Three steps into Oneness E-Book

Thomas Rüedi

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 371

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

"Three steps into Oneness" To face the challenges of modern life, we need to evolve a new view of awakening by being balanced within the wisdom of the Absolute and the Relative. Human development is Indigenous, traditional, and modern work. These relative polarities need to be brought into equilibrium by connecting ourselves to the truth and wisdom that is found in numerous places — all of creation, the living organism of planet earth, psychology and attachment and knowledge of the mind, and in elderhood, just to name a few. Yet we must also stay deeply connected to the wisdom of the absolute world, the heavens, that is and has always been with and beyond all creation. To meet a holistic spirituality by living a holistic world view we can walk "The Path of the Three Steps" to experience both - the Relative and the Absolute - to finally get a taste of ONENESS.

Leseprobe

Three Steps into Oneness

Holistic Spirituality As a New View on Awakening including Indigenous, Traditional and Modern Wisdom

Thomas Rüedi / Jigme Sherab

Swiss Holistic Institute

The Essence of “Three Steps into Oneness”

• We need to remember the authentic, original purity and power of our wisdom traditions.

• We need to update and elaborate our spiritual traditions.

• We must work within the body-house (body-mind) as we combine traditional and modern spiritual practices with contemporary, „awakened“ science at the relative world, by also restoring the value for elderhood.

• We must recognize and stay connected to the Absolute.

• On the path within the Relative towards realizing relative wisdom holistic spirituality needs to integrate a profound, holistic worldview.

• We need to introduce a new approach for the integration of old and new aspects of a holistic, developmental spirituality.

• To reach final ONENESS we need to unfold both forms of wisdom — within the Relative and the Absolute — on our path, completely and simultaneously…

• …like the two wings a bird needs to fly.

© 2023 Thomas Rüedi

All rights reserved.

The work including its parts is protected by copyright. Any use without the author's consent is prohibited.

Published by Swiss Holistic Institute

www.swissholisticinstitute.com

ISBN Softcover: 978-3-347-92762-9

ISBN Hardcover: 978-3-347-92763-6

ISBN E-Book: 978-3-347-92764-3

Printing and distribution by tredition GmbH, An der Strusbek 10, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany

Design, layout and cover design by Thomas Rüedi

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Essence of “Three Steps into Oneness”

Copyright

Acknowledgement

Note and Book Review from the Editor

Introduction

Preface

To Find Happiness by Avoiding Suffering

“It Is Impossible to Get Lost in a Labyrinth!”

To Elaborate and Update Spiritual Traditions

Buddhist Leaders H.H. 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso and H.H. 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje

Idris Shah: Sufi Master and Translator

Holistic Integral Spirituality: the View

Basic Structures of Holistic Spirituality

An Ancient and Authentic Spiritual Tradition: Dzogchen

Fourth Turning Buddhism, Integral Theory, and Ken Wilber

The Timeless and Beyond Religious Characteristics of Dzogchen and Sufism

Kedumah: a Beyond Jewish Mystical Tradition

To Walk in Beauty - Hòzhò: Indigenous Spirituality of the Diné/Navajo Nation

Basic View of the “Three Steps into Oneness”

Overview on the Three Steps of the Path

The Three Steps within the Two Dimensions

The Five Elements in Humans

The Relative Level / World

The Absolute Level / World

ONENESS

The Path: First Step

First Step: Balancing the Relative Level, Finding Relative Wisdom

Working with the Elements

Life as an Expression of Relative Wisdom

Human Basic Life Forces

Sexuality (Fire/Water)

Care (Earth/Water)

Zest for Life (Fire/Water)

Anger (Fire)

Mental Power (Air)

Initiations and Life Visions (Air/Space)

Elderhood (All Elements)

Integrity and Autonomy

Live, Growth, Sickness and Healing: a Development Process

Holistic Medicine is Integrative Medicine

„Awakened“ medical methods and technologies

Modern Methods of Psycho and Trauma Therapy

The Importance of Understanding the Cohabitation with Microorganisms

Colonization, Religious Mission and Racism as a Toxic Legacy of Western Culture

The Fundamental Need of a Holistic World View

Our World in the Anthropocene

Nature Disasters as Wake-up Calls for Mankind’s Wisdom

Indigenous People Suffering Western Cultures Ignorance as a Symbol

Indigenous People as Carriers of Ancient Relative Wisdom

Why the Loss of Biodiversity, the Increase of Nature Disasters and Pandemics Have a Common Background

The Value of Nature Protection and Renaturation Measures

“Born to be Wild”: Rewilding Europe

Decolonization: a Step of Reconciliation and Healing

The Postcolonial Need to Decolonize the Public International Law

Examples of Living Elements of Ancient Traditions Today

“The Blob” or the Intelligence of a Singlecelled Organism

Beyond Nature and Culture

“Awakened Science” in Switzerland

Polarity and Problems within Gender

Elderhood and Old Age are Not the Same Things

The Three Holistic Points of View

The Fundamental Need for a Spiritual Path

Traditional Spiritual Work with Skillful Methods: Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen

Recent Integral Spiritual Work — “Fourth Turning Buddhism”

Example of an Holistic Elaborated Buddhist Practice This meditation is designed to bring the principles of the book to life. This combines the ancient and proven techniques of Vajrayana Buddhism, specifically Dzogchen, with modern scientific principles around HeartMath. In addition, the insights of Integral Buddhism are also included, from Ken Wilber’s Fourth Turning.

Conclusion on the First Step

The Path: Second Step

Balancing the Two Aspects of the Major Polarity: Absolute and Relative Wisdom

An Oscillating Pendulum

The Difference between Meditation and Mindfulness

Balancing Our Bodies while Sitting in Meditation

Vajra and Bell, Wisdom and Method

The Absolute

Wrathful Compassion

Einstein’s Findings beyond Physics: the Mystic Scientist

Reflections on the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine

Disease as a Time to Meet Relative and Absolute Wisdom

Simultaneousness of Relative and Absolute

Human Development — Top Down and Bottom Up

Balancing Pace and Intensity

Active and Passive Qualities of the Major Polarity

Restoring Elderhood and Sageness Today

Conclusion of Step Two

The Fruition: Third Step

Third Step: ONENESS

Contemplation on the Pendulum in ONENESS

Contemplation on Balancing the Scale

Contemplation on the Unification of Perspectives in One Taste

Contemplation on Balancing Two Aspects of the Major Polarity in a Third State

Choice-less Awareness: Mindfulness

Contemplations on ONENESS from a Sufi Point of View

Contemplations on the Heart Sutra

Contemplation on My Personal View and experience of ONENESS

Conclusion of the Third Step

Crucial Aspects of the Holistic Work on the Path

Shadow Work: Cleaning Up

Spiritual Bypassing

The Two Directions in Developmental Spirituality

Relative Conduct of Spiritual Leaders and Institutions

Holistic View on the Body-house

Ancient Wisdom of the Maori

The Central Nervous System (CNS): the “BrainBrain”

The Heart Brain: Heart Intelligence

The Gut Brain: Enteric Nervous System

“Awakened” Scientific Work on the Three Brains

The Heart Reflected in Holistic Complementary Medicine

Non-local Intuition

The Heart as Our (Spiritual) Center

Summary

Personal Notes and Insights from My Path

About the Author

Appendix: Poem „Steps into Oneness“

References

Three steps into Oneness

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgement

References

Three steps into Oneness

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Acknowledgement

I want to deeply thank the following people for making this book possible. They are, were and still are my teachers, spiritual companions, mentors, therapists, coaches, and tutors who supported and inspired me to start and step forward on my path as a spiritual being, incarnated and living in a body house to be a lively part simultaneously of the absolute and relative world:

H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, H.E. the 7th Dzogchen Rinpoche, H.H. Gyalwang Karmapa, Keith Sherwood, Tom Johanson, Emil Neff (†), Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, Dr. Louisa Williams, Ken Wilber, Björn Thorsten Leimbach, Suzanne Scurlock-Durana, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Rüdiger Dahlke, Robert A. Masters, Dr. Bob Weathers, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Idris Shah, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (†)

Many thanks to my book coach Keith Martin-Smith for his support on bringing my manuscript into shape.

Thank you to

my buddy and friend Patrick,

my parents Kurt und Bigna (†),

my brothers Andrea and Felix,

my grandma Herta

“ONENESS is the great nature

As the endless space and its essence,

Centered mindful within our hearts

Showing in complete effortlessness.“1

1 The whole poem „Steps into ONENESS“ by Thomas Rüedi see at the Appendix

Note and Book Review from the Editor

This book was written in English, but that language is not the native one of the author. While the entire book could have been rewritten to be fully in-line with the norms of writing and communication, we made a decision that it was better to edit the book to be as clear as it could be, but to not convert the rest of the manuscript into perfect English. The reason for this is simple: there is a transmission that happens through the writing, one that would likely be lost if an editor like me were to rewrite every sentence of the book to conform to the norms of English grammar and sentence structure.

I would encourage you, the reader, to think of this book like having a conversation with someone whose English is good but not perfect and to relax into the sometimes unusual sentence structure and uncommon turn of phrase. I found, in editing the book, that I quickly came to appreciate the unconventional tone and that it actually allowed for a deeper transmission of Thomas’ insights and wisdom.

As you read this book, I hope that you too will discover this new territory and the richness that lies herein.

We live in a curious time, when we have access to ancient wisdom, modern "hacks" at meditation, brain science, and so much more. But where we still struggle is with wisdom, with finding a way to integrate our own experiences with a desire to plug into a source deeper than ourselves -- awakening, enlightenment, or being liberated from our suffering. Thomas Rüedi’s book offers something utterly unique: a way to honor the wisdom of Indigenous peoples, cultivate the clarity of Buddhism, honor the insights of mysticism, and understand our modern world. He helps the reader find a throughline that lets us develop relative wisdom and absolute knowing, and to integrate these in a map of wholeness that brings together the very best parts of our collective humanity.

Thomas doesn't suggest we "go back to the way things were" but rather see the power traditional cultures had, and have, in relationship to the natural world. But he also understands psychosocial shadow, trauma, and attachment, the history of colonialism and systemic bias, and the importance of understanding how these things still influence us, and keep us apart from the wisdom that is our birthright. More than any book I've read, this one offers a path to a genuine wholeness, of body, mind, soul, and world -- a bridge from the past to now, and into our collective future. Written with heart, passion, and a discerning and penetrating clarity, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to find a deeper meaning in the world.

Keith Martin-Smith, editor

Introduction

Even though the English language is not my mother language, intuitively I know and understand clearly what my inner voice is telling me: when I am supposed to write this book I should do it in English language. I trust deeply to the wisdom guidance of elderhood inside me — knowing what is needed to be told and how to be expressed in this book and it will be done properly. It will be both, the verbal and non-verbal communication, the whole and full message and I wish by all my heart that this message can reach you by this way.

Reflecting deeply on the essential meaning of the message I can hear inside me, it is basically a call of (re-)awakening an ancient and actualized understanding of what the term “relative truth and wisdom” is about. It is the wisdom to be re-discovered within the Western world, the wisdom of daily life we live in on planet earth that has been getting lost, been buried and hidden by a growing intensity, greediness and superficiality inside its individual and collective development within our culture of the last 200 years.

To make the message of it authentic and original you will also notice that this voice I was hearing inside me and that was letting me write these words down has obviously and intentionally taken some liberties with proper English grammar and sentence structure to express itself. To have access to this message fully, please feel invited to relax into it, which can help this English version to be read as close as possible to where ever it is originally coming from. Using not such a fluent and distinct language you might know from most other English books and from authors with an English mother language, the call inside the text wants us to join the entire flow of both — a verbal rather cognitive and a non-verbal, mystical message of it simultaneously. And, if you should even intuitively hear a Swiss cow “mooing,” hear an echo of an alphorn and yodel in the high mountains, the ticking of a Swiss watch or you should experience the disturbing strong and delicious taste of Swiss chocolate on your tongue while reading this book, then please forgive me — as I am Swiss — relax and enjoy it.

Publishing this book, the holistic view and purpose of it asks to address it to human beings interested in this matter and able to read English all over the world. This prevents it be written out of a single “biotope view and language” of one country or continent alone, which would be contradictory to this.

I have been lucky enough to travel, to address my curiosity to and come to know many countries and cultures in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, America and Europe I am coming from. This helps me to open the window to a holistic world view, a part of this book is all about.

Along this book you will notice that I will bring up many different issues by giving you some essential information and/or offering you an experience on them. Then to deepen into the different matters, there will be always links for pages on the internet or information about related books in the footer to follow. So like this you might go deeper into certain matters of interest by stopping in the book for a moment, while some other themes you are fine to have an essential information of it.

Living and breathing in a world of great change, challenge and degeneration — in Buddhist terms: moral degeneration, wars, nature disasters, fires, floods and droughts — , the innate light within certain human beings out of their hearts is able to get stronger, to get lightened by all of this turmoil. It is my deepest wish, as an elder, to help to increase this light in all brother- and sister-human-beings, in all sentient beings, through our hearts to shine in- and outside, to help to enter into a great clarity of our spirits and also to find a heartfelt, caring relationship to our “body-houses (body-minds)” we are living in. As there are individual clouds or shadows that cover the sun of our lives — trauma, accidents, loss of close ones, etc. — , there also are collective shadows that cause a lot of irritation and confusion these days — natural disasters, pandemics and wars, etc.

Using the term “body-house” as a holistic and spiritually elaborated version of body/mind or body-mind, I like to use this term originally created by Dr. Rüdiger Dahlke2, a German doctor and philosopher. The deeper meaning of it in my view is, that our spirits (the element of space or quintessence), as they incarnate in this relative, physical world, live for the length of their earthly existences in body-houses — as a composition of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) and inside the different levels of the physical, vegetative, emotional and mental bodies. This view and discrimination gives us a picture to skillfully work with it and helps us to furthermore be able to dive into the contents of this book.

This is a time where some of us are in despair and suffer from great anxiety — especially because of particular traits or traumatic histories — finding no support and getting caught in our roles as victims. Some of them might find some release in therapies. Or some others — also fixed and narrowed in to the relative world — are pretending there is no change, ignoring the processual movement in their lives, always try to keep on going as before, trying to get immediately back into or to stay in their comfort zones. Tom Johanson3, one of my spiritual teachers, called this way of life some 25 years ago British “Beefburger-Life” for fast food, meaning that as soon as we had a burger, we sooner or later need another one, marching on and on in the rat race… No development at all, no consciousness of the spiritual at all.

And it is also a time, paradoxically, where the opposite is happening. People are trying to escape their discomforts, shadows, and need for support and therapy on the relative level by focusing exclusively on the spiritual. They want to pretend that the relative world is “less real” than the Absolute, and so try to ignore it altoge-

ther. And most find out this bypassing simply does not work. This is because there are some misunderstandings about wisdom traditions or falsifications of them saying, we should only focus on the spiritual and the relative is all fake and is to be given up fully at once.

Recently in a new book from an American author (which happened to be my book editor), Keith Martin-Smith with the title “When the Buddha needs therapy”4 and a video on ARTE “Buddhismus: Missbrauch im Namen der Erleuchtung (Buddhism: Abuse in the name of enlightenment; German version)”5 we are confronted with and shocked by the fact that, as in other religious traditions worldwide — especially in Catholicism — there have been and still happen different forms of abuse on adults and children (sexual, violence, neglect, etc.) inside religious institutions or between some religious dignitaries and their students. In the case of a very famous Tibetan Buddhist Lama in the West, Sogyal Rinpoche and the organization Rigpa6 (I was part of the sangha 25 years ago), this unacceptable conduct contrasts and polarizes in the extremes to his famous book “Tibetan book of living and dying”7, being a bestseller and still a very inspiring book about the spiritual in Tibetan Buddhism. This is of course a sign to us, that we need also a different and more comprehensive culture, education, and code of ethical conduct for monks, nuns and dignitaries, coming out of deep work on the relative level for anybody, at any position — as a human being.

But also in these times mentioned above, we are not disconnected to the heavens, to the wisdom of the so-called Absolute — in the contrary seemingly contradictory… We are even closer !

Some of us are getting awakened now to find new, creative and powerful solutions for the great challenges we are into and our species has to face. In an ancient and yet integrated understanding our world, our living planet earth which we are a part of, dwells on a threshold of potential overwhelm and catastrophe. Within this space it is the completely new we are supposed to find or will find us by being open in our spirits, minds, hearts and bodies. And with Pablo Picasso’s8 famous quote, “I do not seek. I find” it is not our searching, but our intension of finding that opens up new horizons and visions of wisdom for us.

Sensing, contemplating profoundly into my path at this stage of my life I can feel and hear this call inside me to find an actual role as an elder of this culture, to follow and to place my service to disposal of the urge of it. The call is on one hand in the understanding of Buddhism as a yogi (and tiny “tertön” or treasure revealer) being able to receive transmissions by being connected to the Lineage of Dzogchen9 and being able to reinterpret or help others to understand Buddhism newly today.

But on the other hand it is also the call of the “Warriors of the Rainbow”10, many ancient native traditions are telling us about (see also later in the book). It is the call of offering my skills as a messenger to reconnect ourselves to the original, pure power and wisdom within our earthly existence and to once again rediscover our natu-

ral role as one of the many members and parts of our living planet earth.

The urge of the call, which some of us can hear and sense well, is connected with the knowing that in this time of change and degeneration we life in, we badly need support by the main sources of wisdom within the Heavens or Absolute and the Earth or Relative.

At the doorways of a new universal cycle, we should on one hand concentrate and meditate on recognizing and sensing our traditional, authentic roots that brought us up, that nourished us and our culture and that are the basic trunk and the basic roots of our individual and collective tree of existence.

Finding the new path is about continuing and holding on the authentic, ancient and earthly parts of us by contemplating on modern society’s contribution to those ancient parts. We can do this through our newer understanding of biology, psychology, anthropology, and so on and by opening up our inner and outer eyes for new skillful methods and techniques to get into a full, holistic, actual view of this relative world. But finding the new path is first of all a revival of deeply watching and understanding the natural laws, the nature herself, the dawn and ever since the process of earthly development we as humans are part of. It is about re-discovering ancient, relative truths even as we’re open to the cutting-edge and modern, also scientific discoveries about this relative world and our own body-houses inside of it.

And it is about finding this magical balance between the polarities, one of the most important, natural laws of the Relative. For example: as we breath in — we breath out; there is no pole without the other one — except when a cycle starts or comes to an end, when we are born and taking in the first breath or when we die exhaling our last breath.

By deeply remembering, regaining and balancing these natural laws within our hearts by using old and new skillful methods, we can fulfill the qualifications of the side of the Relative — and reach relative truth and wisdom as a first full step on the “Three Steps into Oneness”.

Finding the new path also needs us urgently to find and practice a strong, powerful, meaningful, spiritual path. Without the guidance of a wisdom tradition we will probably get lost, because those wisdom traditions spent hundreds and hundreds of years developing the best ways, the best contemplative technologies as an expression of relative wisdom, for us to connect with the spiritual. And we probably never ever connect our existences to the Absolute — to the vast space, to the heavens, where everything is balanced from the beginning, where there is no beginning and no end, where there is no need to develop or eradicate anything because all is perfect since timeless times — according to the Dzogchen Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and many other traditions as well. It is one of the wisdom traditions that allows us to recognize, to sense, to experience the unique quality that IS the Absolute. The Absolute is like the color blue, it is impossible to describe it. Most of us need to be introduced to it by a spiritual friend that knows it and has the capabilities and strength to show us. Only some extraordinary gifted individuals and prophets have been able to find it on their own.

There are many sacred places or so-called “power places” known all over the world, where people of any culture like to go for various reasons, but mostly for the spiritual.

And what is very fascinating and inspiring in this very context is that many great masters of Tibetan Buddhism — some of them have spent 10 — 20 years of their lives in retreat — lived during their retreats out in nature, in caves or simple huts surrounded by the plain, pure powers of unaltered nature. So there, according to my view, these lamas and yogis found a perfect combination of unaltered purity and originality of nature — containing a natural, relative wisdom — and undistracted silence or original nature sounds to meditate and practice the deepest spiritual — to come close and enter the absolute wisdom. The Jungian and philosopher Bill Plotkin11, author of numerous books and founder of the Animas Valley Institute, is also under the very strong belief that one cannot spiritually awaken unless one spends significant time “lost” in nature, lost in the unaltered fullness of Her being.

This is, as we will see later in this book, a constellation where the Relative and the Absolute match, where they overlap, influence and support each other.

And in this particular issue I found and continue to find a very inspiring picture for the idea for this book, based on my lived experience and the integration of some of the finest minds, ideas, and contemplative insights from ancient times to modern ones.

Working on this book I found myself gravitating also towards Sufism, to a mystical, non- or beyond religious Sufism. I would like to introduce to you a beautiful quotation — dealing with the magical relationship between the Relative and the Absolute — from Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee12, a Western teacher of Sufism:

“The awakening of magic was part of the story of creation, when human consciousness first appeared. The natural magic of the Earth allowed us to experience the wonder and mystery of creation, how all of creation embodies a divine purpose. It can be seen, for example, in the cave paintings in southern France whose animals have a shamanic dimension. Tragically, this early magic began to be misused for the purpose of power, and this started the split between the worlds, the world of light and the physical world of creation, which is imaged in myth as the Fall, a loss of innocence. I sense a calling to return to this primal relationship, awakening this magic that is still present, although mostly hidden, within creation. The magical relationship between the worlds is a part of our heritage which we have mostly forgotten, although we still speak of a ‘magical moment’ when the numinous energy of the inner comes into our outer world.”

We will hear more from him throughout this book, because there is relatedness of the basic issues of this book with his great work along “Working with Oneness”13… I should say: of course!

Finally I want to introduce a specific term to you, that is representing my approach towards a holistic spirituality we will find along the book. Since there is a varying understanding about the meaning of “holistic spiritual paths” by different traditions and authors around the world, I want to make a distinction in how I’m using it. The term you will find in this book is Holistic Spirituality*. It is about the path we will find explained and described in the chapter “Overview on the Three Steps into Oneness” and we will find afterwards discussed in detail throughout the entire book.

Since beginning this book I have found that the content, message, and my own developing elderhood continues its ripening process — like a delicious wine does in oak barrels. This growth into a further depth of meaning invited me then to sharpen the messaging here while knowing that this process of development will keep on going after this book has been published. My hope is this wine continues to age and to blossom.

2 https://www.dahlke.world/about

3 https://vimeo.com/19622063

4 “When the Buddha needs therapy,” Keith Martin-Smith, ISBN-13 978-1737288695

5https://youtu.be/ctPMsYNlFqk — in German

6 https://www.rigpa.org/

7 “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying”: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller; ISBN-10 0062508342

8 https://www.pablopicasso.org/quotes.jsp

9 https://www.dzogchen.org.in

10 https://theearthstoriescollection.org/en/the-legend-of-the-rainbow-warriors/

11 https://www.animas.org/

12 https://workingwithoneness.org/articles/a-story-of-beginnings/

13 https://workingwithoneness.org/

Preface

I want to invite you to approach the main issues of this book by first getting a mental and intellectual understanding of it. But as you will notice reading it further, you will find yourself asked to enter a meditative, mystical, and experiential view on awakening that is outside of a purely mental or intellectual understanding. Most of us have had some access to this non-dual state at some point in our lives, even if it was fleeting. Yet the idea is that a meditative or contemplative practice gives us a more reliable, sustainable and steady access to the experience of awakening, something utterly beyond a mental map of it. To get meaningful answers towards the questions of “Who am I?” and “What’s the purpose of my life?” we need to make our way into both: the relative world we life in and the absolute world where we originally come from.

So let us then start by our mind having a glance on basic purposes of this book.

To Find Happiness by Avoiding Suffering

I believe it’s important to point out a place of suffering I see in the world, and that may have brought you to this book.

As humans, we suffer. And as humans, we try to understand and react to this in two, main ways. Some of us take the spiritual path, and attempt to bypass the relative world — the world of our egos, our traumas, our cultures, our ideas of money and status and achievement — to plug directly into the Absolute.

Others attempt to end suffering by immersing themselves into the relative world and dismissing any notion of an absolute view or experience. Here, they embrace making a lot of money, business, science and technology, psychology and biology, and try to find ways to “hack” their way into a better, happier world.

But both ways of trying to “find happiness and to avoid suffering” — as H.H. the 17th Dalai Lama said often — bring our basic struggling of life to a head, and instead of elevating suffering will cause more individual or collective suffering, both for us and for the world we live in. It other words, it is our avoidance of suffering that causes us to experience more of it, both in ourselves and in the world we share.

This is profound. And this book attempts to address this so that we, as individuals and as a collective, can share a more loving, truthful and connected world.

The point of this book is that neither approach — bypassing the relative or embracing it — can work without the other and, in fact, there is a third way that integrates the best of relative wisdom with absolute knowing.

“Three Steps into Oneness” is a new approach to Holistic Spirituality*, one that opens us up to a new view on awakening, and that including Indigenous, traditional, and modern wisdom.

“It Is Impossible to Get Lost in a Labyrinth!”

The labyrinth of the cathedral of Chartres, France

To give us a deeper taste of what are the basic purposes of this book I want to invite us to reflect on one of the most ancient and fascinating symbols worldwide: the labyrinth. For this we want to examine, talk, and meditate about the crucial and vital importance of the following questions:

• What is the deeper meaning of the symbol “labyrinth”?

• Why are a labyrinth and a maze not the same things?

• Why is it impossible to get lost into a labyrinth?

For 25 years now, I have been and still am fascinated by the authentic and yet timeless meaning of labyrinths going back to the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Christians and even longer before. I visited several of them in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany in a sabbatical time in the year 2010.

At the time and ongoing until today, it was and still is common for people to confuse a labyrinth with a maze, and to be unaware of the critical difference between the two.

This is most important on our spiritual journey.

If we do not understand this, we will simply not be able to discover our path fully and holistically. We will get lost and stuck again and again, recognizing, sensing, that the developmental path as individuals or as a collective of human beings we follow is not the right one. We might experience that the path into depth, plausibility and the spiritual in our lives, as we search devotedly and sometimes for many years already with all our hearts, keeps on feeling incomplete or even wrong. In other words, we feel caught in a maze, unable to see where we are, and unable to feel anything but lost.

“Three Steps into Oneness” can help us to find a way to fully understand one of the many important meanings of the symbol labyrinth within our present lives, our ancient and present cultures…

In short and essentially characterized we further can reed on wikipedia14:

“In English, the term labyrinth is generally synonymous with maze. As a result of the long history of unicursal representation of the mythological Labyrinth, however, many contemporary scholars and enthusiasts observe a distinction between the two. In this specialized usage maze refers to a complex branching multicursal puzzle with choices of path and direction, while a unicursal labyrinth has only a single path to the center. A labyrinth in this sense has an unambiguous route to the center and back and presents no navigational challenge.

Many labyrinths set in floors or on the ground are large enough that the path can be walked. Unicursal patterns have been used historically both in group rituals and for private meditation, and are increasingly found for therapeutic use in hospitals and hospices.”

The most important difference towards a labyrinth is, that within the maze, we definitely can get lost, we often get stuck, we will repeatedly “bang our nose” at a wall needing to turn around getting back from where we came and trying an other way. It is the “try and error” method which is connected with the maze.

Here I would like to connect this visualization with the fact already introduced that many in the West get lost or stuck within their “mazes” either trying to find their path of life only within the material, relative and/or scientific world, or trying to escape the limitations of the relative world by only wanting to find truth within the spiritual, the absolute world. Without including the spiritual into our lives, even when we are applying very meaningful, recent psychological work, it won’t help to remain staying within the maze’s structure.

On the other hand the symbol of the labyrinth, represented in oneway, unicursal labyrinths within cultures all over the world, asks us to follow the one and only path walking into it. We do not search for the path, turn around, cry out, and try to figure out where we are. Instead, we simply put one foot in front of the other, walking steadily and mindfully in a single direction, even though we end up literally walking in circles. All we need is to find the trust and the perseverance to continue this potential, particular path of wisdom. In most cultures it is the symbol of the labyrinth we find — on jewelry, on walls of caves, on floors of churches — showing us that it had and in some cultures still has a deep, spiritual meaning.

Contemplating on it or walking a labyrinth, it is most important to understand that the full meaning of it will only be experienced by implementing all three elements:

 entering and following the path,

 reaching and staying in the center for a while and

 going all the way back again and stepping out of it.

The deeper, spiritual, symbolical meaning in my view is by entering the labyrinth we start our spiritual journey reaching out to experience truth or the wisdom of the Absolute, to meet God by finally and trustfully getting to the center of it.

There, at the heart of the labyrinth, we might get very meaningful answers to our deep questions, we can meet truth within us and/or encounter the Absolute or God communicating to us — we can find and experience ourselves being spiritual beings.

Then we sooner or later need to return into our relative existence by step by step waking out of it, integrating, digesting, investigating what we have learnt and to find or re-find in this there is also relative wisdom. There is the absolute knowledge of knowing of God or the Absolute or us being a “spark” of it. And there is the relative knowing of the world and ourselves living in our body-houses that contain — like all creation — relative wisdom. Here, it is very meaningful, necessary, and often crucial to use, apart from ancient methods like the labyrinth, also modern approaches of psychotherapy, trauma therapy and recent findings in neuroscience to integrate and come along the path into re-discovering relative wisdom.

Using this symbolic path to walk in, stay in the center and walk out of a labyrinth — doing it as a meditation or by doing a physical walk into it (please search the internet to find one close to your home) — we can apply repeatedly in our lives to get into more and more depth on our path of live, that needs to be also a spiritual path.

By entering the main part of this book, you are invited to learn more about relative and absolute work. It is — as already mentioned at the more intellectual part of this chapter — the path of implementing this particular view we expressed “through the eyes of the symbol labyrinth” on a modern approach towards Buddhism today.

In the advanced part of it we will also encounter the heart as our physical, vegetative, emotional and spiritual center — being the main coordinator between us as spiritual beings and our body-houses we live in or between the “vertical and the horizontal dimensions” we will deepen in later in this book.

So at the end our path of live needs to be a journey of re-discovering the wisdom of the Absolute and the wisdom of the Relative — both, as the full walk into the labyrinth. When we have reached there, experiencing both at the same time, we will experience ONENESS.

14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth

To Elaborate and Update Spiritual Traditions

Buddhist Leaders H.H. 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso and H.H. 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje

Ken Wilber and others in the integral movement have been busy updating and integrating modern insights into the spiritual traditions, from Christianity to Buddhism, Judaism, Sufism, and onward.

As a student of one kind of these wisdom traditions, Tibetan Buddhism, I find it interesting that even some very high practitioners and lamas within the tradition itself are open to and ready for this updating of their understanding of how the world works. East and West continue, it seems, to come together and to help one another create a true path to ONENESS.

First we can have a look on one of the famous sayings of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama15:

“The nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”

By saying this, Dalai Lama even goes a step further stressing not only the elaboration of a wisdom tradition is possible, but also when certain claims are found to be false, they should be abandoned.

In “Walking in step with the dharma” (publ. 2006; acc. to Andrew Holecek’s video 2015 - „The Now and Future of Buddhism“) H.H. the

17th Karmapa16 (head of one of the main traditions within Tibetan Buddhism, the Kagyü Tradition) brought up this advice for buddhist students on their path to become a bodhisattva (Buddhist practitioners who aim to attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings):

“Since the benefit of beings is the foremost goal, there is no absolute necessity that everything we say in our teachings be in line with Buddhist philosophical doctrines. This is so because it is possible for some students not to receive much benefit from presentations given strictly on the basis of traditional Buddhist philosophies and ideas.