2012 July

Exploring the Unique Self and beyond (Part 5): Making it real ….

By Hans Jecklin

The following post continues a series of spiritual reflections beginning with this post.

Writing and conversing over the beauty and magnitude of the Unique Self is one thing. Transferring it to our own real life is the real challenge. As illustrates a recent e-mail exchange with a friend:

Good morning Hans

It is humbling but also motivating what you have written. I nearly wrote “managed” to write, but it flows too smoothly, so “managed” conveys struggle, no, there is no struggle for you the author.

The “where to begin” is the problem on this end. So I shall go back to Nr 1, read again and then move very slowly through the others. I just wonder if I am able to keep abreast of your profound experience, even just following it, not even becoming active. I shall try, it is confirming to me that the struggles in life, my life?, will remain, how we manage them is something else.

May I allow myself forwarding to a very special friend in Biel? She and her husband, hmmm, yes, I would like to do this and can’t imagine anything but whole-hearted reception on her end.

Ann

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Thank you, Ann, for your feedback. The struggle is not writing these texts, they come quite easily and are of course based on experience. But still: the real challenges come from what life presents to us and when it reveals as what we do not want at all. And maybe, the Unique Self wants us to become an ever clearer instrument and leads us into exactly those conflicts that have the potential to open our minds?

I do not know, but looking at life’s challenges from this perspective is always revealing and – if we look back – who and where would we be without our past? And I am confident that we will never arrive in a state of perfection, because this maybe beyond human condition anyway.

Thanks for giving me food for reflection! – And if you like to pass the information – about this or our music – on to your friends, this is perfectly in our sense.

Warm regards, Hans

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Dear Hans

It is what I am mulling about: where is my home supposed to be, quite literally, when this place here cannot be, ever ever, but where? What role is it playing in my life to define certain directions and states, I am searching and getting no inner replies. Fine and good to say there are a few priorities, they will in this life be defined by financial means, physical needs, social set-ups, and the one certain fact: age and aging. It has me puzzled, my health is affected in that I have had to get, the first time in almost 20 years, medication against allergies. Something is really out of line. So finding answers determines where I am looking, horizontally and/or vertically. Am fairly sure you follow my very simple scheme.

Shall send off immediately your texts, thank you, thought it is the intent of work. Still, I want permission.

Truly yours
Ann

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Dear Ann

It is difficult to respond on personal matters from distance, apart from the risk of being misunderstood.

This, however, seems evident to me: If our prior home is inside, we are looking at the world from an unalienable security. This enables us to look at the world with untroubled trust, with a view less veiled by emotions like fear or scepticism. Our view becomes wider and clearer and our inner ear more sensitive to the inner directions. We may intuitively be led to more effective actions and unexpected solutions may spring to our perception that we might have missed before. We just may become more creative and inventive.

However, again, becoming more sensitive has many advantages, but we may also become more sensitive to imbalance in the outer world – material and subtle – and allergies or increased need for rest may be the result, until we discover new means to handle them.

That’s enough of preaching for now! Have a wonderful day, and we are looking forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Love, Hans

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Thank you Hans. ……….. On a personal basis, which this is, you have hit many bulls’ eyes. A lunch-time break is needed, my balcony welcomes me.

thanks ever

Ann with love

Exploring the Unique Self and beyond (Part 4): Eros – in search of Enlightenment

Diotima

By Hans Jecklin

Eros needs human consciousness to become enlightened. He cannot do it by himself. Only enlightened human consciousness can embrace the huge evolutionary span wherein Eros manifests as what I understand a primordial driving force of evolution: Supreme Grace.

We can see with awe how on all levels of manifestation – from matter to spirit – a similar pattern of attraction between wholes leads to connection and unification into ever-greater wholes: Eros at work, guided by a greater intelligence.

When we look at human relations and love, it is interesting to watch Eros at work on many levels, most of them being unconscious: Survival instincts in many guises – physical, vital, emotional, mental – that do not differ so much from what we can observe in the animal world. Beyond the realm driven by instincts, it is very likely that what Jungian psychology understands as projection of anima or animus on a partner is a human accomplishment: It means that we are attracted to the other by what we believe to be missing in ourselves.

This the nature of Eros which Socrates relates in Plato’s Symposium as a teaching he has just been given by the sage Diotima: Eros as an aspect of human nature that incessantly searches and creates outer connections which he can not escape to lose, until he finally understands his true history and fate.

This is Diotima’s story: When the divine Aphrodite was born, the gods celebrated a big feast. Befuddled by the delicious nectar, Poros – an incarnation of wealth and abundance – took a rest in the garden and fell asleep. Penaia was attracted to the vicinity of the Gods by her innate nature of need and greed. She cunningly lay down by Poros’ side and conceived Eros from him. Eros, as Penaia’s son and unaware of his father, was a poor, rough and scrubby fellow, scouring barefoot and with no shelter. However, he also carried within him an unknown heritage which made him a searcher for the good and beautiful. Brave, courageous and ingenious he was, inspirited by an indefatigable drive for insight and truth. He felt happy whenever abundance smiled to him, as much as he was heartbroken when all abundance had again melted away between his fingers. “Lacking Goodness and Beauty, he strives for what he believes to be in need of” was the beginning of Diotima’s teaching to Socrates, leading to the realization that “If he gave birth to the supreme Truth within himself, he would be granted the Love of God and attain immortality.” Socrates, convinced by Diotima’s message ended his report to the symposium by sharing his insight “that there is no better guide to enlightenment than Eros.”

Looking back at my own path from the present, through all delusions, confusions – material, emotional, sensual – and notorious dis-enchantments, I can now fully and with great gratitude appreciate Eros’ play of consciousness, driven by an unalienable longing for the One Love and Wisdom: Eros unveiling as pure Grace.

This is the moment when we may wish to honor all imprints from past illusions and deceptions held in our body, asking for healing and transformation by the grace of our Unique Self. Only now, an enlightened Eros can play within us, liberated from all needs and bonds. This is – to my understanding – conscious Love, in full freedom: a most precious gift, to be handled with loving awareness and care! For ourselves and the other!