Human awakening is a big word. It appears in people’s consciousness from time to time and urges change. Its complexity remains a mystery.
It is often in times of crisis that many people suffer and the anxious, restless and depressed cope with their lives. In such times, there are only a few who know how to live their lives carefree. Perhaps some can do it because they have enough primordial trust and others because their consciousness world view is deeply enough anchored in eternity. Because everything changes constantly, they, too, are not completely carefree, for the stream of time also asks them to develop new perspectives on life now, as long as they can still afford the freedom to think about more than daily life requires.
Wisdom and experience
In times of great change, we like to think about what the future may bring us. We look at the past, the present, and are often too quick to criticise the human being and his past, to accuse him and condemn his inertia. We feel the admonishing voice of the spirit of the times only dimly when we sleepily lose the days and neglect to look daily for that what makes us tick. At times we approach the universal experience of humanity, then in the next moment we neglect to feel how we are slowly slipping back into the old flow of life. But whatever we do, there are valuable steps in coming to the realisation of what the human being really can be. Every life consists of sometimes awkward steps to awaken as a human being or humanity. The path that humanity walks is roughly carved in stone and invites stumbling, sometimes even injuries that call for healing.
In the depth of its being, however, this path is soft bedded, allowing the observer to see what drifts behind things, what reveals itself as beauty and invites deeper reflection. Beauty is eternity looking at itself in the mirror, said the writer Khalil Gibran. This foundation has always been there, unchanging through the ages and evoking those thoughts that, unchanged by space and time, always lead to the same insights. Wisdom that combines with every religion, surrenders to science to become the invisible foundation. It is in the art of living to let the soft bed and the rough-hewn path intertwine to make visible the deep inner beauty of the human being. What develops there quietly in the alternation of life and death, of beauty and dark days of suffering, is a primordial trust, a universal consciousness that, flowing together from individual points of realisation, strives towards omnipresence and invites humans to awaken there.
He who awakens exits from a dream. If we look more closely at the different layers of our being, we discover the relativity of dreaming and waking. Sometimes what we experience daily is a dream. Then we may dream at night while sleeping and wake up in the morning to a vague reality. Sometimes dreams seem like real experiences, and we have the feeling of being awake there. Sometimes we suddenly wake up from a daydream after many years.
But who wakes up where?
Switching between the dream world and being awake is like wandering between worlds. When we are asleep now, what is the world into which we awaken? Again and again one finds writings in the history of mankind that bear witness to the experience of an awakening. They describe what it is like to awaken in a universal consciousness. John of the Apocrypha describes how he suddenly sees the heavens open while reflecting on the Saviour. But if one wants to grasp this inwardly, from our present point of view, this description is more like a longing dream. This longing drives humans to the highest cultural achievement, the relics of which still bear witness centuries later to the longing with which mankind strives towards this dream of omnipresence.
Every day, millions of people strive towards this consciousness with rites, prayers and pious ideas, always confronted with the impossibility of achieving it. Simone Weil speaks of this impossibility of approaching God when she recognises that humans cannot seek and find God, but only God can find the human.
The human waits as in a dream until God touches him and awakens him. He passes the time, rushes through space, attracted by beauty, which he chases as a surrogate of the eternally beautiful. These mirror images of eternity are the playgrounds of humanity, the magnets around which science, art and religion gather to create ever new spaces, which are made accessible to mankind as they evolve in the stream of time. They appear like images in a semi-dark world that fade when, from time to time, the power of eternity contracts, concentrates and, as a blinding light, weakens the images and flattens the lives of people to make visible a rift between two ages. This light, as a stream of eternity, pours into the rift and drives forward the flattening of a cultural period. Now the human, taking refuge in his individuality, is called upon to awaken once more in a different way, to leave the dreams that darken before the surging light and, awakening, to turn his eyes to the source from which a new world springs, pointing the way.
The power of this source, the light that embraces the world in such times, becomes perceptible to all, weakens the healthy polarity and allows cultural values to degenerate into shadows of themselves. The classical Rosicrucians spoke of a door that becomes visible. The sight of it lifts the human being out of what was in order to make him see what can be. This gaze changes the view of polarities, allows their influence to fade further. Now minds are divided, a playground is formed for the clash of cultures. There are those who cling to an Old Testament reality of our world, fighting to defend the previous weakened polarity. They sink with it in the maelstrom of a disintegrating age. The door opens for those who see it as an opportunity and break new ground. Some dream of a firmly established world, vigilantly preventing polarities from shifting or dissolving and leaving behind an effeminate human being. Following their religious, Christian heritage, they believe they have the right to judge and act in this way from the story of creation, which states:
26 And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; and created them male and female.
In the others, the world that has become weak creates a longing for the open door through which they pass before the fading light returns the polarities to their former strength.
This struggle for polarities is reflected particularly clearly in the modern gender question. The time when there was male and female, and the man was really a man and the woman really a woman seems strangely weak in the discussion. Today, it is normal for men to live in women’s bodies and women in men’s bodies. There are asexual people and those who prefer not to speak of man and woman but of human being to avoid any discrimination. And perhaps it is really the case that nature does not even know the polarities of the creation story in these unambiguous times. The concept of androgyny from the Greek world of the gods is gaining currency. Androgynous people show a mixture of female and male characteristics, which can refer to behaviour, clothing, body shape and, as medicine knows, also to sexual and other bodily features.
Furthermore, the ancient scriptures still point to a spiritual dimension. Alchemy sees in androgyny the overcoming of material polarity. Here the androgynous person is a higher being. In the hermaphrodite, the male and the female unite in certain parts because of awakening in a universal consciousness. That leads humans back into their original being.
Is this perhaps the awakening that humanity is talking about now and has talked about again and again in the history of humanity?
Two ways of awakening
Physicist Tyson writes in his book “Starry Messenger”:
“Yes, we live in a special time, only because it´s all special, which brings to mind this oft-cited though short-sighted verse from Ecclesiastes, written thousands of years ago.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and
that which is done is that which shall be done: and
there is no new thing under the sun.”[1]
Two different forms of awakening are expressed in these thoughts. The culture today has the idea that a human awakens to become a real human being through education, and thus moves further and further away from the animal. In his development, this consciousness always experiences everything anew and lives from an awake spirit that is active in matter and develops the mental human being. Some people hope that this will solve all their problems. This awakening runs like waves through time, experiences its peak and then flattens out again in a post-cultural phase. Even if humanity believes it has emerged from primitive people, this image is only part of a deeper truth. Material development has undergone great refinement and, progressing from high culture to high culture, an awakening in matter is taking place. The spiritual knowledge of the origins of humanity, however, seems to be receding into the background, allowing spiritual primitiveness to grow.
This background is a force that, like the wind, builds up wave after wave of a high culture, rolling over and out. Knowledge develops over many cultural epochs that is more like a consciousness that speaks as an essence from the sentences of the ancient priests: “There is nothing new under the sun.” This consciousness is the result of a structural change in human beings and humanity. While the waves behind the development of culture work through the heart, the awakening of humanity, which reaches a climax in the post-cultural phase, is the consequence of the opening of the main shrine. We speak here quite deliberately of the main sanctuary because it does not only mean brain or mentality, but an organ that is able to convey the omnipresence of the original human being.
The mystery that humans can inhabit different worlds shows the present. As children of their time, some awaken to a new old world, hastening towards a new culture, while others awaken to the omnipresence.
[1] Starry Messenger, Neil deGrasse Tyson 2022, p. 41, HarperCollinsPublishers, London
