other’s languages, as if all of the Türkmens regarded each other as strangers. The ties between them had been broken.

It is impossible, however, that they should not have been aware of each other, the Seljuks and Magtymguly, the Ottomans and Görogly.

A break in memory leads to the generations regarding each other as strangers. The reason for the break in memory is the movement away from the frame of national solidarity, caused by heavy foreign domination of the moral values of the generations. This causes the nations to be spiritually and morally divided and fragmented.

The real power lies in the heart of the people. After the collapse of the heart, however, man starts to decline in strength because the heart is the spring of national pride. After the spring has dried up, to discuss facts becomes nonsense. There was no Türkmen streak in such people.

My basic aim in writing “Ruhnama” is to open the dwindling spring of national pride by clearing it of grass and stones and letting it flow again. I hope to enliven the heart with the medication of Philosophy. It is like replanting the arid land of the past, which has become unproductive and useless, with the pine trees of the Türkmen plateaus. In this way I wish to rid us of the disease, trouble and anxiety of insensibility.

But if the memory of the past awakens in someone’s mind, then, he, like before, becomes the continuation of history. This person’s moral life and capacity to live start to bubble again like a life-giving spring. His mind and heart transform and become the area for the continuation of the historical and moral. In this person, his ancestors are