We humans are basically strangers, because we don’t know ourselves. Are we also in a foreign place? An attempt to examine layers of strangeness
Anyone living in a highly developed country today is almost certainly living an alienated life. as our consciousness has become separated from many natural contexts without us having become independent of them. The many aspects of alienation include highly compartmentalized jobs, living in almost entirely man-made environments and, last but not least, the increasing digitalization of everyday life. We usually only see parts of the whole, and we experience an immense acceleration of our lives as a result of progress – not only in transportation or manufacturing processes, but also through the constantchange in social structures that take awaymany of our former securities. And this security could at least give us a sense of belonging.
What is our place in life? How often do we still interact with naturally grown, living things that have not sprung from our minds or been spit out by conveyor belts? There is no doubt that our self-realization as creators of our habitat brings with it a great deal of alienation. Our planet as a whole, with us as its inhabitants, even its children, has been reduced to a marginal phenomenon in our consciousness. Our days are often filled with developing all those man-made, small-scale and technologicaldevices and enjoying their “benefits”, as if that is precisely the purpose of our human life.
We can be critical of these developments and justifiably name the psychological distresses that have accompanied them.[1] But what if this development is both an aberration and a path to awakening, leading in the long term from the natural man to the spiritual man?
I experience myself and the world as a process of ambivalent experiences.
Who am I? Nothing that I can be or do in the world will adequatly answer this question; it touches upon a darkness that cannot be measured or even explored by a modern individual. Nevertheless, I feel that I can, may and should develop my abilities and that my being and becoming can form a connecting point, indeed a vessel for meaning, for answers. I experience this: Only in this openness towards my unknown centre am I truly connected to myself.
At the same time, and despite everything, I try to create a tangible home for myself. Relationships, places, routines – they all demonstrate that there is somethingfundamentally missing. No place of residence has ever triggered the feeling in me: This is where I belong. No place has been a source of strength and an object of identification. It went deeper with people, never in the long term, but: I met soul mates. Nothing and no one holds me, unless I can offer a home to something else.
Ambivalent Abstraction
I want to understand. Is the urge to understand the world as a network of relationships, structures and mechanisms, i.e. abstractly, not similar to the way in which machines and ultimately the computer were invented? But by developing his abstract thinking, isn’t man aiming precisely at the realm of ideas, as a higher reality, of which Plato speaks?[2]
I experience an ambivalence in abstract thinking. The attempt to recognize structures often leads us into an airless and lifeless space. On the other hand, laws can be found – in medicine, chemistry, physics, etc. – that help us to understand how we ourselves and the world function. The abstract is a plane in which logical thinking persists with difficulty – until the abstract is experienced as a true reality and until principles of creation can reveal themselves as ideas and higher, primordial forces. But if we only seek function and not essence, alienation arises alongside the technology that makes our lives easier. We control so much, but this kind of mastery is accompanied by isolation and a never-ending stream of questions.
And yet, much that science has developed and achieved seems to constitute a fragmented image of the desired homely, perhaps divine state of being. Increasing speed, real-time communication, the effortlessness of many activities… The planet has become a „village“, time has swallowed up space and is now itself disappearing into some fold of the dimensions. We are losing our reality: Strangeness spreads.
Questions
The knowledge of the “mechanics” of all things confronts me with my existence as a cog in the huge world machine. Could it be that I am the means and not the end? Is there a meaning hidden somewhere in the admirable human body, something that is a purpose and not just a tool? The question of the soul arises, as a touchstone, but also as a means of salvation. I feel that the soul must be something that awakens and grows in the body in order to ultimately carry it and hopefully transform it.
I encounter the world as an equally encompassing question. I am in it, I live in its mystery and I am grateful for it. In nature, however, I experience beauty and chaos, blossoming and decay. She is the giver and the devourer. And: she herself is transient, even if not by my human standards. Is it just a big zero-sum game, a geo-bio-chemical machine? It often seems so to me, and then I feel alien in it. Even the airy leaf canopy of the forest under which I walk sometimes unexpectedly turns into a green grave. It takes my breath away and shows me my place as a mortal being. But there are also other moments: those in which nature becomes a transparent vessel of the all-pervading life that is also within me. I don’t always have access to this myself; I have to walk a path, carried, mirrored and accompanied by nature.
The lost Oneness
There is something that I experienced as a teenager, both astonishing and unsettling, that points to the ultimate reason for my experience of strangeness. I asked myself: Why are the others different? Why are they not familiar to me, why do I encounter them from the outside? What applies to people also applies to the world: why do I experience it from the outside, why does it hide its true nature from me? In this strangeness, a memory of the lost unity emerges. This is precisely the reason for mysearch for understanding – for knowledge of things from within.
The world and I myself can become transparent for something else in my experience. This is the beginning of a new realization and a new path.
The strangeness fades and the world offers me a home when I can offer a home to the One inside me. IT is the space in which I can perceive myself and everything else from within, an (ultimately) all-emcompassing perception that completes the sensual perception. When this happens, everything becomes a clue, a vessel and a living symbol for IT. And whenever the strangeness takes hold of me again, I know that it reminds me that I can only be at home here when I am in transit.
[1] As described by Hartmut Rosa in: Alienation and Acceleration, 2010
[2] That is, in his Allegory of the Cave
