Someone who is ill is in contradiction to the meaning of life. Illness is a deviation from the meaning of life, i.e. from the meaning of existence.
Earthly man was created to give meaning to his existence. The story of creation refers to this as “building and preserving” (2:15). However, the current general practice of building, further developing and thus perfecting, does not prove to be a further development of a careful and responsible consciousness when we consider the Earth Overload Day on May 4, 2023, but rather a barely slowed further development of the overexploitation of resources, the pollution of the planet and the increasing poisoning of social coexistence. There can be no question of any subsequent “preservation”.
As far as the actual meaning of human existence is concerned, the means to this end is the realization of one’s own power over the earth as a decision-maker at the mixing lever (see 2.2.: Binary identity) and the appropriate use of it. In human consciousness, the influences from “above” and from “below”, that of devotional love and that of egocentricity, compete. The purpose of egocentrism is to subordinate thinking, feeling and acting to self-preservation. This is how 99% of people live. But all spiritual teachings on our planet demand the opposite, the victory of the spirit in the form of love of neighbor over the instinct of self-preservation.
If people now live the sense of “downward” into their own preservation of existence instead of helping and supporting in solidarity (see the example of the Good Samaritan), then such “building” of self-fitting worlds leads to destruction, as can currently be seen in such examples as the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine or currently in such initiatives as “remigration”, but also in even the smallest neighborhood or marital dispute. Then it turns out that the purpose of existence is to exist – as is the case with animals. It is as if in a school class the purpose of existing in this school class is to exist in this school class.
The animal only has this one purpose, its existence, from which it cannot escape; humans, on the other hand, have a second purpose, love for other people. He can pervert this love again by limiting it to partners, children, parents, friends and thus turn it into a preferential love that excludes others. This type of love is then an ego function because it is useful to him. It has nothing to do with love for other people.
Wisdom teachings therefore reject this interpretation and point to indiscriminate love for all, which is the only way to break out of the vale of tears (see the parable of the Good Samaritan). Jesus puts it in a nutshell in the Sermon on the Mount by preaching love of one’s enemies. However, this presupposes spiritual aspiration, as it is not possible for everyday people to love others, as this is the result exclusively of spiritual awareness. This principle is currently becoming more and more evident worldwide due to the increasing hostility towards migrants. The fact that global warming is massively increasing the flow of refugees is further exacerbating this crisis.
(This does not mean opening the door to all refugee flows, which would also be impossible; it would, however, be very possible to create living conditions through global solidarity that would make such movements superfluous. But the existing food programs, world hunger and development aid are not even a drop in the ocean).
Only through Samaritan love can peace, freedom from suffering and thus liberation from disease be brought about. And this does not happen collectively, but always individually.
The egocentric attributes for individual life in the form of words such as fun or happiness show the goal of “existing” as the comprehensive meaning of existence. This focus on self-love – as a result of spiritual abstinence – gives rise to illnesses as a corrective impulse. They are the consequence and expression of the substitution of meaning and being.
In the opposite case of indiscriminate (!) love, there is no longer any illness in the here and now. (However, there are always symptoms, because Mephisto wants to bring back the spiritual seeker, but at the same time provokes spiritual progress through hardening). Freedom from illness is not an assertion, a promise, a presumption or an assumption, but the experience of all those who have achieved spiritual dialog with their inner guidance through perseverance, trust, patience and constant meditative practice. For the individual, freedom from illness naturally also refers to the absence of suffering in general and includes protection from adversity as a whole (“Whether a thousand fall at your side or ten thousand at your right hand, it will not befall you.”).
Anyone who has had this experience and has had it several times (see the experiences with the volcanic eruption, the car crash and the canal crossing in the book) will recognize what spiritual proof looks like. Such evidence bears no resemblance to physical or mathematical evidence, because it does not fit into the principle of arbitrarily repeatable experiments. However, there are many published reports of experiences (From Saul to Paul; My everyday life with Christ; Gandhi: From silence comes the strength to fight; In the world you are afraid; The experience of cosmic consciousness: Bucke, Richard: “Cosmic Conciousness”; It was as if the angels were singing: Whittaker, James: “We thought we heard the angels sing”; What they experienced with God: “The guideposts treasury of faith”). In them, concrete people describe concrete experiences in and with the spiritual way of life, which not only show the countless paranormal healings, but also the protective shield in which the spiritual seekers see themselves enveloped – and this over decades – and thus also the liberation from illness. These experiences are so unusual, but at the same time not completely physically impossible, that everyday egos still manage to avoid the word miracle as far as possible by reframing it as “bordering on a miracle”.
These things are alien to theologians because their only support is textual exegesis. But this is worthless without tangible spiritual experience. But it is this experience of not suffering and no longer being ill that counts. However, anyone who has read a hundred books on tennis and researched, discussed and published extensively on the subject is still a long way from being able to play tennis.
The function of illness is to sound the alarm in order to encourage people to return. Due to the aforementioned substitution, the body, which should actually be the instrument for recognizing meaning and implementing charity, has now been turned into meaning and has thus reversed the direction from being to meaning. This is already symbolically expressed in the story of creation, in that Adam follows Eve (and she follows the serpent), i.e. according to external voices and not according to his inner – his divine – voice, in that he follows matter and not the spirit (Gen. 3:6).
The question of meaning is rarely asked; selfishness prevails. The individual wants to be a kind of dominator himself, wants to play God, from president, head of department and chief journalist to the domineering head of the family. Being devoid of meaning destroys itself in the long run. However, this destruction ultimately leads it back to its spiritual purpose. The latter is the purpose of evil in the world (see chapter 3).
The free, albeit unconscious, decision for unconditional self-preservation shows that people who know nothing about the whither also lose knowledge of the whence, namely creation. A prime example is the interpretation of Darwinism that higher development, its whither, is achieved through optimized adaptation to the environment. In this respect, the most adapted animal would be the most highly developed. But humans are the least adapted. Earthly (!) adaptation is the opposite of higher development. The Germans showed this in their adaptation to the Nazis and today the Putin and Trump followers to their presidents. Those who adapt renounce their own higher meaning. The British writer Rudyard Kipling shows this in his world-famous “Jungle Book” by having his hero Mowgli, who grows up with the animals, fall back into the animal-like life of his wolf brothers after growing up and entering human (village) society (in contrast to the Disney film adaptation, by the way).
However, there are two sides to the goal of adaptation, because a spiritual person also adapts to the spiritual ideals (Gita XII, 2, 13; XVIII, 51, 65; Dhammapada 357, 368) and thus struggles with the question of meaning. Therefore, it is not about avoiding adaptation in general, but about Darwin’s adaptation, that of the animal to purely earthly existence. For this entails exploitation and rape. Darwin and his successors did not mean adaptation to the ethical norms of charity, but to self-sufficiency for the purpose of self-preservation according to a reading such as: “The Russian must die so that we may live!” (Wehrmacht photo 1941: see chapter 6 in the book) For Darwin, adaptation is a general principle, but in reality, as with love, it has to be differentiated: There is a materialistic and a spiritual adaptation. The former is unconscious, hateful and leads to slavery to instinct; the latter is conscious, free and loving: “Thy will be done!”
As long as a person behaves in accordance with self-centeredness and the essentially associated rape of fellow human beings and the environment, i.e. in contradiction to them, they will become and remain ill and/or suffer from racism, marital hell, exploitation, etc. as a physically stable individual:
“The organism is in a state of illness insofar as one of its … organs establishes itself for itself and persists in its particular activity against the activity of the whole. … The true form of the spirit contains an inadequacy, which is the disease.” (Hegel: Encyclopaedia of the Sciences. 2/III/C/c/§371 Disease of the individual).
In this respect, the human being is already substantially ill from birth, although it looks as if the babies are born healthy. But they are merely symptom-free and can be brought out of this fragile tightrope life at any time, because the world and its medicine strive to adapt to existence. The illness of the body corresponds to the evil in the world.
In illness, the conflict between being and meaning becomes clear. The human being is created in the image of others, which is expressed in the striving for the realization of unity with his inner voice and his foreign (!) counterpart, like the fingers on the hand. Those who do not recognize the constructive character of the illness as a call to repentance misjudge the unity, fall ill and have to suffer.
There is an important special case that the book of Job addresses: It deals with the question of why terrible suffering can also affect the righteous innocent person – whose level of consciousness, however, has nothing to do with conscious look through. In such a case, the illness is not an instrument or impulse to leave the naked material level of consciousness in the direction of the spiritual, but to elevate already spiritual, but unconscious consciousness into conscious. This becomes clear in the concrete dialog between Job and his inner voice: 7:21 f. and 40:1 as well as 40:3). Only then is unity realized. The evidence for this lies in the many corresponding concrete experiences of all spiritual seekers, who have successfully completed this qualitative step, 42,5. However, the principle of illness as a hard impulse to change course is the same.
The more the sense surrenders to being and thus to attachment to material dependence, the greater the decay and illness. This is dominated by the convictions gained through constant bad life experiences that one’s own fragile existence and dependence on matter are natural. This leads to fierce resistance, such as xenophobia, at every disturbance and every possibility of disturbance, and not only in specific cases, but fundamentally instinctively, from the outset. Cain sends his regards.
For man with his “imprisoned splendor” of likeness, however, the alternative is generally appropriate, the overcoming of selfishness and xenophobia. Through his spiritual consciousness – at least as a potential – he represents the contrast to the animal. But he has largely opted for the lack of freedom of the animal, which in turn cannot break free. He is in fact unaware of the freedom of conversion and mindlessly does everything that the instinct of self-preservation dictates. At the same time, he also believes that he is a sovereign user of his free will, whereas the exact opposite is the case. This is why he cannot find the real reason for his illnesses. He is born into this situation and therefore only has the opportunity to free himself from it after some time. However, this does not change the fact that he has the potential to do so and can free himself from it through a spiritual search for the “tapestry door” (Hans Müller-Eckhard). However, he only ever sees his illness as the effect of a supra-individual external cause: pandemic, accident, coincidence, etc. This collective view of things is already a symptom of his erroneous world view. This is already symbolized in the story of creation: Adam is not guided by his inner voice, for example, but declares Eve to be the cause of the disaster with the fruit, i.e. the “apple”, while Eve does the same with the snake.
In this respect, I am (partly) responsible for the fact that I am infected by a corona infected person and that there is such a thing as disease, global warming and war in the world at all. No matter how many parts of his own “guilt” and how many from the outside come crashing down on him as “fate”, it all boils down to being born into it, from which he was in principle called upon to break out at the latest since religious instruction at school: “Preserve and build” or “perfect”, Mt. 5:48).
Without knowledge of illness there can be no recovery, which is not primarily victory over the illness, but the knowledge of the hidden truth (John 8:32). Illness is generally and comprehensively simply an indicator of the way of life in the vale of tears, because it no longer exists in the spiritually guided life within this vale of tears. One lives consciously in the eye of the hurricane.
However, illness is not always a symptom of the “guilt” of being born into the principle of self-preservation, but can also be a spiritual signal. There are prominent examples – whether dialogically soul-led like Job, Gandhi, Jesus or Joan of Arc or unconsciously non-dialogical like Mandela or Bonhoeffer. But they are even more common in everyday life. Jesus has already pointed out the connection between “chosenness” by drawing attention to people in whom “the works of God shall be made manifest” (see above), namely in their suffering. A classic example of this is Louis Braille, who developed Braille after going blind at an early age. This suffering is not based primarily or at all on personal karmic “guilt”, but is intended to prompt us to search for and find the hidden reason. This goal is always the dialog with the inner voice that provides the answers, opens up the destiny and leads the person concerned on the path to the aforementioned “kingdom of God”, i.e. to spiritual consciousness. This spiritual consciousness in earthly life is free from worry, fear, lack and even illness. There are many examples of downright miraculous healings or partial recoveries or seemingly “impossible” salvations that fascinate the public again and again, but hardly anyone sets out to find the explanation. After all, this requires spiritual orientation.
The doctrine of karma shows that uncaused suffering does not exist, even if modern medicine assumes exactly that. It regards illness as a meaningless phenomenon and is not concerned with its origin. And if it does, it remains on the material level and thus only captures a small part of the truth and certainly not the decisive part. As far as the aforementioned smoker’s leg is concerned, it stops at repairing it and at best is comfortable questioning the patient’s smoking. Why the patient smokes and needs this drug is of no interest to medicine, which claims to want to heal. It certainly doesn’t want to know what kind of suffering drug use causes in general, let alone the question of suffering in general. This is not a criticism of the existence of medicine, as it is of existential importance in the materially oriented phase of human development.
The sages of antiquity still expressed themselves clearly on the question of meaning. Using the example of Pandora’s box, Hesiod shows that the evil in the world, and thus also the sickness, is caused by man’s decision against the spiritual commandments – as in the story of creation. In the Iliad, Homer has the god Apollo send the plague into the camp of the Greeks because they had committed an outrage against him, whereby their iniquity also serves as a symbol for turning away from the spiritual path. Jewish wisdom mentions plagues such as pestilence and smallpox, which God sends to Pharaoh because he does not adhere to the divine instructions given to him through Moses (Ex. 5). This pattern can be found several more times: Num. 25, Samuel 24, 1 Chron. 21. As with Adam and Eve, it is always the turning away from selfless meaning and the turning towards selfish material existence, towards the instinct of self-preservation. This is why collective plagues such as fires, floods, pandemics and wars and, on an individual level, diseases come to persuade people to return. Modern theology does not want to know anything about illness and uses terms such as senselessness, incomprehensibility and anti-divinity, criticizing such an understanding as a “black pedagogy of sin and punishment” and advising fierce resistance:
“What man should want towards sickness in accordance with the will of God can only ever be resistance to the last.” (Barth, Karl: Kirchliche Dogmatik. III/4.)
And all this in order to distract desperately from the meaning of being ill and ultimately, of course, from karma. The motive for this turning away from the often enough presented alternatives – especially from Eastern wisdom – is obvious: If the remaining church members were shown their co-responsibility, i.e. the harsh karmic consequences of their selfish ego life, if they were also called upon to turn away from revenge and retribution and also to give priority over taking and to love their enemies, they too would run away in droves. (For more on this “fearful adaptation to worldly values that no longer has any answers”, see chapter 12 of DIE ZEIT 49/2020, p. 62). This kind of adaptation to bare existence betrays meaning and leads to the opposite of further and higher development.
Illnesses often lead to recovery, but this does not lead to an understanding of their causes and their meaning: Recovery is not higher development. However, those who accept their illness, stop fighting and instead enter into spiritual consciousness (“strive”), move from being to meaning and are freed from it, even if not necessarily from symptoms, which always serve to maintain the level of consciousness.
(Because dealing with illness always has to do with overcoming it, the terms are used here as follows: Healing means the restoration of the state before the illness; the term refers to the earthly dimension. Recovery, on the other hand, is intended to express the fundamental spiritual liberation from illness).
Homeopathy is not a fight against the symptom, but on the contrary its reinforcement in the sense of an inoculation and in this respect a kind of adaptation. It casts out the devil with Beelzebub, whereas conventional medicine tries to suppress the symptoms, which also has nothing to do with sustainable recovery. Both contribute nothing to raising awareness in the sense of a general liberation from illness.
“Allopathy [conventional medicine] works against such a process with all its might; homeopathy, for its part, seeks to accelerate or intensify it … Both want to understand it better than nature itself, which knows both the measure and the direction of its healing methods.” (Schopenhauer: Parerga and Paralipomena. Vol. 2, Chapter VI, § 101)
Conventional medicine wants to turn evil into good, thus remaining on the purely material level and reinforcing our stay in the vale of tears. It cannot heal, only repair. It fights poison with antidote. It amputates, extracts teeth, cuts out tumors, kills bacteria, removes conscious traumas through behavioral therapy, applies bandages and prescribes prescriptions to eliminate pain; in this respect, it proceeds mechanically and primarily wants recovery. Homeopathy also wants healing and recovery, but also remains in the realm of attachment to being; it has won, but so has Mephisto. There can be no question of fundamental recovery.
The exceptions are, of course, when therapeutic steps of any direction are prescribed by spiritual guidance.
Jesus proceeds spiritually with the symbol of Lazarus. His healing could also include general healing, depending on the level of enlightenment. But there is nothing about this in the text.
Liberation from sickness in general through spiritual awareness does not at the same time mean liberation from symptoms. On the contrary, although Mephisto has lost his power, he never gives up his job of bringing the spiritual seeker back into the world of exclusively material consciousness (Goethe: Faust I, Prologue in Heaven: “…draw him away from his original source!”), even if his attacks become increasingly powerless.
The reason for the possibility of general liberation from sickness is the recognition of the powerlessness of evil. In this respect, illness is an impulse towards recovery and should therefore be affirmed (see Job or the paralyzed man or Hakuin; in the book, chapter 9).
It is always about realization – in this case the meaning not only of the illness, but also of life as a whole. Illness is not to be fought, but rather to be placed in the hands of God, i.e. to “seek the kingdom of God”, to seek spiritual awareness. In this respect, fundamental recovery can only be achieved by looking through the world of appearances. Whether at all or which conventional medical or homeopathic or other subsequent steps follow after recognition is no longer a question of principle, but results from dialogs with opticians, dentists with healers, possibly other doctors and, above all, with the inner voice as the last word. And the spiritual path does not immediately jump from zero to one hundred. The suffering that the spiritual seeker now very consciously takes upon himself on the path to liberation from illness means that the sense then affirms the being again, because the being again says yes to the higher sense: “It is I, the Lord, who am your physician.” (Ex. 15:26).
(Translation by software)