Opening

The discussion in this book presupposes some specific understanding of the human make-up. This understanding was brought to the present author, Adam Michaelis, among many other direct experiences in his lifetime, in a situation some years ago, when he was participating in a group on prayer and meditation under guidance of a renowned teacher A. The experience confirmed what Adam had already learned about the subtle and composite nature of our energy-fabric from instruction and reading. In this introduction we will discuss briefly the content of the experience in as much as it constituted a turning point in the subsequent unfolding of the author’s encounter with the forces and dynamics of evil. Moreover the content serves as a convenient point of departure for our discussion of a philosophy of life based on a confession to Christ, which will be a predominant theme of interest throughout this book. Finally the experience is certainly an instructive example of the multilayered and ambiguous pursuit of so-called “spiritual self-development” in the New Age movement. Now then – let the circus unfold its charade!

Opening 2003

The mentioned experience was quite simple and yet very intricate, like reality always is when it is for real. Adam was sitting in silence doing a “meditation of awareness” as instructed, moving the focus of attention from one point of energy in the aura-structure to the next in the prescribed manner of succession, when suddenly there was a dramatic shift of his focus and attention. Prior to this change he had noticed during a day or two an intensified relaxation and a build up of intuition in the form of valuable insights about his personal life. There were crucial childhood memories of violence from his father in a refreshing blend with the inner understanding of the principles of forgiveness and self-responsibility and of the intimate connection between fear and sensitivity.

While performing the exercise Adam now became aware of a peculiar and unfamiliar quality of “suchness”. He was just sitting there, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and somehow his being densified and intensified steadily. He then experienced a sort of merging into the rapidly expanding energy of his body-system and simultaneously there occurred a kind of “swop”, whereby Adam’s awareness was smoothly dissipated on a perimeter around his body at an arms length or so. Immediately several elucidating sensations came to his attention. The most impressive was the acute and distinct feeling of I-ness and its simple, indestructible identity. Adam had for the first time in his adult life that fantastic experience: “This is basically and originally me, what I truly am. Nothing can be added and nothing subtracted. It is something impossible to transfer or share with anybody else, and nothing can ever intrude upon this reality.” The experience was absolutely relieving in its beautiful simplicity and basicality. Intuitively Adam understood that from this foundation only could he ever hope to answer the pertaining question of who he was, but that knowledge was not accessible to him at this time.

Adam’s next sensation was more complex. When we say “next”, we do not mean to imply any progressive dynamic of the actual condition. Adam knew that the experienced arrangement was how it fundamentally was and always will be as long as he is alive. The basic quality of I-ness would always be situated there on the fringes of his aura. Only Adam’s attention shifted from one aspect of his situation to the other. The experience then was that his physical body was “inside” this I-ness along the perimeter of the circle. He was viewing himself from “outside in”, looking into his body. He was not identical with his body, but there was a profound continuity and acquaintance with it. The body was a condensation and an expression of the peripheral I-ness, which surrounded and pervaded it throughout. Somehow the body and “I” shared the same energy-fabric, of which Adam had a direct sensation and vision, but closer to the outline of the body the physical dimension was brought into the foreground and he saw the vivid organic life and detailed composition of it. This was quite a fantastic and overwhelming spectacle! And it was accompanied by a feeling of awe and reverence due to its completely miraculous nature, because that was his vehicle of life on earth! Without bodily life and the physical structure of I-ness, Adam’s “I” would have no means of expression on this level of reality at all. However the opportunity of earthly life was absolutely precious, fragile, exquisite and important – that much was imminently evident from the experience itself. The I-ness had an intentionality attached to it, which needed this possibility most dearly. And so it dawned on Adam finally, that time and opportunity were scarce and rare. Desperately rare! And that human life on earth is holy and an immense responsibility, because this expression of personal life is so profoundly creative and unique.

The expanded perspective lasted with Adam some days and he saw everybody else as being weirdly “on the outside” of themselves, since evidently they did not experience where or who they really were. Then of course the impression faded away and his experience contracted and “normalized” back to its previous confinement in the mental “I” in the centre of his head. The spontaneous and touching response of wonder and awe receded even faster, and Adam was not feeling especially uplifted in the immediate aftermath of the experience. Soon after deeper personal conflicts and turmoil issued forth accompanied with upheavals in his body-energy, in moods and processes of thought, which had to be cleared and dealt with. But certainly the experience made a lasting impression and had a deep impact on his personality and character. There was a striking reduction of timidity and Adam was less fearful and much more self-confident than before, because he had made contact with this ontological and existential foundation. We will comment on the personal structure of fear later on, and in this context it suffices to state, that Adam became more outgoing and assertive than prior to the experience, which caused its balances and unbalances in his life associated with the rapid production of change.

For now we will concentrate on the experience itself and draw the more general conclusions, which will be of use in this exposition. In Western culture the predominant view of the nature of reality is of course materialism, and such a belief has also widely determined the philosophy of man. This materialistic outlook in consequence influences the self image and self perception of every single person and the way we relate to each other and to the environment. Therefore normally people tend to identify with their physical body and conceive of themselves and their nature by analogy with physical objects, reifying their sensations, perceptions and ideas. In our perception the very nature of physical objects is to be delimited and separated from each other. Different objects cannot co-exist in the same place and time and are divided and segregated in a very tangible way, which endow things with a certain self-identity. According to common sense, objects have their existence based on their evident power of cohesion and resistance to dissolution. They seem solid, firm, stable and enduring.

This is of course not a very refined or precise physical conception and it is a far cry from the scientific understanding, but by its practicability it possesses a tremendous psychological and social formative power, shaping values, actions, beliefs and so forth on the grounds of body and property. Even in our non-material experience and identity we see ourselves as separated and delimited monads. I am somebody, who is me and nobody else. My relation with “me” is absolutely private and exclusive. No one else can look into my thoughts, feelings or sensations. They are “mine” by my having them, and somehow this fact is a unique feature of theirs. And if I am thinking the same thought that was previously thought by somebody else, the thought is now mine and I am the one thinking it. There can never be several of “me”, because I am unique, individual and in some mysterious way self-identical. This type of self concept seems obvious and elementary, when we identify with our physical body. But in reflection not even the body or anything at all for that matter owns permanence or final demarcation. You just have to think of metabolism and the fact, that the body is renewing its molecules constantly. In the same manner every other “separate” object in the physical world emits and receives radiation all the time. If not even this material and objective world constitutes a foundation for lasting identity, then how is this quality to be found and constituted in the much more elusive and changeable mind harbouring and anchoring a personal identity? Where indeed can we point to the identity-formative nucleus in consciousness, psyche or body?

This is not a philosophical essay on the concept of personal identity, false or true. But it is evident from the discussion above that there is somehow a contradiction built in with our normal and rather substantial self perception. This is demonstrated in the classic psychophysical problem of philosophy trying to explain the relation between body and consciousness. On one hand you can describe the nature of reality in materialistic terms and arrange a catalogue over every existing object, including your own body. The index will be of an enormous size, but exhaustive, with the only exception of consciousness. On the other you can perceive everything as something of which you are conscious, and therefore as something existing in your own mind or consciousness. You can produce this total content of consciousness, but you will never find any element existing outside of your mind. The two ways of thinking are equally wrong and are easily corrected in an experience as the one Adam underwent, where the boundaries between physical and non-physical or sensory and extra-sensory breaks down into a continuum. Indeed you can experience the solid and indestructible foundation of I-ness in a merger with the energy-field of consciousness around your body as described, and you will understand that your body is an inward extension and condensation of this structure and other formative structures as well. The distinctive mark of personal identity or self is stamped on a living and vibrant reality, which is in many respects permeable and changeable, only not in this self-referral or in any other aspects of quality. On one hand then, the mental construct of “me” and “mine” together with the bombastic identification with the whole content of body and psyche is absolutely illusory, as is the idea of mental privacy and separateness of individuality on the basis of gross property. Self and identity is a creative and formative process of qualitative distillation and existential commitment, not a substantial or static fact. In reality you can totally neglect your own I-ness and never allow this I-ness to sanctify anything in your life. On the other hand the persisting idea and feeling of a personal identity in the above sense is true for every human being and is resting on the most subtle, but indestructible ground of spiritual substance. Furthermore it is a fact of considerable importance that this structure and marker of identity is closely knit together with the physical body. Adam’s experience convinced him that this intimate connection is not reciprocal – that is, the vibrant reality of I-ness can exist independent of the body. He was also certain that this living I-ness in itself represents an extension from yet another dimension of reality, where it is rooted in a spiritual being best described as an eternal soul. This soul in return is a direct extension of pure light or God.

Fundamental insights like these appear immediately from an out-of-body-experience containing some structural clarity and order. From this vantage point you know for sure that you are really outside-in before you perceive things to the contrary. And since you now have both perspectives at your disposal, you soon realize that there is really no separateness or in or out at all. We exist in two continuous spaces or dimensions simultaneously – the sensory physical world and the extrasensory and elementary world of energy – and they overlap and intersect each other. The true connection between them and the greater part of their content lies in the shadow of our narrow egoistic and mentally oriented perspective, which creates our “private internal world” as a protection. We live through bodily identification and sensory deprivation in a mental construct, obtaining a false identity. But with increased integrity and sincerity you can allow the living I-ness to become the founding basis of personal identity and the gyroscopic and invariable point of reference in an open and permeable reality.

These are the general and basic conclusions from Adam’s experience. Then of course it is possible to describe in technical detail what occurred from an energy-perspective, using a map of the subtle bodies and knowledge of the aura-structure. Interpreted this way, Adam experienced an expansion of the etheric body out- and upwards in the aura overlapping parts of the astral and mental aura and touching some of the points of energy, which more or less coincide with the higher mental and the spiritual aura [i.e. the point of essence and the cosmic points] thus establishing contact with the spiritual or fifth dimension represented by the layer of energy on the perimeter of a circle at an arms length or so from the body. We are only mentioning this here, because it gives us an opportunity to introduce different technical terms we need to refer to in the later context. Anyway this is knowledge and descriptions you can obtain from many books on subjects like meditation and healing, and one would certainly like to recommend the pioneering works of Rudolf Steiner, founder of the anthroposophic movement. In his brief exposition “Die Schwelle der geistigen Welt” [The Threshold of the Spiritual World] Steiner leads his reader on a mapped route of description and understanding, which contains a great many phenomenological points of resemblance with the above experience, but of course from a much profounder and deeper perspective on the extrasensory world.

From Steiner’s description we shall here only mention a few additional points and then return later to other of his teachings. Firstly the primary elementary world or the etheric dimension, which constitutes the basic energy-link between the structure of I-ness and the body, since it is the vehicle of vitality responsible for the organic formation and life of this physical body, has in itself to be conceived of as an open dimension or a separate world filled with a variety of beings or powers. Some of these beings or powers enter into the human make-up and represent autonomous wills, motives and intentions, which explains why we often feel that we are not united with or in control of ourselves. Secondly some of these entities are described by Steiner as originating from higher levels of reality, where they once existed as spiritual beings. Therefore they are now still mirrored in the astral dimension, thus constituting the lower astral realm and the illusive astral-mental world, which also “surrounds” us on a subtle level. The real and higher astral world is quite another dimension of spiritual nature, where the soul resides with no connection to physical matter at all. Thirdly you must understand, that our mental consciousness with its provisional sense of I is not identical with the soul either. Only when the consciousness awakens to the extrasensory world and has the inner strength and integrity to stand apart from the beings there, knowing itself from the inside as I-ness and quality, only then is there a direct link with the level of soul and true individuality. There will be much more to say on these subjects later.

Anyway let us briefly note where the aforementioned line of thinking and experience takes us with regard to the understanding of evil. The suggested powers and structures, responsible for the soul-denying, fear-based and contractive/inflating response to the miracle of incarnate life, will serve as the primary explanation of human evil. This is not difficult to accept. The evil actions of men are in most cases based on the assumptions of separateness and vulnerability, which present themselves to us from the materialistic world-view and our identification with a body. Likewise it is the aggressive assertiveness and insecurity of a false and unstable ego-identity with its deep-seated need for protection through accumulation of property which quickly translates into an evil mind and intent. When we are isolated and intimidated in a material universe with a strong urge to survive and an equally strong fear of dying, we focus on egoistic concerns, differences, conflicts and interests. One has to look after oneself and every man for himself are the most prominent mottos. We are unable to see the interconnectedness of life on earth and live accordingly. So people hurt one another and terrorize the Earth failing to realize the Christ-consciousness embedded in the dimension of I-ness as expressed through quality. Also some of the etheric-astral entities integrated in our make-up carry with them highly instinctual, cynical and egoistic motives, which represent the reverse of human values. This ongoing destruction and perversion of higher and truer values represent nothing but evil.