ISPA FLASHBACK
THE FIRST-EVER ISPA KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Deborah Szekely
1991 ISPA CONFERENCE & EXPO
FIRST, I MUST BEGIN BY THANKING EACH
ONE OF YOU and Bernard Burt in particular for making brain and the consequences that changed every single
aspect of human life except the body and nature herself.
one of my husband’s predictions come true. Edmond Rancho La Puerta, which opened in June 1940, was a
direct offspring of a series of health camps that the
Professor, as Edmond Szekely was known, held each year in
a different country beginning in 1935. These held on the
banks of a river or lake were his replication of the camps of
the Essenes (a healer sect of early
Christianity about whom little is
known but much conjectured).
People would climb mountains,
meditate, eat raw foods, exercise
in water and on land, read esoteric
books and listen to the Professor’s
daily lectures, departing a week
later with the conviction that good
health of mind and body was theirs
to achieve.
I attended several of these
camps with my mother, a registered
nurse and vegan who, as she was
wont to say, “saw the light.” That I
am here tonight began with her, for
by 1930 she had decided that
Brooklyn in the midst of the
Depression was not what she had come to America for,
and so she talked my dad into moving us to Tahiti, where
we were to remain for almost five years. My life there-
after seems to have followed a preordained path with
Rancho La Puerta still one more health camp, but this
time I, a recent bride, was chief cook and bottle-washer.
I milked the goats, cared for the vegetable gardens, taught
calisthenics and at night by the light of a kerosene lamp
wrote letters to everyone I had ever met extolling the
virtues of the Essene School of Life, our name during the
first dozen years of our existence, while my husband wrote
his books and lectured to the guests.
Szekely, a remarkable man whom I met in Tahiti in 1934
and who died in 1979, had he been asked would have told
you that an event like this was inevitable. He would have
quoted Victor Hugo in saying: “An invasion of armies can
be resisted, but not an idea whose time has
come.”
I accept this honor on his behalf as well as
my own. Edmond Szekely intuited that the laws
of the earthly mother and the heavenly father
can be ignored for just so long, that the time
would come when man to survive would
recognize these as facts of life.
You who are gathered here tonight
descend from an ancient profession: the
caretakers, the healers of antiquity. Greek and
Roman literature speak of “Mens sana, corps
sana”—healthy mind,
healthy body. It was
inevitable, too, that
science and reason
would accept their
synergy and recognize
that we are descen-
dants of early man.
For eons we were
seed-gatherers,
subsisting on grains
and legumes, trekking
from one watering hole to another very much like the birds
and the beasts. Our bodies were prepared for the constant
search for food upon which our very survival depended. Life
was a natural balance of movement and rest in an
environment of fresh air, fresh water and fresh food.
Nature did not foresee the evolutionary development of the
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