did it with the accompanying psycho-therapeutic and psycho-hygienic effects. He was a doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist. For him the way through which man communicates with the social environment is by means of suggestion – the language of the visible and invisible worlds. 55 years ago he published for the first time the term Suggestopedia and gave birth to half a century of scientific investigation, achievements, world recognition and then repressions, doubts and recent revival in his native country and worldwide. The story of his lifework Suggestopedia is a storyline of paradoxes as is the human being him-  or  her-self.

Having had a mystical experience at the age of 18 while being in a communist prison, Dr Lozanov knew all his life that he had to follow the Light and the Mission it required from him. “You see”, he would say, “when at 18 you see the light entering your prison cell, you know that your mission begins and you have to endure everything”.

People who had known him in the different years of his life would tell a story about him regarding that stage of his Path. I knew him in his last years intimately, deeply and lastingly. I would integrate every word of his, every gesture, every look, every silence. I would witness his wisdom, his determination and zero tolerance to mediocrity, pettiness and rudeness. I would live with his conviction that fighting for Suggestopedia was worth it even when you are not able to speak, you are not able to move and you have just the breath and the eyes remaining to convey its meaning. I could not have had a bigger teacher of Humaneness and Love. I could not have had a bigger example of a Master Teacher. I could not have had a bigger Inspiration for continuing despite all odds, lies, suspicions and depreciating comments from those who could never understand and integrate the intimate power of the teaching-learning system and saw it only as a great source of achieving certain kind of social status and wealth. They were wrong, of course, as they will always be since Suggestopedia and the materialistic world coexist in a very delicate relationship of understanding and respect. It was not the brutal force and desire to possess and use the achievements of doctor Lozanov, as the named by him imitators did, that was going to preserve his work. It was not the recognition by the institutions, which he would try to convince to return to the work of his life as a source for prosperity for the Bulgarian educational system that would ensure the fulfillment of his legacy.

It is, in my opinion, the purity, grace and love born in the heart, soul and mind of each teacher practising Suggestopedia which will pass on the wavering flame of the light that he had seen as a young man.

His work does not need recognition from temporary administrators,  researchers or practitioners in the field of education who reject the understanding of the human being as a whole. Neither does it need it from the teaching institutions where the concept of Love is allowed to exist only in certain research contexts related to the history of Suggestopedia.

Because, by definition, it does not live where binary logic alone and a dead accademic language rule. It is a living system, of singular beauty, applicable in multiple contexts and summing up all that is good in us as human beings. It requires from us as teachers to tap a reserve complex in a teaching process where inspiration is the main requirement. The visible grace, which according to György Doczi’s quote is “a symbol of the other, invisible grace: the potential of harmony and grace that exists within every human being,” are qualities inherent to the teacher who works for the full use of their own capacities, overcoming their own limitations or the social suggestive norms and inspiring their students.

To apply Dr Lozanov’s work on a larger scale one needs to be a visionary, a patron of the ideal of the limitless capacities of the human being, a champion of a society where delicacy, respect and mutual understanding reign. In his life time, Dr Lozanov was supported for the most part of his research, investigation and world dissemination of Suggestopedia by such people as the Bulgarian Minister of Culture in the 1970s , Ludmila Jivkova, whom he acknowledges in his last book “Suggestopedia/Reservopedia. Theory and Practice of the Liberating -Stimulating Pedagogy on the Level of the Hidden Reserves of the Human Mind”: as the person

“who championed the idealistic and humanitarian character of suggestopedia in the hardest times”

He was taught and tutored, cared for by his mentors Professor  Doctor  Emanuil Sharankov, a leading Bulgarian psychiatrist and psychotherapist, head of the scientific councils of the Ministries of Health and Education in the 1965-66, which supported the first experiments in the field of Suggestology and Suggestopedia as well as by Professor Doctor Ilya Zaharievich Velvovski, “a world known Ukrainian psychiatrist and psychotherapist with discoveries in the field of suggestology, who organized experimental suggestopedical courses and supported the development of suggestopedia”. He was helped in the times of his voluntary exile in Austria in the 1990s by “Dr Josef Bandion, the Director of the Ludwig Boltzman Geselschaft Institute, Vienna, who provided (him with) peaceful working conditions”.

These people had a vision for the human and social development similar to the one of the patrons of the Renaissance who would protect and foster the creation of the Neoplatonic academy of Marsilio Ficino; of the Count of Toulouse Ramon VI de Tolosa and the Viscount of Carcassone Ramon – Roger Trencavel who would protect the “bons hommes” and “bonnes femmes” known later by the appellation “cathars”; of the Bulgarian kings Ivan Asen II and Kaloyan who would allow themselves to be advised by the Bogomils.

To defend, protect and be the patron of a teaching-learning system such as Suggestopedia you have to be able to understand it, to have the desire to break with the scholasticism and dogmatism of the idea of the partiality of the human being, to reject the practice to punish and humiliate your students for their failures and to recognize that mistakes are a part of the way to learn not only a subject but also to learn to live this life with dignity. You have to be ready to question if the schools where our children go to keep the balance of welcome and coziness, which stimulate the discoveries, of harmony of the colours, music, art and science with the grace of spirit and high level of humaneness and culture of the teachers working there. You have to see if the administration is ready to study and cherish the work of doctor Lozanov as a national and world treasure.

It is only then that we will be able to say that Bulgaria, a country of millenarian spirituality, traditional cult towards education, sensitivity and work of genius thinkers, is ready for the heritage of a pedagogy where Love, Freedom, The Conviction of the Teacher that Something Extraordinary is Taking Place, the Manifold Increased Study Material, the Relationship between the Whole and the Part and the Part studied through the Whole, the Golden Proportion and the Use of Classical Art and Aesthetics are defined as laws, conditio – sine- qua- non by its creator.

A pedagogy which will light the third millennium only if we succeed to remain Human.

Literature:

 György Doczi,  „The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture”,“Shambala”, 2005

Georgi Lozanov,“Suggestopedia/Reservopedia. Theory and Practice of the Liberating -Stimulating Pedagogy on the Level of the Hidden Reserves of the Human Mind”, Sofia University Press, 2009

Georgi Lozanov, “Suggestology”,   “Nauka I Izkustvo”, 1971

Angela Voss, “Orpheus Redivivus: The Musical Magic of Marsilio Ficino”, in “Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy” from the “Brills’Studies in Intellectual History”, University of Groningen Edition

Angela Voss “Music and Magic” in the Cambridge History of 16^th c. Music,