The title for this article was a bit of a compromise for me. I am not a native English speaker, and the German version of this article is called “Fordern und Überfordern”. This could be translated with “Demand and Overdemand”, but that would probably be associated with something economic. This article is about all of us, being challenged by the world around us. We try to deal with it, but sometimes life is asking more than we or the people we love can cope with. That overstrain can pull us down into a deep crisis, it can even put an end to our life.
Not all people get in conflict with society. Some of us live a happy, fulfilled life, act like they think is right, and get along well with their surroundings and the people around them. Others are constantly afflicted by inadequacies in society, are bothered a lot by the behavior of others, even if they just read or hear about it. Both sides never fall short of justification for their point of view. There is a lot going on that generally works fine, and it is possible to live a good life. Mostly those who are not easily confused, who do not adopt ideologies or trends just because they are popular, who do not spend much time thinking about stuff and events they dislike, those often manage to live a good life here. They do their thing, and they don’t waste time worrying or getting upset about others who go different ways. But, on the other hand, there is also a lot that is not working well at all, and that clearly overstrains a lot of people. Some people cannot stop thinking about that.
People who shape their own life, who create a lot themselves, and consume little “finished” stuff, are not so affected by the trends in their surroundings. This statement is obviously not limited to food. They have more impact on their environment than the environment has on them. On the other hand, people who experience themselves and maybe others as shaped and pushed by society, they feel exposed to a burdensome environment which affects people negatively. When I witness how people are are not just challenged, but overstrained by their surroundings, by the experience they made as children, then it is understandable that I consider the social conditions as unacceptable. Then I spend much time thinking about what goes wrong, I denounce everything that I think goes wrong and I demand that changes must be made immediately and by all those around me. And it will be very tough for me to see how small the resonance is, how slowly things change. Understanding for those who do not prioritize the immediate removal of political or other social impositions is difficult to have or show in that situation.
It cannot be denied that life is not made easy for us today. Much knowledge about life and mankind has disappeared, was removed from every-day life. Little help is offered by institutions like schools or news to find orientation on our own. We are buried with a shitload of information, facts and things to choose from. With hopeless solutions and beliefs that keep us far away from anything essential or important. That we are more than the sum of our physical particles, that we must notice on our own. We will only develop an interest in who we are when we start wondering. Then we must look for help ourselves, outside of big institutions. For now, we need to get off the big roads if we want to discover answers that really give us orientation.
We have achieved a lot with natural sciences. We build a great variety of tools, buildings, machines, infrastructure and food. Now the time comes where people start thinking about redesigning the human body, of at least try to add more and more technology to it. Bot we have forgotten the knowledge about ourselves, which used to be more present in the past. We made a conscious choice do reject it and leave it behind, and start all over with a scientific exploration of nature. The time has come that we expand that scientific exploration to also cover ourselves. We must learn about who we are again. And this time, we must find out ourselves, by observing ourselves. We are already covering our physical body, because it is part of the physical world that natural sciences explore. It does not really satisfy us to know what particles our bodies are made of. It does not tell us who we are. Spiritual science is about the part of us that goes beyond physics – our spirit, our mind. To explore the spirit, we must begin with an observation of the spirit. If we keep looking at particles, we can only see an effect, a reflection or a shadow of the spirit there. Our thoughts, our feelings, our will is what we need to focus on. Many people today believe this area is sufficiently covered by psychology. It is true that psychology is a good start to a scientific observation of the human mind and spirit. Many valuable observations have already been made. But they are barely known to people. There is still a long way ahead of us, and there is still much to discover.
Natural science demonstrates its relevance for reality with the useful, functional applications that result from it. I do not need to understand how a plane works to get to my holiday destination and experience it working. It is similar for spiritual sciences. The application of the results can be experienced, can be observed without understanding why it works. That is already possible today, because many results have already been transformed to applications by some pioneers in the field. It is of course even better when there is an interest, why it works. And when people start exploring on their own. Spiritual science will only become really alive when many people spent time with it, and start to carry their enthusiasm and their results into the world.