Tag Archives: growing up

Why can people become unreasonable, rebellious and destructive?

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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Fifty years later: Making Peace with Christianity

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. InGod 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.

Why Cyber War on my Website?

Why Cyber War on my Website?

What the hell are people looking for on my website? And why do they “attack” it. Whose enemy am I? What do I have that they believe to find when they attack my sites – and unfortunately those of many many others?

Is war still an attractive goal?

The meaning of the colors red and blue in Spiral Dynamics
The meaning of the colors red and blue in Spiral Dynamics

We believed that the times of war were over in the Western World, after WW II, and the remainders of war happen elsewhere on the globe. This may be true when we see war as a systematic way of killing the enemy for gaining their property. This is a concept of “red” and “blue” times in our societies (the colors of “Spiral Dynamics”), of the “egocentric” and “ethnocentric” level, where we care only for ourselves or our ethnic group. It’s THEM who are still believing that they can get something precious by killing the others and destroying their land. It never worked really well, except for a short time, and it still doesn’t.

But the mentality persists, real wars are going on, huge bloodshed of people, also of animals and the destruction of ecosystems in the name of …. WHAT? Fill in the blank and check if these are REALLY reasons for doing that, when seen from a higher perspective which includes REASON and LEARNING from the past. Unfortunately, human development, the evolution of consciousness, takes an incredibly long time.

The modern war on a global scale – attack and protect as an ongoing mindset

Coming back to my websites which were hacked and injected with malware. The wars have changed their appearance. Single people, or better robots, built by single people with mal-intent, are searching for I-don’t-know-what in normal people’s websites. We on our sites are talking about philosophy, personal growth, the evolution of consciousness, integral theory: What do they believe finding inside our websites? Or do they want to protest against the content? There would be better ways to do that.

I don’t want to respond to the call for war, I believe in pacific ways of living together. So why do I need to “protect” myself by paying people to take care that similar things won’t happen anymore? Well, somebody seems to want to get money, or by stealing addresses or bank info (not available on my sites) or by building up all this firewall and what not business, which obviously is a legal thing (but you get forced into it, anyway).

We can stop all wars – by growing up as humanity

trees expand in head
Growing begins in our heads

 

When will the war mentality finally end? In the cyberspace, in politics, between countries and groups, between single people, between businesses and institutions (sometimes called “competition”) and also in the personal life, fighting against our families or spouses, and , worst of all, against OURSELVES (which is rarely obvious to anyone who is doing it)

STOP IT and GROW UP!

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This article was first published on branded.me on August 20th 2016

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After the US elections and Trump as new president

Half a year later I am posting this article – and the topic is more pressing than ever. We have seen an election campaign in America which was more a war than a presentation of concepts and strategies. A war between people, the supporters of one party against the supporters of the other, and the protagonists literally fighting, attacking and defending themselves during times which should give an orientation to the population. Instead, it was a campaign for separation, and also from the dominant male position to the emerging female uprising.

MAle fist and woman bending down
We women need to stop being oppressed

Well, we have seen it, the patriarchal values are still very well in place. Women are still not united in solidarity against male oppression and humiliation. Women are still collaborating to hold themselves down.

Extreme feminism is not the answer, although in the 60ies it has brought forward the issue and kicked off the process. Now, 50 years later, we need to find a way to take a stand against intolerance and separation, against war and violence, and for human values of connection, appreciation, and love. We women cannot ask men to do it for us. It is our innate feminine capacity, caring and connecting, and WE are called to step up and create peace.

HOW can we create peace?

Certainly not by fighting in the way our civilization has been used to. We need to explore our own “weapons” which consist in self-confidence, coming out of the hiding place, speak up for what we feel is not right, educate our children in a way which creates appreciation and respect towards all beings and which enables us to hold and contain those who, out of their existential fear, fall into violence and destruction. We need to see far ahead and realize the consequences we will be facing if we don’t step up in time and propose an alternative to the old and outdated way of living together in families, businesses, countries and on the planet.

open a head
We need to get to know what we carry in our heads and to learn how to handle it

We are deeply challenged today, because we know perfectly well how we can achieve all this – and we resist strongly, because it requires us to change OURSELVES. It requires getting to know ourselves, to meet our shadow, the demons which we hold in us and which will come out in destructive ways if we don#t learn to integrate them and divert their powerful energies into something good.

We need to create peace in ourselves first, then in our families, then in our communities and countries. It sounds easy and utopian at the same time. Humans have always preferred to look for the enemy in others and to fight others for what they cannot see and accept in themselves.

It is time to grow up and become full human beings who are able to see conflict, embrace it without getting caught in it and transform it into something beautiful

Growing up – Personal Evolution is Slow and not to be taken for granted

Growing up

We grow up in an environment which teaches us what is real and who we are. In adult life, we often realize that there is something wrong with us and we don’t necessarily understand, that it is not US who is wrong, but the old conditionings which might have served us back in childhood, but have become a hindrance today. So the question is: how can we influence our lives and overcome the conditionings?

So many approaches came out since the 70ies who promise to resolve the issue. Well, they do – and they don’t. Everyone does a bit, a momentary relief, insight, jump ahead. We experience new states of being. But do they become permanent stages, a new self? more often than not they don’t. People slip back into old behaviors. It is completely normal, although tragic

girl meditating
Growing up – meditation can help

Evolution is very slow. Also our personal evolution. We can do a lot for it, to make it happen, but we cannot guarantee that it WILL happen – at least not the outcome we had in mind. Evolution goes its own ways and we can only prepare ourselves to go with it, when the time comes and the setting is right.

 These lines were first published on branded.me which I began to use as a public journal. Now I decided to use this website to collect my thoughts.
The photo is taken in an exhibition in the castle of Agripoli, Italy in October 2016