3. External diversity and internal unity of all people

The fingers of a hand are individually different, but they still form a hidden higher unity: the connecting element is the common blood flow, without which they would not exist. In this respect, the thumb and index finger are in reality more united than different: without the index finger, the hand would continue to function, but without blood flow it would die. Therefore, the flow of energy is on a higher level than fire is to smoke. Nevertheless, it remains only within the horizontal-material plane.

However, if we transfer the relationship between fingers and blood flow to life, then fingers correspond to humans, whereas blood flow with its energy corresponds to the existence of life on Earth. This relationship, on the other hand, runs vertically: The energy flow is spiritual, whereas humans are material. Blood flows through the entire human being, life through all living things on our planet. In the Bible, this is illustrated, among other things, by the story of creation (Gen. 2:7), and in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita it says: “Everything that lives … is my garment … I am the spirit within it.” (XI, 7)

This divine presence in humans, their life as such in the form of their soul parts—including their inner voice, their conscience (see chapter 1)—is emphasized in several places in Hindu wisdom, in which God Krishna speaks:

“I am the life of all beings.” (X, 29)
“I am the spirit of life in every body and in all worlds.” (XI, 9)
“The spirit of life dwells in everyone’s heart.” (XIII; 17)
“In the heart of every being rests the spirit of life.” (XVIII, 61)

In Christianity, this is described primarily in the Gospel of John;
“You are all gods.” (10:34) and “Father in me” (10:36),
“You will do even greater works than I have done. “ (14:12),
”the Father in me“ (14:10) and ”The Spirit of truth in you.“ (14:17),
”I in you“ (14:20),
”he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

Jesus and Paul usually address their followers directly—similar to Muhammad in the Koran—but in each case, the principle of the divine presence within human beings is expressed, which the great Christian mystics such as Angelus Silesius elaborate on further:
“Heaven is within you,
if you seek God elsewhere,
you will be lost forever.”
(Cherubic Wanderer (I, 82)

“It is not you who lives,
for the creature is dead:
The life that makes you live within you
is God.” (II, 207)

The Dominican monk and vicar general Meister Eckhart wrote in the late Middle Ages that every human being is divine in the depths of their soul:

“Here God’s foundation is my foundation, and my foundation is God’s foundation.” (Sermon 6)

He always speaks of the “spark of the soul,” the “light in the human soul,” which represents the imperishable essence of man, a part of the divine fire that is contained in every human being.

Basically, almost every human being has countless experiences with this spark of the soul within them: as a gut feeling, as a “first thought,” as a flash of inspiration, as a premonition, as conscience, and also as ideas: People think that their ideas are their own because they are unclear about the concept of the soul.

“Anyone who works in a reasonably creative way experiences that there is something at work that is stronger than their own will. … You can’t think up really good lyrics, they just come, they’re suddenly there. … My best lyrics were always wiser than me.”
(SPIEGEL 18/2018)

Keith Richards received the melody for “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” as he was waking up one May night in 1965.

Dave Stewart (Eurythmics) reports that ‘his’ melody for Sweet Dreams came to him “out of nowhere.”

Paul McCartney says he heard the melody for “Yesterday” in a dream.

Paul Simon reports on the creation of his exceptional hit “Bridge over Troubled Water”:
“I have no idea where it came from, it just came. One minute there was nothing there, and the next minute the whole line was there. … It came so suddenly.
I remember it was better than anything I had ever written before.” (nytimes.com/…/Upfront: PaulSimon/Oct.27,2010)

You don’t have to be Ludwig van Beethoven or Keith Richards to receive the tremendous diversity and power of your inner source of ideas, because people experience it almost every day, only they don’t interpret it as such, but consider it their own.

But geniuses know that their inspirations do not come from their minds. For there are experiences in our lives where we immediately realize that they could never have been products of our minds, because they lie completely outside our memory, our previous experiences, and our horizons for problem solving.

Leibniz said of himself:
“When I woke up, I already had so many ideas that the day was not enough to write them all down.”

Puccini said: “I don’t compose. I do what my soul tells me to do.”

Center forward Harry Kane says of his countless goals: “My thoughts completely shut down. Then the goal. How that happens. I don’t know!“

The understanding of the divine in the soul of human beings naturally led the Church to immediately accuse Meister Eckhart of heresy and have some of his works banned by the Pope as heretical (John XXII, March 1329: decree ”in agro dominico”). The accusers’ charge was that of “self-deification,” although it was clear from Eckhart’s sermons that, on the contrary, absolute humility was the basis of his insight.

For the churches, the idea that there is something divine in human beings was dangerous in another respect, despite Jesus’ statements above about “the one who is in you” (1 John 4:4): for their teaching that Jesus was the only mediator between God and man would collapse like a house of cards. The following passages about such a Jesus can be understood as an example of the creed of this teaching:

“The belief that there are others who could take his place or reduce him to the category of a religious leader would be to deny the central tenet of the Christian faith, namely that he is the savior of the world and there is no other. Christianity is also exclusive in the sense that it does not allow its followers to mix their faith with that of other religions. … He is not the head of a religion, but the head and king of humanity.”
(R. C. Chalmers; John A. Irving: The Meaning of Life According to the Five World Religions. Weilheim 1967. Original title: The Meaning of Life in Five Religions. Toronto 1965)

Apart from the fact that Christian theologians have never wanted to consider the difference between exceptional (i.e., as in unique) and sole (unique) in relation to Jesus, the question of Jesus’ identity, of “true God and true man,” raged for centuries in terms of content and power politics. One side emphasized the humanity of the man Jesus, who, however, was endowed with special gifts. The other side took the position that he was the embodiment of God in a mortal human being. A kind of compromise between “man-god” and “god-man” was the “two natures doctrine,” as in Martin Luther: “In the mirror of the little man Jesus, I recognize the true God.” This was – and still is today – a theoretically abstract struggle over the interpretation of biblical passages by councils, theologians, emperors, and bishops.

Yet these two worlds, spirit and matter, are actually present in people’s everyday experience (intuition, gut feeling, inspiration, inspiration, ideas), but the churches still limit higher life to Jesus in order to preserve their doctrine. They emphasize their view of him as the only savior of the world, thereby devaluing Buddha, Mohammed, Zarathustra, Mahavira, Moses, Nanak, Krishna, and Lao Tzu.

A teaching, on the other hand, that aims to uncover the divine “spark” in everyone—whether it is completely walled up or fully developed (“the one who is within you”)—as Jesus attempted to do, focuses on the individual potential for salvation in everyone, as the Hindu monk Vivekananda emphasizes:

“Do you know how much power, strength, and greatness lies hidden within you? Man has revealed only an infinitely small part of his real power. Those who think him small and weak are mistaken. Do you know all that is within you? Within you are unlimited power and bliss. Within you lives the world spirit, whose inner word is the only one you should listen to. Recognize who you really are, the omniscient soul that is not subject to death. Remember this truth day and night until it becomes part of your life and determines your thoughts and actions. Remember that you are not the sleeping everyday person. Awaken and rise up… and reveal your divine nature.”

The churches, on the other hand, have done nothing since at least the Middle Ages but harp on their believers as poor sinners, emphasizing their earthly vices in order to maintain their power, instead of building them up spiritually and showing them the apostles’ words about the greatness of the inner spiritual man: “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4) For those who deviated (“heretics”), there were the stakes.
These are now lost to them, and nowadays they can no longer afford to treat people as sinners. However, exclusion, excommunication, or the revocation of teaching licenses for critical minds (Küng) have remained. They still avoid the idea of pointing to “me in you.” Their creed of Jesus as the only Son of God remains unchanged. The idea that his doctrine of salvation reveals the inner Messiah in every human being and also contains tangible evidence that can be applied in everyday life is unthinkable for them.
When the Silesian priest and religious poet Angelus Silesius writes: “Heaven is within you; if you seek God elsewhere, you will miss him forever” (Cherubic Wanderer (I, 82)), this is far more than just any counter-theory. For the “heaven within you”, that is, the “Kingdom of God” (Mt. 6:33), the spiritual part of human consciousness, is a practical truth that can be sought and applied by anyone at any time: One can “knock” on the inner voice so that it “opens up” to one, one can listen to one’s gut feeling and become aware of its practicality in everyday life, one can prepare oneself for inner guidance through meditation, i.e., increasingly replace one’s own will with “Thy will be done,” etc.

As for everyday people, when it comes to the question of the unity of diversity because of the bloodstream, they are not concerned: they would say, at most, that only the function of the fingers is important to them, so why should they care about the blood? They do not see the difference between fire and smoke. But on the material level, a disturbance of the “bloodstream” (circulatory disorders such as gangrene, sclerosis, or calcification) would lead to serious diseases of the “hand,” and in the case of complete arterial occlusion, even to the death of the hand—or the leg: smoker’s leg. Just as blood flows through the fingers, so vitality as such flows through all living things. This relationship between “finger” and “blood” corresponds to that between the consciousness of material human beings and the divine (within them): it is the vertical spiritual relationship between human beings and God. The presence of God in human beings and their connection to him is called spiritual love—agape (Greek)—as described in chapter 17. If the divine in humans, which expresses itself, among other things, as love for one’s enemies, is not known, understood, or cultivated, there is a disturbance in the flow of energy: the result is called illness, violence, racism, war, and, more generally, plague, torment, and suffering, etc. (see chapters 12, 14, 21). This can be seen in the fact that when agape is activated individually, illness no longer exists in the individual. When activated on a collective scale, as in the case of Gandhi or Mandela, racism and violence dissolve.

The invisible higher unity of the fingers corresponds on the spiritual level to the unity of all human beings through the spiritual energy that is in everyone. It reigns in everything, just as the unified and common atmosphere is breathed in by all.

(Almost) all human suffering is caused by ignorance: it is overcome through the activation of spiritual consciousness, the awareness of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience in the individual: Even if the individual’s share in these factors is actually only a speck of dust, it has enormous consequences for his way of life, which is characterized by fulfillment, meaning, freedom from suffering, and protection:

“No evil shall befall you, nor shall any plague come near you.” (Ps. 91:10)

All those who have embarked on a sustained search for spiritual consciousness, i.e., the “Kingdom of God,” can report extensively on all the things that have not happened to them.

This is also evident in the many and often almost unbelievable rescues that everyone knows from the media and that some have experienced themselves, but for them these were coincidences and, above all, not a consistent principle.

Jesus calls the spiritual parallel of the “fingers” to each other, that is, that of one’s own spirit soul and then that of every other person, love of one’s enemies. It has nothing to do with human feelings of love, because it (agape) is neither about the physical person (“God does not look at the person” (Acts 10:34; Rom. 2:11; 1 Sam. 16:7)) nor about any sympathies, but about purely intellectual understanding (see chapter 17). Jesus’ drastic term therefore also makes it clear that it does not matter (“as I love you”) whether agape is developed and blazing in the “neighbor” in question, or whether it is completely blocked, as in the case of murderers. That is why the term is particularly misleading: without exception, every fellow human being is a neighbor. Jesus makes this reasonably clear in other passages, for example when he says: “You are all gods” or “You will accomplish even greater things than I have done.”

Everyday practice shows that from the moment of spiritual perception of the competitor, the enemy—whatever evildoer—the entire relationship in this microcosm relaxes and harmonizes or, in most cases, the opponent disappears from the personal environment.

(When practicing the spiritual view, the order is important: it is essential to start with yourself and concentrate on becoming aware of your own spirit soul, practicing communication with your own inner voice. Only then does it make sense to transfer or extend this spiritual view to others. The reason for this is not only Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 22:37-38, but also the fact that, in practice, one does not have a sufficiently stable basis in self-awareness if one were to start with 39. The Gita puts it this way: “Greater than the greatest work is always oneness with yourself.” (II, 49)

The fact that there is only one life force is expressed very clearly in Jesus’ love for his enemies. Without it, life as such would be incomprehensible. (In Hindu wisdom, the concepts of life, spirit, truth, and God are identical. ) The idea that there is my life and, in contrast, yours, and then others in other people, is a fallacy: anyone who stands at a grave and thinks that the life of the deceased, in contrast to their own, has now come to an end, fails to recognize that, as in a chain of lights, the luminous energy remains even when one light source fails. In Christianity—as in Islam and Judaism—the single, shared life is mainly expressed by mystics; in Eastern religions, it is a matter of course, as emphasized in many ways in the Gita:

“The spirit of life dwells in everyone’s heart.” (Bhagavad Gita XIII, 17)
“Free from suffering … is he who is mindful of the welfare of all beings and sees God in all life.” (V, 25)

“I reveal myself in many ways, namely in earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, and spirit—and I rule in beings;
this is my visible being. But now recognize also the higher, the all-animating,
through which I brought the worlds into being:
I am the source of life, recognize it, I am the source of beings, oh Arjuna.
I am the origin of all being, the beginning and end of the worlds.” (VII, 4-6)

Among Christian mystics, this is expressed in various ways, including by Meister Eckhart (“On the Unity of Things: Sermon 13”), Jakob Böhme, Johannes Tauler, and Heinrich Seuse, as well as the Silesian theologian Angelus Silesius, who expresses it in a unique lyrical form in his Cherubic Wanderer:

“It is not you who lives, for the creature is dead;
the life that makes you live within you is God.” (Cherubic Pilgrim: II, 207)

“See how a human being and God, a lion, a lamb, a giant, and a child
are one being in one creature.” (II, 212)

“Man does not have perfect bliss
until unity has swallowed up otherness.” (IV, 10)

“In God, all creatures live, float, and move. …
Why then do you still ask about the traces of heaven?” (IV, 71)

Consistently, the one life comes, whose concept is sometimes expressed as God, sometimes as life, sometimes as truth, and sometimes as being, as shown, for example, by the comparison between Judaism, the Tao Te Ching, and the Bhagavad Gita:

“And God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” (Gen. 2:7)

“Do we not all have one Father?” (Mal. 2:10)

“That knowledge which is blind to the unity of all being and imagines each being as separate from the others clings to the fallacy of multiplicity.” (Translation: K. O. Schmidt) (Gita 18:21)

“Whoever … looks inward comes to the vision of the unrevealed.
Outside and inside are different in name, but one in essence.
This oneness is … the starting point of all revelation.” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 1)

“Whoever knows himself to be one with all in spirit and consciousness is preserved from otherness and discord.
Those who look inward in search of clarity will come to see the truth.“ (10)

People perceive each other only as material counterparts – without ”sparks of the soul.” They do not see that the lives of these counterparts relate to themselves as the thumb relates to the index finger, and that only in this way can Jesus’ admonition to love one’s enemies be fulfilled. No thumb would ever think of betraying, injuring, or even “removing” its index finger, as people do with their competitors in economic life, with their killings, murders, executions, wars of annihilation, and genocides.

The thumb, on the other hand, “knows” that it and the other fingers are practically inseparable parts of the hand. Its separation from it would be its death. A symbol of this connection in Christianity is the parable of the Prodigal Son.

The common substance of our existence is the one life within us. It is our divine “heritage” that we are prodigal sons, first “squandering” our wealth, then ‘ruining’ ourselves, and only through absolute destitution do we “set out” and return to the Father.

Through our lives, we are connected with everyone and everything. Life is the unity of all being. Those who recognize and live this live in harmony with everything and everyone, living in a consciousness that Christianity calls the “Kingdom of God.” They are thereby loved, cared for, and comprehensively secured and protected. The practice of life of the spiritually enlightened and courageous under this umbrella proves this as a concrete daily experience.

Just as a string of lights can have different bulbs, some with 10 watts, others with 100, and therefore shining with different intensities, some with small sockets, others colored, etc., so it is the same energy that constitutes the life of the bearers. It is this energy that “holds the world together at its core. ” (Goethe, Faust I, Night) Without it, the string of lights would be nothing at all; it would be just lifeless plastic. The light bulbs are carriers of light, but not the light itself. We always identify with the form of the light bulb, never with its energy, our divine potential, especially our divine identity.

Almost all people identify only with their material being. That is why they do not develop an understanding of the change of forms: one is first a small child, then an adult, then an old person, but one is always life. And when the leaf of the tree withers and is cast off, the life of the tree does not die. The core of the human being is life, that is, the earthly form of spiritual procreation: God breathed his breath into the lump of clay.

I am essentially the same as every other human being, i.e., we have the same cause and the same substance, which the Islamic mystic Rumi illustrates as follows:

“Count a hundred apples or quinces:
They do not remain a hundred, but become one
when you make them into syrup.
The essence knows no division.”
(Mesnevi I, 685)

Every human being is closer to me in essence than a Siamese twin; like me, they carry within them the higher self (Ex. 3:14), the one life, intuition, conscience, and inner voice, whether they behave that way or not. Just as we breathe the same air, we all have one and the same life. Those who perceive their counterpart only as a person of flesh and blood and not also and above all as a spiritual/divine being allow themselves to be blinded by the surface. They do not see the hand in the glove. Thus, my relationship with others, especially with an enemy, reflects my relationship with the Creator. It would be like talking to a ventriloquist after his performance and addressing only the puppet on his arm.

However, this realization of unity does not mean, for example, throwing your arms around your enemy’s neck. That would be earthly emotion, whereas on the spiritual level it is purely intellectual understanding. On the contrary, it may not exempt him from his earthly punishment at all. It is simply “only” about understanding the common substance. Then – and this is the further development – the enmities between people disappear.

Looking at the outer person obscures the view of their inner essence. This ability will be referred to in the following as “seeing through” (Buddhist: “deep insight”). This spiritual view through the surface of the person to the hand in the glove is, as I said, a central component of loving one’s enemy. The shared life energy is the reason for the inner equality and brotherhood of all people, beyond all external diversity. The educator Maria Montessori implemented this principle in her preschool educational work:

“The secret of education is to recognize the divine in man…”
(Small Writings 4. The Position of Man in Creation)

The experience of the past millennia shows that the admonition of the Oracle of Delphi to recognize one’s true self (gnothi se auton) has not yet been fulfilled, not even to a small degree. But only with its realization is individual salvation from the “vale of tears” (Luther) of our planet possible. In other words, without recognizing one’s own dual nature (chap. 1), earthly (instinctual soul) and spiritual (spiritual soul), there can be no salvation for humankind. Beyond the “unconscious consciousness” of the mammal’s self-preservation, it is about the consciousness of its spiritual identity, about the “Kingdom of God,” which cannot be found anywhere geographically or in space, but only within itself. It is about the liberation of this very “imprisoned splendor” (Robert Browning: Paracelsus). This means leaving behind the path of the ventriloquist’s dummy, which tries to live without him.

This incarnation, understood in the true sense of the word, the awareness of one’s own inner essence, is found in a fable from Ghana, in which an eagle chick falls into human hands and learns the behavior of a chicken from the other chickens in the chicken yard. Only a knowledgeable person shows it how to use its wings, whereupon the now fully grown eagle, after many attempts, succeeds in flying and flies towards the sun (!).

MR1805: 3d Illustration with sea eagle iStock

In the film ‘Matrix I’, Neo embarks on the journey from ‘chicken’ to eagle, from small-time crook to the chosen one. This is the path that all spiritual teachers, trainers, masters, healers, etc. have taken to their destiny, as have contemporary authors such as Tolle, Walsch and many others. This potential is inherent in every human being, regardless of the number of stages or reincarnations it takes to travel this path.
The spiritual path frees you from the negative control of the ego, generates a significantly increased tolerance for frustration and brings about self-respect, a previously unknown sense of self-worth. You then become an expression of that instance that you actually already are, but which needs to be ‘activated’.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)