Category Archives: development

Culture, development, Interglobal, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality, Science, society

Open letter to Robb Smith and Integral Life

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Integral Life had organised a big conference last weekend in Colorado/USA where people from all over the world could participate via live streaming. That’s what we did and there were some things I wanted to bring to the awareness of the Integral Community which are of concern to me.

For who doesn’t know what “Integral” is: A short introduction by Jeff Salzman in our Wisdom Factory HERE

My open letter:

Hi Robb,

Heidi here from Italy with some feedback to and considerations of the conference. First of all: THANK YOU! It was great to be able to attend from Europe via Live Streaming – one of the miracles of modern technology for which I am very grateful.

 

There was a lot of interesting content offered by many competent and interesting people, I enjoyed it greatly, even at 3 am in the morning! I especially appreciated Helen Palmer and her reminder to not be attached to what we believe what we are and what we think is right or wrong as seen by the filters of our unconscious conditioning.

We see reality through our unconscious conditioning

In the light of Helen’s talk I want to send you some of my observations: I noticed in you a strong bias to not take into account the possibility that things could be different than we have seen them so far. In a true integral setting I would love to see openness to look into those things we “traditionally” considered not valid.

Specifically I am talking about a question from the audience about Wikileaks and conspiracy theories. You quickly swept it from the table together with laughing at the topic of “extraterrestrials” as science fiction, invented for movies for popular amusement – or, if you see it from a different perspective. for instilling fear and an unconscious bias in favor of the idea of threats coming from the universe towards us on earth. And this as a justification to increase our military force.

 

Do you believe in the power of science to reveal the truth through facts?

REAL science which tries to falsify the hypothesis instead of trying to find a few good arguments for an already existing idea? (as you defined good science in the conference). If so I suggest that you read Dr.Judy Wood’s “Where did the Towers go?” And then, please, give a new response regarding “conspiracy theories”. What you find in this book is pure scientific physical evidence which defies all the official stories about 9/11 and also the counter-conspiracy movements which, themselves, where undermined by forces which didn’t want the TRUTH to be known. The book is an extended forensic study of what has been found – or not found – in connection with 9/11 and you will ask yourself: “How could I believe in the stories”, what so many of us did: preferring to keep the eyes closed and to stay attached to our fundamental belief in the goodness of the world and, especially, in the US Government.

People fear to lose their attachments and don’t want to look at what reality is.

Lately, we showed the movie “Unacknowledged” to a group of expats here in Italy and it came out that we Europeans had no problem giving credence to what the disclosed documents were saying. The Americans among us just didn’t want their belief in their government and country to be compromised. Conscious or unconscious bias?

The movie shows declassified documents about UFOs. Yes, they exist, there is a mass of evidence, and only a few days ago many thousands of documents were officially disclosed around the topic of Extraterrestrials, even mainstream media talked about it. With some probability, though,  this is a new move towards fostering the belief about a  threat from outer space with the hope of “uniting humanity” against a common but constructed enemy, in order to begin a war and justify the crazy increase in military expenses to the benefit of a few psychopaths, reminiscent of the “weapons of mass destruction”.

And again at the cost of a huge number of people, if not of all humanity this time. What the USA did to its own people on 9/11 to justify a war (a very ancient strategy btw.) is absolutely appalling, horrible and unjustifiable. The fact that people still believe in the airplane story is only understandable from a psychological perspective and is deliberately ignoring evidence and “common sense” in order to protect old beliefs from where we draw our feeling of security.

Yes, we need to focus on the positive and to give our power to that. But we also need to not be blind to what reality is in this world of samsara.

POWER

Robb, you showed a chart about the power in the various stages and its expression. This is fine. BUT WHERE IS THE ABUSE OF POWER DISCUSSED? And what we can do to stop it? In the 30ies so many people in Germany didn’t believe in what was about to come – despite all evidence. We are in the same situation today. We don’t want to see the evidence for what is really going on and prefer to wrap our minds around Trump vs. Hillary. This is a huge error and limitation which i see expressed even with we people who believe to be at the cutting edge of development.

This is very much preoccupying to me as a German woman of the post-war generation. If WE laugh about things which the psychological warfare of the past 70 years has so thoroughly prepared us to do – who else can have enough perspective to really look behind the scenes and see from a broader point of view?

BTW, Hitler’s specialists in psychological warfare have been employed by the US military and the Hollywood films about Ufos are part of their strategy.

 

My wish for Integral Life and further events would be to include those topics which are very important to address in the light of co-creating a better future. I also wish the community to become more “integral” in many ways which it is definitely not (yet).

If the main perspective is still “masculine” as expressed in the numbers of male vs. female presenters and in the structure of the setting of the event as well as in the featured topics of this conference about technology etc. then, please, consider to embrace science fully and look for those who are dismissed for doing science that threatens the official narrative – or are silenced and even killed when it comes to fields like free energy. The list of victims of doing “unwanted” science is long! Dr.Judy Wood is one of many who lost their job because they discovered the truth behind the official stories.But, at least, she is still alive probably due to the existence of the internet which makes it much more difficult to just eliminate uncomfortable people.

Integral needs to take a stand here!

With gratitude, appreciation, love and hope

Heidi

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

Me too? – a Consideration about Patriarchy

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“Me too”, the movement of this year which opens the world’s consciousness about the abuse of the power of men towards women in our “patriarchy” (which is a NoNo word, a symbol of oppression !?). This is a good thing, for sure. I hear men saying that they, only now, can really feel for themselves how it must be for women to suffer from sexual aggression. Before, they just “knew” it, now it becomes embodied. Hurrah! This would be a very good outcome of the accusation series, if it opened men’s ideas and compassion to what it means to live in a female body.

But then STOP here!

First of all the whole campaign happens in the Western world where women, for many decades, have all the possibilities to lead a self-directed and autonomous life. We don’t have any religion which forces us to succumb to men, as it is still the case in many countries of the world or their immigrant population in the Western world. Who talks about those women? Nobody. And they cannot stand up and blame the men in their society without undergoing severe danger. So why is all the blame and accusation directed to powerful men in the Western world alone as if sexual aggression was the norm here and only here?

Only women?

There is hardly any adult woman who hasn’t experienced a situation of sexual harassment or even violence in their lives. What about boys? Maybe not all of them have experienced sexual harassment, but harassment or violence of all other sorts for sure. What makes the sexual violence so different from all the other forms?

Is it because generally women have less physical strength than men and therefore are less able to defend themselves? To say that is certainly not politically correct as there are University Professors who claim in public television that “there are no biological differences between men and women”, coming from an equality/equity movement which seems to ignore even their own personal experience, let alone scientific facts.

Who cares about really oppressed women in this world?

Woman carrying water and child
Truly disadvantaged women

In many countries of the world women are not allowed to go out into the public without a male accompaniment – to protect the woman. Maybe. From what? From aggressive males in the society, from violating the social codes and bring dishonour on the family? From living their own ideas about life? Who in the western World complains about PATRIARCHY where it is really at home? I don’t hear any outcry and solidarity with women who really have no rights for an autonomous and self determined life. But alone the poor Western women are the victims of this bad thing called Patriarchy. Come on!

Yes, there was a time when, also in the Western world, women couldn‘t freely decide about their own life and what to do or not to do and they sought out marriage as a safe haven to survive in exchange for giving up certain personal freedoms. But now?

We have all the freedoms we need. It is up to us if we use them or not – and also HOW to use them.

Women are choosing – believe it or not

A couple walking through applauding people
Marriage, status and social approval

It is an old story that women from a lower social rank try to “marry up” and men regularly “marry down”. Many stories are told about the nurse who succeeds to marry the doctor. But a female doctor marrying a male nurse or a truck driver? That doesn’t seem to be the case very often and is somehow not acceptable socially. Why?

Women still are the ones to have children and it is a biological and evolutionary necessity that women try to get the “best” fathers for their offsprings – whatever is valued as “the best” in a given society. If you, woman, had the choice to have a child from a super intelligent and wise man or from a vagabond or criminal: what would you chose? You make a choice according to your values and there is a hierarchy of values if you are aware of it or not. And don’t tell me that, because you reject hierarchies, you consciously would chose to have a sperm injection from a convicted mass murderer instead of from a Nobel Prize winner! There is a clear hierarchy operating in a woman’s mind when choosing a mate!

Patriarchy is hierarchy and status – so what?

And here we come to the reason why, today, so many people hate patriarchy: because it is organised in a hierarchical manner. There are people who have better jobs, live in better places, are smarter or otherwise privileged over others and that is considered BAD. But, honestly, if you woman have the choice between two lovers and future father of your children: wouldn’t you aim for the one who has more status and more money and all of that? Don’t pretend that you would prefer the one who leads a miserable life in a slum with no food and no hygiene. So you are perfectly aware that your actions are guided by hierarchical values – while you complain about their existence at the same time. Think a little more about that before you open your mouth again in wild accusations.

So back to sexual harassment by powerful men.

As I said before, this was a normal thing in previous stages of societal development in the Western World and it is still the case in many other countries of the world. It definitely happens that some men abuse their power for their sexual or psychological self-esteem. But

WHAT IF MEN DIDN’T FIND A WOMAN TO BE HARASSED?

How do women ALLOW men to harass them?

people touching each other
people touching each other

Women accuse men and hide in the victim role. But what did THEY do to allow the harassment happen? When did they give away their genuine feminine power? And when, if not most of the time, they indulged in exercising the very ancient expression of female power? What do they think that would happen in a man when they show up with super short pants, hardly covered breasts and seductive ways of moving? He probably responds like the animal part in humans responds: with being sexually attracted. HAHA! Now he is caught in the web of his biology and things proceed as they proceed.

At any moment both, the man AND the women, have the CHOICE to say STOP in one way or the other. If you are an actress and you really want to get the big role than the “normal” way has always been to get the attention of the producer or whoever in charge and you both traded the issue. Women traded – and still do – sexuality in one form or other much more frequently than the feminist warriors want to admit – or any woman who now cries out about the perpetrator men who have made them suffer.

Be honest, woman: you will find at least one episode in your life where you got advantage for the fact that you are a woman which was granted to you by a man whom you manipulated into that.

  It is so deeply ingrained in women’s history that most of the women don’t even notice when their behavior is manipulative towards men, in the same way that men often have no idea how their behavior can be understood as violence.

Power and Empowerment

Life is about empowerment and power. To say that we need to make some very important distinctions: Today the word “POWER” has become a synonym of “abuse” and “morally unacceptable”.  This doesn’t justify the dismissal of power all together. “POWER OVER” is completely different than “POWER FOR”. People, men and women alike, can exercise power over others by reducing them to a sort of slaves. Thankfully this use of power is stigmatised and hopefully will be overcome soon with new structures of co-creation and communication – if people grow up sufficiently to be able to live in this different way.

What we certainly need is PERSONAL POWER to be and do what is right for us to do. Without our personal power we are transforming ourselves into the slaves where others can dominate us. There is no abuser if there is nothing or nobody to abuse. When we are embracing our personal power – which fundamentally consists in saying NO or YES in the right moment and really meaning it – we cannot be abused in the way of the present accusations. Somewhere along the line all those women who claim to have been sexually abused by men with whom they had a personal social contact have given up their personal power and chosen to be the victim, probably for good reasons. Even if the man is “guilty” 95% in a specific situation, but there is no woman who couldn’t detect these 5% or more of her own contribution to what she declares “abuse”. Being the victim and abdication of personal responsibility seems to be the easier way: all guilt and shame to the other. But at the long run those women have missed the chance to be truly free from their own conditionings and somewhere inside they perfectly know their own complicity in the ancient game between humans especially of different sex.

The evolution of Patriarchy

Colored Spiral: The Levels of Development
The Levels of Development

So “Patriarchy” is a name for a period in human history which is evolving like everything else. It is not to be blamed for all our personal shortcomings in the evolution of our personal self and of our societies – which are formed by people like you and me and not by some malevolent entity. If you and I discover shortcomings than it is our duty to bring them forth in the most possible unbiased way and to collaborate without shaming and blaming to create a better future for ALL of us.

 

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

Why Racism Doesn’t Exist

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The Postmodern predicament

Racism, Political Correctness, Freedom of Speech (or it’s negation) and even “anti-bias training” are the key-words of post modern society. But they are grounded in error which I will explain using the topic RACSIM. Racism, as we see it today, has two origins. One is the biologically innate fear of “The Other”, the second is a confusion of certain attributes of people, like skin color, with their value systems which is shaping their behavior.

In the following I want to give you a short introduction about why it is not racism when people fight against all sorts of “others”, like immigrants or blacks or whites or whomever. Then I will share two videos. One explains the human drive to violence and the other the value systems of humans and how they develop.

 

The innate fear of the OTHER

4 figures, tribal context
living in a tribe

From the beginning of time humans’ main concern in life, besides looking for food, was the desire for safety. Most creatures are less safe alone than when they form groups for mutual protection. Humans built tribes as the first form of living together more than 10000 years ago. In the Tribal Stage humans felt safe inside the group and they radically fought everyone who appeared at their “doorstep” who definitely was “the Other”, which was the same as “the Enemy”, an entity which needed to be killed. Tribes provided safety for the members but they prevented individuality. Everybody was confined to the habits and requirements of their specific tribe.

Hero kills the dragon
The Hero kills the dragon

Later on, new ideas emerged: the hero appeared who leaves home to become a successful individual – or to fail and perish. This is the Egocentric Stage where the own individuality emerges and is expressed in the world, often in quite violent ways.

Then the necessity arose to contain the egocentric manifestation of men who oppressed their people with tyranny. They fought bloody wars in the pursuit of their personal power with those who were guided by some other tyrant – which was the Enemy. When this way of being in the world became intolerable, rules of living together were established in specific groups of individuals, and then the members of those groups cared for each other by following the rules and recognising a higher purpose in human life which was not anymore confined to survival or power. This was the conformist stage. Safety was found, again, in the group which then was an ethnic community or even a nation. Enemies are all those who don’t belong to the specific ethnicity or nation.

Many countries in the world are still arrested in the first 4 stages of development, while many western societies have climbed up two more steps.

Please watch the video below which explains “Spiral Dynamics Integral”, the research on the evolution of societies and the development of individuals which is connected to the evolution of values and worldviews.

Introduction to SDi 1

 

What we call RACISM today has nothing to do with RACE

From the very short outline which I gave you above you can see that in different stages of human development safety is found in different ways and the definition of “the ENEMY” varies accordingly. While in early times the enemy belonged to another tribe, in the egocentric stage the enemy is EVERYBODY WHO THREATENS MY POWER. In the conformist stage the enemy is EVERYBODY WHO DOESN’T BELONG TO MY NATION or ethnic group.

The present USA was formed by many immigrants from Europe starting from the 1500’s. During the centuries they amalgamated to a rather homogeneous population. Their differences in culture and development were small from the beginning; they could reach a common understanding quite easily and grew together to the next stages. The egocentric behaviours of the first times were tamed and a sufficiently united nation arose.

Tribalism meets conformists

Then the slaves came to America. Yes, they were black, but first of all they came from a purely tribal background into a country which already had grown out of tribalism for some time. The differences in behavior and worldview were clearly visible – and they were also the reason why the “white Americans” were able to exploit the black slaves in the way they did. Belonging is the main need for tribal people, not fighting against power. So they accepted their role as slaves belonging to some master, naturally.

Slowly the consciousness arose that dominating others is not morally right and the slaves were freed – not always to their immediate advantage as they were not used to stand up for themselves as mature individuals, due to their tribal identity. As a response to the changed life conditions black people in America grew into the egocentric stage, also called the “warrior stage” and in time single individuals had the chance to grow into higher levels of development when they met the right conditions in their life, as for instance individual help in education or living in a surrounding which encourages growth and development.

Racism in USA – a clash of value systems

Racism against blacks or Mexicans actually has not much to do with the skin color of people or even of the geographical provenance. As outlined above, many blacks in America belong to the warrior stage or below – and so do Mexicans, Africans or other third world populations. Missing differentiation creates the appearance that the problem is “the Blacks” or “the Mexicans”, but it is their OTHERNESS which creates the refusal to recognize them as peers. They are not peers because they live within another worldview, within a different value system which the Americans refuse to recognize as still valid. They in their majority have gone through that period already. They are also rather dismissive of the subgroup of their own population which is still caught in the egocentric stage – which finds expression often in criminal activity. So criminality is easily equated to Blacks or any other ethnic or social group from “outside”.

You don’t need to have different skin color or to be born in a different nation: A new form of racism against home born Americans is coming through these days by the stigmatisation of “white males” as the oppressors of minorities like “black women” or LGBT’s. It is brought forth by postmodern activists who – instead of embracing the positive values of post-modernism – fall back into previous developmental stages and fight for their own power on the backs of those who they pretend to fight for. They ignore the rules of society and intend to destroy the structures which they believe to be oppressive and totally arbitrary and without intrinsic meaning. And doing so they throw the baby out with the bathwater and celebrate their fall back into previous stages of development with the credo of a stage, the post-modern “green” stage (in terms of “Spiral Dynamics”), on their lips which actually would be the most advanced stage in our western societies if it had been reached in a healthy way.

Violence – a biological ingrained trait in humans

If humanity had indulged in violence as expressed in the egocentric stage of development we probably wouldn’t be here today to talk about the situation in the world. We would have annihilated our species with much probability if we hadn’t found a way to tame the destructive emotions of the individuals. Religious beliefs emerged and with them a guidance of how to live our lives properly. Rules were established on how to treat each other and those who didn’t obey the rules were marginalised, imprisoned or killed – mainly the same mechanisms which we still find today.

The emergence of this stage in our development, the conformist stage, made it possible for humanity to stay alive and avoid self-extinction.

 

Are we able to handle our challenges today?

Today we are again at a similar moment where self extinction is a possibility, due to the same egocentric drive among individuals in “leadership” positions. But actually it is more complicated than that as we have to deal with two more levels of development in action, modernism and post-modernism which both add their pathologies to the mix and make it even more explosive and dangerous than medieval killings with sticks, knives and swords.

Listen to the explanations of Dr. Jordan Peterson about the history of violence and you will get some important insights why the new-age ideas of mere positive thinking as a remedy for everything is just not enough – and even dangerous when we adopt those thoughts as our idea of existence. We are naive when we ignore the deeper reality – and we are easy prey to malevolence and evil.

A History of Violence:  an interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson

 

Conclusion

Conflicts arise all the time when humans live together. Whether people can handle conflicts and even transform them into growth and development depends on their personal growth, their level of resilience and, at least partly, on their level of development. Lower levels, especially the warrior stage, encourage confrontation and destruction, while higher levels, the “green” stage, encourages love and compassion in the case of interpersonal problems. Unfortunately, even the green level has not yet all the means to really step out of the treadmill and see the bigger picture where all conflict is seen as an expression and clash of worldviews whose members believe they possess the one and only truth and all the others are wrong. Such a position cannot lead to understanding and peace by its very assumptions: “only WE are right”.

Humanity must grow as a whole and leave behind the first 6 stages of development before they really will be able to create peace on earth.

At least a certain percentage needs to be there and those individuals need to learn a language with which they can reach those on lower levels of development and gently – or not so gently, depending on whom they are dealing with – bring them to a new and better understanding about what really matters in life.

Culture, development, Psychology and Spirituality

Why can people become unreasonable, rebellious and destructive?

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Rebellion is part of growing up

2 girls protesting for free energy
The “normal” form of protest

It is normal that in our youth we rebel against the the structures which have been imposed on us by our parents and our immediate environment. It is part of the developmental process and it is necessary to begin our own personal journey of individuation. If this rebellion persists and reaches levels of real violence as opposed to the “normal” teenage hassles, we need to ask ourselves what the reasons are for it, especially when property and people are wilfully damaged.

The “fashion” of “fighting” against the “establishment” began in the late 60ies, at least in Germany, where I grew up. The demonstrations in Berlin ended in shootings, providing to the political left some hero for further use in their ideological war against the state and all people who were suspected of holding power. The radicals pretended to be cool and tough by shouting slogans, burning flags, sometimes cars, and by fighting with the police. But, then and now, are they really what they pretend to be?

 

The Story of my Ex – Fighting Against (what?)

In the early 70ies I was newly married to a young man who was lucky enough to already earn good money as an architect. But his head was still full of these strange ideas and beliefs which he had picked up in University: the need to “fight against the establishment” and for the “proletariat”. Being the son of medical doctors, he himself actually was part of the “establishment” that he pretended to be fighting against by – stealing! Stealing from the office, from restaurants and hotels and in bookshops – where he finally was caught by the police. You should have seen this “righteous” man when he came home and confessed what had happened. No hero anymore fighting for the oppressed, but trembling with fear of being punished and of his future career being impacted by being sentenced.

bookshop
The temptation to act out the erroneous beliefs

Nobody was really damaged greatly by his deeds, it was first of all the ethical component in his thoughts and behavior. My warnings had been dismissed for years that stealing was just not right, even when a bookshop has an owner who earns some money by selling books, or even when a boss gets more money than a young employee. His black-and-white thoughts created his arguments to justify his own misbehavior and he extracted a strange “right” out of the income-difference – and “Class difference”, of course, – to damage others. It even seemed to be his duty to do so, in order to “help the lower classes”, the same shallow arguments which we hear today, again.  Well, no, these were only rationalisations for a game which he should have played in earlier times, as a boy at home, but not as an adult in society.

 

Why do people adhere to fascinating, but wrong ideas?

So what makes people believe such weird things and act with extreme radicalism against property and people without any sign of recognition that what they are doing is WRONG, unless they are caught and convicted, and maybe not even then? They are not at all interested in helping the people which they pretend to fight for. They are acting out – dangerously – what they have missed in their own childhood and youth.

 

Very interesting in this regard is the conversation of Stefan Molyneux with an ex-Antifa fighter who openly talks about his story, his upbringing, his attraction to the radical left. He describes the culture and the actions there and his long journey to arrive to the understanding that they were, by no means, justified and “right” as he had been willing to believe before, and for so many years.

 

Boys Need Fathers

Boys need the guidance of men when they grow up. Boys coming from families without fathers or with dysfunctional fathers are much more likely to become extremist “heroes” than those who had fathers to teach them to be men.

a men swinging a boy in the air
Fathers and their sons

The liberation of women – which I really appreciate – and the subsidies of the state for single moms have created a situation where many women prefer to raise their children without their fathers. And that is a bad idea, at least as regards the psychological health of the children, males and females alike. I don’t say that a woman needs to stick with the father of her children no matter what, as it was for such a long time. What I DO say is that – understandably – women in their new freedom exaggerate in egocentrism and don’t properly consider the psychological needs of their children. They actually continue adhering to the very traditional belief that only the material needs are important to be met in a child’s life – while they are thinking to be very progressive and evolved. Not reall

 

The Fatherless Generations

3 soldiers with hands up
After the war how to live now?

Coming back to my ex-husband. He was born in the first years of WWII, no fathers around and the mothers busy finding ways to survive. His father came home from war, but probably, as all people of that generation, unable to elaborate his own tragic experience. So the physical presence of a father in the house was not a guarantee for the children to have a “father” who would play the role they needed for their healthy development. A whole generation grew up fatherless and so they didn’t learn what is “right and wrong” in life, the classical role of fathers. Children need to know where the boundaries are. When they haven’t learned that when young they have a lot of problems in adult life which we could roughly describe as either depression or aggressivity and violence.

 

What Steve Reports About Antifa

That’s what connects the stealing of my ex-husband with the Antifa terrorists and the Social Justice Warriors: they have never learned to find their rightful place in society and they are full of illusions about themselves, the world and their power to do whatever they want to do.

Colored Spiral: The Levels of Development
The Levels of Development

In terms of “Integral Theory” or “Spiral Dynamics”: they are stuck in the “red” egocentric warrior stage. They haven’t learned to adapt to society – which is a necessary stage in the growing-up process – and so they never could transcend it and grow out of it into a person who has integrated the rules, without being any longer totally conditioned by them. In other words: they never have grown into a true rational stage where they would be able to properly decide what to do and what not. Instead they use rational language to justify their irrational behavior. This phenomenon is called “rationalization”. It means roughly that: you find a string of arguments after the fact to make your actions appear “right”, but you didn’t think your behavior thoroughly through before you acted it out.

 

Missing or unhealthy stages in personal development: the reason for disaster.

If it is the ultra right or the ultra left or any other group ready to use violence against objects, animals and people, they basically are children in their psychological development and their belonging to the group gives them what they lacked otherwise. They do everything to belong and to be valued in that group, hence the absurd violence in speech and action of the individuals. Their behavior is the response to what they didn’t get in childhood: belonging and recognition as a human being. It is as easy as that to understand, but surely not to handle and heal.

 

True Rationality Allows Freedom of Choice

a scale
The possibility to chose: seeing both sides clearly and the weight and impact they have for the future

For those who actually have succeeded in arriving at the rational stage of their personal development, like the guy named Steve in the above interview, it is possible to understand what is going wrong in the group and to find a way out. This certainly is very difficult and often dangerous because fundamentalist radicals don’t joke and bully and damage those whom they label “traitors°. History is full of evidence of that.

Congrats to Steve that he managed to get out of the group prison and to spread the word and inspire others to follow his steps – for their own personal good and for that of our society which has enough trouble with many other things apart from crazy dangerous never grown up children.

PS.In a future post I will try to outline the difference between men and women in their path to radicalism. The lack of the father seems to be more important in the boy’s socialisation, while women have still other dragons to slay.

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Culture, development, Interglobal, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality, Science

“Unacknowledged, Unaccountable, Unconstitutional, Unspeakable and International”

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Unacknowledged, Unaccountable, Unconstitutional, Unspeakable and International

And also sparsely “Undocumented” by me as it might interfere with the flow of this rant!

The events of this summer, as Heidi and I became aware of them, have stuffed down our throats some most – to continue the parallelisms – “Unpalatable” mouthfuls.

Topping them all off has been the understanding that evil exists in all the horribly banal forms in which it has always been found.  In this case we’ve been exposed to the vomitably sickening account of the “real” story supporting the case to be made in favor of Russian interference in our last presidential election.  

Please don’t misunderstand…

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren

Please don’t misunderstand, I voted for Hillary simply because she was not Donald.  Bernie, running with Elizabeth Warren as his VP, would have been a combo I could have enthusiastically supported, even if not my “ideal” team.  Excuse the digression which is only to clarify context.

 

Apropos, I considered a couple days ago reading a recent article in The Atlantic, linked to a post on Facebook by someone whose name I’ve forgotten.  The author. Rosie Gray, titled her article:

 

Bill Browder’s Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Bill Browder
Bill Browder

(with this subtitle, still quoting Browder): “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests.”
It was a bone chilling account of ruthless oligarchical mafiosi of the worst Russian sort and their battle with the equally “competent” Vladimir Putin.  The utter cruelty of all parties in their struggle to loot the rest of the world, now that the homeland itself has been cleaned out, recalls the extremes of Stalin and Hitler and Mao and all those Kim Il Somebodies in North Korea and elsewhere. Undercover of some ism or other, they stop at nothing to attain immense wealth and power.  Such (inset your favorite evil here) -opathy requires endless struggle against real or imagined enemies for which we all pay.

stunned with incomprehension

Sergei Magnitsky
Sergei Magnitsky
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Mikhail Khodorkovsky

I confess that I intuited what the article would recount and passed it unread on to Heidi, who was stunned with incomprehension at what Browder recounted in Gray’s article. With the (perhaps) unknowing enabling of American law firms and publicists, a great campaign was launched by Putin to repeal – or at least “defang” – the Magnitsky Act which had been passed by Congress in 2012 in response to brutal and fatal human rights violations of a lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who had been uncovering illegal pilfering of, among other activities, the Russian treasury by Putin himself – along with his cohorts. What he eventually uncovered was a veritable hoovering machine which provided Putin personally with percentages of the take of the cream of the oligarchs who didn’t want to end up like the wealthiest of them all, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, publicly humiliated in a cage for a trial that put him in prison for 10 years followed by exile in Switzerland.  In the course of the cover up exposed by Magnitsky, others were murdered, not always within Russia itself.

 

The Magnitsky Act enabled billions of Russian funds held in banks elsewhere, especially in the United States, to be sequestered.  This included Putin’s own money and that of his henchmen who no longer trusted that their money would be safe within Russia.  The Panama Papers added much detail to these operations.  

The Magnitsky Act enabled billions of Russian funds to be sequestered.

Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin

As horrible as these ongoing crimes have been, they are internationally recognised as illegal and subject to legislative control. Now I want to pass onto another huge area of concern, but in this case the events are not seen as illegal…because they are neither known nor acknowledged!

As such there is no law against these activities and no legal entity is responsible, right here in the good ol’ USA! The unmistakable ongoing presence of living entities from beyond this earth.

…they have…mastered faster than light limitations on speed

Dr. Steven Greer
Dr. Steven Greer

In the past few months, and especially since May, we have become aware, largely due to the tireless and decades long persevering research of Dr. Steven Greer, of evidence that Heidi and I consider convincing regarding:

  • The unmistakable ongoing presence of living entities from beyond this earth.
  • Their presence has been known by intelligence and military authorities since at least World War II.
  • Captured ET “personnel” and craft have been mined for information and technology which no civilian authorities, even presidents, have knowledge of, let alone control of.
  • These extraterrestrial beings have “travelled” so far from other star systems that they have, ipso facto, mastered faster than light limitations on speed (and mass!).
  • Since the 1950’s humans have been able to mimic some of their technologies, including “anti gravity” techniques.  Some are genuine and some are, shockingly,  choreographed to fool, intimidate, mislead, create war hysteria, sometimes even assassinate, others who have dared to speak frankly of these phenomena.
    President Eisenhower
    President Eisenhower



    The motives are simple enough: to retain control over existing forms of energy (fossil fuels, etc.) and the stranglehold of scarcity which generates unspeakable wealth among the very few who are privy to these programs which are unauthorised, and therefore unsupervised, by any constitutional authority (and hence Illegal) – or any authority outside than their own siloed compartmentalized realms.  No single conspiracy or cabal knows all the activities, being restricted to their own “need to know” areas.  Of course, the military uses private contractors for research, development and production, but the costs are unknown and no one “keeps books” on them.  Banks are involved, but they don’t know details of operations. Science and technologies are employed as needed, including great universities, media is controlled and corrupted, politicians may be included if they can be “trusted” or bought off.


  • …presidents are denied information as they have “no need to know”.
  • Briefly, presidents are denied information as they have “no need to know”. Military as high as the intelligence head of the joints chiefs of staff are denied even knowledge that these “Unacknowledged Special Projects” (USAPs) exist, let alone their contents.  
    UFO? OURS? THEIRS? If so, who are we, who are they?

    Dr. Steven Greer has painstakingly documented a huge dossier of information from highly credible sources – as well as his own observations which he has revealed in endless interviews, videos, and films since the early 90’s when he was asked by others who were too exposed or too fearful (or in some prominent cases, just too chicken shit) to risk their own political, corporate or academic careers.

To be sure, he too is protected by high and powerful agents, many ex-military, who enable him to continue his research and ongoing exposés. Heidi and I trust that anyone reasonably intelligent and open minded will also find him credible after some exposure to him.  An excellent place to start would be his just released crowdfunded video documentary “Unacknowledged” available for rental or purchase ($15) through Amazon. His earlier film from 2013, “SIRIUS” is now free on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C_-HLD21hA

Further media and references can be found on his Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Dr-Steven-M-Greer-194568653910069/posts/?ref=page_internal

Do not worry any longer about the ridicule of anyone.  It’s too late for that!

Mark Davenport

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

What are you waiting for?

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Today the answer is easy and quick: I am truly waiting for the super heat wave to finally pass. And then?

Waiting seems to be a fundamental human “activity” although it can appear in quite different clothes. Why are we waiting and what are we waiting for?

Being busy and waiting at the same time?

You might say: I don’t wait a lot, I have so much to do, and I have no time for waiting. You might exactly FEEL like that, but aren’t you waiting, anyway? Waiting for the work to be finally accomplished, for the boss to finally recognize your bravery, for the next pay check, for the next weekend, for the lunch break, for a coffee or a cigarette? You might not be actively waiting by sitting in the corner and thinking exclusively about what you are waiting for. You might be engaged in all sorts of different activities and the waiting component runs alongside, undercover, in your mind and in your organism.

Life is waiting

Pregnant belly
Waiting for new life

I was struck lately by the insight that all human (and animal) life consists of a permanent time stream characterized by waiting. A pregnant woman is “expecting”. Doesn’t that mean that she is “waiting” for the fetus to grow in her belly and then be born? Sometimes women are waiting far over time to give birth to their child, this is recognized as “waiting”, for sure. But before birth it was waiting, too; waiting for the unknown to arrive, waiting for what could happen the next moment – the movement felt in the belly or the lack of it -, waiting for the next week, the next month, the next year. We don’t know what will happen and we are waiting for the future to unfold in our lives.

Active & passive waiting

dog waiting at the window
A dog’s active waiting

There is a difference between “active” waiting and “passive” waiting, or conscious waiting and waiting without being conscious that we are waiting. The fetus is waiting to grow and has no idea that he or she does so. Children become conscious about their waiting in increasing degrees. When hungry, the baby cries and waits for the food to arrive. Later children are told that they need to wait for all sorts of things. It is part of the training for life that children learn to postpone gratification, which means nothing other than waiting consciously for a goodie instead of devouring it immediately. Studies show that children who have learned this have a hugely higher probability of being successful in life. So waiting purposefully for something better in the future is a very useful thing, not bad at all.

 Conditioned for waiting

child looking through a fence
Too young for…

But when can “waiting” become a “bad” thing? Actually, the “bad waiting” demand creeps into our lives without us really noticing it. A 4-year-old is told that he or she has to wait until 6 to be able to do or get certain things; all children wait to become older, teenagers or “adults”, because they think that “real life” will start then whereas their child-life is somehow insufficient, not valuable and therefore to be gotten over as soon as possible. The joyful life of a child’s mind is erased by the desire of a promised future which needs to be waited for. Waiting for getting older overshadows the present and devalues it as “not ok”.

 

Later, when we get the scooter license we are waiting for the car driving license; we wait until we finally can leave school – which was my case, for sure – and then we can go to University, when “real life” promises to begin. Some time into University I was waiting for finally passing my exams and becoming an MA. Other people are waiting for their completion of the professional training because the “true life” will start with finding a good job. Maybe we have found a husband, wife or life partner in the meantime for whom we have waited since adolescence and whom we have expected to guide us into the promised land of a fulfilled life. Maybe we are lucky and it works out for some time, but aren’t we all waiting for the relationship problems to arrive which we have witnessed as “normal” among others. Or better, aren’t we waiting for them NOT to arrive? We are waiting, though, in one way or the other.

 

white figure Stepping up the ladder until...
Stepping up the ladder until…

In our professional career, we start waiting from day #1. Normally we begin at the bottom of the power hierarchy and we are told that we have to march up the ladder to success, as an employee as well as a solopreneur. We invest a lot of energy, of work and of learning and we are constantly waiting for the moment when all that will “pay off”. Some people seem to have reached what we want to reach and they promise to teach us how to do it ourselves – by feeding them money from our desire to abbreviate the waiting time for the fulfillment of our dreams.

Does waiting ever end?

Maybe your waiting ends in one particular field, but there is still enough waiting material in your life where you can continue to engage whole heartedly: your first, second or fifth child to be born, to go to school, to grow up, to become successful and what not; everything you were waiting for for yourself can become a waiting subject for you by transferring it to your children, or your siblings, your group, your society.

What are we waiting for and why?

So what are we REALLY waiting for? For a better future? For something miraculous to happen in our lives? For the world to change? For freedom, wealth, health, success, whatever? For being free from the burden of responsibility? The burden of living? The promised land after all the suffering which human life implies?

Active-passive, conscious-unconscious

You might insist that you are not waiting, you have a goal to achieve and you are busy the whole day to finally arrive there. This is a form of non-conscious waiting, non-active waiting, as your activity is bound and focused on that goal and you are not sitting around noticing the awkward burden of “just waiting” like you might know it from the doctor’s waiting room or before the results of an election are announced. Those moments I would call ACTIVE WAITING and we all are good in trying to get over that as soon as possible by distracting our attention from the burden of conscious active waiting. But it is still waiting when we watch a film, go out for dinner or dive into our work during these times of focused expectations.

 

I believe that, ultimately, we are waiting for the end of our life on earth, curious what might happen afterwards. This long waiting time is structured by the many worldly things we are waiting for. If it is the financial success, career fulfillment, becoming grandparents or reaching enlightenment, there is no real difference regarding our propensity for waiting. The object of the waiting process changes according to our age and stage of consciousness, to our inclinations and personality traits, but the waiting persists from birth to death.

 

Who are you in the face of – waiting?

So the question arises: What is it what you personally are waiting for? What did you wait for when you were a child, a young adult, in midlife and in your older years? Did the objects of your waiting change? And did you reach what you were waiting for and how did that feel for you? Did it give you the satisfaction and nourishment which you had expected? And in case you didn’t reach it: what was the consequence of it? Did you become disappointed and bitter, or did you succeed to get a kick into the future because of the failure? Only you can find that out, it will be different for everybody, at least on the surface, but probably not in the deeper layers of life. Here the question is: Did you learn and are you still learning from the outcome of the various waiting processes you were engaged in? Does it lead to your growing up into a differentiated and responsible adult? Or did you stay a helpless child in a grown up body?

Still waiting to grow up?

Mal person holding a Teddy Bear, both in red
Playing with the world like with a Teddybear

Looking at the present situation of our world it is easy to deduce that most people are stuck with the last option. A president who behaves like a 4-year-old. Military chiefs in need of new playgrounds for their insane games, scientists who try to bend reality to their theories, ruthless mafia gangs pursuing money and power: none of these display maturity as a human being but being stuck in egocentrism and omnipotent fantasies – a rather low level of possible development which is available to us humans today.

 

So where are you? Where am I and where are those around us?

If you have read so far I assume that you have traveled more of “the road less traveled” (Scott Peck). You are able to face your reality and that of the world and you are willing to explore what can be done to facilitate change for the benefit of the whole world, humanity, our planet and the whole cosmos. I am really glad to meet you here!

And now?

Now the question: what can we do, both together, and each of us by ourselves?

I suggest that we begin with noticing when we are waiting, again, and check what we are waiting for and what we try to avoid with this specific act of waiting. I am talking about our waiting for others to do what we desire and want to happen. Waiting for the state, society or whoever to resolve the problems we are facing. Waiting for the courageous people to step up and take the blame while we are hiding out behind the curtain of our cowardice. Or just waiting that the nightmare will stop, that we recognize reality as a dream where we can easily wake up and everything is fine – a dear and well-practiced illusion which we are far too eager to embrace by giving it the name HOPE.

Hope, motivation, inspiration, and engagement is needed.

We need the power of hope, but hope alone and waiting for things to change is not something to rely on. Sure, change will happen anyway, but without our participation, it most likely will go into a direction which we didn’t foresee and probably didn’t want. There are too many malevolent forces in this world who will take advantage to direct change towards their own interests as soon as there is “laissez faire”, a vacuum, which our lethargy, our fears, and inertia give to them. They, for sure, are highly motivated to direct the world where they want it to go.

We need at least the same degree of motivation and dedication  to counterbalance them. That means we need to get out of victimism and helplessness and begin to step up and DO. Do what? Well, begin and find out what the right thing is for you, for me, for the many others who want a positive change but are still holding back by indecisiveness.

 

What I am doing:

Paradiso Integrale in Italy - the home of the Wisdom Factory
Paradiso Integrale in Italy – the home of the Wisdom Factory

As for myself, I begin with writing down my thoughts and hold public conversations at the Wisdom Factory and I am trying to inspire others to do the same and distribute their insights to as many others as possible. I talk with people about edgy topics and do my best to help them see new perspectives on “old” things. I try to connect people and to create initiatives for collaboration and co-creation – which often can mean simply: listen to each other and engage in creative dialog to find ideas and solutions together which neither of us alone could have conceived.

 

Will you join the tribe who decides to abandon active waiting and step into active creating? You are so welcome!

 

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

The courage to feel – the path to peace in the world

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You might think that you don’t need courage to feel, that “feeling” is something natural and you just feel what you feel. Well, yes and no. Most of us are longing to feel joy and happiness and run away into distractions of all kinds as soon as unwanted feelings present themselves. Alcohol is a means of eradicating negative feelings and, as we all know, our societies drink a lot. Doesn’t that mean that we don’t want to meet our negative feelings? That we don’t have the courage to face them, directly, and find out what they want to tell us?

During the last weekend, I attended a conference about the “Courage to Feel” in Berlin and we addressed those feelings which are buried in the shadow of our country, those feelings which we try to avoid and which we fear to feel. Beginning at the personal level it turns out that newbies have a hard time to just look right into the eyes of another person for a few minutes. What comes up often is awkwardness, fear, shame and all sorts of thoughts which want to convince us to turn away our eyes. We fear the intimacy which arises when we REALLY look closely and attentively at something for a certain period of time. And we fear the feeling of intimacy with a person we have never seen before.

Power – the eternal predicament

The  exercises we did were all about becoming conscious of what is going on inside, the feelings and the thoughts around them, and to bring all that into the context of us and our nation, Germany, which is confronted with the huge challenge of taking over leadership in the world again while still carrying the shadows of the past. We are aware that POWER WITHOUT LOVE leads to violence. We are also aware that our nation holds power and has a huge conflict with that fact. And we are aware that we need to heal the past in order to avoid a repetition of history.

Hitler
Hitler – a symbol for severe abuse of power

Germany has recognized the guilt for what it has caused in the 20th century, but we Germans, collectively, have not yet transformed the guilt into the power of positive change. We haven’t integrated our shadows and made available the positive force which appears when completing this process. The true liberation from guilt and shame, which is still haunting us up to the fourth generation is needed for Germany to be able to use its strength and power to become an inspiring leader in the world, to co-create a world community which leaves behind ethnocentric behaviors and embraces the human existence as what it is: a unique whole where everyone and everything is connected, where no one can win at the cost of others because it will impact them as well.

The victim – perpetrator cycle

war memorial
Soldiers are victims of the system and perpetrators by command. An unresolvable conflict for the soul.

We know from psychology that the victims become perpetrators and vice versa – and we see it everywhere. The perpetrator is haunted by what he has done and/or gets victimized by the other side as soon as the situation changes. Permanent winners do not exist; this is an illusion. It is time that we all understand that and therefore work towards a world which doesn’t know “winners”. and “losers”, but only human beings who collaborate to create the best future possible for everyone,

But how can that become possible? The only true answer is: Become yourself a full and grown up human being. That means, first of all, get to know yourself well, on a very deep level. Learn about your hidden motivations, your conditioning and learn to feel fully how your body feels, how your emotions move you, what your unobserved habits are.

What we need to learn

Your thoughts and feelings, what quality and direction do they have?  Are you fearful and suppress the fear instead of feeling it? Do you become aggressive instead? Or do you freeze in the face of fear and challenge?  If you don’t know well your feelings and the consequent thoughts and behavior patterns you have very little chance to meet the problems of life in an adequate manner. You will try to manipulate the world in order to avoid these feelings if you are a private person or the President of the United States. You will be a part of the problem, not of the solution.

The courage to feel

The organizers of the conference welcome the participants
“Mut zum Fühlen” – The courage to feel: Beginning scene of the conference in Berlin

In Berlin, we worked on it in depth, in personal exercises, and in a mega constellation to heal the wounds of the Nazi regime. I had the role of “frozen feelings”, a behavioral and psychological pattern people often adopt to protect themselves in horrible situations – and which allows them to terribly mistreat others as they cannot feel their pain and meet it instead with contempt. During the 2 hour process, I realized I was finally melting, a transformation was taking place.

I hope that this work will liberate the frozen energies in so many of us who are afflicted with the same pattern, knowingly or not. I am sure that 130 people at the conference, doing this incredibly deep healing work, have added a piece to the big puzzle of the liberation of humanity from the everlasting oscillations between conflicts and wars on one side and “helpless hope” toward a different future of peace and harmony.

The freedom to generate the right decisions

If we really want to create peace in the world then the future needs to be built on solid ground where we humans explore deeply our human nature, embracing our inner parts, including the victim and the perpetrator and all the others, and become able to freely decide to choose as opposed to being driven by uncontrollable emotions into destructive behaviors to the detriment of all.

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

Fifty years later: Making Peace with Christianity

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My personal experience with religion

I left the Lutheran Church at 21 after I had lost my faith at 14 because of a minister who was a total failure, unable to respond properly to the questions of a mind that was entering into rational thinking. He certainly isn’t the only one, then or now, who have not the least ability to awaken and maintain the interest of young (and older) people in the transcendent reality. Otherwise, religion and Christianity wouldn’t be so denigrated and undervalued in the West as it presently is.

I am coming to a deep understanding of my roots embedded in Christianity now, after 50 years, thanks to a person who can explain these things in ways that people grounded in rationality can understand and realize with awe that we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. There are so many things to discover which help us understand ourselves and the world as it presents itself today!

Children like the biblical stories!

Drawing Biblical stories
Biblical stories

Like many children, I was attracted by the biblical stories. They were fantastic, like fairy tales, and children adore this kind of thing. At 12 I had to go to the preparation lessons for the confirmation, an initiation ritual of the Protestant Church which you don’t want to miss as a child. For the first time in life everything is about YOU, relatives from all parts of the country come together in their best clothes, they watch you when you “perform” in the service where your heart beats when being officially admitted in the congregation of the adults, and, well, the many gifts you get that day. I got enough money that day to buy a tape recorder, those huge and heavy things which were the technical highlight then. So no wonder that I didn’t really have the choice to not go to the preparation lessons although I disliked them and the minister. The previous excitement about the Bible turned into aversion and the desire to get away from all that and as far as possible.

Goodbye to Religion

What was intended the first day of belonging to the religious community turned out to be my one and only day there. Many years later I led the choir of the German church in Rome. When, after a long time, they found out that I was not an official member of their church I was pushed to become one again. I compromised myself by doing it in order to be able to continue my job there, but the negativity I felt as a 14-year-old arose again, strongly. It certainly didn’t foster my relationship to religion and Christianity and it continued to keep me in ignorance about the foundations of the religion.

Christianity is at the root of our Western Culture!

During my early adulthood, Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation became a fashion among us “different” people. It seemed to be normal to become a Buddhist but I always hesitated. It didn’t feel right to me, although I couldn’t articulate why not. Later, in the 90ies, I began to learn meditation and many other “esoteric” modalities. It was very useful for many reasons. I had been very interested in Psychology and only very slowly did I discover my yearning for Spirituality. But still, the fashion was Eastern Spirituality. Western religion seemed old and odd and had nothing really to offer which could have attracted me.

Detail in a volt
Art born in Christianity

Nonetheless, I was sure that, whenever I would dive deeper into religious thought or belief, it would only be possible with Christianity. It has completely formed my culture, we Westerners have breathed it in from birth, if not with “church” so with all the achievements of our culture, from art to music, philosophy, science, architecture, everything. Adopting another cultural system seemed interesting but certainly, wouldn’t bring me to my roots. How could it.

Making Peace with Christianity

So I remained “homeless” religion-wise until I discovered Jordan Peterson. He gives me back my religion. He can explain the things in a way which makes complete sense to me without returning to “belief” as the traditional religions do. He is opening my mind to an understanding which really blows me away and leads me to a deep gratitude towards our ancestors and their relentless attempt to reach understanding and wisdom – by telling stories.

This is what helped me to integrate my culture more fully

The awe started in the first talk of his lectures on the Bible called: Introduction to the Idea of God. God is an idea, not a “reality” of any kind, let alone the old man with a beard sitting on the cloud.

Video Cover on Youtube
Jordan Peterson’s first lecture: 337.000views in only 3 weeks! People yearn for this message!

And yet, I began to understand why “He” is represented this way: it is the attempt of wise people in their time to tell a story which couldn’t be articulated in any rational ways. Rationality had not yet emerged, as we know from integral theory. This happened in the Renaissance fully, but the Bible is so much older than that and needed another way of explaining: telling a mythological story.

I certainly cannot summarize with half a paragraph a 2-hour lecture and maybe for you, something else stands out when you watch it. But I want to tell you about another big insight I received when listening to the third lecture: Christianity seems to be based on different principles than Buddhism. So far, to me, both seemed to be completely different. In “God and the Hierarchy of Authority” Jordan Peterson comes to a description of the Trinity in Christianity which seems to match the basics of Buddhism. He defines the three elements in the Trinity as such: “God” is the infinite space of possibility from which all form arise (the ground of being which I heard mention so often in meditation practices). The “Holy Spirit” is Consciousness itself and “Christ, the Son of God” is Consciousness in its specific form in space and time, the embodiment of possibility.

Understanding what we have ignored – a huge gift!

I hope I got that right with these few words. Listening to Jordan Peterson’s thoughts is a continuous “click, click” in my understanding, and history is opening up to me in an unexpected way. I begin to appreciate the past, the endless endeavor of humankind to understand life and how best to live it. The dismissal of previous times which is an underlying thread in our Western world, the arrogant feeling of absolute superiority of our present world, which declassifies everything else as “primitive”, has been dismantled and transformed into recognition and appreciation of the past. We are the result of thousands and millions of years of endless attempts to evolve a culture where we humans can find meaning for our lives on earth. We don’t just “begin” with our birth as a blank slate where we can write our life story at our own individual will. “It is more complicated than that”, using Jordan Peterson’s words. We, modern people, want to have everything easy and simple. But life is not like that. And striving for the easy button and believing that we are separate entities, independent from others, from the past and future and only existent in our physical reality deprives us of the richness of existence and the depth of experience. And most likely it causes us to fall into deep pits because of our self-induced blindness towards the complexity of existence.

Presently we humans dwell near the border of a self-created abyss. If we continue to ignore the lessons of the past as well as reality which is not based purely on the material world but which includes the invisible and transcends our being, we have a good chance to fall into that abyss and we will have a very hard time finding our way out again. Maybe hundreds or other thousands or millions of years depends on how good we are in understanding the real threat we are facing: the destruction of our culture without envisioning any alternative. Humans are capable of total destruction, you and me and everyone else. Unless we dig deep into our own psychology and understand this force in ourselves, we inevitably act it out in the opportune moments without then having the possibility to stop what we are doing.

Wordcloud with important words for growing up
Speaking the truth – important for all aspects of life

We need to grow up and to wake up to the whole reality of being in this world. Deliberately ignoring one part or the other leads to any sort of fundamentalism with all its destructive powers. We need to learn and understand and hold the space for multiple perspectives. Then we need to step up and speak “the truth” about what we see and understand. No longer believing in doctrines and ideas which transform us into “innocent” and ignorant sheep, victims of who knows who. And seeing the Bible and Christianity with new eyes we can learn our ancient innate knowledge about the psychology of humans – which hasn’t changed very much, after all, during the last some thousand years.

Culture, development, Photos and videos, Psychology and Spirituality

Do you believe in God?- Don’t you like that question?

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So, do you believe in God? What would be YOUR answer to the question?  And what would it have been 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago?
Let’s assume for a moment that your answer is “no” right now. Many people in our western world would give that answer because they believe in rationality and science and not in the old man with the long beard sitting in the clouds or setting bushes in fire. Fair enough.

Not the right question to ask!

Probably still yesterday I would have answered similar to: “I don’t believe in God, but I am a spiritual person”. And, actually, I never have given a profound thought to the question, I just repeated what I heard others say and which seemed to suit me as well. Then I watched the following video – and I became aware of the inappropriateness of the question itself which is so commonly asked in all times and everywhere.

 

Jordan Peterson makes it very clear that not everyone gives the same meaning to objects or words. We all have our own ways of perception and interpretations of what we perceive. Nonetheless, this is not a completely arbitrary process and you can observe some patterns in the way people perceive the world.

The Evolution of GOD

When we talk about GOD, the development of the “image” of God and what people believed God to be and to do, you can read a very interesting book called “God 9.0”. The entity we consider “God” has changed in fundamental ways since the beginning of time and today we can envision “version 9.0” of what we connect with the word GOD. Read the book (you can get it HERE) and you will understand why religious wars have reigned on earth, why you yourself believed in the almighty God as a child if you grew up in a “religious” family and why some people are seeing the world in the same old way while you have lost your faith in God and, maybe, now you believe in energy, crystals, psychotherapy, science, atheism and what not.

So when Jordan Peterson doesn’t answer the question whether he believes in God but challenges it as meaningless, he exactly responds to the insight that the terms “God” and “believe” are absolutely unclear and need a much longer answer than “yes” or “no” in our evolved societies. There was a time when you were supposed to say “yes” or you were burnt on the pyre if you dared to have your own ideas about God, the Divine and the Sacred. This, unfortunately but understandably, is still the case in parts of the world, regarding religion or political belief systems.

Between God 2.0 and God 6.0 – that’s where the problems come from

Our western world has managed to, basically, step up to “God 6.0”, while other parts of the world are still between 2.0 and 4.0. Let us make sure that we keep up the development and go towards 7.0 and higher – instead of allowing terrorism, conservative security needs or liberal utopian ideas to crash that which we have already achieved. Let us not fall back into political purging of “others” through fascist or communist ideology, and let us overcome rationality as religion as well as New Age Pseudo Spirituality. Let us open our minds to ever more comprehensive and differentiated ways of seeing the world. Although the answers we can give will often be “I don’t know” (as Jordan P. is demonstrating with all his honesty in the above video), we are coming nearer and nearer to the truth – which is never merely yes or no!

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

How can you actualize your potential?

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The term “potential” is used constantly in recent decades, understood with a desire to “unlock” it. Many people earn a lot of money by hooking people with courses or books. It doesn’t mean that those resources are necessarily bad, most likely they are not, but they don’t consider the prerequisites people need to truly reach before they can become able to step up to their potential.

 

What if parents don’t do their job?

Before introducing the Ted Talk by Dr.Jordan Peterson I want to briefly tell you my personal story about how one word of my parents decided upon my possibility to develop my potential or not: As a child and teenager, I sang in a choir and quite rapidly climbed up the levels. I liked singing a lot, but, as so often in that age, sometimes I would have preferred to hang out with friends instead of going to the regular appointments with the choir. One day I just didn’t want to go when my mother said: OK, but if you don’t go today you will never go again. Boom, splash, ugh. I had to decide and my decision would have consequences for which I would be responsible. I chose to go – and later I became a classical singer, a voice teacher, and therapist.

Children and young people need to learn to follow rules in order to later be able to become free of them again. They first need to adopt a system that works to figure out who they are and what is possible for them, for later be able to break free from the rules and develop their own ways. All developmental psychologists talk about that: we cannot skip levels of development. We cannot “allow” children to decide for themselves things which are too advanced for them – which was the mistake of the approach of the “anti-authoritarian education”.  A 4-year-old just cannot decide where to go best for holidays and a parent who thinks to give them equal part in the decision, or even have them decide alone, does not fulfil their task of guiding the young person, but tries to get out of their own responsibility for the welfare of the child – and their own, btw. Too!

Children want to know from grownups what the right ways of behaving are. They want to get to know the limits and boundaries which give them a safe space to experience themselves. In time they will push against these boundaries and expand them. But first, you need to have something to expand which is not complete chaos and uncertainty. And children need food for their minds and bodies in the sense that they need to be shown things, get acquainted with many realms of life without indoctrination, but just as an offer to taste and try out if they like it. A 6-year-old fervently demonstrating for political issues is abused quite as much as the one who is forced to decide about the family holidays. Indoctrination is as bad for the child’s development as is abandonment, whether physical, emotional …or educational.

 

Getting to know what we are really interested in needs inspiration and possibility.

We can develop our potential when we are deeply interested and drawn to something in our lives. If I hadn’t been drawn to singing – and then made responsible for pursuing it by my mother – I wouldn’t have discovered my abilities in that field. Many people today say they don’t like or cannot relate to classical music. If no one has ever given them the inspiration and the access to it, how can they know if they like it or not? What we don’t know, we cannot like.  How could we?

 Classical music

Kinder mit klassischen Instrumenten
Fotokredit Heinz Wagner from his article on the  Simon Bolivar Orchester visiting  Austria

 is by no means an ancient thing nor has it anything to do with higher social classes. An excellent example is the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra from Venezuela which results from a dedicated person going into the slums of the big cities and teaching children a classical instrument. Learning the violin or the oboe is a very demanding job – and it has the potential to excite the souls and lead people to a potential which otherwise they never would have discovered. Visit their YouTube Channel here

 

What is your potential and how can you realize it?

Finally, now we’re coming to the talk of Dr.Jordan Peterson about how to think about potential and how to develop it. First of all, it is clear that your potential is something innate in YOU and specific to you. Sure, all humans have a certain potential in common, but if you have more regarding creativity or, let’s say, science, that is specific to you. You can learn and study also the things where you are not really gifted for and you will arrive at a certain level, but it will be very hard work and not very inspiring for you.

This is an indicator: something “comes to you easily” probably means that you have quite a potential for that thing and that your soul will be happy when you pursue it. It might not be easy for you for all sorts of reasons, especially for social-political reasons, but for you, that thing is real and gives meaning to your life. Without it, you would be latently unhappy and unfulfilled.

 

Not only transcend the past but include it!

I don’t want to transcribe the Ted Talk which Jordan Peterson has given and provided a good outline of his thinking. He is a very strong voice against the usurpation by the hardcore materialism, the beliefs of which include: everything is material, dead material, and everything else is illusory. As we know already from Integral theory, these ideas are on the bottom of the overall crisis of the world as the concept of reality is one sided and reductive and therefore cannot give an explanation, let alone pride guidelines for our lives. Jordan Peterson makes clear that “reality” is not what we have believed during the past hundreds of years and he shows ways how we can re-integrate into our present life what we have lost along the way.

Watch this inspiring talk with open ears and open hearts and consider that you can be part of the solution to the present problems when you are inclusive enough to reconsider the past and the core value of TRUTH.