About this archive
Raw Truth is a digital archive of Aajonus Vonderplanitz (1947–2013): forty years of recorded Q&As, workshops, interviews and writings, gathered in one place with synchronized transcripts you can read or follow along with while you listen.
Most of this material was gathered, organized and transcribed over many years at aajonus.net, the archive that first brought his work together in one place. This site is built on that foundation: I took the texts and transcripts from there, synced them to the audio, and made everything searchable. The synchronization and this website are my part; the preservation came before me.
How to use it
Browse. Every piece lives in The Archive. Filter by type: Q&A, workshop, interview, video, book, newsletter, or misc. Choose a category first if you want to narrow things down before you search.
Search the full text. The search box reads inside every transcript, book and newsletter, not just the titles. Search a word, a symptom, a remedy or a topic. Every form of a word counts as that word: donation also finds donate, donated and donating, tooth finds teeth, and aluminium finds aluminum. Results are grouped so the closest ones come first: an exact quote, then pieces where your words sit side by side, then close together, then within about 150 words of each other. Further apart than that is not a match, and if nothing has your words that close, it says so and offers each word on its own. A long question may miss one of its words, so what to eat after a car accident still finds the passage about the accident. Small words like and, the and it are not search terms of their own, so they never crowd out the words that matter. Longer words that begin with yours (teaspoon for tea) count as weaker matches, and for a single word so do words that contain it (buttermilk for milk). Misspell something, or type just a piece of a word you half remember, and it suggests the word it thinks you meant. You can search within the category you have selected, and if nothing turns up there it offers to look through everything instead.
Paste a quote. If you remember something he said, paste the line into the search box. It looks for those words in that order and shows you the recording it came from, even if your memory of it is not word-perfect. Half a sentence is usually enough.
Narrow it down. Put "quotation marks" around words to demand that exact phrase, or put a minus in front of a word (milk -goat) to leave out anything that mentions it.
Sort by date. Results come back by best match. Switch to newest or oldest first to read his answers on a subject in the order he gave them, which is often how the thinking becomes clear.
Walk the series. At the end of every piece, two quiet links lead to the previous and next recording of the same kind in date order, so you can read the Q&As or workshops straight through the years without returning to the list.
Land on the match, not the page. Each result shows the piece of text that matched. Click it and you arrive at that exact moment in the transcript, with it highlighted. If a recording comes back to your subject more than once, the next couple of matches are shown right under it and the rest unfold on a click, each one a direct link to its own spot.
Read while you listen. Open any recording and press play. The transcript follows along, marking the passage being spoken, so you never lose your place.
Jump to any moment. Click any sentence and the audio jumps to where it was said. The slim scrollbar on the right shows where you are in the recording, with a marker for the spot now playing and a tick for each search match.
Step through the matches. Arriving from a search, the page highlights the passage you clicked and every other place that matches the same way. Click a result where your words sit side by side and only places like that light up, never every stray mention of one of the words. A small counter near the top steps you through them and sets the audio to whichever one you are on, so pressing play always starts on the words you were looking for. To see the weaker matches instead, click one of them in the search results. Clear the highlights with the ✕ when you are done.
Search inside one piece. While reading anything, press / or click the magnifier near the top right to search that page alone. It highlights the closest matches the page has, the same way. Enter moves to the next match, Shift and Enter to the previous.
Share a passage. Select any words in a transcript, book or newsletter and a small bar appears. Copy quote copies the words together with who said them and where. Copy link gives a short link that opens the page on exactly those words, highlighted, with the audio ready at that moment; in most chats and social apps the link's preview shows the quote itself. Quote card turns the passage into an image to post or send, split evenly across several cards when it is long. On recordings, Video clip makes a short video of the passage in his own voice with the words on screen.
It remembers where you were. Nothing to sign up for and nothing leaves your device: the archive quietly keeps track of how much of each piece you have read or listened to, picks up where you left off, and marks a piece as in progress or finished in the listing. Once you have started something, an In progress filter appears alongside the category chips so you can find your way back to it.
Focus on the words. On a recording you can fold the audio player away to read in full, then bring it back with the Player button.
Pieces without audio. A few Q&As and writings only ever existed as text. Those are labeled as such, and a short note explains where the transcript came from.
Light or dark. Use the ☾ / ☀ toggle in the top corner; the site remembers your choice.
Restored audio
The original tapes are decades old, and many carry heavy hiss, hum and room noise, recorded quietly on the equipment of the day. Recording by recording, the archive is being given a restored version: the background noise is stripped out with a neural denoiser, and the volume is raised to the loudness modern platforms use, so his voice comes through clearly even on a phone or laptop speaker.
Nothing is replaced. A recording with restored audio is marked Restored audio in the archive list, plays the restored version by default, and the untouched original transfer stays one click away: press the Restored audio pill at the top of the page (or the switch in the player) at any moment, even mid-sentence, and you are hearing the exact same spot in the original tape. Every word he spoke is preserved as it was recorded; the restoration only lifts it out of the noise.
Contact
This is a personal project, and it will always be a work in progress. If you have a suggestion, an idea, or a correction, I'd love to hear from you: maxim.v.kulakov@gmail.com.