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- Herausgeber: tredition
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A clear view of the reality of life! Wilfried Nelles outlines in this book the development of the human soul and consciousness from the embryo to the old man, from the expulsion from paradise to modern civilization. He describes the deep imprints that man experiences in the various stages of his life and the development that carries consciousness into an ever wider and higher dimension when one lets oneself fall into life without reservations. He exposes the life lies of modernity, its blind faith in technology and narcissistic worship of its own ideas, its delusions of world and self-improvement as youthful escapes from the reality of life, and shows a way to enter this reality. In the process, a map of human life emerges that leads into the practical elaboration and vivid description of a new psychology that leads beyond the loss of meaning in modernity without falling back into old patterns of belief. It is at the same time earthy and spiritual, true to life and full of love for the human without idolizing man. Nelles relies not only on his profound knowledge of Western humanities and social sciences as well as Far Eastern spiritual traditions, but above all on his own observation and life experience, which are described in clear and lively language and illustrated with many examples.
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Wilfried Nelles
The World We Live In
Consciousness and the Path of the Soul
Disclaimer: The advice and exercises published in the book have been prepared and checked by the author and publisher with the greatest care. However, no guarantee or liability can be assumed. The performance of the exercises contained in the book is at the user’s own responsibility.
1st edition 2023
Cover Design: Bunda S. Watermeier
Cover Art: Klaus Holitzka
Translated from the German by Samar Nahas
Copyright© 2023 English Edition: Wilfried Nelles
Copyright© 2020 German Edition: Innenwelt Verlag, Köln
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN
Hardcover:
978-3-910654-01-3
Softcover:
978-3-910654-05-1
Ebook:
978-3-910654-04-4
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
February 1979
40 Years Later, October 2019
I. Humans, the World, and Consciousness
The Stages of Human Life and Consciousness
From the Womb to the Tomb: The Journey of the Body
From Symbiosis to Unity: The Path of the Spirit
The Stages of Life and Consciousness at a Glance and as a Circle of Life
II. the Outward Path to Life
The World of the Unborn Child
Symbiosis
Sensing – Perception Through the Senses and the Body
Switched at Birth
The Cuckoo Child
How Does an Unborn Child »Feel«?
Our Origin is Life Itself
Your Parents Are the Only Parents
The Mother as Our Earth as Humans
Birth – the First Separation
»Unity« with Nature – Symbiotic Oneness
Mythos and Reality
Expulsion from Paradise
History and Stories
Summary
The Child´S World
A Change of Worlds
Freedom and Dependance
Father and Mother – Biological Parents and Their Significance 36
Excursus 1: Family Constellation
Excursus 2: Our Modern Times
Separation and Bonding
Child Love
I’ll Do Anything for You, Mama
From Sensing to Feeling
The Family as a Psychological Womb
The Group - the Home of Child Conciousness
The Group as Home (Place of Belonging)
Religion
A Sense of Belonging
Group Consciousness and Egoism
Stage 3: Adolescence and Youth – I-Consciousness and Modernity
The Adolescent and His World
Puberty
Youth as a Search
Adolescence as a Birth Process
Arrogance and Loneliness
Thinking instead of Feeling
The Idea Instead of the Reality
Adolescence Instead of Initiation
Modern Man and Modern Consciousness
Nowhere Man
The Upward Gaze – A Gaze into the Void
The »Inversion of Being« – From Man to God-Man
Modern Art
From the Outer to the Inner
»Free« Will
From Childlike Feeling to the Abstract Idea
General and Abstract, Idea and Reality
Excursus: Are We Bound by Our Given Sex, or Can We Choose It?
God Was Only Dead for Three Days, then He Rose Again
Death Comes from Within
The Quest for the Meaning of Life
The Loneliness and Arrogance of Youth and Modern Consciousness: a Personal Synopsis
Can Modernity Be Overcome?
III. the Inward Path to Life
Stage 4: Becoming an Adult – Consciousness of the Self and the Initiation into the Self in the Life Integration Process
The Adult Human
The Turning Point in Life
The Externalization of the Body
The Re-Membering of the Spirit
Stepping into Reality
The Spiritual Birth – The Second Birth of Man
Borders and Boundaries
The Possible and the Real
Moving with the Flow of Life
Response-Ability
Aloneness and Belonging
The Birth of the Self as a Falling into the Great Unknown
Spiritual Teachers as Midwives
The Unconscious Knowledge – Looking at Yourself in the Mirror
The Life Integration Process (Lip) - an Initiation into Psychological and Spiritual Adulthood
»You already know everything« – My Story in the Midst of Rebellion, Arrogance, Failure, and Loyalty to Myself
The Inner Calling
The Path
Insights into the Life Integration Process
The LIP as a Mirror of the Soul
Trauma
Childhood Belongs to the Child – Dealing with Trauma in the LIP
›Retraumatization‹
The Past Is What Is Past
All Wounds Can Heal
Life Integration or: Life Happens
Guilt and Merit
The Life Integration Process as a Modern Initiation Ritual
The Ego and the Self
It Is All About Living Everything
The Phenomenological Stance
Spiritual Perception
Belief and Trust
Love
First Love
Being in Relationship and Being Alone - Adult Love
Love in Therapy
Confusing the Inner and the Outer
Stage 5: Entering Mature Adulthood – Spirit Consciousness
Menopause – The Gateway to Old Age
Spirit Consciousness – Creativity and Revelation
Stage 6: Old Age and Maturity – Knowing Oneness
Stage 7: Death – All-Consciousness
Epilog
Bibliography
About the Author
The World We Live In
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Preface
Bibliography
About the Author
The World We Live In
Cover
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For my granddaughter, Ava
PREFACE
February 1979
I am lying on the warm beach sand of Kho Samui, a small unknown island in the south of Thailand. My wife and I had arrived this morning. It’s my first real long-distance trip. We had spent a few days in Bangkok with a university friend of mine with whom I’d occasionally chat in the library, who had recently taken up a position leading the Southeast Asian bureau of the German Development Service. A mutual friend and now staff member in the research project I lead at the University of Bonn had recently visited him and returned raving to me about Thailand, rekindling the mysterious magic of Southeast Asia that had captivated me since my youth. As a gift from Germany, I had brought him some salami and schwarzbrot, a typical German pumpernickel-style bread. In return, he took us along on his first business trip to various German development projects in southern Thailand. Koh Samui was the last station. He is on his way back, and we have decided to stay an extra week here.
Here I was finally living my South Sea dream life. Tall palms and tropical trees, their wide crowns serving shade, warm sand and sea, and a few bamboo huts scattered along the beach. And the bare minimum of tourist comforts and amenities. A pickup truck that can drive us over sand roads to and from the port, a small kitchen counter, water, a gas stove, and a »fridge« filled with ice blocks that were shipped over from the mainland by ferry every day. A few wooden tables and chairs under a palm leaf roof that functioned as a restaurant serving simple but good food and, yes, beer that cost more than our dinner, a toilet with a water bucket and a ladle to wash and an open-air shower behind the hut, and only for a short time every night a little light powered by electricity from the generator. Otherwise, silence.
A giant moon rises from the sea. It’s full moon. I look up at the natural palm leaf roof hovering over me as my body melts into the earth. After dinner, I had puffed on a joint. Everyone here, both the handful of tourists and the locals, smokes weed. I am not a smoker, and the couple of times in my twenties I had dragged a few puffs on a joint left me so unimpressed that I never felt the need for more. But here, in this place, it felt right. And besides, I didn’t want to be left out. As my body sinks deeper into the earth and I begin to feel completely at one with it, I hear the gentle and constant waves of the quiet sea gently sloshing over the sand shore, lending rhythm to the silence. Slosh – – – slosh – – – slosh. Very gently, very slowly. That’s when, suddenly, it all becomes crystal clear to me. This is it. This is everything. This is the world. This is life, slosh – – – slosh – – – slosh. For millions and millions of years, day in and day out: slosh – – – slosh – – – slosh.
For a few moments, I am one with it all. My mind is completely still, only awareness remains. Nothing but peace, deepest peace. Then gradually, the thinking returns: »… and within this eternal movement, amidst this perpetual sloshing, one fish eats the other,; one is born, struggles, and dies.« I see that this is all part of life, that the deep sense of peace I feel is no contradiction. I begin to sense my body again, though I cannot tell where it ends and the ground beneath it or the air above it begins. And suddenly from deep within my belly a loud laugh erupts. I see myself in Germany in my research project, see how we argue and squabble in internal discussions and at conferences, see how we are all taking everything so seriously, how we believe we must change the world or at least shape it, and I cannot stop laughing. »Doctor Wilfried Nelles, Political Scientist«, I burst out. My wife, sitting twenty meters behind me in front of our hut walks over and asks what’s wrong. »Everything’s okay,« I reply, »I was just seeing reality.«
Everything’s okay and yet nothing is as it was before. Many decades later, I would listen to Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem and often quote (and sometimes sing) it in my courses: »There is a crack in ev’rything / that’s how the light gets in.« That night, a crack split through my life and a small light came through that is still shining to this day. The crack, it seemed to me, happened because I had found myself outside of my regular environment in a completely different world. After being immersed in this strange and new external space (a tropical island) and internal one (due to the marijuana), I was able to step back and take a good look at my life. Three years later, my research project, and with it my deep desire to change the world and make it a better place, was over. And I suspected that my work in science and academia would not last much longer either. In the years that followed, the crack became wider, and the light became brighter. My spiritual search, the seeking within my inner life, began at first on a personal level, and then later professionally.
40 Years Later, October 2019
Again, I am sitting by the water in Thailand, this time on a wooden jungle raft on the River Kwai, not far from the border with Myanmar. After three weeks of giving a series of workshops in China, I am relaxing here in a very beautiful 4-star jungle resort, with bungalows tucked in between the tropical forest trees. There is nothing here but the river and the lush jungle, giant caves filled with bats, a Mon village (the Mon are today a small ethnic minority but, alongside the Khmer, are the oldest inhabitants of Thailand), and the Hellfire Pass where the British fought in the war against the Japanese, made famous by the film The Bridge on the River Kwai with Alec Guinness. Tourists from all over the world come and go every day, transported in longtail boats to the hotel, where they stay 1-2 nights, go on a tour, and then leave. Apart from that, only silence.
The water flows gently downstream. I look at its travelling ripples and think. Everything flows down the river, and has been doing so for millions of years, everything changes, and everything remains. One day like the other. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha comes to my mind, as he sits by the river with Vasudeva, his friend the old ferryman, listening, completely absorbed in the flowing of the river when he suddenly sees his own life and all the forms of life – birth, love, hate, struggle, seeking, and dying. And in the tranquil sound of flowing water realizes: »All the voices, all the goals, all the longing, all the suffering, all the pleasure, all the good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of this together was the river of events, the music of life.«1 I see this eternal flowing and think in nature everything is equal, and everything is indifferent to everything that is happening.
On the opposite riverbank rises a vertical, almost 200-meter-high karst limestone cliff, large caves puncturing its facade and 100-meter-high trees bore their roots on small ledges into its porous rock. Here, a horde of monkeys begins to hunt through the treetops. They do this every day when the sun disappears behind the mountains, just as at dusk, at six o’clock sharp, the crickets begin their deafening concert, only to stop an hour later when everything disappears into complete darkness. They have been doing so for millions of years, day in, day out. Everything, and everyone, is in motion, but no one is ›doing‹ anything; everything is moving and being moved according to the laws of nature. And in the midst of it all, human beings run around thinking their lives (and even their thoughts) are important, that they must understand and grasp everything, and then have it all under control.
I. HUMANS, THE WORLD, AND CONSCIOUSNESS
My World and Your World
We all live in a different world, and each one of us in their own. And yet, none of these worlds is the reality. We argue and squabble over right and wrong, about what we should do and what we must never do, about what the ›truth‹ is. And we do this because we all see life and the world differently and simply assume that our view is the right one. If you were to place four people in the same room, each facing one of its four walls, they will each see a different room. Their experience of the room is shaped by their position in it, and thus differs from all the others in the room. Where one sees a wall from the front, the other sees the same wall from the side or not at all if they are sitting with their back to it. The room feels different depending on the corner one is sitting in it. And though no view is wrong, none is complete.
We all each see from a different perspective, from a different position, and each one of us only sees what we can see from that point of view. The term ›view‹ is very accurate here, as in the point from which you view. In most cases, and especially when it comes to things that are important to us, we regard this view for more than just our view. We regard it as the right one, if not the reality or the truth. If you are humble and know, or at least are willing to admit, that your view depends on your point of view, your position, and looking from that specific preceptive, you would not place your view above those of others. On the contrary, you would accept the views of others and incorporate them into your own so as to expand your view of the world and yourself.
To see what this means for your view of the world and the people around you, here is a small test. If you have siblings, ask each one to describe your parents. What is (was) your mother like? Your father? What were their strengths and weaknesses? What was their relationship with each other like? How did they treat the children? And so on. You will soon see that each child has different parents, and each one has a different family, even though it is in fact the same family. And yet, in most cases, each one of you will insist that their version of the story, their view, is the right one, that their assessment of their parents is correct, and that their childhood was exactly how they perceive it.
You can do the same thing with your life partner or with colleagues from work or with friends. You will find that everyone sees the other person differently. This applies not only to the general picture that one forms of others, but also to the description of factual events, that is, things and processes that are seemingly objective. They all have two sides – The factual reality and the image that appears in the eyes of the observer.
I have known my wife for over fifty years, and for 45 years of those years we have lived together. Even when we talk about events that we both experienced together, our experiences and stories often diverge considerably from each other, sometimes to the contrary. And this is all the more evident when we are describing or assessing other people. In the meantime, we manage not to argue about it, and instead accept each other’s perspective as their view of the issue2, which is very gratifying and enriching. But this was not always the case. For many years we constantly argued – and at times quite intensely, especially if there was a third person present. Feeling misunderstood, each of us then withdrew into our own worlds. Only love could bridge our differences, but the non-understanding remained. Our worlds are not and will never be exactly the same. For someone like myself who harbors a deep longing for a truth3 we can all agree on, this was a particularly hard pill to swallow.
And this does not just happen between different people, it also takes place within us. Our world (our view of the world and ourselves) is constantly changing, and this change is for the most part gradual and hardly perceptible, though at times it can be quite sudden and violent. The way I saw my parents as a child was very different from the way I saw them at twenty, and even more different than the picture I had of them at sixty. Today I also have a very different view of the world, including the factual world, as well as very different ideas of what is good and important and right. And I also have a different picture of myself, of who I am, what I can do, and what I want. If you were to paint these images or photograph them or project them as a film, you would get to see completely different worlds. I believed different things, thought different things were right or good or wrong or evil or beautiful or ugly or important or indispensable or indifferent or possible or impossible or true. The way I see the people around me or how I view time and its events is constantly changing, not only because the world is constantly changing, but also because I am constantly changing. The same is true of my self-image.
None of these images is false per se, but none is ›right‹ in an objective sense either. They are both false and ›right‹. A child cannot have any view of the world other than that of a child, and that makes its view ›right‹ for a child. But this view is also limited and if you hold on to it your life long, you remain mentally a child. For example, it is important for a child to have someone care for it. So, when this is the case, life is good for the child and when this is not the case, it is bad and even terrible for it to be abandoned and left to care and fend for itself. For an adult, it is quite the opposite. If an adult holds on tightly to the need to be cared for, the adult remains emotionally and mentally a child. That means, what is right for a child is in no way right or appropriate for an adult or even a teenager. Teenagers view themselves and the world through the lens of adolescence, as that is what adolescence demands of them to leave their parental home (to free themselves from their rules and restrictions) and to find their own place in life. And this is what determines their perspective and thereby their view of the world, their feelings, and their judgment over what is right and what is wrong. An adult that starts a family and must care for children will yet again be in another position and develop a new perspective. With each of these life stages, we enter a different world. We can find agreement by acknowledging and accepting each other’s perspectives and not declare them as false. In the case of the life stages of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, however, unlike the previously mentioned example of the room, it’s a matter of growth and development. Every new stage encompasses more and is higher and wider than the one before it. When it comes to real growth, the higher (and later) stages of life include and encompass the previous ones, that means adolescence encompasses and includes childhood, and adulthood encompasses and includes both. Every life stage emerges from the one before it. It is thus both a wider and higher development – but only if the previous one is integrated and not rejected.
The child view of the world, the world of fairy tales and sorcerers, of belonging to parents and a family (in general, to something greater that carries, protects, and cares for us), etc., is perfectly right for a child and therefore ›true‹ for it. That is why it should not be denied to children, in an attempt to teach them openness, or taking personal responsibility or freedom to make choices and decisions. In adolescence, this world shatters into a thousand shards and that is the way it has to be. If you truly want to become an adult, you have to gather these shards and piece them together to see what new image will emerge. It will completely differ from the one you dreamed of as a teenager.
You become an adult when you absorb and include your childhood and adolescence within you, exactly as they were – without judgment or even the desire to change it or want it to be different. With every step we take into the world – from birth, puberty, adulthood, the several stages of aging until death – our world not only changes but it also becomes wider and bigger. If we follow this in consciousness, our mind also expands and becomes larger and more comprehensive. This also means that an older person can understand a younger person, but a younger person cannot understand an older person, because the younger person has not yet had the experiences or, to use the same image, has not yet entered that world. From this, we can derive important insights both for the relationship between the generations and, above all, for the inner growth of every human being, which I will present in this book.
The existence of different worldviews or images of the world is something that affects not only individuals, but also entire cultures, and it does so in two ways. First, cultures – and thus the people who belong to them – differ in manifold ways. The Chinese, for example, think in images because their writing is based on pictographic characters. Abstract thinking is foreign to them and not as easily accessible as it is to Europeans. And because they learn to write not by combining 26 meaningless characters, but by copying and understanding several thousand characters, each of which represents a holistic image, they do not consider the act of copying a bad thing. Also, the way they think is based on the deep philosophy of yin and yang, which are understood as complementary polarities and not as opposites, so they (like the Japanese and Koreans) do not think ideologically, unlike Westerners who think in mutually exclusive opposites, black and white, or either-or states. In China and Japan, everything is simultaneously both sides. This also strongly determines their image of progress and their way of dealing with the past. In a similar way, each culture forms its own world that determines people’s respective views on life, so that we can say we live in different worlds. Even with the best of intentions, this makes mutual understanding very difficult, and is possible only to the extent that one accepts the respective worldview as being equally valid as one’s own.
I only mention this for the sake of completeness, but it is not the focus of my interest here. I am more concerned with the second difference between cultures, namely that of the different levels of development. Because similar to childhood, adolescence and adulthood in the individual human being, the consciousness of mankind as a whole develops in stages that follow each other and which are higher and more comprehensive than the one before it. The world view of a European is different from that of an Arab’s, not only because of their different religious backgrounds, but also because Europe (and with it Christianity) has undergone a development that Muslim countries (and others as well) have yet to experience. This is true for the entire issue of globalization. Here modernity and tradition collide and have to be brought into a new balance. However, we are experiencing the same thing that I have already indicated for the individual level. The West believes and insists that its perspective on the world, in particular its path of modernization and its interpretation of modernity, is the right one. And this is why it will fail. Beyond all economic and political differences (such as democracy and human rights) and power struggles, this belief lies at the core of the major conflicts with China (which is self-confident and strong enough not to allow the Western perspective to be imposed upon it). The conflicts in the Middle East, on the other hand, are more about the struggle between modernity and tradition/ religion. Immigrants will also have to realize that they cannot find refuge in a world that they inwardly reject.
Consciousness
I use the term consciousness to define each of the perspectives from which we see the world, and which determine our worldview, our perceptions, opinions, judgments and finally our actions. By ›consciousness‹ I mean the way we see and perceive the world and ourselves, the perspective from which we look at life and thus experience it. ›Consciousness‹ refers both to our inner place in the world, and the way the world is present within us. In this sense, world and consciousness are not different things.4
This consciousness is determined by time and culture, on the collective level as well as for the individual. As a child, we see the world differently than we do as adolescents, and as grown adults the world looks different again. And because it looks different, it is also different. Childhood reality is very different from that of an adult’s – and both realities are true. For people living in the Middle Ages, the world was a different place than what it is for us today, and so their problems and their solutions for them were very different. For an Arab woman the world looks different than for a European one, and for a native in the rainforest of South America, the world looks different than for a white person. Again, it is not that our reality and our worldview is truer than that of an uncivilized Amazon Indian or our ancestors in the Middle Ages. We may know more and see the world differently, but in fact we are merely living in another mythos, in which other truths apply than they did back then.
Allow me to relate this to the human soul and its diseases. Psychological problems and mental illnesses did not exist before modernity. They could not exist because the concept of the psyche did not yet exist. This does not mean the symptoms did not exist, but that they were interpreted differently and thus treated differently. Aborigines in the African savannah or in the rainforest did not (and still do not) know what mental problems are but might think they’ve been haunted by demons. What we call ›schizophrenia‹ today was thought to be the soul possessed by an evil spirit or an aberration that had detached itself from the group’s soul space and was wandering around aimless and unattached. Among peoples who had not yet been conquered by Christianity, shamans cured the sick by fighting with demons to wrestle back the souls of the inflicted and return them to the group. Then came the Christians with their cross, which they used to banish the devil. In the Middle Ages, people exhibiting symptoms that we now call psychosis were believed to be possessed by the devil, and the remedy for that was exorcism.
Today we take all this to be mere superstition and consider our view to be the right one. I believe this to be both arrogant and false. These treatments were just as successful or unsuccessful as the treatments we administer today to schizophrenics, aside from the fact that today we numb the symptoms with pharmaceuticals and thereby permanently change the person’s personality and/or suppress their illness. This is by no means a real cure or healing – apart from a few exceptions, and we also had these in the past. But that does not mean that we should, or even could, revert back to using ancient methods of healing. We can no longer integrate modern humans back into the group soul because we have long ago left it forever. Getting a healing session from a shaman or holding ancient shamanic rituals to call on nature or the souls of your ancestors using drumming or chanting (or drugs, such as Ayahuasca) will not lead you back to yourself. While for natives and aboriginals such a ritual is a return to the source that is their home, for westerners it is a journey to another world, one that may change them so much so that they return as different persons. Much like the pilgrimage to a guru in India, it can most certainly enrich you with new and deep experiences, but it is not your world, and it will never be. The same applies to the practice of family constellations that is based on the belief that you can heal almost all psychological suffering by reconciling with the ancestors and returning to the family soul (group soul).
In fact, it is our consciousness that is the cause of everything that we consider a psychological problem or psychosomatic suffering. Depending on the stage of consciousness and/or culture, what may be a problem for some is not an issue at all for others because it is considered to be utterly normal. This applies to trauma as well. A member of a native tribe who fashions an amulet or trophy from the scalp or other body part of a killed enemy does so out of pride and suffers no damage to the soul. A modern westerner would not be able to do so without experiencing enormous emotional and mental suffering. And in a culture that practices blood vengeance, one is more likely to experience a greater trauma from not avenging the death of a brother with a murder than by actually killing the murderer. What we consider a trauma for a modern European is far from being one for an African or an Afghan. If, for example, we consider all refugees to be more or less traumatized, this is an entirely European view that has little to do with the psychological reality of those affected. Generally speaking, things that are a cause of the greatest concern or severe grief for one person may not necessarily be a problem for someone with a different consciousness.
To Be Human Is to Be Conscious – or: The Quest to Find Meaning
Our consciousness is what differentiates us from other animals. It is what makes us human. It is why we revere those who have attained a much higher or greater consciousness, such as Jesus or Buddha or Lao Tzu or the many others who have not originated any religions. Many of them were simple people with hardly any education, but their consciousness was one with everything. Many today, and especially in the entire spiritual scene, aspire to achieve such greatness or at least a higher level of consciousness, but few among them can see that our consciousness is also our greatest problem. To attain ›higher consciousness‹ (and consciousness in general) initially means greater pain, for as our consciousness grows all our ideas and expectations of life have to die. And with the emergence of human consciousness, human’s oneness with nature (the Garden of Eden) ends and the birth of the human as a creature that stands opposite to nature (and is no longer in and of it) begins. Adam and Eve learned this in the most painful way. Their boredom with the oneness of paradise weakened them to the temptations of the serpent that led them to bite into the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. In that moment, they became aware of themselves, saw that they were naked, and fell out of oneness. It was not God’s punishment but consciousness itself, the act of becoming conscious, that brought on their suffering. The moment humans became conscious of themselves is the moment they fell out of paradise (oneness with nature). Henceforth, humans must wrestle their lives from a nature in which they were once embedded – a nature that up to that point had been their home and shelter, but now they stand outside and apart from it. Since that moment, humans have asked two fundamental questions: Who am I? and What is the meaning of life?
Humans are creatures that are aware of themselves; we know that we live and that we will die. No animal knows this. That is why animals have neither religion nor philosophies, nor do they think about the meaning of their existence. They simply exist. Humans have consciousness, they are aware of themselves, their environment, their origin, their history, their actions, their lives, their death, and in this sense, their future. If you kill another human or an animal, you know that you are killing. Animals kill without knowing that they are killing, it is simply part of their existence. A predatory animal is simply a predatory animal, but it does not know what a predatory animal is and would never think of it as something wrong. Humans are also predators, but for us this is a problem, at least when we are aware of it. An animal lives in and with its nature. Humans have and need culture. But that does not mean that we stand above our nature. It is still within us, even though we may no longer mentally inhabit it. We are and remain biological beings, and no culture or technology can change that. If we ever do succeed in changing that, in removing the biological from the human, then these creatures are no longer humans.
However, that fact that we are beings with consciousness – that we are aware of our existence, our actions, and the fact of our death – has not only been a great advantage and an evolutionary leap over animals. It has also been our greatest problem. An animal neither suffers guilt nor pursues goals it feels it must accomplish. An animal does not question the sense of its actions and the meaning of its life. We humans do and must. As humans we need to be connected to a framework of reference that lends sense and meaning to our lives, our actions, and most of all our death. An animal is embedded in its nature, but we have broken out of it. Nature is paradise, so to speak, the blissful primordial state. With the bite into the apple of knowledge, with the recognition of ›I am‹, this original state, this purely natural life, came to an end, and that automatically gave rise to the questions: Who or what am I? Why am I? What for? Why live, why die? Why do this, why that? Unlike pure natural beings, we cannot escape these questions, they are a part of us, and it is precisely these questions that have given rise to what we call, in the broadest sense, culture.
The End of the Great Stories
It all begins with religion, initially in the form of a myth. A mythos is a story, a narrative about the source, about the origin of mankind, about ancestors and the meaning of existence. This story replaces nature, it replaces an unquestionable existence, thereby giving human existence a new place. As humans we still live in a deep symbiosis with nature, but we are no longer (only) nature. After losing our home in nature, we have a new home, namely the mythos. Nature and the earth are still mankind’s ›mother‹, but we now live alongside the mother and no longer within her.
At first, it makes no difference whether the mythos is true in a factual sense. This only becomes a problem when humans begin to have experiences that contradict the mythos. When many or a significant few experience the same thing, the current mythos is replaced by another, wider one. The next big step, the next stage, is then the step from mythos to religion. This gives humans a new home that embraces the experiences that the mythos could no longer hold. But with time – or more precisely with the discoveries made by the natural sciences and finally the insights and knowledge stemming from them – the framework of religion has also become narrow. It, too, no longer serves humans as a home.
In the early days of the Enlightenment, the collective hope and belief was that humans would find a new home in Reason and Science, that these would provide an even broader framework that could once again lend meaning to mankind’s existence and a connection to something greater. This hope was lost with the advent of modernity (ca. 1900). Science and Reason, which had replaced religion, cannot produce meaning, cannot tell us how to live, and can say nothing about truth. No two philosophers share the same opinion or see the world in the same way. If we assume that all these philosophers have mastered the art of thinking and reason, then evidently thinking cannot bring us closer to the truth, otherwise all these great thinkers would have to agree.5
The final blow to our hope for redemption through Reason came with the mass murders and genocides of the National Socialists and the death camps and cold-blooded atrocities of the communists, acts all justified by Reason and Science, planned and executed by a cold calculated rationality, and committed in the name of ›progress‹ and ›freeing humanity from the yoke of slavery‹. But we have yet to bury it, for we remain in denial of Reason’s death. We still clamor tightly to it, for fear of the barren desert of meaninglessness that lurks beyond it, in which we humans cannot survive. All of today’s ideological struggles are nothing more than desperate attempts to escape this desert and find a new home. In other words, a new story that makes sense for modern humans that can hold and integrate our experiences and thereby give our lives a meaning and a direction. This also applies to the spiritual quest, for it is ultimately a search for home.
Psychology and the Quest for Meaning
In this lack of orientation – aside from reviving or reinventing all kinds of myths, seeking refuge in foreign religions or, quite fashionable today, quasi-natural ›identities‹ – people today have turned to psychology and psychotherapy. They are not necessarily seeking the grand story but are searching more for short- or medium-term orientation and clarity in the form of small stories, so-to-speak, that serve as a sense-giving framework for the diverse problems of everyday life, including diseases and illness, at least for a short while. They ask, sometimes implicitly and sometimes more explicitly, questions such as: Why am I suffering, where do my problems come from, and how can I overcome them? How can I become better, happier, more successful, get a better grip on my life, have a better relationship? How can I
get along better with my family, my parents as well as my children? How can I reduce my stress or protect myself from diseases? Can I actually do all of that? What does my illness, my disability, my accident mean? What does the death of my husband or my wife or my child want to tell me?
Though it is often a practical request (i.e., the therapist should make the problem go away), if you listen carefully, the big questions resonate beneath the surface. Some people are aware of it, while others only partially or not at all, but these questions are always part of the same story. What or who am I? Why do I exist? What is the meaning of it all? Millions of people are seeking answers in thousands of workshops and consultation rooms. As recently as my own childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s this would have been unthinkable. Even though the generation of my parents and their families survived two horrific World Wars, hardly anyone would have ever thought to spend their weekends in therapy workshops. And people only went to a psychotherapist if they were seriously mentally ill, i.e., suffering from schizophrenia or severe depression, and were more or less forced into an ›institution‹ by a doctor. Today, not only are the practices of medical and psychological therapists hopelessly inundated with those seeking relief, but people from all strata of life – from managers and doctors to skilled workers and farmers’ wives, from millionaires to people on welfare – are seeking guidance, support, and a meaning to their existence in workshops and seminars of all kinds. And because demand is rapidly rising, quite a few of them are training to become so-called life coaches. When I say that the big questions resonate beneath it all, I also imply that psychology must address these questions if it is to aptly respond to the circumstances and conditions of our times, for if it fails to do so, it will not live up to its responsibility, that is, its ability to respond to life. Essentially, many of the people who come to us are looking for a new grand narrative, a story that will give their lives purpose and meaning and direction by providing a coherent framework for what is happening to them.
Theology can no longer provide answers, and neither can philosophy because Reason is just as dead as God. What remains is psychology. But this cannot be a »scientific« psychology, i.e., not one that emulates the model of natural science, because science cannot answer the big questions of the meaning of life.
A New Story? About this Book
So, what can a new story look like in an age when not only God is dead but also Reason? What sort of story can we create that can resist becoming an ideology? How can a psychology and a therapy be designed to offer people an answer to the meaning of life? Can it do that at all? What can it be based on in a world where, according to Nietzsche, »there is no above and no below«6 anymore, no Archimedean point from which an order or at least a direction can be derived? In the external world, that is above (in a transcendental sense) or below (in the physical world or in history, where Marx and Engels had hoped to find it), this point can no longer be found. If there is a place that can give us a certain orientation, it can only be found in the inner world. Within ourselves, inside each and every one of us.
All we can do, it seems to me, is to show people a way to find themselves and their own answers, and to enable them to find the path to themselves – even though no one can say or know in advance what this ›self‹ is. This path emerges from life itself and is revealed to us when we turn our attention to life and its stages, and carefully observe them.
In this book, I invite you on a journey through human life and its stages and the respective consciousness that belongs to each of these stages, during which I hope to show you how our consciousness develops, changes, and expands with every stage. It is a sort of map that not only traces our biological path through life but also describes how with every stage our consciousness changes or – and this is especially true for the second half or our life – can change if we fully surrender to life. In short, the path leads us first (until the end of our adolescence) out into life and the world and then (as we enter adulthood) back into life – back into our respective realities of life and into what wants to be realized in us. If we follow this path, we inevitably arrive at ourselves.
In the German language we use the term entwickeln to mean develop or evolve. Made up of the preposition ent and the verb wickeln, it literally means to un-wind or un-coil. So, when something evolves, it presupposes that it has already existed still coiled and not yet uncoiled. When a human being is evolving, this means that this person already exists as exactly this human being and that they are undergoing a process of unwinding to become unwound. But this cannot be a movement towards something or someone else, to a goal that one sets for themselves or is set for them. It can only be a movement towards oneself, that is, evolving into that which one has always been, albeit in a coiled state. It seems to me that this is the inherent meaning of life that emerges from itself. To unwind and unfold into what you already are in your innermost core, that is, to yourself, much like a flower finds its ›fulfillment‹ (its inner meaning) in growing out of the seed in which it is initially enclosed, unfolding and blooming as the flower it has always been. The same is true for consciousness. It, too, strives to evolve out of itself into what it already is, into its innermost being, into itself.
In this book we will travel back, as best we can, to the earliest stages of our consciousness, both for the individual human and for the beginning of human history, and from there we will move forward – for the individual, to the end of life, for the general collective consciousness, until the present day. We will follow the movement of life itself, as this always and only moves forwards.7
This process of following life also entails describing in detail the development of a human life from conception to death. The spaces we pass through, the conditions and limitations that life imposes on each of us at every stage, the experiences we make along the way, and the new spaces and possibilities that open up with every stage of life. This I shall use as the basis for how consciousness develops and changes in this process. This basis also forms the framework to address the perspectives and methods that psychological counseling and therapy should explore and adopt in the respective stages of life in order to support people in finding the path back to themselves.
That my narrative is a psychological story by no means implies that I only address the individual’s psyche. That would be far too narrow a view. We are always part of the human soul or the collective consciousness, even when we live as hermits. And we always feel and act from our respective consciousness, also as psychologists and therapists. That is why I feel it is imperative that we become aware of this consciousness, this place from which we see and derive our so-called ›solutions‹. This equally applies to both our personal lives and to the collective consciousness in which we are embedded. So, I always look at both sides: the inner life of the individual and their development and the inner life of mankind and its development. Both are interconnected and both together make up what I call the ›soul‹. The inner side of life.
This book is not based on theoretical assumptions or philosophical positions on consciousness but on the observable processes of life itself. This means, describing and sharing my perception in a way that everyone can follow. I do this in the narrative form – I tell a story. One that is based on the current state of knowledge, insofar as it is accessible and known to me, but in no way claims to be objective. Because objectivity is no longer possible. All stories, all theories, all narrations are subjective. There are two ways in which they can become valid for you, the reader. One way is for you to compare them with your own experiences and see whether they correspond to them. The other way is to follow the experiences and observations told in the story, or the suggestions I make for verification, and in the process you perceive them to be true.
The observations I detail in this book consist of:
• Firstly, the ones I had made of myself, which includes all my life experiences. So, where I deem it appropriate, I also report on these personal experiences, so that my conclusions are comprehensible, and readers are encouraged to recall their own experiences.
• Secondly, those I have made with many thousands of clients and hundreds of students, i.e., in my work with all kinds of psychological problems, psychosomatic illnesses, coping with fateful life events, ordinary everyday problems, and a variety of mental issues.
• Thirdly, what I have seen and experienced in and with the people around me, in family and friends, especially my own children and those of others.
And finally, everything I have read and studied. This includes Karl Marx and Critical Theory (especially Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas), the great work of Ken Wilber and the equally great and, for me, even more profound work of Wolfgang Giegerich (who also gave me a deeper understanding of C. G. Jung’s work) on consciousness and psychology, the work of and with Bert Hellinger, in which I was completely immersed for ten years. And above all Osho, whom I met in my mid-thirties and in whose spirit I have felt at home ever since, as well as the teachings of Sri Nisardagatta and Ramesh S. Balsekar, which come from the same spirit and are identical in content but formulated quite differently, to name the most important and formative. Finally, from literature, two books by Hermann Hesse were very important for me, not because they are better than others, but because I encountered myself in their protagonists: Narcissus and Goldmund, and Siddhartha.
Another important source of insight for me has been my experience working in China. Since 2004, I have traveled to China twice a year for several weeks at a time and have conducted courses and seminars there with several thousand people. Nowhere have people poured out their hearts to me as openly as they have in China. Though I still do not fully comprehend China, I have, however, gained a far different perspective on Chinese culture, its society and, most importantly, its people than German media has shown.8 But mostly, my work in China has enabled me to take a distant and external view of our Western culture that would have otherwise not been possible. It has also allowed me to see things that I would have otherwise not perceived, such as our ideological dogmatism, which completely eludes the Chinese, our black-and-white, either-or thinking,` our arrogance towards teachers and elders, or our lack of love and respect for the elderly. All this and much more became evident to me only when I was able to look at our culture from a distance. The same applies to my twenty years of work in Central-Eastern Europe, namely in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Here the cultural distance is much smaller, but also in these countries I gained a different view on the people there and their way of thinking and living as well as on my own world.
1 Hesse, H. (1998). Siddhartha. P. 157, Dover Publications.
2 Accepting the view of the other does not exclude the fact that we inwardly hold on to our own view as the correct one. Tolerance can certainly take place alongside ignorance and arrogance. Real acceptance is only achieved when we acknowledge the other’s truth as being just as true as our own.
3 Theoretically, Jürgen Habermas formulated this dream in his theory of domination-free discourse (herrschaftsfreier Diskurs). According to Habermas, when people talk and listen to each other reasonably and without wanting to dominate the other, this will result in an insight that all those involved in the discourse perceive as the truth. In my early thirties, I was leading a research project in which this theory determined our work. When I realized, however, that I had practically failed to reach a consensus from the different points of view in our team, I suffered a severe physical breakdown. As a result, I realized that my worldview, with its belief in reason, was broken. However, this belief has lingered on quietly beneath the surface for quite a long time. Though they may shatter quite suddenly, our deepest dreams and longings seem to die very slowly.
4 There is also a second meaning of ›consciousness‹ in which it is understood as spirit (in contrast to matter). In this sense, we do not (only) ›have‹ consciousness (as something which is added to our natural being), but we ›are‹ consciousness. I also call it the ›pure‹ consciousness or the true consciousness. The context makes it clear what kind of consciousness is meant.
5 This is different in the case of mystics and spiritual masters (›enlightened‹ or ›awakened‹ ones). They all basically describe the same world and experience. The differ only in how they convey that experience.
6 Nietzsche, F. W. (2006). Translator’s note: The author has pointed out to me that from his point of view the common English translation of »there is no up and no down anymore« is not entirely accurate because Nietzsche was addressing the loss of the transcendental (of heaven, the death of God). For this reason, I have decided to use »above« and »below«.
7 This is why the book in which I first introduced this movement is called Das Leben hat keinen Rückwärtsgang (Life Has No Reverse Gear) (Nelles, 2009).
8 I have summarized some of my impressions of China in the essay Inbild, Abbild und Vorbild – Eine Annäherung an die chinesische Seele (Image, Representation and Model – An Approach to Understanding the Chinese Soul) (available only in German, in: Nelles (2018b, pp. 116-133)).
