An unusual way of learning

Learning is one of the most important skills of our times. What we learn and what we have to learn during our lifetime changes where quickly. New inventions, ever changing circumstances demand a growing awareness and flexibility, not only in physical movement but even more in mental abilities. But even when things around us are changing, there are certain stable rocks that change very slowly if ever in our lifetime. One of such stable components is the way we learn. School normally suggests that there is a right way for learning, as well as there is a right way to do things. In effect, pupils and students are forced to accept a certain way of doing things, whether it applies to the individual personality or not. Whoever fits into the educational system will be promoted and probably get successful. But the ones who fail or have learning habits, who are very far away from what is called “normal” will get bigger problems, or in worst case, fail completely and are called dull or mentally underpriviledged. One indicator by which this can be seen, are the school marks. For good marks tell very little about the real abilities of children, but even more about the adaptability to the system. The more you conform, the better your marks will be. Smart pupils always knew that in order to get a good mark, it is not necessary to be enormously intelligent, but to impress the teacher, by telling him what he wants to hear.

This leads me to the question of the style of learning. Many people do not know their own style of learning or thoughts, and believe that it is not really necessary to find one’s way of learning things. School is over (for luck), they think, and the rest is a more or less successful struggle through life. I cannot agree to this and more and more people can’t because they feel the negative consequences of not knowing their one learning habits. So there are people who prefer reading things (reading types) or others, who do best, when they hear, what they have to learn (hearing types). These are the types, who will be most successful in the traditional school system. Then there are others special types of learners, like the one’s who have to read aloud or walk through a room by learning (like a lawyer before court). Some people have all kinds of rituals to promote their mental awareness and creativity. Think of poets like Friedrich v. Schiller (1759-1805) who had always old apples on his desk, while working or many artists who have their muse to inspire their mind to produce their most wonderful works of art.

I am sure that there are many other ways of learning, which are as individual, as there are personalities on earth. My personal way of learning is writing. I never learn better, than when writing about something. This blog is one way of doing so. Whenever I read or hear about something new, I sit down and write a few sentences about the topic. By doing so I recapitulate what I have got to know, I structure the lessons learnt and express myself. It took some time to find out, that this is the optimum of doing so for me. Until a few months ago, I was sure my way of learning would be walking through a room and recitate what I have to learn. It was a very well working way for me, which was successful for many years. But now I have found another and even better path to learn. It is not what will be accepted very well at school. I got to know that Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), the famous British Prime Minister, did learn exactly the same way. Well if someone winning the Nobel Price for Literature was learning in that way, it may not be the worst choice for me also!

Hero of the net – coward of real life

There is an interesting phenomenon which can be witnessed during surfing the internet, whether it is public newspapers, information guides, private blogs, online communities or worst of all, diverse kinds of forums. Obviously the persons behind the nicknames or the apparently anonymous posts, feel the strong urge to blurt out into the world his or her degenerated and highly unqualified thoughts. What I am referring to are the masses of anonymous writers that penetrate all areas of the World Wide Web and increase the amount of confusion, disinformation and entropy by which the average internet user is molested permanently.

It has been said, that at least two third of the net’s content consist of misinformation, propaganda und sex. For that is definitely true and complaints about such facts are all in vain, I am one of the strongest proponents of not falling into the trap of the illusion, that the world outside of you can be changed. Not at all. What makes me think about this anonymous writers is more of an academic interest, the need to know and to understand, an effect of my unsaturating curiosity. The phenomenon is well known, but only little studies are done on the subject. I remember in fall of 2008, when Jörg Haider, the politician of the Austrian right, died in a car accident, it became a very big story in Austria. The media and especially the net where filled with all kinds of propaganda and conversations of the lowest level imaginable. Most posts where worthless, either there was glorification or happiness about Mr. Haider’s death. The net turned into a bloody battle field. A well known psychiatrist wrote in a local newspaper about the kind of person that exists behind the anonymous posts and nicknames.

There was a study of a Swiss psychiatrist, who found out that the personality of the people who write very courageously and seem to have strong personas and opinions, own the complete opposite of these qualities in real life. The net seems to turn them around and under the secure cover of anonymity they pretend to be great and powerful people, they live the illusion in the webspace they do not dare to live in their real life. When I read this article, I discovered parallels to my personal experiences. Reading some homepages always made me ask, if the writer is serious or just writing fiction. Behind the outside appearance, there is shyness, anxiety and feelings of not being worthy and a strong lack of character. But most of all, such people feel a big amount of aggression inside themselves, which need to be expressed. For they do not dare to express aggression in there daily life, the web becomes a substitute, a “safe space”, where all the non-digested energies are thrown into. The anonymous writers crave for acknowledgement, for they believe there contributions have not been evaluated enough and the respect of the community is painfully missing. Of course the writers feel secure and do not believe in any negative consequences for themselves, otherwise such actions would not be possible. These people are cowards, they are what without any doubt can be called a narcissistic personality. But may be there is one good effect of these internet user’s activities. If they use the net for their expression of aggression, they do not act aggressively in the “real world”. As far as I remember that was the conclusion of the mentioned article.

Non the less, the internet shows a lot of what is really going on inside the human’s mind. It seams to me like a course in free association sometimes. Robert Greene writes in his “33 Strategies of War”, that it is fatal, that human beings of our times are trained for peace and not for reality, what is war. Hypocrisy and manipulation became very common, everybody is searching for the “trick” to get things done the way they like it. The surface is shining like gold, but the deep waters of character are highly intoxicated. Make people become emotional and you see through the vale of complacency presented to the world. Never overestimate the moral of people. The person who exposes him- or herself as highly moral, is oftentimes the complete opposite of being moral. We all know the false Phariserians, who shine outside and stink inside, without even knowing it; most of them really believe what they tell themselves. They are hypnotized by their own words and ideas and cannot see the truth. One part of their personality contradicts another one, without even recognizing it. A human person normally includes all kinds of contradictions. But if we are aware of ourselves, we see that different aspects of us (often appearing as different inner voices) have different positions toward the same thing. Goethe, the great German poet expressed this by saying: “there are two souls living in my chest”. But for luck I am quiet sure that nobody of my readers belongs into the category of this anonym writers. At least I hope so!

The guy whom can be trusted

One of the most crucial factors in choosing our leaders in society, business, politics, as well as our friends, companions and people we socialize in general, is trustworthiness. To trust means to believe in someone without proof. That does not mean, that we trust blindly or without mind and thinking; not at all. It just means that there is a solid base, a strong fundament, on which our beliefs are grounded. It is evident that all comes down to the question of character or personality. In this text I am using character and personality as synonyms.

We shall not choose the ones we follow by their resources, their social network, their power or by their outside appearance. Such criteria for election have always been a disaster in effect, as history is full of stories of the charismatic leader, who led his people into ruin. But the leader of a country, may it be a king, a dictator or an elected president, is always a representation of the mass consciousness of a certain people. So it can be said, without being sarcastic, that every people has the leaders it deserves. That it definitely true, and makes us draw a crucial conclusion from it. If we want to have better and more capable and competent leaders, we have to change ourselves first! We have to act more mindfully, more in the present of the moment with guiding the help of our heart and our brain. What I mean is not some weird, esoteric or New-Age thinking, without connection to reality (we have had enough of that for a few decades now and the results are everything else than fruitful). It just means, we do not be blinded and irritated by the smoke of fake personality and see through all the deceptions that come along our way.

One is never deceived, we always deceive ourselves. The lack of our own integrity opens up a hole in our personality, so that outside forces can invade us and may take control of our true being. We may feel like being out of control, and that is true to some degree, for we let an outside force (normally another human being) take control. But we always have the power to re-establish our own reign. So first of all, if we really wish to live in a world of trustworthy people, if we want to have prospering relationships, we have to become, what we want to perceive - trustworthy. If you want to have good friends, first it is your duty to be such a good friend to others. And considering the question of trustworthiness, it is your job to be trustworthy yourself.
Many people think, detecting the personality of another human being and being successful in life comes from a certain kind knowledge and the training of clearly defined skills. In other words, they believe, that success, may it be in business, society, sports or relationship and the like, comes from knowing “tricks” and having special information most people do not have, or which are hidden from public. They believe that knowledge is power, and that you could change the word outside of you. So they read books, visit seminars and workshops, listen to “Gurus”, who seemingly have “the wisdom”, and pay thousands of Euros or Dollars. Nothing could be more short-sighted. Fact is that you can control to hundred percent what is inside of you (at least potentially, not to say you have already acquired this ability) but the world outside of you is completely out of your control. You have zero control over what is not inside of you. So any change in life can only come from inside. The outside is only an effect; the world is an indirect perception of ourselves, not more and not less!

Let’s go back to the question of character and trustworthiness. A person, that knows his boundaries, knows what he can control and what is outside of his control. Ideas of “let us change the world and make it a better place” are dull, especially when spoken by a politician. The attempt to create heaven on earth has always led to hell! (By the way did you notice that dictators are always talking about peace: Hitler, Soviet Union et. al.) A mature person accepts what cannot be controlled and is not wasting energy on it. If we have the wish for vengeance, we live in the illusion to controlling the past, which can not be controlled. If we are afraid of the future, we are living in the illusion of controlling the future. Regret or vengeance are suffering over the past and anxiety is suffering over the future. But we can only live in the now. Suffering means there is going something wrong in our life. Suffering tells us to stop, what we are doing. But that is not the way human beings look at the world. Suffering is just wasting of energy, we are alarmed by our mind, not to waste energy, and therefore suffering exists. The truth is, that there is never a past and there is never a future, they are never real. A person, who is afraid, as well as a person, who regrets the past, is not living in reality. Suffering also tells us, that we are not living in reality. In reality there is never pessimism, there is only optimism. Pessimism is nothing else than immaturity. And do not be deceived by people who tell that the reason, why they are pessimistic is because they are realists. That is another deception to justify their negative view of the world and themselves. For whatever we think about the world, is what we think about ourselves.

So we have another factor of a mature person, whom can be trusted. A mature person is an optimist. A trustworthy person has strong personal boundaries. He knows what are his goals and values; he knows his priorities and lives by them. So he is able to say “no” when someone wants him to act against his values or goals. We may not like, that a person opposes us with a “no”, but at least we can respect such a person and we can trust him, for what we know what he is standing for. He has a profile, in other words, he has character. And character is destiny, as we know since the times of the old Greek.

The ability to choose other people by their character is one of the most important skills we must learn in life. Without this skill, we end up in bad jobs, bad economic situation, bad relationships and bad societies. But keep in mind: You are the master of your character, your are the master of your word, everything begins with you! Character is destiny!

The Feel-Good-Society

During the last twenty-something years a dramatic change of values has taken place in the Western Societies. We have become weak societies of immaturity, of coward’s and most of all, of victims. And victims are characterized with not being responsible. Some even think victims have a right for vengeance, they are allowed to harm the one’s, who seemingly harmed them before. The methods therefore are very various. One may just get angry, living out the own narcism on others. Another person my tyrannize the co-workers or the family and friends or start a lawsuit to get a compensation for the pain, that had to be feat. Even getting insane, acquiring a mental disease is a way to get rid of society and leave it up all to the other people. And then there are the various “psyche problems” so many people hide these days to live on their pervert and infantile lifestyle and have a “good explanation” for it. Society is stupid enough to believe theses people and psychologist strongly support the poor “victims”!

The worst thing about an immature society is the inability to face the reality, to face the facts. Politicians don’t communicate brutal truths to the voters, the pay marketing companies for giving them advice to “sell” their politics to the people. Other consultants give advice how to deceive commissions and get around obstacles by swindling. That is what happened with Greece, when the poor country in the southeast corner auf Europe joined the Euro zone. But on the other hand, there are not only the people who deceive, but also the one’s who let themselves be deceived. Goethe once wrote that you never get deceived but you always deceive yourself. That is more than true.

People are far more interesting in hearing what sounds nice to their ears, instead of being told hard truths. But in the background there always stays this inconvenient feeling that somewhere in the future we all will have to pay a high price for not seeing the reality in the moment. That is true for individuals as for whole societies and in the end for the whole mankind and the planet. People have lost their freedom to a seemingly nice present, for many it looks nice to be caught in a golden cage, but even a golden cage stays a cage, an instrument of control of someone else and of imprisonment. Whoever sells freedom for security is neither worth the one nor the other. We have to recognize, that the value of freedom is more important than “having a nice life”. Life is a school for learning no place to enjoy yourself and no purpose on its own.

In the children’s society, we are living in, more and more people act out instead of behaving as natural and spontaneous human beings. For they never have become adult, they never had an adequate guidance, nor an example of such a person, they fight the demons of childhood for the rest of their lifes and project there own inner emptiness and problems onto others. So the idea arises, that there is “evil” in the world, and that must be fought. But evil per se does not exist. What is evil for one person, is good for another person. Good and bad are completely relative. Even a war cannot be considered evil, for there are people who profit from it and in who’s perception it is something good. This is another truth nobody wants to hear, and of course it is not “political correct” (political correctness is also an instrument of deception, to make people be “nice” to each other, also if there is nothing to be nice about. Id est the wish to feel good).

The happiness of human beings is not intended by nature, as Sigmund Freund, the great Austrian psychiatrist, declared. Word nobody wants to hear nowadays and whoever can not argue against an argument, must attack the arguing person. People want to hear, that their life is important, that everybody could be a kind of “kind” or “queen”, every person could be successful and the like. Be we all have our destiny and for most, what we call “success” in the ordinary way, is not intended. We have a complete corrupted idea about happiness and fulfilment. The mistake is already rooted in the depth of the culture we live in, that has come to a lower level than ever before in history. In contrary to what most people believe, we live in very primitive and bad times! Immanuel Kant, the German Philosopher and Professor, once wrote, that complete happiness, complete bliss, would mean that all our wished would be fulfilled in quantity and quality. How can that be? Imagine all the different wishes people have, they would necessarily contradict the wishes of others. So, if god wanted to fulfil everybody’s wished, he himself could not do it. Thinking along this avenue, we never come to realize true happiness. Even if we get what we wish, we experience suffering, for nothing is eternal, everything in the universe finds its end, even ourselves, we are going to die and every day on earth brings us neared to the cold grave.

So, what do we have to realize? We have to realize, that happiness does never come from fulfilling wishing, but to give up wishing at all. We enter the realm of reality, if we live without intentions in our life. Wish nothing, crave for nothing, and you are happy in the same moment! Hard to believe, but the only truth, that can be found concerning happiness and fulfilment.

A typical sign of our times is, that everybody feels like a victim, people behave, as if life owed them something and they are looking for the “bad guy”, who is to blame for their own misery. Whenever something in life goes wrong, someone else must be to blame or must be brought before court. That is not the behaviour of adult people, but adult humans are the rarest species to be found on the planet. Ever exotic animals, threatened to be the last of their kind, are more common in the world.

Especially the western societies are bankrupt, not only in the financial sense but especially concerning morality. Tolerance is based on cowardice, “doing good” is done out of feelings of shame or guilt (by the way feelings of guilt and shame are naughty, we should not teach our children guilt or shame, so that they can live a free live) and the hope, that nobody will harm us if we don’t harm others. My own mother used to say: “The way you shout into the forest is the way the words come back to you!” But she was damned wrong! The world is not a nice and cosy place and it never will be, it is not in the hand of human beings to create a “paradise”, that attempt will only lead to hell. What is necessary for human beings is finding oneself in the ability to attack others and defend yourself and be proud of what you can do, find your own strength apart for society of other people. The only thing that really counts in life is you and only you! Everything else is at the ranks behind you.

To see truth and accept it as well as be able to handle it are adult characteristics. As long as people are not adult they will your “tricks”, “manipulation”, “drugs”, “alcohol”, “distractions” (media, movie, TV, Shopping..) and the like, to go through life to give them the feeling of being part of mankind. What we need is intellectual honesty and integrity to survive in this 21st Century. Non-western societies go different ways. Some try to imitate the senseless consuming approach of the West, others are more concentrating on their own core values. But most of these countries a quit noble in their way to communicate to us, but don’t think they know that the west is bankrupt, and that real values have been lost. Our society is getting digged out from inside and it is only a question of time until everybody sees that there is nothing inside and that our way of living, our nations and societies are as empty as the neurotic every-day-person on this planet.

Wake up and change your reality! Or disappear from earth!

Valentine's Day

Today is Valentine’s Day and I want to use this opportunity to write a few words about love. When you look at the world and listen to what people say and what messages you get bombarded with, you could believe, that love is what is most common in the world. The world has become obsessed with this word. And it seams that everybody knows what it really means. But when it comes to love, the majority of all human beings are not more mature than little children. They have learnt from the blind (normally their parents) und are creating new blind ones (their children) by passing over a false belief from one generation to the next. What do I mean by using such harsh words? Love is a great concept, it is the greatest and most wonderful concept that has ever been brought out of the universe. The real love is what has been taught by great masters of metaphysics like Jesus or Buddha, but ever since then there have been single people who understood und who have practised it to make it visible in the world.

We normally misuse the world love. For example: when we say: “I love to go to the movies” or “I like steak and French Fries” and the like. We have to be more careful by using our language properly, that we don’t soil the holiness of some word. We have to heal the idea of love again. I don’t go into more details what I mean by deconsecrate love, for everybody can make his own judgement by reading the real criteria for love.

So what are they? First of all, love must cover all that is. Love is not something personal, for when you recognize the world as a whole, there is no “You” and no “Me” and it is impossible to say: “I love you”, by not also meaning “I love everything there is”. Real love is never something exclusive, given to a special person; it always must include everybody and everything. The second point to mention is, that real love is unconditional; it does not depend on something or anybody. If you love a person, because he looks good, it is not real love. If you love a person, because he is doing something for you or gives you something, it is not love at all. Love even includes the enemy. Real love is always also love to the people who hurt you, even the ones who would like to kill you. You only owe love to other people, not sympathy. Of course you do not think that a person, who harms you, is someone you have sympathy for. But that does not mean you cannot love him.

But this is not all that is. Love contains four further characteristics. The first one is friendship. The second one is compassion. The third one is Joy. And the fourth one is equanimity. What ever you do, if love is joy for one party but not for the other, it is not love. It is also no real love, when you want to do good things, but you harm another person, because you did not have the rightful understanding. If you give a present to someone for whom the present has no value, because he cannot use it or does not like it, it is not real love. For real love always has to consider both, the heart and the mind. Giving without understanding is not rightful giving, is not rightful understanding. The last one, equanimity, is the one that many people don’t understand. Equanimity is the wisdom of equality. You understand that there is no higher and no lower in the universe, you see that all people and all beings are one. Pride is a sign of not understanding the fundamental truths and one of the many causes of suffering in the world. People who are proud, create a blueprint in their minds, which will let them suffer in the future. So what is pride? Pride is to think you are better or superior to someone else. Pride is also to think you are less or inferior, than someone else (even modern psychology knows that). But pride is also to think you are equal to others. So what is not pride: To see that there are no others.

“I am not better than the others,
I am not worse than the others,
I am not equal to the others,
I am the others!”

If we do not have equanimity in our mind, love is in danger to become a struggle, a struggle over power. One partner tries to “own” the other one, like a piece property, in the worst scenario of course. But more often we see the tendency in relationships and especially in marriages, to limit the freedom of the spouse, to “bind” him or her. That behaviour is not love, it is possessing. We have to see, that if we really love, nobody loses his or her freedom, relationship does not mean to have less freedom than a single person. If it is so, than there is definitely something wrong. And both partners should meditation and contemplate deeply about their real feelings and the mental attachments that are their, that have nothing to do with love, but mimicry themselves are part of love.

If we practise more mindfulness in our lives and especially in our relationships, we can help ourselves and our loved ones to cultivate the fruitful seeds in our mind and not the unfruitful ones. Whenever we see someone getting angry, we should instead of supporting his anger, help him so that the unfruitful seeds, which are about to come up, can disappear fall back into the depths of the mind, where they came from. And we also have to watch ourselves not to cultivate the seed of anger that is within us. It is very ease to be infected by anger of others and getting angry ourselves. Mindfulness is the guardian, which recognizes the danger before it can arise.

A happy Valentine’s Day to everybody!!!

What good times we are living in!

We are really privileged, especially if we have access to the internet and the time to use it wisely. For that is the most important point. We can waste our times away very easily and swiftly, if we do not pay attention to our most precious resource, which is time. But on the other hand, we can train our mind, we can train our brain in a way completely unthinkable for former generations of human beings. If there is a problem in our times concerning that issue, it is not that access to almost any information your need in your life is denied, but how to find the right information in a big heap of what is often a kind of garbage. I think we do not live so much in an era of information but in an era of choice, of making the right selection of what is accessible to us. As much as there may be said about how the media influences the people, even they are blamed to stupidify a whole generation of younger people, and so on. The truth is, influence is what happens automatically, when people communicate with each other. There is nobody to blame for that fact. Every person has to pay attention on his or her own, it is not to the others to do that job for us. Face the fact, if you do not know what is important to you or what is not, you become like wax in the hands of others. And if so, you cannot accuse the world, other people, the media, or even the whole culture for your own lack of awareness.

Recently I was doing some research about different regions all around the globe. Including such remote places such as the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the inner deserts of Asia, the islands of the South Pacific, southern Italy or the rain forest in Ecuador. Having not visited all this places on my own, I relied on reports of others who have seen them, books and guides and so on. But far apart from the technical data, I could use a lot of pictures of the landscape and especially what makes it more vivid, the use of hundreds of videos downloaded form Youtube.com. It gives you an inspiration and in some way it even touches your emotional system (of course only if you have made a similar experience throughout your life, so that your brain has a starting point to begin). For me, as a writer, this is even more valuable, because it supports me a lot in my daily work of writing. The combination of thinking and feeling with the help oft the world-wide-web is an enormous widening of my rage of action and imagination.

Not only the data material, in the shape of texts, pictures and movies, does a good job, but also the possibilities to connect with people throughout the planet. Sometimes you want to know something only people can know who live at a certain place, and/or at a certain time. And even this information you can get access to through the internet nowadays. Never before in my life, the net has ever been so precious to me. This is one reason, why I believe, we are living in absolutely great times. There are many more reasons of course and I will discuss them later in further posts. But for now, good night and have a nice time!

The need to face the game of power

At the age of 16, I had my first summer job in a major electronics company. It was my first true experience with “the real world”. At school you are in a kind of protected area, as long as you learn, are smart and know how to satisfy the teachers, you have a quite easy life (as long as you are no loner, or strange in some special way). Of course you don’t know that then!

My boss in that summer was a man of great integrity and virtues, he believed in values like honesty, hard work, rationality and common sense. His position in the company was stable and he was respected by most people, but his career had been manoeuvred into a corner. For ten years he was the chief of his department not advancing a single step since then. Other people, who were in the company for much less years, were promoted and found themselves in higher positions.

Under the surface there was the frustration you could feel and that influenced the whole department and the people of my boss. For me there was no reason why my boss was not advancing. Other people who where in higher positions like him where much less intelligent and their working moral was not very high. They cared more for themselves then for the company and many of them did not even try to hide their attitude that the company would exists for their own personal good and not for the owners, the people that financed the firm. I thought about the Peter-principle: Everybody gets promoted as long as he finds himself in a position where he fails.
I started thinking a lot about the situation, about power and the way you get it and what so many people seem to do to avoid being promoted. I was fascinated by the dynamics of power and in all the years since then my fascination grew even bigger.

Power is something that is present all around us but in our political correct times people try to avoid the word power. We do not tolerate obvious craving for power like with active aggressive acts. So even more people smile and pretend to be uninterested in power, use feelings of guilt, make others feel ashamed and make massive use of passive aggression. The situation is not so much different form the royal courts in Europe during past centuries. The more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. In some way civilization is a fake and history has shown from time to time that even a very civilized nation, under a certain influence, can loose it’s thin layer of cultivation and show the substance that lies beneath.

Back to my job. One thing became very clear to me: I had a wrong idea about how human relationships work, what really counts in life and how the dynamics of movements can be controlled, even if you don`t control them. I came to the conclusion that moral is a human invention, it is nothing natural, nature would never have created such laws that very often irrationally limited the range of human behaviour. If I could look at things how they really are, and make a rational decision, independent of what people think and if they like me or not, I could get anything in life I wanted. In other words, if I could get independent of the crowd I could be in a position like a cowboy who controls the cows until they are brought to the slaughterhouse (as a specualtor in stock markets I know that it is not the crowd that makes the money – see my other blog http://samuraiofthemarket.blogspot.com). As a 16 year old I felt powerful and knew little about how much I still had to learn even if the basic principle was and is still right: “As a samurai (warrior) you have to have the ability to be cruel and unforgiving to do what is right and create the good in effect”. Or as Goethe wrote in his “Faust”: “I am the power that always wants the evil, but always creats what is good”.

After two months my work at the company was over. I made a few friends but no enemies. I learnt a lot (much more about human nature than about the technical abilities that were needed for my job). We have not created the world and its laws but every living being has to find his niche and go with the flow. You cannot resist the natural order – that is only human arrogance. If you want to make the ultimative victory in life, you defeat your enemies with intelligence and not with acts of violence or vengeance. It may sound very seductive to call the battle for power or war barbaric, but that is completely irrational – you are in danger to loose contact with reality. The truth is even more that war (in the widest sense of the word) is the father of all things – as Heracletus calls it – it cleans things and makes the necessary difference between people, companies and nations. It is neither good nor bad, it is just the human appearance of Darwin’s law.