Two souls dwell, alas, in my breast (Faust I)
The path to finding meaning in human life stands and falls with the realisation of what a person is, what their nature is: Who am I?
Even in ancient times, people were naturally aware of the importance of the answer to this question. The inscription above the temple of Delphi, where the prophetess Pythia oracled the fate of the questioners, reads: ‘Know thyself’ (‘Gnothi se auton’), and she did not leave it at this general admonition, but clarified it with another: Sophrosyne, moderation. This calls on people to control their typical thoughts of fear, anger and desire and thus embark on the path to liberation from suffering.
The material understanding of man as a purely flawed being at that time was followed by his characterisation as a being with a divine core (Plotinus). Later, church father Augustin took up the divine likeness from the story of creation. Nevertheless, Christianity regarded all attempts at such a spiritual self-interpretation as presumptuous: It emphasised a primordial distance between Creator and creature – Jesus excepted, of course – and has maintained this to this day (exception: ‘deification’ in the orthodoxy of the Greek church fathers: theodosia).
Due to the spiritual forlornness of man in the modern age, the search for self-knowledge seems to have been lost. Accordingly, he has also given up any attempt to achieve the associated human freedom from suffering in the here and now, as described in the wisdom writings, from Judaism to Hinduism, Islam, Daoism and, in particular, Buddhism: ‘The noble truth about the cessation of suffering’ – with the exception of Christianity, of course. Rather, he has resigned himself in a purely individualistic way to his unconscious existence of exclusive self-preservation and the self-evident existence of suffering. And he constantly tries to avoid it as far as possible and/or to fight it bitterly, with a complete lack of understanding of the meaning and logic of Jesus’ admonition not to resist evil (Sermon on the Mount).
But of course there is the decisive key to a successful, fulfilled life in which people realise their destiny. If I know how and who I am, then I know what and how I can lead my life successfully. Jesus paraphrases this in a flowery way with the formula ‘’… they will possess the earth.’
If I know how and who I am, then I know what and how I can lead my life successfully. Today, we find the thematisation of self-knowledge in the most diverse areas of human culture:
Literature:
‘As in every human being, two people lived in Nechljudov, the moral man who sought his good in the good of others and the animal man who sought only his own good and was prepared to sacrifice the whole world to this good …’ (Leo N. Tolstoy: Resurrection; Volume I, Chapter 14)
Painting:
In his painting ‘The Drowned Boy’, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch shows a light and a dark male figure walking side by side, which are supposed to represent the two sides of the same person, struggling to dominate this person. The artist himself comments on this as follows:
‘The division (!) of the soul, … which like two birds tied together each strive for his side … a terrible struggle in the cage of the soul.’ (Munch-museet. Oslo 2007)
Philosophy:
Arthur Schopenhauer on the question of who he was: “Man is in the heart, not in the head. It is true that we are accustomed … to regard the familiar ego as our real self. …But this is a mere brain function and not our own self, … which, when the [ego] perishes in death, remains intact.”
Islam:
The Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi wrote in the 13th century:
“Know: The human creature consists of spirit soul (ruch) … and instinctual soul (nafs) …” (The Wisdom of the Prophets II, Chapter Junus).
Hinduism:
The holy book of the Hindus, the Bhagavad Gita, describes the human being thus:
‘Twofold is the nature of all beings; partly divine, partly inferior.’ (XVI,6).
The Gita also says the following about the upper part of the human soul, the spirit soul (lower part: instinctual soul):
“I am the God, the eternal Self that indwells every being. … (X,20)
Christianity:
The important Christian theologian of the High Middle Ages, the Dominican cleric Meister Eckhart, writes:
‘Now the soul has two countenances: the upper one looks at God at all times, and the lower one looks down and directs the senses.’ (Sermon 49)
He comments on this lower face of the soul in the behaviour of everyday people as follows:
‘The outer man, that is the hostile man …, there is something in me that is against what God commands.” (Of the noble man)
In the view of the evangelist John, he lets the Nazarene speak as follows: ‘I can do nothing of myself.’ (John 5:30) ‘The Father does the works for me.’ (14,10)
In the 17th century, the Silesian mystic Angelus Silesius wrote:
“Two men are in me:
One wants what God wants,
the other wants what the world, the devil and death want.”
(Cherubinischer Wandersmann V, 120)
The vernacular:
It speaks crudely but aptly of the ‘inner bastard’ as the counterpart to the ‘conscience’ with its typical admonitions, the pangs of conscience.
Jewish wisdom:
In the second creation story, man is symbolically expressed by the two elements from which he was created, on the one hand from the material ‘lump of earth’, and on the other from the spiritual ‘breath of God’, the immaterial transcendent dimension (Genesis 2:7). This double face is symbolised by Cain and Abel (Gen. 4, 1-16, as also in the Koran in Sura 5, 27 ff.).
These and many other similar references show first of all the structure of the two parts of our soul life; some also mention the moral value. Although every person is somehow aware of these opposing components of their inner life, they do not usually have conscious control over their functions. Rather, most people automatically react to ‘ seeking only their own good’, as indicated by the 500,000 hit-and-runs per year.
The two parts of the soul consist on the one hand of the self-preservation instinct, the ego programme in humans, the instinctual soul, which primarily loves itself and then at most its own environment; it is located on the material level of existence. The other part of the soul is the love for all other people, the intuition, the inner voice, ‘the father in me’, the spirit soul, the gut feeling, the conscience. The spirit soul, the ‘better soul’ (Faust I, Study) is located on the divine level of human consciousness. It is the programme of love (see chapter 17) that relates not only to our own unconditional survival, but to that of all human beings. This is the (re)born Son of God who ‘seeks his good in the good of others.’ Can one express it more aptly than Goethe, who has Faust say:
“Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast:
The one holds on to the world
clings to the world with clutching organs;
the other lifts itself violently from the * Dust
To the realms of high ancestors.” (Faust I. Before the gate.)
______________________________________
* Nullity (derived from dust)
The human software
It is the bridge between God (spirit; metaphor: sun) and matter (body) and it has two faces. Substance and spirit meet in its division. Christianity calls the overcoming of the barrier, the descent of the spirit soul to the earthly plane, its physical experience, especially as an inner voice or gut feeling, and its physical power (‘guardian angel’) the Holy Spirit.
Spirit soul (nous):
Metaphor: ray of sunshine
Jesus’ choice of words: ’Son of God’
Spiritual part of the soul (physically tangible), surviving, not mortal.
‘Father in me’, High I, Atman, “guardian angel”.
Christianity calls the Holy Spirit its interpreter. Intuition, remorse, ‘first thought,’ gut feeling.
Three-way mixer (Biezl) https:/ commons.wikimedia.org/wiki
Driven soul (soul):
Jesus’ choice of words: Son of man
Material part of the soul, mortal.
Lower self, psyche, ego, reason, intellect and emotion. negative thoughts, devil in the desert (Christian), non-self (Buddhist). Worry, fear, anger, egoism, striving for possession, recognition and power; use of violence, impulses.
Mixing lever:
This distributor between the two levels of the soul is controlled on the one hand from ‘below’, from the perceptions through the sensory organs and the programme of self-preservation, but on the other hand also from ‘above’, from the programme of preservation of all, from gut feeling, from intuition, from ideas: ‘One only sees well with the heart.’ (St Exupéry: The Little Prince).
This mixer (Tauler: homo rationalis) is the central part of human consciousness. It decides in the conflict between ‘above’ and ‘below’ in the so-called ‘decisions of conscience’, which, however, are almost always controlled by ‘below’, i.e. by the ego, in 99% of people. In this respect, his ‘decisions’ are in reality largely unconscious and not genuine because they are not actually his own. In principle, however, the power of decision is not lost. These controls usually correspond to the proportions of the two instances, i.e. how many proportions come through to consciousness in each case, corresponding to the material and/or spiritual influence.
Jesus’ inner struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26:39) is a classic example of this agony of choice in which the consciousness is caught between the animal soul and the spiritual soul: He is assailed from below out of fear for his existence, asking that ‘this cup maypass from him “, i.e. torture and crucifixion; he is likewise subjected to the impulse from above, to divine guidance, and he decides (!) in favour of this, i.e. to do ”as you will.’
In at least ninety-nine out of a hundred people, the influence or understanding of the impulses from above is barricaded. If this seems exaggerated to you, you can work out that in a village with 500 inhabitants, for example, there would have to be five people who base their actions on ‘Thy will be done’.
The two identities of man
Recognising the split nature of the human soul is crucial for success in life. A comparison with animal life shows that animal life is controlled exclusively by the programme of unconditional self-preservation: hunting, eating, resting, sleeping, reproducing, fighting against competitors. Animals only have this one behavioural control. For them, there is no conflict between good and evil, and consequently they have no free will to differentiate between them. Members of the lion pride are therefore unable to look after other lions outside their own pride. And their lifestyle is at the expense of others. The animals live exclusively according to this programme of survival, they cannot escape. For them, the purpose of their existence is their existence.
Humans also live according to this programme. For 99% of them, the basic drive in their lives is also personal self-preservation, and if possible, as sufficient as possible. Thus, for most people, the unconscious purpose of their existence is their existence.
This manifests itself in all possible forms, from ‘having fun’ to Las Vegas to the countless activities of material world improvement. But while the material standard of living has improved over the millennia, people have remained envious, self-centred and jealous, they suffer endlessly from bad neighbours and mean superiors, from accidents, theft, robbery, rape and murder, and at a higher level from pandemics with hundreds of thousands of victims, terrorist attacks with knives, firearms or lorries, political and religious system conflicts with civil war or war, they suffer from every conceivable disease, they continue to lie and cheat and continue to use violence against children, partners, other groups and peoples. They allow themselves to be blinded by the fascination and the promise of salvation of technical and social progress and never dream of fundamentally overcoming their incomprehensible suffering, even though this would be the most natural thing in the world and even though all wisdom teachings speak of nothing else.
This clinging to the programme of the instinctual soul, to egocentricity, leads to a seemingly endless continuation of the life of good and evil, and therefore also of fundamental suffering. The apparent perspective of ‘wanting to make theworld a little better’ is limited to raising the material standard of living and has nothing to do with liberation from good and evil, especially liberation from suffering. The reason why this delusion continues to work in people’s minds is that it is often successful in individual cases (the momentary good from the realm of ‘good and evil’) and thus overshadows the worsening of the overall situation (climate crisis and threat of war). It is an illusion that is refuted on a daily basis, but is nevertheless more than successful and is called Maya in Hindu wisdom, the goddess of concealment (see chapter 23).
The showpiece of this ego programme is the so-called love of neighbour. People practise this love, which is what they call it, literally in relation to their immediate surroundings, to their life partners, children, parents, relatives, neighbours, friends, and indirectly also to members of their own group and people. It has nothing to do with the spiritual second programme and is worthless for human further and higher development. It is nothing more than extended self-preservation, the individual benefits of which can be seen in every pride of lions. Jesus reveals this rather rudely: “Only love those who love you? There is no reward for that. Even crooks do that.” (Mt 5:45)
This understanding of love in relation to one’s neighbour excludes love of strangers or enemies, especially due to racist reservations, usually out of unconscious fear for self-preservation. This egocentric understanding of ‘neighbour’ is understood and practised by people in exactly the same way: see hundreds of cars driving past clearly visible accident victims at the side of the road or countless bank customers who want to go to the cash machine and in doing so (surveillance camera) walk unmoved over the unconscious person lying there.
However, in contrast to animals, humans generally have a second programme. It consists of devotion, dedication and the preservation of other people: its characteristic is to go beyond the framework of family, friendship and clan as well as that of the people, as shown in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29 ff.). This programme is that of true charity, which recognises all people as neighbours. The animal does not have this second programme.
This second programme, which also serves the preservation of all other people, becomes clear in the example of this Samaritan, who – as a foreigner from Samaria despised and degraded by his Israelite surroundings – rushes to the aid of a helpless injured stranger by the roadside, thus showing unselfish devotion to strangers. This Samaritan compassion corresponds to the term ‘ubuntu’ from African cultures: ‘I am because you are.’ It goes far beyond the described love for one’s emotional and spatial neighbour, because it is neither individualistic nor competitive, but contains the mutual dependence and connectedness of all (!) people. It shows the theoretically immediate realisation that stable self-preservation can only function through the preservation of others. But practical realisation is prevented by distance and, of course, by one’s own ego.
Just as the Samaritan in question selflessly helps others, people also help others time and again. They are lifesavers, priests, blood donors, donors, sponsors, crisis workers, whistleblowers. Many of them follow the second programme more or less selflessly. This means that their purpose is – to a greater or lesser extent – other than just self-preservation.
As far as a mother’s care for her child is concerned, this is done less out of overarching humanity than internal humanity and predominantly out of unconscious self-preservation in an extended form, see the lion pride. But mothers, as well as saviours and helpers in general, are already on the first rung of the ladder to karmically overcoming egocentricity through their devotion. Nevertheless, they remain consciously within the framework of the material world; there is still no higher reference to the spiritual purpose of human life in general (see Chapter 10), which in Christianity is referred to as ‘perfection’ (Mt 5:48). This is about the true meaning of existence as described by all wisdom teachings.
The central content of the second programme is love for other people ‘as lovefor oneself’ (Mt 19:19): With ‘ubuntu’ it is clear that it is at least a clear alternative to self-centredness. However, love for others ‘asfor oneself’ always involves sacrifice – over and above preferential love – both in terms of hardware and, above all, software, such as fundamental forgiveness and love for strangers.
– Judaism, Leviticus 19:18:
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself…’.
– Islam, Koran, Sura 41:34:
“Repel evil with that which is better, then he with whom you live in enmity will become like an intimate
friend and counsellor.”
– Hinduism, Bhagavad Gita, XIIIth canto:
Verse 17: ‘The spirit of life dwells in every heart …’
Verse 28: ‘He who understands him as the one whodoes not revile his self in the other self. Thus he walks the path to the heights.”
– Buddhism, Dhammapada, verse 5:
“In this world / enmity is never put off by enmity. Through non-enmity/ enmity ceases.
enmity ceases.”
– Daoism, TaoTeKing, verse 49:
‘The heart of the wise beats within all, therefore he is equally kind to the good and the bad.’
– Christianity, Mt 5:44:
‘Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you.’
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
However, the crucial addition ‘as to yourself’ is a foreign concept for 99% of people. Because it is not possible for me to treat all other people as I treat myself at the level of exclusively material consciousness. Cain sends his regards. ‘As with oneself’ presupposes a level of spiritual consciousness at which the beginning of forgiveness of all things and practised love of one’s enemies can be found. This means – not immediately obvious – the central factor of sacrifice. It is not just about giving money, energy or time, but above all about not striking back, not worrying, giving only in secret (Mt 6) and all other impositions, such as those contained in the Sermon on the Mount. It is the surrender of negative thoughts and the selfish will, of self-centredness.
On the one hand, being there for others is nothing more than a job for some people in corresponding fields of activity, but on the other hand, it is also a vocation for many, which enables the devotion and dedication for others that is inherent in them. But what a level of understanding, consideration, protection, caring and boundless forgiveness it requires to ‘love others as yourself’. This is a stab at the heart of the personal ego and requires a great deal of ego sacrifice, as shown by the great role models such as Gandhi, Buddha, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Mandela (forgiveness), Janusz Korczak, the US Army medic Desmond Doss, Mother Teresa or Malala, but also many ‘normal’ fellow citizens who have repeatedly and consciously paid for their devotion with their lives, such as Franz Jägerstätter (executed in 1943 for refusing to do military service) or Arsaccharis. conscientious objection) or Arland Dean Williams Jr.
(At first glance, the arbitrarily set percentage of 99% seems hugely exaggerated, but if you consider that there would have to be 5 such ‘enlightened’ people in a small village of 500 inhabitants to fulfil it, then it becomes clear that it is more likely to be an understatement).
The level of all-love (see chapter 17) refers to an understanding of the spiritual unity of all people: it has nothing to do with earthly feelings such as affection. It is ‘only’ about recognising the spiritual substance inherent in one’s own (!) self and that of all other people. It is about recognising the ‘eternal self that is inherent in every being’, which does not ‘revile its self in the other self’.
This level of love does not refer to the material part of the soul, but only to the spiritualpart (see below). It means that it contains the realisation that even the most brutal human being is a son of God, even if his access to this disposition is completely blocked. (Of course, any self-evident punishment for a misdeed remains on the worldly level).
The higher level of love contains the awareness of one’s own spirit soul above the dimension of matter with the instinctual soul. It is the conscious realisation of the unity of one’s own spirit soul with the spirit soul of the other person. It is the decisive ladder to achieving the awareness of the unity of all being.
In Christianity, this level of love is essentially demonstrated by Jesus’ way of life, in Buddhism by Siddharta Gautama, for example, but also much more concretely by Mahatma Gandhi, for example. However, it is alien to the vast majority of people. The reason for this is the associated unconscious fear of jeopardising one’s own self-preservation. After all, it would mean practically standing up for strangers, just as you would want to do for yourself, i.e. for your own preservation, if you were in their place (Golden Rule).
However, this does not mean – as far as the problem of migration is concerned, which is always topical in modern times – opening the floodgates to uncontrolled immigration. On the contrary: because a disorderly influx of mass immigration, especially into existentially attractive areas, quickly leads to the overpopulated collapse of the whole, caring for impoverished foreigners ‘as for oneself ’ can only consist of making a collective effort to provide decent living conditions for those living there in their previous places of residence – just as one would wish for oneself as a person affected there. But people are currently a long way from such a self-evident solidarity in the sense of global humanity.
We are born with self-preservation, the unconditional survival instinct, of course: it is a necessary basic programme that enables us to overcome crises, find solutions, protect our children growing up, and so on. However, for the 99% mentioned above, this basic programme develops into exclusive egocentricity, which remains trapped in the described framework of animalistic, selfish ‘love of neighbour’, driven by instinct and without understanding. Humanity that goes beyond the framework of the self-centred environment is unconsciously blocked in people by the first programme of exclusive self-preservation. With their egocentric behaviour, people are ‘only’ tools of their instinctive soul, the control of self-preservation, which leads to people behaving ‘more animal-like than any animal’ (Goethe: Faust I, Auerbach’s Cellar): Animals do not build concentration camps.
The fact that people live in ignorance of their inner control(s) and also of their potential to change the distribution lever is the reason for the enlightenment endeavours of the Bible, Gita, Koran, Dhammapada, TaoTeKing and so on. The Sermon on the Mount, for example, calls on people to make this 180° course correction through love of enemies and comprehensive forgiveness.
And even if people generally have no awareness of true love of neighbour in the sense of the Golden Rule, as a result of the unconsciously drilling ‘second’ programme and their tangible role models, they find themselves in an equally unconscious dichotomy between love of self and love of others, a dichotomy that is unknown to a lion and its pride.
In literary terms, Robert Louis Stevenson attempted to deal with the division of the human soul in his novella ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, even if he only sees it on the horizontal plane and not the vertical.
There have always been forms of expression for the two sides of the human soul, such as the prehistoric lion-man from the Hohlenstein, the ancient Greek Minotaur or the centaurs. They express an image of man that shows a kind of cross between animal and god.
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This also applies to the magpie symbol in the Enlightenment novel ‘Parzival.’ The magpie, with its black and white colouring (not speckled and not grey either), appears again and again in the course of the plot and shows the constant more or less conscious conflict between the two opposing soul instances. But of course there are also depictions that focus only on the dark part of the human soul, the ego, as Goethe shows with the example of Faust and calls Mephisto.
Realising one’s split soul means increasingly suppressing the material part, that of the mammal, and gradually activating the spiritual part. Buddhist wisdom calls this ‘recognising both worlds’ (Dhammapada XIX, 269). St Paul calls this ‘daily dying.’ By this he does not mean a biological withering away of the body, the ‘hardware’, but the material part of the software, the instinct of self-preservation, which must be reduced in order to unfold the spiritual soul, the software of the Son of God. In practice, this is usually initiated through meditation, which practises the suppression of egoistic and therefore always fear- and revenge-filled whispers, thereby increasing receptivity to the inner voice, intuition and gut feeling. This leads to overcoming ego behaviour more and more through service, through self-giving for others, with the focus on strangers. Self-giving for one’s own partners or children is the horizon of the animal world, can be done by anyone and also has great earthly significance, but is worthless for ego death.
Oleksandr Chaban: In a human being is good and evil … Who are you, human? iStock 94401140
In ancient Greek mythology, the activated spirit soul of a human being is referred to as a ‘demigod’, for example by Heracles. Very few people have any idea that this actually refers to every human being, even though this spiritual potential is often walled off, even completely in many cases. However, the term demigod primarily refers to those who actually face up to their inner conflicts (attacks of selfishness, envy, greed, hatred, etc.) and, with increasing awareness of the power of their spiritual aura, successfully take up the fight against their animalistic software.
Everyone has the potential of the demigod or child of God because they are the owner of the divine spark, whether they realise it or not. Everyone has the spiritual potential for self-knowledge and self-liberation: ‘You are gods and all children of the Most High.’ (Ps. 82, also John 10:34) From this it is clear that spiritual development, transformation, enlightenment or whatever you want to call the attainment of a higher consciousness is the very essence of man; no special talent is required for this.
Figure emerges from the cosmos. Bestdesigs. iStock 1099434540
But no one has told us that each of us is unique, divine and fascinating at the core of our being: ‘ What good would it be if I were king and did not know it?’ (Meister Eckhart: Sermons 15)
The churches in particular have focussed exclusively on dwelling on people’s sinfulness. The teaching of Jesus to show people ways to perfect themselves (“You are all gods! You will do even greater things than I’, John 14:12) and to exemplify them was nothing more than presumption, arrogance and arrogance for them. Their understanding of man was that of a creature, that of a purely earthly creature with ‘primordial distance’ from the Creator God. With this constant devaluation, they tried to suggest their own superiority and expand their position of power. This is why they wisely hushed up any enlightenment, such as that provided by Meister Eckhart, and suppressed it by force if necessary. And it is also why they persecuted and, if possible, killed the Cathars, Johannes Tauler (‘God-like nature of our spirit’) and Joan of Arc.
The story of creation gives the reason for our divine origin: it is our likeness, i.e. a relationship like that between father or mother and child. It may not be equal to adults, but it is on the same level. In contrast to other mammals, this is associated with creation potential. For the ego in the outer human being, however, likeness is not enough. It wants to play God and achieve equality: ‘above everything in the world.’
Of course, humans have creative power, but only from developments and not from principles. These were already there before man, like relativity before Einstein. Humans can create the design of life through genetic manipulation and cloning, but not life itself. Dr Viktor Frankenstein sends his regards.
The idea that humans have a divine core does not seem very credible in view of their predatory behaviour and what they are doing to our planet and their kind. Modern man in the age of globalisation faces a myriad of threats from ‘others’, such as competitive pressure, attacks, job insecurity, streams of refugees, burglaries, drug use and religiously motivated violence, etc., in which it is difficult to discern the aforementioned divine heritage. And yet it is also part of everyday life that incredible talents, brilliant achievements and sacrifices for the common good can be observed. These are the great role models of human history, who are not to be understood as exceptions, but as examples of the inner potential in every human being, similar to parents for their children. Every day we witness the incredible abilities, talents and courage that lie within human beings, such as lifesavers, healers, scientific talents, gifted leaders like Mandela or Gandhi, social angels, and so on.
Humans are the only living beings with the capacity for vertical transformation. Neither a rose nor a lion can do this. And animals, as I said, cannot break out of the animalistic programme of self-preservation. Only humans can develop higher spiritually. Goethe, the master of poetic summarisation, puts it in a nutshell:
“If the eye were not sunlike,
it could never see the sun,
were it not for the power of God within us,
how could the divine delight us.”
(Tame Xenia, 3rd book)
The material-spiritual nature of man
| God (spirit) |
| Soul (nous); Holy spirit with all-love ————- mix————- Soul with preferential love |
| Body |
The diagram shows the dual nature of the human being in the form of matter and spirit: On the one hand, it is the material identity with physical body and the thinking and emotional life. The latter (psyche) contains the control of self-preservation through the instinctive soul with mind, feelings and memory. It is the animal part.
The higher part consists of the spiritual dimension with the divine intuition, the gut feeling, the inner voice: ‘You can only see well with your heart’, as Saint-Exupéry puts it in The Little Prince.
The bundle of instinctual soul and spiritual soul is the bridge between matter (body) and God (spirit). Biblical terms for the animal and spiritual parts are ‘son of man’ and ‘son of God’.
As far as the Son of Man is concerned, Matthew writes: ‘The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.’ ( 20,28). Paul comments on the Son of God: ‘Whoever believes in the Son of God bears witness within himself.’ (1 John 5:10)
An awareness of the spiritual second identity – i.e. beyond the egoistic instinct of self-preservation and emotional love – this awareness of the soul power of spiritual love (see chapter 7) is only present in most people, but completely blocked. Their self-awareness amounts to perhaps 1% of their entire way of being. For a level of spiritually controlled life (‘Thy will be done!’) would be recognisable through freedom from all suffering, all worry and all fear (Job 42; 5,10,16).
Materially orientated people believe that they only consist of mind, feelings and, of course, the body. They are convinced that the mind is their main controlcentre. However, the fact that it is only a tool and is in turn controlled by inputs from ‘above’ (spirit) and – almost always – from ‘below’ (ego) is out of the question for them.
Of course, there are also many who ‘believe’ in the existence of a controlling soul within them, but without any consequences: Because, having left the church service, they continue to envy, covet, be jealous and lie. And the churches do everything they can to leave this contradiction unmentioned, because then their lack of success throughout the millennia would become clear. To cover this up in a makeshift way, their teaching postpones salvation to the realm after death: ‘post mortem.’ Of course, people realise this and therefore leave them in droves. Incidentally, all other religions emphasise the opposite of ‘post mortem’: ‘he has reached perfection here’; see not only Job (see above) or the Bhagavad Gita in XVIII, 46. Above all, however, the concrete experience of the many people who have taken the path of ego crucifixion and have reached their personal level of earthly perfection is decisive, clearly visible, for example, in sacrifice on the one hand and freedom from suffering on the other. In some cases, the personal sacrifice of self-preservation even goes as far as giving one’s life, as with Janusz Korczak, Arland Williams and many soldiers at the front.
Ignorance of one’s own higher identity is the cause of all suffering in this world, as the Buddha clearly recognised two and a half thousand years ago. We are biological mammals (‘sons of men’), but at the same time demigods, i.e. sons of God. We are an expression of the mammal’s instinctual life, but also an expression of the divine power of love that the hand recognises in the glove. Accordingly, Jesus emphasises: ‘You are all gods!’ (John 10:34). The fact that we live in a vale of tears is the result of our unilateral ignorance.
What would have happened if people had been aware of their divine heritage, their divine identity (alongside their animal identity) from the beginning of their earthly existence? The enlighteners were there: Odysseus, Heracles, Jesus, many prophets, martyrs, Plato, Plotinus, Ibn Arabi, Nanak, Buddha, Lao Tse, Maimonides, Meister Eckhart, Goethe through Faust, Gandhi, Mandela, Mother Teresa, Eckhart Tolle, many others. However, people have never seen these signposts as examples of their own hidden potential, but as exceptions from some other star that can only be confronted with wonder and adoration. This is why the Hindu monk Vivekananda challenges every human being:
“Do you know how much power, strength and greatness lies hidden within you? Man has only revealed an infinitely small part of his real power. Anyone who thinks he is small and weak is mistaken. Do you know everything that lies 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. Recognise who you really are, the all-knowing … soul that is not subject to death. Remind yourself of this truth day and night until it has become a part of your life and determines your thoughts and actions. Remember that you … are not the sleeping everyday person. Awaken and arise … and reveal your divine nature.”
However, as long as the self-knowledge of each individual in relation to himself as a divine image is missing, the lower animalistic behaviour characterised by self-preservation dominates. This is precisely the reason why the self-centred person can fall ill, have desires and fears, lie, cheat, torture and kill.
Lower ego and higher ego
The Nazarene’s statement ‘I (?) am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6) can certainly not refer to the part that knows of itself: “I (?) can of myself do nothing “ (John 5:30), because ”it is the Father in me who does the works ’ (John 14:10). This material ego, which can do ‘nothing of myself ’, could never be the part of the Nazarene that embodies and brings about truth and life. Due to the lack of clarity about the divine part of our identity, the word ‘I’ was mostly used to refer to the material side of the Nazarene, to his person, although he himself testified in various places that he was not to be respected as this person, as an external human being, as a glove, as a ‘little I’:
‘If I testify of myself, my testimony is not true.’
‘God does not look at the person.’
‘A person sees what is before his eyes, but the Lord looks at the heart.’
Furthermore, he only uses the term ‘Son of Man’ when making statements about himself as a person.
An ‘I’ as path and truth could therefore never be the material I of the person of the carpenter and rabbi, i.e. by no means the small I, the survival-centred part of the person in the form of the instinctual soul. It had to be the divine soul in him, the other part, the immaterial, the mighty high I from Ex. 3, in which God names himself. (‘I am who I am’), the Christ in man. (It is that instance, the inner voice, which the Quakers call the ‘Inner Light’). The Nazarene thus refers his utterances at one time to the material part of his soul, at another time to his divine part; he often does not emphasise – see above for exceptions – whether he is referring to the ‘lower’ part of his soul or the ‘upper’ part. It therefore sometimes takes a closer look to recognise the half of his identity that is meant, as can be seen in his statement on ‘way, truth and life’.
For good reason, he does not say: ‘God is the way, the truth and the life. ‘ Because the former is the indication that it is about the divine soul directly in him and not about a god somewhere far away up there. He continues: ‘You will recognise the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ He does not say ‘I’ will set you free!
Jesus also never said that he was God , he emphasised that he had him in himself, that he was his expression or realisation. From the very beginning, the churches have used this saying as if Jesus were the only person who would embody this way and this truth. This is not only contradicted by a number of his own statements:
‘The kingdom of God is within you.’
‘He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.’
Jesus was indeed the great beacon of Christianity, but by no means the only one valid worldwide. His teaching of self-knowledge in relation to the divine part with forgiveness and love of enemies can also be easily found in the Hindu original texts of the Vedas, especially in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘ I dwell in the heart of every man.’ (XV,15) The Islamic mystic Ibn Arabi comments on a saying by Mohammed with the same substance: ‘He who knows himself knows his Lord.’ ‘Look within, you are the Buddha’ is attributed to Siddha Yoga. The same content can be found in the ancient Chinese Tao Te King (Daodejing): ‘He who, striving for clarity, looks within, arrives at … truth.’ (10)
Because the ‘breath of Godisbreathed intoman’ (Gen. 2:7), it is true for everyone that the I in him is ‘the way, the truth and the life’, regardless of how strongly this inner light is either unfolded or blocked. Jesus expresses this polarity of man, on the one hand the animal, on the other hand the spiritual man, by saying about himself: ‘Of myself [person] I can do nothing’, ‘ the Father in me [intuition] does the works’. (John 5:30; 14:10).
As the concept of the soul has given rise to countless interpretations (see Wikipedia), Goethe’s choice of words of the two souls in one breast is taken as a basis here: The intermediate realm of the soul (nous and soul) with precisely these two parts of the soul, the instinctual soul and the spiritual soul, is said to be located between the spirit and the body.
The human being is a bridge between spirit and matter, a two-faced bridge between intuition and logic, between divine and animal heritage, between idea (Plato) and reason, between the ‘inner man’ (Paul in his letter to the Ephesians 3:16) and the outer person (son of man). Intuition corresponds to the sunbeam of the sun, which provides man with light (knowledge) and warmth (love). Almost all people live with the rule of the instinct of self-preservation, the ‘son of man’. The mixer, the human consciousness with the mind as its instrument, decides which inspirations it follows, whereby ‘decisions’ also includes unconscious behaviour.
Jesus always tried to distract from his person through his inner intuitive way of life, the ‘Father in me’ : ‘Why do you call me good, no one is good but God!’ Finally, he also expresses the difference between the two instances in man by addressing his inner God as a person with his material consciousness (Mt. 26, 39 ff.). Its existence was expressed in the Gita five hundred years before the Gospel.
The churches avoid teaching the direct individual access of each individual to his divine soul, the path of all spiritual seekers. The churches also suppress other statements from the Gospels, labelling them ‘mistranslated’ or attempting to reinterpret them:
‘I live, yet not I, but the Christ lives in me.’
‘Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you.’
The reason is obvious: if they were to recognise that this perfect self is in every human being, they would lose their monopoly on being authorised to access God and lose their social power in one fell swoop. Therefore, for them Jesus must be the only Son of God (sole) in the sense of, for example, ‘the only survivor’. Of course, it is then annoying for them: ‘You are all gods.’ (John 10:34) Their invention of making the only one out of his uniqueness (exceptional), as with Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, Moses or Lao Tse, distracts from the fact that every person is unique, but an outstanding special case is therefore not unique. In this way, they want to successfully distract from the divine potential in every human being, no matter how barricaded it may be in a completely empathy-free murderer, for example. The absurd invention of the one and only, in contrast to the great prophets of all other religions, still attempts to prevent the individual from turning inwards when determining their own identity. It wants to direct attention outwards to the person, i.e. away from the guidance of one’s own inner voice and also away from the statement: ‘He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world!’ (1 John 4:4 ). (1 John 4:4), as Paul clearly states. That is why it is so important for them to heed Jesus‘ admonitions on the subject of “Know thyself”, such as ’You are all gods!” (Ps. 82:6; Isa. 41:23; John 10:34) ‘and will do even greater things than I’ (John 14:12).
This is why Christian organisations used to immediately execute anyone who claimed to have a kind of divine spark – the ‘inner light’ – i.e. as someone who had recognised their spiritual identity in addition to their earthly identity, such as Al-Halladsch, Joan of Arc or, remotely similar, the Cathars and, of course, Jesus. In this respect, for them it is a matter of avoiding the connection between the sons of men and ‘even greater works ’.
Any emphasis on the human characteristics from Jesus’ career is not so much desired by the churches:
– His going crazy in front of the temple, his overturning the tables of the money
changers,
– his agony of conscience in the Garden of Gethsemane ,
– his apparently still existing doubts on the cross: ‘Why have you forsaken me?’
Rather, it is always about absolutising his sonship of God, although Jesus himself avoided this wherever possible (‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except the one God!’ Mt 18:19).
The anger of Scottish Presbyterians towards the Quakers can be seen in the following outburst: ‘Cursed be all they that say any man hath a light sufficient to lead to Christ’ (Paul Held: The Quaker George Fox. Ch. 10)
All these statements show that the imaginative teaching of the Christian churches that Jesus is the only owner of the ‘Father in me’ is absurd. However, until today it has been very easy for them to maintain this cult of personality as a means of power, because the awareness of one’s own likeness is not so easy to achieve. And the churches have suppressed all efforts to do so. A clear example of this is their treatment of Meister Eckhart, who said about Jesus (Wikipedia) that his:
“human nature is… no different from that of any other human being, … indeed an unequalled model, but by nature not different in principle from other human beings. In principle, everyone is capable of realising and accomplishing what Christ realised and accomplished.”
Eckhart was cursed by the Pope for this. Today, the churches no longer have the curse, at most the withdrawal of the church’s teaching authorisation, as with the reformer Hans Küng; but any teaching that ‘everyone has an inner light for spiritual self-knowledge’ would still be existentially poisonous for them. This applies all the more to the fact that personal self-knowledge with, so to speak, sonship of man and sonship of God is an ideal approach to the spiritual realisation of all other people (love of enemies).
No other religion has come up with the idea of exalting its great prophets such as Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Lao Tzu or Krishna in such a qualitative way, let alone declaring them to be the only ones in the world and thus devaluing other religions: ‘Seek first the kingdom of God, and all things will be added unto you.’ The churches should explain to people what is meant by seeking, how it is practised and what the results must look like (see chapters 8 ff.), and not always after death, but in the here and now.
It cannot be repeated often enough that it is not the ecclesiastical persons who are the actors, but the ego programme of the self-preservation soul, which is no less effective in them than in all other people and which Hindu wisdom calls Maya, the goddess of concealment.
Although Jesus emphasised all the characteristics of likeness (Gen. 1:27), i.e. the filiation of all people, the churches want a god somewhere up there to solve the problems, the internet is full of these views:
– ‘Lord, make haste to help me!’
– ‘Jesus – the problem solver.’
– ‘Jesus Christ – the solution to the problems of our lives.’
– ‘Jesus is more than a solution to problems.’
However, the wisdom of all religions, especially our own experiences in everyday life, show that the solutions to all illnesses and other everyday problems are within us: ‘It is I, the Lord, who am your physician’, Ex. 15:26) by which is meant our inner spiritual identity, the Son of God, the inner voice, the gut feeling. They teach that we should ‘look within’ and consciously use our ability to open the floodgates in order to release our spiritual guidance in relation to solving material problems. They usually ‘only’ show us the map to the solution, which we then have to follow under the guidance of this pilot, but they also repeatedly intervene directly and materially in the processes (see below)
Everyone knows the two inner voices, the higher one as gut feeling, idea, intuition, flash of inspiration etc., the negative, corrosive one as fear, inferiority complex, arrogance, despondency etc., which then express themselves as negative emotions. However, most people are not aware of the possibility of being able to consistently switch off the barrage of negativity and its intrusion into their consciousness. There is also a general lack of clarity about why this barrage exists in human life in the first place (see Chapter 13) and that it exerts a decisive influence on our life’s destiny. This is why George Bernard Shaw’s bon mot is so apt: ‘Man is the only creature that has a bad opinion of himself.’ (That this fatal self-assessment is the decisive tool for overcoming it, see Chapter 13.) This applies first of all to the destructive effect of the behavioural programmes from ‘below’, which manifest themselves as mistrust, hatred, arrogance, inferiority complex, anger, etc.. But it also concerns the possibilities of following the impulses that are opened up from ‘above’, i.e. through the dialogue with the inner spiritual (!) voice, which are difficult to implement at first. True self-knowledge of the divine essence in the individual breaks through when we know what to do and when we (can) follow the guidance that says: ‘Thy will be done!’ (It speaks volumes that the usual abstruse emphasis in worship is: ‘Thy will be done!’ This ultimately happens anyway. Above all, the emphasis on Your will would be a disaster for the human ego.
The prerequisite for the fundamental solution to all our problems is that we increasingly acquire the ability to recognise our will as such, which, as Tolstoy quoted above, ‘seeks only its own good’, and to put it aside in favour of the will of the inner spiritual voice. If we then find more and more ‘our own good in the good of others’, then our crises in living together in marriage or family, with unaffordable housing or even crises such as job loss or abortion will collapse. Then the spiritual forces unfold their effect, as such examples from everyday spiritual life practice show. (See the relevant chapters for information on how spiritual living can lead us through existential emergencies).
The planning for the student exchange trip is in full swing. This is also my favourite class. What’s more, this endeavour is a matter of the heart for everyone involved, not least because it is also the graduation trip. Then I am told very clearly in meditation: ‘No.’ But even after asking several times: ‘No!’ It’s not about cancelling the trip, but only about my participation. I am very disappointed and organise a replacement for the trip leader, and a colleague is immediately available. The trip goes ahead as planned and, as reported later, is extremely harmonious and successful. The protocol for the day of the return journey contains the following sequence of events: Early in the morning, all the suitcases are packed and the bus to the airport is waiting outside the hotel door. Then a call from Aeroflot: All flights have been cancelled because the ash from the Icelandic volcanic eruption has reached the atmosphere over Central and Northern Europe, meaning that flights are no longer possible. An extreme phase of stress begins for the tour group and especially its leader: The visas are only valid for that day, the passport authorities, who are overburdened for such an event, cause difficulties upon difficulties, the hotel has to arrange emergency accommodation and insistently demands cash payment for the additional room costs, the telephone wires between the hotel, consulate and home school are running hot, everyone is glued to the television and, above all, a group of lively tenth-graders has to be amused, supervised, instructed and kept under control. What’s more, the uncertainty about the duration of this inclement weather is wearing on the patience of those responsible and the parents at home. After another six nerve-wracking days of wild back and forth, the group arrives home complete, but mentally at the limit of their endurance.
Me and self
The background to the fundamental difference between the two identities in terms of transience and timelessness has been known since ancient times: Everything related to the person is subject to extinction. In the Allegory of the Cave (see chapter 23), Plato shows the shadowy existence of man’s material personal identity. The primary identity as the Son of God, as the inner Christ (John 10:34), is based on the immortality of his life beyond physical death (Genesis 3:22; John 5:24; Suras 32:11, 36:24).
It is about the immortal divine soul within us, about the original and actual human being (Gen. 1:27, not: Gen. 2:7). Every human being is primarily a spiritual individual, ‘primarily’ because it is permanent. The name of this spiritual identity is I AM. We are soul as spirit and have soul as instinct, mind, feeling, memory etc., the latter with their corresponding housing, our body, just as weare – now seen purely materially – a person and have clothes.
People live as a matter of course with the awareness of their own identity as a person. It should be the other way round, but probably far fewer than 1% of people are aware of their second and actual identity as a son of God, as a self (in contrast to the ego): ‘What good would it be if I were king and didn’t know it!’ as Meister Eckhart emphasised.
The Jewish wisdom of the Tanakh (OT) expresses the facts of the inner God in the following form: God breathed his life into man, not human life and not just life as such. This is the background for likeness.
The Christ in me (Paul) – and therefore also in you – is also the essential background for Jesus’ admonition to love one’s enemies.
In the Christian New Testament, the spiritual core of man is expressed in the temptations in the desert (e.g. Mt 4:9). There, the tempter wants to extinguish all spiritual awareness of inner sonship with God through the temptation to worship only him, i.e. matter, the life of the good/evil world with all possible material glories. It is precisely this temptation that people are following more than ever. A current term for this is ‘secularisation’. One of the main reasons for this is, of course, that the churches have failed to prove their practicality and effectiveness, and not just in terms of overcoming evil (see chapter 13)
However, those who have mastered the sacrifice of ego-crucifixion usually lead a new life in security, a loving environment and material prosperity – in the eye of the hurricane, so to speak. He has left the level of the good-evil world. We can already see this in Job (verse 42), but above all in the published life stories of such beacons as Mandela, Gandhi, N. D. Walsch or Eckhart Tolle. The principle is, through the ascent into the spiritual dimension, through the return of the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15, 11 ff.), to be able to lead the remaining time of life without material good and without material evil, on the spiritual level of only good within the material environment.
The tempter (Maya, instinct of self-preservation, devil in the desert, Mephisto) on the other hand wants to reduce man to his shell. He wants to address himself exclusively to the ego. He tries everything to focus exclusively on the personal interesses of Jesus. It is his only task to ensure that people do not get the idea of recognising the principle of the spirit behind the surface of the material surface, the principle of the divine life in all people, that of the hand in the glove.
“It is not you who are alive,
for the creature is dead.
The life that is in you
makes you live,
is God.”
(Angelus Silesius: Cherubinischer Wandermann II, 207)
Instinctual soul and spiritual soul
Of the two souls that dwell ‘alas, in my breast’, one is the animal instinct soul (psyche), which expresses itself in the instinct of self-preservation. It controls my life by eating, drinking, reproducing, fighting for my livelihood, defending my territory, driving away competitors, raising my offspring and resting. Our domestic cat also has all these characteristics. Only our higher level of consciousness with the associated ability to reach the spiritual dimension distinguishes our mammalian constitution from it. The other soul, the spirit soul, wants to nourish, protect, guide and develop us vertically. When it is consciously recognised, there is no more (!) material lack and comprehensive protection. For anyone who has experienced this many times, such as falling off a ladder, being rescued after misjudging an overtaking manoeuvre, etc., these events are no longer coincidences.
After sport, I drive home in the evening in deep darkness and pouring rain. On a sloping road, I take the sharp left-hand bend that I know well. I turn the steering wheel to the left, but because the road is wet with rain, the back of the car swerves to the right. I jerk the steering wheel to the right, causing the car to swerve to the rear left. It then hits a young birch tree in the middle, shaves it off, spins around its longitudinal axis in the air, flies over the deep ditch to the right of the road and lands softly in the recently ploughed field, four metres from the edge of the road at right angles to the direction of travel on all four wheels. I am completely unharmed. After a few moments of trying to realise what has just happened, I get out of the car, get my sports bag out of the boot in the pattering rain, sink up to my ankles in the soft clod of earth, stomp towards the road, lower myself into the ditch, crawl up the ditch wall on all fours to the edge of the road. At that moment, I see headlights coming towards me. The car stops, it’s a police patrol car. The officers take me in, ask what happened and drive me home.
By recognising our spiritual soul, we become an inexhaustible stream of abundance for ourselves and our surroundings. The proof of this is the concrete experience that anyone can have who opens themselves to it, who ‘knocks’ and (!) receives an answer. The effect of the spirit soul only unfolds where it is recognised as a presence and at some point physically (!) perceived. When I have consciously entered into a dialogue with question and answer in this way, I have fullness and fulfilment. Then I no longer live by myself, but am essentially lived by my higher soul, which is a horrible idea for the ego in man; moreover, the usual view of “finally being able to do what I want “ is unconscious self-deception anyway, because it is the illusion of a person ”s self-determined behaviour, although it is nothing other than external control by the instinct for self-preservation.
The dialogue with our highest self cannot be established voluntarily and certainly cannot be earned. What we can do, however, is to build up the willingness to receive through meditation, i.e. to turn our gaze outwards and start the journey of consciousness inwards. The spirit soul is constantly knocking quietly to make itself heard, but most people are so caught up in the worldly dimension that they do not seek it out at all, nor do they hear it – with the exception of some people’s ‘gut feeling’ – let alone listen to it. As a result, they live in a world of scarcity, chance, unpredictability and fear.
“Stop, where are you going?
Heaven is within you;
if you are looking for God elsewhere,
you miss him for and for.”
(Cherubine Wanderer I, 82)
The belief that we are separated from our spiritual power or the ignorance that this inner voice exists at all is the cause of all our problems without exception, of every deficiency. Those who do not know that they are above all divine in nature are subject to the suffering and lack of the valley of tears, although it would only be a step towards complete self-knowledge. Every moment of worry is a demonstration of mistrust towards my inner voice. Even when we look ‘up’ – as many footballers do before they cross themselves and then enter the pitch – we have created separation in that moment.
The solution is to look inwards and become aware of the presence of our spiritual identity. Then we take a giant step towards unity, or at least union, like ink with a piece of chalk. Although the example is flawed because the ink also belongs to matter and not to the spiritual dimension, it clearly shows how much the activated divine influence changes the animal part. Then the aforementioned consciousness that Jesus refers to grows: ‘You are all gods and children of the Most High.’ Then our lives change as long as we approach all things in everyday life with this awareness.
I am like the branch of a tree: life comes into the branch from the tree, not from the surroundings. A branch cannot bear fruit on its own. There is not the life of one branch and the life of the other branches. There is only the life of the tree. That is why all people who lead a life separated from the I wither.
Nothing must come to us, everything must come from us so that freedom from suffering and abundance flow. Then (Isaiah 45) all obstacles will be levelled. This is the sensory-practical experience of all people who are cared for and protected in their everyday lives because they are guided in dialogue with their inner voice on a daily basis, because they allow themselves to be guided. When we ask our soul power for guidance, it provides, protects, guides and elevates us. To do this, we go into silence, into meditative contemplation, so that the cries of fear, anger and hatred of the small ego become quiet and our High Ego becomes conscious, audible and effective.
The search for my spiritual soul is the path to true self-knowledge and self-realisation and at the same time to individual happiness in the here and now. Those who recognise it have life and full satisfaction. Then we are no longer responsible for our livelihood, just as the children of a loving father are not. That is his task. This does not mean that it is no longer necessary for us to work, but that we no longer have to fight for it. We simply ‘only’ do the things that come our way, even if this means considerable, sometimes tremendous effort. We no longer have to labour in the ‘sweat of our brow’ for our income, but we inherit. We are then no longer dependent on earthly conditions, but truly free. This freedom means liberation from causalities and development towards perfection. This is the reason why Jesus emphasises the goal of creation: ‘You shall be perfect’ (Mt 5:48).
He defines this requirement of perfection through the steps necessary for this (Sermon on the Mount) and explains it through the parable of the Prodigal Son (see above). Up to the fall with the low point with the herd of pigs (Lk. 15, verse 16), this parable applies to all people, but for the immediate ascent (verse 18) and for perfection especially for those who have chosen the spiritual path. It should be noted that they were generally driven to do so by earthly hardship.
The term perfection basically refers to a state that (see Plato) cannot change or improve any further. As there is nothing on the material level that is not capable of further development, a state of perfection is inevitably independent of time, which is described in several wisdom texts with the adjective ‘eternal’. This refers to the spiritual level. This development is precisely that of the Prodigal Son, the structure of which can be found in many religions, sagas, fairy tales, legends, novels, etc.
It consists of the three steps:
1) Birth in matter with abstinence from spiritual consciousness, but taking along the ‘inheritance’, the spirit soul (!). Then a fall into suffering with poverty, illness, separation, loneliness, complete earthly forlornness.
2) Then the phase in the ‘whale’s belly’ (Jonah), which can coincide with the beginning of the spiritual dialogue. It is the ‘dark night of the soul’ (John of the Cross), the deepest depression, the absolute hopelessness and at the same time the turning point, the letting go (actively) of previous earthly dependencies, but above all the passive experience of the deletion of all expectations, fears, retributions, plans, worries, desires, fears and other earthly contents of consciousness in favour of far-reaching liberation from them and complete serenity in terms of security, protection and provision through spiritual upliftment: ‘Whoever loses his life [ego] for my sake will find it! “ (Mt 16:25)
3) Return and further ascent into spiritual consciousness, promoted by freedom from fear, security, protection, provision and comprehensive love and harmony of life.
This sequence is found with Jonah, who is thrown into the sea, swallowed by the whale, who ‘cried out to God’ in its bowels and is then saved after three days. His ascent into spiritual consciousness is shown by the fact that he begins to preach.
The same applies to Little Red Riding Hood, who ‘goes astray’, is devoured by the wolf and is then freed and saved unharmed.
We can also see with Jesus that his earthly torments of the material ego level lead to the burial cave and then to leaving the vale of tears and thus to liberation from the good/evil level.
Job has the same fate, whose material suffering shows the futility of formal faith (“I had heard of you … ‘), who then humbles himself, thus defeating his ego (chapter 42), thus finding the spiritual direct dialogue (‘the Lord answered’) and then experiences his enlightenment (‘now my eye has seen you’), whereupon he is redeemed from his pain, completes his resurrection on a spiritual basis and reaps its rich fruits; in Job’s case, it also takes terrible suffering in the material world before he awakens with the spiritual dialogue. A modern choice of words for this achieved dialogue is, for example, that of N. D. Walsch: ‘Conversations with God.’
Parzival ‘s path is also that of man on the path to perfection: first he has to go through the disaster of his compassionlessness before King Amfortas, before only then does he reach spiritual kingship. His example, as well as those of many others, especially Jesus and Joan, make it clear that the path to spiritual enlightenment is individual and, as with Joan, works without the church and priesthood:
“I well believe that the Church Militant cannot err or lack. But I hand over and leave my words and deeds to God alone, who told me to do what I did.” (In: DIE ZEIT, No. 2, 05.01.2012).
Odysseus also undergoes the development to spiritual maturity with the three-step process, clinging to a beam and drifting in a raging hurricane, before being asked by the sea goddess to let go and give up the very last straw of his material existence: ‘Jump!’ He then drifts for three days in the raging waters and is finally washed up on the shore of his ‘home’. Although he has to fight through further serious conflicts, he now does so with spiritual awareness and thus to ultimate victory.
The same pattern can be found in the survival of Joseph in the cistern, in the liberation of Snow White from the glass coffin or in the ancient Egyptian tale of Osiris:
Public domain: Osiris-nepra.jpg Copy (The stalks of wheat symbolise the resurrection.)
In the self-sacrifice of the northern European creator god Odin (Wotan), he wounds himself with a spear and hangs himself upside down from the World Tree; but here it is nine days until he ‘findstherunes’, the spiritual vision and knowledge, the spiritual dialogue (In Job: ‘Now I have seen you.’); Odin ‘cries out’ and begins to ‘thrive spiritually .’
The Eskimo hero Raven carries out his self-destruction, i.e. his ego extinction, by asking the giant whale to open its mouth wide and jumping in by itself. However, he does not do this without taking his fire drill with him, which he uses this time to cut himself out of the monster after four days (Campbell: pp. 92, 200).
We see the same thing with Heracles, who throws himself into the mouth of the whale to save Hesione, cuts himself out of this kind of burial cave and thus achieves victory over matter.
Above all, it is the modern Enlightenment thinkers who take these steps in the experience of the Prodigal Son with a fall into the disaster of material life, the vale of tears. In Walsch ‘s biography, however, it is not three days, but a year that he spends as a homeless man on a park bench, so to speak, before his “Conversations with God” are opened to him.
Exceptions such as Joan of Arc are rare. This also applies to Goethe’s Faust, in which the path of the Prodigal Son is only shown as far as the pile of broken glass (Faust I), but then ultimately also the final goal of perfection at the end of Faust II, when the angels rescue Faust’s soul, which he had signed over to the devil: ‘Abduct Fausten’s immortal’. (Chapter Entombment)
Just about everyone on the spiritual path experiences the described sequence of experiences in which, through some kind of rubble heap of material existence, he learns to follow the guidance of the inner voice via the annihilation of his own ego ‘in the belly of the whale’ and thus the realisation of ‘Thy will be done.’
Like Buddha, Mohammed, Zarathustra, Mahavira, Krishna, Nanak or Laozi, Jesus showed us which steps to take (Sermon on the Mount). He pointed to self-knowledge as a divine being and also demonstrated through his behaviour how nafs, the instinct of self-preservation, the ego, can be broken through sacrifice.
This development towards perfection was fought to the death by the churches in the Middle Ages, and even today they remain silent about spiritual self-knowledge and perfection (exception: theodosia, see above). Some of their main tasks would be to show how people can fulfil the requirement to be perfect, what ‘striving’ looks like, what prerequisites are needed for this and what dead ends exist, such as formal blind faith.
Identifying with our High Ego is so difficult because we are completely unaccustomed to trusting and surrendering to an invisible entity. Rather, we believe that we are actually responsible for our life and possibly its destiny ‘ourselves’ as a person, although we are ‘only’ performers. It is also difficult to identify with our intuition because we are used to the powers of the external world from an early age. And finally, we have not even been made aware of their individual (!) existence. Although, everyone should know better that there is more than body, feelings and mind, namely our spirit soul, colloquially known as our gut feeling or conscience.
Our biggest enemy in life is the false perception of the ego, of me as merely a material person, which means that the much more important part of our holistic self-knowledge is missing. This view that I (?) am anything but perfect, as the churches have preached over the millennia, is an absurd simplification and absolutisation of our mammalian nature, a complete lack of understanding of the statement that we are created in the image of the Creator, which ultimately amounts to an insult to the Creator. Despite their expulsion from paradise, Adam and Eve did not lose their image and likeness status. In this respect, the first goal of life remains the attainment of contact with our higher consciousness, which reaches far beyond the earthly. Then the prince (our spiritual consciousness through a flipped ‘mixer lever’) has successfully made his way through the hedge of thorns (vale of tears, herd of pigs) to Sleeping Beauty (to intuitive guidance) like Odysseus to Penelope.
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Comments
Eva says:
That’s nice to have these facts described from so many different sources.
At the same time, I get the impression that the two sides are valued differently. The instinctual side is the evil one, and the one that rises to the ‘realms of high ancestors’ is the good one. But what would God do without the material, instinctive side? I reckon he would soon be pretty bored in his eternal peace, he wouldn’t be able to meet himself in the other and would probably soon be longing for the next big bang.
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jlang says:
You’ll find the answer in chapter 3. The drive side is there to drive us to the spirit side. It is the ‘evil’ part that … always creates the good. In this respect, there is nothing evil in creation, which is ‘very good’ (Gen. 1:31). The only evil is what humans do to themselves and the planet. The reason is misunderstood self-preservation. But more on this later orally.
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Kerrysek says:
Браво, мне кажется это отличная мысль
ИндивидуальныеПЭТ-Формы | https://novopet.ru/
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Eva says:
Dear Jürgen,
Your comments are very interesting. The many quotes impress me, you must be very well read! And they largely coincide with my IFS model, the work with the inner parts, the inner family. However, I wouldn’t agree with Meister Eckhart when he says that the inner person is the good one and the outer person is the bad one. There is a lot of good on the outside too!
I don’t like the black and white division between good and evil, because experience shows that good also produces evil and vice versa. And it always depends on your point of view: For the tiger, catching its prey is a good thing, for the gazelle it’s more evil.
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Claudia says:
I was very touched by this article, thank you very much for it and I would love to read more.
Kind regards
Claudia
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jlang says:
Hello Claudia, thank you very much for your kind comment. In fact, my daily experience is still and now more than ever that with every disturbance, with every problem, with every open question, I immediately go into the consciousness of likeness and then receive the solution, not always immediately, but always correctly (which then turns out to be the case).
Would you like more? You can have that, either a deepening of the statements on my website (these are, of course, strong abbreviations of the respective topics and also represent only about half of the overall concept) or answers to specific questions on your part.
Go ahead!
Greetings from the rainy Harz Mountains.
JL
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Claudia says:
Hello Mr Lang,
I found your blog in search of help‘ what is still important to me and how do I want to live my life in the future?’ Like you, I have been through some bad things and am now trying to give my life a different direction and am focussing on what I have always had. A strong sense of construction and a penchant for the spiritual.
I find your blog extremely interesting and, above all, very complex.
I still have a long way to go, but I look forward to every new page that you describe in your entries.
Thank you very much for that!
VG from the Baltic Sea, which is raining today.
C
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Eva says:
I wonder whether more and more people are actually awakening to this knowledge and whether the brutality of this world could change for the better as a result. I wish it could, but I can’t quite believe it, as I haven’t noticed any development in this direction since I’ve been in the world. I rather have the impression that things are getting more and more cruel. But maybe that’s only due to the one-sided news that you get pressed into your ears every day.
To the description above: In this description, the animals come across as very unenlightened, as lowly creatures.
When I watch my dog, I sometimes think that he can meditate much better than I can. Or a tree, for example! Who told you that it doesn’t meditate? And is possibly far more advanced in this discipline than humans? Huh?
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Eva says:
This is really very coherently explained and supported by many scriptures from around the world. What a difference single little words can make in interpretation if they are ignored!
Thank you for this impressive collection!
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Nata says:
Yes Jesus totally the wise God,wow, clearly that was his High I, he was talking to himself and then asked himself on the cross why he was hanging out there looking so beautiful. Why have you left me? Oh let the cup pass over! Do you want another way for me! Ohhhh chalice did not move x) . Wow how wise Jesus was, and his high ME, even today I still recognise him in the sweet TüTü.
Wow what a great soul plan and how wise his I was. It’s just funny that he was completely different and stupid and didn’t even understand his high I x) ‘why did you leave me?’ Waruuummmmm help me high ME, I am so stupid without you, but you are me?
Then why don’t I know how beautiful I am on the cross x).
So sarcasm.
If all people have a high ME, I’ll eat a broom.
It’s more likely that many are descended from disturbed apes, and the rest from something cooler. No, not everyone has a high I, and if they do it’s dead x) as stupid as they are x) IDIOTIC.
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RodneySlido says:
Прибарахлился: поменял взгляды на вещи.
https://www.threexvideo.com/super-hot-snapchat-couple-snapchat-username-sofia-kaylala/ | https://www.threexvideo.com/
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MarcusEcotT says:
Только настоящий друг может терпеть слабости своего друга.
—
ценавоенный билет | https://g0g0.net/
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Eva says:
I still have my difficulties there.
It would mean total surrender, and my control part is reluctant to go along with that. It feels responsible for ensuring that my earthly manifestation can live as long and pleasantly as possible. But the higher self may have other plans or none at all, everything flows somehow, influenced by billions of things that work together, such as a butterfly flapping its wings in China, and I live well or badly or I get infected by a virus and die. Accepting all this with the stoic devotion of a samurai is really asking a lot.
But it is probably the only salvation from the psychological vale of tears and the pain that only resistance to what is creates. So I will continue to practise bowing in humility before the great God who dwells within me and of whom I am also a part.
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jlang says:
The spiritual path is comparable to that of a soldier. The soldier receives everything from his employer: food, clothing, accommodation, a responsible job and everything else he needs. This also includes a partner, family life, friends, rest periods, etc. In return, he has only one thing to do: obedience, i.e. complete devotion to his spiritual leadership.
The only exception in this parallel is that he not only risks his life in the fulfilment of his orders, but surrenders it in every case; this does not refer to physical life, but to the animal part, the ego programme.
Translated by software