Simple explanations?
One phenomenon in the modern information society is to create simple explanations for complex facts in order to regain the feeling of understanding. Such naïve explanation patterns are circulated thousands of times today as so-called “conspiracy theories” via digital media and are shared by many people. By means of simple models, opaque incidents can be resolved and traced back to apparently known causes.
Thus, a certain situation may still be frightening, but thanks to a belief system it can at least be explained and the “guilty parties” are apparently unmasked. Thereby, unconsciously, our own contents of consciousness are projected onto a group of other people. This group is then held responsible for the evils in the world. Such kinds of blame are used to feel more comfortable in one’s own inner life and to be able to hand over personal responsibility. But this also prevents a deeper self-knowledge and ultimately increases the ambiguity in life.
Interpret the unknown
Wanting to understand is an elementary characteristic of the human being. In the background, our desire for home and a need for familiarity are at work. Understanding promotes orientation – combined with the feeling of being an integral part of the whole. Every desire to understand is also a struggle to interpret the unknown, the still misunderstood.
When we hear or read words in a language unknown to us, the meaning and sense of the words remain closed to us. Our desire to understand encounters resistance, impenetrability and strangeness.
In contrast to this, trying to understand the meaning and significance of a situation leads to a positive experience. This moment can be compared to connecting two cables and the flow of electric current. Before the current flowed, there was tension and a blockage of the connection – the non-understanding.
Obstacles to understanding encourage us to think, reflect, draw conclusions and recognize connections. Temporary non-understanding is essential for the process of evolution, for the higher development of consciousness. It is made possible precisely by the tension between understanding and non-understanding. If all open questions were already answered, then there would be no further possibility of development.
The manifestation of the spiritual
As spiritual seekers we know that the essential being behind the visible appearance is always the spiritual principle that manifests itself in form. Behind the mineral, the plant, the animal and finally the human being, different spiritual forces work to manifest themselves.
The life principle manifests itself from itself and can perceive itself through this. In the animal and plant kingdom, the self-perception of life is found in complex processes and behaviours that suggest a self-reference.
But only in humans does self-perception experience a higher quality, because a higher principle of thought or consciousness is at work in them that pushes for a more far-reaching insight. This principle goes beyond that of perception and desire in the animal kingdom. It is connected with the urge of active understanding.
Where exactly does our longing for understanding come from? Why can’t we just accept the circumstances and ourselves?
It is because our deeper being, our innermost being, reaches beyond the natural. In the spiritual tradition we speak of the microcosm of the human being who has gradually sunk into the earthly, materialized world in a process of involution.
The original cosmic consciousness has been lost and we can no longer remember our true origin. Today we live in a state of incomprehension and oblivion – a kind of amnesia.
At the bottom of a deep lake
This process is comparable to diving to the bottom of a deep lake. The deeper we go, the more unclear and blurred everything becomes. After some time we reach the bottom of the water – the nadir of materiality. We can settle down here – or push ourselves off the bottom to return to clarity. When we do this, a decisive phase in the evolution of consciousness begins.
As a consequence of the implied involution, we are currently in a world in which we have to fight for our survival, for our existence. In the space-time dimension there is a constant concern for one’s self and the urge to understand one’s own reality with its mostly invisible causes.
Our lives often seem to be guided by seemingly random events and external forces of influence that make no sense to us. We are not free to shape our lives and are constantly confronted with unforeseeable events. At the same time, in the age of globalisation with its manifold mechanisms of action and complex interrelationships, today’s society is becoming increasingly confusing and difficult for us to grasp, both mentally and emotionally.
All this results in a feeling of homelessness and strangeness.
As long as we act completely from our old consciousness which has developed through all of this, then we find ourselves in a realm of illusion. We permanently create forms that take shape in the worlds of thoughts, feelings and finally matter.
Our mental creations can be reflected again and again. It is possible that these reflections continue to infinity. In addition, mental concepts have the tendency to network with each other and to form energetic structures with the emotional world (the “astral world”). The original divine-spiritual impulse is thereby more and more veiled and contact with the comprehensive reality can be lost.
The ambiguity and deception of our present situation are the inevitable result.
Opening to the comprehensive reality
We can, however, also open ourselves to the comprehensive reality and let ourselves be guided by a pure spiritual principle, which always inspires us anew. We can struggle to penetrate to a new way of understanding the spiritual causes. We then strive to get to the core of things.
Striving to get to the source also means recognizing the cause of everything that has separated us from it and led us into oblivion. It is the gradual immersion of souls into the world of forms of gross matter and the contact with the forces of crystallization and death that arises from this.
Very often we identify ourselves with the form revelations, with our body, its thoughts and feelings. This creates the illusion that our self is a form. The form is then apparently everything that exists.
Once we consciously experience how we walk through a door into a room, leaving all our self-creations behind: thoughts, feelings, will, activities, ideas of time and space, ideas of ourselves, our whole personal history, with its hopes, wishes, concepts and belief systems, if we leave all this behind – what remains?
Another illusion, or something deeper, more essential?
A light in the consciousness field
Maybe we notice a light in the consciousness field of the soul. Something that consists of formless “substance” and wants to reveal itself in our being. This light serves us as a sign on our spiritual path. The more we open up for it, the clearer our understanding becomes. An intuitive faculty emerges, as a pure tool for reflecting truth and light.
What is our true origin?
It is the spirit-soul – the spiritual aspect of our being, as a union of spiritual will and spiritual love. Through them we can come to the understanding of the essential.
If we focus on the impulses from the highest level of our being, then the forces from the spiritual-soul dimension will become fully effective within us. We send the resulting clarity into every cell of the body and also outwardly into the world of external appearances. Thus, we bring new impulses into the collective field of consciousness. The aeon-long toil of working through the incomprehensible with the countless attempts at interpretation and analysis is then no longer necessary. We can finally let go of them.
