To have or to be?

If I make an offer to you and say: “There are two different ways of living your life. One way leads to fulfilment, joy and a feeling of being united with yourself and the universe. The other way means stress, hardship, the permanent feeling that something is missing. It is a way of disease, lack of love and happiness. The first way is being true to yourself, the second one is playing games and roles for the whole life long.” Which one of the two ways, would be your choice?

The answer is at hand, but guess what: Almost anybody is choosing the second way, the way of despair, hardship and pain! Why is that so? `How can people be so dull?´, one may ask. Well, the answer to that one is not so easy. The first way of living is, what can be described as the “way of being”, the second one may be called “the way of having”. This second way is the way we know so well, almost anyone is living according to it. It is the way children learn from their parents and society and could be summarized with the motto: “What counts in life is what you have and how other people see you!” Value has, what can be described, what can be measured. It is the world in which someone is evaluating all things: money, possessions, titles, reputation, etc. Did you ever notice that people say: “He is worth 10 million a year”, which means that he has an income of 10 million per year. A humiliating sentence and an insult to every person of dignity, but “normal” in our society!

Children learn very quickly, that they are important, loved and respected, if the do something, if they own (have) something. “Performance” is what people want and the reward consists of getting respect. Very often the children have to fulfil the parents’ needs, instead that it was the other way around. No wonder that “to have” becomes what counts alone in the world, whether we like it or not. Do not be deceived by the political correctness statements of “being nice” and giving value to human life per se. The only things which really count, are the actions of people not their words. And by judging the deed, we are living in a world of having and doing, not of being!

People live their lives in an unspectacular way and only very few really find out who they really are. And if they do so, only a minority possesses the courage to live by it. From a very young age we get trained in not being ourselves, by acting according to the world’s expectations, beginning with our parents, who only “want our best” for you. (By the way: “parents know best” or “parents only want the good for their children” are lies told from one generation to the next one. Parents do not want “the best”, but what fits their one interest, not the child’s!). And they really mean it, for that is they were brought up by their own parents. First lesson in live is to learn that what is important is not, what your really want or what you really are, but to be like what society wants you to be (firstly represented by the parents, teachers, etc.). The second thing what you learn is your “role” by heart and third is you forget about your true self and stick to the artificial “educated” self, which your were taught. At the age of a kindergarten child, you are trained and fit for letting you out “into the public” and from now on you can act and live according to the “script” given to you by your parents. And the chances are good, that you will never find out, what has been done to you in your childhood!

You may search for the sense of live for your whole life, have problems of all kinds but society offers a lot of distractions to cope with the emotional tension: Alcohol, drugs, sex, TV, internet etc. Many of them are widely accepted by the culture and the state. But only one thing you shall never do: Looking inside of yourself and find out that education is manipulation and that deforming you began in a vulnerable age you do not even have any memory of any more.

Searching for your true self is not easy, a lot of explosives will blow up on the way, the attempts to “get you into line”. Anxiety is the main obstacle on that way. The biggest anxiety of all is paradoxically not the fear of death, but the fear of freedom, to be alone to be without your “textbook” by which you could live your life. Being free, means to be alone with your own being, making all your decisions on your own, by your own mind and thinking. That is a way of being, most people never experience in their whole life.

But the people who have started to live like this, they are seldom, but they exist! Do not want to go back to a life of slavery. The real root of being un-free or being unsatisfied with life, lies in the dark beginnings of every person’s life. Therefore it is so hard to get rid of the “impregnations” we got through the process called “education”. If you get free, your values, your motivation changes. What becomes important is not what you have, but what you experience. Life is about making experiences, it is the only thing which really stays. But experiences cannot be measured, they are unique and can’t be compared. This makes it very difficult for a culture which wants to bring everything into a mathematical order, to appreciate something. “To be” and not “to have” raises the quality of life to a much higher level, you feel united with the cosmos, you know the sense of your life and the nagging insecurity of people who have to “perform well”, is gone forever. Once you get a taste of what is awaiting you at the “end of the tunnel”, you do not want to go back! And that is the beginning of a new life – the only real life there is. To thyself always be true!

Complete mental health

What is normal? A simple question but a whole bunch of misunderstandings surround it. When we say something is normal, or someone is a normal person, we mean the thing or the person is inconspicuous, the “way it should be”. Therefore “normal” is understood in the meaning of average and average stands for “good”. But such a definition of normal is always orientated on the masses. Good is how everybody is. From a psychological point of view this is catastrophical. The average person in any society is sick, has a complicated sexual life and is having various neurosises. People don’t recognize it because everybody is having it. In a society of the sick, it is normal to be sick and the ones who are even sicker or who are healthier are the ones who shine out. Both are considered “abnormal” and any society tries to bring them into line or to get rid of them in one or the other way. As paradoxical as it may sound: A society is more interested to stay how it is, even if it is sick, than to change for the better.

When we face the world and ourselves we all have to ask: What is going out there in the world and inside of me? All we have are frameworks to cope with the surrounding and it feels very comfortable for us, if other people support our point of view, we get a feeling of being right. The need for security gets fulfilled. But people who challenge the society and its norms become nuisance. They don’t let the others go away the way they where used to. But without such people there would not have been any progress, neither in politics, philosophy, economics, science or even religion.

The better a person lives in reality, the more he or she lived in concordance with the world, the less neurotic or psychotic he or she is. Reality for us on a subjective level is what our brain is making out of the input we get through our senses. Our thinking is forming certain patterns which are characteristic for the individual. But the more energy, the more feelings, we put into such a pattern, the stronger it gets. A negative side effect of this mechanism is that the stronger a patter is, the more difficult it gets to replace the pattern. Most patterns in relation to life are formed very early in life. The period of 15 to 25 of age is critical because it is the time where people form up the ideal outside appearance of the inside pattern. The pattern itself regularly gets formed up to the age of six of seven, not later. So you can see, that people who are between 15 and 25 make the outside world very easily into there inner world and they have little problem there. But the older they get, the more incompatible the inner image is with the very quickly changing world outside. So whenever you see a person with a certain worldview, ask yourself how old the person is, go back in time when he was around the age of 20 and than look, if there is correlation between the person’s ideal world and the picture of the world when he was in the mentioned age. The completely mentally healthy person is not building up any inner pictures of the world and is always living in the world which is perceived by the sense. But this individual is extremely rare, especially in the sick societies of the western world.

Of course that does not mean, that the older a person gets, the more neurotic he is. Not at all. The acceptance of life grows with age. Young people try to make the world according to there own view, older people are better in coping with circumstances, which they don’t like. But back to the healthy persons. Erich Fromm wrote that the sick person is more normal than the average adjusted person. The sickest are probably the healthiest people in society. For the ones who are sick, who feel that something is not okay, are still sensitive enough to feel the lies he has been taught and the pressure which is used to suppress individuality which is very quickly becoming a threat to the community.

What is the ideal person? In history we have had a lot of ideas of the ideal human being. The religious being of the middle ages, the intellectual being of the renaissance, the economic and heroic being of the 19th and 20th century. All these ideals did not look at the real needs of human beings, they all where created by science of mind, religion etc. What we really need, is an ideal which considers the nature of human beings in its entirety. So I use the definition of Abraham H. Maslow, the great psychologist of the humanistic psychology movement. The ideal person is a self-actualized person. Every behaviour which fulfils human needs in a proper way is healthy and supports the growth of personality. Every behaviour which denies human needs or fulfils them in an ineffective way is not healthy. The really healthy person is free of neurosies, psychosises and personality disorders. We have never seen such a society but we also have never seen a society which believed in human beings. There was always the belief that human beings are evil or at least they have some part of evil within them by nature.

That is not true. There is the potential for evil and good within humans. For we can sin, but we also can do good things. The root of evil is not inherited, but learned. A baby gets born into a sick society (every society in the world is sick only the degree of sickness is varying). Evil is the good which is not developed. The reason for evil is that one generation passes on its corrupt and defect ways of thinking, speaking, feeling and behaving onto the next generation. We create the evil anew in every generation. Such patterns can be traced back in families over generations. I strongly recommend the books of Alice Miller, the famous Swiss psychologist, who concentrated on this topic (examples of the development of people like Hitler, Nietzsche et. al.).

One point I want to mention at the end. A critical issue is language. Nowadays we use language exclusively in a descriptive way. We pass on information from brain to brain but we have forgotten the heart. Words can be used in another way also. They have the power to create reality. A communication between heart and heart is very well possible; also most people are not used to. If you read poetry or novels of former centuries you will get an idea of what I mean. We have used language as a tool to create a distance between us and the world and other human beings. Even emotional terms like love have become words alone. You say love but you don’t mean it. It is just like if you would say: “My shoe-size is 29”. I thing we have corrupted one of the most precious things which make us human: The ability to communicate with each other through language, especially by speaking. It should be a job of the 21st Century to change this thing.

Mental pressure on earth an within mankind

Only few people would deny that we are living in times of big changes. And as during all changes which happened in history people don’t know what will come out, if it is over. See for example the French Revolution and the establishment of the empire under Napoleon Bonaparte. There are many ideas; experts of all branches from economy, history to sociology are drawing their scenarios and for people who prefer less “intellectual” solutions we have an army of fanatics and “prophets” of all kinds, who know it best and with certainty. I am sure you also have heard about 2012, the year either the world will be hit by a cosmic object, which is called “Nibiru” or “the world would be advancing in spiritual development” and the rest, i.e. the unenlightened people, will be killed, for the new world will have “higher vibrations” and the people with “lower vibrations” would not be worthy to be part of this space jump. I hope that none of my readers is among such believers.

Explaining the unknown, the uncertainty of life has always been a big task for human beings. We all find ourselves confronted with a world (and with ourselves) and have to find out what is going on there. Therefore we have to use frameworks, to do that job. On specific way of approaching the word is what we call science. Science has proven to be the best system available until now to find out about the surrounding universe. Science is searching for the maximum of objectivity possible and also includes rules for self-correction. It is not delivering “truth”, at least not in the absolute sense of the word.

When we look at the world and the universe as it is lying before our eyes and our mind, we see that there are two directions into which evolution works. They could be called the inner and the outer sides of evolution. For most of history and also of science we where always looking at the outer side, which is, what can be observed in quantity. For example life is spreading over the surface of the planet very quickly. As long as there is enough space there is little, which could stop it in this process. The less space there is, plants, animals and human beings have to find another direction. Therefore I an considering the inner side of evolution, die big tree of life, of which we only see a small part, because vast parts do not exist any more in our time. By the way this has been one of the points which have always been attacked by “Creationists”. Their argument is like the following: “Show me before my eyes that one species changes into another. If you can do that, I am going to believe you, if not you have no proof for evolution”. This would be the same as if you would want a geologist to create a mountain right before your eyes, otherwise you would deny, that geology is true. This is absurd and it shows very clearly, that such people have no idea about how scientists work in the 21st. century.

But back to the topic of the pressure in the mind of mankind. The second direction by which evolution is developing to is the inside. The more the universe expands, the more it is rolling into itself, the more it becomes complex inside its inner structures. This is a conclusion to which all evolutionist come. The top of this complexity is us, human beings. A human being is not an animal. Also we have a common ancestor with primates and have 95, 97 or 98 percent of the DNA of a Chimpanzee, we are something completely different. But this difference does not lie in the DNA, not in the physical, but in the consciousness! In this sense I would define a human being as the evolution which has become conscious of itself. The more consciousness we have the more we are spontaneous and are creator instead of creations. I think we have come to a state where our further development will not be in the physical. It is quiet possible, that we human beings are the peak of the physical which is possible. From now onwards, the driving force of our evolution will guide us into the mental. To make such statements is very dangerous, if told to a new age person, who very quickly adopts such ideas, which fit very well into there worldview. But I am sure, that our problems will no become less and easier, there will not be a “saviour” coming to poor mankind. We have to become the saviour ourselves. The pressure we all feel comes naturally as the world becomes “one big village”. We influence each other with our thoughts, our actions and words and we have a bigger amount of information we get in one day, than people centuries ago got in there whole lifetime! This is pure stress for our mind. It is necessary to develop our consciousness to learn to cope with each other. It is a time of chaos. That is right. But after a successful adoption and new and higher organization of the individuals as well as the whole mind of mankind (may be a united mind of mankind), the stress will be relieved to a lower level and new equilibrium will be found. That is, what I believe. I am not going to pretend to know what everything which I have written here will mean in the world we are going to face. Therefore I stayed very abstract. But I don’t see any possibility to handle the thing without become very speculative or wore, illusionary.

At the end I want to say a little bit about religion and believe. We have become adults. In the time of the Old Testament for example mankind was in a childlike state, and needed a stern god, who punished all the time. We have developed and are rebuffing such an image of god. I am talking about images of god, not got himself, for who could god be detected? If he could be detected by human beings in his entirety, that would not be the “real” god. Image of god must develop according to the changes of the times. This is no blasphemy, but a necessity. We cannot successfully live life according to a 3000 year old image of god, not to say such an old code of morale and ethics. I personally do absolutely believe in God and Jesus Christ. And there is no problem combining my belief with modern science. If there are people talking about dying of religion and belief, they are talking about old image of deities. Yes, many of them will not be surviving, but if they cannot survive you see who week they where form the beginning onward. They had there effect during history, but the final point of existence of them hade to come necessarily. One danger for society stays: If some old images of the divine go bankrupt some people stick to superstition and worshipping of idols. We all should be very careful not letting people fall back into primitive states of worship, like polytheism or worshipping of nature (trees, stones, stars, moon, sun and the like). But there is a good chance that falling back in consciousness is not possible for mankind as a race, only for individuals. May be this is a too optimistic point of view and such a fallback could mean the end of the world? That’s a question everybody has to answer for himself.