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.

Life on earth

Getting in touch with nature – a surprise?

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Getting in touch with nature:  it might be different than you expect

We dream of the quiet and happy place in nature where we will be free of what is bothering us. We believe nature to be as we see it in photographs or in lovely stories, a wonderful and positive place to be. Well, it is – and it is not. What do you expect? When you decide to open yourself up to REAL nature then you can learn a lot, find many moments of perfect fusion and enjoyment, but also many surprises which are sometimes not seen or lived as positive.

My Love Story with Living in the Countryside

I LOVE nature and when I lived in a big city on the third floor I dreamed of the simple life in the countryside, about growing my own vegetables and being ONE with Nature – the ideas which arose in the 60ies together with Post-Modernity. I realized the dream and I learned about reality by my own experience. And the reality which opened up to me was not always what I had expected and envisioned, Almost 40 years in close contact with animals, plants, the weather and the constant changes taught me that Nature is just what it is, neither good nor bad – or both. Nothing to be romantic about or to idealize in ways which city people often do, but a never ending source of learning.

So what is the problem?

Lion with the paw on another one's head
Beautiful – when we see them in a zoo or on photots

You might say: When I go to live in the countryside somewhere in Europe for instance, I won’t be eaten by lions or crocodiles. No, you won’t, but you will be eaten, literally or figuratively, by many other things which you often haven’t even known they existed.

The gap between imagination and reality.

Does this sound like a negative outlook on what I am going to write? Maybe you might think so, but actually, it is not. This short article is my attempt to show you the gap between imagination and reality – and also the big gap between what is really beautiful and impressive, although not fitting in our cowardly expectations of beauty grounded in the illusion of a safe space.

Nature is not like we want it to be

A group of sheep lying in the gras
My sheep waiting for me and hoping for a treat

Nature is not a safe space, for anyone. People who grow up in cities know nature mainly from the carefully cultivated parks and gardens. They often confuse their experience with what nature really is. I had run an agritourism and I had quite a few guests who were scandalized when they had to walk on the natural paths wearing their shoes with high heels, especially after rain. Did they really believe in finding pavements and streets everywhere in the countryside like they are used to in their big cities?

A red insect, looking beautiful
Looks beautiful but who knows?

And there are animals in nature, insects who don’t die on the command of the city hygiene sprayings, there are mice who live their rightful existence (hopefully not inside the houses, but for sure in the stables). There are all sorts of animals which we have no idea of, except by the sweet pictures in books and advertisement: cows, sheep, lambs, rabbits, chicken and all other farm animals on one hand, and foxes, wild pigs, porcupines, badgers, martens, weasels, wild dogs on the other hand. We know very little about how to handle all those animals even when we have some experience with a cat or a dog. And if we have never had any animal at all we live in total illusion about the goodness of nature, about the easiness of being immersed in it fully and about producing our own food by handling the ground and the creatures.

How I entered in contact with the other side of Nature:

My initiation into the “unspeakable cruelty” of nature happened only after a few months of holding chicken and pigeons in a little hut behind my house surrounded by the beauty of the Umbrian hills. I was totally excited when one of the 4 hens deposited her first egg and the pigeons were breeding in their nests. What a miracle! I went very often to the tiny stable to check if there was another egg or a young pigeon born. One day I noticed that one hen was missing. Strange. I couldn’t explain it and went immediately into panic mode: I became very nervous, even fearful because I had no idea what had happened. Maybe a fox? Or somebody had stolen the hen, or… You know how the mind runs through worst case scenarios when we haven’t learned to control it yet, and how the stories we tell ourselves make us ever more nervous and upset.

Two of my proud and beautiful cocks
Two of my proud and beautiful cocks – the fox got them!

That day, I checked the stable every hour. Three hens were there early in the morning, at about 10 o’clock I could find only two and at noon there was only one left. There was no hole in the fence where they could have gone out for a walk, but, actually, the door wasn’t locked properly, although always closed. At a certain point, I had to hang up the washing and turned around the far corner of the house – when I saw a white spot which looked like – an egg!!?? Here an egg? How come? And in the next moment, I saw the dog happily chewing on a chicken wing! I was totally shocked, petrified, helpless. I phoned my partner in his workplace and could hardly dial the numbers for the upset I experienced. My report must have sounded like a confused outburst of anger, indignation, upset, disappointment and more. The beautiful and romantic world I had lived in so far had crashed: How dare my dog (whom I loved) could do such a thing to me? And the poor hens! How CAN he DO such a thing! All my fantasies about the goodness – and harmlessness – of nature crumbled into pieces.

Letting go of what we think SHOULD BE:

There was more to come in the following years and it took me many years until I could let go of my unrealistic expectations of what nature SHOULD be and to be able to enjoy it as it is. Rather I became prepared for the unexpected, without fear and preoccupation – but just knowing that nature has its own terms and will never allow us to dominate her.

Nature has its own ways – and can impact politics and societies

Dry soil, wind, globe
Drought depletes countries and destroys the balance.

We are now in 2017, we are living with poison in the air and in our food, the last icebergs are about to melt and the arctic winds arrive even in Italy while the drought in the Middle East has led to the mass exodus of people and the rise of power thirsty extremists who have no regard for anything, not even for their own personal lives, let alone for those of others. We are doing our very best to disturb the balance on our planet and we ignore the consequences. Humanity in its ignorance behaves like a safari tourist who takes a bath in a river and gets eaten by a crocodile. We have no idea about the relationship between cause and effect, we hope that Nature will continue to support us and keep us alive, or better, we don’t really pose the question.

My experiences with nature lead me to consider the present situation of the world as very critical. If we continue to exploit nature it will slap us in the face, as it is beginning already with droughts and storms of unheard-of consequences. Nature is not nice or kind, as we “New Agers” tend to believe. Nature will do her best to gain back her balance and she has no special regard for humans, as we are tempted to think. When she takes over we will learn the lesson of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

The need to align with nature as opposed to force our ideas on it

But why don’t we understand and learn? Why don’t we stop being so stupid as to believe that we are stronger than nature? Not only the 7.0 earthquakes in Italy, killing more than 300 people and destroying innumerable towns and villages, should show us that we are not as powerful as we think and that it would be better to collaborate with nature rather than trying to subdue it.

An invitation to a constructive discussion

Please write your comments below and contact me if you would like to have a conversation about this or similar topics in our live broadcasts at The Wisdom Factory. net

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.

 

Culture, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality, Science

Freedom of speech – freedom to use violence when you feel like the “victim”?

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They behave, already grown up, like little children who scream to get the attention of others. Always the same phrases, insulting and blaming and using the power of loudspeakers to shut down who they don’t want to grant freedom of speech which they consider to belong exclusively to them as the eternal victims.

Blind to the own blind spots and contradictions

Woman reading in a book
What do we really learn in life to become responsible adults?

I am always amazed how sufficiently intelligent people can be so completely caught up in their contradictions, so unaware that they are doing themselves – massively – what they blame others for. How they, so easily, overstep the rules of society which holds them safe – and even forgives their adolescent blindness – to take as granted to themselves that which they are not inclined to allow others. How can people convince themselves to be right, with no exception and no discussion about it?

How can they proclaim and promote their violence against peaceful people, how would they enter into total war and try to provoke the other side to cease and play the role of the enemy? It is a dangerous game, not only for others, but also for themselves. The revolutionaries of the first hour rarely ever have been alive for long after their destructive victory!

Would you be able to handle such a situation?

This is what came to my mind when I watched the following video. It is loud – but scroll ahead when you have heard enough of the always same phrases and screams, the important part comes in the second half!

Dr.Jordan Peterson trying to speak at McMaster University

Please watch it and ask yourself: Would you have been able to respond to the chaos in a similar wise way as Dr.Peterson did? He has understood that opposing these blind forces only creates more of it.

So what can we do in the face of it? No wonder why other panel guests withdrew from the event because of the harassment. I surely wouldn’t be able to handle a similar situation, would you? Dr.Peterson was calm – and finally gathered the people who wanted to listen to him, somewhere outside the building, and answered their questions and gave them advice about how to meet similar situations in their lives.

This is a lesson in what it means to be an adult and a responsible person in the face of the chaos created willfully by others. This is what we more insightful people need to learn: get free from our triggers, bring our own shadow to light, and then BE THERE and face the situation without the primordial reactions flee, freeze or attack. Then we can be part of the solution, not of the problem!

We are called to stand up and say what we need to say! Even when we consider ourselves non-political, introverted or whatever!

Please watch also our conversation How can we stay inspired to work towards a sustainable future

WOMEN MATTERS

Conversations at The Wisdom Factory

Culture, Psychology and Spirituality

Why being in opposition to others is not only useless but…

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Opposition and fight is useless when we want to bring forth positive development.

Understand me right: I don’t mean that we need to agree with everything which comes our way. Not at all, to the contrary, I would say. Getting in touch with other people’s behaviors and ideas is a perfect occasion for self reflection and for refining our own takes on the matter. And there are probably more things in the world towards which we are skeptical or we totally disagree than those which we happily embrace right away and feel connected to whoever brought them forth.

I am talking here of a completely different case: people who for any reason whatsoever take pride in opposing somebody else’s work. The criticize all or parts of it, the axioms, the ways of reasoning, the worldview or whatever they happen to consider wrong… or they dismiss the whole work of the other person because they believe to have discovered some flaws in it or because of certain assumed or real traits of the originator.

When opposition and critique becomes a personal identity

fingerprint
Identity as Know-it-better and warrior for it?

Today such a case came – again – into my awareness: A person whose name I don’t want to mention here has the habit of criticizing the American philosopher Ken Wilber for more than 15 years. He has created an identity around his opposition to the man and his large body of work. It has become his only viewpoint: something is wrong and I have to point it out. This would not be a problem if the critique was well founded, constructive and benevolent. Instead it turns out as a one sided fight for being heard and for being right – by making the other wrong.

The power of rationalization and projection for avoiding to see our own flaws.

It is a human trait to diminish others in the attempt to raise oneself, not a very healthy one, as we know from psychology, and it sheds light on the personality structure of a person engaged in the fight against his or her windmills. Attack and war to dominate others is as ancient as the need for being right. In integral theory we probably would attribute these attitudes to lower levels of development as we would assume that after integrating rationality into our evolved being we would be able to see also ourselves from a rational perspective. Well, maybe. We certainly see others from our rational perspective, we are able to detect flaws and merits and we are able to develop our own theories as well as we can. But our ability to reflect on others and the outside world is far better developed than our ability of self reflection and self knowledge.

Psychology is a relatively young discipline and the insights we can gain about human conditioning and our own behavioral patterns – which  express our thoughts and our emotions – are not easy to perceive and acknowledge, let alone integrate into our lives. To avoid the confrontation with our own reality we prefer to flee into our rationalizing heads or into the more or less “fake” bliss of spiritual experiences.

Projection on hand with points to other people
Projection on others what you don’t want to acknowledge in yourself

The “natural” consequence of the former is to find fault in others (projection of what we don’t want to see in ourselves onto others) or withdrawing from the outside world in the latter. The former leads to separation and war – as if we hadn’t enough of that already. The latter leads to the negation of the responsibility which everyone of us has towards ourselves, humanity and the world.

How being stuck in opposition betrays one’s good intentions.

woman in anger
Angry fighters more likely destroy than repair

The paradox, in my eyes, is the fact that many people who “fight” for a better world, for all the good things to happen instead of eternal conflict and war, they themselves are heavily contributing to maintaining animosity and destruction – against their conscious intent. And they don’t even notice it! They don’t realize what they are doing under the headlines of their positive intentions. How can this happen?

Well, first of all, emotional competency and freedom of unconscious patterns has not necessarily to do with levels of development when we consider the cognitive line as main indicator of our level. There are very smart people around with a complex understanding of theories of all kinds – and they might at the same time have not the slightest idea of their collective and personal patterns through which their actions in the world are colored. It is the question of the fish who cannot tell you what water is. It is too near to be in the fish’s awareness!

Making others wrong makes collaboration impossible.

Coming back to the person who triggered this article. Only he himself can figure out why he is behaving this way, why he spends his life energy in maintaining his opposition and fight to make the other wrong and himself right. I only know that this is not a worthwhile occupation in times when all forces are needed to collaborate for the survival of our species and our planet. It is like wanting to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while everything around is falling into ashes. In other words: it is not helpful neither for the world nor for the person himself.

Prolonged emotional responses to events in our lives are self consuming and certainly not ultimately rewarding. They are considered disorders, from the psychological point of view. Attachment to victimism might be another term here and blind willingness to seed destruction instead of peace.

The way out

wooden-track in nature
The way out – not a shortcut for sure
  • Be willing to look inside deeply
  • Observe and recognize your own patterns
  • Forgive yourself for not having noticed your deep conditioning as a human and as a person
  • Discover the experiences and triggers which led you into the pattern and work with them
  • Release the counterproductive patterns consciously and create new habits of perceiving, evaluating, thinking and behaving – as well as you can
  • Be willing to see and acknowledge the good in yourself and in others, in your work and in that of others
  • Let go of your need to dominate and know-it-better  
  • Be willing to contribute your part of the truth to the bigger picture
  • Stop searching for the (negative) needle in the haystack and trust that it will be found and treated appropriately in time
  • Become friendly and cooperative – and happy

It might sound as if I knew it all, as if I had figured that all out for myself and that I take pride in advising others. I am definitely not at that level, but I have come to understand what the missing part is in us humans which, for yet another time, is driving us towards separation, discrimination and hate – and ultimately to war. The threat of total nuclear destruction or by an environmental catastrophe could be right around the corner – and we are contributing to it without being aware of it.

Intergral theory is giving us a good understanding of many aspects of reality. If you want to go deeper listen to the lectures of Dr.Jordan Peterson. He has a very engaging way of leading you into the human predicament – and what you can do to become a better and more helpful person in this world. Check out his channel and especially his message to millenials: How to Change the World — Properly.

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

Information overload – the new disease

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Is this YOU?

A calendar with the word NEWS and several globes
Too much info every day

You are a person full of energy and curiosity and you are delighted with learning new things, right? For years and years, you got an extra kick when you discovered something new – and lately, you feel often a little tired and some tension in your forehead, right? You get up in the morning, the emails, the news channels you usually visit, some extra info from Facebook or G+, all seems to be so interesting and you click and click, you read as much as you can – and probably you forget to plus/like the articles, to write a comment or to share it in your feed. Just too much, you think.

We need to enter into a conversation!

And you are right, just too much! And still, just reading something without expressing our gratitude for the author’s work, or without telling them your own opinion on it is like lurking behind the curtains. Without intending, we co-create the consumerism and onesidedness of the internet. A net is intended to flow in all directions, not just from source to consumer. Just reading and not engaging deprives us of entering into a conversation – and it deprives the author of a genuine feedback which would be very precious for developing their ideas and insights.

Information overload

There is a new illness – or maybe it is an addiction, at least in the beginning before serious physical symptoms arise. We want to “dance at every wedding”, as we use to say in Germany. We don’t want to miss something which could be important. You never know, do you? And then you – and me – continue to check out this, read that, install this, go to that platform, begin a new project, engage (shortly) in a new group etc.

Overloaded camel
Falling down or axle break?

Well, if you have read this far, I am sure you know all that. Now the question arises: what to do about it? Shall we wait until the improperly stacked load falls and shatters everything? Well, we are not WAITING, we convince ourselves that, after all, it is not too bad and we can go on as we had, our body and mind will stay with us as our faithful servant as long as we want. Really?

Burnout even without a day job

When you live in the countryside and you have no 9-5 job, how can you think of burn out? Work on the land makes you tired, yes, but your head remains clear and your mind calm – unless you have major emotional problems, but this is not our topic today. Sitting in front of the screen and reading other people’s most interesting stuff doesn’t feel like work. It satisfies our curiosity. Contrary to working outdoors, we confine our energy on our eyes and on our intellectual mind. The body begins to ache – we don’t care. Movement in front of the keyboard. Fingers yes, the rest remains still or in awkward constricted positions. Shoulders ache, eyes ache. The body protests and gives us all sorts of signs – which we normally misread as a request for coffee, cigarettes or food. Where will this end? In eye problems, obesity, lung cancer, and overall burnout – right where other people travel to for relaxation!

The predicament of change

The earth drowning in water and fire
The earth drowning in water and fire

Most of us are very invested in change. We fear that Nature collapses if we don’t work against the fatal tendencies. We fear that our nations may fall back into separation and confrontation – and we feel like needing to become activists for connection and peace. We are deeply touched by injustice against humans and/or animals and we feel called to do something there, too. We want to help, help, help to create a better future – and we see how things are getting worse and worse, at least from our present perspective. We become ever more worried about all sorts of things, our emotions get triggered more and more, we feel we definitely have to step up and do something useful. But WHAT?

Navigating the crisis – a personal challenge for everybody

Humans have different styles of responding to crises and uncertainty. Some people enter into panic, they become resentful and even violent towards whatever they see as an enemy. Others try to be resilient and keep their emotions under control. Hopefully, they succeed, it certainly depends on the amount of challenge they are facing. At a certain point comes the burnout, an illness, a detrimental quarrel with the spouse, a serious depression etc. The energy which we are accumulating, willingly or not, doesn’t just disappear.

So why don’t we stop in time? Why can’t we follow our own advice, our better knowing, our rational insights about what is going on with us? I believe that we are still in the modern mindset which elevates the mind over body and psyche. I have learned as a child to control myself with will power, and the western world is grounded on the “free will” of humans. So it’s no wonder that we underestimate the power of our psyche and the intelligence of our bodies. We have continuously practiced ignoring both when they speak to us and we agree with our thoughts and follow their biased advice. We have lost the connection to ourselves and to get it back we have to make a deliberate effort to BEGIN to take ourselves seriously and to abandon our fears about missing out on something important. We certainly will – we already do, all the time – but we need to come to terms with our limited being . We are not omnipotent even if we have the tendency to believe it.

The way out

As always it boils down to us humans and how we see and treat ourselves. We need to sort ourselves out. Even if we have done a lot of psychological and spiritual work on ourselves, we need to continue, to go deeper. We have learned previously – at least we hope so – how to conduct ourselves in the life we used to live. Things have changed rapidly in the outside world. We haven’t been able to change with the same speed. We have fallen into the traps of speed, success and wanting to be in control. We have pretended to be able to create change in the world. Well, yes, we have created change – but as it seems now it was not the change we had envisioned.

So what to do? 

flooded landscape
Submerging in the flood?

We can give up, float with the stream until we crash against a dike or drown in the deeper waters. We can ignore the dangers, we can become resentful, we can blow up everything in which we believed and pull everyone and everything with us down into psychological or physical annihilation – very common for humans to do! (Think about HIV positive people in the 80ies who deliberately infected others to express their existential rage against God or destiny).

Or we can become humble and begin from scratch with our work to transform ourselves. We imagined that, finally, we had reached a good level of development and were proud of it. We need to understand that we have just a short rest before we are sent out into the storm again, the hurricane of inner turbulences, contradictions, desires, needs, fears and visions. We need to hold our own hands and go ahead, step by step, and give ourselves the necessary understanding and compassion.   And along with it we need to refresh the encouragement and push to clean up what is still lurking in the corner, which is hindering us from doing what we are meant to do. We need to overcome the obstacles inside ourselves and become fuller human beings. We need to understand that the change in the outside world depends on us – literally

Butterfly
We need to transform from the caterpillar to the butterfly, from following the food to be able to see from above.

We can no longer pretend that the others need to change, politicians, economy etc. to change the current downward spiral of our planet earth. Well, they do need to change, too. But first of all, WE NEED TO CHANGE OURSELVES and then go out and be a role model for the others who find themselves unable to change without a plan and without guidance.

My advice to you and to myself:

STOP COMPLAINING – FIND THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM IN YOURSELF AND CHANGE IT ACCORDING TO YOUR VISION OF A BETTER WORLD.

Stop with the overload, take only what you really need! Become the better world inside you and the outer world will follow! (And not the other way round!)

 

 

 

Culture, development, Photos and videos, Psychology and Spirituality

Human development and the fascinating power of music

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The World is Sound – Nada Brahma

Music is a innate capacity of humans. It is the most fundamental means for our expression, especially when we use our voice, and it has the power to influence our whole being.

Music develops alongside humans

Along with our social-psychological development, music too has developed over the centuries. It is a real pleasure to meet the young composer Samuel Andreyev in this interview with Jordan Peterson where they explore together the power of music and the development it has taken up to the present. Even for non-musicians this conversation is quite understandable – and a musician also gains a expanded perspective.

This happened certainly with me. I was very delighted with the analysis and could confirm from my own experience what these two intelligent and open minds were talking about.

Jordan Peterson in conversation with the composer Samuel Andreyev

 

My experience as a musician

I am a classically trained singer and my main interest has always been classical music. I always enjoyed the music, from the middle ages to the early 20th century – but there it stopped for me. My experience of singing in a professional choir taught me how difficult it is to study pieces by 12-tone composers like Webern, Schönberg or those of the sixties like Penderecki and others. Those concerts had a certain fascination as sound experiences – but is it really worth all this huge amount of preparation? I always decided NO for myself – maybe only because of my lack of an absolute ear (perfect pitch) – which would have made singing these pieces so much easier?

How we learn to hear and expand our perception

One thing I noticed though – and it was addressed also by Samuel Andreyev in the interview above: The more you study a piece, whatever music it is, the more you get familiar with it and it becomes “your” music. This is the point where your interpretation of the piece will come from inside you rather than just a repetition of the ideas of someone else. When we really understand the music and own it by continuous practice, it becomes familiar and we begin to really enjoy it – which often was not the case when we encountered it the first time.

What sounds GOOD to our ears?

This is the reason for a continuous expansion of our ability to hear and accept newness in music. The acceptance of what sounds “good” has developed from total harmony (octaves), to fifths and up to all the harmonic intervals. Today it is almost unimaginable that once a third had been considered a dissonance! Our perception of what we hear as consonance or dissonance has developed until today when we can enjoy whole clusters of adjacent sounds. This is just a harmony of a higher level – as all these notes appear, sooner or later, on the scale of the harmonics of the basic note.

Personal development and enjoyment of music 

In short: I realized that, today, my ear has developed so far as to accept music which I had dismissed totally 30 years ago. That doesn’t mean that all music is “good” which is offered today. Good music has a certain felt attraction. Maybe not at first hearing. “Hear it 10 times and then find out what you feel about it!” This is also the recommendation by the composer Samuel Andreyev.

When you listen to his music – especially after having watched his conversation with Jordan Peterson – you probably will find it very attractive, or at least interesting and well worth listening to!

Enjoy

 

Culture, development, Life on earth, Psychology and Spirituality

Is Western Society Heading Back to The Middle Ages?

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Heretics burning at the stake
Heretics burning at the stake

We made it about 400 years ago: the separation of church and state. It took many centuries of fight and suffering, thousands of “heretics” burnt at the stake, loosing their lives for our benefit: For us to be able to say whatever we want without ending up imprisoned, tortured, stoned or burnt. Are we now heading back to the Middle Ages?

Funny enough – or better: tragic enough, it is the leading edge of modern societies who is pushing us back into that state where we lose our freedom of speech, where we have to bite our tongue if we don’t want to be denounced and tried for what we say: If not as in the Middle Ages, but certainly as in the “east-block” countries. I grew up in Germany, fortunately in the West, but I had relatives in the East and I know how they were continuously threatened and had to be very careful or pay dearly if they said something about a certain group or the practices of the state.

The Levels of Development – evolution in healthy and unhealthy forms

The Levels of Development (Ken Wilber)
The Levels of Development (Ken Wilber)

The unhealthy form of the”green” level  is  expressed in an aggressive  fundamentalism (see the levels of development in “Spiral Dynamics” or as outlaid by Ken Wilber). It is nothing better than any other fundamentalism, only the target changes. Western Societies have recently been governed mostly by people with a “green”- postmodern – mindset. In their attempt to protect minorities and to see everybody as (literally) equal, they see the necessity to create laws to protect THE FEELINGS of certain members of certain minorities. 

Who is Responsible for Your Feelings?

Face in hands - expressing sadness or any negative feeling
Negative Feelings

Modern psychology has clearly stated that we are responsible for our own feelings, we alone, nobody else. Yes, we can be triggered by what other people do or say, but how we react to the trigger, that is exclusively our own choice. With the new laws in Canada this gets completely turned around. People’s feelings are considered subject to criminal deeds done by others. This is the perfect form of victimism which is appropriate for little children, but not for adult citizens in the world. It reminds me of my mother’s saying with which she tried to teach me responsibility for my actions: “It’s too bad for my mother that I froze my fingers; why didn’t she give me gloves?”

So, whose feelings would be eligible to be protected by law?- and whose not? Apart from the fact that it is absolutely beside the point for the above reasons, it is a bottomless barrel. We will end up staying silent, all the time, for fear of being accused and “burnt at the stake”. Hello Middle Ages!

White ghostly figures walking over meadow
Do we want such an atmosphere?

We will end up in a totalitarian state – from which most of the present refugees are trying to escape by flooding into the Western world. Will we give up our achievements in our societies and allow practices of previous levels to govern us again? Do you want to live in constant fear and repression because someone believes that you have violated THEIR rules?

Man with bended mouth
Freedom of Speech?

Do you want THEIR rules to take over our countries? Think about it and get clear about the consequences for yourself, your family, your country and the world. And if you decide that your freedom of speech is more important and also the freedom in your personal life altogether, then stand up and fight for the principles of our constitutions and watch out for all the hidden or open attempts to re-establish values which we had overcome with so much sacrifice during the past centuries.

Is This a Picture of Mohamed? – what can you say and what not?

Here you can experience what we are heading toward – if we don’t pay attention: Jordan Peterson brings it to the point in this short video. Feel into it and observe yourself: would you like to live with the fear of saying the “wrong” words?

Let me know what you think about it . now, after you have watched the video!

Journaling interests and everyday life