Tag Archives: jordan Peterson

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, Interglobal, Psychology and Spirituality, Science

Is that true? – Facing the Fake News Society

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Is that true? Believing vs. Knowing

 

“Do you believe that ETs exist?” a friend asked me lately after we watched the movie “Unacknowledged”. Do you believe that they exist? Is that true? I couldn’t answer the question, I stumbled over the word ”believe”. When do you believe something? When do you know it, or when do you intuit that something is true?

 

In the following, I will outline some thoughts about the different ways of judging if something exists or not, if something is “true” or not, and how we can judge about truth and “fake news”.

 

Hypothesis: Only what you can see exists. True?

 

Mathematical equations
Mathematical equations describe reality

Let’s begin with Mathematics. Does it exist? Do you believe it exists, or do you know it? Or do you assume that it exists, for several reasons; maybe because they tried to teach you something with that very name in school and so it must exist! One thing is obvious: you cannot SEE mathematics, you can use it by writing down equations, all sorts of symbols, and miraculously something meaningful comes out at the end – or, if not, you have made some error. So mathematics exists although it is a non-material “thing” which nobody has ever seen, but using its principles leads to interesting insights about what actually does exist in the material world.

 

So you probably don’t BELIEVE that mathematics exists, you KNOW it.

 

What about electricity? You cannot see it either, but touching a plug with a wet hand – or, worse, letting your hair dryer fall into your sink filled with water – you certainly have the direct experience of its existence. First, you better BELIEVE the warnings to be careful in similar circumstances and then you will KNOW it for certain as soon as you undergo such an experience or watch it happen to others.

 

So, do extraterrestrials exist?

 

Coming back to that question: You probably haven’t seen any yet, but does that mean that they don’t exist? Remember what we have shown with the examples of mathematics and electricity. You might have seen the famous movie “ET” and heard people arguing about the question if aliens really exist or if they are only the purposeful invention of someone or, alternatively, the hallucination of super crazy people who claim to have seen some spaceship appear in the skies. If it is so, you only have the choice to BELIEVE it or not, you cannot KNOW it. You might evaluate how trustworthy the sources of these pieces of information are, but you don’t really have the means of KNOWING as opposed to BELIEVING – or hoping or fearing or whatever.

 

If you should see yourself these super bright lights which they say accompany spaceships on the sky, would you then BELIEVE it? Or would you think you even KNOW it because you have seen the phenomena with your own eyes? This could well have been the case from the beginning of time until about 60 years ago. But now? Since modern technology is able to fake a spaceship there is much probability that somebody from this planet is trying to deceive you. (If you doubt this statement, get the documentary “Unacknowledged” or start with watching the movie below)

 

Don’t trust your eyes and what official manipulation wants you to see.

 

So in the case of extraterrestrials, you cannot use BELIEVE to answer the question but you need to arrive at KNOWING.

 

How can you arrive at knowing?

 

That’s easy when you know a little about humans and psychology. From innumerable studies – and from mythological stories like that of Cain and Abel (watch here Jordan Peterson talk about the biblical story of Cain and Abel) – we know that the individual hides everything from others which they don’t want them to know, and he/she envies, attacks and ultimately destroys everything and everyone who embodies their ideal, the thing or the being that they themselves most deeply desire to be or to possess when they realize that they can neither be it nor get it themselves.

 

Let’s assume that ETs don’t exist.

Ok, fine. Everybody could talk freely about the topic, nobody would care, it would only serve as a topic for films or a hobby for people who have no better thing to do than observing the sky. But how then could the phenomena be explained? What other explanation would be credible?

But if we assume that technology is able to do similar things, the urgent question arises: How? There is no easily accessible info on the Internet about how flying saucers are constructed and how they work. Does this information exist or not exist? Who is hiding it? And if it doesn’t exist, then the question remains what are these observed phenomena.

 

Now let’s assume that ETs exist.

Ufos in the night sky?
Ufos in the night sky?

So why don’t we all know about it? Why is there such secrecy around it? People who are ridiculed when exposing what they know – or in the worst case, as happened many times, killed? Why would you kill anyone who claims to know how the extraterrestrial spaceships work? Why were so many researchers assassinated who had developed alternative and low-cost (or free) functioning energy sources? Guess who is interested in NOT everyone having access to abundant resources and thriving lives? Well, we know who; those who would lose most when humanity would adopt the alternative energy systems.

 

Here is the principle which makes clear that ETs must exist:

Something is ever more likely to be true the more someone tries to hide it from the eyes of others.

 

Coming back to the initial question: Do you believe that ETs exist? Or do you know it?

 

brain, both hemispheres
Left brain hemisphere, the place for logical deduction

I cannot speak for you, but the logical deduction tells a clear story: ETs DO exist and they threaten the power of those who were able to gain unimaginable power over us, over the whole world, in the past century. It began with the US military who, by themselves, gathered all available evidence about ET existence – and locked it away in such a way that not even the president or CIA boss is granted access to the documentation. (Watch the below movie for the evidence of what I am saying here)

 

You might say that this is a conspiracy theory, and you are free to do so, when you BELIEVE it to be the case.  My BELIEF is directed to the credibility of the sources and the documented events and to the “misfortunes” which happened to so many people who seriously researched the topic. I believe in the information I get from people who I personally know as trustworthy or who I have observed for quite a time and have come to the conviction that they are speaking credibly.

 

AXIOMS are at the base of deduction 

railroad-tracks
On earth parallels never meet – an assumption which works fine here, but not in space

That is my basic “axiom” from which I start my logical conclusions. Axioms are those entities which cannot be proved true within the system itself and therefore need to be assumed as true in order to construct a valid and true conclusion from propositions within the system. When axioms change the conclusions change – you might remember the famous Euclidian parallels which never meet, and a completely new geometry arose when this axiom was dropped.

 

Regarding the existence of ETs in the Kosmos: The other axiom for my deductions is grounded in the laws of human behavior as briefly outlined above: “If you have nothing to hide why do you keep it secret at all costs?” Or better; whenever you use drastic means to keep things secret, these things are real and others knowing about them is highly threatening to you.

 

Therefore my conclusion: ETs exist.

 

For me, aliens do exist and they visit our planet to make sure that our destructivity won’t erase our planet and our species, as well as damage the whole Universe. Our human capacity for endless fighting and destruction for egocentric motives is exemplified in atomic warheads directed not only on locations on this earth but also into space.

An atomic explosion
The ultimate destructive power of ill intended humans

We humans are a menace, not only to ourselves but also for whatever might be living in the Kosmos – and NOT the other way round! Despite the fact that psychopathic leaders and those behind the official leadership carousel wanting us to believe in their story. They keep doing this in order to maintain the personal advantage which they draw from the present economic system of scarcity. Fossil energy as the basis of the world economy is not only depriving us humans from the clean air and water which we need for survival, they also keep us in artificial scarcity by means of which they are able to continuously accumulate material wealth.

“Free energy” – the consequence of modern science and alien example

The aliens have mastered the “free energy” challenge and overcome gravity and other basic laws which civilian human science is still struggling with. They use what is presently called “free energy” which has been discovered by many individuals from about 150 years ago on. We all could already live on a clean planet if the main exponents of this KNOWLEDGE hadn’t been eliminated and their documents weren’t hidden. It is useless to hope that the change will come from those who have all the interest in keeping the knowledge hidden. The Internet presently gives us the chance that what has once been discovered can be rediscovered again – and every time it gets easier. (see “Cosmic Grooves” by Ken Wilber). The more that people come out with their ideas and devices and the more it happens in completely publicly, the more it will be difficult to kill all of them and to continue to hide what all humanity has the right to know and use for the benefit of EVERYONE.

The documents available

There is a movie to watch about this topic bringing many testimonies for the existence of what we have talked about here. The movie is a sort of summary of many hours of footage, much of which published on Youtube and certainly worthwhile to watch – if you need more evidence to get from “believing” to “knowing”

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

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