6. The cause of human drama: personification

In principle, ego behavior has nothing to do with the person exhibiting it, just as a megaphone is not responsible for the racist slogans shouted through it by a demonstrator. The person is, so to speak, the loudspeaker, not the cause. They are the bearer of their control programs, about which they themselves know virtually nothing, at most having a small pinch of awareness: for example, the notorious womanizer knows at most that he has this habit, but not why and certainly not that he is subject to control. The person whose flow of speech is almost unstoppable and who constantly tries to show off at staff meetings, birthday speeches, etc., knows at best – if they are self-critical – that this is the case, but hardly that they are the almost defenseless victim of control.

When the ego is described psychologically, the focus is always on individuals and their characteristics, but this leads nowhere: the focus should be on their controls, on the primal human software of self-preservation to which we are subject.

It is an all-encompassing program to which we are all exposed and from which we all suffer without exception, like an invisible total epidemic, a kind of general psychological plague, which Goethe poetically describes as follows:

“From the power that all binds,
frees the man who overcomes himself.”
(Poems. The Secrets, 24th stanza)

It is not people as individuals who produce all the bad human characteristics, but the universal ego program that is anchored in every human being and is expressed to a greater or lesser extent. It is our animal heritage. Humans are “only” the executive organs of the original software, which is symbolically expressed in the example of Cain.

However, those who shout right-wing extremist slogans and attack migrants are, deep down, no different from anyone else. For without exception, all people have the divine core, their spirit soul, within them. Those who hate are “only” much more subject to the xenophobia complex of the universal ego program. It is not a difference in quality, but only in quantity. In this respect, it is a mistake to reduce the men and women of the current right-wing movements, regardless of whether they belong to the Euro-critical, protest bourgeois, conspiracy theory, or völkisch factions, to their earthly surface, “for they know not what they do,” Luke 23:24. (Of course, this does not mean ignoring their misdeeds.)

The ego is in every human being. Everyone is subject to this inner guidance and its attacks, just not to the same degree. In this respect, authoritarian, self-obsessed, or exclusionary rulers and their electorates are only a symptom, and indeed for all of us—albeit to a greater or lesser extent.

In the wake of the development of so-called “fake news,” it is forgotten that every person lies every day, and AI-controlled Internet portals even more so. Their unscrupulousness and audacity are indeed a new dimension in public communication, but only in terms of quantity. Their behavior reflects the principle of behavior that we all follow, that of self-preservation.

There is nothing wrong with self-preservation as long as it is not at the expense of others. But this is precisely their animalistic and almost always human characteristic, namely to exclude the preservation of all other human beings with their consciousness and concrete behavior. It is for this very reason that Jesus formulated the commandment to love one’s enemies, in order to point out the only way out of the misery of earthly life, the “vale of tears” (Ps. 84:7).

Since we “can do nothing of ourselves,” we are all structured in the same way, only affected to varying degrees. As painful as it may be, the fact that the ego is in everyone is demonstrated by the reaction of many highly educated and ‘tolerant’ fellow human beings who respond with contempt to right-wing radicals, using words such as “rabble,” “crazy people,” or “they are not human beings,” and thus do the same thing as the addressees, namely devalue and build separation instead of unity, thereby realizing the Pharisee principle “Thank God we are not like them…”.

Through projection, i.e., shifting our own syndromes (the beam in our own eye) onto others, we disparage the xenophobia of others (the splinter in their eye). They shout “racial mixing” or “population replacement,” and we may respond with “brown mob.” But this shows that we are also haters. Otherwise, we would avoid such derogatory terms. We had then fallen out of spiritual unity just as much as our opponents, only not as blatantly and conspicuously. At the same time, we dumped our hostility on these others.

After a state election to the Saxon parliament, a newly elected right-wing extremist member of parliament stood up in front of the plenary session with racist tirades and demanded the exclusion of foreigners. The other members of parliament reacted by turning their backs on the speaker. In other words, they responded to exclusion with exclusion.

Exclusion is universal. A classic form of it is in relation to minorities, such as anti-Semitic discrimination against Jewish populations throughout the centuries, whether in Western, Central, or Eastern Europe.

Currently, exclusion of Black people, refugees (especially from Syria), and migrants, as well as its various forms, can be clearly seen in Europe, such as Italian detention camps in Greece or border fences in the US.

Exclusion is vital for the ego, because only in this way can it perceive and define itself as different and independent. Although this is important for survival, it quickly gets out of hand, as the need to set oneself apart from others is exponentially transferred to the fundamental creation of enemy stereotypes: If it is no longer the “hereditary enemy” or the ‘Frenchman’ for the Germans before World War I, then it is the Jews, the Palestinians, the communists, the blacks, the refugees, the neo-Nazis, the East Germans, the West Germans, the neighbor, “those up there,” the capitalists, or the “unfortunate.”

Loving strangers or even enemies does not mean forming emotional bonds or even friendships with one’s opponents. It is about spiritual understanding, seeing through the outer appearance to one’s/our spiritual core (“seeing through” or, in Buddhist terms, “seeing deeply”). It is the perspective of the soul, which is not oriented toward form and shape, i.e., it does not use the sense organs, but rather looks at the other soul with spiritual understanding through the surface of matter. It recognizes, so to speak, the hand in the glove. It recognizes the unity of the seemingly opposite sparks of God, like two light bulbs in a string of lights through which the same life energy flows. It recognizes the unity of the fingers of the hand, whose common energy flow of blood is their unity, their prerequisite for their existence, for their life.

Man removes face showing lightn in landscape with question shaped clouds
Bestdesigns: Man removes face and shows inner space. iStock 1069780080

Looking beyond the surface is not as unrealistic as it seems at first glance. Rather, everyone knows it: in the first months of new love, each partner is only too willing to look past all the strange quirks of the other. It is love that looks past the negative aspects of the surface.

File: crane_beauty5.jpg WalterCrane, BeautyandtheBeast.jpg (5.5.1875)
https://archive.org/stream/beautybeast00cra/beautybeast00cra#page/21/mode/1up Wikimedia Commons.wikimedia.org

Significantly, human love diminishes in average lovers due to the urgings of the ego. But the aforementioned overlooking of young love is an experience that at least points in the direction of seeing through, even though it remains on the material level. If the transfer to the vertical, i.e., the view of the soul, succeeds, the way out of individual suffering begins.

Those who hate show that they cannot truly love. In this respect, hatred poisons relationships with others, but also the hater himself, because he permanently poisons himself, i.e., his consciousness. It is a kind of self-harm. Who would take an axe in their right hand and chop off their left hand with it? Certainly no one, and yet this is exactly what people do every day because they have lost sight of the connection or unity between the two hands.

However, overcoming hatred of others (including myself) is only possible through a spiritual view of the other, through the recognition of their spiritual identity. When I discover my own hatred, the awareness of my own spiritual identity saves me. Herman Melville describes where indelible hatred ultimately leads in his novel “Moby Dick”; he describes the path to self-destruction.

That is why true, complete love is so rare in the world (see chapters 9 and 17), because it overcomes the ego and is not distracted by outward appearances, but always recognizes the inner spiritual substance of human beings.

Evil in the world is not created by humans, but by the instinct for self-preservation within them, which is not recognized. For the general view is limited to the surface, to the person. Unlike animals, however, we can free ourselves from this mammalian heritage.

Seeing through is necessary to free us from the hopelessness of our planet. For in doing so, we switch the lever from earthly to spiritual consciousness. But we live in a vale of tears because we do not look behind the scenes, and are therefore prone to discord, having switched the lever down and left it there.

When the Pope asks incomprehensibly at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in May 2014: “Human, who are you? … What has caused you to fall so low?”, then the enormous hurdle that must be overcome in order to do what Jesus exemplified, namely to look behind the mask of the person (Latin: personare: to sound through), becomes clear.

You can practice seeing through by examining how you mentally deal with a speeder who, while you are in the fast lane, flashes his lights at you repeatedly, honks like crazy, then gives you the finger when he passes you, threatens you, and clearly swears at you. You could then begin to realize that he does not know what he is doing because he is a victim of his unconscious self-preservation instinct. You can also test your ability to see through things by observing your own reaction to someone who tailgates you, causes an accident, and then aggressively refuses to take responsibility for it: Does your reaction remain on the surface, does it remain with the appearance, or does it look behind the scenes of the person?
“Affirm Tao in your neighbor.” (Tao Te Ching II, 54)