We are interwoven into a great unfolding that has led our universe from light and energy, through matter, to life and consciousness. And every blossom of this stream of life is beautiful.

There is an orchid on the windowsill in front of me. It was a gift from a friend a few years ago. For a long time it stood there inconspicuously with its flat leaves. Until a few days ago, purple buds appeared on it. They have now blossomed into a large, wide-open flower. Shaped like a butterfly, you can also see the shape of a five-pointed star in it. The purple on the petals, a delicate white running towards the centre, a light yellow at the centre and the same purple towards the inside of the flower as on the outer edges of the petals. The beauty of the flowers casts a spell over the room and our minds. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they have unfolded. Beyond my control. This is another reason why the sight is so exhilarating. Beauty happens to us. The flower has given birth to itself with the power of life. At the same time, the whole cosmos dances in it. The plant draws sustenance from the small amount of soil in the pot. It has absorbed the light of the sun, the water that I gave it and which nourishes it. And many other forces and interrelations have led to this moment, at the end of winter, being the right time to blossom. As a harbinger of spring, the time of burgeoning life.

I find the sight of the blossoms beautiful. In blooming flowers we all feel the breath of beauty. It is the form and colour that enchants us. And at the same time, it is the act, the happening, the event of blossoming itself. When a plant blossoms, it is as if the essence, the unique expression of this life becomes visible. We also feel the elemental power of life itself, which pushes towards blossoming, towards perfection.

When I look at the orchid for some time, I enter into a field of resonance. Its blossoming becomes a tender and awakening memory of the possibility of my blossoming. I feel that this awakening power of life is also at work in me. And with it, beauty.

The blossoming of this plant fulfils an ancient law of the living, an eternal principle that is inscribed in life itself: life wants to flourish. Then the plant is not an object that I look at or even admire from the outside, but a developing form vibrates in it, which I also feel within me. As a human being, I too am an evolving being and strive towards blossoming. In a blossoming life I find the space, the environment, the will to allow the gifts, talents and creative impulses that lie within me to flourish, to allow the buds of the soul to blossom. A person who blossoms in this way is a beautiful person, because life in him or her has been able to find a perfection that is not a conclusion, but rather an opening to the whole, to what is still possible. A blossom that gives itself to all life.

Birth, an

Opening from afar

Bestows me near

With the essence of time

Becoming to be

Speaks your voice

Transforms me to go home

Life is one and blossoms

Whatever is

The eternal breath

In the beautiful flower, we touch an eternal principle of life that transcends our limited and temporal existence. When we perceive something as beautiful, we feel the breath of comprehensive laws and forces. Something eternal touches us. That is why beauty can give us such orientation in the midst of a world of insecurity, destruction, conflict and upheaval.

The sight of beauty in nature, in art, in humanity and in interpersonal relationships, in ethical action reminds us that we live in a world that wants to flourish out of itself. The miracle is that the world is beautiful, even if there is a lot of ugliness and darkness in it. Beauty exists. And our soul longs for it. We seek contact with this transcendent power and presence. Even if our culture presents us with many superficial pleasures, the urge for true beauty remains.

True beauty blossoms out of life itself, as life itself. That is why no ‘cosmetic’ surgery can match true beauty. It is only external manipulation. No amount of smoothing or prettifying can replace true beauty. An old person who is dying and whose face is illuminated by a fulfilled life radiates such a lustre of life. In contrast, made-up, smoothed, standardised bodies are only a façade.

True beauty always unfolds from within, because a being, a person, a life, a work of art, a society follows the harmony of the living from within and gives it expression. That is why the eternal radiance of beauty is so unifying. The great works of art of every culture, music, poetry, may be foreign to us in their form, language or sound, but we can still feel the breath of beauty in them. Beauty can connect us. As human beings, we are all drawn to it, regardless of our culture. And in experiences of beauty, such as looking at a flower, which is perceived as beautiful in all cultures, we become aware of our interconnection with the whole of life. We always flourish as one, as ONE life.

Completely

Awake

Born into

The moving light

Creation happens

When we grow

And go beyond ourselves

Into the open gaze

That gives us

What is possible

And looks at us

A great unfolding

Beauty arises from life. It is the breath of the living. The power of creativity pulses within it, and this power also resides in us. We are interwoven into a great unfolding that has led our universe from light and energy, through matter, to life and consciousness. And every blossom of this stream of life is beautiful. The galaxies that we see through our telescopes, the plants, animals, landscapes, the human being in his artistic creation, in his life-affirming impulses of compassion and connection, in his striving for knowledge of the world and his inner self. Beauty pulses through this process from within. When something is beautiful, the creative power and harmony of the living is expressed in it. When something is ugly, the flow of life is interrupted, deadened, frozen.

In our creative being, we visualise beauty. When we consciously align ourselves with this blossoming power, feel it from within and express it in the world, we poetise our existence. Poetry lives in creating from the beautiful. The poetic, understood more comprehensively as a way of being in the world, lives in resonance with the beautiful. Every poetic work, every poetic act seeks to bring our connection to the greater life into experience and to realise it. Poetry takes the path of aesthetic attunement.

When I write a poem, something in the world touches me. I am moved. I resonate with what is. And express it. Find words, images, metaphors that express my state of mind. Even when I write about a loss or pain, beauty can be felt just by expressing a touch. By revealing a connection. When we are attuned to life in all its complexity, with the beautiful and the painful, life finds expression. And we correspond to our true nature as creative actors, as co-creators of an unfolding cosmos, as co-creators of life who are becoming aware, as poets in the great poem of creation.

Breath comes to us

Moves me from within

The ebb and flow of your being

I am the instrument

Of Your music

Filling the earth and sky

And giving us the space in between

Transforming our togetherness

When we follow beauty, our togetherness can also be transformed from within. Beauty is a whole in which the different parts find a dynamic harmony that remains in motion. In the form of this whole, the inherent connectedness of life is realised. Relationships become beautiful when our own blossoming finds space in them and when the relationship itself becomes a flower that we nurture together and transform again and again. It nourishes us. It reminds us that we are not separate islands in an empty cosmos, but interwoven with everything.

A society, a human community, can also become a space for blossoming. Then every person is given the space to develop freely. To be formed from within. To be shaped in one’s true nature is spiritual blossoming. That is why learning spaces, places of true inner development and strengthening of the heart, are the social energy centres of a community and society.

A person becomes beautiful when the abilities inherent in them – thinking, feeling and willing, embodiment, imagination and agency – find a flexible harmony. They become a process that fulfils itself in its unfolding. Then the whole of life becomes a creative space for that which is possible. The fact that our life itself is open to the horizon of the possible gives our being creative power and an unconditional confidence. A more beautiful, fairer, more life-serving and regenerative world is possible. That which we have in mind, which we sense, exercises a pull in our hearts that calls us to itself. This is a hope that is not directed towards a specific goal, but lives from the fact that our being and doing is permeated by the developing energy of life, which shows itself in our ability to follow a deep meaning. The flower that we could be calls us.

This is the beautiful call from the depths of life, in which truth and goodness are also embraced and sheltered. The true, the good and the beautiful open up the space of the sacred for us as the ultimately essential dimension of our existence. In the sacred, the wholeness of being is revealed, from which we can never fall away, and an absolute depth of meaning, in which we experience that we are woven into an incomprehensible mystery of life. We marvel. We feel awe. Beauty vibrates and reveals itself in mystery, wonder and awe. We come close to the unknowable ground of our being, which is more intimate to us than all the characteristics that determine our individuality. At the same time, we are a unique expression of this all-encompassing whole. A blossom of great life. This is the creative beauty that we are and seek.

Because we can see the beautiful, be moved by it, fall in awe into the silence, look with reverence, we partake in the beautiful. The aesthetic sense is within us and in it we are one with the beautiful that shows itself to us. An aesthetic life is touchable, it is a sentient, perceptive, poetic existence. It rejects the anaesthesia, the insensitivity, the numbness of a culture that does not want to feel what it is and does. Through beauty, we can awaken to our humanity. And we can poetise our world.

My eyes return to the orchid at the window, which has helped write this text. Like every flower, it calls us inside into the creative force field of blossoming, from which we can re-enchant our life, our relationships, our thinking and feeling, our being and doing.

Let us look at each other

In the sparkle of the encounter

The horizon opens up

A shared present

We feel freely sent

Together we are carried

And create the land

Future

It blossoms

Now

Mike Kauschke (*1972) is an author, poet, translator, editor and dialogue facilitator. He practised Zen Buddhism and has been exploring an integral, meta-modern spirituality for many years. After training as a nurse, he worked in naturopathic and anthroposophic clinics and in hospices in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt. He then turned to writing, initially as a translator, then as a senior editor of the magazine evolve, a freelance contributor to the online magazine Ethik heute and an author of books on Poetic Art of Living. For many years he has been involved in the community of ‘evolve World’. Publications, among others: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Welt (In Search of the Lost World, 2022), Im Gespräch mit der lebendigen Welt (In Conversation with the Living World, 2024).

Aktuelles | Mike Kauschke | Portfolio

Evolve Magazin

The image of a threshold recurs throughout spiritual traditions. A doorway between two rooms, the first light of dawn before the sun rises, the pause before a journey begins — all suggest the same experience: the moment between two states of being.

A threshold is not yet the new life, but it signals that a transition has become possible. Something in the old situation no longer feels complete, yet the next step has not fully revealed itself.

In many ways, the Threshold is a place of heightened awareness. We begin to sense that the familiar patterns of life do not entirely satisfy the deeper questions within us. At the same time, we may not yet know what lies beyond.

In the Rosicrucian narrative of The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosycross, the seeker repeatedly encounters gates and thresholds that cannot be passed through by effort alone. Entry becomes possible only when the moment of readiness has arrived. Recognition must precede the crossing. The Threshold, therefore, represents a subtle but decisive moment in the human journey — the awakening of an inner awareness that something new is calling.

The Light of Awareness

What makes such a moment possible is the emergence of a new kind of awareness.
Spiritual traditions often speak of a quiet radiation that surrounds human life, even when it is not yet recognised. It does not intrude upon our freedom or compel belief. Instead, it remains present as a gentle invitation.

This presence may reveal itself in many ways: as a sudden insight, as a deep longing for truth, or as the quiet sense that life holds a meaning that cannot be reduced to outward success or failure.

At first, this awareness may seem distant or uncertain, like the faint light on the horizon before sunrise. Yet once noticed, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

It is this growing awareness that reveals the Threshold. We begin to sense that another dimension of life exists — one that invites us to look beyond the surface of things.

An Inner Turning

When this awareness awakens, something within us begins to change. The questions that arise are no longer abstract ideas but personal realities. We begin to reflect more deeply on the direction of our lives and the meaning behind our experiences.

At such moments, the Threshold becomes real. We recognise that life is not merely a sequence of external events but a process in which the inner life gradually awakens.

The Rosicrucian tradition often describes this stage as the beginning of a new orientation. The seeker does not yet see the full path ahead, yet something within has shifted. The certainty of the past begins to give way to a deeper search for truth.

This awakening is rarely dramatic. More often, it is quiet and almost fragile, like the first light appearing at the horizon before sunrise. Yet it carries a profound significance, because it marks the beginning of a conscious response to the deeper possibilities of life.

Living on the Threshold

Once this awareness has emerged, life rarely continues in quite the same way as before. Outwardly, the familiar patterns of daily life may remain unchanged, yet inwardly a new sensitivity has begun to develop. We become more attentive to the deeper movements of the heart and more aware of the questions that shape our inner life.

This is what it means to live on the Threshold.

The Threshold is not yet the new life, but neither is it the old life we once knew so unquestioningly. It is a place between two worlds — a moment of quiet tension in which something within us has begun to listen more deeply.

Often, this state brings a heightened sensitivity. Questions arise that cannot easily be dismissed. The meaning of our actions, the direction of our lives, and the purpose behind our experiences begin to take on a new significance.

Yet the Threshold is not only a place of uncertainty. It is also a place of attentiveness. To live on the Threshold is to remain aware of the deeper call that has revealed itself, even if its full meaning is not yet understood.

Crossing the Threshold

The movement beyond the Threshold rarely arrives as a sudden event. More often, it unfolds gradually, as the human being begins to respond to the awareness that has awakened within.

At first, this response may be little more than a change in attention. What once seemed unimportant now becomes meaningful. The inner life, which the demands of daily activity may have previously overshadowed, begins to take on a new significance.

The person who has sensed this deeper call finds it increasingly difficult to ignore it. Questions that once seemed distant now become deeply personal.

For once, the Threshold has been recognised, the journey toward a new understanding of life has already begun.

In this way, the Threshold gradually becomes a passage. Step by step, the human being begins to enter into a new relationship with life — one in which the deeper dimension of existence can illuminate the path ahead.

Dostoyevsky’s Novel The Idiot

‘Is it true, Prince, that you once said that the world will be redeemed by beauty?’ This question is posed by a young friend to Prince Myshkin, who is the essential figure in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. When the Prince remains silent, his friend asks again: ‘What kind of beauty will redeem the world?’ The Prince looks at him penetratingly, but does not answer.*1

However, from now on he will remain at the side of his consumptive young friend with boundless compassion, for he knows that his friend is close to death. He remembers only too well the face of death, which he once faced as a young man. It seems as if he wants to tell his friend with his silence that he will share his pain with him in love and that this will make their souls shine with a beauty that will conquer death and one day redeem the world.

A mock execution

Dostoyevsky himself was 27 years old when he was sentenced to death in St. Petersburg along with a small group of friends for anti-regime, socialist thinking. In a letter to his brother, he writes: ‘Today, 22 December, we were all taken to Semyonovsky Square.’ When they were lined up on either side of the scaffold, the auditor stepped into the centre of the execution ground and read out the death sentence: ‘sentenced to death by firing squad’. Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds. And Dostoyevsky said: It cannot be that we are being executed …

The delinquents are thrown over the white death gowns, the swords are broken over their heads. They are tied to the posts and the hoods are pulled over their eyes, the soldiers hold the rifles ready to fire, then a drum roll. The hoods are torn from the heads of those doomed to die, and they are untied from the poles. A tsar’s messenger announces the reprieve. The death penalty has been commuted to hard labour! A few days later, Dostoyevsky is deported to Siberia with many others. They will learn later that the tsar had been planning this show trial for some time.*2

That one moment of ‘neither death nor life’ which is suddenly bathed in sunlight, lets Dostoyevsky later say:

It is amazing what a single ray of sunshine does to a person’s soul. And also: I can see the sun, […] and knowing that the sun is there, that is life.*3

Stefan Zweig describes this moment in his poem Heroischer Augenblick (Heroic Moment):

Death creeps reluctantly from the frozen joints.

And the eyes, still veiled in darkness, sense

that they receive a greeting from eternal light […]

Because he feels that, only since

he had touched the bitter lips of death,

his heart senses the sweetness of life.

Epilepsy as a metaphor

Dostoyevsky was deeply affected by the unspeakable humiliation he suffered at the hands of the state authorities who had sentenced him to death and then spared his life at the last moment. This shock triggered chronic epilepsy in him. The one crucial moment, when the sunlight penetrating his soul saved him from death in a higher sense and awakened him to new life, will remain in Dostoyevsky’s soul as a lasting experience during his epileptic seizures, which he processes in the character of Prince Myshkin in his novel The Idiot. In this ambivalence, every epileptic seizure of the prince is an attempt by his soul to integrate the contradictions of death and birth and experience them as a unity in human life. Prince Myshkin is a kind of alter ego of Dostoyevsky.

The prince, who in his own misfortune receives the vision of the interconnectedness of all human life, leads a truly humble life. However, the people around him cannot understand him. They live in a false reality of self-love, mock his noble and compassionate soul and call him an idiot.

A parallel between Prince Myshkin and Jesus

In his Thoughts on Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ Hermann Hesse compares Prince Myshkin with Jesus.*5

The parallel between the two is the thought of the moment when Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane drinks the last cup of loneliness […]. It is the moment of incredible, total isolation, of the tragic loneliness of the Idiot: On the one side, society, the elegant, the worldly, the rich, the powerful and the conservative; on the other, the angry youth, implacable, knowing nothing but rebellion, wild, savage, namelessly stupid … – and between the two parties, the prince alone, exposed, critically observed from both sides and with the utmost tension. And how does the situation end? It ends with Myshkin behaving entirely in accordance with his good, tender, childlike nature, […] responding with selflessness to the most outrageous […] and thus being completely rejected and despised […] Everyone turns away from him […], for a moment the most extreme contrasts in society, age, and attitude are completely erased, and everyone is united, completely united, in turning away with disgust from the one who is the only pure one among them. So what is the reason for this idiot’s impossibility in the world of others? It is because the idiot thinks differently from the others. His thinking is what I call ‘magical’ thinking.*6

Prince Myshkin once stood on the magical border during the execution process, where he had to accept everything, the thought of death and its opposite, life. He realised that there is no law, no culture, no morality and no formation that is true from any other point of view than that of one pole – and that every pole has its opposite pole. He thus denied the whole world and reality of others, and the fact that he appeared as a lovable, selfless person made people helpless. He had experienced the true unity and law of human existence in the light and warming love of the sunbeam that once called him to new life.

The law of compassion

‘Compassion is, after all, the most important and perhaps the only law of existence for all of humanity,’ said Dostoyevsky. When we share pain with our neighbours, we embrace all people in our hearts. At the same time, we connect with our common divine source of life, which is the place where the original beauty of God’s love radiates.*7

This is the secret of beauty: it radiates a splendour that expresses the glory of God in all his creation and will redeem the world.

With his complete modesty, even humility, Prince Myshkin is completely unapproachable, and his life radiates an order centred on his own solitude, mature to the point of disappearance. This is indeed a very strange thing: All events, however distant they may be from him, have a gravitational pull towards him and this gravitating of all things and people towards the One constitutes the content of the book.

Walter Benjamin

From Stefan Zweig’s poem Heroischer Augenblick (Heroic Moment):

And it becomes clear to him

that in this one second

he was the one

who stood at the cross a thousand years ago,

and that he, like him,

since that burning kiss of death,

must love life because of its suffering.

 

References:

1 Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Der Idiot (The Idiot), Munich 1997, p. 588

2 Dostoyevsky-eu Execution

3 Quote from Aphorismen, Sprüche und Gedichte – Aphorismen.de

4 Stefan Zweig, Sternstunden der Menschheit, Heroischer Augenblick, Projekt Gutenberg-de

5 Hermann Hesse, Thoughts on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, https://hesse.projects-gss.ucsb.edu

6 Ibid.

7 Then beauty realises the significance of its Sanskrit origin: Bet-El-Za, which means ‘the place where God shines’.

We find it in Hinduism, Buddhism and – around the beginning of our era – among the Gnostics. Plato depicts it vividly in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’. Today, we have created a cave that we carry with us in our mobile phones.

In recent times it has become, if not commonly accepted, then at least a topic of considerable debate, that the world we live in, from the cozy familiarity of our own homes to the furthest galaxy unthinkable light years away, is a kind of fake, or at least a copy, a simulation. What may once have seemed the stuff of science fiction – think, of course, of the film The Matrix –  is, for some scientists, now seen as, if not yet fact, then as a 99% probability on its sure way to becoming one. High profile technology giants like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel seem to accept it, and in an odd way, the fact that the simulation theory is yet to be proved or even to be accepted as provable, seems, in their case, to be one very good reason to accept it, as an act of faith; both have described themselves as Christians, although not in an orthodox sense. In some ways, this faith strikes me as an example of the “promissory note” character of much current science, the contention that, while we may not be able to prove X now – whatever X might be – we most likely will be able to prove it soon enough. So, if we can’t yet prove that we live in a simulation, don’t worry. With a few more years and more technological advances, we’ll get there, you’ll see.

Are we being simulated by a future civilisation?

The main idea behind this notion comes from the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. In essence he maintains that just as we, now, run computer simulations of any number of things, from the weather to traffic to military combat – not to mention video games and virtual reality – so too, advanced civilizations – either extraterrestrial or in the future – will run them, but on a much larger and more complex scale. These advanced civilizations would run many such simulations and one of them is life here on planet Earth. Quantum physics allows this, with quanta of ‘reality’ being manipulated in the same way that pixels on our computer screens are. The many ‘coincidences’ that seem to have been involved in life appearing here, and which for other scientists suggest what is known as the “anthropic cosmological principle” –  which argues that, rather than a fluke in a hostile and meaningless universe, our universe is one in which intelligent life must emerge – are for the Simulationists, evidence for, well, the simulation. Someone, they say, is running the show.

For some that might be God. For others, it’s the great computer programmer in the sky. For some of the Simulationists, it is ourselves, in the future. We then are simulations that our future selves have created. Yet if we give rise to the future generation that the Simulationists suggest are simulating us, it’s difficult to escape the logical problem of how a ‘fake’ reality can give rise to the ‘real’ reality that creates it.

One remark by one of the scientists advocating the simulation theory stopped me when I read it. Rich Terrile, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believes the simulation theory is so probable, that “if we are not living in a simulation, it is an extraordinarily unlikely circumstance.” How he could possibly determine whether it was likely or unlikely escapes me, given that, if we are living in a simulation, any notion of “likelihood” would necessarily be part of the simulation and so unable to pass judgment on it as a whole. And in any case, how “likely” was the Big Bang – if indeed it happened – or, better still, how likely is existence itself? How could we possibly answer that question, given that our notions of likelihood are part of what we are asking about?

The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has stopped some hefty minds in the past: Leibniz, William James, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, not to mention countless children, before the wonder is drummed out of them. That what I see when I open my eyes is a simulation is no more likely than that I see anything at all. That the universe “just happened” seems incredibly unlikely, but minds like Stephen Hawkings, who believed he could know the mind of God, more or less said that it did, although his suggestion of a “quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing vacuum” being behind things sounds much more scientific.

Besides being “unfalsifiable” – the philosopher Karl Popper’s definition of a theory lacking “scientific” status – simulation theory has some other things going against it. For one, it assumes that “advanced civilizations” would be doing the same things that we are, like running simulations, but on a bigger scale. That strikes me as suggesting that they would have busses, just as we do, but that they would be a mile long and move at 1,000 miles an hour. If these civilizations are so advanced, why would they bother doing the same things scientists here and now are doing? Perhaps their being ‘advanced’ would be better evidenced by their transcending technology altogether?

The assumption that any definition of being ‘advanced’ must be in terms of technology is itself is a product of another problem with the theory: it presents a metaphor as a fact. When Newton did away with the old Ptolemaic model of the universe and replaced it with one modelled on a machine, he projected a metaphor onto reality. The Einsteinian revolution did the same when it overthrew Newton; now, through relativity, the universe was like an expanding balloon. Today it is no surprise that computers and the ‘virtual realities’ that emerge from them provide the metaphor for the latest model of the universe, the simulation.

The illusory nature of our experiences

Yet even more than this, while being presented as the sharpest point on the cutting edge of scientific theory, the notion that the world we inhabit is somehow false – or at least not all it seems to be – is as old as the hills, simulated or not. Hinduism speaks of Maya, the illusory character of our experience of being separate from the world. Buddhism does as well and speaks of our Nescience, our ignorance of reality. But we needn’t go to strange altars to discover ideas that predate our current fascination with simulations. The west has produced them as well.

One indigenous source of an early simulation theory, we might say, are the Gnostics. The Gnostics were a diverse group of early religious movements, some of them Christian, flourishing mainly in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Many Gnostics distinguished between the transcendent, supreme God and the creator God of the Old Testament, whom they identified as a lesser divine being (the Demiurge). They tended to interpret Christ’s life, death, and resurrection in a symbolic and spiritual manner, emphasizing inner knowledge (gnosis) rather than a literal or historical reading.They are called Gnostics because, rather than accept Christ’s teachings through faith and dogma, as the literal Christians did, they sought gnosis, a Greek word meaning ‘knowledge’. This was not the sort of knowledge one gets through learning or study – what the Greeks called episteme – but a kind of immediate experiential knowledge, a knowledge that was an ‘experience’. This knowledge was of the true character of the world, which they believed was created by a false god – the ‘demi-urge’ – who came to believe he was the true God. We are trapped in the false god’s world, but we retain within our souls ‘sparks’ of light that are from the true God beyond creation. The Gnostics saw Christ as a liberator who came to Earth, not to die for our sins, but to teach the truth and show the way to release the sparks and return to our true source.

Until relatively recently, most of what we knew about the Gnostics came from hostile accounts by the early Church fathers. In 1945, this changed when a collection of Gnostic writings were discovered in Nag Hammadi, in Egypt. Through works like Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Gospels, a more positive understanding of what the Gnostics were about has emerged. By now, the term ‘gnostic’ has entered our common language and is used to characterise a number of works in popular culture, all sharing in some way the notion of a “false world.” I’ve mentioned The Matrix. Other films, such as The Truman Show, Dark City, and The Cube, present similar scenarios, of humans living in a world that they don’t realise is “unreal.” The novels of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, many of which have been made into films, are frequently based on the same idea. Netflix series like Dark and others use the same theme of everyday reality being unlike anything we believe it to be. I would even say that the kind of “hermeneutics of suspicion” that the philosopher Paul Ricouer developed in the context of texts – seeking for their ‘hidden’ meaning beneath the surface – has translated into our contemporary epistemological uncertainty, exemplified in the rise of what we’ve come to see as a “post-truth” world made of “alternative facts” within a malleable reality. We seem to live in a time when everything is plausible yet nothing is certain, with a plethora of pervasive conspiracy theories dissolving the distinction between fake and ‘reality’.

Yet, even before the Gnostics, the father of western philosophy, Plato, presented what still stands as a symbol of the difference between knowing reality and being trapped in illusion. In The Republic Plato presents what we know as the Myth of the Cave. He asks us to imagine people chained in place in a cave, where they are forced to look straight ahead at a wall, on which shadows move back and forth. Behind them is a fire, which they cannot see, and before the fire people, whom they also cannot see, carrying objects which cast the shadows they see. As those chained look at the shadows, voices explain what they are. Fixed in place, unable to move, reality for them is what they see on the cave wall.

The philosopher, however, is somehow able to loosen his chains and turn around – can we say he looks inward, away from the unreal images on the ‘outside’? He sees that what he had taken for reality were merely shadows. But even more, he makes his way out of the cave. At first he is blinded by the sunlight – the Truth is a shock – but when his vision adjusts, he returns to the cave to tell his fellows what he has discovered. Alas, those who cannot see the Truth will not believe it and, as Socrates himself came to know, will hate those who try to make it visible to them.

In many ways, Plato’s cave strikes me as a more apt metaphor for today than the simulation theory. Or rather, I see our current obsession with our personal technology and the digital electronic world we enter through it, as a blend of Plato’s cave and simulation theory. But in this case, the simulation is not the world ‘out there’, the world of stars, clouds, sunlight, mountains, animals, trees and other people, but the world we enter when we narrow our consciousness down to what we see on an iPhone or other device. More and more, it strikes me, we are losing interest in the outer world – which the Simulationists tells us is a simulation – and are becoming increasingly addicted to the simulated world we find on our telephones. We seem to be going back into our own personal caves, portable ones, that we carry around with us, and on which we watch the shadows of reality provided by social media. The simulation, then, isn’t the world we see around us, but the one we spend our time in, when we shut out the world and enter the stream of electronic pseudo-reality we carry around in our pockets. Those who choose not to enter the cave, have to entertain the “extraordinarily unlikely circumstance” of an unsimulated world that still confronts us with the mystery of its existence.

This article is also published in the German print issue of LOGON

The flight Secondari speaks of can be compared to what Eckhart Tolle describes in the introduction to The Power of Now: a state of deep peace and joy, joined to a renewed, vivid perception of everything around us.

Anyone who has known this ‘flight’ understands it as a profound inner shift.

When the door opens to perceiving each thing with more light and beauty, we then awaken to the monotony we have been living, without even noticing.

And as Secondari suggests, once you have lived it, you will always long for new flights.

The span of a flight can vary, but without question, the first experience is the most remarkable, because everything in it is new.

A flight may begin – after a period of intense longing for illumination – through a sudden change in breathing.  It quickens and deepens until, quite naturally, we arrive at a new inner state, without the inducement of any technique or substance.

In that moment, ordinary, merely pulmonary breathing – the kind that sustains our life within our nature order, where everything is perpetually changing and bound to duality – can give way to a subtler rhythm.  This is magnetic breathing, a sign of realignment with an entirely different reality: a static reality.  This reality is the original divine order, a sublime state governed by spiritual laws wholly different from those that rule ordinary life.

Magnetic breathing does not wholly belong to the physical state.  It unfolds in the etheric body when a spark of consciousness begins to express a more static state.  It is not just the in‑and‑out of air, but the absorption and circulation of living forces (prana, chi) that emanate from this higher order.  It is as if the whole being begins to inhale a living current directly from a more real and enduring source, filling not only the lungs but the space between thoughts, awakening subtle centres.

While pulmonary breathing ties us to the cycle of birth, change, and death within this nature order, magnetic breathing signals the being’s reconnection with its true home in the static order.  This is where the flight begins – not as an escape from the world, but as an entry into a more real and eternal dimension of existence.

Of course, there are surface similarities to altered states brought on by drugs.  Even so, that path is misleading – unsustainable and risky.  Drugs operate entirely within the spectrum of polarities of this nature order (pleasure/pain, euphoria/depression), creating an illusion of expansion that, in truth, binds us even more deeply to it.

Using substances to chase expanded states, creates illusory, fragile perceptions.  They work from the outside in, never as a truly inner process of rebirth from the static order.

Hence the biblical warning:

“Truly, truly I say to you: whoever does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a robber.” — John 10:1

The “gate” is the path of genuine awakening that leads to the static order, while “climbing in by another way” is the attempt to force a spiritual experience using the expedients and forces of this nature order, such as drugs.  As true spiritual teachers have long emphasized, purity of the vehicle – the body and the bloodstream – is a condition for this new life‑principle of the static order to manifest sustainably, moving us toward a lasting bond with what Secondari calls, ‘heaven’.

The aim, then, is to turn what were once only flights, into a new and enduring way of being – a rebirth through a transfiguration into the glorified body of the original divine order.

May we all make that shift.

Some encounters do not announce themselves as decisive.

There is no sense of conversion, no dramatic break with the past, no outward change of identity. Life continues. Responsibilities remain. Yet something interior shifts — quietly, almost imperceptibly — and from that point onward, nothing is entirely the same.

The physical setting has long since faded into the background. It was an ordinary room, unadorned and functional. No atmosphere was constructed to inspire reverence. No symbolism claimed attention. A Bible lay open, and the words were read.

What remains vivid is not the room, nor even the sentences spoken that evening.

What remains is recognition.

The teaching did not attempt persuasion. It did not appeal to inherited identity or demand allegiance. It unfolded in a measured and coherent way.

And something within responded.

Agreement can be reasoned into existence and reasoned away again. Admiration may depend on personality or presentation. Recognition moves differently.

It felt less like encountering something new and more like meeting something long sensed but never fully articulated. The search up to that point had been sincere. There had been study, exploration, immersion in ideas that promised depth and structure. There was an attraction to ordered ways of living — to the possibility that life could be shaped by principle rather than impulse.

Yet each system, however meaningful, carried layers: cultural history, institutional form, collective identity. These sustain communities and preserve continuity. Inwardly, however, the question gradually shifted. It became less about belonging and more about truth.

Recognition answered that shift.

It did not require prior affiliation. It did not insist on identification before understanding. It stood on coherence.

There was a simplicity to what was encountered — stripped of excess. Nothing stood between the teaching and the listener. No spectacle. No emotional pressure. No expectation of group identification as a condition of engagement.

The effect was disarming.

There was peace — the peace of alignment. There was clarity — something falling into place. There was authority without dominance.

It felt like coming home.

A home is more than familiarity; it is a place where one stands without inner contradiction. In that encounter, what was addressed was something deeper than biography or background. The teaching did not overwhelm or compete.

It corresponded.

The word used to describe this place was “school.”

Only later did the depth of that word become clear. A school implies learning, patience, and discipline. It assumes that understanding unfolds gradually and that growth requires sustained participation. It suggests that what begins in recognition must continue in effort.

Yet in that first moment, none of this was analysed.

Recognition came first.

Explanation followed.

Over time, it becomes evident that recognition differs from enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm may arise from novelty and diminish when novelty fades. Recognition endures. It remains through questions, through routine, through disappointment and fatigue. It is tested by time and, if genuine, deepens rather than diminishes.

Years bring complexity. Life rarely simplifies. Responsibilities expand. Cultural currents shift. Public discourse grows louder. Identity becomes central to almost every conversation, and belief is often framed in terms of affiliation.

In such an atmosphere, clarity can be obscured.

Recognition provides orientation.

Orientation is the quiet knowledge of direction, even when the terrain is uneven. Without it, every difficulty feels destabilising. With it, difficulty becomes formative. Questions continue, yet they no longer erode the foundation.

Trust grows from this continuity.

Trust in coherence. Trust in correspondence. Trust that the initial recognition was not projection or mood, but response.

Belonging, in this sense, is directional. It belongs to a principle rather than to personality. Belonging to a group may offer reassurance; belonging to a principle calls for inward work. It invites transformation.

That invitation was never imposed.

It arose from recognition.

With time, what first appeared simple revealed depth. What seemed clear demanded responsibility. Understanding unfolded gradually through lived experience rather than abstract reflection.

The foundation, however, remained constant.

Recognition did not depend on complete comprehension. It depended on resonance.

Spiritual impulses arise in many forms — through tradition, service, contemplation, or study. Recognition is personal.

When it occurs, it carries a distinct quality. It does not dramatise itself. It does not insist. It remains steady, unforced, quietly authoritative.

Perhaps that is what many seek now. In a culture saturated with messaging and competing claims, there is a longing for something that stands without ornament — something transparent enough to allow genuine encounter.

Recognition cannot be manufactured.

It cannot be argued into existence.

It can only be experienced.

And once experienced, it quietly shapes a life.

‘To be or not to be – that is the question.’

The face in the mirror is startled. ‘Who am I?’ And, between astonishment and discovery, it realizes that it is a shell, a mask, a persona. ‘But is that all I am?’ – it soon asks itself.

Inside this cocoon, the sleeping caterpillar no longer crawls on the lowest levels of its earthly nature. But it dreams of being the blue butterfly that rises to other unknown dimensions, with ethereal and eternal lightness.

Suddenly, it realises that it is no longer a caterpillar, but it is not yet a butterfly. So, inside this cocoon, like a seed, it feels an immense desire to blossom, to be free, to break away and fly towards an unknown sun.

But the caterpillar-self still wriggles inside. It thinks about its social obligations, its survival instinct, its desire to dance and sing its joy full of earthly lightness. Yet deep down, the almost-butterfly is eager to gain infinite and eternal space.

Inside the cocoon, the conflict begins: the caterpillar self feels in its veins the “blood” of its parents, its country, all its traditions and beliefs. The almost-butterfly feels a deep nostalgia ─ a longing simply to be.

Thus, an unknown light, coming from above, opens a crack and reaches the center of the cocoon. The caterpillar self-surrenders. It realises that it no longer is.

The butterfly flutters lightly.

At dawn, the supreme joy of  being is realised.

Many years ago while meandering along on a beach, I came across a young lady sitting cross-legged on the sand writing in a notebook she held on her lap. Pondering and apparently noting down her thoughts. We said very little other than a greeting but I was aware of something different about her and reflected that “today I met one”. I wasn’t exactly sure what a “one” was but I sensed that it was something special perhaps in the sense of a soul being. I walked on.

Today I was conscious of the same sensation from another young lady who had come to help me with some work. A lightness, a joyfulness, a genuine and spontaneous love for her fellow human beings. A naturalness. Again the sensing of “today I met one”.

But wait – the following day, I met another two of these special people, one a friend who I have known for a long time, another a young man walking his dog in a local park. There was the recognition of something special within each of them, just as with the previous people. Something not forced, not manipulated in any way, just natural and real. Warm, loving, genuine people with a natural inner joyfulness, unaffected by, disconnected from the world’s turmoil. Perhaps not even perceived by themselves but nevertheless present.

How had I not noticed them before? I pondered that if I have met a small number of these beings, how many more could there be on the earth right now. In each case an endlessness about the experience, time and distance playing no part, past and future not relevant. They were just there doing what was needed at the moment.

If there were some, there must be, will be many more now and in times to come. Perchance their lightness and love can and will enhance that same experience which is growing on this planet right now, in individuals but also collectively, lifting it up to a higher vibration.

Let there be joy!

playing with earthly architecture, dreams, and utopias. How many revolutions have attempted to stop the hands of time, to carve out a niche of eternity! How many shipwrecks have there been in search of non-existent cities of the Sun? New worlds are always just copies of the same world, as was well known to the Gnostics from the beginning. Today’s disillusioned and lost man no longer has magic lanterns of chimeras that can pierce the dark ocean, but tries to burn in the brazier of denial every transcendent value, every old custom, as in the succession of ancient Chinese dynasties, remaining under an empty sky, in agonizing solitude. False rebellion animates ordinary people who would like to turn the page, to overcome the Taedium Vitae that assails them, but who remain completely identified with the conditioning and unconscious mechanisms of personality. To dismantle one’s personality, to rid the brain circuits of everything that culture has instilled in them, to go against the tide of common thinking, or against habits, to silence one’s ego, is an endeavor doomed to inevitable failure, without a path to rebirth. That journey to the center of the earth, the acrostic V.I.T.R.I.O.L. , which can be interpreted, according to Servier, as:

“Descend into the depths of yourself and find the invisible core on which you can build a new man”.

A journey that can lead to Compostela, like the one made by Nicolas Flamel, or that of Captain Cook, who discovered islands and archipelagos in succession, dying in the last port, on the island of Sandwich. Death that must be understood as mystical death. A journey into the self, since knowledge of the outer world passes through knowledge of the inner world. Eliade recalls that in Eastern alchemy:

“The search for the elixir was linked to the search for distant and mysterious islands” .

When the ego entrenches itself in its ivory tower in comfortable situations, an unconscious, amoral, archaic force bursts in, taking its place and causing a profound sense of disorientation.

A scenario of suffering and pain that unites both the nihilist and those who embark on a spiritual journey. The starting point is the same, but the nihilist will stop at the edge of the abyss, succumbing to the labyrinth of the unconscious psyche, while the true traveler, whose goal is the objectives of the self, will see the rainbow appear, as in Durer’s admirable engraving “Melancholia” (1514). A sign indicating the numerous transformations of the personality, which appears under different lights, followed by constantly changing moods. Wim Wenders’ film “Perfect Days” attempts to break through in this world of ruins.

Jean Cocteau said:

“Cinema is modern writing whose ink is light.”

A mixture of lights that is skillfully blended in the film under review and reminiscent of the colors of the alchemical tables of Salomon Trismosin’s “Splendor Solis.”

We move from the darkness of night, nigredo (mystical death), to the lights of dawn, albedo (white work), to a resurrection finale, in which a red sun reigns supreme in the sky, representing Rubedo (rebirth). The protagonist goes through all these phases without letting himself be drawn into an alienating Tokyo where skyscrapers tower against the inaccessible sky and where money takes on a privileged role: the baseball team wins because it has more money, love is won through money. Everything is rotten, devoid of values, but the protagonist does not lose heart. Starting with the smallest things, he tries to elevate his philosophical mercury through reading, poetry, and music, in order to detach himself from a tragic daily life and a job that involves human waste. But above all, he discovers what it means to live without a greedy and conflictual ego: poetry is already a source of transformation. The etymology of the word poet, in the language of Sappho and Alcaeus, means I form, I build, I create. For Henry de Vaughan, poet and brother of the Rosicrucian alchemist Thomas, poetry means the search for a vigilant innocence capable of perceiving eternal light, through the call of analogies that weave the world of appearances and finitude. Finally, the encounter with the shadow, that unresolved unease that we hide in our dusty drawers and that should not be avoided, but integrated, overcome, knowing how to grasp the message it conveys. The nihilism of the third millennium, which masquerades as libertarian and hedonistic, actually creates a tyranny of desires, an automatism understood as dependence on material and technological goods. Shopping malls become the true idola tribus of our times. A Sunday meeting place for families. Desiring is a passive activity, because it is not a desire to give, but a desire to have. Its goal is to shift one’s center outside of oneself and is subordinated to the urgency of fulfillment. Desire distances us from the voice of our soul, which knocks desperately in the dungeons of our being. The writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald intuits the illusory nature of the web of desires that individuals weave:

“Desire is a cheat. It is like a ray of sunlight that wanders here and there around the room.

It stops and covers an insignificant object with gold, and we poor fools try to grab it,

but when we succeed, the ray moves on to something else and we are left

with the insignificant part in our hands, while the sparkle that made us desire it is now gone.”

As long as we are bound by a thousand attachments, we are agitated and unhappy. Catharose De Petri urges:

“Do not let your soul be sensitive to the mood swings of the natural being.

Keep yourself beyond joy and pain. If you let yourself be sucked into all the turmoil of time,

how can you be part of eternity?”

Modern man, always connected to the web, is no longer connected to the threads of consciousness that Ariadne, the soul, offers him, so as not to get lost in the inner labyrinths.

In megacities, people in a state of perpetual agitation come and go like ants in an anthill without being aware of their feelings, their actions, and the results of their activities. William Blake, poet and painter, understood that the “dark factories of Satan” of the contemporary industrial landscape were built in the image of a mechanistic philosophy that enslaves human beings and annihilates the soul. In an era of epidemics such as the one we are experiencing, bourgeois economic morality, which worships the sanctification of production, insinuates subtle Darwinian messages:

“Many of us will die, especially the most fragile, but we will emerge stronger and ready to produce.”

In Marco Revelli’s book “Umano Inumano Postumano” (Human Inhuman Posthuman), an important episode that occurred during the Covid epidemic is mentioned:

“Daniel Loeb of Third Point and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone became regular attendees of almost daily

conference calls with the President during the height of the epidemic, when mass graves were filling up in  New York

on Hart Island, the island of the dead, to ensure that he stuck to the idea that we are not made to stand still

‘and bring into line’ those cowardly governors who stubbornly listened to scientists and closed factories,”

(taken from the Washington Post, 24/03/2020).

In this, albeit brief, overview of the ills afflicting modern society, the loss of a sense of wonder cannot be overlooked. Especially after World War II, this realism, dear to the progressive bureaucracies of the East, triumphed:

“The first tractor arrives in the village”

is one of the recurring headlines in the press.

Nowadays, however, the fluctuating fortunes of GDP take on greater importance. We live in the chaos described by Meyrink in his novel Walpurgis Night, where the protagonists lose their individuality, reduced to surviving only through a series of repetitive acts, without ever seeking anything higher. Some psychologists speak of the “repression of the sublime” when the spiritual door is closed, giving more importance to the concrete mind and using the left side of the brain more. In the name of science and a philosophy defined as rational, modern society claims to exclude any mystery from the world. Rationalism as a belief in the supremacy of reason proclaims a veritable dogma, denying everything that belongs to the supra-individual order and pure intellectual intuition. Cartesian common sense excludes the intervention of spiritual influences in what is designated as “ordinary life.”

In this well-oiled clockwork mechanism that claims to mark every moment of our day, the killers of magic kill, behind the scenes, the winged hippogriff that lies within us and can connect us to purer heavens.

“Inside every man lies a dead child,”

says Curzio Malaparte.

The sense of wonder is typical of children, whose souls are able to capture fragments of the original soul. In the Chinese wall that surrounds us, cracks can still open up. The ocean of the unknown breaks its waves against everyday life: it can be a book that opens to a page that has been ignored and reveals important meanings that had not been noticed; it may be ice flowers forming on the windowpane, drawing patterns like finely chiseled jewels, which may be messages sent by the soul of the world; it may be a celestial symphony that bridges other dimensions; it may be dreams that indicate a spiritual path to be taken. The law of Hermes:

“Quod Superior Sicut Est Inferior,”

which summarizes the transition from the sphere of air to the lower sphere of the waters of becoming (and vice versa), is taken up by Arthur Osborn:

“Just as a sponge is impregnated with the air, water, and chemical constituents of its environment,

so are our bodies impregnated with the subtle matter of the lower planes”

(The Meaning of Personal Existence).

But these are distant echoes of which human beings can only grasp fragments. In the Corpus Hermeticum it is written that our personality, with which we identify ourselves, is not only earthly, but also belongs to the zodiac. The zodiacal system governs our lives and our personality is determined by it. The tent, the personality we inhabit, exists thanks to the twelve activities of the zodiac. Twelve signs representing twelve vices. In reality, twelve imperfections representing twelve vices, that is, something that has not yet become a virtue. The path to liberation therefore implies leaving the wheel of the zodiac, the

“painful wheel of life and death,”

as found in a 4th-century BC Orphic tablet. Liberation implies the weaving of the golden wedding garment between soul and spirit.

A very young child, not yet of school age, not yet influenced by the world’s ideas and thoughts, stood alone outside under a blue sky and pondered. Where did the clouds of yesterday go to, where will those of tomorrow come from? What was beyond that overarching canopy in which they floated, disappeared and then reappeared in new shapes and forms?

And an answer presented itself within that child, in the words of a song, a lullaby, that had stayed with her since its hearing in even earlier years.

“Over the rainbow, way up high, there’s a place I have heard of once in a lullaby…. if birds fly over the rainbow, why then, oh why, can’t I?”

That question had remained throughout her life and now, many years later in maturity as an adult those same words still resound, over and over. Life has responded over the years in many different ways, with many different experiences and different directions but only one response has always remained true.

Seek within, seek the rainbow within your heart.

That early childhood experience proved to be the gateway to life.