Ikar Publishing House Bratislava, 2020

The most powerful tool of the people in power to control ordinary people is fear. Successful businessman Martin Vodnár also struggles with fear. Perhaps he achieved everything he dreamed of: property, success, admiration, glory. Still, he’s not happy. His family is falling apart, he has not even found a way to his wife and two children, he is losing the meaning of life. He has restless dreams, fear has entered his days and nights. He realizes that he has entered into a destructive cycle of competition from which happiness has disappeared. After celebrating his birthday in New York, he visits the museum of the Russian painter Nikolai Roerich. There he meets the Altai shaman Čet Čelpan, and a conversation with him inspires him to undergo a painful journey to rebirth. He decides to survive his “death” and flies to distant Altai, four times larger than the Alps. Altai is the largest necropolis in the world, it has more than forty thousand burial mounds. That is also why it is the right place for “Socratic” debates between Martin and Čet, a former university professor. However, they are not talking about physical death, but about the death of pride, ego, lust and especially fear. We will only be free when we get rid of it. Jozef Banáš reveals not only the essence of fear, but also the secrets of Altai and the Russian mystic Nikolai Roerich.