The courage to encounter creation developed long before we were born.
One could call this special time the time of paradise. It was certainly a happy time, but at the same time, human beings lived in a state of childlike undifferentiatedness. They lived in an environment consisting of light and love, having been created in God’s image, they lived completely in childlike ignorance.
This state could not last forever if humans were truly to become the image of God. God’s demand on humans caused the “tree of knowledge” to grow in paradise.
It takes a great deal of courage to eat from this tree. Kati Wüthrich, a well-known Swiss puppet therapist, coined the phrase during her long working life:
“The courage to experience comes before the achievement.”
People always follow this path of experience, sooner or later. The moment they have the courage to eat the fruit in order to overcome the undifferentiated state of paradise, they are born into the interplay of light and darkness, day and night, division and wholeness.
At night, the gates to the inner world opened and, as a forgotten consciousness emerged, humans recognised the depth and diversity of their universe. During the day, however, they were drawn outwards into the bright world of solid forms.
The night, constantly opening up new spaces, was for the fearless, who courageously broke through wall after wall and passed through room after room. They did this and they continue to do so today.
During the day, it is the courageous who lose themselves in the world of seemingly solid forms in order to explore their polarities and structures. What is confident grasping and measuring during the day becomes cautious groping in the twilight of shadowy contours at night, full of curious fear and longing restlessness – courageously reaching for the unpredictable.
Daylight makes things solid and flat, giving them concrete contours with a scientific meaning. At night, they transform into shadows, dissolve, and everything takes on a different meaning.
During the day, the sky appears as a solid blue dome, while at night, as the light fades, its longing-filled essence becomes visible in its boundless depth, playing with the countless shapes and colours of light in the darkness.
Night thus constantly gives the groping senses a new experience that transcends the sensory world into the realm of the imaginable.
The day belongs to exact science, the night to religion. Science carries within itself the dark seed of a shadowy depth of meaning with a bright aura of fixed forms, the meaning of which is constantly being debated.
Religion has a firm, luminous core of divine revelatory power, whose aura remains dark and shadowy, devoted to longing exploration in order to give depth to perceptible longing.
Both realms are enclosed by high walls with a gate that is always open. Above both gates are written in golden letters:
“Enter, ye who are brave!”
The art of man, born of pain and courage to wisdom, consists in merging these two worlds, these two parts of human nature, back into a whole, so that all indifference and ignorance may cease.
This requires the courage to descend into the heart to look into the mirror. The mirror in the heart is one of the most mysterious organs of the human being. Those who look into it experience a transformation that transcends everything previously thought possible.
Looking into this mirror is like a cleansing. Everything that is history passes by in shadowy and solid forms. Everything is revealed in the light of its true connections. Those who look into the mirror slowly detach themselves from their ties to history and allow the mirror to become a silent observer. A silence pervades the being, slowly emptying the mirror.
The Chinese poet and philosopher Zhuang Zi describes the being that leads to an empty mirror as follows:
He does not pursue things, nor does he go out to meet them.
He reflects them, but does not hold on to them.
He can overcome the world, but is not wounded.
He is not a slave to his fame.
He has no plans.
He does not concern himself with business.
He is not the master of knowledge.
He pays attention to the smallest things and yet is inexhaustible.
He dwells beyond the self.
He accepts what heaven gives him to the very last,
and yet has as if he had nothing.
His attitude remains humble.
This inner attitude leads to the courage to be humble. We live in a time when courage and humility are not particularly popular. But a time is already dawning when people will need more courage again. Courage to experience, which ultimately leads to a transformation of the soul, as described by Zhuang Zi.
The courage to experience comes before the achievement.
