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
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.
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
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.
Rebellion is part of growing up
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Life is precious, right?
How would our world look like if we really knew how precious LIFE is?
We are so much used to take life for granted, only
when a baby is born we get excited about the miracle which coming into life represents; or, maybe, we get excited when we observe seeds sprouting and growing into huge plants. The enormous potential which enfolds in front of our eyes; yes, we might still have a sense of awe and wonder.
Then there is the other side, the end of life, and we don’t want to go there too often. We try to avoid thinking about death and dying and only when we are directly confronted with it do we give it some attention, the minimum possible. For fear of being “pulled down” we neglect our human duties towards people at the end of their lives. We don’t go to visit them, we deny them the comfort of not being alone in this difficult transition time because we do not want to be reminded of our own inevitable end. By not thinking about it we imagine that the “problem” will disappear magically, that somehow we won’t die, anyway…
How we pass our life time
As a consequence we have little chance to become aware to what extent our life is precious. We live it, daily, dealing with all sorts of distractions, often disguised as “important”, we are wondering how the next day will unfold: will it be as hot as today? Will it finally rain and end the severe drought? Will the President finally become a reasonable person? Will the terrorists attack again? Will I be safe? – Never ending questions which keep our thoughts and emotions occupied. We put our attention mainly on what doesn’t work, what should be better – and often we have a naive and sometimes also a can-do idea of how we can create a better world for ourselves.
So most of our time we are occupied – and preoccupied. And most of our time we don’t really LIVE our lives in the sense of being fully present to ourselves and our experience. We try to get out of the “experience” as soon as possible, especially when it is a bad one, and then we have something to tell to others.
By telling our stories we, again, most of the time are not present to ourselves and our precious lives. We bridge the waiting for the horrible hours, days, months or years to end – by finding something which replaces the direct confrontation with LIVING.
I wrote about the many ways of WAITING which seems to be the main occupation of living creatures as soon as they have some sense of time. (Read it here). Then there are some moments when the stream of waiting is interrupted: a sudden smell of roses,
a flashing image of a happy moment in the past, a short and meaningful eye contact with somebody, a musical line filling you with joy, the awkward attempts of a baby or young animal to walk: many snapshots which can wake us up from the dull routine of the passing hours until tonight, tomorrow, next year, some distant day from which we expect salvation.
Becoming more present – but not too much, please!
Yes, we can learn to be more present to ourselves and what our experience is, but it actually is a necessity that for the most part of our days we are acting on autopilot. We couldn’t live otherwise.
Imagine if you needed to pay attention to every movement of your body, to every step while you walk. When you try to do that, just for fun, with intense attention, you end up stumbling over your own feet. It makes a lot of sense that we automate much of our behaviors, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to be attentive to what is going on around us. And even there: we are continuously making choices regarding what we notice and what not, what is important enough to pass through our perceptual filters and what we can ignore – which actually is most of what surrounds us. Not being able to ignore irrelevant things, like not being able to forget, is a curse to humans which makes their lives miserable by the overload of endless input into their sensorial system.
So let’s be grateful that we are not always aware of everything.
This doesn’t mean, though, to push away those things which are important to be included in our awareness. And maybe the biggest one is the recognition of the preciousness of life and the gratitude we need to nurture for being alive, still alive and able to enjoy and to suffer, to give and to receive, to be a full human being.
That’s what inspired me to write this post:
The reason for this post was a brief experience of the past few days. Last Sunday we went on a bike ride. There was a badger lying on the road. I hate when cars run over animals when lying dead on the road. This one was at the side but we wanted to put it into the nearby field and give it the due respect by this mini-ritual of a burial. Coming nearer we realized that it was not dead. It’s breath moved his chest, up and down, it seemed to sleep peacefully. But it was hurt, obviously, and destined to die.
What is the RIGHT thing to do here?
What to do? From an ethical point of view, but also from a practical one? The mind says: the best thing is to end its suffering. But how? Would you be able to roll over it with your car? Yes, I know, at the moment it is fashion among the terrorist to run over people with their trucks. How can they do THAT? And could you do it, even if it is “only” an animal? Well, we didn’t have that choice while traveling on bike. What else? Hitting it with a stick? I once tried to kill a badly injured duck, and I did it so unskilfully that it haunted me for months because of the extra suffering I had created for the animal, despite my intention to help.
We didn’t even dare to lift the badger up to carry it away, to a shady place, to die without being burnt by the hot summer sun. We feared that it could come to life again and we would become the target of its defense. Would you risk the bite of a strong wild animal? Obviously, we decided to let it be there, breathing quietly lying on the shoulder of the road in the hot sun – and I felt a wave of compassion for this creature and the impossibility of helping.
It is not easy, at least for me, to have to tolerate the idea that there is nothing I can do and that I need to let other creatures, whether animals or humans, go through their destiny path, no matter if self-created or not. It is not easy to watch people run into their misfortune which you, from the outside, can see as not inevitable. But how can you tell them, or help them, to change, to come out of it, to embrace life again by transforming their habits and belief systems? I tried it once, desperately, with an ex-husband, until I finally understood that there was nothing I could do to change his life. The only thing I could do was to change my own life which had become quite miserable while I lived within that relationship. I had to let go of the sense of duty, the idea that I am responsible for the other person (a trait which many women cultivate) and that the best thing for both of us was a total separation with no regrets.
Easily said, not so easily done. But fortunately I had many experiences with animals here on my farm, similar to that one with the badger, and so I knew I could do it. I have chosen LIFE over a covert death while still alive. And I have also understood how the fear of our physical death brings us into situations where we do not live our lives, where we are caught in tragedy and distraction which keeps us away from the really important things in life: compassion, love and presence to our experience.
Facing a disaster – what can you do?
What can you do when your house has crumbled down and your work and income were bound to the place where you live? I guess it hasn’t happened to you, but there are folks which are truly left alone with that problem.
Today we decided to drive into the area where many villages and towns were heavily compromised by strong earthquakes from August 2016 on. We live about 50km as the crow flies from the epicenters of these earthquakes. I felt them strongly, nothing happened here to my house, but o boy, it did destroy more than I had feared.
Driving to the earthquake area – a real shock!
It is only for 2 weeks (after 10 months of inaccessibility), that one road has been opened into the area, from Norcia to Castelluccio on the high plateau of the Sibillini mountains. Some parts of the road were completely renewed, others limited to one track and you see the outer part of the road hanging down, and heaps of rocks, as you would expect. Then the view opened up to the plateau – and WOW. A huge crack runs over the mountain chain now, the rock has broken open over many kilometers. I remained in awe considering how much power had been released to split the mountain.
Finally in Castelluccio, the village of the famous lentils: I had been there many, many times. Only a few years ago the last of the previously abandoned houses had been rebuilt and tourists came to visit the village or even buy a tiny house, especially people passionate about Hang Gliding, as a school had been founded in this place.
See here what is left of the village. I took this photo from the spot where during my last visit two years ago I had sat on the porch of a bar and specialty shop, enjoying the delicious local food.
The building of the bar has collapsed, the shop and bar-service are now offered from a trailer – and it is only for these last few weeks that a handful of people show up again and buy their stuff. And the 10 months in between?
What the people tell us
Talking with the owner I mentioned that they are very unfortunate because they are left alone in their misfortune. WE ARE LUCKY BECAUSE WE ARE STILL ALIVE – was his answer. Wow again!
He told me a little about the event and what happened later. From last August on, when the first earthquake hit about 25km to the south – when 300 people were killed – everybody living in that area was on high alert. And when 2 strong earthquakes hit 4 days before the big one, everybody went to sleep in campers or tents – and that’s why they survived. A witness reported that during the strokes he wanted to leave his camper but the surface of the street came up, right into his face, the waves were incredibly high. He still lives – or lives again – in his camper near the mobile bar and right next to the container-station of the military – who don’t seem to be active or even interested in fixing anything, just wandering around, in 5 or 6, while the village is doomed in its state of total destruction.
People who once lived there are not allowed to enter their houses, and the bar keeper himself had to fight to be allowed to come back and open his little activity in front of his destroyed property. “Maybe in 30 years”, he said, “our shop will be in our house again”, With that, he expressed clearly the little hope for help which the people have in Italy to come back into a normal life. This is the common experience here. The historic city Nocera Umbra to the north of Assisi was totally destroyed in 1997. Now, in 2017, it is finally rebuilt, but with almost nobody living in the historic center anymore. After 20 years everybody has found some other place to live and to earn their money, not by choice, but by necessity.
How long would you wait to come back home?
How long would you be able to wait for coming back into your property? Two years? Three, maybe five? But 20 years is a long time.
Our bar keeper is “fortunate” compared to those people from Nocera Umbra because he will be able to make a living, sooner or later, again, from a camper, a tent or a house, as he can offer what people need who come and visit this place: drinks and food. And we started to help him by buying some of his marvelous salami and by having a morning snack
in his place. We also bought salami and cheese from his competitor on the other side of the Piazza who has opened a tent-shop in front of the open space which once was his house and shop…
The official lies about reality
You cannot imagine what an earthquake of this magnitude can do. Officially – for many unscientific reasons (see my previous blog posts here and here)- it ended up with a magnitude of 6.6 in the records. Cutting a mountain in half needs a little more. The bar keeper said it was 8.0 and this comes nearer to the truth. It could have been 7.6 to 7.9, but certainly not only 6.6. The quake has moved the whole mountain. A hang glider told me that he could see from above that, in addition to the crack we can see from the plateau, there is another one right behind the mountain top which literally has cut it into two parts.
Another unpredictable result of the event: the fountains in the whole area have dried out, the water veins have been blocked and the water has found a different way. It is now pouring out of the mountain near Norcia, in thousands of liters per second. This will change everything and, hopefully, the farmers find a way to continue to plant their famous lentils despite the lack of water.
“I Love Italy” – and how it is abandoned
Hold on, I still need to tell you about Norcia, the city which was so proud to have resisted the first earthquake in August last year. Norcia is now an incredible mix of “life as usual” and huge amounts of debris.
The inviting restaurant on the square in front of the theatre – the colorful life as usual.
And 50 m from there in a side street: we have an ice cream in a bar – and a clear view on one of the two crumbled churches in the small Piazza
and two or three workers slowly beginning to erect some scaffolding: not to fix anything, no, but to just keep in place what has not yet fallen down.
A bank in the main street neatly restored and the shop in the same building open, while right next to it abandoned shops and small announcements that they are still working, somewhere, outside the city.
Whoever goes there and buys their goods? The tourists come and see the historic center and buy something there; they don’t drive to the industrial area to buy something which they couldn’t even desire without seeing it exposed while strolling by.
So how do they make their living if they are not among the fortunate ones who are allowed to open their shops again in the center?
( I guess about 80% of the commercial activities are closed).
And even those who are open again do not really have many clients. I have never seen so few people in Norcia in the past 30 years and my 20+ visits there.
The main attractions are either completely destroyed, like the 4 main churches,
or are inaccessible like the town hall which seems as if still contemplating if it is better to tumble down, too, for giving a consistent appearance to the main piazza, where only the medieval castle sits perfectly in place like a flat rock.
How interesting is a disaster in the long run?
Yes, some people are interested to come and visit these places, the “earthquake tourists”. But most people come to visit Italy and the Italian cities for admiring something beautiful and not for getting sad and thoughtful about the uncertainty of life which is expressed so clearly in the natural destruction of what has been created with so much effort.
The following thought is almost unavoidable: Imagine how places look like after a war, after intentional destruction. That’s where we don’t really like to go, and alas, who knows how many steps we are away from such a scenario?
What can WE do? – What can I do in the face of disaster?
I am an optimist and I believe that we are all called to engage in activities and with people who passionately work for a better world. I am speaking of people like Jordan Peterson who has opened my eyes and helped me to recognize my “new-age” illusions about the “goodness of everything”, to see my naïveté regarding my irrational hopes and folly acts of trust in people who don’t merit it. I came to understand that there is true malevolence in this world and that we need to learn to recognize it and to stand up against it – as does Steven Greer by disclosing the secrecy with which we mercilessly are misguided. View previous posts on this blog here and here and here)
And here is a big “Thank You” to Ken Wilber who taught me to see the bigger picture and to appreciate the efforts which people do in one or more quadrants of reality. My attempt is now to bring together all these seemingly disconnected aspects and to realize their value and transmit what they bring to the table in service of a truly better world – and to help to diminish, or even end, the influence of the malevolent forces in power.
Will you join me? And in case your house crumbles with the next earthquake, be sure to knock on my door!
Today the answer is easy and quick: I am truly waiting for the super heat wave to finally pass. And then?
Waiting seems to be a fundamental human “activity” although it can appear in quite different clothes. Why are we waiting and what are we waiting for?
Being busy and waiting at the same time?
You might say: I don’t wait a lot, I have so much to do, and I have no time for waiting. You might exactly FEEL like that, but aren’t you waiting, anyway? Waiting for the work to be finally accomplished, for the boss to finally recognize your bravery, for the next pay check, for the next weekend, for the lunch break, for a coffee or a cigarette? You might not be actively waiting by sitting in the corner and thinking exclusively about what you are waiting for. You might be engaged in all sorts of different activities and the waiting component runs alongside, undercover, in your mind and in your organism.
Life is waiting
I was struck lately by the insight that all human (and animal) life consists of a permanent time stream characterized by waiting. A pregnant woman is “expecting”. Doesn’t that mean that she is “waiting” for the fetus to grow in her belly and then be born? Sometimes women are waiting far over time to give birth to their child, this is recognized as “waiting”, for sure. But before birth it was waiting, too; waiting for the unknown to arrive, waiting for what could happen the next moment – the movement felt in the belly or the lack of it -, waiting for the next week, the next month, the next year. We don’t know what will happen and we are waiting for the future to unfold in our lives.
Active & passive waiting
There is a difference between “active” waiting and “passive” waiting, or conscious waiting and waiting without being conscious that we are waiting. The fetus is waiting to grow and has no idea that he or she does so. Children become conscious about their waiting in increasing degrees. When hungry, the baby cries and waits for the food to arrive. Later children are told that they need to wait for all sorts of things. It is part of the training for life that children learn to postpone gratification, which means nothing other than waiting consciously for a goodie instead of devouring it immediately. Studies show that children who have learned this have a hugely higher probability of being successful in life. So waiting purposefully for something better in the future is a very useful thing, not bad at all.
Conditioned for waiting
But when can “waiting” become a “bad” thing? Actually, the “bad waiting” demand creeps into our lives without us really noticing it. A 4-year-old is told that he or she has to wait until 6 to be able to do or get certain things; all children wait to become older, teenagers or “adults”, because they think that “real life” will start then whereas their child-life is somehow insufficient, not valuable and therefore to be gotten over as soon as possible. The joyful life of a child’s mind is erased by the desire of a promised future which needs to be waited for. Waiting for getting older overshadows the present and devalues it as “not ok”.
Later, when we get the scooter license we are waiting for the car driving license; we wait until we finally can leave school – which was my case, for sure – and then we can go to University, when “real life” promises to begin. Some time into University I was waiting for finally passing my exams and becoming an MA. Other people are waiting for their completion of the professional training because the “true life” will start with finding a good job. Maybe we have found a husband, wife or life partner in the meantime for whom we have waited since adolescence and whom we have expected to guide us into the promised land of a fulfilled life. Maybe we are lucky and it works out for some time, but aren’t we all waiting for the relationship problems to arrive which we have witnessed as “normal” among others. Or better, aren’t we waiting for them NOT to arrive? We are waiting, though, in one way or the other.
In our professional career, we start waiting from day #1. Normally we begin at the bottom of the power hierarchy and we are told that we have to march up the ladder to success, as an employee as well as a solopreneur. We invest a lot of energy, of work and of learning and we are constantly waiting for the moment when all that will “pay off”. Some people seem to have reached what we want to reach and they promise to teach us how to do it ourselves – by feeding them money from our desire to abbreviate the waiting time for the fulfillment of our dreams.
Does waiting ever end?
Maybe your waiting ends in one particular field, but there is still enough waiting material in your life where you can continue to engage whole heartedly: your first, second or fifth child to be born, to go to school, to grow up, to become successful and what not; everything you were waiting for for yourself can become a waiting subject for you by transferring it to your children, or your siblings, your group, your society.
What are we waiting for and why?
So what are we REALLY waiting for? For a better future? For something miraculous to happen in our lives? For the world to change? For freedom, wealth, health, success, whatever? For being free from the burden of responsibility? The burden of living? The promised land after all the suffering which human life implies?
You might insist that you are not waiting, you have a goal to achieve and you are busy the whole day to finally arrive there. This is a form of non-conscious waiting, non-active waiting, as your activity is bound and focused on that goal and you are not sitting around noticing the awkward burden of “just waiting” like you might know it from the doctor’s waiting room or before the results of an election are announced. Those moments I would call ACTIVE WAITING and we all are good in trying to get over that as soon as possible by distracting our attention from the burden of conscious active waiting. But it is still waiting when we watch a film, go out for dinner or dive into our work during these times of focused expectations.
I believe that, ultimately, we are waiting for the end of our life on earth, curious what might happen afterwards. This long waiting time is structured by the many worldly things we are waiting for. If it is the financial success, career fulfillment, becoming grandparents or reaching enlightenment, there is no real difference regarding our propensity for waiting. The object of the waiting process changes according to our age and stage of consciousness, to our inclinations and personality traits, but the waiting persists from birth to death.
Who are you in the face of – waiting?
So the question arises: What is it what you personally are waiting for? What did you wait for when you were a child, a young adult, in midlife and in your older years? Did the objects of your waiting change? And did you reach what you were waiting for and how did that feel for you? Did it give you the satisfaction and nourishment which you had expected? And in case you didn’t reach it: what was the consequence of it? Did you become disappointed and bitter, or did you succeed to get a kick into the future because of the failure? Only you can find that out, it will be different for everybody, at least on the surface, but probably not in the deeper layers of life. Here the question is: Did you learn and are you still learning from the outcome of the various waiting processes you were engaged in? Does it lead to your growing up into a differentiated and responsible adult? Or did you stay a helpless child in a grown up body?
Still waiting to grow up?
Looking at the present situation of our world it is easy to deduce that most people are stuck with the last option. A president who behaves like a 4-year-old. Military chiefs in need of new playgrounds for their insane games, scientists who try to bend reality to their theories, ruthless mafia gangs pursuing money and power: none of these display maturity as a human being but being stuck in egocentrism and omnipotent fantasies – a rather low level of possible development which is available to us humans today.
So where are you? Where am I and where are those around us?
If you have read so far I assume that you have traveled more of “the road less traveled” (Scott Peck). You are able to face your reality and that of the world and you are willing to explore what can be done to facilitate change for the benefit of the whole world, humanity, our planet and the whole cosmos. I am really glad to meet you here!
Now the question: what can we do, both together, and each of us by ourselves?
I suggest that we begin with noticing when we are waiting, again, and check what we are waiting for and what we try to avoid with this specific act of waiting. I am talking about our waiting for others to do what we desire and want to happen. Waiting for the state, society or whoever to resolve the problems we are facing. Waiting for the courageous people to step up and take the blame while we are hiding out behind the curtain of our cowardice. Or just waiting that the nightmare will stop, that we recognize reality as a dream where we can easily wake up and everything is fine – a dear and well-practiced illusion which we are far too eager to embrace by giving it the name HOPE.
Hope, motivation, inspiration, and engagement is needed.
We need the power of hope, but hope alone and waiting for things to change is not something to rely on. Sure, change will happen anyway, but without our participation, it most likely will go into a direction which we didn’t foresee and probably didn’t want. There are too many malevolent forces in this world who will take advantage to direct change towards their own interests as soon as there is “laissez faire”, a vacuum, which our lethargy, our fears, and inertia give to them. They, for sure, are highly motivated to direct the world where they want it to go.
We need at least the same degree of motivation and dedication to counterbalance them. That means we need to get out of victimism and helplessness and begin to step up and DO. Do what? Well, begin and find out what the right thing is for you, for me, for the many others who want a positive change but are still holding back by indecisiveness.
What I am doing:
As for myself, I begin with writing down my thoughts and hold public conversations at the Wisdom Factory and I am trying to inspire others to do the same and distribute their insights to as many others as possible. I talk with people about edgy topics and do my best to help them see new perspectives on “old” things. I try to connect people and to create initiatives for collaboration and co-creation – which often can mean simply: listen to each other and engage in creative dialog to find ideas and solutions together which neither of us alone could have conceived.
Will you join the tribe who decides to abandon active waiting and step into active creating? You are so welcome!
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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”
There were times, not too long ago, where the question of where you would like to live was not anything which would have concerned most of humanity. Today it is a burning question for very many people on this planet although for completely different reasons.
Although the present situation seems very difficult and almost hopeless – and I will describe why – there is a bright light shining on the horizon. Keep on reading through all the problems described!
Many people have to leave their countries
Topic #1, not only in Europe but in many countries of the world: the refugees and the migrants. Refugees definitely don’t want to stay in their own countries any longer, or better, they CANNOT remain there where they were born because of war and devastation. Migrants might not be directly threatened to be killed in their countries by actual malevolence, but they feel that they cannot find what they need there, enough food, education or personal freedom.
So, most of the people in the world move away from their home places because they cannot meet their basic needs for survival as a valued human being. They don’t actually know where they “would like” to be instead. Anything better, for sure. The best possible, if they can make it.
The problems of refugee camps
Syrians or other Middle East refugees who end up in the refugee camps in Lebanon or similar countries might live in physical safety from the violence of a war. They survive, but they are kept like slaves in the camp, without a passport if they happen to be born inside the camp, and they don’t have the possibility to ever create a life for themselves, a career, a purpose for living. They are kept in the camps because the country lives on the money which it receives from the UNO to run the camps. If the refugees left the camps the main economic pillar of the country would break away. So they don’t get any encouragement or help to move on with their lives towards a better future.
Migrants who search for a better life
Then there are the migrants who leave their countries to find elsewhere a better life condition. Migrations have been a normal thing since the beginning of humans on this planet. Today they are perceived as a problem because, definitely, the people living in poverty want to partake, at least a little, at the rich life in the Western countries. Those people often are filled with the illusion that here in Europe everything is better for everyone – and partly it is true. Still, everyone who arrives gets food and shelter, but the people in the rich societies are, generally speaking, not very compassionate. They don’t really want to share a lot and risk to fall back into relative poverty themselves. This is totally understandable but doesn’t solve the problem. The problem was initially created – and still maintained – by the rich countries which became rich by colonialism and exploiting those countries from where the people are flooding in now. How can we find a balance here? By closing borders and building walls? Well, some leaders and many people think so, but it won’t solve the problem.
Who can choose where to live?
So, most people cannot really choose where to live, they have to tolerate to stay where they are or aim for somewhere, some place of which they don’t really know anything, where they probably won’t be welcome and where they would be forced to live a 3rd class life. And still, they risk their lives for getting to that somewhere-place.
What about us Westerners? When we build walls to keep others out we certainly expect that we, ourselves, are not limited by those walls and that we can freely choose to go to the other side as we like. A new form of colonization? Maybe the new settlers in the land of the unwanted people will be their unwanted people there – and they are most likely OUR unwanted people: those who don’t have enough money to maintain the same good life at home as their fellow countrymen who are fortunate enough to not have been swallowed by the technological progress and its subsequent elimination of workplaces.
Especially those are the losers who are not super intelligent or super industrious. And also the old people who don’t get a sufficient pension to afford a decent western lifestyle and all those who depend on a social support which gets cut more and more because there is no lobby for the non-productive people – and nobody cares.
Can we chose where we want to stay?
So the question gets turned upside down: can we choose to stay where we want to stay? Can we remain in the country where we lived for decades and in the house which we have built up with endless years of work and investment? Or do we need to leave to go nowhere because the banks don’t care if we have a place to live or not, and not even that we have already paid them a huge amount of money which doesn’t seem to matter at all. Nor do the governments care when they invent all sorts of new taxes to fill their holes in the budget. Once a fully owned house was a guarantee for having a safe space for the future. This has changed. If you own the house you have to pay all those taxes if you have the money or not if the house gives you any income or only huge costs of maintenance. You just have to pay, regardless if you have some money left for food or clothing. The state comes first.
What is going wrong in our societies?
We had the illusion that our societies were built in service to its populations, an organization for living together in the best possible way. We have come to the extreme where the normal population is subdued to what others decide, call it democracy or not. The real power is somewhere else, not in the will of the people. Don’t understand me wrong, I am not advocating any ideas which would lead to communist totalitarian states, but I do claim that the government should have an ethical direction and the will to serve the people instead of giving a few people the opportunity to infinite power over the well being (or not-well being) of most of the population.
Considering the present world situation:
Where would you like to live? And where would it be possible for you to live?
– Nota bene, these are completely different questions.
The astonishing fact is that it is not only the case of refugees and migrants to have to go away from their home countries and not really be able to choose where to go. Increasingly it will be the same for many people of the so called rich countries. Old people are outsourced in 2nd or 3rd world countries the culture of which is completely different than theirs – but where life and support are cheaper and affordable for their small budget.
Going down the rabbit hole? – Where the light comes in…
We are on the way, down the rabbit hole, unless a huge change happens which turns upside down our financial system and economic powers and renders them into institutions in service of life and prosperity.
An illusion and wishful thinking? No, not at all.
The end of secrecy and the transformation of our societies
We are already in the middle of a huge crisis – the necessary stage for something new to emerge. When we are able to expose the secrecy and malevolence of who is really leading our lives and who keep their power behind the scenes by oppressing all information which, for instance, would free us from fossil fuels and similar necessities of our present life; when this secrecy leaks and no longer works and the new and basically free energy is available to everyone, that would be the end of poverty and the end of wars – because we don’t need what others have and for what we are willing to fight, because everyone can get what they want without needing big corporations who maintain their power by creating artificial scarcity. There won’t be scarcity because of energy, or better the manipulation of energy is on the bottom of all problems. With free energy available to all, literally every person in the world, all costs would be drastically reduced and we all, included the population of the Middle East, could remain at home and live an abundant life.
There won’t be scarcity because of energy; or better the manipulation of energy is on the bottom of all problems. With free energy available to all, to literally every person in the world, all costs would be drastically reduced and we all, included the population of the Middle East, could remain at home and live an abundant life.
What is HISTORY?
History is a subject in school like biology, languages, sports, whatever. It seems to be as much (or as less) important as those other subjects. I didn’t like it very much in my own school days and only now, many decades later, I come to understand why it is so important to learn about history, the history of our own country and that of those countries with which we were or are in close contact.
This article is inspired by what I learned recently about my own country, Germany, by reading books which told me many things I didn’t know. They often are not available in English, but here is an article in English which I came across only a few days ago and which gave me other info which I hadn’t known: (Read here)
Why do we re-invent the wheel whenever we can?
We certainly would all agree that it wouldn’t make much sense to invent again letters and numbers in order to write down what we say. The writing was invented a long time ago and its use is still valid. We can invent some new fonts, that is fun, but we wouldn’t invent completely new symbols for the sounds, it just wouldn’t be worth the effort and lead to no better outcome. We hold the way things are written in our collective memory as we learn it in early years in school and we understand why we need it for our everyday life.
This is different with history. We learn in school about wars and similar ugly things in the past, the exact years of some historic events (mostly famous battles or beginnings and endings of wars) in order to pass the exams in school. And then we forget everything as soon as possible. In our young and adventurous mind, we might not want to hear about these horrible things which live somewhere in the unreal past. We want to do something good in the world, at least many young people do. We are full of idealism and energy, we run to object to what is not working right now and we are determined to make it better. And, unfortunately, with our limited knowledge, we also believe to be in the possession of the truth and the only working concept to make everything happen for the best outcome. We intend to re-invent the wheel and are not willing and able to realize that the wheel we are riding on had been broken time and time again in the past. We haven’t understood anything about history because we didn’t really get in touch with it in our own lives. And so our most positive enthusiasm and energy will bring us most likely to the exact opposite of what we had foreseen in our ignorance and blindness.
How long can we go on with “more of the same”?
Everybody needs to make their own experience and suffer the consequences of their decisions. Well, yes, this is fundamentally true. But do we really need to re-invent the wheel or the written word? Isn’t there a possibility that the next generations can learn from what has worked in the past and what has not?
I believe that this is the only way for humanity to survive the present challenges. As long as we were only a few humans working with an ax and scythe we couldn’t create much damage even when committing the worst errors. With the number of people on the planet and the easy buttons for virtually everything we just cannot allow everyone to experience their destructive thoughts and actions before becoming wise. The damage might be fatal. We as humanity need to not fall into the same errors ever and ever again!
Why do I write all this?
Because I am learning about the cause and effect of not knowing what is important to know for getting oriented in life instead of bouncing around with all sorts of undesired outcomes.
And also because I realize that we humans have a hard time to learn from history for several reasons:
With that, I begin to understand why so many attempts to do good in the world end in disappointment, frustration, and even destructive behavior; the total opposite of where it started from. And I also begin to understand that we neglected the study of the past, our own past as a human being, by not discovering our dark sides and our still unrealized potential; as well as the past of our cultures, of our ideas and how they worked out when adopted in real life.
Maybe that now is the right moment to tell you what inspired me to this post. It was the article as mentioned above, but also books and films about my native country Germany which tell a different story than the one we heard in school. History lessons stopped before WWII when I was at school and no word about the mindset and the specific German traits which were the basis for such an outcome to be produced. Nobody really wanted to talk about the recent past where so many murderous things have happened. There was the collective attempt to just forget all about it. Otherwise, people of my country, every single person, would have needed to question themselves about the degree of their participation and their enabling of what has happened. There was a huge silence in the families, we became oriented into the future, the past was over and we didn’t get to know anything, especially not about how our family lived in those times.
What we knew and didn’t know as children in Germany
Well, yes, we knew that my mother went 2x25km with a very primitive bike to get a sack of potatoes from distant farmer relatives. We knew that my mother married my father during the war, during his second holiday days from the war line. (So they knew each other for maybe 10 days altogether before marrying). We knew that she went to the prisoners’ camp and succeeded that my father was released already in 1947 while others were kept prisoners there for many more years and under terrible circumstances.
We knew that my father couldn’t proceed with his University studies which he had begun in the first year of the war, but that he did a crash course to become a primary-school teacher, and that he hardly succeeded to feed his quickly growing family with what he earned. Yes, we got to know these things, but we never got an emotional impression of what they had gone through, they never wanted to talk about what had happened with their Jewish neighbors and how their position was towards the Nazi party and its ideologies. And as children, we even didn’t know that there was something that we could have asked. Silence everywhere in the society which was eager and busy to build itself up again.
Confronting the past
Bettina Alberti wrote a book (Bettina Alberti on the post-war generation ) – and most impressively talked about it at the conference I attended last month – about how the silence has impacted the children and grandchildren of that generation. In the past 30+years, many conversations took place in Germany to come to terms with our collective history, mainly by members of the younger generations. The victim/predator generation was caught in amnesia of frozen fear and terror, psychologically unable to face the topic. Germany has done a lot to finally face its past, to acknowledge the guilt and to try to do some amends: For instance, the beautiful gesture to welcome all refugees by remembering how difficult it was for German Jews to find a secure place in another country. (It was by no means that countries like America opened their heart and doors to German Jews – unless they found someone already in the country who would take over reliability for them – a fact that too easily is ignored when talking about the generosity of other countries in the face of Hitler’s horror regime).
Overcoming and healing the past to become able to face the future properly
Today Germany is called again to take over leadership in the world and to not leave vacant this position to the detriment of all, as it would allow those forces to grow and reign which would certainly contribute to a further destabilization of the world. Other countries are somewhat fearful to have seen Germany rise, and Germany itself is hesitant to take over the leadership role in remembrance of its past. We Germans have still a weird relationship to our nationality and our nation. And that means that, despite all the efforts, we haven’t yet transcended and included our past.
Becoming a healthy and trustworthy nation, unfortunately, is not a question of neither decision nor contemplation of the collective guilt. Every one of us has to look deep inside and search for the personality traits which have enabled the behavior of our parents on one side, and on the other side, we need to clearly see and name the abuse which deliberately has taken place by the ideologists. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff and stop throwing out the baby with the bath water. Our ability to commit, be faithful, do things well and be enthusiastic for idealistic goals has been betrayed and exploited in the worst possible ways. But, after all, we are still operating inside of this framework! And as long as we don’t bring our personal shadows at the light and find out how far they are embedded in our unconscious and how we can get some hand on them, then we can by no means be sure that we wouldn’t repeat the same old errors.
We need to FEEL what it means to be a victim, and to FEEL what it means to be the perpetrator, we need to understand that we, individually, are capable of the most horrendous things in situations that favor our worst parts to be acted out – unless we intimately know them and can decide wholeheartedly against them. We as humans have the whole spectrum of possible ways of being, the noblest ones, and the very worst ones. Unless we don’t get acquainted with the murderer in us we cannot be a good person. Unless we recognize the dictator inside ourselves we will unconsciously work towards becoming one – or be his or her victim. (Read my blog post on the conference “The Courage to Feel” here)
Whoever told you these things in your history lessons? Whoever told you that evil does exist and that it dwells right inside you and will command you unless you get to know it and take over the command yourself? Goodness is not automatic, it needs to be desired and worked towards wholeheartedly!
If you want some inspiration about what everyone of us can do to avoid the errors of the past, individually and collectively, here some resources (click on the links below)
Videos: Jordan Peterson: Pathological Belief Systems
A film about pre-war childhood in Germany: “The White Ribbon” (trailer)
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.
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
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
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.