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The Ditmarsh Tale of Wonders
Tale of the Brothers Grimm translated by M. Hunt [1884]
Interpretation by Undine & Jens in green [2020]
I will tell you something. I saw two roasted fowls flying; they flew quickly and had their breasts turned to heaven and their backs to hell, and an anvil and a mill-stone swam across the river Rhine prettily, slowly, and gently, and a frog sat on the ice at Whitsuntide and ate a ploughshare. Three fellows who wanted to catch a hare, went on crutches and stilts; one of them was deaf, the second blind, the third dumb, and the fourth could not stir a step. Do you want to know how it was done? First, the blind man saw the hare running across the field, the dumb one called to the lame one, and the lame one seized it by the neck.
There were certain men who wished to sail on dry land, and they set their sails in the wind, and sailed away over great fields. Then they sailed over a high mountain, and there they were miserably drowned. A crab was chasing a hare away, and high up on the roof lay a cow which had climbed up there. In that country the flies are as big as the goats are here. Open the window, that the lies may fly out.
Well, maybe we’re thinking now of a silly beer-pub story. Yes, it often happens that we greatly underestimate the spirit of our ancestors out of our own arrogance. Are fried chickens still alive? What is the line between life and death? Is our life oriented towards happy heaven or sorrowful hell? Can dead matter float like waves on the sea of life? Can one attain a Holy Spirit of the kind that is to descend at Pentecost by feeding on dead things and dogmas frozen in ice? Can we conquer the scaredy-cat in us with our thoughts (in German: der Angsthase - the scared hare)? When is our mind blind, deaf, dumb and lame? Can one set the sails of life on the firm ground of matter? Why do we love the “great fields” of a monoculture? Are we also threatened by a painful downfall on a poisoned and littered earth? Where does the fear of cancer come from? And how did the cow get on the roof? Why have we reversed our world view and made flies into goats, even mosquitoes into elephants or tiny viruses into the greatest enemy of the state?
Open your senses, expand your narrow-minded consciousness from ego-consciousness to universal consciousness, so that the lies disappear! Because we are increasingly living in a propagandistic advertising world and are enveloped in filter bubbles and echo chambers in which we can hardly distinguish between truth and lies. That is, we live in a world that is “built on sand,” just as the “Ditmarsh Land”, a marshland or bottom land on the North Sea that was said to be a peasant republic from 1227 to 1559 that had expelled its noble rulers. From a symbolic point of view, here we can consider the peasants as our senses and thoughts and the king as our reason. And how this becomes a made-up story, we would like to examine in more detail below.
What is truth?
Science has also asked itself this question and then determined that it cannot find any reliable truth at all. Even the TV-famous Prof Harald Lesch thinks that scientists cannot say anything about truth.
Video Lesch ZDF Physics and Truth:
“Now the big question is, if you think about how important the sciences are today and how big the truth character is that we assign to them, can they find anything like truth at all? ... And now it gets really interesting... I talk about truth all the time... but the truth is, we can’t say anything about truth.”
That sounds plausible at first, because science is primarily about the level of thoughts and senses. From a materialistic point of view, one could build the following pyramid:
This means, that living bodies with sensitive organs emerge from matter, indeed purely by chance, because there is no purposeful spirit. Then the sensory information is processed by the thoughts in the brain organ, similar to the data in a computer, and reason can arise from this, or as Wikipedia says: “In its modern use, the concept of reason denotes a mental human faculty of knowledge determined by thinking.” That is why modern science is primarily limited to the level of thoughts, and because thoughts are always distinctions, they must of course always be relative because they relate to differences. Logical! Only relative truths can be found with it, and accordingly the President of the Leibniz Association recently said: “Science does not create absolute truths, but knowledge that is valid until it is confirmed, supplemented or disconfirmed by new findings. This is completely normal in today’s science and research... There can therefore be no talk of a crisis of trust in science in the current coronavirus crisis... Trust increases when scientists present their current knowledge processes in front of running cameras and explain where and how they learned...” Well, that’s as far as you can trust today’s science, namely until the next TV show...
Or should that be a self-issued certificate of incapacity to avoid responsibility?
Well, what used to be called “human reason” has been going downhill rapidly in science since the scientific invention of chemical weapons and atomic bombs at the latest. Because a thought-based reason promotes above all egoistic thinking, or as Goethe said in [Faust I]:
He calls it Reason thence his power’s increased,
To be far beastlier than any beast.
Nevertheless, science believes that this type of “mental reason” is increasingly approaching an absolute truth, as Prof. Harald Lesch also claims in the continuation of the video above. If that were so, the illusion in our world would have to decrease steadily. In practice, however, we are increasingly living in a propagandistic advertising world and are becoming zombies of digital media, which meanwhile have global propaganda firmly under control. In view of current politics and science, one can hardly speak of growing honesty and truthfulness, because practically we are sinking into a mental world of lies in which people are becoming more and more incapable of making really reasonable decisions. And by “reasonable” we don’t mean modern thought-based reason, but classic reason, as it is still explained in older books, such as the dictionary Duden: “A human mental ability to gain insights, to form an opinion, to recognize the connections and the order of what is perceived and to act accordingly.”
Why do we no longer want this classic reason in the modern age?
As already stated and scientifically confirmed: The differencing knowledge of thought is only relatively true and cannot grasp absolute truth. This also includes our beloved “facts” and all sensory perceptions, which are only assumed to be true. So they are assumptions, views, theories, abstractions, etc. This distinguishing knowledge can of course be useful, but never reliable.
Now what would be a knowledge that does not distinguish?
This brings us to what is also called universal intelligence and what can provide a holistic view. You can also call it classic reason, which turns views into insights and, instead of many differences, recognizes the connections in a holistic system in order to make correspondingly reasonable decisions for long-term beneficial action, as explained in the above quote from the dictionary. In this way, reason as a universal intelligence has a much higher quality than the intellectual thinking. While thinking discriminates, reason can decide. One could compare the intellectual thoughts with lawyers who represent the interests of a person, the five senses would then be the witnesses in this case, and reason would be the judge who decides and settles the dispute of opposites in a holistic sense. With that, humans could at least be able to make decisions in the sense of an absolute truth, and on a completely different level than the thoughts. Because we know, when the judge speaks, the lawyers and witnesses must remain silent and accept the verdict. So if reason wants to speak, thoughts and senses must be silent. That’s good...
But at first we shy away and ask: What is left when senses and thoughts are silent? Well, after the above pyramid from a materialistic point of view, only dead matter remains, because even the little tip of reason is only thought-based. So how could a higher reason function in this worldview? And why should one develop a higher reason at all? Perhaps it is no coincidence that materialistic societies such as socialism and capitalism have developed so little higher reason. This means that they can realize intellectual or one-sided interests in the form of monocultures with a lot of strength, but they are obviously not capable of holistic decisions that would be useful for the entire organism of nature.
What now?
Let’s just turn the pyramid around according to the holistic-souled world view that we have already described in the fairy tale “Thumbling”:
The pyramid thus corresponds to a holistic-souled worldview, as it has been cultivated by mankind for many thousands of years. Here reason as a universal intelligence is the integral and living basis for all creatures. From the principle of unity develops the distinguishing thinking, which produces mental separations and thus also the self-awareness with the idea of “I” and “You” or “Mine” and “Yours”. Then, on the basis of this conscious distinction, sense-consciousness arises, and on the basis of the five senses, the idea of material corporeality and the particle character of matter appears. Matter would then be an inert or hardened spirit, as quantum physics also suggests, and many practical experiences would be much easier to explain, such as the numerous psychosomatic diseases, the function of placebos and homeopathy, intuition, compassion, déjà-vu, near-death experiences, telepathy, spirit worlds, and also why no localizable data store has been found in the brain to this day.
In this pyramid you can also see that matter is only a tiny part of the universe, as confirmed by modern physics. But much more important is the question of the way to reason and thus also to truth. While in the previous pyramid one tries to build up a higher reason through thoughts and sensory perception on the basis of dead matter, in this holistic-souled world view it is about dissolving the sensory and mental attachment to matter, and what then remains is the higher reason, i.e. a judge who is dependent neither on material wealth nor on intellectual and sensual or personal interests. Because only a judge who is not corrupt and bribable can represent the truth.
That would be the way to reason, and that’s why development used to be understood not as wrapping in new shells, but rather as unwrapping something wrapped up. So reason cannot be “trained” or “built up” but only “discovered”, or as the saying goes: “Seek and you will find!”
What is it that hides reason? As seen in the pyramid above, the covering shells include the knowledge of opposing thoughts and the idea of dead matter. In the past, the spiritual path was about the purification from intellectual knowledge, which was also referred to as ignorance, so that reason and thus the truth came out again or was discovered. And this ignorance is above all the sensual and mental attachment to matter, so in short with quantum physics: seeing dead particles where there are living waves.
Which worldview is the right one?
A world view can never be the absolute truth, because it is an image, a view i.e., a relative truth. Above all, it should be a path that one walks in life in order to reach the higher reason. And experience has shown that there are many ways to the top of a mountain. However, in our opinion, the materialistic world view has it much more difficult to come closer to a true reason. But practically one should not cling to any worldview dogmatically, because then one would cling to the path and never reach the goal. Experience has shown that you have to leave the path behind in order to reach your goal. And the big goal is, of course, a freely moving spirit that can think and move in different world views, sitting on the summit, so to speak, and being able to survey all the paths around.
I will tell you something. I saw two roasted fowls flying; they flew quickly and had their breasts turned to heaven and their backs to hell.
What is life? What is death? And, who draws the line between the two? We have already discussed the two roasted chickens in the fairy tale “The Clever Gretel”, and there we also spoke about reason and thoughts, and how thoughts, through hungry desire, manage to make something dead out of something living, which naturally always occurs in opposites. Well, here we can read: As far as we manage to let the supposedly dead come alive and move, we turn our backs on the painful hell and face heavenly happiness. Death is suffering, life is bliss. And the more the ego-consciousness in a dead world disappears, and the further one can develop the all-consciousness in a living world, the greater life becomes, and it is said that in this way one can even reach eternal life.
For whoever wants to preserve his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it - and eternal life with it. [Bible Matthew 16.24 / John 12.24]
An anvil and a mill-stone swam across the river Rhine prettily, slowly, and gently, and a frog sat on the ice at Whitsuntide and ate a ploughshare.
Water has always been a symbol of life, and rivers were seen as flowing life. How can heavy and solid matter be carried by easily mobile life? The Bible tells how Jesus once walked on water and his disciple, who wanted to do the same, sank after a few steps. Jesus stretched out his hand and said: “You of little faith, why do you not trust?”
Why do we live as if our bodies are made of dead matter? Because we feed it on supposedly dead matter, like the fried chickens mentioned above. We trust the dead more than the living. And that’s how our material world view came into being, which regards dead matter as the basis of everything and thus also of life. We usually take matter as absolute truth and try to feed life on dead matter, just as the frog, which is also an ancient symbol for life, is supposed to live on a ploughshare. Today one would speak of machines, technology and chemistry, which is what we want to live on. Well, with that, the Holy Spirit cannot come down at Pentecost either, because as dead as our physical food is, our spiritual food can no longer be living water, but an endlessly growing mountain of definitions and dogmas crystallized to ice in a world of “ scientific materialism”.
We know where dogmas lead to from the development of the Christian Church, which for a long time tried to establish a spiritual monoculture all over the world with great violence. Even though it knows the biblical parable of the Tower of Babel and should know that God himself smashes every monoculture, because living nature needs a living variety of multicultures, inside and outside. It was not for nothing that the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost in a variety of languages, so that every culture could find itself in them. So no matter how many artificial edifices of ideas you build, like in the Tower of Babel, you don’t get any closer to heaven and thus to the truth with one-sided views. The road to truth is a breaking down of views, not building them up. This also confirms the second commandment of Moses:
You shall not make for yourself an image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. [Bible, Exodus 20:4]
Because one-sided views can quickly freeze and become dogmas. This results in a violent struggle against all other views and those who think differently, as we know it from the Christian crusades and the Inquisition against heretics from history and today again in the form of falsification and defamation against conspiracy theorists, esotericists and unconventional thinkers in modern science and politics. What is theoretically not possible cannot be allowed to stand in practical. They even want to ban the profession of alternative practitioners by law because they have practical successes that contradict materialistic theory. Insane! But that is a typical sign of a crumbling worldview that desperately wants to survive by any means necessary, but can’t uphold much longer. After the Christian world view came the materialistic world view. What will come next after that? First we experience a great fear:
Three fellows who wanted to catch a hare, went on crutches and stilts; one of them was deaf, the second blind, the third dumb, and the fourth could not stir a step. Do you want to know how it was done? First, the blind man saw the hare running across the field, the dumb one called to the lame one, and the lame one seized it by the neck.
(Another version is: Four of them wanted to catch a rabbit, they came walking on crutches and stilts: one couldn’t hear, the other was blind, the third was lame, the fourth couldn’t speak. Now I don’t know how that happened, and that the blind saw the hare grazing in the wide field, the mute tells the deaf, the lame catches the hare. Source: Old high and low German folk songs B.1, Ludwig Uhland, 1845)
The rabbit is a typical symbol for fear and the corresponding flight reflex. Fear supposedly activates our “reptilian brain”, that is, our animal nature. This might explain why people react like animals in fear and either become blindly aggressive or hide, duck, play dead or flee. This can be useful in some situations, but if a human being in the course of development cannot rid himself of this fear in everyday life, he will not be able to rise from his animal nature and develop what should be human wealth, namely the higher reason. Because under fear people are unable to make rational decisions. No judge can represent the truth under fear. Under fear there are at most short-term solutions.
What is a mind walking on crutches? This could be the thoughts leaning on the deceptive senses. And what is a mind walking on stilts? This could be the self-awareness that sees itself as something separate and struts about the earth. Both were formerly called ignorance or blindness because they obscure and veil reason. One cannot recognize, capture and conquer the animal nature of fear either with thoughts or with the ego-consciousness. One can try, but it will not have long-term success. Only higher reason can help here, before the thoughts are silent and the separating self-awareness becomes a holistic all-consciousness. This is the only way to get rid of the root of fear.
What is the root of fear? Lack of faith, because without faith everything is uncertain. But where to find true faith as long as paid lawyers rule who only represent personal interests and no true judge decides in the sense of truth? When thoughts rule without a higher reason, there can be no true faith either, and we live in constant fear. It is also said: Without this higher reason, man is blind, deaf, dumb and lame with regard to truth. There are also many parables in the Bible in which Jesus heals such people, not only physically but above all spiritually, which certainly also includes the awakening of an expanded consciousness of higher reason and the corresponding trust.
Of course, this higher reason has a very bad time in a materialistic world view, and that is why we are currently trying to solve many social problems through stoked fear out of helplessness: public order through fear of punishment, hard work through fear of existence, environmental protection through fear of climate change, peace through war and fear of loss, insurance through fear of the future or health promotion through fear of illness such as the horror pictures on cigarette packets, the shock stories about vaccination campaigns and medical check-ups and much more. Hardly anyone today trusts in higher reason, and it is not promoted by society either. This is understandable, because true reason would be the downfall of the materialistic-egoistic world view that many people today cultivate as the basis of the market economy:
There were certain men who wished to sail on dry land, and they set their sails in the wind, and sailed away over great fields. Then they sailed over a high mountain, and there they were miserably drowned.
Well, life built on dead matter is built on sand, so to speak. Life needs a living foundation, a sea of living water full of waves on which we set the sails of thoughts in the wind of reason. Wind, spirit and life are conceptually related in many ancient languages, as we still speak today of the breath of life, formerly breathed in by God, which can be thought of as a universal intelligence or holistic spirit.
But apparently there was a time when more and more people lost their faith in the spiritual basis of life. Certainly the dogmas and political lies of the Christian church made their contribution here, and a materialistic world view was formed that wanted to stand on solid ground with scientific certainty. This marked the beginning of the age of the scientific-technical revolution, and the intellectual monoculture also became the agricultural monoculture of the “great fields”. Initially, however, things went upwards, the dogmatically dried-up creativity of the people woke up again and promised a lot of material wealth. The necessary sacrifice of the spiritual values of virtue and truthfulness seemed to pay off. But in the meantime there are more and more voices saying: “This won’t go well for much longer!” Despite all material security and the belief that we are standing on solid ground, human life is increasingly threatened today, and not only by the destructive potential of accumulated chemical and nuclear weapons, but also by the disturbed balances in nature and the mental and physical degeneration of the people themselves. We are sinking globally in a propagandistic advertising world that is increasingly becoming a world of lies, a sick organism that naturally tends to self-destruction, like the insane lockdown in the corona crisis has already indicated. One could also speak of a global cancer that generates more and more fears:
A crab was chasing a hare away, and high up on the roof lay a cow which had climbed up there.
But the crab is also an ancient symbol for life, as we find it in the fairy tale of the “Doctor KnowAll”, and true faith in life can put any fear to flight. Why do we have so little faith in life today? How could the cow climb onto the roof and how could our worldview reverse so fundamentally?
What formerly was bottom, now is summit.
Hereon they base the law there’s no disputing,
to give the undermost the topmost footing… [Faust II]
Well, that is precisely our freedom, which lies in thinking. “I think, therefore I am!” Thoughts are creative. They can create an “I” with entire worlds and turn living waves into dead particles. In this way, the materialistic world view could also arise, which is based on the truth of dead particles. First it was the atoms, then the elementary particles, and now it’s the quarks and similar particles that are becoming practically more and more elusive and unreliable.
What can you rely on? What is absolute truth?
Well, from a materialistic point of view, matter is reliable, which consists of clearly separated particles. From a spiritual point of view, it is spirit, which exists through God. And just as the elementary particles become more and more intangible the deeper one searches, so the divinity in the depths is also intangible. The oldest cultures already knew this, and the Christian and Vedic writings also say: The absolute truth has no form that one could grasp and understand with the senses and thoughts. That is why one speaks of the uncreated, unformed and unborn in this regard. It must be so, for if truth had a fixed form, thoughts could never be so free and creative, there would be no free will, and we would be like robots, totally dependent on our programming and technical basis. Oddly enough, even some materialists believe so, or at least wish they did, and try to fix people like cars and replace their brains with smartphones. If that were the only truth, it would be a sad truth.
From a Christian perspective, the epitome of truth is “God” as the unborn father and the “world” as the born son:
Therefore there is an inward work, which neither time nor space can enclose nor encompass, and in it is something divine and equal to God, which neither time nor space encloses - it is everywhere and always equally present - and it is equal to God in that no creature can perfectly absorb him, nor mould the goodness of God into himself. And therefore there must be something interior and higher and uncreated, without measure and without manner, in which the heavenly Father is able to impress and pour himself wholly, and in which to reveal himself: these are the Son and the Holy Spirit. [Meister Eckhart, Book of Divine Consolation]
...as if you were taking God, you put a cloak around his head and pushed him under a bench. For whoever seeks God in a way takes the way and misses God who is hidden in the way. But he who seeks God without a way, grasps him as he is in himself; and such a man lives with the Son, and he is life itself. [Meister Eckhart, Sermon 6]
Why was man not satisfied with the Spirit of God? Why did a materialistic worldview emerge?
The causes are certainly far in the past. At some point, material wealth became much more important than spiritual wealth, and the ancient Greeks and Romans complained a lot about the associated decline in virtue. Francesco Petrarch described the decline of reason in a similar way around 1350 in his book “Healing of Happiness und Sorrow” and recognized even then a pathological and addictive development of the spirit. As early as 1325, Meister Eckhart, one of the most brilliant spiritual scholars of his time, was accused of heresy by his own friars and later even convicted. Something similar is happening today with many scientists who dare to use the term spirit or even God. Science has been stuck in a stagnant crisis in almost all areas for decades. The findings of quantum physics have been known for almost a hundred years, but their philosophical consequences have not yet arrived in the practical life of scientists. The classic materialistic world view is defended almost fanatically because it is the basis of capitalist society. And in this regard one can accuse many scientists today of knowingly lying, because they know better, but neither live by it nor teach it to others. Not that our intellectual elite will soon have to be accused:
Woe to the Pharisees! They are like a dog lying on the cattle manger. For neither does he eat himself, nor does he let the oxen eat. [Thomas Gospel 102] - Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, who shut up the kingdom of heaven from men! You will not enter, and you will not let those enter, who want to enter. [Bible Matthew 23:13]
Even today one sees science fighting less and less for truth, but increasingly against all those who think differently, as at the time of the Inquisition, in order to maintain a shaky world view that can no longer be maintained. A world of lies?
In that country the flies are as big as the goats are here.
How is it, that small problems can turn into big problems, or as we say today, that a dust speck is made into a mountain? Mental problems usually have the property of circling around in the mind until they are decided and resolved. They demand more and more attention, and everything else around them suddenly seems unimportant. The soft buzzing of a fly quickly becomes the loud bleating of a goat. This is mainly due to the distinguishing nature of thoughts, so that they can only grasp relative truth. They look at the fly and the goat as distinct objects from specific points of view. In terms of body size and meat content as food, the goat then appears significantly larger. From another point of view, however, the fly can also be much more annoying than a goat and can even transmit more diseases. And when credible researchers then find out that flies transmit extremely deadly diseases, they quickly become the greatest enemy, and we start shooting at flies with cannons, wanting to exterminate them all and waging a bitter world war. Well, this is what happens when no reason has been developed that can break this vicious circle of thoughts and recognize from a holistic point of view, that the fly is not an independent object but a part of the whole natural organism that serves a healthy balance. So one can certainly say: Wherever there is a lack of higher reason, people lose proportionality and tend to exaggerate because they cannot make sensible decisions on the basis of thoughts alone. People have also known this for a very long time: Ne quid nimis - nothing in excess! - How else to maintain a natural balance?
But how difficult it is to break out of the mill of thoughts without reason has certainly been experienced by everyone who has consciously looked inwards, and many people do not know what else to do here than distract themselves externally. Therefore, our society has become a master at sensual and intellectual distraction. The more aggressive the distraction, the more effective. The range of scandals, horror, violence, sex and drugs is almost inexhaustible. Our media work diligently to bring together all the catchable sensations of happiness and even more suffering from around the world and present them as sensationally as possible. But we all know that this is only a short-term and short-sighted solution, with which we lie to ourselves:
Open the window, that the lies may fly out.
This last sentence was probably added by the Brothers Grimm and shows how deeply they understood the meaning of the fabricated story. It doesn’t say: “Open the gates and tell the lies!” Because if someone tells a lie, there will soon be hundreds of others who will tell it as the truth. And in the age of Facebook and similar global media, it can even be millions of people. This is what is called a viral spread of lies or “fake news”, and these have now become completely normal, not even the legal public media are immune to them anymore.
So, better open the windows, clear the mind, dissolve the fog of thoughts and no longer lock yourself in a narrow edifice of ideas! Or as Goethe wrote in [Faust I]:
Ah, me! This dungeon still I see.
This drear, accursed masonry,
Where even the welcome daylight strains
But duskly through the painted panes.
Hemmed in by many a toppling heap
Of books worm-eaten, gray with dust,
Which to the vaulted ceiling creep,
Against the smoky paper thrust, -
With glasses, boxes, round me stacked,
And instruments together hurled.
Ancestral lumber, stuffed and packed -
Such is my world: and what a world!
And do I ask, wherefore my heart
Falters, oppressed with unknown needs!
Why some inexplicable smart
All movement of my life impedes?
Alas! In living Nature’s stead,
Where God His human creature set,
In smoke and mould the fleshless dead
And bones of beasts surround me yet!
The “window, where even the welcome daylight strains but duskly through the painted panes” means above all our sensual and physical limitations, so to speak, the mental attachment to senses and body. And opening that window is escaping the prison of physicality and restoring freedom to spirit.
Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh; and what is born of the spirit is spirit. Don’t be surprised that I said to you: You must be born again. The wind blows where it wills and you can hear its rushing; but you don’t know where it comes from and where it’s going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. [Bible, John 3.5]
In this biblical parable, too, we find the symbolic relationships of water, wind, life and spirit. And the two kinds of birth from physical and spiritual sources remind us of the two worldviews that we presented above. Similarly, in the traditions of the Indian Vedas, one speaks of the “twice-born” (Sanskrit Dvija), who, after their physical birth at a certain age, when reason awakens, ritually receive the sacred thread, so that their spiritual birth or training by a Guru or Vedic teacher can begin. The major goal of this training at that time was not “education of the mind” in the sense of mental and conceptual imagination, but mental flexibility up to the liberation of the spirit from sensual and physical attachment (Sanskrit Moksha). In order to attain this great goal there were four general ways of life which one could adopt in succession, namely student, householder, forest hermit and propertyless mendicant monk. Thus, all of life was aligned towards liberating the mind from physical and sensual attachments. If in today’s educational system we shape the spirit primarily in terms of its function within the social economic system, then the economically oriented life as a householder was only a means to an end for the two higher levels. The forest hermits could be compared to today’s retirees, who withdraw from the world of work due to the natural decay of the senses and body. They, too, are looking for healing and vacations, except that today healing is understood as the doctors’ marathon and vacations as commercial tourism for the intoxication of the senses in order to hold on to material enjoyment for as long as possible. And that also corresponds to the direction of development of the above pyramid from a material point of view. For the forest hermits, vacation was a retreat from domestic life into the natural solitude of the woods, and they sought their healing in spiritual ways, working to dissolve sensual and physical attachments and expand their consciousness through yoga and meditation, which probably came much closer to the natural meaning of physical transience and thus also to the truth.
May we also open our windows! May we trust life! May we not sink blind, deaf, dumb and lame in a world of advertising and lies and drown miserably! May we develop reason in order to gain insights, to recognize the connections and the order of what is perceived, to make reasonable decisions and to act accordingly!
• .....
• The Seven Swabians - (topic: Corona Hysteria, the essence of fear)
• Thumbling - (topic: What is the soul? Is our worldview correct?)
• The Crystal Ball / Castle of the Golden Sun - (topic: Egoism, defeating the inner beast)
• The emperor's new clothes - (topic: MONEY-MAKES-BLIND - Memorial 2020)
• Rat King Birlibi - (topic: Money, Enmity, Addiction, Poverty)
• The Ditmarsh Tale of Wonders (topic: Lies, Thoughts and Reason)
• The Robber Bridegroom - (topic: dead soul, spiritual murder)
• The Poor Boy in the Grave - (topic: Education, Ego, Fear and Reason)
• Simeli Mountain - (topic: material and spiritual world)
• Strong Hans - (topic: Ego, robbers and ultimate gain)
• The Old Man and his Grandson - (topic: social division, disgusting impermanence)
• ... Table of contents of all fairy tale interpretations ...
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[1884] Grimm's Household Tales. Translated from the German and edited by Margaret Hunt. With an introduction by Andrew Lang, 1884, Vol. 1/2, London: George Bell and Sons |