Walter's Career Guide: Why Getting a Job is Not Enough

WALTER’S CAREER GUIDE

BOOKS BY PETER FRITZ WALTER

COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD

THE LEADERSHIP I CHING

LEADERSHIP & CAREER IN THE 21ST CENTURY

CREATIVE-C LEARNING

INTEGRATE YOUR EMOTIONS

KRISHNAMURTI AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

THE VIBRANT NATURE OF LIFE

SHAMANIC WISDOM MEETS THE WESTERN MIND

CREATIVE GENIUS

THE BETTER LIFE

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

CREATIVE LEARNING AND CAREER

FRITJOF CAPRA AND THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE

FRANÇOISE DOLTO AND CHILD PSYCHOANALYSIS

EDWARD DE BONO AND THE MECHANISM OF MIND

JOSEPH MURPHY AND THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND THE LUNAR BULL

TERENCE MCKENNA AND ETHNOPHARMACOLOGY

CHARLES WEBSTER LEADBEATER AND THE INNER LIFE

WILHELM REICH UND THE FUNCTION OF THE ORGASM



WHY GETTING A JOB IS NOT

ENOUGH

by Peter Fritz Walter

Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC

113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA

©2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-516884-95-7

Publishing CategoriesSelf-Help / Personal Growth / Success

Series ‘Training and Consulting‘ Vol. 1

Publisher Contact [email protected]

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Author Contact [email protected]

About Dr. Peter Fritz Walterhttp://peterfritzwalter.com

About the Author

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) focused upon fine art, cookery, as-trology, musical performance, social sciences and humanities.

He started writing essays as an adolescent and re-ceived a high school award for creative writing and editorial work for the school magazine.

After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M. in European Integration at Saarland Univer-sity, Germany, and with a Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1987.

He then took courses in psychology at the University of Geneva and interviewed a number of psycho-therapists in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified through a hypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hypnotherapist in Lau-sanne. This led him to the recovery and healing of his inner child.

In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908-1988) in Paris and interviewed her. A long correspondence followed up to their encounter which was consid-ered by the curators of the Dolto Trust interesting enough to be published in a book alongside all of Dolto’s other letter exchanges by Gallimard Publish-ers in Paris, in 2005.

After a second career as a corporate trainer and per-sonal coach, Pierre retired as a full-time writer, phi-losopher and consultant.

His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective, while his fiction works and short stories focus upon educa-tion, philosophy, perennial wisdom, and the poetic formulation of an integrative worldview.

Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes English as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. He also reads source literature for his research works in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre has notions of Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese.

All of Pierre’s books are hand-crafted and self-published, designed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware company, Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media).

Pierre’s Amazon Author Page

http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Fritz-Walter/e/B00M2QN4SU

Pierre’s Blog

https://medium.com/@pierrefwalter/publications/





Contents

❊

Introduction 13

Chapter One 21

Introduction 21

Learning vs. Superlearning 25

Holistic Learning 55

Learning and Career 76

Points to Ponder 86

Chapter Two 91

What is Creativity? 91

How Creativity Manifests 101

Creativity and Democracy 104

Creativity and Individuality 110

The Creative Continuum 115

The Creative Ones 120

Points to Ponder 122

Chapter Three 127

Introduction 127

Classical Psychoanalysis 132

Transactional Analysis 134

Hypnotherapy 136

Bioenergetics 138

Shamanism 139

Divination 143

Sages 149

Spiritism and Channeling 156


Chapter Four 165

Introduction 165

You Got It 167

A First-Hand Life 170

The True Meaning of Education 179

How Consciousness Works 184


Chapter Five 201

Creator’s Essentials 201

Why Attitude Counts 205

Where New Ideas Originate From 207

How to Nurture a Creative Mind 216

Write Your Story 218Practice Meditation 219Note Your Dreams 221The Adventure of Solitude 223


Chapter Six 231

Introduction 231

The Art to Be Different 232


Your Way to Be Different 235

Task One : Roadmap for Distinction 235Task Two : Attentiveness 246Task Three : Just do it! 247Task Four : Mark Your Path 250


Chapter Seven 255

1st Principle 255

Be Yourself

2nd Principle 258

Respect Your Soul Values

3rd Principle 259

Fight Timidity

4th Principle 261

Handle Negativity

5th Principle 263

Handle People

6th Principle 265

Timing

7th Principle 266

Resource Management

8th Principle 268

CONTENTS

Be Compassionate

9th Principle 272

Be Ecstatic

10th Principle 274

Live Your Love


Work Sheets 285

Your Ultimate Decision 287

Your Ultimate Decision and Contract

Your Needs 290

Your Needs Statement

Your Expectations 292

Your Expectations Statement

Power Impediments 294

Developing Your Inner Powers

Power Animals 295


Power Problem 296


Power Change 297



Power and Ideals 298


Power and Community 299


Annex 301

Introduction 301

Answer 1 304

Answer 2 305

Answer 3 306

Answer 4 307

Answer 5 309

BIBLIOGRAPHY 313

Personal Notes 349

CONTENTS

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions let drown your own inner voice, and most im-portant, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what we truly want to become. Every-thing else is secondary.

—STEVE JOBS

Introduction

Why Getting a Job?

❊

Dolf de Roos, Ph.D., is a very successful real-estate

investor from New Zealand. He writes in his books

that he never had a job in his life. And he says that

with a certain pride, let alone being ashamed about it.

As a young man, he found a mentor, and when he was

starting out investing in real estate, he met Robert T.

Kiyosaki who shared with him a lot of his success sto-

ries as an investor, and of course also a lot of know-

how. Rather early in his twenties, Dolf was making his

first million.

Now, Dolf de Roos travels the world for teaching

investment strategy to large groups of people. I am

one of his students, for I always had a knack for real

estate, too, was successful at first and then loosing a

lot, by making a lot of mistakes.

That’s why, after those huge losses, I sought him

out, and bought several of his books. And I knew from

that moment that failure is not my accepted reality

and that I can win back those losses, even though

they made out one third of my fortune!

If you have decided to read this book just for get-

ting a job, you should look for someone else to help

you. I am not helping you for getting a job.

I think that the very idea of ‘getting a job’ is mis-

taken. It’s a bottomline philosophy. If you love to work

for somebody because you are afraid to take charge

of your life, that’s okay. But then, you won’t reasonably

expect to become a millionaire, right?

This book is written for those of you who do rea-

sonably expect to become millionaires!

To begin with, a good career starts with a creative

attitude. What is a creative attitude? It’s an attitude

based on a firm conviction that you will make it. A

creative attitude translates as flexible adaptation to a

challenge, for meeting that challenge.

When you have realized a project, or you created

something out of nothing, a groove will be stablished


14

in your gray matter that is an image of the strategy

you used for solving that problem, and achieving the

solution. It’s like a recording, a track you can play back

over and over again.

But life is unendingly changing! And next time the

situation will be different; applying the wisdom of

your previous experience, activating the groove in

your brain, you are going to realize that it won’t give

you the solution! That’s not because you were not

smart enough, but because of an automatism of the

human brain. The brain can only see what it knows, it

can only learn more of what it already has learnt.

In technical terms, the brain can only add on new

patterns to existing patterns; it can also create new

neuronal patterns or pathways, but it will do that only

in very exceptional cases once we are grown up.

For children from age two to six, the brain creates

a lot of new pathways or grooves in the neuronet;

however, once we complete the age of six, the brain

relies much more heavily on acquired pathways, reluc-

tant to create new neuronal highways. This means

that, as we grow older, we grow more and more awk-

ward learning new things, and change the ways we do

INTRODUCTION

15

things, while as children we were totally open for

learning all kinds of behaviors.

This is something so natural that you should not

make a fuss about it, but you should definitely know

about it. For you will feel it yourself when you grow

older. The secret of growing old and still learn in old

age is that you are creative; to be creative means to

be destructive! For you have to constantly destroy the

old ways of doing things, the old grooves in your

brain, the old neuronal connections; only then you

have a chance to come up with something new,

something virtually unthought of.

In the words of think tank Edward de Bono, a new

idea cannot be unthought. That’s a good expression

for the fact that essentially all we create is a function

of thought, or rather, the way we handle thought.

Now, when you apply this insight to your career

path, you may shy away from a strategy that targets

the bottomline: get a job! For you know now that’s

not a creative way of handling your life, your thoughts,

the neurons in your brain, and your relationships with

others. You will then think of learning, the learning


16

experience as such, as a meaningful and also pleasur-

able endeavor.

When you focus on your qualities, and you remain

steadfast with this focus, the money will come, and

your life’s work will be meaningful and fulfilling.

Let us explore now in the seven chapters of this

book what this implies, what such a career path re-

quires you to do or not to do, and how you prepare

yourself for the challenge.

It’s basically that you start to coach yourself, by

developing vision, focus, emotional maturity, endur-

ance, persistence, and joy.

Life should be fun as well and the reward of a ful-

filling career is that you do not feel it to be ‘work;’ and

you don’t mind to delve into your business during va-

cation, or work on weekends. This is actually the lit-

mus test: if you resent to ‘sacrifice’ time for your life’s

occupation when your friends are partying, then it’s

not meant to be your thing, then you need to focus

again and find out what it really is that makes you

happy. By contrast, if you focus on money only, espe-

cially in the beginning of your career, you risk to spoil

INTRODUCTION

17

the outcome. This is so because money is not a value,

it’s an energy that reflects your own spiritual energy.

The more you develop your true gifts and talents,

the more you refine your spiritual energy, the more

money you will attract as a result. Thus, money is an

effect, not the cause. The cause is your inner life, the

way you think, the way you act on what you fix in your

mind as true, and the way you feel about yourself.

Feelings of self-worth are very important in this

process while self-condemnation is utterly destructive

in this process of developing your spiritual heritage,

for you yourself do matter in the universe. You are

part of this creative process, and by self-abnegation

and guilt, you weaken your success chances.

This being said, and after you got your beginner’s

focus right, we shall see what education truly means.

I am not using the word in its new institutional

sense, but in its oldest, most traditional meaning. The

word comes from the Latin educere, which means

something like ‘guiding along.’ Thus, education in this

most ancient sense of the word means self-education,

it means to guide yourself, to be yourself your own


18

guide, your own light, your own guru. I can’t stress

this often enough in this book: all in your career will

visibly reflect how much you have guided yourself,

educated yourself, and coached yourself, and as a re-

sult, how much your self-esteem has grown with you!

This in last resort also means that you are respon-

sible for your education, not your parents, not your

teachers, and not your professional mentors. To meet

this responsibility, you will stop complaining about

conditions and circumstances and focus, once again,

inside, too see how in your thoughts and feelings you

create your life, on a day-to-day basis, and thereby,

your future.

In your career, then, you will have many opportuni-

ties to let others become aware of your emotional

maturity, and your self-knowledge. This is one of the

strongest factors in building good relationships, both

professional and private for it gives people reasons

for trusting you! And trust is all in professional life;

without trust, there won’t be any companies—for the

people in a firm accompany each other and thus they

give each other company by giving each other trust.

INTRODUCTION

19

These values, as you will reflect throughout this

guide, are much more important than any ‘first salary’

for they build the rock-solid foundation for your future

career success.

Success is not something random, volatile and

hazardous. Napoleon Hill has shown in his remarkable

lifelong research on the common success principles

with highly effective people that success can be

traced, demystified and rationally grasped; it can be

seen in relation with values, inner values, personal

values, and principles!

Emerson said that all success in life is the triumph

of principles! In this sense, your focus on values and

principles in your life will pay you a huge dividend.

This focus will also attract to you the right circum-

stances for your professional deployment, and the

right people to collaborate with, work with, and do

business with.


20

Chapter One

Schooling vs. Career

❊

Introduction

Most of us were taught that learning is the process

of absorbing knowledge. Only a few of us have ab-

sorbed the knowledge that learning is more of a

process of how-to-absorb, rather than absorbing it-

self.

The good learner, then, is the one who knows the

how-to of learning. And the good teacher is the one

who knows the how-to of teaching.

At the university level, we of course need lecturers,

because at that level we should have learnt how to

absorb lectures. The how-to of learning is unfortu-

nately left to the primary school system. And there it

is in bad hands. Learning innovations are generally

not the outcome of the school system but rather the

result of professional training, coaching, and man-

agement schools. In the past we went to school once

for a lifetime whereas today learning is programmed

into our whole life cycle. Therefore it is so important

to learn how to learn fast, effectively, and joyfully!

Clearly, if we want to come back to something

over and over, we need to experience pleasure doing

it, and that is what learning traditionally really never

seemed to be. But ask the highly evolved scholar, as

the famous writer, ask the successful entrepreneur, ask

the artist of world renown: they will all tell you that

learning is for them sheer pleasure, and a challenge

to grow.

Once we grasp the truth that learning is made for

our pleasure and not for our torture, we are open to

accept change in our learning habits. It begins with

questioning the effectiveness of our former learning

methods.

Sometimes we are motivated by a particular

teacher or the setting of a particular school. But at the

end of the day, we might want to change the teacher

or the school—all schools for that matter. The learner


22

is in us. It is inside and not in any teacher, school or

system. We cannot change our brain but we can use it

more effectively so that the results we get with learn-

ing, memorizing and realizing projects are magnified.

I learnt this truth in high school when I was con-

fronted with my baccalaureate. This was something of

a shock after eight years of hanging around in that

school that bored me and where, lacking stimulation, I

was dreaming my days through.

Not that I was stupid in school, but I had been ab-

sent almost all the time; not physically absent but

mentally, emotionally.

I felt all through those years that the world I was

part of was strangely different from the world those

teachers and those other students were living in. I just

felt different, and they felt it too, and let me feel my

difference.

I might generally not be very helpful for career if

others make you feel marginal; yet, in a certain way it

is an advantage, if only you see it that way, for you

mature more quickly. Since you do not trust your envi-

ronment, you begin to develop more trust and belief

SCHOOLING VS. CAREER

23

in yourself, in your intuition, your inner world, your

creative intelligence.

And I really needed that trust then, because I was

far behind in some subjects. Yet despite all, I wanted

to succeed above average in my diploma.

However, there was nobody to teach me what ef-

fective learning actually was. I had left the boarding

one year earlier and thus went home every day after

classes, eighty miles to ride every day. I thought I bet-

ter use the time creatively, and the car’s tape player.

Thus I prepared tapes for English and French vo-

cabulary, and Latin grammar. However, it was dreadful

to prepare these tapes because at that time I hated

my voice, for I did not love myself.

But it was good to notice that for this insight

served me to take firm decision to change that condi-

tion later on.

So I listened to those tapes while driving to school

and back. No, I think the secret is that I did not listen

to them. I let them play while daydreaming. I did not

consciously listen. At the time, this was the result of

my laziness, yet it was to my benefit.


24

Of course, I did not know at that time why pre-

cisely this method makes for maximized learning re-

sults! And I passed the bac so brilliantly that some of

my teachers looked at me angrily and said I had

fooled them for years! They could not believe it. The

essay I had submitted for the creative writing class

was read aloud by our German teacher in front of the

entire school…

I was glad. I had made it, and without their sup-

port, their school, their teachers. Simply by trusting

my joyful inner learner.

The only difference between creative and uncrea-

tive people is that the latter take ineffective learning

for granted. Creative learners either change the sys-

tem or drop out of it. In my case, I chose obviously

the first option, and it was to my benefit later on!

Learning vs. Superlearning

Recent research conducted in the United States

showed that a high percentage of the young is illiter-

ate, despite a sophisticated and highly expensive

school system! Most college graduates, although


25

studying languages for years, are unable to lead a

simple conversation in the languages they major in.

Why? Our mainstream learning methods are not

among the most effective. In the 1960s, we had Su-

perlearning® coming from Bulgaria to the States and

then the rest of the world. Dr. Lozanov’s Suggestope-

dia, as he named it originally, seems to be in align-

ment with natural laws and the way our brain func-

tions.

—Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder, Superlearn-

ing 2000 (1994).

It shows how to combine the conscious and un-

conscious memory surfaces so that we learn and

memorize with our whole brain.

Using music, our right-brain capacities are en-

hanced in Superlearning, and the learning content is

absorbed by little chunks that are written into our

long-term memory. The chunks are patterns, and the

whole approach could be called a patterned learning

approach.

How can this be done? How can we realize virtually

unlimited learning capacity? The answer is, by learn-


26

ing patterns, not singular elements. The brain picks

up patterns by using both brain hemispheres simulta-

neously engaged.

Most people only use a fraction of their potential.

In fact, we use in our culture most of the time only the

left side of our brain, our left brain hemisphere. We

try to cope with progress and challenge using our ra-

tional mind,disregarding the incredible potential of

both our subconscious and our associative minds,

which are located in our right brain hemisphere!

It is not by chance that our brain consists of two

hemispheres. The right hemisphere coordinates while

the left brain hemisphere analyses, and when the right

brain hemisphere assists the left brain hemisphere in

the learning process, a holistic understanding of the

learning content is brought about.

The right hemisphere functions in an inductive and

associative manner. It does not, like the left hemi-

sphere, memorize abstract concepts but the images

associated with those concepts. Since a concept does

not per se have an image connected to it, it is useful

to make up images about all we learn. The more vivid

our imagination, the better we memorize, simply be-


27

cause imagination and visual thinking get the right

brain involved in the learning process. Every poet

knows that images, symbols and metaphors can con-

vey much more information in much less time than

strictly verbal transmission. Therefore true poetry is

acrobatics; it achieves the impossible, by expressing

what cannot be expressed. It puts in words what is

rather of an imagery quality.

In his research Dr. Lozanov found that our passive

learning capacity is about five times higher than our

active learning faculties. This means that our passive

vocabulary in every language is five times as high as

our active vocabulary; hence we understand five times

more than we are able to express.

It is funny because the negative thinkers conclude

from this fact that our brain suffered from an innate

deficiency when learning languages. In reality, this

feature of our memory surface is a true advantage. It

namely ensures the fundamental understanding of a

foreign language actually before we are able to speak

it. In fact, this characteristic of our memory interface

enables us to learn passively, that is to say, almost

without effort.


28

We learnt our mother tongue without studying

grammar, didn’t we? Children pick up foreign lan-

guages while adults try to translate them into the

structures of their mother tongue. However, this latter

procedure, while it is used by the majority of people,

is highly ineffective and inappropriate. It prolongs the

learning process and is responsible for the accent we

bring into the foreign languages we speak.

Dr. Lozanov’s method, by contrast, has been seen

to produce native speakers. Learners speak foreign

languages without any accent, like native speakers,

simply because they have absorbed the language by

pattern recognition.

Before I go in more detail about highly effective

learning, let me first glimpse on the subject of learn-

ing from a more global perspective. I am aware of the

fact that reforming existing organizational structures

in education would not be enough; we need nothing

less but a revolution in education!

This revolution has since long been on our human

agenda. Great writers, philosophers and teachers like

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Maria Montes-

sori or Alexander S. Neill have prepared the shift


29

which is now taking place all over the world. This is

not a shift in styles or methods or ways to perform,

but a real paradigm shift.

The old paradigm holds that learning is an un-

pleasant and mechanical activity that is a necessary

but unavoidable sacrifice on the way to higher

achievement. The new paradigm holds that learning is

an essential ingredient of life, a part of the human na-

ture and naturally as pleasurable as breathing, play-

ing, eating or taking a shower.

It further holds that unpleasant learning is the re-

sult of ignorance and a deep mistrust in the human

potential if not a form of outright violence originating

from a pleasure-denying ideology. The old paradigm

favored oligarchic systems of power that kept masses

of people ignorant, while the new paradigm strives for

effective and nurturing forms of learning as the very

foundation of democracy!

The new paradigm associates learning with crea-

tive living and, as such, is essential for human dignity.

The paradigm shift in learning stresses human val-

ues such as respect for the individual’s natural learn-


30

ing faculties and intuition. It has given rise to a higher

value of personal choices and preferences.

The paradigm shift in learning deeply affects

modern society, which is currently evolving into a

global learning society with a high esteem for the in-

dividual’s learning capacities and choices.

Hundreds or even thousands of new ways of learn-

ing are presently being born all over the world, and

the common denominator among them is the diversi-

fication of the learning process. Meanwhile, the me-

dia, and even good old television are going through a

deep identity crisis and a transformation that will get

them ready to cope with the global need for more

and better education on a mass-scale level. In a glob-

ally networked and value-based consumer culture, we

need to learn constantly, effectively and joyfully.

Many of us, among them the highly gifted ones,

practice this already now and probably since their

childhood. The impact learning has on our creativity is

not to underestimate. To be creative and not to learn

is sheer impossible! Creativity and learning go hand

in hand. I would go as far as advising everyone who

complains about lack of creativity to simply start


31

learning something new and then begin with practic-

ing this new learning.

As a result, creativity will blossom not just in the

particular field you have chosen to train yourself in. It

will be a general creativity and can affect areas of your

life that you considered as dull and stagnant. More

generally put, we can say that every learning experi-

ence rejuvenates us from inside out.

Expenses are currently decreasing on a large scale

and the one who still invests a fortune in getting a

master’s degree or diploma will tomorrow be consid-

ered a fool! Learning will be tightly interwoven with

daily life, and it will be for the most part electronic. It

will on a lesser scale be left to professional teachers

to teach, as the culture will provide virtually everybody

the opportunity to share information and thus be-

come a sort of public teacher. And why not?

From such large-scale information distribution, in-

come will be created in a more diversified manner as

ever before. Since the individual will not have much to

pay to get information, the per-client profit of infor-

mation providers will be relatively small, yet the great


32

mass of potential clients networked within the global

learning structure will do for great profits!

The areas where new learning is required are al-

most unlimited; we’ll will have to master perhaps a

dozen languages fluently if we want to cope with the

global marketplace, and this can be achieved once

learning is felt as pleasure and as an essential enrich-

ment of life.

By playing with knowledge, we overcome learning

barriers that result from negative experiences in the

past. Such a tremendously new and energizing expe-

rience will take us beyond the accumulated frustra-

tions.

Naturally learning really is pleasurable since it re-

flects to us our unlimited potential, and because it

empowers us and boosts our self-esteem.

The learning barriers many of us have are not in

our nature and certainly not, as some misanthropes

say, in the human nature. They are but conditioned

responses to inhuman learning experiences! Love for

learning actually is similar to love for life.


33

Children learn by play. They learn language by ab-

sorbing language and by playing with words and

phrases that they have already captured. The way

children learn languages can be compared with a

scanner. A scanner transforms pictures or writing in

electronic signals that the computer can identify and

retransform into pictures.

Children indeed scan the language they are ex-

posed to on a daily basis, with all its complex gram-

matical structure, intonation, syntax, and vocabulary,

and they memorize these whole patterns, not just sin-

gle elements such as words, or grammar. They never

learn isolated words and phrases, nor any grammar, as

most of us did in school.

Rather do they absorb language within a context,

a frame of reference, which is a patterned structure.

This is the secret. This context, this patterned

frame of reference in which we learn, is responsible

for a much higher learning input. The more our brain

can associate new knowledge with existing or contex-

tual knowledge, the more easily it can store it away in

long-term memory. This has to do with the neurologi-

cal fact of preferred pathways in our brain. That is why


34

mental pictures help tremendously in memorizing

language or any other kind of learning material.

Another factor is that children never are in a learn-

ing environment specifically designed for them. Be-

hold, this is a major advantage! It means that they are

every day bombarded with new words, and that they

are, technically speaking, exposed to a much higher

input compared to the actual output they are able to

produce.

Traditional learning completely disregards our

passive learning capacities; it starts from the wrong

assumption that learning must always be an active

process, and that it must be hard and painful to get

learning results. This assumption is disproved by ho-

listic learning that engages our full potential and that

thus activates our full memorization capacities.

Superlearning techniques are natural in that sense

since they are based on the way our brain functions

when it functions as a whole brain. They recognize

that we can learn passively, just as we did as children,

by absorbing the whole of the learning content, using

our subconscious mind as a major reception antenna.


35

These modern learning techniques are not only

much more effective, they are also healthier since

stress is reduced on a major scale and frustrations are

reduced to a minimum.

We speak of playful children. So why not speaking

also about playful learning? Whoever met a genius

knows what I am talking about. Geniuses are playful

learners! They have never left childhood. Not that

they remain immature, but they keep their playful atti-

tude in learning because they have preserved the in-

tegrity and aliveness of their inner child!

Geniuses like to play, with thoughts, with images,

with strategies, with concepts, with patterns, with

theories, and some also with people or countries, or

with life as a whole. In a way life is a game and can be

considered as a context where nature plays a game

with herself, where creatures play games with each

other, in order to survive, but also in order to have

fun!

Learning brings more results once it is done in a

way that is fun, that feels good, that is lively, and that

motivates us, thus releasing the learning frustrations

of the past.


36

To put it in a formula, traditional learning is basi-

cally centered upon sweat and potatoes. It is based

on life-denying beliefs such as ‘life is a hard job’ or

‘life on earth is a sacrifice for later heaven,’ and similar

nonsense. Therefore traditional learning has bred

pressure and fear and got many people to become

dull who were enthusiastic as long as they were inno-

cent. It has built hero philosophies, which tell us that

only some people are winners and that all the rest will

become losers.

The hero cult has deeply affected our self-esteem

in the most negative way. Many people were crippled

by traditional education to a point to be unable to

pursue life in a naturally pleasurable manner; they

turned bitter and resentful.

However, life has not given birth to us for torturing

ourselves. Our brain is not a stubborn old donkey that

has to be beaten in order to run in high gear. It has

only to be motivated to learn and it will learn—and

frantically so!

Learning is an essential part of a human life. Life

recognizes the enormous potential we got as human

beings and tries to activate this potential by a thirst


37

for effective and joyful learning. In fact, most of us

never learnt to learn, and in school, then, unlearnt the

little what life, or the street taught us about this im-

portant subject. All the virtues that are connected to

understanding the learning process are bluntly disre-

garded in the traditional educational culture. The first

and foremost of those original virtues is flexibility. In-

stead of teaching us flexibility, school taught us rigid-

ity.

Flexibility is the highest virtue because life itself is

unendingly flexible and yielding. Survival is based on

the ability to flexibly adapt to any new situation or en-

vironment. The dinosaurs disappeared because they

couldn’t adapt to climatic changes. And many people

today are jobless because they are at pains with an-

ticipating structural changes in the world economy or

unable to cleanse their mind of outdated knowledge.

Relying on what you have learnt in school is not

only silly but dangerous for your professional career.

Among all what makes a modern society, the pri-

mary school system is the end where we are still with

one leg in the dark ages. More and more structural

transformations change the world presently and we all


38

know that in only ten years from now the world will be

more different than a hundred years ago compared to

now. The acceleration of development on both an in-

dividual and a collective level is a fact of life that even

the uneducated masses today are beginning to face.

We cannot rely on school systems that teach this

or that stuff instead of teaching learning skills. And we

cannot rely on governments since the broad majority

among them follow outdated paradigms and even

fascist ideologies instead of empowering and motiva-

tional strategies.

Often, because badly needed reforms are post-

poned, huge unemployment and misery are the re-

sult. And in addition, because of insufficient knowl-

edge about how to learn, masses of people are mal-

adjusted in a world that is developing far beyond the

concepts traditional education was based upon.

Needless to say that all this is a potential root of

upheaval and social unrest. There is an urgent need

for groups of enlightened individuals to take respon-

sible control of the media so as to spread information

about the following topics:


39

‣ The unlimited and divine nature of the human soul;

‣ The unlimited range and power of our human po-tential;

‣ The most effective forms of learning and self-study;

‣ The art of learning-how-to-learn;

‣ The art of peaceful and joyful living;

‣ The art of holistic problem solving;

‣ The philosophy of the information age;

‣ and related subjects.

Learning-how-to-learn is what we call philosophy

in the original sense of the word. Philos originates

from the Greek philein, to love, and sophia means

wisdom. Philosophy thus is the love of wisdom, and

truly the original source of motivation to study intrigu-

ing phenomena such as the functioning of our brain

and the modalities of the learning experience.

Let me ask: ‘Why do some people remember al-

most everything they ever heard or saw, while others,


40

perhaps the majority, have rather mediocre memory

capacity?’ I am convinced that the answer to this very

old question is simple. The first group of people have

learnt how to learn, the second are too much cen-

tered upon what to learn instead of realizing the pri-

mary importance of the learning process. If the proc-

ess of learning was not felt as a pleasure and an ad-

venture for growth, the result of learning will always

be poor.

I had a colleague at law school who was gifted

with a phenomenal memory. He told the professors

right away when they made a mistake, citing by

memory from voluminous commentaries, indicating

page number and exact location of the quote on the

page. When I asked him where he got his extraordi-

nary talent from, he replied, smiling:

—Oh, that’s easy. I just visualize everything I want

to learn. I look at the page one moment with high

concentration, very intensely, and thus photograph

the page into my memory. It’s just like scanning the

page—and that’s it. Like that I scan whole books, law

texts, commentaries, everything I want.


41

Needless to add that this lad was the best of our

law class, if not of the entire university. In addition, he

was blessed being from one of the finest families in

town. He drove to law school in an old classic Mer-

cedes 500 Roadster, but despite his extraordinary gifts

and his royal-class family background, he was one of

the most modest and friendly people I’ve met in my

young life.

This example may raise your awareness to the im-

portance of memory. Usually we are not conscious of

how important it is to have good memory. You may

say that good memory serves to keep track with

phone numbers, birthdays and faces. But it’s much

more than that and it’s much more basic, too. Good

memory is not all in life but it facilitates life tremen-

dously. You should not underestimate it in the daily

running of your business or in whatever you do.

People who cannot remember faces are con-

fronted with many awkward situations and their rela-

tional life is deeply affected by their incapacity to

keep in mind the features of another person. What-

ever the deeper psychological reasons for this strange

inability may be, there is no doubt that people who


42

easily remember others give the impression to be

more open, more friendly, more accessible and com-

petent, if not more social and communicative. How-

ever, as important as memory is, it is only one element

in the learning process, which is concerned with the

know-how of storing pertinent information. The most

important word in this sentence is pertinent. Why do

we forget certain things and not certain other things?

Do we forget at all? In fact, the truth is that we don’t

forget anything. Research has shown that our uncon-

scious knows exactly how many steps we go to get to

their office, and back home.

Why not consciously, then? The reason is obvious:

we would be submerged with information. However,

the information is all the time present in the memory

surface, but it’s hidden away from conscious aware-

ness. You can figure this as some sort of backup tape

where you have more data stored than on your hard-

disc, data that you archived because it could be im-

portant one day, or that you need to keep for other

reasons, but data that you do not need to have on

your active hard drive.


43

Now, there are people who, by nature, have got

such an extraordinary conscious memory surface that

they virtually can’t forget anything.

The famous pianist Svjatoslav Richter was one of

them. Even in old age, he knew sixty-three complete

concert recitals by heart, which means about two

hundred hours of uninterrupted music, note by note,

including fingerings, tempi, dynamics and other im-

portant details important for brilliant piano play. In

some interviews shortly before he died, he said he

could remember events and people from his child-

hood, and their long Russian names, as clearly as he

had seen them the day before.

He admitted actually in this interview that he was

suffering all his life from his unnatural incapacity to

forget.

What is it that makes good memory? Is it perhaps

a result of learning motivation? Is it involvement? Or is

it even something like a playful attitude toward learn-

ing in general?

Or is it direct perception, or else a combination of

various factors in play? Excellent learning certainly is


44

based upon strong learning motivation, a high level of

involvement and, as research has shown, a playful atti-

tude toward learning in general, as well as high curi-

osity.

Direct perception is the faculty to achieve results

without involving analysis or theory. It is the use of in-

tuition and spontaneity to perceiving reality in a non-

mental as well as a non-judgmental way. Small chil-

dren learn directly, holistically, by absorbing the whole

of the experience and importantly so, without judging

and without the past getting involved in the learning

process.

The past gets in the way because of thought.

Thought which is the derivative of past experience

and its projection into the present moment blocks

learning instead of facilitating it. Thought generally is

concerned with the use or the usefulness of some en-

deavor or activity. Those worries keep us from being

completely absorbed by the learning experience.

It is irrelevant if the specific content of what we are

learning is useful. What we learn with learning is

learning itself! Even if we forget the content of what

we have learned, if we have learnt the right way, that


45

is, through direct perception, the fruit of the learning

process will be there: we will have enriched our

learning-how-to-learn experience.

And this, by itself, is worth any kind of learning!

Motivation is the pathway to highly effective learn-

ing. We can reach such insight only through under-

standing learning as a holistic experience. The tradi-

tional approach to learning is reductionist in that it

deprives learning of a whole lot of its implicit and

contextual content.

There is a broadening of our intelligence in every

single learning experience. Even if the learning con-

tent is irrelevant or becomes futile, if we have passed

through the experience with enthusiasm and have

been immersed in it, there is a subtle essence that

positively touched our human potential. This is valid

not only for single learning experiences but, more in

general, for learning systems or methods.

On the other hand, it is typical in our days to over-

estimate the effectiveness of electronic media for

learning. Today’s enthusiasm for electronic learning is

the natural outcome of our moving into the informa-


46

tion age and our almost child-like joy to indulge in

those exciting new media features. I am not different

in that and was from the start a fervent prophet of the

New Age of Information. However, we should not for-

get in our i-fever that the computer does not change

our thinking habits; it’s our brain that created the

computer, and not the computer that created our

brain.

It is through studying our brain and our natural

ways to handle information, and not through imitating

the very incomplete way how computers deal with in-

formation that we progress in understanding fast and

effective learning for ourselves and our children.

Traditionally, teaching languages was teaching a

grammar. Until now in English the term Grammar

School is used for a basic, elementary school. Just re-

call what you learned about grammar in school and

then evaluate how well you could speak a foreign lan-

guage with this grammar knowledge only.

I guess, zero percent!

We do simply not learn languages by gathering

knowledge about grammar. This is a fact that has psy-


47

chological and neurological reasons, which are in the

meantime also scientifically corroborated. Our brain

simply does not need grammar to learn a foreign lan-

guage, but something totally different!

But despite this knowledge we go on to teach

children the grammar nonsense and let them lose

their time with mechanical and highly boring activi-

ties!

And then we wonder why they feel bored and

want to break out! They should break out because

this proves that their creative impulse is strong

enough to survive the prison of routines in which we

want to incarcerate them.

I already mentioned Dr. Lozanov who found that

we learn better when our brain functions in the so-

called alpha state. The alpha state is the state in be-

tween wake and sleep.

In this state of consciousness, our left and right

brain hemispheres function in sync, thus ensuring the

full potential of creative possibilities we dispose of.

In our waking state, by contrast, our brain func-

tions on beta waves, and most of the time invoking


48

the left-brain hemisphere, enabling us to straightfor-

ward, logical and so-called rational thought, to the

detriment of our intuitive, receptive and truly creative

possibilities.

It can be said that the whole of modern culture is

based on a predominance of our left brain hemi-

sphere! Logically then, within this reductionist system,

it was upheld that language learning meant the study

of grammar. But times have changed. Today, not only

with Superlearning have we got a method that is revo-

lutionizing learning since it is devoid of any conscious

effort to learn.

There are nowadays other methods around that

are perhaps less sophisticated, but also less expen-

sive, among them, for example, the Assimil method.

This method, like Superlearning, is based upon

the fact that our brain picks up whole patterns, and

this including the grammar structure of the language.

That is why Assimil does not teach any grammar and

yet is one of the most effective modern language

learning methods worldwide. And in addition it’s

highly affordable!


49

But Georgi Lozanov did not only revolutionize lan-

guage teaching. After he was already a famous psy-

chiatrist and parapsychologist in his home country

Bulgaria, Lozanov went to India in order to study the

astonishing psychic capacities of Yogis. At the same

time, the Russian scientist Alexander Luria spent dec-

ades to study Venjamin, a man who remembers all,

and found his memory capacities unlimited. Venjamin

never forgot anything and could even remember the

setup of the dishes and the flowers on a table of an

afternoon tea forty years back in time. Lozanov knew

Luria’s books and found similar phenomena among

the Yogis in Bulgaria and India. Some of them had an

almost total photographic memory.

What Lozanov did, then, was to combine his re-

search on language teaching with what we know

about the functioning of human memory.

And here we have a method that is, despite all

similarities with Assimil, very different and unique.

While Assimil and most of the newer programs for

language learning are made for self-teaching, Super-

learning cannot be applied that way, and some peo-

ple who have tried to transform it into a self-study


50

method failed. The original Superlearning technique

needs a specially trained instructor. This teacher must

have the qualities of an actor. Students are in arm-

chairs and enveloped by soft string sounds, by prefer-

ence Baroque airs.

The teacher, standing in front of the audience, re-

cites long texts in the foreign language. The tone of

his voice alternates. One moment he shouts, then he

whispers, then he talks normally. The rhythm of his

speech is exactly in sync with the rhythm of the music,

which in turn is in sync with the breathing rhythm of

the learners.

The results are nothing short of astounding! You

can learn difficult languages such as Arabic, Russian

or Chinese in two months; children learn to read and

write in no more than six months—and this with an

almost total perfection. The foreign languages are

spoken without accent and written in exact orthogra-

phy and this despite the fact that no grammar is ever

taught.

Dr. Lozanov was convinced that our brain, our sub-

conscious mind, knows all grammars of all languages,

and therefore picks them out of the spoken phrases,


51

which are listened to in the alpha state. His theory

must be right since the results show that all tested

students of his programs knew the grammar of the

foreign language—without ever having studied it.

The reason why the speaker alternates the volume

of his voice has to do with the reception capacity of

our brain.

First of all, our subconscious mind picks up what is

underlying in a mixture of different sounds, and not

what is dominant. At the beginning of the sessions,

Dr. Lozanov puts specially chosen music to help his

audience to relax. The airs and andante are adjusted

in tempo so that they fit exactly our natural heartbeat

which is around 62 beats per minute, thus relaxing

those who are nervous (heartbeat too quick) and

stimulating those others who are apathetic and unmo-

tivated (heartbeat too slow).

Later Dr. Lozanov found another important func-

tion of the music: its transmitter function. The music

was seen to serve as a transmitter for the spoken

texts. As the phrases were spoken in precise sync with

the tempo of the music, the music in a way became a


52

transmitter for the foreign language to reach the sub-

conscious mind of the listeners.

From Bulgaria, Suggestopedia spread very quickly,

first of all to the United States, and from there back to

Europe and all high-tech nations. The essential new

discovery, however, penetrated only into very few cir-

cles of society. It has, to my knowledge, not reached

the level of public education where students still sit

on benches, with a crushed stomach, and are pumped

up with grammar knowledge, leaving their classes

with a feeling of having done ‘hard work.’

Hard work indeed, but without significant results!

Lozanov’s findings are just a beginning for us, to-

day. The great psychiatrist was for us a pioneer and

we have to continue the research that he so brilliantly

set in motion. In our era of globalization, the struggle

for every single youngster to succeed in the rat-race is

harder than ever before. On the other hand, the chal-

lenge to reach more satisfying lifestyles and careers,

more satisfying in creative realization, is today present

in all societies that have reached a certain level of

progress and a basic level of democratic freedom!


53

There is not one process of creativity, there are

many. They are interwoven in a complex network of

brain functions, on one hand, and behavioral atti-

tudes, on the other.

The study of education therefore is very large. It is

the study of man as a whole, and of his culture. Our

research must have a theoretical basis as well as a

practical dimension. Without theory, our experiments

will not explain us why things develop in a certain way

and not in a certain other way and without practice

our hypotheses remain unproven.

Theoretical work means the review of the abun-

dant and rapidly growing literature on the subject of

creativity research in order to find out the state of the

art in this field, to see what is admitted in the mean-

time and what has still to be proven.

It equally encompasses the working out of new

hypotheses, even if they revolutionize our findings

from yesterday. Progress has become rapid all over

the globe and the human development takes big

steps in new directions. Faster, more effective and

more relaxed learning is only one of them, but a very

important one!


54

Holistic Learning

All learning is a process. When we focus upon the

process of learning we learn about learning.

What we did traditionally was to focus upon the

learning content. Thus, we can say that in the past

learning was considered as something static and me-

chanical while today we see learning as a dynamic

process, something ongoing, organic and that is

somehow part of life. This process of learning, if we

are to understand it intelligently, must be seen in

alignment with our totality of perception.

Learning is the way we deal with what we perceive,

and it is all about how we process the information that

has been collected by our brain, but not only our

brain, through a rather complicated process that we

call perception. Thus, when we want to find out about

the process of learning, we need to look what percep-

tion is and how it works.

Perception, it seems, is a subject not very broadly

discussed in modern science. This obvious neglect of

scientific in-depth study of the holistic process of per-

ception has various reasons, one of them being the


55

general focus of modern science upon information

processing. There was a historic shift around the end

of Antiquity that led to a trend away from direct per-

ception and toward information processing, archiving

or mere information reproduction.

And yet, direct perception is our most natural,

spontaneously intelligent mode of perception. It is

the way our brain receives and stores information.

New research has fully corroborated the teachings of

the old sages who affirmed that learning has to be

holistic and whole-brain in order to be truly effective.

We can only wonder when we hear scientists state

that generally we use only between about five to

eight percent of our brain.

Why are we so terribly uncreative, so utterly inef-

fective in our learning performance? Despite this

whole process called civilization, despite schooling,

despite the printing press, Gutenberg and all the rest

of it, we have remained in a truly primitive state of

evolution regarding learning.

I am not concerned with finding out about the

causes or reasons for this terrible waste of human po-


56

tential, but with the possibilities to take action here

and now to change this state of affairs.

Changing the world comes about through individ-

ual changes. Once a sufficient number of individuals

quantum leaped to a higher evolutionary scale, there

will be a major paradigm shift in the whole system.

This is how civilization develops; it all begins in the

cell and then expands to still bigger patterns.

Nature is programmed in a system of patterns that

are holistically related to each other and where the

information of the whole is contained in every single

cell of the pattern. The pattern structure is typical for

the information the brain receives and stores informa-

tion. New information is added on to existing patterns

of information. Without such connections which in

neurology are called preferred pathways, memory is

not possible. The better the brain can manage to as-

sociate new input with already stored patterns, the

better the information storage will be, and the higher

will be the memorization result.

Our brain does the entire process of perception

and information storage automatically, passively,


57

without a need for us to set a decision about it. This

fact is important for the understanding of the func-

tioning of the brain. There is a positive side and a

negative side about it.

Positively, the passively organizing perception

structure of the brain insures that we continuously re-

ceive and store information, at any moment of the day

and the night.

Also during sleep and even in deep coma all the

information from the five senses is stored in the un-

conscious memory surface. So the apparently passive

functioning of the brain is actually an extremely active

process. The important point about it is that the or-

ganizer of the information is inside and not outside of

the system.

To give an example, let us have a look at two

groups of children. The first group is raised freely so

that they can pick up any information from their envi-

ronment and grow, from the information they get, into

what they are destined for. The second group, how-

ever, is strictly regulated, protected and guarded off

from unprocessed information.


58

Which group, would you think, will be more intelli-

gent and more creative, the first or the second one?

Of course the first one. Simply because in their

case the freely organizing and unhindered system of

their perception and the free flow of information,

combined with high input, made that their brains

were working in high gear whereas in the second

group creative learning processes were for the most

part impeded and blocked.

In the first group the organizer of the information

was inside, within the children, while in the second

group it was the tutelary adults around the children

who were installing valves for the free flow of incom-

ing information filtering out the larger part of it.

We can also put it that way: in the first group it was

nature’s intelligence that cared for those children’s

evolution, in the second case it was shortsighted hu-

man judgment.

This example shows the impact the early environ-

ment has on the development of our intelligence and

our later use of the potential we’ve got.


59

In my opinion we all got high potential but only

very few of us were exposed to the necessary amount

of environmental support and have, in addition, de-

veloped the creative will for freeing themselves from

the dangers of conditioning; we need both these fac-

tors working in a positive direction if we are to fully

develop our talents and creative powers.

I am convinced that people like Leonardo da Vinci,

Albert Einstein or Pablo Picasso, were they scored for

the use of their creative resources, would have been

found to use more than eighty percent of their crea-

tive intelligence potential whereas for the common

individual four to eight percent might be realistic. Be-

hold, one of the greatest errors consists in assuming

that this state of affairs could not be changed or was

inherent in our human nature!

Darwinism has contributed to spread this error as

one of the most destructive and absurd ideas about

the human nature and the hero cult has built it into

the belief system of millions that forms part and par-

cel of postmodern international consumer culture.

The truth is that every single human being has got

this incredible power that enables us to achieve what-


60

ever we wish, if only we set our minds to it and de-

velop tremendous focus on realizing our creative will.

In his book Serious Creativity (1996), Edward de

Bono states that ‘education does very little about

teaching creative thinking.’ For more than two dec-

ades, de Bono stressed that there was an astounding

lack of creativity not only in schools and universities,

but also in business, even in the highest ranks of

management, and the even higher ranks of govern-

ment.

Edward de Bono’s creativity teaching focuses on

enhancing business creativity as a deliberate ap-

proach, something that can be learnt and that he

called lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is not a special

wondrous skill of the right brain, but simply a particu-

larly coordinated way of both brain hemispheres

working in sync. The discovery of lateral thinking

came about through the observation of the human

brain’s unique capability to collect and store informa-

tion through pattern recognition and pattern assem-

bly. The brain does not store isolated pieces of infor-

mation but always organizes information in patterns.

De Bono states on page 11 of his book:


61

What computers find so hard to do (pattern recognition) the brain does instantly and automatically.

When de Bono released his theory of passively or-

ganizing systems in one of his first books, The

Mechanism of Mind (1969), scientists at first disre-

garded these astonishing findings. However, later

Nobel Prize winners confirmed them; in addition, the

amazing new discoveries in neurology corroborate

them brilliantly.

The preferred-pathways setup of the brain, nowa-

days presented as common knowledge even in popu-

lar science books, is but another way of formulating

de Bono’s early theory. And de Bono equally saw the

negative side of this mechanism whereas neurologists

continue to acknowledge but the positive effects of it.

The essential negative point in passively organizing

systems is that the recognition itself is conditioned

upon the already existing patterns. Bono said that

when we analyze data we can only pick out the idea

we already have. And even more clearly does he state

on p. 24:

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will


62

give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

That de Bono’s insight is about more than neurol-

ogy is shown by the fact that no lesser than Krishna-

murti stated exactly the same, saying that only passive

awareness and not active thought can help us under-

stand the world intelligently.

Thought or what we call our ratio is not able to

recognize patterns, it can only process patterns that

are already available in the memory surface.

In addition, the conditioning of perception by

thought and past experience was a major argument

Krishnamurti used to overcome the limitations of the

conscious mind, showing that there is unlimited intel-

ligence and awareness not in thought but in the realm

beyond thought.

Creativity, then, is strictly speaking not a product

of thinking, but of creative thinking which is more than

thinking. De Bono was outspoken about the destruc-

tive process of creative thinking. What he calls the

‘creative challenge’ basically consists in destroying

existing patterns or disregarding them in order to free

one’s perception from their conditioning influence. In


63

this sense, creativity comes close to love, or else love

could be seen as a form of creativity.

Krishnamurti stated that love is destructive in the

sense that it destroys existing perception patterns

and thus powerfully refreshes our regard on life, and

on ourselves.

It also happens, as de Bono repeatedly pointed

out, in humor. This is the reason why humor heals and

exerts such a positive influence not only on our mind

but also on our organism. Humor detoxifies the body

from accumulated old patterns that have restricted

our evolution.

To understand this reasoning we should keep in

mind that evolution can only take place where our re-

gard shifts. Evolution proceeds in a spiraled manner,

repeating the basic processes of one level of evolu-

tion on the next level, thus climbing one step higher

in the evolutionary scale. The form of the DNA, sym-

bol of all life, reminds it plastically.

Our regard can only shift in moments where condi-

tioning ends. This can happen during meditation or

during ‘creative pause.’ The way de Bono develops


64

creativity is based upon actively implying right-brain

capacities in our regular thought processes for bring-

ing about a more holistic process of thinking.

It is quite different from the Eastern approach

which was traditionally obsessed with the idea to de-

liberately stop thought in order to connect to the

higher realm of wisdom and creative thinking. For de

Bono, it is not to stop thinking but to think differently.

Another difference would be one of dynamics.

Both approaches, the ancient Eastern approach to

complete perception, and de Bono’s, have in com-

mon that they stress the ultimate importance of the

perception process as what it is, a movement.

In terms of the dynamics involved in the process of

perception, the Western and the Eastern approaches

differ.

The latter starts from the premise that only by

slowing down thought, by one’s detaching from the

thought content and by becoming passively aware,

we prepare for the unknown and thus become crea-

tive. For de Bono it is in the contrary a very active and

deliberate process of thinking to be learned and car-


65

ried out that will trigger the creativity response. This

difference in approaching the question typically rep-

resents the way in which East and West culturally dif-

fer.

It also makes clear what the essential difference is

between creativity and creativeness. De Bono’s lateral

thinking method is intentionally limited to bringing

about creative results on demand. It is not meant to

be an artist’s way of creation—it is not meant to teach

creativeness.

Krishnamurti’s educational approach, as the basis

of the Krishnamurti Schools definitely is a way to edu-

cate children within a continuum of gradual unfold-

ment through creative and holistic living. Krishna-

murti’s starting point was that institutionalized educa-

tion destroys intuition.

The third important factor in learning, next to di-

rect perception and intuition is self-regulation. Obser-

vation of nature, psychoanalysis and permissive, non-

authoritarian educational projects such as Summerhill

as well as modern systems theory demonstrate the

existence of an inherent mechanism of self-regulation

in all natural growth processes.


66

—See A.S. Neill, Summerhill (1961), pp. 29 ff. and

Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! (1972).

Permissive Education assumes that as a matter of

fact, children grow by themselves and thus we do not

need to artificially stimulate children’s emotions, chil-

dren’s sensitivity and children’s creativity. What we

have to look for is only that these values, which are

naturally present in every child, are not destroyed,

and thus preserved.

Children are by nature emotional, sensitive and

creative. It is society that destroys this integrity in

schools that are more like prisons than anything else,

and that subdue children and undermine their natural

self-esteem.

What we only have to care about is that children

receive adequate support so as to grow in an envi-

ronment that is nurturant for fostering their unique-

ness, their creative potential and their intrinsic talents.

Before the existence of schools, children were

raised by their parents and other adults present in the

extended family. They learned primarily by observa-

tion or by direct perception, picking up what they


67

needed for their later career, from their early environ-

ment. They do this still today, but there is less free-

dom in our society for children to grow up uncon-

trolled and unsupervised and develop their own emo-

tional and cognitive insights.

Conditioning is very strong in today’s industrialized

societies and the culture tries to impregnate children

from early age with its agenda and values.

De Bono, much like Lozanov, found that only in

early childhood learning, and especially in the way

young children learn their first language, we see na-

ture’s full intelligence at work.

It is a well-known fact that geniuses such as Ein-

stein or Picasso and most of our cherished cultural he-

roes never entered or finished school, dropped out or

flew it. These people know that they know better and

follow their instinct rather than an artificial learning

system that represents a considerable waste of time

and resources and that essentially violates human

dignity in the most flagrant way.

Life, seen through the eyes of a school system, is

but a mechanical, dead system that, pretty much in


68

the style of the vivisectionists, has to be killed in order

to be ready for study.

Until today, international organizations such as the

United Nations or UNICEF still adhere to concepts

such as alphabetization of the masses, and this de-

spite the fact that more and more research is accumu-

lated that shows that alphabetization alone has no

value at all without being imbedded in a school sys-

tem that respects the child as a unique individual and

creative and spiritually minded person in her own

right. Mass civilization, mass learning, mass standardi-

zation and mass indoctrination have led to a dehu-

manization of culture, and this on the global level.

These reductionist principles have led to worldwide

destruction and violence.

This cycle is currently undergoing a revision

through a total reformation of the educational and

pedagogical systems on a worldwide scale.

Learning through direct perception is the key. This

form of direct learning is not new, but actually very

old. Many of those who were and are considered as

stupid, recalcitrant, refractory or even criminal in the

traditional educational system are actually the intelli-


69

gent ones, the highly gifted ones and the ones with a

unique and original mindset.

They regularly know that true and original learning

is not what they can find in schools or colleges, relig-

ious or worldly, but what they directly and spontane-

ously comprehend, by observation, by the experience

of immediate perception that passes not through the

reasoning mind but through the still mind of the pas-

sive observer.

Let me explain more in detail what direct percep-

tion is about, using a famous example, Krishnamurti.

While in the meantime K is recognized to have been

one of humanity’s greatest spiritual teachers, he was

beaten daily in school by a violent and ignorant

teacher.

He was left utterly alone and would probably have

ended as the village idiot in Madanapalle, India, if not

the theosophists had taken him to England where he

was educated under their patronage.

Announced by seers as the New Messiahs, this

boy was found, at fourteen, at a beach side, ne-

glected, almost toothless, malnourished and in a pre-


70

carious health condition. His whole early environment

treated him without any respect, without any dignity

and, needless to add, without any intelligence.

Krishnamurti, as a little boy, rejected all knowledge

he was supposed to assimilate. He rejected the whole

of it, the whole of conditioning, societal, religious,

moral or whatever; and because of this refusal he was

treated with utter disrespect and violence, as so many

other children who, like him, prefer to remain in their

original state of mind that is pure and unspoiled, the

mind of a totally conscious direct observer Once freed

from the uncivil early environment, Krishnamurti learnt

everything, languages, behavior patterns of many dif-

ferent cultures, religious customs and traditions,

philosophical doctrines, literature, poetry, and even

worldly matters such as driving a car.

He, the little neglected boy became one of the

greatest teachers and philosophers of our times and

of all times. Krishnamurti learned through direct per-

ception and therefore his learning was immediate,

spontaneous and almost instantaneous, the learning

of a genius.


71

From his experience and deep insight into the

spiritual nature of man, he founded the Krishnamurti

Schools in India, Britain and the United States which

are truly alternative in terms of teaching because they

teach the wholeness of life and not fragmented and

isolated subjects.

Direct perception is the key to using our hidden

potential in hitherto unforeseen ways so as to achieve

miraculous results that we know only from people who

are called geniuses. Truly, we all possess the spark of

divine intelligence, able to pass beyond the limita-

tions of our conditioned mind once we are able to use

our whole brain.

Direct perception is a whole-brain experience.

Since the left brain is not primarily involved in it, the

language center is not, either. When we perceive truth

in an immediate way, we cannot put our experience in

words, because it did not come to us through words.

People who report direct perception experiences

almost always have difficulties to put their holistic

view into the limited corset of language. For example,

when children report to have seen Virgin Mary, as it

happened at repeated occasions in Zeitoun, Egypt, in


72

Fatima, Portugal or in Lourdes, France, they are

speechless at first. Even adults, when witnessing a

miracle, tend to lose control over their choice of

words or just repeat the same words over and over

again.

—See Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe

(1992).

Similarly, in situations of shock or trauma, we lose

speech for a while. Why is that so?

I suppose that in such situations, our brain uses

temporarily an archaic survival pattern that energizes

first of all the brain stem and the right brain, activat-

ing basic mechanisms of flight and fight. Survival

works without the involvement of the neocortex and

thus without the involvement of the language center

which is located there. It is in this mode of functioning

that direct perception takes place.

When there is danger for life, the brain switches

into survival mode and triggers the survival response.

It does so because this mode of reaction is much

faster than reasoning, thought and language.


73

Of course, what the brain does in danger, it can

also do in peace. We only have to understand how

the brain triggers the immediate response so that we

can let it work for learning purposes.

What then is evolution actually about? Looking

back in history and becoming aware of the high level

of wisdom that humanity possessed in ancient times,

we cannot seriously claim that there was evolution at

all. In the contrary, humanity has devolved during the

process of what we use to call civilization, at least

since the last part of this process, which are grossly

the last five thousand years, the time of patriarchy.

It is for this reason that today we must head into

developing the parts of the brain that have been left

out by evolution, the right brain hemisphere and the

brain stem.

It will begin with relearning how to learn, with un-

locking our potential for true receptiveness, for

whole-brain learning, for using our brain for what it is

destined for: learning by absorbing whole patterns

instead of isolated pieces of knowledge.


74

It will begin with consciousness-based holistic

education, and it will be with electronic learning. And

eventually it will pass into the school systems world-

wide.

As long as we continue to bring up and being

brought up in systems where our true intelligence

agonizes and dies, we will breed but confusion and

violence. And there is no question that, then, we will

not be able to master the challenges of the new era

we are heading into: the Information Age, the New

Age, the Aquarius Age.

Only through holistic solutions that involve our

wholeness and the integration of all parts of our be-

ing will we be able to survive in the mess that we our-

selves, or past generations, have left over to us.

Learning through direct perception is the way out,

and it is actually a way back to true intelligence and to

the teachings of the ancient mystery schools where

perennial wisdom was once taught to an elite.


75

Learning and Career

Creative career design is one of the most impor-

tant yet also one the most challenging tasks of civil

administration.

It actually requires a joint cooperation of govern-

ment and industry so that workable solutions can be

implemented.

This is even more so as career design or generally

professional formation is a long-term endeavor.

Educational structures are rooted in social and cul-

tural conventions and are therefore not easy to

change. It takes a considerable effort from the side of

the decision-makers involved to come up with crea-

tive new solutions.

Our times bring profound change in all areas of

life. Jobs get lost through structural changes on a

worldwide scale. Rebuilding the world economy

brings much suffering if educational needs are not

met in time. One of the most urgent educational

needs is a closer connection between education and

the industry. That is where career design comes in.


76

Creative career design remodels education in a

way to be more flexibly adapted to the demands and

expectations of the industry. This can for example be

done through implementing think-tank classes like

The Art of Learning in the school system. In those

classes no specific skills are taught, but the how to of

learning. Social scientists and psychologists agree

that in the future job changes will occur much more

often in our lives and careers as before.

This brings about the need to take up learning al-

most constantly during one’s lifetime. Formerly, it was

generally sufficient to have learned one specific job or

skill in order to survive as a craftsman or employee.

Today and tomorrow this is going to change quite

dramatically. Individual development and social

change are required today and tomorrow at such a

speed that there is certainty about one thing only:

that there will be change!

Laurence G. Boldt, career consultant, stresses that

most of his clients come to get a ready-made solution

for their career problems. Boldt says that most people

lack initiative to see a wider perspective of profes-

sional possibilities and do not understand that it is


77

their limited thinking much more than a lack of spe-

cific skills that led to their unemployment. On the

other hand, Boldt found that people can hardly be

blamed for their apathy since they come out of a

highly rigid educational system that is impregnated

with the belief that once you went successfully

through the required stuff, you will make it later on.

—See, for example, Laurence G. Boldt, Zen and the

Art of Making a Living (1993) and The Tao of Abun-

dance (1999).

What we learn is at the end of the day far less im-

portant than how we learn what we learn, and what

we generally think about learning. Specialists agree

that those who rapidly acquire a wide perspective

about opportunities, and who develop motivation and

excitement for new learning easily overcome reces-

sion periods and find new ways of successful em-

ployment or even entrepreneurship. For example,

they may choose freelancing as a new and creative

possibility of earning their life.

Freelancing has gained widespread reputation be-

cause it is much better adapted to the quick changes

modern life brings along. Freelancing also ensures a


78

basically free and relatively creative professional life

without too many restraints and thus contributes to an

independent lifestyle.

On the other hand, the financial situation of the

freelancer typically is unstable and rather fluctuant.

But for many people, especially in creative profes-

sions such as creative writing, design, art, music pro-

duction, consulting and nowadays telecommunica-

tions and networking, freelancing is preferred be-

cause it ensures space for creativity and inventiveness.

Another quality freelancers must possess is toughness

to market their product through a morass of compet-

ing alternatives.

However, freelancing is not based on knowledge

we acquire in school. Much to the contrary, none of

the typical characteristics a successful freelancer

needs are taught in school.

There is almost no emphasis, in traditional up-

bringing, upon independence, nor on creativity or

positive forms of aggressiveness or at least care-

freeness. Yet, compared to both employment and en-

trepreneurship, freelancing is one of the fastest grow-

ing fields of professional realization. Freelancing is


79

also well suited to survive structural change and diver-

sification. Compared to employment, it offers a lot

more freedom and space for creative impact on one’s

life while it does not generally require the huge finan-

cial investments that are typical for free entrepreneur-

ship.

It is after all irresponsible from the side of gov-

ernments to stay with our outdated and depleted

educational system. This system namely is fundamen-

tally inadequate to keep up with the present, and

even more so, the future requirements for successful

and satisfying professional endeavor.

We are since long beyond the times where gov-

ernments educated people to become either blissful

soldiers or thankful breeding machines for new off-

spring to be readily killed in the next war or civil war.

Despite the urgent need for reform, governments

tend to cut costs at the frontline of education rather

than in military budgets or through bureaucracy re-

duction. This is why chances are that only through a

well-thought strategy of intervention from the side of

the industry, changes may occur on the government

side.


80

Bureaucracies are not likely to initiate change from

inside out. Evolutionary processes therefore have to

take place from outside in, through consultancy or

through joint-ventures between government and in-

dustry.

The first step in this process of structural change

would be to raise awareness about how and to what

extent a networked world and an international mar-

ketplace molds the human potential, and what we can

learn from that.

This is an assessment that is relatively easy to be

done. It will bring about the insight that there is an

amazing similarity of the human qualities needed in

modern market competition all over the world, which

are not dependent on culture, race or social condi-

tioning. Some of these qualities are:

‣ Flexibility, adaptability

‣ Intellectual mobility

‣ Curiosity

‣ Ability to play with concepts


81

‣ Creativity and response-ability

‣ Integrity and commitment

‣ Readiness for change and personal growth

‣ Readiness for team work

‣ Readiness for sharing

‣ Interdependent thinking

‣ Understanding about networking and team lead-ership

‣ Readiness for stewardship

‣ Care and quality management

‣ Awareness of social, cultural and environmental factors

Individuals who possess these qualities can learn

any of the skills needed for the specific tasks they are

dealing with in their career. Skills are always at the pe-

riphery of the personality whereas qualities are part of

our inside nature. Skills are built on qualities, and not

vice versa. Where there are no inner qualities, skills


82

may be trained but they will vanish because the fertile

ground for their growth is missing.

Typically, inner qualities are assembled in an atti-

tude. Hence, the importance of attitude training and

its superiority over mere skill-based training.

Human resources and endowments are often

wasted because this fundamental distinction is widely

misunderstood or even ignored in the business world.

In my experience, in management training all over the

world, the general emphasis is on skills. However, the

truth is that a person who is really dedicated and pos-

sesses the right attitude will easily acquire the skills

she needs for realizing her inner qualities on an out-

side level.

Skills incarnate qualities and make them visible

reality. Before they can be learnt, a seed must be

planted inside. Qualities are these inner seeds. And

there must have been a growth process to let this

seed unfold.

Seen from this perspective, the obsession with in-

culcating skills seems almost grotesque, as if people

were discussing a lot about the color and furnish of a


83

new car they want to buy while they do not even know

if this car can be built and construed and made avail-

able for purchase in their market economy.

Only a deep concern and commitment from the

top of both government and industry can bring about

a fundamental reform of the existing vocational train-

ing.

This must result in providing the funds, in bringing

the right people together, and in a consistent imple-

mentation of the new career policies. It cannot be

done through quick fixes such as putting computers

in schools or stating in curricula that creative input

from pupils should be encouraged and valued. Only a

holistic solution that is brought about in joint coop-

eration by all decision-makers involved will finally as-

sure the victory over the deep crisis of education we

presently face. These are some of the changes that

could and should be implemented:

‣ Joint operations between government and indus-try for the adaptation of education to modern standards;

‣ A task-force that is jointly composed of govern-ment representatives, industry leaders and con-


84

sultants to work out operational solutions that provide a high-quality and at the same time flexi-ble educational standard that allows graduates to adapt creatively to every possible professional challenge;

‣ Educational curricula to be worked out jointly with industry experts, such as H.R. managers, training consultants and teachers in order to en-sure their effectiveness;

‣ Curricula to be revised on a more consistent and more frequent basis than ever before;

‣ Learning results measured more in terms of inte-grative and holistic thinking capacities and solution-centeredness than measured in terms of specific knowledge or skills;

‣ Learning strategies implemented that focus on the development of creativity and integrated or parallel thinking capacities as an add-on to ana-lytic and merely logical forms of thinking training;

‣ Industry funding for educational innovations based upon the rationale that the industry has a vivid interest to sponsor more practice-oriented educational solutions; the higher the practical usefulness of graduates for the industry, the less training budget corporations have to spend on them;


85

‣ Job search offices or resource centers at every school and university that provide service for graduates to find a job, that organize regular meetings with representatives of the industry, that provide free writing facilities such as computers, phone and fax connections, and C.V. writing serv-ices for users.

Points to Ponder

‣ In Chapter One, we have seen that ‘schooling’ and ‘career’ do not necessarily mean the same, and that upon a closer look they actually reveal to be quite different experiences in the sense that our schooling simply is inadequate to prepare us for our career.

‣ As most mainstream schools around the world have not yet implemented effective learning methods that are based upon the brain’s func-tioning as a patterned and neuronally structured system, the ‘learning’ part of school for most in-telligent people consists in more or less elaborat-ing their own learning effectiveness. In other words, these people achieve brilliantly not be-cause of school, but despite of school.

‣ For most high achievers, decision-making about school and emotional survival is clear-cut in the sense that it regularly turns out to be that either the person develops their own learning system and persistently follows it, or the person drops


86

out. Examples for the latter type of learners are notorious, to cite only Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. An example for the first type of learners is myself.

‣ We also saw in this chapter that when we follow the brain’s inbuilt patterned structure, when we setup learning in the way that children learn their first language, that is, by pattern recognition in-stead of ingesting fragmented learning input, we learn much faster and our learning effectiveness will be much higher.

‣ On this same line of reasoning, learning motiva-tion evaporates when competition thinking creeps in or when learning is coercive in the sense that failure is met with punishment. That is why under the old paradigm school was often traumatic for sensitive, gifted and intelligent chil-dren in that it all happened in a climate of terror and fear. In addition, people might then be blocked for lifetime against new learning of any kind.

‣ For learning foreign languages, no study of grammar is needed, as all grammar of all lan-guages is known by our memory interface in the sense that when we pick up whole patterns of the new language, we automatically pick up the grammar. So learning grammar is actually a gi-gantic waste of time and energy. Among other modern learning techniques, Suggestopedia or Superlearning, created by the Bulgarian psychia-


87

trist and pedagogue Dr. Georgi Lozanov, proves that foreign languages can be learnt perfectly and comfortably, and almost effortlessly, without learning any grammar, and in a minimum of time.

‣ Regularly, with this method, difficult languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian or Turkish can be learnt in two months, at conversation level, and speakers will pronounce words like native speak-ers, without accent.

‣ When we look at the notion of holistic learning, we see that it is closely related to perception, and that perception as a holistic process has never got much scientific attention in our society be-cause our science is so much focused upon in-formation processing. Hence, we should take a pragmatic approach and ask how we can improve learning results despite of our culture’s aloofness for changing the learning paradigm?

‣ The first factor to consider in our endeavor to im-prove learning effectiveness are preferred path-ways, and the fact that we can create, even in ad-vanced age, new preferred neuronal pathways in our brain, thereby deliberately changing our neu-ronet.

‣ While early neurology was telling us that after the first six years of life, the neuronet in our brain got its definite form and could basically not be changed, cutting-edge research in psychoneuro-


88

immunology showed that we can impact upon our neuronet at any time in our life, and that we can both dissolve and build new neuronal con-nections through appropriate techniques, the use of deliberate intention and what is nowadays called ‘Creating Your Own Reality.’

‣ The second factor to consider is to realize what direct perception means and how we can im-prove our ability for perceiving reality directly, and not through the filter of our belief system.

‣ The third and last factor to consider is how learn-ing and career hang together and what could be done for improving career design in the sense of increasing our personal career chances and long-term professional satisfaction.


89

Chapter Two

Creative Learning and Realization

❊

What is Creativity?

In order to find out about the process of creativity,

let us see the factors that produce non-creativity.

More than 90% of our life is routine!

We move, clean, plan, manage events, we ar-

range, we prepare, we repeat, we store, and so on.

Not even ten percent of our time do we spend with

creating things, inventing new methods, changing ex-

isting routines, or finding new ways of doing. We all

have creative impulses, but for most of us, when they

surge up, they pass unnoticed because we do not

value them.

The majority of people think that we can’t change

the awkward misbalance between routines and me-

chanical procedures, on one hand, and creative, in-

ventive work, on the other. As exceptions from what

they take as the rule, they cite the geniuses, people

like Picasso, Dali, Bach, Rachmaninov, or Gershwin,

people who were creative all the time.

Let us have a look at art, first of all. Let us find out

why at all humans produce art. Has there ever been a

serious inquiry about how art comes into being, and

why? What drives us to become artists, to develop ar-

tistic talent?

Most of us seem to think that artists are born and

that not everybody can become or be an

artist. However, work with children has shown me that

basically everyone has creative capacities and is a po-

tential artist. This is an insight not personal to me, but

common experience of educators, psychoanalysts

and art therapists.

—See Otto Rank, Art and Artist (1932), Brewster

Ghiselin (Ed.), The Creative Process (1952/1985),

Shaun McNiff, Trust the Process (1998) and Art as

Medicine (1992). More generally, see Don Richard

Riso & Russ Hudson, The Wisdom of the Ennea-

gram (1999), Jean Houston, The Possible Human


92

(1982), Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body

(1992) and George Leonard & Michael Murphy, The

Life We Are Given (2005).

As every child is an artist, why then do so many

adults perform so poorly when asked to be creative or

spontaneous? The simple reason is that most of us do

not realize their inherent artistic potential and disre-

gard artistic intuitions and creative impulses they pos-

sessed in childhood.

This is so because many, if not the majority, are

caught in a network of obligations that they have

themselves created, and which renders them deaf to

the voice of their inner child. Some however are

searching for a way back to the connection they had

as small children with their original unspoiled mind.

They try to get away from second-hand lives in order

to live a first-hand life, which is their own life, their

true destiny.

They may search religious paths or follow a ther-

apy, or whatever, to get started in the daring adven-

ture of finding back to themselves. Yet not all thera-

pies or spiritual paths lead to the desired liberation.

Some of them have the contrary effect and incarcer-

CREATIVE LEARNING AND REALIZATION

93

ate their followers in a still tighter net of rules and

musts or even try to destroy any creative impulse in

them.

As a matter of fact, art seems to be of primary im-

portance for sublimating our asocial urges and long-

ings. This is not only a Freudian theory, but the result

of research on biographies and autobiographies of a

great number of artists. This research shows that most

artists actually suffer from high psychic tension.

In fact, many artists carry a childhood trauma all

along their lives. This is generally known more from

the lives of writers than from musicians or visual art-

ists. Yet some painters were open about their inner

life, such as Salvador Dali, and wrote extensively

about it.

Others, such as van Gogh or Juan Miró, did not.

But in these cases, we have biographical sources and

documentary reports from their contemporaries and

know details about their life stories. Sometimes it is

not much and therefore the theoretical ground for ex-

tracting knowledge from personal biographies is still

quite slippery. To summarize, much more research


94

needs to be done on the psychological function of

art.

The next point to elucidate is the effect art pro-

duction has in the life of an artist. Does the produc-

tion of art lead to a liberation of inhibited or blocked

emotional or sexual longings, or to instinctual subli-

mation? Is the major effect, thus, of art, in the life of

the artist, a liberation of the inner tensions the artist

suffers from? Can it also be said that art leads for the

devoted artist to liberation in the spiritual sense? In

other words, is art an essentially spiritual activity? Be-

sides, does it have a therapeutic effect, in the sense

that it brings about a kind of healing of childhood or

karmic trauma?

As a matter of fact, art is for most artists the outlet

for tensions, the way they channel their energy in a

constructive trail, and their own unique manner to

overcome deep frustration.

Of course, all of us experience frustration and hurt,

but the problem is that most of us do not act counter

to it and let these negative imprints on their self-

esteem penetrate inside and break something off. I

am speaking of a critical moment when something


95

hurts so much that we give up, that we slacken our

efforts and begin to pity ourselves. This inner rupture

in the creative flow can indeed have a traumatic effect

in case we remain completely passive, and when we

share some or the other fatalistic life philosophy.

Strong natures, by contrast, act immediately! Not

on the outside level perhaps, but on the inner level.

They don’t allow being hurt deep down and instead

use one method or the other to overcome their hurts

and frustrations. They may pray, if they have got a re-

ligious mind, or they create, if they are artists. Or they

travel or go gambling. But they do something about

their problem, about their damaged self-worth, and

positively so, namely by building positive appraisal

and self-appraisal through overcoming, without re-

sentment, the frustration or the hurt, thus becoming

stronger.

Artists surely spend considerable time working out

their artistic inspirations, but in their lives there is what

I call a creative balance between creation and some

routines, some techniques.

Picasso mastered painting techniques despite the

fact that he never attended an art school. He simply


96

learned them, but of course in his own unique way,

and not by joining schools. Picasso did not spend

ninety percent of his time working on improving his

mere technique, and only ten percent on creating

paintings.

What he actually did was simply painting. In paint-

ing like other people eat or drink, in painting what

came to his mind, he held the flame of inspiration

burning while at the same time improving his painting

technique.

That is why Picasso’s life was balanced and—

happy! Svjatoslav Richter, in an interview where he

was asked to give advice on effectively training piano

playing said: ‘The best way to train piano is to play

piano, to play music as it should be played—per-

fectly.’

That sounds like a truism; yet I followed Richter’s

advice for now about forty years, and the result is that

I can today not only perform piano better than at

twenty, when I was practicing the piano for several

hours a day, but I also realized a whole series of col-

lections with my own music!


97

Richter did not mean to be tautological in his

statement, but implied that it is better to play a piece

that is technically demanding but of high musical

quality, and to play it in a masterful way, instead of

hacking around in an etude that may be easier to per-

form but that is a piece of musical crap.

In one word, it’s not the technique that makes the

excellent pianist but the excellent musician inside the

pianist. To train this musician, you have to use music,

not pseudo-music. And there is a lot of pedagogy

built in real music because most great composers

were reputed piano pedagogues.

Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, De-

bussy, to mention only these, were highly gifted com-

posers, but also outstanding instrumentalists, and ex-

cellent teachers. They did not want their students’

creativity to be ruined by dull repetitive etudes with-

out musical value. So they created their own peda-

gogy. To begin with, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the

Inventions and the Well-Tempered Clavier for this

purpose. The same standard is set for the organ by

Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, composed as a study for be-

ginners on the organ. These pieces are true musical


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jewels. To play them perfectly, on a piano, a harpsi-

chord, a church organ or even a modern synthesizer is

the best technical and musical school for Baroque

style a musician can ever have.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the Sonate fac-

ile, the C-major Sonata KV 545, for teaching purposes

and as a study piece for every new student that joined

his master class. To play this sonata with perfection is

the best exercise for playing Mozart, and also for play-

ing scales, and can never be equaled by any of those

dull and dry exercise books.

Frédéric Chopin was even more radical; he revolu-

tionized the entire piano technique and declared as

abysmally wrong most of Czerny’s pedagogy. He

composed two volumes of piano etudes, op. 10 and

op. 24, that each contain twelve etudes of major diffi-

culty and extraordinary beauty. They serve today in

the formation of virtually any concert pianist around

the world. Chopin not only revolutionized musical

harmony, but also the fingerings, allowing inter alia for

the thumb to play on black keys, something that was

taboo in Czerny’s classical piano pedagogy.


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Franz Liszt, like Chopin, was an excellent peda-

gogue and revolutionized pianistic theory and prac-

tice; his Transcendental Etudes are real show pieces

of glamour, virtuosity and genius that can only be

mastered by very advanced pianists.

Liszt, like Chopin, was expanding the dynamic

range of the piano in ways that would have sounded

like utopia in classical times.

Serge Rachmaninov’s Etudes Tableaux, op. 33 and

op. 39, are based very much on the artistry and tech-

nique of Chopin and Liszt, but bear their own, very

uniquely Russian musical language. Contrary to many

musical critics, I defend the view that Rachmaninov

also contributed to the piano world with a huge body

of pianistic novelty, but he was not well understood in

the Western world, which I think simply is due to the

neurosis of the ‘classical music’ world that is stuck with

their Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin and Liszt to be re-

peated ad absurdum. It was largely the merit of Svja-

toslav Richter to have changed the musical world’s

understanding in this respect; it was Richter’s genius

and commitment that made many in the West under-

stand, perhaps for the first time, the tremendous mu-


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sical power and the etheric beauty and distinct emo-

tionality of Rachmaninov’s, Scriabin’s, Prokofiev’s and

Shostakovich’s musical language.

Debussy then further revolutionized piano tech-

nique as he went beyond Liszt and Chopin, and has to

be considered a real modernist. His two volumes of

piano etudes belong to the most difficult-to-play

pieces in piano literature, and they are not played of-

ten, probably because of lacking understanding of

their very modern and avant-garde harmonics and

their hairy difficulties.

How Creativity Manifests

We all need to cut off the flow of thought from

time to time and take a leave from thinking and plan-

ning. Most of us are stuck in repetitive thought pat-

terns, bored and lacking motivation for regular travels

into the landscape of the right brain.

You can use relaxation, meditation, yoga or Zen,

spontaneous art or writing, whatever gets you more

integrated will do. If you refuse to take regular leaves

from what seems all-too-important to you, you will get


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stuck, and your creativity potential will go down the

river.

We should not wonder why the world changes so

slowly for the better. As long as the deepest source of

our human potential is not only a desert land, but

even disdained, we can fly a hundred times to the

moon without ever grasping it!

The real flight to the moon is that of our imagina-

tion, not that of armored astronauts and robots who

carry out the orders of bureaucrats who want to make

history. History—with what? The general lack of crea-

tivity that is part of every bureaucracy is especially de-

structive at the university level and, even earlier, at

school. Children brought up in the tiring boredom of

school-prisons will never really fully access their deep-

down creativity and originality.

As civilization progresses, creativity is more and

more linked to technology. Today, universities in the

United States, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore or Hong

Kong that are deeply involved in providing the best in

new technologies and new forms of learning are also

very concerned about awakening and maintaining

creativity in their students and, first of all, their teach-


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ers! For the rest, I question the general excuse that

there is no money or no budget or no whatever. In

most countries, there is no creativity at the top gov-

ernment level! That’s where the root of the problem

is! Governments that are merely focused upon prob-

lem solving or problem-maintenance have no idea of

what the potential of a creative government is.

The first step towards a creative government is

not, as many believe, more money or more technol-

ogy, but more interest! Without interest, genuine in-

volvement, openness and flexibility it is impossible to

progress on any level. Interest is the fruit of motiva-

tion, and motivation, in turn, is the result of high self-

esteem.

Creative people I know and have heard of all share

one common character trait: they are very curious.

They are interested. They feel involved. They have

high self-esteem. They are non-conformist.

All uncreative people I know or have heard of

share their general lack of involvement, their general

disinterest in life, their lack of curiosity combined with

a certain level of accumulated frustration and negativ-

ism, and a high level of conformity.


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Curiosity and joy are very closely related. There is

lots of joy in curiosity, and lots of sadness in people

who lack this primary quality of being human.

Creativity and Democracy

Creativity is democracy. No dictator can rule a

mass of creative people. Thus striving for more de-

mocracy means enhancing creativity in our pre-

schools, schools and universities. Those who have de-

veloped their creative potential are individuals in the

true sense. What is individus cannot be divided, can-

not be split off, cannot be manipulated. Therefore

creativity is threatening dictatorial governments and,

generally, stiff hierarchical systems.

This is also true for the private sector. Organiza-

tions that put their trust in a system of punishment

and reward, regarding their employees as machine

wheels will never really motivate them to give their

best. By contrast, companies adopting a person-first

approach and stimulating the originality and creativity

of their employees will definitely profit from the input

their staff will provide, and prosper on many different

levels.


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Fortune 500 companies around the world have

given positive evidence for that truth. Since creativity

is deeply linked to the expression of human potential,

it is related to self-esteem and self-worth. It is impos-

sible to enhance self-esteem in people without re-

specting their creativity. There is nothing more satisfy-

ing and rewarding than to create and express oneself

through the channel of one’s intrinsic and original tal-

ents and gifts. This is true also on a political level.

Governments who lead with policies that enhance

creative living and favor new inventions will make their

countries prosper whereas those who belittle human

creativity will decay at the end of the day. We may

produce marvelous tools for creativity such as the

personal computer or the World Wide Web, but with-

out implementing policies to make sure that a large

number of people have access to those media and

can express themselves creatively in them, we have a

paper democracy.

Democracy and human dignity being interde-

pendent, it is vital in an advanced civilization for the

new media and technologies to really enhance crea-

tive expression and to not just represent wonderful

shells without content, or a content that is not worth


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its wrapping. Imagine how much more effective our

schools would be if more space was given to chil-

dren’s creativity instead of wasting time and resources

with struggling year by year through boring curricula

that satisfy only the needs of bureaucrats rather than

enhancing the effectiveness of learning!

And it is there where democracy begins: in the

school, in the kindergarten. Election strategies are ri-

diculous inventions as long as the people who choose

do not know what they choose or have no choice for a

better alternative because all the political candidates

play the same false game! Therefore it is vital for any

democracy to reform the educational system and

adapt it to the needs of the future.

Presently, there is no higher priority than the need

to create a creative and playful learning environment

where the human potential is really put to the service

of the individual and the community at the same time.

Creative balance in this context means to shift the

emphasis from advancing in technology to a cultural

mix and equilibrium between left-brain and right-

brain policies so as to foster our natural human ability


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to create and to find new original solutions within es-

tablished technical and procedural frameworks.

We can have hundreds of ‘creativity boosting’

workshops that pursue this goal, but with a fraction of

the investment of time and resources the same can be

achieved on a much larger scale once we educate our

children differently, giving them more space and free-

dom to express their natural creativity. Since children

without anxiety and neurotic blockages are naturally

creative, we do not need much input to stimulate

their creativity. What we have to do is rather to dimin-

ish the factors that block their creativity, by for exam-

ple doing away with authoritarian forms of education,

stiff hierarchical structures in the organization of

schools and the teaching staff, and first of all punish-

ments, be they moral, psychological or corporal, and,

most importantly, the modeling of children after he-

roes or other figures of veneration. The latter is per-

haps the subtlest, most effective and most destructive

form of dictatorship.

Many societies today follow the example of the

United States since they consider the American sys-

tem as the most advanced. What they forget is the


107

origin of the American culture, which is quite unique

in that it was, since its start, based upon hegemony,

genocide, cultural rape and patriarchal dominance.

Cultures are living organisms and grow organically.

Social institutions and all the ingredients of a civiliza-

tion cannot be seen separated from the culture in

which they were born. It is therefore erroneous to just

cut off a piece of flesh from a culture in order to feed

another with it. Human history is full of attempts to

deport not only humans but also systems or organ-

isms from one culture into another. If the outcome is

not a complete disaster, something different of what

was expected will surely be the result.

For example, the Japanese, when they began

producing cars, thought that their key to success was

to copy the American car. The result? The Japanese

car. After admitting their failure the Japanese saw that

their market was not within the large and expensive

car range but in the small and economic one. So they

set out to copy the European car. The result? The

Japanese car.

Now judge by yourself. Do Japanese cars really

look like European ones? Of course not. As a result of


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all their copying, the Japanese finally saw that people,

if they wanted to buy a Japanese car wanted a car

that looked like a Japanese car and not like a Euro-

pean car. Which meant that the Japanese car looked

better, and often was also technically better, than a

European counterpart of the same price range.

So with the Japanese car market it was not a fail-

ure but the second alternative: the outcome was to-

tally different of what the Japanese had expected

when they started out producing cars.

We all know examples of technology transfer fal-

ling within the first category. We do not even need to

remember spectacular cases like old factories that In-

dia bought from Krupp in Germany without thinking

that they also needed skilled workers to operate

them—with the disastrous result that huge invest-

ments were done for nothing and India was sitting on

their inoperable factories like the hen on the egg,

only that this egg remained sterile. It is everyday ex-

perience in a world that gets more tightly intercon-

nected that governments, organizations or private

companies try to implement policies into other gov-

ernments, organizations or private companies in other


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parts of the world, in other cultures, without consider-

ing that cultures create their own bio-organisms

within which certain things grow and certain others

not, even if they flourish elsewhere.

Creative governments and organizations will keep

in mind that creativity is always connected to the hu-

man element, and they will therefore value the human

element before all! They will not so easily overesti-

mate technology and stay away from transferring

technology or concepts from one culture into another.

They will rather want to enhance the creative po-

tential of their own people, their own students, their

own professionals, their own civil servants. And crea-

tivity will mean to them an important requirement to

exploit the human resources they naturally have at

their disposition within their own culture, instead of

grafting their plants with sprouts that grew in a differ-

ent soil.

Creativity and Individuality

Creativity is directly related to individuality. This

may be one reason that in cultures where individuality

is regarded as a secondary value, creativity is not con-


110

sidered as a primary value either. As a general rule, it

is true that cultures that value the individual only as

member of a greater unity such as the group, the clan,

or political, religious and social communities have lit-

tle or no regard for the innermost potential of the in-

dividual.

Astonishingly in such cultures, teamwork is not

functioning better than elsewhere, but worse.

This is a paradox since in those cultures education

is much more community-oriented than in the West,

and much less centered upon the individual. It took

me quite a time to find out the cause of this seeming

paradox.

For more than a year I was carefully listening to

dozens of hotel and bank directors, airline top execu-

tives, human resource directors, university deans and

government officials in Indonesia. And I heard every-

where the following unison complaints:

‣ General lack of effectiveness;

‣ High level of miscommunication;

‣ Lack of team stability and team effectiveness;


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‣ Lack of loyalty;

‣ Lack of responsibility (response-ability);

‣ Lack of innovation ability;

‣ Lack of flexibility;

‣ Lack of personal profile.

This valuable information helped me to coin my

training approach into a product that was really useful

for the needs of my corporate clients. My creativity-

oriented training concept had to be completely modi-

fied if I wanted to succeed in that market. Yet I could

not figure out why team work was so difficult in the

Indonesian corporate culture considering the fact that

education in the family in that culture is highly clan-

centered and community-oriented.

—See, for example, Gordon D. Jensen & Luh Ketut

Suryani, The Balinese People (1992)

Was this not the ideal soil for socializing people,

for getting them to be highly synergistic in the team?


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It should be so, logically. But it wasn’t, in the opin-

ion of most of the leaders of that country, and in my

own observation. Why?

I again evaluated my previous research on the

roots of creativity and personal effectiveness in order

to find the key to this riddle. ‘What is a team?’ I asked

myself, repeatedly. ‘What is it that makes a team ef-

fective?’ And where is it? Is it outside or is it inside?’

And suddenly it flashed through my mind that it is

not outside, but inside. ‘Inside, where? Inside the

team?’ No. ‘Inside the individuals that make out the

team?’ Yes. ‘So if it is inside the individuals, is it per-

haps something related to individuality itself?’

But, this cannot be, this would be highly, highly

paradox! The more somebody is individualized, the

more he or she is able to function effectively in a

team? No, that could not be. Could it? I went again

through my research on codependence and my ex-

tensive work with the inner dialogue, and suddenly I

saw it as clearly as a diamond in front of my eyes!

There was no doubt that effective relationships on the

outside level, with others, require an effective rela-


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tionship of the person with herself, with all our differ-

ent inner entities.

In other words, somebody who has never built his

inner team cannot function well in the teamwork with

others. And further, somebody who is symbiotically

attached to others, family, friends, siblings, spouse,

clubs or sects will not be able to work creatively with

others because creative relationships require space

for every partner involved in the creative relationship.

After having reached this insight, I modified my

original concept for corporate training and inserted a

basic voice dialogue and spontaneous art program in

it.

Later I saw that I had been on the right track with

this, my workshops having become highly successful.

However, success was only possible if I was able to

motivate the group on a deeper than conscious level

so as to enter this journey.

Still today, almost twenty years later, individuality

still seems to be considered either a Western inven-

tion or a threat to many societies. I had learned a lot

from the experience, because I saw that I imperatively


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had to begin on a personal, and not a corporate level,

for training high motivation, commitment, and effec-

tiveness.

Society is formed by individuals, while cultural

norms define the individual’s involvement and behav-

ior in the group. That is why, serving the individual

rather than the group, and focusing on enhancing in-

dividuality rather than group-adherence, group think-

ing and group progress, I serve also the group and

the culture. It goes from bottom to top and from in-

side out—and not vice versa.

The Creative Continuum

Let us shortly inquire what is the general impact

that creativity has in our life, and particularly why it

changes everything and brings everything to change,

why it transforms our body, our soul, our whole organ-

ism, why it even influences the growth of our cells?

If you don’t believe in the miracle of creativity, if

you deny its existence, the whole process cannot un-

fold effectively for you. It is very important that you

develop first of all a basic openness for wonder, for

the unexpected, the miraculous in life. And then, that


115

you also expect it to happen in your life! As it is writ-

ten in A Course in Miracles (2005), miracles are habits,

and should be involuntary.

They should not be under conscious control, and

they are natural, they are an exchange with love, the

great potential of love in you and in all. What I call

The Creative Continuum (CC) is the whole of this

process.

One of the general traits of the Aquarius Age into

which we are presently heading is a strong emphasis

on the individual as opposed to the collective, the

group. This will have important repercussions on pro-

fessional choices and, in general, career options.

While it is true that many jobs are presently getting

lost during this global structural change, it is equally

true that a lot of new professions are surging up with

the creation of new markets. And these new profes-

sions deal a whole lot more with entertainment,

pleasure, health, beauty and lifestyle than ever be-

fore. This is so because Aquarian society is a complex,

pluralistic, individualistic, hedonistic and freedom-

oriented society. This means that everybody will attain

a considerable capacity of expressing themselves in


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public. All the tools will be at hand, and already are so

today, for those who are willing to throw themselves

into the exciting adventure of self-expression.

However, schools do not educate our youth in any

way for this new adventure. In the contrary, our out-

dated, moralistic and highly patriarchal school system

handicaps children emotionally and raises them with

very low self-esteem, like irresponsible slaves who

have to be protected.

The fundamental paradigm shift in networked cul-

ture is one from uniformity to diversification, and one

from group choices to individual choices. This is why

our educational system has to change as well, in order

to reflect the paradigm shift. For if we refuse doing

this, we will end up either producing people for non-

existing professions or have more and more unquali-

fied people on the job markets. As governments are

not seeming to see the urgency of this task, there is

no other way than to appeal to private creativity to

bring about this necessary change.

The secret of high creativity is a close contact with

self or soul. A continuum is something like a holistic

framework of references that determines our life and


117

is at the very basis of our specific way of experiencing

living.

The continuum concept also implies that this

frame of reference is harmonious and makes that our

life is well balanced.

—See only Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept

(1977/1986).

When we live within our continuum we are gener-

ally happy, aware that our life has a deep fundamental

meaning.

We may even better understand this expression if

we look at it from a negative point of view.

Those who do not live within their continuum tend

to be unhappy, depressed, neurotic, schizophrenic,

and they often depend on artificial stimuli like the

media, drugs, or alcohol, if they are not outright sui-

cidal. It means that one is alienated from one’s inner

self, determined by outside forces, and regulated by

random influences.

Living in our continuum means to lead a first-hand

life. We have never learned this in school since


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schools do not teach happiness nor wholeness nor

even understanding of the regulating principles of

life, the truly religious principles in the sense of the

word religio that originally means back-link to our true

identity.

All our power hangups come from the fact that

most of us feel they are impeded from creating their

own reality. But this impediment is inside, not outside.

It comes about through inner fragmentation. We are

split into a real me and a moral me. The first lives with

what is, the second strives for what should be.

As a compensation for this basic lack of happiness,

we condition and violate ourselves into conformity,

thereby conditioning us also into violating others, into

overpowering others, and in regulating and manipu-

lating others, instead of caring for ourselves in the

first place.

At the same time, alienated from our true source,

we try to imitate and follow others, gurus or political

leaders. In following people who seek power, we lose

power. And, what is even worse, we may then equally

try to seek power over others, and so the vicious circle

is taken from one generation to the next. We can


119

avoid this pitfall by simply recognizing the soul power

in us, the universal wisdom in us and actively deny any

organization, be it political, religious or other, to de-

termine our life—which means that we take our life in

our own hands!

If we apply this principle in education, we really

help the new generations in growing up responsibly

and happily at the same time!

The Creative Ones

Do you think that one who exercises piano by us-

ing Czerny etudes or other piano exercises becomes

a wonderful pianist? You may answer ‘No, there is

something fundamental in place already, because it is

not the exercise but the one who uses it that will

make the difference!’ Success truly depends not so

much on the exercises and tools I lay into the hands

of students, but how consequently and consistently

they apply them. It is said that good tools don’t make

a master, but it is also true that a good master will ex-

cel also with bad tools.

When Charlie Chaplin started his fabulous career

as a film comic, he used the simplest means, and


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much of it was improvised in the beginning of his new

career as a film clown.

Chaplin was not interested in the ordinary roles

that were offered to him by producers. Deep down he

knew that he owned more power and creativity than

all those mediocre film producers. Charlie, the figure

of the street vamp, clown and charming guy was cre-

ated from scratch, utensils that Chaplin found in the

studio and spontaneously fit for costumes. If Charles

had not followed his intuition and not played out his

own cards, Charlie would never have been born.

Charlie was the ingenious Pygmalion of Charles.

During my younger years, I studied biographies

and autobiographies. Among those that fascinated

me was Charles Chaplin’s autobiography.

—Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964)

The man was unique because of his trust in his

own nature, his own creativity, his own star—although

at the decisive point in his life, when he began carry-

ing out his first vision of Charlie, everything and eve-

ryone seemed to be against him.


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We have a tendency to look at famous successful

people only after the moment they have made it,

thereby overlooking the many years of sacrifice and

failure they have lived through before they were fa-

mous.

Points to Ponder

‣ In Chapter Two, we have seen that the only dif-ference between geniuses and ordinary people is that the first group are always creative, while the second group are only once in a while.

‣ For artists, creating is often a must in that art brings balance to their vivid emotional life. Many artists actually carry a childhood trauma all along their lives, and their art serves as a healing agent. But being aware of this fact, we should not for that reason reduce the activity of the artist to a ‘psychological’ necessity, as Freudian psycho-analysis argues, but try to see that after all, art does not need a justification for its existence! In addition, there are certainly many other important factors why people do art and become artists.

‣ Highly creative people, contrary to most people, do something about their psychic condition when they have been hurt, humiliated or when they live for years and decades without significant recogni-tion. The difference here is one of attitude. While


122

ordinary people would indulge in self-pity, frustra-tion and depression, the creator person does something about their condition, and immedi-ately so.

‣ This something could be called ‘the way of art;’ it is to use art as a catalyzer of higher potential and as a cathartic instrument at the same time. The recurring catharsis can be seen as a constant in the lives of all great artists, and it is this very ca-tharsis that is the empowering and rejuvenating force in their lives. This is especially visible in the life of Pablo Picasso, who was perhaps of all art-ists the one who despite the high challenges he set for himself, was overall a happy human, who lived life wistfully, while not at all passively.

‣ We also have seen that creativity often means to help others, not just being oneself brilliant. We saw with some famous examples that most out-standing musicians are equally good pedagogues for teaching the technique that allows students to play their music. And this is very smart, when you think about it, because most people would hardly be able to understand great music if there were no great musicians performing it.

‣ Creativity is smashed through actually overdoing education by coercing children into doing art or musical performance. It is important to realize that human creativeness is something linked to freedom, not to being obliged in doing some-thing. The more you force yourself for being crea-


123

tive, the less you will be! That is why those who have liberal and understanding parents have al-ways the better starting position, even if they might have wasted time, for they can make it good later on.

‣ We can learn all and everything, it is only a ques-tion of motivation. However, motivation is stran-gled through coercion and a feeling of obliga-tion. The danger is to regard musical perform-ance as a mechanical activity which in turn will render yourself dull and mechanical, and such an attitude damages not only your soul, but also the very art you are trying to learn. Art is a fragile thing, it can only be approached with care and love, not when you make a routine out of it.

‣ Great spiritual teachers gave clear warnings. Krishnamurti said that thought and most of our brain functions, including perception, are rather mechanical processes, and that creativity does not use those pathways, but is rather using intui-tion, the space in between thoughts. And Gurdjieff even thought man is entirely a machine, not by nature, but precisely through the condi-tioning influence of our misconstrued and life-denying civilization.

‣ Hence, the human who is really alive, in full pos-session of his gifts and genius, is a multidimen-sional personality.


124

‣ On a social level, it is important to realize that creativity and democracy go hand in hand in the sense that without a basic level of personal free-dom and safety, humans cannot be creative, as the creative condition needs a state of abandon-ment, a state of letting-go, which is impossible when one lives in a terror regime.

‣ By the same token, creativity and individuality go together. As long as the Japanese thought they had to imitate European or American cars, they were not successful; only when they realized they can build the identity of a truly Japanese car, and really follow this concept, they became hugely successful on a worldwide scale.

‣ Last not least, there is something like a Creative Continuum that is just another continuum con-cept. That means that creativity is an original genuine kind of human behavior that is not the result of cultural conditioning but the outflow of innate wisdom and a will for distinction.


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Chapter Three

Opening Inner Space

❊

Introduction

Your career can be compared to a voyage in space

and time, the space and the time of your life. Both in-

spired writers such as Joseph Campbell and brilliant

psychiatrists such as Carl-Gustav Jung compared our

professional career with following an inner call, bring-

ing about a state of bliss, or fulfilling our higher des-

tiny.

Career consultant Laurence G. Boldt in San Fran-

cisco talks about our professional orientation as our

life’s work, thus expressing the uniqueness and impor-

tance of realizing the best of our talents and capaci-

ties in our work. We could also say that giving birth to,

and incarnate, our life’s mission is an opportunity put

in our cradle that we surely should not miss. And yet

this is something we do not generally learn in school

and if not parents are mature enough to be mirrors to

their children, the latter are at pains to recognize and

nurture their unique talents and gifts.

There are methods and techniques that help us

find out about who we are and what we are to do in

this world.

These methods range from simply asking our-

selves, a technique Laurence G. Boldt advocates, to

more complex strategies, group interactions and self-

finding therapies.

You can also use esoteric techniques such as as-

trology, numerology, or using divination, the Tarot, the

Runes or the I Ching.

—See also Peter Fritz Walter, The Leadership I

Ching: Your Companion for Daily Guidance (2015).

This chapter, then, presents some of those tech-

niques that may appeal to those of you who, like my-

self when I was young, are so sadly alienated from

their true being that they would not be able to tap

into their true potential by just asking a question to


128

themselves. For me, it was potential astrology that

brought the solution and showed the way to go.

Excited about the perspectives of a career as a

spiritual teacher and 1-2-1 counselor that was traced

out in my birth chart, I was honest enough to admit

that I was suffering from a certain amount of neurotic

symptoms that made it extremely difficult to do the

necessary personal changes without competent help.

Thus, I engaged in a hypnotherapy that helped me

integrate all I was forced to split off, during my child-

hood and youth, from my true personality, my soul

and my feelings. With this therapy that I completed

with private work on my inner selves, I became pain-

fully aware of the fact that I had been living an ex-

tremely residual existence, a life of utter self-denial

while on the outside level I had been well adjusted

and succeeded to become an international lawyer,

doctor of law and legal advisor.

In this chapter I will thus walk you through some

useful strategies that may help you open this space

that you may still ignore and that you cannot simply

access using your wake consciousness because during

the years of mere survival, as a child, you had to re-

OPENING INNER SPACE

129

press certain intuitions about yourself and your life,

and certain feelings, because you were not accepted

as you were, but as the person you faked you were.

This fake existence as it were was not your choice, but

a necessity for you to survive in an environment, be it

family, be it school, or both, that you felt was hostile

to your true existence and what you most wanted to

be. Thus, what you did was to repress your true self

and create an artificial mask, a fake-me, that you put

in place as a protective shield and that helped you to

survive this hostile childhood.

I intently say survive because that’s what it is. You

were not living this childhood, but you lived through it

to get it behind your back as soon as possible; for liv-

ing it, truly you would have needed to be accepted

for what you were because life requires a certain

amount of autonomy.

If autonomy is denied to us as children, our cour-

age to realize our innermost desires is thwarted and

our will is bent. Without courage and will, without

knowing who we are, how can we ever achieve to find

and realize the career of our heart?


130

Some of us therefore need psychiatric help for

when autonomy was denied to us as children, it is very

difficult to build it later and become resourceful and

self-reliant. However, with therapeutic help it is possi-

ble, as I have myself experienced it.

There are three different kinds of methodologies:

therapeutic methods, shamanic methods and divina-

tory methods. Regarding therapeutic methods, I am

going to give you an overview over classical Freudian

psychotherapy, Transactional Analysis (TA), Hypno-

therapy and Bioenergetics. With respect to methods

of divination, I will shortly present Potential Astrology,

the Tarot and the I Ching.

In addition, there are teachings that help you find

out who you are, and thus assist you to gain more

self-knowledge. Without self-knowledge, without

knowing who you are and why you have come into

this existence, you cannot really find out what your

life’s mission is.

Both quests are interconnected while I would say

that the spiritual quest, the quest for self-knowledge,

is the more basic one.

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131

Classical Psychoanalysis

One of the declared goals of psychoanalysis is to

help sublimating the instinctual drives in man that

have an antisocial impact or that bring us in conflict

with societal rules and moral attitudes of the commu-

nity. Freud saw the emotional survival of the creative

human in a midway between total adaptation to the

demands of civilized society, on one hand, and total

revolt against it, on the other. This midway is however

only available for those who recognize and acknowl-

edge their instincts and thereby achieve to sublimate

them. Sublimation, in the Freudian sense, does not

equal repression, since the latter would mean total

adaptation of the individual to the needs of society, a

form of behavior that Freud considered as similarly

destructive for the individual as the total revolt

against the demands of the collective.

Freud understood sublimation as a kind of chan-

neling of instinctual drives into a constructive mission

or life’s work, thus preserving the energy of the drive

and not repressing it. The drives or instincts, or sexual

energy as such was, in Freud’s opinion, a powerful


132

motor of creation in general, and of art creation in

particular. Therefore he called it libido.

But not only social disapproval might prevent us

from living our desires to its fullest. Some desires may

for ourselves have detrimental effects, such as nega-

tive effects on our health or our relationships, be it

only through some kind of perpetual fear or guilt that

shall keep us from feeling well during longer periods

of time. After all, there may be a need for every one

of us to become an artist of life because not all our

instinctual energies can be sublimated.

But apart from its conflict-resolving effect, art is

certainly primarily a way to express our individual

creativity. Art is a way to achieve human perfection!

Among psychoanalysts we find many artists, hav-

ing discovered or freed their artistic potential during

their own analysis. Otto Rank, a direct disciple of

Freud, was among them the one most outspoken

about the function of art and the relationship be-

tween art and psychoanalysis. In his famous book Art

and Artist (1932/1989), he wrote:

I myself approached the problem of art from the individualist side of the artist’s personality a good quarter of a century

OPENING INNER SPACE

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ago, after my first introduction to psycho-analysis. In 1905, when Freud’s investigations stood at the zenith of pre-war materialism, I wrote a short study on The Artist, in which I tried to produce a psychology of the creative personality; simultaneously, however, I developed a new theory of art up to a point which made it possible, quite recently, for the German art-historian E. von Sydow to say that I was ‘the only one who had produced a system of aesthetic within the framework of a general cultural philosophy with psycho-analytic material. (Otto Rank, Art and Artist (1932/1989), Preface, pp. XX, XXI).

Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysis (TA), established in the

1950s by Eric Berne, proved to be an effective ther-

apy, showing results already after short-term treat-

ment and was especially beneficial for liberating per-

sonal creativity.

The transactional method starts from the insight

that life is primarily communication, not only with oth-

ers and us, but also, and primarily, with ourselves, our

inner selves.

Communicative messages are called transactions,

from which the term transactional therapy was de-

rived.


134

The human personality is taught as consisting of a

range of inner selves, the most basic of which are the

Inner Parent, Inner Adult and Inner Child. Psychic

health is defined as a flexible balance between the

three entities in us, psychic problems seen as the stiff

predominance of one or two of the entities, to the

detriment of the others.

In this form of therapy, psychic disorders are sim-

ply seen as communication errors, first of all errors in

our inner communication system, between the differ-

ent entities of our personality, and, as a result, also in

our outer communication system, the ongoing dia-

logue with the outside world.

The analytic aspect of this theory is very strong

and reaches, far from being limited to analyzing dia-

logues between different persons, out to researching

societal or inter-societal communication problems.

There is some deep truth in this approach since it

is true that every war is an ultimate failure of commu-

nication between two or more states, peoples or po-

litical entities. By the same token, civil war reflects

communication problems inside of nation states, be-

tween different racial or social groups.

OPENING INNER SPACE

135

The strong point of the theory is that it is suffi-

ciently pragmatic and can be verified in experimental

groups. As a matter of fact, we all suffer from commu-

nication problems, inside ourselves, in our families,

and our work places, and most of the conflictual situa-

tions that produce negative feelings have their root in

simple communication errors, or total lack of commu-

nication in the form of the disruption of dialogue.

Where dialogue has stopped, the projection

mechanisms become predominant and irrational im-

ages about the other arise easily. Once they have

risen, it is difficult to erase them again. If there is new

dialogue, however, and a mutual effort for communi-

cation, projections can be overcome.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy can be said to represent the most

popular of therapeutic methods in our days, espe-

cially in the United States. The most famous represen-

tative of medical hypnosis is Milton H. Erickson.

—See, for example, Sidney Rosen, My Voice Will

Go With You (1991) and Milton Erickson, Complete

Works (2001).


136

Hypnotherapy has the advantage of achieving sig-

nificant results after extremely short periods of treat-

ment.

It works with medical hypnosis or auto-hypnosis,

situated between relaxation and deep hypnosis, also

called light hypnosis or light trance. In hypnotic trance

it is safe and easy to let surface deeply repressed past

emotions and feelings, traumatic experiences, frustra-

tions, humiliations and extreme pain, and let them

pass through the mind; it is this meditative attitude,

the passive experiencing of the original wounding in

light trance that triggers the healing.

Hypnotherapy is sometimes associated with medi-

tation; both can be said to be auto-therapeutic. And

in both we encounter the phenomenon that the per-

son lets pass, as in a film, parts of their life, situations,

relationships, traumas in front of the imaginative eye,

being again confronted with the repressed feelings

that once accompanied those situations and encoun-

ters. By confronting those feelings, the psychic energy

that was blocked in them is freed and can be used for

creative goals and purposes, or just for reactivating

OPENING INNER SPACE

137

one’s life and getting new motivations to progress

and to succeed.

Bioenergetics

Dr. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) is to be credited

with conceptualizing the original bioenergetic ap-

proach to healing. As Reich was largely slandered and

misunderstood over the major part of his scientific ca-

reer, the method was later developed successfully in

the United States by one of Reich’s patients and most

committed disciples, Alexander Lowen.

—See, for example, Alexander Lowen, Love and

Orgasm (1965), Bioenergetics (1975), Narcissism

(1983), Pleasure (1970), and Fear of Life (2003)

This approach, if one hears about it for the first

time, seems to suggest that bioenergy is transmitted

onto the patient, such as, for example, in Reiki.

However, this would be a misunderstanding of

bioenergetics. Reich himself stated that bioenergetic

therapy only consisted in liberating and strengthening

the patient’s endocrine energy resources through the

dissolution of deep muscular fixations and the de-


138

struction of mental as well as emotional shields that

keep the patient from experiencing the natural

streaming of the bioenergy.

Alexander Lowen has from the start combined

bioenergy and group therapy, as well as role play be-

tween the participants, and this approach became

very successful and popular. Others have developed

only this aspect of the therapy, especially in combina-

tion with techniques from Gestalt therapy, and have

given personal interactions in form of spontaneous

role play a predominant importance.

Shamanism

Shamanism is an old tradition that teaches ways of

inducing a voyage into the spiritual world, typically by

entering a deep trance through the ingestion of plant

hallucinogens. Shamanism is rooted in the traditions

of many tribal societies, in Siberia, Africa, Asia, Austra-

lia and on the American continent, as well as in the

folklore of Scandinavia and the Caucasus. It is within

these traditions considered as a religious way of real-

izing a broader form of existence.

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The two main purposes of shamanic interference

are healing psychic and physical disorders and guid-

ing people into the afterlife. The local shaman is a

very respected person in all these cultures and socie-

ties while he lives at the borderline of the group.

Nowadays, Westerners are developing a growing

interest in shamanism and shamanic rites and their

effect on us. There are many reports, after voyages

induced by shamanic practices, about clearer self-

vision and an enhancement of people’s creative ca-

pacities and possibilities.

What is shamanism? Let me state first that main-

stream society’s notion of reality and that of most na-

tive populations are worlds apart. Michael Harner, in

his leading study on shamanism, defines it:

Shamanism represents a great mental and emotional adven-ture that implies both the patient and the healer. Through his voyage and his heroic efforts, the shaman helps his pa-tients to transcend their normal, ordinary, definition of reality as well as their self-definition as being sick. (Michael Harner, Ways of the Shaman 1990, p. 1).

Interestingly, this same statement could be made

about hypnotherapy, in particular medical hypnosis as

applied by Milton H. Erickson; you only have to re-


140

place the terms healer and shaman by hypnothera-

pist. In fact, Erickson certainly learned many of his se-

crets by studying shamanic theory and practice.

In some way our modern psychotherapists are

something like Western shamans. This idea has been

taken up by the famous shamanic healer Dr. Alberto

Villoldo, who defines his mission as the training of

Western shamans for accelerating individual and cul-

tural healing in our modern Western society.

—See, for example, Alberto Villoldo, Shaman,

Healer, Sage (2000)

Shamans are borderline figures in our mainstream

worldview that normally excludes soul values. How-

ever, to remind the saying of Carl Jung, psychother-

apy begins with the study of dreams, and thus our in-

dividual unconscious, as well as myths and cultural

sagas, which are representing our collective uncon-

scious.

—Carl Jung, The Meaning and Significance of

Dreams (1991)

A native would qualify somebody with a narcissis-

tic hangup as a person who lost a part or the whole of

OPENING INNER SPACE

141

their soul. A psychotic patient who, in his delirium,

says that he’s Jesus Christ would be qualified by a na-

tive shaman as somebody whose soul is possessed by

a spirit who, for whatever reason, speaks through him.

According to Mircea Eliade, one of the most re-

spected researchers on the matter, shamanism is to

be defined as ‘deliberate use of archaic techniques of

ecstasy’ that were developed apart from religious

dogma or philosophy.

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism (1964)

You can trigger ecstasy in your adult life as I was

myself able to awaken this basic innocence; then, you

are able to live those moments of full and unham-

pered happiness when they come; they come sponta-

neously, without being asked for and without being

triggered by any drug. But I know that not many have

been innocent as children. I was not. That’s why you

may want to build original innocence through tech-

niques of ecstasy that are available within the array of

shamanic magic.

The books of Carlos Castaneda are well known in

educated circles all over the world.


142

—See, for example, Carlos Castaneda, The Teach-

ings of Don Juan (1985), Journey to Ixtlan (1991),

Tales of Power (1991), The Second Ring of Power

(1991).

Their success was phenomenal! Carlos Castaneda,

an American anthropologist, went to Mexico in order

to follow a seven-year apprenticeship with a local sor-

cerer, Don Juan. The initiation he went through was

initially induced by the intake of mushroom tinctures

that were producing hallucinating effects, and that

temporarily altered the researcher’s state of con-

sciousness. Going through all kinds of experiments,

partly dangerous for his health and psychic integrity,

Castaneda followed meticulously a notebook in which

he tried, with great difficulty, to capture more or less

profound insights about the experiences. Subse-

quently he profited from these notes in writing his

books.

Divination

Astrology, with its long tradition, has been revived

during the 20th century and made accessible to a

larger circle of people than a few sages and initiates

who knew it back in Antiquity. In the United States

OPENING INNER SPACE

143

and Great Britain, astrology is taught in the meantime

at several reputed universities.

Moreover, astrological advice is more and more

sought after by leading officials, celebrities and busi-

ness people all over the world.

Many different astrology schools and techniques

have diversified the astrological landscape. One of

the strongest and perhaps most important aspects of

astrology is its capacity to tell us more about our true

destiny. This so-called psychological or humanistic

school of modern astrology, mainly developed by

Dane Rudhyar and his followers is, from an empirical

point of view, more precise than the prognostic part

of astrology, which is the branch of astrology only por-

trayed by the mass media and thus known to the

general public.

—Dane Rudhyar, Astrology of Personality (1990), An

Astrological Triptych (1991), Astrological Mandala

(1994).

This is so because we change and have free will to

direct our lives. The stars only indicate potentialities,

which means they incline us to follow certain paths,


144

but they do not determine us. It is our own thought,

our own desire, our own intention that direct us, and

not any fixated notion of destiny. Astrology is often

erroneously taken as the mirror of predestination we

are fatally submitted to. In the contrary, astrology is

taught since Antiquity as the science that provides us

with self-knowledge and helps us realize our true po-

tential in a creative, happy and constructive way.

Popular thought sees always more astrology’s

forecasting aspects, with all the Nostradamus and

Wallenstein stories and their more recent vintages.

Forecasting bears, to repeat it, always a certain risk

since we can change our intention and our desires

from today, thereby changing our future accordingly.

The astrological forecast is rather stiff and me-

chanical, compared to the ever-changing nature of life

and the unpredictable nature of the human being. On

the other hand, the psychological, characterological

advice of potential astrology is in most cases surpris-

ingly accurate. The birth chart is an open book for one

who is able to interpret it; it reveals with truly scientific

exactitude our talents, capacities, creative possibili-

OPENING INNER SPACE

145

ties, but also our weaknesses and challenges for self-

development.

In my personal coaching approach, I use pure po-

tential astrology as a diagnostic tool. This means that

I don’t do any kind of forecasting, but use the astro-

logical projection system as a tool for finding the cli-

ent’s, or their child’s, life mission and innate talents

and capacities by a karmic analysis of the birth chart,

mainly by examining the Moon Nodes axis.

Numerology is another method to detect astro-

logical data. It can be held that astrology is but a spe-

cific form of numerology and vice versa. To say, both

techniques lead to the same insights.

The I Ching or Book of Changes, a five thousand

years old Chinese wisdom and oracle book, is of pri-

mary importance in any serious discussion about divi-

natory practice.

—See Peter Fritz Walter, The Leadership I Ching:

Your Companion for Practical Guidance, 2nd edi-

tion, 2015.

Famous writers, psychologists, musicians and writ-

ers such as Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Joseph Mur-


146

phy, John Lennon or Terence McKenna have used or

analyzed it, not to talk about the Chinese sage Confu-

cius who literally slept with the I Ching under his night

pillow. They and many others profited from the advice

the book can give on virtually all life situations.

The Tarot is not as old as the I Ching and astrol-

ogy. It has been conceived by medieval alchemists

who took their knowledge from old traditions and dis-

tilled it into a set of game cards, composed of twelve

large arcanas and a number of small arcanas, to be

interpreted as to their importance in the divination

process. The advice-givers, traditionally people who

went through initiation in esoteric knowledge, are

bound to a set of ethical rules and obligations. For

the application of the most famous of Tarot decks, the

Tarot de Marseille, the advice-givers were for example

bound to not ask for pecuniary remuneration. They

were generally paid with food. However, if the advice-

seeker put some money in a place designed for vol-

untary contribution, the advice-giver could take it.

Nowadays, we can observe that the Tarot again

takes an important place alongside various other

methods for building self-knowledge, for exploring

OPENING INNER SPACE

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our greater life cycle and for self-transformation. The

abundance of literature, in re-edition and new edi-

tions shows that many now are searching for their

roots and the significance of life.

Among all divinatory practices, the Tarot seems to

attract the most of attention from the greater public

and from young people, perhaps because it is more

propagated within popular culture. The very fact that

the Tarot has been created shows that there is still

space and need for integrated approaches, even after

thousands of years of tradition and the most erudite

writings already existing.

Every tradition has to be adapted to the period of

time where it is to be considered. There are in fact

many new Tarot decks, and new divinatory games

based on the Tarot system, but more adapted to the

psychological insights of our era. Actually, the young

generation today got an acute interest in all they

judge as magic in a larger sense, or that is considered

as a tool for exploring invisible realms of reality. It is

perhaps that the Tarot looks like a game which makes

it more attractive for the young than other divinatory

practices.


148

As a result, new magic games are booming within

that niche market. The power of creativity behind this

vague of new productions is considerable! Despite

the fact that there is hardly something really new, the

way the old traditions, especially as divinatory card

games, have been inspired with new life proves that

there are creative impulses in our young generations

that are going to foster a revival of perennial science

and philosophy during the Aquarius Age.

There are many other systems of divination. The

more well known among them are geomancy, and the

Runes, which is originally a Celtic divination method,

and nowadays again sought after in initiated circles.

Sages

The teaching of Ramana Maharshi is astounding.

For some people it is disturbing. When you have

searched the world for a guru, and then one day you

meet one who is known worldwide and whom the lo-

cal people venerate like a god, and this man tells you

that you did not need to search a guru because you

are yourself and thus have already got what you are

OPENING INNER SPACE

149

searching for, then you are beginning to shiver or

even throw a serious depression!

—See, for example, Matthew Greenblatt (Ed.), The

Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi (2002).

Ramana Maharshi told us the same with regard to

our creative potential. He would have said that we

have already and from the start got it, that it is in us,

more precisely even, that we are this potential. In fact,

it is the very energy that created us, which gave us all

our potential, and we dispose fully of this energy, if we

are conscious of it or not.

Krishnamurti, in many of his talks, held that most

of us are utterly uncreative and that the last residue of

creativity we possess is sex. For this reason, many of

us, he said, are so obsessed about sex. Sex is for us a

kind of second-hand creativity, an ersatz for what we

lack.

What is for Krishnamurti this original creativity?

This seems to be the decisive question about the

whole of his teaching. K said often that this question

could not be answered since we could not put in

words what cannot be an element of thought, be-


150

cause it is beyond thought. This x, he said, is not de-

finable, and can only be invited to join us once we

were ready to receive it. This x is the strongest crea-

tive force that exists; it is pure creativeness. We can-

not search for it or run after it, since more we put ef-

forts into this search, less chances are that the unex-

pected is going to happen.

Second, K insisted, we have to decondition our-

selves, not by chastity or masochistic self-denial, but

by the strict denial to assimilate what we identify to

be untrue for us, and by the intelligent understanding

of ourselves as moving, changing beings, which im-

plies intelligent understanding of our desires, wishes,

habits, emotions, and reactions.

Krishnamurti repeated saying that we should pas-

sively observe our inner and outer life and our rela-

tionships, without judging or labeling them in any

way.

There is something in K’s teaching that has no par-

allel in all existing guruism, something entirely new. It

is the refusal of discipline, of effort and any form of

chastity.

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In fact, almost all religious teachings favor one or

the other form of sex repression. K’s teaching is more

subtle; he says that love is not pleasure. He doesn’t

say sex is bad, but he does say that when we end-

lessly strive for pleasure, in an exclusive sense, we

may miss to hit the goal of our life.

But the question is, what is pleasure and what did

K understand under this word? For example, is a shal-

low life focused upon repetition and enjoyment a life

of pleasure?

Or is pleasure something much greater, something

related to creative realization? Is pleasure only sensual

and sexual pleasure or is pleasure also intellectual

pleasure? To put it even more daringly, is the striving

for ‘spirituality’ not just another form of pleasure-

seeking?

K analyzed our striving for pleasure saying that

pleasure is a necessity for the brain as a storing device

of many thousands of years of human and pre-human

history. In fact, if we understand our deep concern

about pleasure and all we do to satisfy our desires, we

have done the first step on an evolutionary ladder

leading to greater inner and outer freedom and hap-


152

piness. As a matter of fact, if we are serious about

this, we have no choice since repression simply does

not work as it reinforces desire, and makes us more

dependent on it.

The only way to achieve greater independence

and interdependence with others is to understand

desire and accept desire as the single most important

vital force! The change, then, will come not by the

suppression of awareness, as it is the case with re-

pression, but in the contrary, by reaching a higher

level of awareness.

What K does in his talks is to attract our attention

to certain facts which are inherent in human nature,

certain mechanisms in our thought process, certain

functions of our brain, or more generally, our human

structure. As he did not search for followers, K cannot

be said to have created a system of thought; and he

has not founded a philosophical school in the sense

this is understood by religions and their dogmas.

Everything in life that has deep meaning seems to

arise spontaneously. This is so in love, with the con-

ception of a child or the birth of any major creative

idea that arises in us despite our lack of knowledge

OPENING INNER SPACE

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where our intuitions precisely originate from. K

wanted to show us that we do not need to put end-

less efforts in whatever we do, and certainly not in

matters of religion and spiritual evolution. He basi-

cally said that the more effort we put in what we do,

the more we cut ourselves off from true creative re-

sources that are available to everyone of us. It is not

important how we call it, faith, god, higher self, inspi-

ration or relax-and-let-things-happen, or else stop

searching!

If we have understood that our rational thought

can only progress in a linear way but not in a spiraled

manner, and that every true evolution comes about by

a spiraled movement, we have got it! The empty cir-

cle in midst of the spiral is faith, is let go, is creative

reception without effort!

The Austrian Rudolf Steiner was deeply influenced

by the theosophical movement. Yet Steiner founded

an original method that is strongly motivated by an

ideal of ‘right education.’ He was concerned about

the child’s natural creativity, and harshly criticized in

his writings how our culture systematically destroys it.


154

As a result of his great knowledge about Eastern

cultures and traditions, he created a new and revolu-

tionary approach to education. In all his writings he

criticizes, just as Krishnamurti, the utter brutality of the

traditional school system and how it approaches the

individual child by applying a standard concept. Ac-

cording to Steiner, right education should take care of

the child’s soul and help the child develop his or her

spiritual receptivity and expression.

Steiner created special methods of working with

colors and music. Through his research on how music

affects the human psyche, he found that the occiden-

tal tuning and scale, with its half tones, is rather irritat-

ing the natural vibrations of the soul. He therefore

began to focus upon the Eastern whole-tone scale

that was in Antiquity also used in Europe, for example

in the tuning of the ancient Lyre of the Greeks, which

was tuned in whole tones; based on these insights,

Steiner created an entire curriculum for musical edu-

cation.

Steiner school children, especially handicapped

and emotionally disturbed children are enveloped by

sound-carpets of whole-tone Lyre music and are seen

OPENING INNER SPACE

155

to be considerably improving their behavioral pat-

terns.

Spiritism and Channeling

Spiritism was widespread in Europe at the end of

the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

It was a sort of fashionable pastime for the distin-

guished classes.

Behold, however, that dealing with energies of

other dimensions or parallel universes must be

learned and should not be taken as a distraction or

social game. It is possible to call spirits of other di-

mensions when there is in a group a strong common

will to achieve this goal, and specific setup of the ex-

perience is provided. Yet there are inherent dangers

that most of the people engaging childishly in those

experiences are not aware of.

For those who are competent enough to profit

from the experience, spiritism can provide tools for

enhancing individual creativity.

Many of the spirit entities called upon in spiritistic

séances are reported to have spoken about the reali-


156

zation of creativity or listed a number of reasons why

most people today have become so utterly devoid of

creativity.

It seems there is with guides from other dimen-

sions a particular concern to communicate to us the

ways to enhance new potentials of creativity and per-

sonal realization within the whole of humanity.

Channeling is a more recent vintage of spiritism. It

is true that many people who, like me, received a tra-

ditional academic education and, moreover, have

been trained in a quite Cartesian profession such as

law, are brushing this kind of knowledge off as charla-

tanism.

However, I can say with conviction that channeling

has provided me with extremely valuable teachings

for my life, for change management, and for finding

the career I really love.

Channeling is for me one of the important sources

of knowledge gathering today. Whatever the precise

techniques are at the origin of channeling, and what-

ever may be explainable about them by science, I can

say that channeled messages such as the ‘Seth’ books

OPENING INNER SPACE

157

by Jane Roberts were more important to me than all

and everything I learnt in school and university.

Let me mention here particular books that pro-

vided me with a slice of that immense cake of knowl-

edge. When I opened myself to channeling, about

thirty years ago, it was first of all the books of Jane

Roberts that began to open my eyes. I carefully stud-

ied two of them, The Nature of Personal Reality (1994)

and The Nature of the Psyche (1996). In both books,

Seth repeatedly lectures about personal creativity and

the development and deployment of our unique tal-

ents and gifts through our life’s mission and our work.

After that, I read one of Sanaya Roman’s Orin

books entitled Opening to Channel (1987), and did

not regret reading it. Finally, another channeling book

really captivated my attention, so much the more as it

came to me in a quite unusual way. I found it at a chil-

dren summer party’s kiosk among all kinds of plunder

and used children toys, where it obviously made a

strange appearance. This book was Barbara

Marciniak’s Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the

Pleiadians (1992).


158

These channeled messages converge in stating

that our human potential is unlimited, thus confirming

the oldest teachings of the sages.

Let me close this chapter with the advice that you

should accept as truth for yourself only what you, in

your heart, hold is true. All the rest, while it may be

truth for others, is just not true for you. And as you are

the master of your life and have in yourself the guide,

you should always stay true to your truth. It sounds

commonplace, but is not. It was over millennia a se-

cret teaching but now is corroborated by cutting-

edge consciousness research.

Points to Ponder

‣ In Chapter Three, we have seen that there are several unique methods for finding out what your life’s work or mission is all about, what your intrin-sic talents and gifts are, and what your purpose is for this lifetime. They range from simply asking yourself certain key questions to esoteric tech-niques as astrology, numerology, or divining with the Tarot or the I Ching.

‣ There are three different kinds of methodologies for finding your true self and mission, therapeutic methods, shamanic methods and divinatory

OPENING INNER SPACE

159

methods. Among therapeutic methods, psycho-analysis stands out as perhaps the most culturally demanding, but also the least effective theory, while Transactional Analysis (TA) is less culturally normative, but more effective in actually healing the source trauma because it focuses not on be-havior or norms, but upon communication; that is why it most often helps to access and integrate our inner selves.

‣ The most effective of therapeutic methods is hypnotherapy or medical hypnosis, especially the Ericksonian vintage of it. It is effective, while re-spectful and safe, because it uses a particular language capacity of our organism, which is hyp-notic language, the language of the body.

‣ Hypnosis allows a safe journey into the time and the feeling universe of the actual trauma or im-print, thereby facilitating the healing process through building awareness, consciousness being a most powerful healing agent in our organism. Once we remember what caused the wound, we are beyond it, and spontaneous healing occurs. This is the power of hypnosis, which is thus a pure application of consciousness to healing.

‣ Shamanism is a set of techniques that bring about a state of inner contemplation; these tech-niques use religious ecstasy, a state of meditative contemplation, for invoking spirit helpers and guides who enable the shaman, after formal ini-tiation, to heal himself and others. Shamanic heal-


160

ing is powerful and effective but it requires dedi-cation; this means it cannot be achieved with a light-hearted intention or for indulging in a fad or fashion, as when serious interest and commit-ment is lacking, or one’s intention is not pure of self-interest, things may go in ways not expected, and not desired. In the regular case, the seeker of health or personal transformation doesn’t himself go the rather burdensome way of becoming a shaman, but will be guided, by his inner voice, to a competent shaman, who acts as an intermedi-ary or catalyzing agent.

‣ Astrology is one of the most ancient methods for gaining self-knowledge, and in this respect, it is not divinatory, but characterological, and psycho-logical. The psychological school of astrology, which is part of perennial science, was revived by Dane Rudhyar and Alexander Ruperti during the 20th century and is today an established method of assessing human potential for adults and chil-dren. It is also taught now at many universities in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Aus-tralia, and many other countries. Instead of as-trology, numerology may be used, which is essen-tially the same method that only uses another vo-cabulary, but comes to the same results.

‣ Along with the I Ching, the five thousand years old Chinese wisdom and oracle book that is used for divination and advice by many scholars, the Tarot has gained more of popular interest during the recent decades, especially among young

OPENING INNER SPACE

161

people. The Tarot is more psychological than the I Ching in the sense that it works with archetypal images that are open for interpretation and that can be meditated upon.

‣ The pictorial and game-like aspect of the Tarot may be one of the reasons why Tarot games have become so popular within the new age business world. However, their use is beneficial only when there is a serious commitment to deriving mean-ing and advice from consulting the cards, not when the activity is a mere leisure and done for curiosity only.

‣ When we evaluate the teaching of sages, for showing us the way to personal growth and reali-zation, we find two who are exceptional in the sense that they do not teach a doctrine, nor rec-ommend any form of self-discipline to realize awakening. They are Ramana Maharshi and J. Krishnamurti. They were teaching all through their long lives that most of our cultural achievements do not assist us in finding inner peace, and spiri-tual guidance, hence one of the motivational triggers for their careers as spiritual guides and personal gurus.

‣ These spiritual teachers or sages emphasize the need to have faith in the highest possible out-come while putting our focus upon what we really love and wish to do.


162

‣ They emphasize freedom, and creativeness, not ‘hard work’ for the sake of joining both ends. They basically say that we are living in an illusion when we think we are lacking anything in life as we are the creator force ourselves and thus, all apparent lack is a lack of conscious awareness of what-is, and a result of our conditioning which stands in the way of freedom, self-realization, power and abundance.

‣ Another pathway for finding your life’s work and a creative approach to living is spiritism, also called spiritualism. While today less popular, it was one of the favorite pastime activities of the distin-guished classes during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.

‣ Today, what gains more and more importance is channeling, which is perhaps just a new word for an old hat. Channeling is a technique that pro-vides us with often uncanny information that comes from sources other than the rational learned mind of the medium, the person who does the channeling. It is information that is often surprisingly accurate and that bears a note of freshness to it. I have myself received many valu-able insights about life and my own path of life through channeling and feel very grateful for that.

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Chapter Four

By Yourself About Yourself

❊

Introduction

Though the content of what I will be writing about

in this chapter is philosophical in nature, the applica-

tion of this knowledge is immensely practical.

This being said, these lines only make sense if you

put them in practice. As the title suggests, this chap-

ter gives you hints or a guideline for work that you

have to do with yourself. You would probably be re-

luctant to begin if you were put alone in a room, the

door closed and said ‘Now, transform yourself! To-

morrow I want to see another you sitting here!’

You may smile, but is it really as farfetched as it

sounds? Does it not reflect a bit the way most selfhelp

gurus approach their clients? And most of us try hard

to comply with our guru’s method and perhaps it

helps.

The chance that it helps is as high as the chance

that it fails. This is so because we are all different as

human beings and what works for one does not nec-

essarily work for another.

This does not mean that nobody could teach you

anything in matters of self-improvement. It only

means that a particular method is not going to work

for you just because it has worked for Mr. Guru. If it

works for you, it does so because it is in accordance

with your continuum. If it does not work for you, this

does in turn not mean that Mr. Guru is a charlatan.

Our present social and educational paradigm

makes you perhaps believe that there are standard

truths for all of us, standard values, standard forms of

behavior and a standardized morality framework for

all of us.

Natural science that was deeply alienated from

spiritual truth and whose main advocate was Charles

Darwin has led many to simply compare humans to

the animal race and to deduct social, political and


166

psychological conclusions from such a haphazard

premise.

The fact that we all got two arms and two legs

does not mean that we can compare human beings

with each other on a soul level. If we could, it would

be easy and practical to work out standards for self-

improvement and promote them worldwide in

schools, universities and the media.

You Got It

The only wisdom you can learn is the one you have

got already, that is contained in your continuum, your

inner space, your timeless soul, your potential.

All wisdom, all knowledge that we find, we knew it

before, and if we wish, we can find it again.

I think we all have gone, as humans, through the

loss of connectedness with our true source. From this

experience of loss we keep a deep-down memory,

somewhere in our collective unconscious. From this

memory and the depression and loneliness that fol-

lowed, we have developed a feeling of anticipation, a

deep anxiety regarding the lost knowledge. This is

BY YOURSELF ABOUT YOURSELF

167

why many of us today still reject what they call eso-

teric knowledge or make it down as superstition or

imagination.

This chapter is a guide that tries to direct you to-

ward your own Tao, your own Way. It’s about a first-

hand life and I will have to explain more in detail what

I mean by this term. My quest and perhaps contention

is that most of us today lead second-hand lives, rather

than living lives grown on the fertile ground of what

perhaps could be called self-ownership.

Most people today, as I have observed over more

than forty years, do not own themselves. They are nei-

ther the owners of their bodies nor even of their

thoughts or feelings. They live shallow lives, at the pe-

riphery or even outside of their continuum. They are

the product of input given by others.

Honestly, I find this state of affairs frightening. This

is why I wish to address you these lines. If you do care

about yourself and are searching, you are still on the

way to what is your Way. I indeed believe that wisdom

can only reach those who are ‘on the way,’ not the

ones who have settled down in their graves of social


168

status, of establishedness, self-satisfaction, or who are

imbued with so-called success.

This is to tell you that being-on-the-way is the Way,

is the Tao. The point you are going to reach is by far

less important. When you look closely at it, you will

see that you are constantly reaching points, and that

you are constantly passing by points. By doing so, you

namely let them behind and face new ones. Points,

goals, achievements are transitory. This does not

mean that they are worthless. They possess the wor-

thiness to contribute to our growth. They are valid

and precious in their being transitory. Were they not

transitory, they would be useless.

Thus points, goals, and achievements are neces-

sary but not essential. They are steps on the Way,

steps toward perfection. Mastering the steps does not

per se imply mastering life. Many people confuse the

steps with the Tao, and forget that the most important

is to be consciously on-the-way, and not to con-

sciously take the steps.

In our culture, it is fashionable to be goal-centered

instead of way-centered. If I understand that every

goal is transitory, how can I be goal-centered at all? To


169

focus on the Tao is to see the futility of goals, without

however disregarding them.

The difference between a master and a day-

dreamer is that the first sees the futility of goals

whereas the latter completely disregards goals. There

is a tremendous difference between both, also an en-

ergy difference. If I do not invest energy in achieving

goals but invest this energy in the Way to achieve

them, I preserve my energy for the ultimate purpose

which is the Tao, the Way, itself. As long as I focus my

energy, it is preserved. If, however, I daydream, I spill

my energy without focus. This is precisely the differ-

ence between a sage and a fool.

Creativeness is invisible. It only is seen or heard

once the creation is born, once action has been initi-

ated at the outside level. However, during gestation,

when others perceive nothing, there is most vivid ac-

tion going on in the invisible realms of the creator.

A First-Hand Life

Life is our creation at every infinitesimal point of

the lifeline. The lifeline itself has no beginning and no

end and therefore is more appropriately described as


170

the circle-of-life, or the spiral-of-life. There is no doubt

about our impact upon the invisible threads out of

which the web of life is woven. However, our today’s

depressed and alienated masses tend to believe that

there is, if ever, only negligible individual control over

life and that life is per se destined to be this or that

way, according to some mysterious heavenly plan. In

reality, there simply is no such plan.

Contemplating the power of nature, of creation,

how can one associate anything but freedom with the

fundamental force from which sprang all the thousand

and million things?

This force has created unlimited freedom and

power. However, humans have limited it to the tiny

petty thing that they have made out of life and that

they use to call their life. They talk of ‘my’ life and

‘your’ life, as if we individually owned life, as if life

could be owned at all. Only things can be owned but

life is not a thing, but a dynamic, energetic process—

a cosmic dance.

Only ignorance about the spiritual roots of life

could bring about the present state of affairs among

us humans, this desperate dependency, this fatalism


171

and passivity of people worldwide. Of course, we are

very busy imitating others and in that many people

find their shallow satisfaction. It is a lack of energy, of

commitment to ourselves and our individual and spe-

cific mission that makes us comply with the baseline

of living and transforms us into bad copies of our-

selves.

Few people live first-hand lives, compared with

the masses of imitators; thus these people represent a

tiny minority. And if you look closely at them you find

out quickly that they are always the contradictors, the

ones who try to do things differently, the ones who

are not easily satisfied, not easily duped into some

petty mediocre thing, be it a job or a partner or the

proverbial ‘million in the lottery.’

Their value system is different from the one most

people have blindly adopted. When they were chil-

dren, they were keen, curious, sometimes excessively

inquisitive, yet not out of low intention but from a

deep thirst for human experience and interest in the

human soul. In school, or more generally, in systems,

educational, military or otherwise, they are the big or

small disturbers, the ones who never fit in, the ones


172

who won’t comply with most of the rules, the ones

also who spontaneously create different rules that,

typically, function better than the rules they broke.

I do not say that you have to become a rule-

breaker in order to get to know your original self,

while rule-breaking at times does trigger a personal

path of self-perfection. I do say, however, that in order

to get in touch with your own originality, you have to

become acutely aware of all the influences you are

exposed to at any moment of your life.

Why? Because there are influences that are bene-

ficial for your growth and there are others that are

harmful for it or that for the least are going to retard

it. The art of life is all about being able to distinguish

the latter influences from the former. Some authors

and gurus require an inner purification before they

admit that our soul can grow and develop. However,

this means to put a time element in something that is

beyond or outside of time.

Matters concerning the soul or our higher self are

outside the time-space continuum. If we assume that

growth processes on this level can only take place af-


173

ter going through a sort of soul graduation, we as-

semble events on a timeline that have no place there.

It seems smarter to admit that the process of

growing implies in itself a purification of old soul con-

tent. There is probably, without our knowing of it, a

continuous process of renewal going on in the soul. In

addition, it seems more effective to think in terms of

evolution than in terms of purification. Purification fo-

cuses on the past, evolution on the future. If I want to

ride a bicycle or a car and watch the road too closely, I

am accident-prone. I ride safely if I gaze within a far-

ther distance.

The same is true for personal evolution. Directed,

voluntary progress is possible only if there is vision,

and a vision that heads farther into the future than just

tomorrow or next week. True vision is created by your

higher self, after deep relaxation, by focusing inside

and becoming aware of your uniqueness.

Many people, especially from the older genera-

tion, find it against the rules of good taste to focus

upon themselves, to practice introspection or gener-

ally to bestow attention on themselves. Many of them

carry along deep guilt feelings from childhood, often


174

having suffered mistreatment and neglect in their

early years. As a result, they tend to block off when

they are asked to take care of themselves. They may

well indulge in a good deal of social help for others,

assist in welfare projects, or be otherwise useful to the

community. More often than not, their self-neglect

ends with a cancer or some other violent disease that

crowns the big sacrifice they wanted to offer with their

life!

We cannot be ultimately useful if we regard our-

selves as useless. We cannot bestow loving attention

upon others if we do not give it to us first. True relig-

ion, in the sense of the word, begins with taking care

of self.

This is not a religion of egotism as you may hap-

hazardly consider it, but the only true religion. We do

never know others good enough to judge their spiri-

tual views, needs and belongings. We are all on dif-

ferent levels of evolution and different spheres of exis-

tence and belong to different soul groups and energy

fields; and we all have had different former lives, in-

carnations and challenges, and we all carry different


175

visions about our individual evolution and the evolu-

tion of our clan or race.

It is this difference about our soul origins that

makes us so helpless when we talk about what we call

spiritual matters. Have you ever observed that people

talk on different levels of consciousness when they

discuss about what is called spirituality?

The true lover of truth does not make a distinction

between spiritual and non-spiritual matters since this

distinction is artificial and without value. For the spiri-

tually minded being, everything is spiritual. For the

materialistically minded individual, everything is mate-

rial. Life is a whole process and every attempt to di-

vide it up, to section it, to dissect it into various parts

is detrimental to grasping its perfume.

The central issue of this chapter, then, is about

how to gain a deeper understanding of this process

that we call life. We are part of this process and there-

fore, understanding ourselves is a condition to lead-

ing a first-hand life and at the same time goes along

with understanding life as a whole.


176

This holistic way of looking at things may seem

strange to you and you may not have looked at it that

way until now. However, much of the shortsighted

views that have been developed by mechanistic sci-

ence were based upon a fragmented view of life. We

cannot understand ourselves being part of this crea-

tion if we do not care about its other vast aspects and

dimensions. Religion, therefore, is truly a science!

True religion is the science of the interconnectedness

of all creation and the study of this interconnected-

ness, which can only be a holistic study.

Since the intellect is only a smaller part of the

mind, we must pursue this study with a greater en-

semble of tools than mere intellectual understanding.

Meditation, in its original meaning, is a different

form of information gathering, and thus a way of ho-

listic understanding of the patterned nature of living.

As a matter of fact, meditation is not sitting for hours

cross-legged trying to control your breath, and it is

not forcing spirituality upon you, which is merely an-

other mental concept. It is more of being open and

soft, and able to gently flow with the currents of life,


177

to adapt flexibly to it and, most of all, understanding

the why of circumstances, things and events.

Meditation is a way of perceiving the whole of the

process and dynamics of life. It is a form of direct per-

ception.

Meditation is not different from any other activity.

It is not an exercise or a special thing to do for some

chosen enlightened beings. Krishnamurti defined

meditation as being undivided attention; he repeated

many times that we do not need to take any special

posture for doing it. He even said that driving a car

with full attention to every single detail of the process

of driving is meditation.

Read Goethe or Schiller, listen to Baroque music,

and you feel that in pre-industrial times, people were

meditating when walking in nature, sitting in a boat,

having a picnic in the forest, or go to a river or lake for

an afternoon walk. There are a thousand ways to

meditate, and since we are all different, everybody

should freely find out about his preferred way to

meditate.


178

Small children also meditate spontaneously and

can even get into theta brain waves for short mo-

ments, without however losing consciousness of the

outside world. It is a wonderful thing to happen.

You are challenged to perceive this life in your own

unique way, once you are ready to open up your inner

view. Then you will see and understand to what extent

our perception of life differs, and that we all live in dif-

ferent worlds, even though, outwardly, we seem to

live here, in one and the same dimension. And yet,

inwardly, our range of experiences is very different,

depending on our mindset. Even if you take two indi-

viduals who have lived through the same experience,

they will report it differently because they have per-

ceived and felt it differently.

The True Meaning of Education

I mentioned already that once you are ready to

guide yourself along, to educate yourself, you are

able to educate others. It works less the other way

around.

We also saw that the word education has its origin

in Latin, stemming from the root educere which


179

means something like to guide along. Perhaps some

of us were guided along by our parents and teachers,

and perhaps others not, or they were misguided.

However, the decisive question is: How can we guide

ourselves along? The question opens a door since it

gives rise to another important question: the question

about the direction. Where do you want to go?

Now let us ask: Is there any predetermined path

set for us? Or did we choose such a path at the onset

of our incarnation? Many spiritual teachers tell us that,

in fact, we have chosen everything we want to realize

in this life, and in the greater life cycle of which this

present incarnation is only one element.

However, for most of us this question is not really

important. Why? Because we have forgotten about

this decision we have once taken before we incar-

nated.

What I want to convey is that we can at any time

renew that decision. We are not bound by any deci-

sion we have once taken, be it in this or any other di-

mension. Each point in the time-space continuum is

of equal importance. There is no reason why a deci-

sion taken before the moment we incarnated should


180

be more important than a decision we take after our

incarnation.

In addition, there is a good chance that if we focus

inside and look at the question innocently, we are

likely to take the same decision again. But it could

also be that we have matured to a point to change

our self-vision and thus to project another self into the

future.

Educating ourselves can therefore only refer to our

present valid self-vision. We have to guide us along

the vision that we have set for ourselves and that we

consider so fundamental and important for our evolu-

tion that we reaffirm it over and over again.

For that purpose, I do not consider it important to

indulge in regression therapy or deep hypnosis in or-

der to find out about that decision we may or not

have taken before birth. Because of the cyclic nature

of life, nothing is lost forever, and there is no barren

path to truth. If this decision was so fundamental that

it is part of our truth, we will easily take the same de-

cision again, once we center and are connected to

our inside reality, our continuum.


181

To get there, suffices to relax and ask the universe

for guidance. If, on the other hand, this decision was

not that important, it would be rather confusing to

use the armed forces of the hypnotist to get there

again. Of course, those who like to go this way at any

price are free to do it. But it is not necessary for soul

development.

The only true education is the one we give to our-

selves. The only true guru is the one we carry within.

The only truth is that we grow, constantly, from life to

life, experience to experience and year to year of exis-

tence. Our teachers and gurus are outside mirrors of

our inner guides. Education, as most of us have expe-

rienced it in school is a most decadent whitewash of

what education was originally about and what it is go-

ing to become again in a future Aquarian society.

Education in the true sense of guiding ourselves

along our primary vision is the highest task that is set

for us in life, within all its cycles, not only the earthly

one. It means to be truly responsible for our destiny.

When you are ignorant about your unique, original

and true being, you lead a life of imitation, having


182

sold your soul to the gods and devils of modern con-

sumerism.

We live in a society where originality is seen as a

luxury. It is hard to find people who dare to be truly

original.

We all tend to fit in one or the other standard that

we adopted as valid for us, without perhaps being

aware of the damage that constant imitation will do to

our original being.

Standards are dangerous to our true nature. They

alienate us from our own truth and lead us on the

slippery path of imitation. They keep us afar from

original creation, which is our natural, subtle Tao.

And how much more dangerous is it for our Tao

when we live in a society which is impregnated with

standards, molds and labels, and that spits out end-

lessly repeated behavior patterns through the mass

media that reach the new generations as early as in

babyhood.


183

How Consciousness Works

Conscious living and realizing our highest self-

vision is the best armor against any form of involun-

tary conditioning; this is why true creativity is the best

shield against alienation, in which form ever you may

face it.

Consciousness works in a somewhat paradoxical

manner. The information we receive from the senses is

filtered by our belief system, and our conditioning.

There are three possible dimensions in consciousness.

‣ Spontaneous acting without thinking, without ob-server;

‣ Action based upon thought, involving the ob-server;

‣ Action based upon guilt, involving the observer-observer.

The most direct action is spontaneous acting

without an observer. In this highest quality of action,

thought is not involved. This is beneficial because

thought is based upon the past thus conditioning the

present pattern along previous ones that were initi-

ated by different frames of reference. If there is no


184

thought, the present pattern can fully grasp the pre-

sent framework and conditions and, therefore, effec-

tive solutions are easily in reach. However, most of us

unlearnt spontaneous action through the school envi-

ronment; while, when we were small children it was

our normal daily behavior. Only sages and geniuses, it

seems, consciously maintain and cherish the treasure

of spontaneity until old age. They are at odds with

conditioning and the herd values set by mainstream

society.

Spontaneous action is thus based upon direct per-

ception, which I discovered to be the secret behind

fast and effective learning. Direct or immediate per-

ception was once, in ancient times, the regular mode

of learning for the upper range of society. It was

taught in the mystery schools of the East and the

West. It was primarily the mode of perception to be

learned among philosophers and religious leaders.

Direct perception is rooted in the present moment.

Some call it the ‘eternal now.’ When perception is di-

rect, there is no need for interference of thought or of

past experiences to perceive reality. There is no judg-

ing involved in this perception and no conditioned


185

response. For these reasons it can be said to be the

purest way of perceiving reality.

However, because of our strong conditioning in

the opposite paradigm, the intellectualizing and ra-

tionalizing mode of perception, immediate percep-

tion is not easy for modern man to get into. Not by

rejecting thought or trying to stop thinking can it be

triggered but solely by understanding the mechanism

of the thinking process.

The brain must learn to understand the brain.

Thought is not something we have to get rid of; it’s

anyway impossible to ‘control thought’ because it

means to control the thinker.

While it is true that what is beyond thought cannot

be reached through thinking, many of our earthly en-

deavors need thinking and rational planning.

Please be aware that to reject thought means to

reject civilization or technology. Technology has cer-

tainly no absolute value, but it has a high relative

value. It ensures not only survival, but also comfort

and, what is perhaps more important, safety and

worldwide communication between humans of differ-


186

ent cultures. Global international culture could not

have come to exist without the high technology in-

volved in electronic communication. Likewise, nobody

would fly an airplane without international conven-

tions and agreements on inflight security, simply be-

cause of the dangers involved.

Action based upon thought, then, is not by itself

bringing about holistic or wistful action, but it plays a

valuable part in the preparation of such action. Action

based upon thought such as rational planning, logic

reasoning or academic research is important, however

limited because of its adherence to the past and to

cultural, social and religious conditioning.

Thought always is conditioned by the thinker since

there is no thought without the thinker who produces

it. This is why there is also an observer which is but

another part of the thinker. The observer looks at

thought and comments upon it. That is why action

necessarily is delayed because the incentive for action

will be inhibited as long as the observer does not fully

agree with the action that the thinker wishes to take.

In extreme cases the personality is going to split. In

schizophrenia or paranoia these two parts or proc-


187

esses are so divided that they incarnate different split

personalities that lead their own lives.

In the normal, non-pathological state, the two

parts are still under the control of the ego but in ei-

ther case immediate action is impossible; in situations

of shock, however, when the survival response is trig-

gered and thought is temporarily disabled, such ac-

tion can spontaneously arise. In situations of immedi-

ate danger, to be true, nature triggers the flight-or-

fight response that disables thought in order to short-

cut the observer. The result is immediate action that is

almost unconscious but highly effective. Look at the

example of the German mother in World War II who

was reported to have lifted a car with her bare hands,

so that her husband could pull out the badly hurt

child and save her.

How can a human being lift more than two thou-

sand pounds? Not even an athlete could. The answer

is that the human being has got infinite power. This

subtle power can be activated through appropriate

work on the self. Our inner wisdom or self under-

stands the functional scope of thought so that it can


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reassign thought the relative place in the whole of the

human consciousness process.

The least effective action is action based upon

guilt. In this action there are two observers involved in

the thinking process, the observer and the observer-

observer.

The observer-observer is a second observer that

observes the observer. This second observer is not

originally built into the human psyche; it is the result

of guilt. While the primary observer is a consequence

of social conditioning, the secondary observer comes

about through guilt and shame. It’s the result of a

neurotic condition. The observer-observer is an inner

critic that judges and evaluates, sometimes very

harshly, every thought, every intention, every desire

and every action of the thinker and of the observer.

Therefore its task is twofold: observing the thinker

and the observer.

Imagine how many possible alternatives this

observer-observer can come up with regarding every

single thought or intention of the thinker! Action,

then, becomes almost impossible or is considerably

delayed. And there will be a high level of procrastina-


189

tion. Even when action is taken, it will barely be whole

and consistent since the observer-observer will

change position many times during the process, try-

ing to influence the actor to modify action according

to the judgments of this ultimate inner judge.

Guilt feelings are destructive because they frag-

ment the integrity of the personality.

After this summary explanation about how con-

sciousness operates, I come back to the original ques-

tion of how to get to live a first-hand life, a life that is

our own unique creation?

It now seems easier to understand that direct per-

ception is the way back to our original source of

knowledge and eternal wisdom, our self. Logically, the

first thing we must get rid of is guilt. Second, we have

to understand the thinker and the observer so that

they cannot interfere with the action but act as mere

inner consultants.

At this point, I am often asked the question why,

actually, the observer, too, must get into a kind of lim-

ited mode of action? The question is twofold, actually;

some people ask if the observer could be completely


190

annihilated? They seem to reason that if conditioning

has brought about the observer, then by undoing

conditioning the observer will logically disappear.

This is of course a correct reasoning. However, it is

not that easy to completely free oneself from condi-

tioning; it is notoriously reported that when Krishna-

murti, toward the end of his life, was asked if he had

the impression that his teaching was understood by

humanity and if there were people who have realized

total freedom from conditioning, he answered that he

himself had not known one single human being who

had mastered that decisive step during his lifetime.

Intuitively, I agree with the rather pessimistic out-

look of K in his old age. I myself cannot say that I have

got there, after so many years of practicing direct

awareness and even though I learn relatively fast us-

ing direct perception as a learning tool. I can affirm

that some years ago I was able to annihilate the

observer-observer and that, further on, the primary

observer has lost a lot of importance for me and its

voice has become rather soft. But I cannot say it has

altogether disappeared, while at least in meditation, it

is now completely absent.


191

When I discovered Krishnamurti’s writings and

teaching thirty years ago, I could at first master only a

time span of one to three minutes to be completely

without thought. Now, this happens for several hours.

Especially when writing and editing books like the

present one, thought is almost completely absent, as I

am doing all repetitive work in a state of meditation.

And while this book looks like the production of

thought, it is not. It is a product of intuition and spon-

taneous creation.

It is not thought that brings about original crea-

tions. It is that something is coming through, in a state

of mind that is relaxed and comfortable. Without

practicing automatic writing in the strict sense, I feel

that when I write, draw or spontaneously compose

music, thought is absent and there is some kind of to-

tal awareness or presence. In this awareness, some-

thing clear and authoritative manifests through me.

Without these concrete results, I would probably

not dare to publish my hypothesis about direct per-

ception and the fact that indeed tremendous learning

results can be derived from it. When you do some-

thing constantly and you get visible and verifiable re-


192

sults with it, you can safely take it as part of reality and

not a mere fantasy product.

It’s you who is going to make up the techniques

and first of all the lifestyle you are going to adopt in

order to manifest your first-hand life. I can only know

what is good for me, but not what is best for you. This

is valid for all people, also your highest spiritual

teachers for they if they are honest at all, will tell you

exactly that. Maharshi told you that, Krishnamurti told

you that. Jesus told you that. Buddha told you that.

But you did not understand them.

The obstacle for your understanding is your lack-

ing freedom and your stubborn obedience along with

your craving for imitation. However, in spiritual mat-

ters nobody can tell you anything. Now, if this is so,

how can I help you to free yourself from all sense-

givers that interfere with your own private, personal

religious quest? In reality, there are no sense-givers

and only you yourself is going to give your life and

destiny the meaning it needs to assume so that it is a

fulfilled and happy one.

You cannot get to realize the true sense of your

destiny in brushing away your material wishes and de-


193

sires, your longings for fulfillment, judging them child-

ish, nonsensical, selfish, irrational or megalomanic.

There is beauty in our wishes and desires, material,

emotional, sexual, spiritual or religious. There is deep

significance hidden in them. In brushing them off, you

will miss a part of the significance of your life. We all

are dreamers, and that is the magic of human nature!

And the creator force that you may call God, Brahma,

Allah, Zoroaster or Buddha or otherwise is the great-

est of all dreamers. This force has dreamt this world

into existence!

We are not the kind of robots many so-called spiri-

tual teachers wish us to be in order to better manipu-

late us for their personal glory! Your spiritual side and

your material side cannot be separated until the mo-

ment you die. Then they separate naturally. But as

long as you are incarnated and on this earthly plane

of existence, the two spheres are intertwined into one

single whole. You may wonder how it can be that the

realization of material wishes contributes to connect

you to your true selfhood; truly, the split of our en-

deavors in ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ ones is merely arti-

ficial. It does not exist. Every material wish is the mani-

festation of a higher purpose, an evolutionary quest


194

of a higher order that is hidden behind the wish—and

that is often unknown to us. There is a deeper reason

and a purpose why you want this or that car. Psy-

chologists may say that you have a power hangup and

need this car to compensate for your feeling power-

less or even worthless and that I suffer from megalo-

mania.

Let us be careful with such quick judgments. The

psychologist may be right but in another way as he

intended to. He may be right in that the car will help

you heal your power gap and channel misdirected

energies into constructive paths. Second, the car may

be for you a manifestation of belonging to a higher

social class, while your power setup is probably not

defective. Let me try to explain more carefully what I

wish to convey.

Spiritually and materially we do have classes, dis-

tinctions, levels, hierarchies, and castes. We all have a

natural striving to move upward in the hierarchy, be it

in our personal evolution or on a social scale. It is in-

fantile to belittle this fact and to label such behavior

as immature. The best way to handle your desire for

constant self-improvement is to be conscious of it,


195

and not to repress or belittle it. You may not easily

discover what the higher purpose is behind each and

every of your material wishes. You do not need to dis-

cover it, to be true. It is much more important to listen

to your inner voice and work actively and in a focused

manner for making your wishes come true. Then you

will see for yourself, for something in the quality of

your life will subtly change without you becoming

aware of that change.

Points to Ponder

‣ Chapter Four was about a first-hand life, the true meaning of education and the way consciousness works.

‣ Contrary to what you may have learnt in school and university, in life there are no standards, and there are no standard values. All values are indi-vidual, and need to fit your continuum. That is why it’s really not easy to go for your first-hand life, because it means you have to make choices, and these choices must be in alignment with what might be called your cosmic purpose. All choices that you make, especially in spiritual matters, and that you make by following your inner guidance, are choices that somehow comply with your full cycle purpose, the purpose not only of this pre-sent existence but the much more encompassing


196

purpose of your wandering soul, across all incar-nations.

‣ The fact that we all got two arms and two legs doesn’t mean we are standardized into a mold also on the soul level. On that level we are as dif-ferent as the sun and the moon. This is the reason you need to be careful when trying to find out about your soul values, those values that enable you to live a first-hand life, a life of your own unique creation.

‣ Few people live original lives, and if you go for it, I can assure you that you will have few friends. Gandhi said, ‘When you are a friend of humanity, you will have no friends.’

‣ When you are a friend of humanity in its highest possible evolution, you will see how quickly you will make empty space around yourself, and I do not tell you it’s all sunshine, because you have to cope with being alone, and see the beauty in it all. Only then will you understand by and by that company is not something to get at any price, and certainly not at the price of your soul. A so-cial life doesn’t mean you fiddle around with all and everybody, but that you align your purpose with a select few people who are reflecting in their vibration the same wave length you are emitting.


197

‣ The true sense of democracy is not to become a herd animal, but to be truly yourself within a group whose interactions are based upon mutual respect and freedom.

‣ Today more than ever, you are supposed to find your soul mates everywhere in the world, and the likelihood you find them in the place you were born is rather low. Today, more than ever, you can bond with people around the world, using the electronic media highway, but that also implies a danger, namely that you become soulless and mechanical, assuming you can build a lifelong friendship with people by exchanging a few emails. It is possible of course, but it’s not the regular case, simply because when you require more in life than ordinary folks, it’s harder to get it.

‣ And this truth is not bound to culture, it’s univer-sal. When you go for a first-hand life, you want to be around people who do the same, and then, you are among a minority. So either you howl with the wolves, or you remain in your own reality and seek out company among those who have been reality creators just like yourself. Then, you are in a private club, and the space in your galaxy is as huge as the space within the atom. Then you live in colder spheres, where there is more oxygen, but also more solitude!

‣ When you reject thought, you reject technology and civilization. You reject a necessary part of


198

your human machinery. While thought is me-chanical, it serves us. Without thought, there could not be memory, and without memory there could not be civilization in the sense we know it.

‣ Thus, thought has served survival and this was intended to be so. However, this doesn’t mean you should boost thinking, while this is the pa-thology most of the people in hyper-tech civiliza-tions are suffering from.

‣ When you connect with inside, by doing regular meditation, thought will still be present when you need it, but vanish off when you don’t need it. When you are simply sitting quiet, you don’t need thought. While in the beginning thoughts will be recurring to a point to bother you, this will gradu-ally cease to happen when you are persistent and regular in your meditation practice.

‣ You cannot get to live a life of your own creation without meditation, and authoring your life in a consistent manner.

‣ Authoring your life means to develop your lan-guage skills, to be able to write spontaneous texts, compose spontaneous music, do sponta-neous art, to be able to answer loaded questions in a stream-of-consciousness style manner, where you abandon your intellect and let your heart speak. Authoring your life means to get into a vivid dialogue with your inner selves. Authoring


199

your life means to give up control and let go for the god in you to take over control. This means you need to develop faith on top of it all.

‣ Behold, faith is not belief; faith is a form of put-ting your knowledge to work. When you know you do not depend on your thoughts because they are the past, nor on circumstances because they are the result of projections, you focus inside to see what kind of reality you are going to create right now, with this inner mix. When you see that this mix is predominantly negative, you are doing something about it until you are satisfied that your inner state of regular peace, happiness, and a poised assurance will bear positive fruits!

‣ Then, and only then, you can publish your life—go out and make it all happen. And contrary to the Toltec teaching I am adding on here, when you publish your life, you may publish your story, on a web site, in a book or by making a film about it. Your story does count, while it’s not having a molding influence over you anymore, but it counts, because without your story you would not have come where you are.

‣ This is why, contrary to the Toltec teaching as it was brought to us by Castaneda or Ruiz, I am say-ing, publish your story and feel happy about it. You will then see that it’s that, a story, nothing more or less. But it’s what adds on poetry to your life, for that’s what your story is: a poem.


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Chapter Five

From Imitating to Originating

❊

Creator’s Essentials

The decisive step for you to take on your way to a

first-hand life is the one from imitating to originating.

In authoring your life, you learn the basics of creating

your own life and of gradually letting behind patterns

of imitation that you may have carried over from your

earliest days.

The world has known few independent thinkers.

Yet, the reasons most psychologists cite for this fact

are wrong. It is not that human nature is prone to imi-

tation and that it lacks creativeness; the culprit is the

worldwide plague of social, moral and religious condi-

tioning that brings about standardized norms and be-

havior patterns, and social systems that are static and

rigid. Here is the root of the problem.

Most of us take for granted that the human lot has

to be molded into a residual norm where all parame-

ters are following the outdated paradigm of linear

logic. They are alienated enough from the logic of life

to believe in such a grotesque myth!

The human being is a free creature who doesn’t

need to comply with any norm other than its own.

Great thinkers and sages such as Lao-tzu, Schopen-

hauer, Kant or Nietzsche have unveiled draconic and

rigid systems as pure hypocrisy.

How to undo conditioning for unleashing your

original creativeness? This is the decisive question I

am asking you in this chapter.

Much has been written about creativity develop-

ment. From my experience with self-development, I

can say that without developing yourself and com-

plete your individuation, you cannot really develop

your highest creativity potential. Of course, my view

may sound queer in the ears of those who wait for

quick fixes and who believe in what Edward de Bono

called the ‘removal techniques.’


202

—Edward de Bono, Serious Creativity (1996), pp.

35, 36. Edward de Bono expressly states in ‘Misper-

ceptions about Creativity’ that one of those mis-

perceptions was the idea that it was enough to re-

move inhibitions or the fear of being wrong that

would trigger automatically the creative response.

De Bono found that it is simply not enough to re-

move inhibitions for helping people in the corpo-

rate world to be more creative.

These techniques claim it was enough to remove

some inner barriers for a person’s original creativeness

to bloom up. Edward de Bono has found in many

years of creativity training for major corporations that

these techniques are ineffective. He concluded that it

is simply not enough to remove some obstacles so as

to trigger in us our highest creative potential.

Creativity is not a mechanical device that can be

turned on and off. It is an outflow of the whole of the

personality, a vibrational effect of the flowing together

of the spiritual, mental and emotional vibrations. This

healthy energy flow will be triggered once the self is

integrated and can be contacted in a state of relaxa-

tion or meditation.

CREATOR’S ESSENTIALS

203

In our daily life we can learn step by step to be-

come more original, more daring and less imitating. I

mean that we can work on two levels, an inside level

and an outside level which is your behavior in the out-

side world. You can change this behavior here and

now!

It is really important to me to make sure you un-

derstand this not as a ‘philosophical’ opinion of mine.

Philosophy that cannot be directly applied in life is

not philosophy, but speculation!

My practice of Zen taught me that the slightest

gesture counts and that we cannot grow in wisdom by

just reading and digesting opinions, discussing views,

without integrating what we have learnt. That is why

the second step is as important as the first! The sec-

ond step is how we behave in our daily relationships,

the one with our self, the one with other humans, and

the relationships with animals, with plants, with the

earth and the universe.

These five forms of relationship are actually only

manifestations of one single relation: the relation with

yourself— your higher self. The way you relate to the


204

you in you, you relate to others. There is no difference

between inside and outside relations.

Why Attitude Counts

Originating new forms of behavior means to build

a different relation with yourself first.

But this first is not meant as a time factor! I do not

want to say that you have to first work on the inside

level and wait what happens, and that only later, once

you have done the changes inside, you are going to

work on the outside level. It does not work in a se-

quential way. The changes have to be made simulta-

neously on the inside and the outside levels! This is

why your attitude counts!

The way you present yourself to the world is not

something involuntary or hazardous. It is not com-

pletely voluntary either. The more our individual con-

sciousness is developed, the more we are able to dis-

play a consistent attitude, an attitude that is positive

and that brings us honors and rewards on our way to

successfully realizing ourselves.


205

Communicating these guidelines to you and not

caring about your attitude would be only half of the

work. Your attitude mirrors your inner orientation. To

neglect attitude would mean to work in the shadow.

Shadow work surely is important and it is perhaps a

good way to begin with, but it must soon be accom-

panied by the development of a conscious outer atti-

tude.

In Zen, all this is done. Zen teaches us that mere

theory or high morality is of little or no value if it is not

accompanied by actions that incarnate it. The inner

rectitude cannot be achieved by mere learning mere

intellectual concepts of ‘goodness,’ ‘moral standing’

or ‘righteousness.’

All these words are but concepts as long as they

are not rooted in our attitude. This is why attitude

training is so important—and also why it is time-

consuming and not a matter of quick fixes.

Attitude building requires commitment first of all,

but also a psychological understanding of human na-

ture—and finally patience. A lot of patience. Many

people have high opinions and when you talk with

them, they are able to say nice things about others


206

and the world. They think of themselves as highly

educated and considerate, yet when meeting a beg-

gar or a sick child in the street, they turn away quickly.

I have seen this many times in my life. I do not care

what people think and even less what they value or

depreciate. I just watch how they act. And I guess that

you do the same, that we all do the same—more or

less consciously.

Switching from imitating—which is often the result

of the fear to be different—to a new and original way

of life is not easy. It requires courage and the will to

succeed on one’s own—and not as a follower of a

group, or of the majority, the herd, or a guru. It re-

quires a strong sense of individuality, and, to repeat it,

cannot be achieved without individuation.

Where New Ideas Originate From

One or the other of you may think that ideas are

pure chance or that some people just get many ideas

whereas others are dry like the desert sand when new

ideas or inventions are called upon. Some may have

more natural talent to be creators than others, but ba-


207

sically we are all equal in the ability to learn the tech-

niques that bring about new ideas.

Edward de Bono, in his book Serious Creativity

(1996) has demystified creativity and shown that pro-

ducing ideas can be taught as a deliberate activity

that brings results for virtually everybody.

However we trigger the subtle mechanism of crea-

tivity, there is something of the unknown involved in it,

something that has to do with chaos, with ‘Freedom

from the Known,’ with serendipity, with synchronicity

in play. It is obvious that the new cannot come from

the old, that the unknown will not flow out from the

known, that the new and original will not be a clone of

the established. However, many of us disregard this

simple truth and wonder why they cannot find new

solutions by thinking about old problems!

Thought is always in the past and can only operate

from a limited perspective.

Einstein said that a problem can never be solved

on the same level of thinking that created it. New

ideas come from a realm beyond thought, beyond

experience and beyond expectations.


208

Original creators, among them Leonardo da Vinci,

Thomas Edison, or Picasso, generally believe that

genius is a not a special benediction, but something

as normal as eating and sleeping. Creators are simply

free to be themselves, all the time, which is why their

human potential is fully complete, not residual as it is

with most people. That’s because the majority of

people are not really themselves and do not live their

own lives.

I am convinced that everybody is a genius in the

sense that we all receive great ideas once in a while,

often in dreams; else, we all get those hunches while

we are in the bathroom or taking a rest. The problem

is that most of us simply disregard these valuable,

precious intuitions by—

‣ belittling them;

‣ making them down as nonsense;

‣ calling them fantasy or imagination;

‣ denying their reality;

‣ considering them as childish;


209

‣ considering them as inspirations of evil.

The first step is to take serious the perhaps confus-

ing messages from inside. Doing this will open your

mind to another dimension or dimensions, to a

deeper and more holistic vision of living. The old

sages knew details about the fantastic interactive na-

ture of life, its paradoxical complexity in simplicity and

the possible ways to interact with life in a way to cre-

ate in much the same way as nature creates. This is a

learning process, however an extended and multi-

faceted one, and generally one that takes many years

or even decades of diligent work.

I equally deny the distinction between ordinary life

and spiritual life that many people today tend to em-

phasize. It is an artificial distinction and one that is

tautological. Life is all of that—and more!

The unique thing about life is its variety and its

unending change. To divide life into different sections

alters the subtle magic that is inherent in holistic living

into a set of rigid behavior patterns—the typical way

modern man is living. You cannot be productive in

new ideas and original ways of doing things and of

realizing yourself if you cut off this deep magic of life,


210

if you rationalize it away, if you raze off the roots that

emerge every day from the seeds that your potential

has planted. Another reason why creative energy is

stuck is attachment to—

‣ the past;

‣ other people;

‣ the family;

‣ the partner or children;

‣ the parents;

‣ groups;

‣ organizations;

‣ the nation or your country.

All these attachments consume vital energy, and

creativity is but that: energy.

How to dissolve these attachments; how to empty

you from this garbage? It is difficult if not impossible

to do that in a day. I needed about fifteen years to get

there.


211

Meditation greatly helps in this process. This is so

because thought has a natural or physiological ten-

dency to attach to its content. Thought cannot by it-

self leave the boundaries of its content. It is confined

within the limits of the past, the vécu, the remem-

brance of what has been lived —and what is thus

dead. This is not a negative or fatalistic opinion, but a

fact. Thought cannot master thought.

There must be some kind of higher authority that

can direct and renew thought. This authority does in-

deed exist. It is the self. The self is not bound by

thought since it is not bound by time and space.

The self is not the accumulation of experience; it is

not thought, it is not the remembrance of past hurt

and pleasure, neither is it originating from earth-

bound life or past lives. The self or higher self is be-

yond life and death. It is not the transformed but the

transformer, not the learner but the teacher, not the

actor but the director. Some people, when I get into

this subject, ask me if my vision of the self is what in

Hindu philosophy is called atman.

The answer is that there is no answer. I have not

really gone into this. It is of no importance how you


212

call it. I can confirm that your intuition is correct in that

there is in fact some parallel and that indeed, gener-

ally speaking, most Eastern religious concepts bear

some striking logic that one misses in other religious

teachings. Yet, my knowledge of the higher self is not

derived from tradition, but more from the teachings

of the most non-traditional sages, that I mentioned

already—Maharshi and Krishnamurti— but also from

Western sources, the teaching of Master Eckhart and

last not least theosophical teachings, and, I do not

hide it, from channeled sources. And yes, I almost

forgot, Edgar Cayce’s teaching also had a strong im-

pact upon me.

I explained it once to a friend who asked me to

clarify this question for her:

‘Concepts are vessels and carry messages. They are them-selves not the messages! I do not offer a vessel since the vessel is provided by your own inner guide. From a certain level of spiritual development, we do not need vessels any more. This is when we can directly receive the messages. I have rejected the vessels since my childhood which enabled me to advance more quickly on direct perception which I am now teaching, joining a tradition that was practiced several thousand years ago and then destroyed by moralistic think-ing (which has got us where we are now: bare of any true and valid life-philosophy that understands life instead of judging it).’


213

The self is not the ego, but a higher, eternal en-

ergy code or pattern that is distinct and individuated,

but that flows within the ocean of the primordial cos-

mic energy so that there is living exchange between

all beings.

Most Western people call it the soul. The self con-

tains all the wisdom of the universe; it is the individu-

ated aspect of the divine soul.

I do not know if ‘self’ and ‘soul’ are identical or

separated but I would say that this distinction is of a

mere theoretical nature. The higher self or inner guide

is our source of wisdom, creativity and prosperity. The

ego or shell can touch the self, once it is connected.

This, in turn, gradually expresses our total perception

ability, as when this connection between ego and self

is realized, our total perception awakens.

As an analogy of this truth on the level of the indi-

vidual, the self may be a more individualized mask of

the soul.

—See Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Orien-

tal Mythology (1962/1992). The title of the book

shows that in spiritual language, a mask is a mythic

object which symbolizes in tangible reality what in


214

fact is invisible and intangible. Thus the metaphor

that the self is the mask of the divine soul of the

individual. In addition, in all tribal cultures, masks of

whatever kind are considered as sacred ritual ob-

jects, which shows the same truth.

To awaken creative thinking and get out of our es-

tablished concepts, there is no other way than going

beyond thought and language. Once you touch your

self, by being yourself, you are no more reasoning in

terms of concepts and patterns that are made from

past experience, but patterns that are universal. New

ideas namely come from the realm that hosts this im-

mense reservoir of universal patterns. In order to in-

carnate these universal patterns, we must mold them

into our spacetime reality. We do this constantly,

however most often without being aware of it.

When man created the wheel for the first time,

they incarnated the universal pattern wheel into our

space-time continuum. This pattern already long be-

fore formed part of the universal pattern library. By

receiving an inspiration that did not come from

thought, man was able to improve life on earth. With

every new invention it proceeds alike. Practicing di-


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rect perception greatly enhances our chances to

grasp bits of the essential patterns life is made of.

In the following sub-chapter, we will see what it

means to nurture a creative mind and how to foster

and maintain abundant creativeness even through old

age.

How to Nurture a Creative Mind

A creative mind is the essential divide between an

original person and an imitative one. A creative mind

is not afraid to be different and to do things differ-

ently. It is much to the contrary focused upon the un-

usual, the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the mi-

raculous.

For a truly creative person, nothing is impossible

in a strict sense, and life becomes something like a

precious thunder box where new marvels happen at

every moment. A creative mind also is a childlike spir-

it—a ‘beginner’s mind’ as it is called in Zen.

How to nurture and maintain such a mindset? It is

not an easy task, especially for those of you who so far

only imitated others. Yet it is achievable. I myself went


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through a childhood totally devoid of support for my

very bold and premature creativity. In the contrary, I

had to fight for it and against all opposing forces until

I could eventually realize it, about thirty years later. My

personal story may signal that it is essential to clear

the mind from the old garbage that accumulates

through passively absorbing the opinions of others

and the immense amounts of gossip that is spread

around the world by a mediocre, mass-oriented and

for the most part utterly stupid media world!

Most people live alienated from their continuum,

their inner world. This is an incredible waste of their

lifetime.

We are here to live our own lives and not washed

down versions of other people’s lives or some form of

collective living standard that is imposed on us by a

rapaciously greedy consumer culture that we silently

accept and conform with.

How to effect that clearing process that liberates

us from the known and prepares us to receive the un-

known?


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There are methods that will help you refresh your

mind and clear it from all that does not belong to

yourself. I will elucidate, then, the clearing techniques

I have come across.

Write Your Story

Write your story in a single run.

Sit down and spit it out, and do not give up until

it’s done; if it takes one page or one thousand, this is

entirely up to you and to your inspiration.

You may begin innocently and think that you will

have done it in three days and it may take you one

month. Or you may think that this is so difficult a task

that it will take you one year, and later you do it in one

week. All is possible, but there is no excuse valid

enough for not doing it. Writing our life story is one of

the most effective ways to get rid of repetitive

thought patterns relating to the past.

This is not an easy task because most people think

they have no gift for writing. However, you don’t need

any writing skills. There will be no judge and certainly

nobody asking you to publish your scribbles. There


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are some important points to observe for carrying out

this task:

‣ Do not judge yourself!

‣ Do not show it to others before it is ready!

‣ Do not require from yourself to be a good writer!

‣ Do not give up while half way through!

In my own experience with writing my life story, I

can say it’s really a primordial means to trigger creativ-

ity. The liberating effect that goes along with simply

writing down one’s story is almost unbelievable. Try it!

I would go as far as saying that your whole metabo-

lism will change and even the cells in your body will

reflect the fundamental change that will happen on all

levels of your mindbody. One of the direct effects will

be that your emotional flow will be enhanced and you

will feel more alive than ever before!

Practice Meditation

Usually, when I mention the word ‘meditation’ in

my corporate training seminars, I always get more or

less intelligent questions. There are so many miscon-


219

ceptions about meditation in today’s international cul-

ture. The meditation I am talking about does not

need any specific technique. It is rather a state of non-

action, of quietly sitting down for a time-span that is

entirely up to you.

Most Westerners perceive doing nothing as some

sort of punishment! I do not exclude myself. It was for

me extremely difficult to get out of the rails of the

have-to and should-do and ought-to, and just let go

and accept life as it is —which of course means to ac-

cept ourselves! Meditation is an activity that teaches

us acceptance and moving with the flow of life.

It is not an exercise, not something rigid, and cer-

tainly not something like an obligation. If you do it

that way, you certainly do something, but what you

are doing is different from meditation.

The problem with meditation is that many people

have preconceived knowledge about it and may even

have tried it out, but since they have not seen results

they think that it does not work or that it is silly. If you

are tense or you have problems that tear you up emo-

tionally, do not even try, for learning meditation is dif-

ficult if you do it in a state of inner conflict. In order to


220

see results, and that is what motivates us to continue,

we need to learn in a state of mental and emotional

peace.

This is the reason why schools that teach and prac-

tice meditation are often in the mountains or other

remote places. However, this is not a guarantee ei-

ther! If you bring your emotional turmoil with you to

the highest mountain, the mountain as such cannot

help you to get rid of it.

You, only you, can do something about it! What

the mountain can do is trigger in you a slightly shifted

perspective of yourself and the world.

If you take this perspective really serious and are

ready to go from there, it will help you to entirely shift

your inner mind and to get clarity about your truth.

Note Your Dreams

Writing down your dreams every morning helps in

many ways. To be in touch with your inner mind, the

content of the hidden part of your mind is an impor-

tant aid in self-development.

Furthermore, it helps you maintain emotional bal-

ance even in times of great personal or collective


221

turmoil. But there is another thing about dreams that

is lesser known to most people. Writing down your

dreams every day boosts creativity since it is the pri-

mary pathway to creative writing. I have found this as

a result of my own experience.

Many years ago, I experienced an explosion of

creativity while engaging in a hypnotherapy during

which I had to write a lot. First I wrote down all my

dreams every morning and this took sometimes

pages and pages since my dreams were rich and long

like movies. Then I had to write reports about my

therapy sessions, a task that I took very serious. And

while the therapy ended, and with it the session re-

ports, the dreaming continued. And I kept maintain-

ing my dream journal. The result was that my high in-

spiration for creative writing continued to blossom for

years without end.

The difficulty in writing down dreams is that there

are many things in dreams that are hard to put in

words. This is the best school for becoming a writer.

Besides that, this exercise helps you to awaken your

creative mind. Of course, it is sometimes hard work.


222

But creativity is only in part inspiration. A good part of

it is constant and regular work, believe it or not!

The Adventure of Solitude

For most of us it is gruesome to be alone, to have

nobody to share our free time with. It is today a rather

unusual idea to pass essential periods of time, such as

leisure, holidays, and weekends without company.

I go as far as saying that most of us are addicted

to some kind of company, be it a partner, be it a

group, or media entertainment as an ersatz for all

that. What are the deeper reasons of our need of

company for enjoying life? Why do we invite people

when we want to give a party?

Ever thought to give a party for yourself—and only

for you? Perhaps you find that idea crazy but once you

have done it, you will most probably change your

mind.

Some of you have reached a point to avoid others

because of previous bad experiences, and they turn

to animals, to pets. They need the company of pets as

they formerly needed the company of other humans.

They still are in need to be comforted.


223

There are two kinds of company, one that is genu-

ine and based upon mutual sharing and one that is

false and based upon dependency. The first type of

relationship is fulfilling and rewarding in the long run;

the second kind of relationship is exhausting and de-

structive in the long run. The first augments the ex-

change of vital energies, the second diminishes or

obstructs the exchange of energies, and in extreme

cases it can leave you exhausted when the relation-

ship is finally broken off!

To be social doesn’t mean to seek company at any

price; it means to choose and to being discriminate as

to who are to become your partners, friends and as-

sociates and then relate to them according to this

choice. It does not mean to use others as gap fillers

for your many hours of loneliness. The fact that you

cannot be alone without getting into anxiety and de-

pression is pathological. It is not normal.

Don’t be surprised that all boils down to the ques-

tion of identity. That may bother or even annoy you,

but it’s as it is. I have researched for years this com-

plex network of problems that are all inter-related and

found that they all flow out from a false identity.


224

People with a genuine identity do not have these

problems, they do not get sucked empty in code-

pendent vampirism, they do not need heroin or per-

verse wars, genocide and crusades, or domestic vio-

lence, and they are not afraid to be alone. In the con-

trary, they are alone very much and this with a certain

logic: in a society based on fake-values, those who

represent true values are forcibly isolated and consid-

ered as strange, marginal or arrogant. All our great

creators, artists, stars, scientists and geniuses are the

most lonely people you find on this globe! Don’t get

blinded by the glitter that surrounds them. The glitter

is but the façade made up by the media and it is as

false as those media are. Ask some of the stars or

geniuses you worship, and write to them, and you will

see for yourself!

All things that are true and vital in my life are the

result of my own fight; society, family and environment

constantly tried to bog me down and get me away

from what is good and true for me and made down all

the artistic and religious values I cherished. They con-

stantly pushed me to reduce myself to a consumer-

robot.


225

It was only through my struggle and persistent ef-

fort that I was able to built some things of value today,

after more than forty years of contemptuous resis-

tance.

As a consequence of my choice to go my own way,

I have been isolated in the strangest ways and had to

get familiar with the most atrocious forms of solitude.

But I got to love my own company beyond all, and

found the true value of identity after having shed

many tears.

Points to Ponder

‣ Chapter Five was about nurturing a creative mindset. In what would you think is the life of a creator essentially different from the life of an imi-tator? Is it not that the creator relies on his or her own intuitions instead of looking at what others do? Is it not that the creator is focused upon in-side, and the imitator upon outside? Is it not that the creator follows his own god, while imitators seek to follow the standard gods?

‣ Few of us are born creators in the sense to incar-nate with a clear genius for one or the other sphere, be it art, music, or literature, sport or dance. Most of us are coming here with a range of more or less undeveloped talents that we of


226

course can develop if we seriously wish to; this, then, may be the basis for a later professional ca-reer in that particular field of interest.

‣ Hence, there is one essential characteristic that creators have, and imitators not: it is daringness and courage for going against the stream, and for being different from the norm.

‣ We have seen that by just removing uncreativity, it’s not like peeling an apple. By removing uncrea-tivity, you aren’t going to develop creativity.

‣ It doesn’t work with a negative approach. To be-come an original creator, you need to create, and nothing but create—whatever it is. Some people create movies, or novels that are a symphony of hate and murder. Be it. At least, it’s their creation, and somehow it puts on stage their inner vio-lence. In that sense, their creation might contrib-ute to their inner healing, while for the world, such creations may bring about the very contrary. Be it. We are not here to judge. It is better some-one creates something negative than creating nothing at all.

‣ All creation is the fruit of relation, first of all the relation to self—your inner self. Once you are in touch with yourself, you are in touch with all-that-is, and then you create spontaneously, and effort-lessly. So the first step is to get in touch with the five relationships, which are flowing out from the


227

one relation you maintain with your self. Then you build your outside world, your relations with oth-ers, and here attitude comes into play and needs to be built.

‣ To build a consistent attitude is not easy, it needs time, patience, commitment and persistence.

‣ An attitude reflects inner strength and a certain character structure, and these qualities in turn are the result of individuation, which is a process, not something that arises spontaneously. The process of individuation in our culture is unfortunately not smooth, and it is not really supported by our edu-cational system, which is why this system breeds passive consumers, and imitators, not creators in their own right. Hence, when you want to get on the creator track, you need to work yourself on building yourself, building an original first-hand identity.

‣ New solutions cannot result from thinking about old problems, but by making space for the un-known, for novelty in your life, and in your crea-tion. New ideas obviously do not originate from established ways of doing. Edward de Bono said that the brain can only see what it is used to see, and Einstein said a problem cannot be solved on the same level it has been created. Genius, or high individuation, then, is the result of giving ample space to self, to your own inner world. A life where you are truly yourself is per se a spiri-tual life.


228

‣ When you create and you are original, the creator is the self, not the ego. The ego is made up by thought and therefore is the past, but the self is able to produce novelty because it is connected to the timeless and spaceless continuum of the soul. New ideas originate from the timeless realm of universal patterns.

‣ This is something you can imagine like a huge library of thoughts, ideas, emotions, and where you find whole structures that are built already and can be used in your creation. To access this universal library is a result of meditation and in-trospection as part of the process of creation.

‣ For nurturing a creative mind, there are some specific techniques you may practice and that bring about something like an inner clearance.

‣ These techniques, some of which I mentioned, are story writing, meditation, noting your dreams, and learning to be content with your own com-pany—the practice of solitude.


229

Chapter Six

Your Way to Be Different

❊

Introduction

In the present chapter we are going to focus with

quite a decisive spell on our difference!

We live in a culture that stresses uniformity and

adaptation as the highest virtues of the good citizen. I

contradict vehemently, and virulently, and since my

childhood to this defeatist worldview. In my opinion,

high achievement and distinction never are the out-

come of adaptation and uniformity but clearly of indi-

viduation and nonconformity.

The present chapter is destined to help those of

you who are seriously interested to develop their dif-

ference and base their success in life upon their

uniqueness and primary power instead of letting oth-

ers, their family or a community determine the out-

come of their lives. What I am going to offer here is

something non-intellectual, something with little

steps that every good-willed person can do, and that

harnesses intuitive insight much more than your intel-

lectual understanding. If you do not like to do all the

tasks, do at least one of them.

The Art to Be Different

I do not want to bore you with psychological ex-

planations, yet we have to dig a little bit into the stuff

dreams are made of. To be different from the mass is

only possible if you tender your own garden and find

the treasures in your own soil. Individuation is a com-

plex thing to happen.

It has to do with how we have made our first steps

and how far our mothers or nurses have let us go on

our own—autonomy or else dependency are learnt in

babyhood!

The early years of conditioning have a strong im-

pact upon our whole life. It is not easy to change this

early conditioning. I have gone through all myself and

talk not from a book-knowledge perspective.


232

I am motivated to share my positive outcome with

you and the world at large, for it has shown me that

there are real possibilities of change, provided one is

motivated to change, and persistent enough to get

through the whole of the process of inner change and

reconditioning. Where do these difficulties originate

from?

First of all from the restriction of freedom. The

human nature is basically built upon freedom as a mo-

tor for all living. From my experience I know that all

that is forced upon the human nature cannot endure.

All moralistic systems fail and have failed throughout

human history. On the other hand, it is not easy to de-

velop a kind of self-discipline that is not rigid, not

judgmental and not moralistic yet effective and con-

sistent. And yet without self-discipline and regular

work, ongoing effort and high flexibility, nothing of

value can be achieved in the long run. However, by

applying the traditional rigid concept of self-

discipline, to say it right away, the work I am going to

propose here will not work! The secret of working on

attitude is something like flexible persistence. Better

to make every day one small step instead of a mara-

thon jump once in a while.

YOUR WAY TO BE DIFFERENT

233

The second secret on being different is accep-

tance! As Lao-tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, it is

through accepting the world that the sage wins the

world. It is namely not through conquering it, and not

through opposing it, as most people today believe.

Lao-tzu shows us the Tao or Way of being different

and unique. This way appears to be quite paradoxical.

It is by not trying to be different that we achieve to be

different.

Originality thus after all is an outflow of spontane-

ity; it is born from a natural being at home in one’s

own continuum, not from the desire to promote and

display fancy attitudes and lifestyles so as to mark

one’s difference. It does not originate from will at all.

Attitude has little to do with will. It comes from

deep inside, from a source where will has no influ-

ence.

Therefore it is not possible to just wanting to be

different, to just have a will to change the condition-

ing influence of our childhood. Willpower may trigger

the change process, okay, but not more.


234

It is through understanding the process and prac-

ticing a deconditioning method that we can achieve

this goal.

Combining information and practice creates a

substance in you that is living, and organic, while pur-

suing a rigid method kills the most precious in you

rather than inspiring you and lifting you up. Every

practice, if done correctly, is an art—an art of living, an

art of learning, an art of growing.

Your Way to Be Different

Task One : Roadmap for Distinction

It is essential that you write your answers intui-

tively, without thought getting involved in the proc-

ess. Try to do it with a playful, curious attitude and see

what happens!

You should do these tasks right now, as I did not

include them in the worksheets below.

1. MY WISH LIST

Write what you wish here and now. In which ways

do you wish to excel with your own intrinsic gifts and


235

talents, to be different from the herd, to be unique,

original, daring and bold? Write your answer here:


236


237

2. THIS IS HOW I VALUE CREATIVITY AND ORIGINALITY

Even if you think you are leading a dull and boring

life right now, imagine how different it could be if only

you took the first step into being truly creative! Write

your answer here:


238


239

3. THIS IS WHAT I THINK ABOUT MARGINALITY

Even if you always have been rather conservative

and tend to avoid marginal people, try to see the

value and the necessity of marginality, and your own

intrinsic marginality as a unique being of light. Write

your answer here:


240


241

4. THIS IS HOW I ADMIRE, ADORE AND IMITATE OTHERS

Even if you always have been rather anxious to do

your own thing, try to honestly relate here how and

why you think that others are always better than you.

Write your answer here:


242


243

5. THIS IS HOW I DIFFER FROM OTHERS

Get the truth about your uniqueness, your differ-

ence, despite the fact that hitherto you may not have

considered this knowledge as something precious.

Write your answer here:


244


245

Task Two : Attentiveness

The first task was a precise activity that you had to

sit down for. The next task is very different in that it is

more something ongoing, something to be done

daily: it is to develop attentiveness.

In which ways are you—

‣ trying to imitate others;

‣ restrain from new original endeavors because of

• fear;

• procrastination;

• negative thinking;

• worrying what others think about you?

Now, you may react with the thought ‘Well, to

watch this and not do something about it, what’s the

purpose of it all?’

The purpose is that by simply watching it, by de-

veloping this awareness and practicing watchful atten-

tiveness, your consciousness changes and with it your

life. This means the problem will disappear by itself!


246

You do not need to do anything about it. At least not

something more than being attentive.

Being attentive, being passively watchful requires

a high investment of vital energy. Krishnamurti has

shown it in all his writings and talks.

Task Three : Just do it!

When you have original ideas, intuitions or im-

pulses, just do what you wish to do, and do not worry!

When I was young, my whole energy, my whole

spirit was focused on becoming a pianist. Yet all cir-

cumstances of my early life contradicted my wish. It

was almost hopeless. I had to wait many years until I

could begin with taking piano lessons. I was eighteen

when I started, yet my left hand was totally undevel-

oped and hopelessly weak.

At the age of twenty-one I could eventually study

with a well-known university professor and pianist. Yet

I never could achieve the standard of technique I

needed to possess in order to play the compositions I

loved, the piano preludes, etudes and concertos by

Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Liszt and Scri-

abin—all the wonderful piano literature that is awfully


247

difficult to perform. And this despite my exercising

the piano up to eight hours per day.

My teacher was telling me that I had the spirit of a

graduated pianist with the hands and the technique

of a child! He said it well with a touch of humor, but

for me it was like a sword penetrating into my heart

and the flesh of my musical passion.

The result of all this? I abandoned completely and

forever any kind of training, any kind of lesson, and

any kind of help for piano playing. I continued on my

own.

I continued despite all, and also despite all the

turmoil I had with the neighbors who wanted to set

me out of the apartment because of the ‘noise’ I

made and even won a court action against me, upon

which I had to change the flat.

And yet I continued, but without musical scores,

without the classical training and without hope to ever

achieve something valuable with my efforts on the pi-

ano. And yet today I have realized sixteen audio CDs,

with my own little spontaneous improvisations and


248

compositions, and in addition, I have published and

designed them all by myself!

You can do the same, and you will see miracles

happen in much the same way as they happened in

my life!

As I said in the beginning, nothing works if you are

not persistent. That’s why you need self-discipline

which is, however, not control. It is not meant to bur-

den you, to push you into self-sacrifice. It is rather

some kind of passion or even madness that drives you

to the point to realize your ultimate vision. When I say

‘do it’ I mean do what you can in the moment. It does

not mean to shoot and rob somebody so as to have

the money to realize your dream. The universe stops

helping you when you are violating universal laws,

while when you patiently comply with them, the uni-

verse will truly support your dream, once you are in-

vesting the necessary vital energy to keep focus and

persist despite all.

Sometimes little steps or endeavors that lead to

your goal may seem almost ridiculous if you compare

them to the final result you want to bring about. Yet

all great achievements are realized by little daily steps


249

and successes, for all great and lasting success is

gradual, not sudden.

Task Four : Mark Your Path

Task Four requires you to put little road signs for

yourself that you are walking a certain path.

There is a funny little anecdote told by Anthony

Robbins in his book Awaken the Giant Within (1991).

Robbins said that it was not possible to always do the

right thing at the right time. It was only important for

us to put little signs along the road, signs which serve

as signals for us to see that we feed our vision, that

we take it serious! He then reports the story of a man

who took his gun and shot his old car in pieces. ‘This

man wanted to set a sign that he wishes to have a

new car! That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?,’ commented

Robbins, chuckling, ‘but at the end the man was right

in setting an act. To have done it will greatly advance

his project to eventually get a new car.’

What did Robbins mean? Did he want to convey

that we should do something crazy and outlandish to

show we are in the world, and to attract attention?

No, he wanted to say that when you set your new


250

course in life, you should celebrate it! You should set

a markstone, for yourself, not necessarily for others,

and you definitely do not need a guru for doing that!

The goal of setting an act is not to attract atten-

tion, but actually to give a signal to your own subcon-

scious mind, that you are taking this new direction se-

rious, and that you are not going to waver with your

decision.

That means you root yourself in your new energy,

and then the energy will take over. All in our universe

works that way. There must be an idea first, a thought,

an intent, then its expression in the outside world

through a decision or, stronger, a dedication to that

idea; a dedication is what reinforces intent, and gives

a signal to the universe to attract all that is needed for

the realization of the initial idea or project. This, then,

will attract all the help needed, and the energy that is

going to propel the idea into tangible realization.

Points to Ponder

‣ In Chapter Six, I provided you with a roadmap for being different, and accepting your difference.


251

‣ Have you ever thought about how much strength, power, and original creativeness lies in your dif-ference?

‣ Autonomy, the natural growth condition, or co-dependence, a pathological condition, are both learned in babyhood. While most of us were con-ditioned to be codependent with our parents, or a single parent, we can work on building auton-omy. I acknowledge that the change is not easy but it’s not impossible either. It took me thirty years but I come from an extreme condition of mother-son codependence, and for most people it won’t be that difficult and time-consuming to develop their true originality.

‣ You may trigger the change process by willpower and intention but to get through the whole proc-ess, you need to build an attitude that is consis-tent and that supports your specific inner setup. For this to happen, you don’t need to oppose the world, and you do not need to develop a fancy lifestyle or mannerisms, but you simply stay con-nected with inside and let the change come about spontaneously, and incrementally, doing one step at a time.

‣ There are four tasks you may accomplish on your way to build personal distinction and creator-hood, and for affirming your difference. In the first task, entitled Roadmap for Distinction, you write spontaneous essays about, for example, your Five Reasons to be Different, how you Value Creativity


252

and Originality or what you think about the Value of Marginality. These essays may be door open-ers for you as the questions are loaded with meaning, but the condition is that you write your answers fast, in stream-of-consciousness style, without letting your observer come too much in the way.

‣ In the second task, you are developing attentive-ness, or what K called ‘total attention.’ Attention is something magic as the power of conscious-ness is self-executing in the sense that anything you focus upon is strengthened and anything you wish to disappear, you can make vanish out of sight by simply withdrawing your attention from it. For example, if you wish to be more healthy, withdraw your attention as much as possible from your ailments and focus it on your wellbeing and strengths. Then there is nothing that can defeat your long-term health. It’s as simple as that, while it’s not simple to do it because it requires you to invest vital energy in the quest.

‣ When you live a sluggish, luxury life, indulging in all kinds of debauchery and pleasures, you are unlikely to have this amount of energy at your disposition. This is why a certain purity and self-discipline in your inner and outer life is necessary to bring about total attention.

‣ The third task, if you remember my music story, consists in just doing what you intuitively feel is right. I felt that pursuing a piano career is not for


253

me, so I studied law, but did not let teachers or written music spoil my passion for music, continu-ing piano on my own. There was no immediate result. Twenty years went in the land until my in-born creativity was strongly enough built to see its day, and back in 1994, I started to record my musical inspirations.

‣ This is what I mean when I say ‘Do it!’ It means to solve all the problems that are in your way, one by one, and one at a time. But persist, do not let anybody defeat you, and do not get on a track of self-pity and procrastination.

‣ The good news is that when you just do it, when you are active in creating your dream, such mo-ments of frustration are only coming up once in a while, and are easy to master.

‣ The forth task is to put up little road signs that mark your trace, which for me was recording my music.


254

Chapter Seven

Ten Success Principles

❊

1st Principle

Be Yourself

There is self-publishing now established, and you

can tell your opinions to all the four directions. But

when you look around with what kind of content peo-

ple come up, you may be surprised to find very little

original ideas. You find very rarely that people express

their worldview in a way that really makes sense. Ei-

ther they imitate others or what they say is outright

off-track, subjective, outlandish, if not outrageous.

This teaches with lots of evidence that self-thinking is

really not the order of the day today among humans.

Never before in human history did we have such an

array of free options for people to express themselves

creatively, using modern technology and the interna-

tional networks provided by the www protocol that is

used all over the Internet. And what do they do? For

the most part they complain about the ‘bad world,’

and talk about conspiracies and secret governments,

as if there was nothing else to talk and publish about.

These are the younger ones.

And for the rest, what do you find? House and

garden, cooking recipes, home sweet home, how to

feed your pets, and the so-called selfhelp world of Mr.

and Mrs. Little.

And within this glorious publishing revolution, an

author like myself is to this day rejected, just as be-

fore, by literary agents and all those busy in the chan-

neling industry, the industry that makes sure to keep

the world informed about feeding dogs and cats, and

how to cut your Bonsai trees, and that makes equally

sure that issues that concern all of us in this cata-

strophic world are not published about. I have some-

thing to say and as it’s something substantial, they

take good care that I am silenced. And when I publish

with self-publishers I know already how I will look

within the weeds of the worldwide garden, and in the


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showcase of worldwide selfhelp, as just another vanity

author, as they call it …

Yet, this is exactly what I wish to tell you. I have

understood my fate and do not worry, nor complain

about it.

When you are like me, a true creator, when you are

a self-thinker, you know that you won’t have an easy

kick-start in this kind of society that while it affirms

everybody can publish what they like, is actually very

self-protective. The managers of ‘worldwide democ-

racy’ know they don’t need to be afraid of the young-

sters who yell their conspiracy stories out on Youtube

and the elders who talk about their pets, plants and

emotional pathologies on Lulu.

But they may be afraid of people like me, and

perhaps you, who really have something to say, and

are not stupid enough for being offensive or outra-

geous, but rational-minded and smart.

This example may teach you that success is not

your petty home world, nor your youthful paranoia

that somehow compensates for your emotional and

sexual deprivation; and it also teaches both you and

TEN SUCCESS PRINCIPLES

257

me that nothing in life is given for free—except life

itself.

It needs a lot of belief in yourself, and the active

work on your inner mind, day by day, to not succumb

to negativity and frustration, but sympathize with

those who are like you, and there are a few, perhaps

less than a percent of the world population, but that is

still quite a lot of people.

When you are bathed in silence, despite all your

mailings well-done, despite of your well-designed and

extensive web sites and the many books you offer

there for sale or free of charge, and that are truly use-

ful, not just fake, as most what you find on the Inter-

net, then, when you still get only silence—I tell you,

you can know that you are on the right path!

2nd Principle

Respect Your Soul Values

Never follow anything that is not in accordance

with your soul values. Social values, as you see them

around as societal guidelines of conduct do not guar-


258

antee your ultimate happiness and fulfillment as a

soul being! They are robot rules in a robot agenda.

Soul values are different from social values in they

are coming from a deep source, your spiritual origins,

the light that created you (and me), your inner god,

angel or guide, the higher self, the ultimate source of

our beingness.

When society or any guru tells you to follow their

doctrine, hold on and reflect inside first and consult

your inner guide; check if this teaching is in accor-

dance with your deepest intrinsic soul values.

Behold, soul values go over many life cycles not

just your present life cycle, thus they are cyclic, not

transitory.

3rd Principle

Fight Timidity

Some people believe that timidity or shyness was

natural, especially those cultures where it is frowned

upon to show emotions, and where carefreeness and

closeness with others is supposed to be intentional

because probably sexual; in fact, when behavior is


259

natural and spontaneous, there are hardly any after-

thoughts when people meet with other people. It’s

like breathing, then, largely unreflected, and there is a

goodness connected to it. However, when people re-

treat in their inner world, and avoid meeting others,

they bear most of the time one or the other prejudice

against the group, and networking with others, which

means they have developed a defensive worldview.

While in our culture, still some time ago, timidity

with women was considered a form of decency and of

good education, the same doesn’t apply for men.

Men who are timid suffer real disadvantages in social

and professional life. I was one of them for about the

first fifty years of my life, so I know what I am talking

about.

Missing out on contact-making and befriending

others is about the worst that can happen to you, ex-

cept you are happily married, enjoy to be with your

children, and are working in a stable, long-term gov-

ernment job.


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4th Principle

Handle Negativity

I suffered from negativity for many years. Having

been brought up in a problem family, I had been con-

ditioned to be fatalistic and negative, and my own

rather large mindset and positive outlook on the

world and people was systematically eroded by my

mother’s fearful and revengeful attitude, and her

eternal complaints about the bad world. As a result,

since my most tender years, I was eaten up by anxiety

from morning to evening. Still back in my forties, I was

suffering from compulsive sweating, while I could re-

duce a number of neurotic habits in earlier years. I

have been robbed and cheated by others over years

and years, losing two thirds of my fortune, and devel-

oped a self-defeating pattern that made me work

against myself, becoming my worst enemy. The fears

by and by grew in a real paranoia and I was at a point

to face therapy, suicide or serious illness. Yet facing

the bottomline of my life triggered a turning of the

wheel! Instead of blaming myself or fate, I began to

pray. Upon my prayers and extended meditation, my


261

dreams slowly began to change and were mirroring

my behavior.

I could hardly believe that through those dream

visions, I was able to see myself, as a third person

would see me. This allowed me to become fully con-

scious of my lacking relationship skills, and exagger-

ated fears, and I became painfully aware that all my

life I had been living a shell existence. In one dream

the inner voice said:

—You do not believe in freedom!

I woke up with great relief, realizing that indeed I

had denied to myself the most basic freedom over

years and years, having lived in a tight net of com-

plexes that were more and more strangling me.

The turning point occurred a few weeks later, and

it appeared to be a miracle! I was once of a sudden,

virtually from one minute to the next free of all that—

what today I call a curse. I was simply free of it, it was

behind me, and I felt like newborn.


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5th Principle

Handle People

A French hotel manager I met one day in Phnom

Penh, Cambodia, thought that the people of that

country were difficult to motivate. Life acted upon his

inner belief and attracted him staff that was generally

unmotivated, hanging around lazily all day, complain-

ing about their salary, and blaming the manager for

their condition.

This was quite astonishing to see because gener-

ally, in Cambodia, local staff does not behave that

way!

That French manager was unable to motivate his

staff because he projected upon them his stern belief

they were ‘anyway lazy and unmotivated.’ The result

was a whole list of complaints I had collected over five

days staying in that boutique hotel, that was excel-

lently furnished, yet so badly managed. That manager

had put his single focus on the hardware, and badly

neglected the software, that is, the human element,

which is unfortunately often done wrong in managing

hotels.


263

There is an old saying we should not only look at

the beautiful motif on a vase or bowl, but also regard

what it contains. Would you feel attracted to buy a

China that contains spider webs, or a dead rat?

Would you not be shocked and appalled when

you discover the inside of the beautiful vase? Would

you not become angry at the shop owner to show you

such a beautiful object that yet contains such un-

pleasant items?

Would you not think that such a shop owner must

have an upside-down mind, caring only for the out-

side of things, and neglecting the inside?

And yet, many managers have this attitude, worry-

ing their corporate limousine not being the newest

model, and at the same time overlooking that the

driver of the car is underpaid, and overworked, thus

risking an accident to happen because of his lacking

sleep, and his high stress level.


264

6th Principle

Timing

A friend of mine in Phnom Penh, a 72-year old Ko-

rean banker and CEO of a small exclusive investment

bank was telling me that with property acquisition the

most important factor was not, as it is often said,

location-location-location, but timing. He explained

to me that all the factors could be handled intelli-

gently and dealt with, except timing. When timing is

wrong, all is wrong, he concluded.

This man had given me excellent advice for my

own anticipated investment in real estate; as I was

rather anxious to invest, he offered me his help and

support, but I was still too little aware of the big op-

portunity and missed it. Two years later he told me he

had invested five hundred thousand dollars at that

time, and in only a few months, the land he had

bought was evaluated a net worth of five million dol-

lars. Yet I had missed the moment, and time had been

running against me. When I eventually wanted to

climb on the bandwagon, he told me it was too late

as property prices had virtually exploded and real es-

tate was overrated.


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7th Principle

Resource Management

I met a property developer who had made twenty

million dollars two decades ago. He considered him-

self very lucky, and began to lead a luxury life. He told

me he had owned two handmade Porsche, that each

cost him half a million dollars, and that for one birth-

day party he had spent one hundred thousand dol-

lars. He proudly added that one bottle of Premier Cru

red wine he served that night for his illustrious guests

had cost him eight thousand dollars.

Not for overstating I may add that the man is not

of the shy rut and acquainted with statesmen and

some very rich and famous entrepreneurs, a fact that

of course gives him repeatedly new self-esteem

boosts. Yet he spent his money, obviously not caring

for maintaining his fortune and just living from the in-

terest; he touched the substance.

So he really spent 18 million dollars in about

twenty years. When I met him he had just two million

dollars left and moved to Cambodia where he could

play the big man, just as before, as in that country, at


266

that time, two million dollars was about as much as

twenty million in his home country. He told me in his

usual grand allure he is spending more than twenty

thousand dollars every three months only on call girls,

bars and massage parlors.

While he prided himself working for the renova-

tion of his home country’s embassy and was allegedly

the best friend of the ambassador, the week thereaf-

ter he said that all ambassadors ‘were madmen’ and

that he had quit the contract, as their demands had

been excessive.

I then found out he simply had acted against the

safety regulations of that embassy and thereby en-

dangered their security. And despite his played-out

professionalism and a grand seigneur attitude, every

time I met this man, he asked me to invest money in a

joint-business, and every week it was another project.

This man defied an old and established wisdom.

While allegedly having much more money than I, he

was asking me for money every time I talked with him.

What would you think of such a man? Is he on the

success track? Will he ever attract good and trustwor-


267

thy partners and investors? Is his allure and entire life-

style trust-inspiring? And last not least, does this man

know to manage his resources?

8th Principle

Be Compassionate

This is one of the strangest stories I have wit-

nessed in my life. Some years ago, in Phnom Penh,

Cambodia, I met a sexagenarian billionaire from Aus-

tralia. We had spontaneous sympathy for each other

and met at breakfast in a hotel in Phnom Penh. He

was a small, fat man, very easy-going but with a trait

of vulgarity, a true original. I had noticed him two days

before we met, as he was regularly shouting at the

staff in the restaurant, calling them lazy, stupid and all

kinds of names.

He invited me over to his room that same day, to-

gether with the hotel manager he had equally be-

friended, and showed us a box of raw diamonds. He

took several of them out, as if playing with glass balls,

and slightly noted that that box had a value of ap-

proximately twelve million dollars.


268

He left it on his night table, without locking it,

without even putting it in the cupboard. The room

was very dirty, and the man was eating only junk food,

not taking care of messing up the floor and his bed.

The room actually looked as if it hadn’t been

cleaned for at least a week. To make it worse, the man

was smoking heavily, to a point that the air in the

room was foggy. Later on he told me his net worth

was about fifteen billion dollars.

Not long after that, he presented me to a friend of

his, who founded an NGO for helping children who

work, under terrible conditions, in a huge garbage

dumb outside of the town. We had been chatting with

him for a while, and I found he was a witty and coura-

geous man and engaged myself at once to sponsor

one of his trips, an investment of just a hundred and

twenty dollars.

After putting the money on the table, I asked my

billionaire friend if he didn’t want to join, so much the

more as he had presented me to that man. He shook

his head, with a grin, saying:


269

—Are you kidding, buddy … me and give a penny

to such nonsense? No, that’s not for me. You won’t

see me giving my money for any of such humanitarian

crap.

Upon which he put his arm around the bar girl who

was sitting next to him, and I did of course not insist.

I met him several more times at lunch or dinner,

and he was telling me he was not only lucky finan-

cially, but also in love, because he was married with

the most gorgeous young woman, and that she was

just twenty-five, a Procter and Gamble top manager in

Thailand, and from a very good family from the Thai

upper class. And that he was hard-on for her and

couldn’t wait to fly back to Thailand to meet her.

As I did not hear from him for two weeks, I called

him, to learn he was in hospital and recovered from an

urgency operation of his colon; that he had eaten in a

good restaurant in Bangkok, but that the food had

been poisoned with the result he had suffered a total

colon closure.

The colon thus had to be opened surgically, which

had been a painful operation. As he did not seem to


270

recover, his assistant told me he had returned to Aus-

tralia without telling him and even his Thai wife where

he was. He had cut all contacts from one day to the

other.

And I was thinking very strongly of him and how

his body had been putting on stage his words when

we visited that organization. His body had said:

—I do not want to give, I do not want to let some-

thing out of me, I want to keep it all inside.

His body had incarnated his words that said he

was never wanting to give a penny for humanitarian

nonsense.

His assistant later told me I had not understood

the severity of his illness and operation, and that he

had almost died.

It made me pensive.


271

9th Principle

Be Ecstatic

Many people think it was inherent in modern cul-

ture that people are egotistic, and do not want to

share.

They ignore that the true reason for the inflation of

the personal ego is lack of ecstasy. Ecstasy has never

been understood in our industrial culture, while native

tribal societies around the world have an ecstasy pat-

tern built in their lifestyle.

The truth is that we need ecstasy as much as we

need to touch and being touched, as much as we

need sleep and laughter. But ecstasy is not what most

people in our culture think it was. It’s not group sex or

any kind of fancy lifestyle, partying, ‘high life’ and all

the rest of it. Ecstasy is a truly religious experience

that is characterized by the fact that the ego is mo-

mentarily dissolved, and one experiences a deep un-

ion with all that is. Thus contrary to folk wisdom ec-

stasy is an ego-dissolving journey.

It is amazing to see how much of their time and

energy humans invest in veiling the truth; in fact if the


272

human was not by nature a truthful individual, only

little energy would be needed. The fact that we need

a gigantic worldwide media machinery for manipulat-

ing humans into corrupt and false ideas and ideolo-

gies proves this fact more than all. The human is a re-

dundant wistful animal that always springs back to

truth; and while the mind may be able to bear distor-

tions over long periods of time, the body doesn’t.

You can experience ecstasy while watching a sun-

set, or being around people you have never seen, in a

village, observing their interactions, or you may expe-

rience it when you play with children, or ride through

the streets during the water festival in Thailand and

get some water sprinkled all over you, or you may ex-

perience it while going on a boat tour, or in a villa in

Bali, where late at night, you have a glass of wine near

the pool, watching the silent moon and the stars, and

feeling in union with all creation.

How you experience it is up to you, and different

for all of us, but that you must experience ecstasy

once in a while is a fact, for otherwise you easily slide

into robotism, which is the lot of most people in to-

day’s technological societies.


273

Behold, as long as you remain locked in your ego,

you cannot realize great and worldwide success be-

cause typically huge, overwhelming success comes

through serving others, by realizing projects that are

beneficial not only for yourself but for a lot of other

people, or even humanity at large.

To integrate your ego, you don’t need to get in-

volved with any organized religion if you don’t want

to. Suffices you remain open for wonder, the miracle,

the unusual, and that you keep your heart open for

novelty, and your skin receptive for the osmosis of

love.

10th Principle

Live Your Love

I honestly never met anybody who was really suc-

cessful yet was inhibited, trying to hide his loving at-

traction. When you meet really successful people you

may be astonished how outspoken they are about

their love choices!

Their loves may be completely against the rules,

and yet they just laugh about the common lot of


274

those who are conformist and comply to society’s writ-

ten or unwritten inhibitions.

This is not just chance. To be successful needs a

lot latitude, a great and open mind, for if you are

petty, you can’t find the great solutions that others

haven’t found, and you can’t think big enough to real-

ize them.

When you do anticipate those needs and when

you do engage in thinking big, then you will do that

also regarding your love, and you will not allow homo

normalis or the boulevard papers to tell you what or

whom you have to love, and whom you have to avoid.

We all have different love options, and we choose

different love objects. We all have different fantasies

about love and what we desire most in love.

There are no standards in love and the fact that

humanity came up with marriage doesn’t mean any-

thing, and in particular it doesn’t mean marriage is

good or bad. Now in most Western nations, homo-

sexuals can marry as well, but will that have really a

positive impact upon their lives?


275

I doubt it. Many men are happily married in the

sense they enjoy to have a home and children, but

their loving focus is not their home but mistresses

they keep and that are kept secret, or not so secret,

from their families. This is also something women are

now claiming for themselves in most Western coun-

tries. Does that mean they are happier than before? I

doubt it.

I think that love is fundamentally opposed to any

kind of formal arrangement, however you may call it,

as even concubinage now has legal consequences.

Love is volatile and the excitement and value in love is

exactly its freedom.

To enclose and lock love in certain institutions,

however you may call them, surely destroys it. All

those love-regulating institutions namely are based

upon possession thinking. I own that partner, I own

those children who are mine, I own this household

with all living and dead objects in it, I am the owner of

cars, houses, staff and family, I just own everything,

and that is why I am rich!

That is how many people think, and I guarantee

you these people may be rich, but they are not happy.


276

They have transformed their lives and loves into

cemeteries of dead possessions.

What keeps you alive and full of vitality is real love,

which is never established, never respectable, like a

perfume in the air that you can’t store away, like a

flower that you pick at the roadside. The flower will

keep alive for a few hours and may have a wonderful

fragrance, but a day later, the fragrance has turned

foul and shortly thereafter, the flower dies. So it is with

love, which is a symbol for the temporary state of

what we call life. It reminds us of the most important,

which is death. It is through the presence of death

and through the acceptance of death that we really

live vibrantly, and joyfully.

You can’t take your possessions with you to the

other world, but the loves you lived, the respectable

ones and the non-respectable ones alike, you can

bear them in your heart and they won’t vanish away

after your passing over, for they are an energy; they

are within your soul and thus eternal.

Our society knows nothing about love, otherwise

we wouldn’t be at the border of global ecological dis-

aster and we wouldn’t have wars and genocide all


277

over the world, and that’s why our society has no right

and no mandate to tell you, and me, how we have to

live our loves!

For one thing is sure, if you are going to dig your

grave before you die, you will have a hard time to live,

for you will be focused on your grave, and not upon

your love.

So the solution is, if you want to be at all success-

ful in life, socially, in your business, in your relation-

ships, in your humanitarian activities, that you try to

be successful first of all in your love, by living it with-

out shame and guilt, by defying all the rules and all

the moralistic trash that keeps you from engaging in

the love that you feel and know is yours! Then, and

only then will you be successful also in the rest of your

life.

Points to Ponder

‣ In Chapter Seven I proposed you some uncanny 10 Principles of Success. This is something like a wake-up call that was growing out, paradoxically, from all my defeats in life—simply because I did not accept them as defeats! Ten principles of success? What does that mean? Just another


278

quick fix? No. I tell you it means that these ten principles of success are first of all ten principles of how to deal with defeat.

‣ The 1st success principle tells you how to deal with those nice or not-so-nice citizens that tell you you are a piece of crap or just ignore you (which essentially boils down to the same). Be-hold, I have done my homework, have you done yours?

‣ The 2nd success principle suggests you to respect your soul values, which are not transitory but cy-clic and thus valid not only for this present exis-tence, but your whole cycle of reincarnations. This means that in a conflict of interests, you should abide by your soul values instead of conforming with the conflicting social values.

‣ The 3rd success principle is about fighting timid-ity. Part of your social existence is that you learn to be around others without shame or guilt. If you went through a guilt-inducing education, as many of us, you need to do something about this timid-ity that is a real handicap in social relations, espe-cially when you are a man. While with women, timidity is often associated with decency, with men, in our society, timidity is considered a weakness, or, worse, a lack of smart. So learn to fight timidity, by doing something about your condition. For example, you may follow a hypno-therapy or setup a life plan to approach all peo-ple you feel funny about, females, pop stars, or


279

your favorite scientist or pianist. Learn to ap-proach them freely, and politely, and claim to get an answer, even if that answer consists only in a one-liner email, but still. And if you don’t get an answer, do by no means associate it with de-feat—but take your conclusions about the human integrity of your great star. He or she might well melt down to human proportions, or even below!

‣ The 4th success principle is to handle negativity. We all are negative once in a while, and it often comes over us without having been invited. And yet, it can destroy much. This foul mix of frustra-tion, depression and negativity that is the result of high performance, and that comes up when things don’t go as expected while you invested all your skills and all your energy, is normal, but it can destroy relationships if you can’t control it. When you leash out on others, every time you are in this condition, and others don’t have enough latitude to understand why you do what you are doing, then you may lose many friends. It hap-pened so in my own life, and it took me years to handle this problem. How did I handle it? First of all by reducing alcohol intake when alcohol served as a stimulant for workaholism. Eventually realizing that alcohol had become for me a medi-cine for fighting fatigue, and letting the fatigue take over, I was able to normalize my feelings, and my behavior, and my relationships normal-ized as a result. We have a natural way to deal with negativity: it is sleep. In sleep all our wounds


280

are healed, but alcohol prevents sleep, and thus prevents healing, and makes it all worse.

‣ The 5th success principle is about handling peo-ple, which requires tact, sensitiveness and smart. It requires you to remain as much as possible free of second-guessing people, free of limiting be-liefs and projections, and free of general judg-ments about ‘all and everybody.’ And when you are in a position that you have to motivate peo-ple, try to motivate yourself first, to perform at the highest possible level. The secret is when you do that, you motivate the people around you without talking, by your mere beingness, nonver-bally—and effectively. This is how real leaders behave. The way we act is what motivates others, not what we say and preach.

‣ The 6th success principle is to have a sense of tim-ing. Timing is often crucial in business, be it pub-lishing a certain book, be it the acquisition of property, be it the opening of a restaurant in a strategic location. All our dealings on this plane are bound in time and space, which means time and space do have an impact on them. Time is especially crucial in banking matters, and in cur-rency trading, as everybody knows, but also in subtler ways in other business decisions, such as regarding real estate. On the other hand, some-times, people are not, like myself, late in decision-making but act prematurely which can equally have disastrous results. For example, if you miss thorough inspection of all parameters


281

upon entering a new business and you rush into it, simply for ‘gaining time,’ you may meet with failure. So neither procrastinating, nor rushing ahead is the recipe for success, but spotting the right timing by getting a felt sense from your in-tuitive mind. What is good feels good!

‣ The 7th success principle is about managing your resources wisely, and lead a lifestyle that inspires others to trust you; trust is needed, whatever business we are in. I have given a living example in the text without judging this person in any way, and leave it over to you to ponder it, and do an estimate about this person’s chances for future success.

‣ The 8th success principle is to be compassionate, not ruthless, to understand others in their situa-tions, to have a feeling for their misery or their luckiness, to empathize with them, and to be true in one’s feelings, not faking anything just for be-ing ‘good and decent.’ This means to be honestly interested in others, for when you are not, com-passion is just a word. True compassion means that you see not only your own life, be it a lucky or less lucky one, but actually see a natural equal-ity among all beings, as everybody has chances to make it, and become happy, wealthy and pow-erful. This equality or its contrary, our difference, is what should humble us, not in the contrary make us proud and selfish.


282

‣ The 9th success principle is to practice ecstasy. I found through long research on native tribal cul-tures that one of the eight patterns of living they practice is ecstasy, and that’s the secret why they are happy and peaceful. Ecstasy is a state of relig-ious union, or deep meditation, where you and the source are one. It is a state of union also for mind and body, and for psyche and soul, a state of bliss. How you practice ecstasy is largely up to you, but keep in mind that it is not an ego-inflating but an ego-dissolving journey and that it’s not linked to pleasure. The intricate fact about ecstasy is that it brings about joy, which is not pleasure but an entirely different vibration. Joy is not induced by pleasure and it’s not related to the ego and its remembrances of past pleasure. It is a state of novelty where the ego is temporarily put at rest so that the whole being can unfold. Let me relate that, not surprisingly so, I am experi-encing deep ecstasy when I play piano, not when I play any written music, but let my own intuition guide my fingers and produce what cannot be put in words because it’s sheer bliss.

‣ The 10th principle of success is to live your love, whatever it is and however society or homo nor-malis think about it. Love is never respectable and you can be sure that when it’s neatly pack-aged in conformist marriage, it’s no more love, because the perfume of it is gone. Our society has never practiced love which is why it has genocided so many tribal peoples who knew what love is, and what love is not. Our society


283

thus cannot tell you anything about your love. You have to know for yourself, and this knowl-edge unfolds gradually through experience.


284

Work Sheets

Doing the Work

❊

Print these worksheets, take a pen and do the

work. You may write directly in your book. This makes

your experience authentic and adds your own positive

vibration to your copy.

Doing this, while you may find it unusual, has the

effect to imprint in your copy of the book your own

vibrational code. This will enhance the impact and

success of your study, and in addition will make this

really your own! If you need more space, add addi-

tional sheets and attach them to the worksheets in the

book.

Giving your input is essential for realizing the

benefits you can reap with this guide. If you are more

comfortable writing on your computer, you can write

your answers in a text file and save it for later review.

However, the emotional or soul value of doing the

work is higher when you print the sheets and use a

pen or pencil because you will keep something origi-

nal and your handwriting testifies about the soul con-

dition you were in when you did the work.

This gives you the additional advantage that you

can scribble on the pages, color them, put little draw-

ings or even a mind map—all this will enhance the

soul quality of your work and help your subconscious

mind trigger the changes that you expect to happen

in your life.


286

Your Ultimate Decision

Your Ultimate Decision and Contract

YOUR ULTIMATE DECISION

Our life is directed by our decisions, if we want it or not. In the latter case others take the decisions for us and we are not really in control of our des-tiny.

Therefore, if you want to seriously subscribe to and engage in a process of self-empowerment, of asserting yourself within your life, if you want to take the key to open the locker of your highest potential, you have to make decisions. After all, you have to take only one decision, your ultimate deci-sion.

This decision is simply a choice, the choice to realize yourself exclusively on your highest possible level of achievement. It is your decision for achieving a successful career path. The quality of the beginning is more often than not the quality of the end result.

And because I want you to succeed with this guide, you must take your ultimate decision first. And more than that, I re-quire you to make a contract with yourself.

If you take a decision for change lightheartedly, there is not much chance that you sustain your efforts beyond your first phase of enthusiasm and overcome the inevitable drawbacks that are part of the way to high leadership ability.

✐

WORK SHEETS

287

A CONTRACT WITH YOURSELF

If you are afraid of decisions, life takes them for you! No decision is also a decision. In one word, you can’t avoid to making decisions, it’s only the question if or not you begin to make them con-sciously and intently. Thus, if you want to enter this

new path of leadership, you may want to profit from the techniques of programming yourself so that you imprint upon your conscious mind what exactly you want. In this con-tract which is like a vow taken for your life, you assert for yourself your devotion to the path of change and achieve-ment you want to take. You affirm your absolute intention and will to get rid of your problem forever and to make the change which will bring about all that you desire for improv-ing your life. This contract is for yourself your substantial in-vestment of will and energy which serves as a motor for your change.

Your ultimate decision is a unique command that you imprint upon your subconscious mind. It is a signal to your mind which automatically triggers the change mechanisms in it.

I, undersigned, hereby conclude a contract with myself which follows the Ultimate Decision that I have taken. This contract is binding for myself. If I break the contract I impose on my-self the following fine:

—Work through this guide once again from the first to the last page.

DECISION

I hereby ultimately decide that I apply from now on the universal laws and principles that are basic for every form of life in the cosmos. Knowing that

these principles are the guarantees for raising my career success abilities to a higher level, I do all I can to study these

✐

✐


288

principles and to apply them in my life. I call these principles from now on: ‘My Career Principles.’

CONTRACT

I give all my devotion to the fulfillment of my Ulti-

mate Decision and sign this contract with myself in the conviction that I follow from now on ‘My Ca-reer Principles.’ I hereby declare that I have the firm and absolute will to master any kind of fear,

especially the fear of failing.

SIGNATURE

…………………………………….

Your Signature

✐

✐

WORK SHEETS

289

Your Needs

Your Needs Statement

There is unison agreement among psychologists that for any form of self-improvement, we need to know our present condition or state of mind, and inquire into our present state of consciousness,

including our subconscious mind which speaks to us through dream monitions, mistakes, fears and accidents.

One essential element in our status quo to be assessed and checked out are our needs. We all have basic needs, which are first of all the need for food and shelter, the need for touch and closeness with others, the need for sexual rela-tions, the need for peace of mind, the need for creative ex-pression, the need for social recognition, and others.

Now, for any kind of personal evolution to take place, we first need to assess and render conscious our needs, all of our needs!

Here is a list for you where you should cross the needs you feel are most urgently to be met, and that you feel are not adequately met in the present moment.

[ ] I need better food and/or more comfortable housing[ ] I need better relationships and friendships[ ] I need more regular sexual fulfillment[ ] I need more touch and closeness with others[ ] I need to marry and have children[ ] I need my sexual difference to be recognized socially[ ] I need more peace of mind, and quietness all around me[ ] I need more creative expression[ ] I need more social recognition

✐


290

[ ] I need my achievements to be awarded and rewarded[ ] I need a better workplace where I can unfold my talents

If you have individual needs that are not listed here, get full clarity about them and state them in the box below.

MY INDIVIDUAL NEEDS

WORK SHEETS

291

Your Expectations

Your Expectations Statement

There is equally unison agreement among psy-chologists that for any outcome in personal evolu-tion, we need to know what our expectations are. Why?

Have you ever observed how expectations seem to mysteri-ously program and condition the outcome of our experi-ences?

Generally speaking, in life we get what we expect. If I expect not much, being just satisfied with the bottomline, I am not likely to attain the highest possible result. Therefore it makes sense to check out my expectations before I engage in something new, and deliberately set my expectations as high as possible.

Check the boxes where you feel the answer applies to you. Be honest with yourself!

[ ] Thinking about my career is for me a pastime[ ] To know about my career is entertainment for me[ ] I expect to have a good time with this guide[ ] I expect to be successful when achieving my career[ ] I expect to acquire a new skill called ‘career success’[ ] I will know myself better once having a successful career[ ] I expect to acquire a new human quality[ ] I expect to get along better with others[ ] I expect to understand the sense of life better[ ] I expect nothing; I think we shouldn’t expect much in life[ ] I expect this kind of work being boring and unfulfilling[ ] I expect nothing short of a miracle

✐


292

[ ] I expect a steep learning curve ahead[ ] I expect an exciting time to pass with this new learning

If you have individual expectations that are not listed here, get full clarity about them and state them in the box below.

MY INDIVIDUAL EXPECTATIONS

WORK SHEETS

293

Power Impediments


What do you think are the obstacles that keep you away from realizing your full power potential? In other words, what do you think are your power impediments? Please jot it down in a few minutes!

✐


294

Power Animals


Some people believe that certain animals have a significance for us regarding our power or power problem. What do you think about that? Please jot it down in a few minutes …

✐

WORK SHEETS

295

Power Problem


How would you describe shortly what your intrinsic power problem is and, perhaps, how it could be solved? Please jot it down in a few minutes …

✐


296

Power Change


Is there any change or was there change in your recent past regarding the fundamental way you perceive your power? Please jot it down in a few minutes …

✐

WORK SHEETS

297

Power and Ideals


Do you see a connection between power and ide-als? In which way could an ideal enhance your power? Please jot it down in a few minutes …

✐


298

Power and Community


Is there change or was there change in your recent past regarding the way you face the community? Is it okay from the perspective of your Inner Child to be vulnerable to a point to risking reject, or is that

child rather up to hiding its vulnerability and thus trying to please others? Please jot it down in a few minutes …

✐

WORK SHEETS

299

Annex

Your Way to Be Different : Possible Answers

❊

Introduction

The answers I am publishing here to ‘Your Way to

Be Different’ are not in any way an example of how

you ‘should’ answer to these questions relating ‘Your

Way to Be Different.’ What I did was to just meditate

on each question for a short moment and then wrote

the answer as fast as I could, without thought getting

involved. Thus the answers are not really answers, for

they may miss the point, and talk about something

else, but that doesn’t matter.

When you do it you will see that when you are re-

laxed and in a creative mood what you spit out is im-

portant in one way or the other, even if it doesn’t

really answer the question. We are always tempted to

write about the things and events that most hurt us in

life, especially when they are rooted in early child-

hood. Doing this, expressing it, publishing it, really

has a healing effect, believe me! It helps you to say

‘Amen’ to your past, to accept it as it was, to accept

all the hurt, for only then are you ready to really be

yourself, and express your true self in your life and all

you do.

I insert a page of my answers scribbled in the

proof of my book for you to see how it looks when

you really express the deepest of your soul; it was only

possible to decipher the text because I did it right af-

ter writing it to properly type it into the computer.

Had I waited only one hour, I would have been in-

capable of reading what I had scribbled, for it would

have been intelligible, even to myself. This is how it

should, for then you are authentic and what you write

really expresses what is in your soul waiting to be dis-

covered and unearthed!

(See opposite page).


302

YOUR WAY TO BE DIFFERENT : POSSIBLE ANSWERS

303

Answer 1

I want to be more useful socially, with my talent for

writing, my musical compositions and my media pro-

duction. I want to reach out to many more people as

this was so far possible. I want to do it through my

own TV channel, and through my career as a corpo-

rate trainer and personal consultant.

So far, I barely have any visitors to my many web-

sites nor do I sell more than a few books per month,

and this goes on since more than five years of consis-

tent publishing effort. Thus, I am not really reaching

out to people, despite all my creativity, and my recent

success on attracting thousands of followers to my

writings on Medium.


However, on Youtube, my almost 200 videos barely

get any views.

http://youtube.com/ipublica

I really wish to be useful and help people develop

their true identity, and accomplish their individuation,

autonomy and self-reliance.


304





I believe the only way left to me, after the total

failure of reaching out to people in the Western world

is to promote my teaching and my books in China and

Japan, which is why I am actively learning Chinese

and Japanese now, at the age of 60, and to get into

corporate training and consulting in these countri-

es—while I have given up on the West for promoting

my genius.

Answer 2

I think that living a life devoid of original creative

output is wasted. We are not here to be vegetables or

to lead passive lives in which we just consume what

has been produced by others, be it on the material,

the mental, or the spiritual level.

We are here to contribute to nourish and feed

others with our own output, brilliance, and insights,

with our own food so to speak, with our own ‘waters

of life,’ thus to be a well and a resource to others and

the world at large.

A meaningful human life is a life of creation, and

no other life, for we reach our full humanity only in be-

ing resourceful to others, and this is so not because


305

certain religions recommend us to do that, but be-

cause it’s the human destiny of man. We are not pota-

toes!

Answer 3

I became a creator precisely because all my life

through I was marginal in all the senses of the word.

That started as early as in kindergarten. In primary

school I was beaten up on a daily basis because I was

different, a silent boy who was so pretty that he was

often taken for a girl.

In the boarding in a provincial little town in the

countryside, from age 10, I was again beaten up be-

cause I loved playing piano and they loved football

and hated my exercises. Again I was the different one,

the marginal one, and they let me feel my difference.

In high school I was best of school in the music

and art classes, and wrote the best essays which were

usually narrated to the entire school during special

celebrations. I was also co-founder of the school

magazine and Editor-in-Chief, and criticized the

teachers to a point they developed a special respect


306

for me, while before that time they treated me almost

like an outlaw.

Today, as a writer, I am just as marginal at the age

of 60 as this was the case in my youth.

While all my 30+ books are published on all Ama-

zon stores around the world, and all the other online

bookstores, I just sell about 5 to 10 a month, making

from 30 published books no more than about 50$

royalties per month. It is absolutely ridiculous was it

not creating utter frustration and a feeling to be so-

cially useless.

In addition, I have as good as no friends and abso-

lutely no social life, no family, no children, and no-

where to go where I could have a good talk about

some worthy subject.

Answer 4

In my younger years, I felt as a piece of shit and

that my life has no value. It was suicidal over decades

in my life, while I was admiring others that I used to

worship like gods, from pianists such as Svjatoslav

Richter, Martha Argerich, Maurizio Pollini, Claudio Ar-


307

rau or Keith Jarrett to famous painters such as Dali or

Picasso, to great psychiatrists such as Wilhelm Reich

or Alexander Lowen, to great scientists such as Fritjof

Capra or those interviewed in the movie ‘What the

Bleep Do We Know.’

I wrote to all of the scientists interviewed in the

movie, and to a number of pianists, and never got a

reply. I felt that my life was worthless and dull, and this

changed only once I sat down to write regularly, and

produce articles, essays, and books, and then audio

and video content.

All of this started in the 1980s, while I was working

on my international law doctorate in Geneva, then in

1990 to 1992 a psychotherapy with auto-hypnosis, that

helped me tremendously to accept myself and my life

and make the best our of it. I was in my thirties at that

time, but it took me almost three more decades to

eventually end all the hero worship and see myself as

the master of my own universe, seeing other creative

people on equal level as me. It was only then that I

developed the focus and the consistency to continue

my productions without complaining, and to accept

my lonesome life, seeing the beauty in my solitude.


308

Answer 5

I was raised by a family steeped in convention and

conformity, a family of the typically German Protestant

landed bourgeoisie. Yet I had the example of my par-

ents who were different.

While the entire extended family belongs to the

most conservative establishment in Germany, my

mother was different, as she refused to follow the Na-

zis, never entered the NSDAP, and became a declared

anti-fascist, working for Berlin radio as a journalist.

She experienced reject and social marginalization

as a result and became bitter and resentful to a point

to beginning to hate her own family. After our prop-

erty was bombed just three days before the end of

WW2 by an American chain bomb, she had lost all the

books she had written, and all her precious art books,

for she had studied not only journalism but also art

history. And my mother married a man from a worker

family, unacceptable for her family, which then re-

sulted again in reject, even by her own mother who

broke with her.


309

During the first five years of my life, I lived an atro-

ciously solitary life, my mother giving me away in

homes most of the time as she had to work very hard

to earn a little.

As my father turned out to be drinker whose man-

agement of their coffee shop resulted in bankruptcy,

my mother had to pay the debts from this business for

seven years, and never recovered from it.

She remained an absolutely bitter and negative

person all her life, even though her mother supported

her again and even bequeathed her the family for-

tune. But all the millions did not help my mother re-

cover her early creativity.

This was for me a very useful example of how ‘not’

to lead my life, which is why, as my mother forced me

into a profession I never wanted, that is, to become a

lawyer, I revolted, and while I finished all those studies

with several diplomas and a doctorate in international

law, I never carried this qualification over into an ac-

tual career and bogged out. I really freaked out into

psychotherapy, first, and a spiritual retreat, thereafter.


310

Only at the age of 48 did I experience success in

my own chosen profession, the career of a corporate

trainer, coach, and consultant. It was only then that I

began to write and publish books and media, after

setting up a company in Delaware for my publishing

endeavor.

My uniqueness, my difference, was obvious for me

even as a small child for I was different from all other

children I met in the homes. I was responsible even as

a small child, having active memory of my childhood

back until I was 2-years old. At age 3 and a half I went

shopping for my sick mother without any ‘protection’

alone, in a big town, crossing streets and doing the

grocery shopping while my mother was in bed with

anemia. From age 4 I started cooking, and at age 10 I

was preparing entire gastronomic menus for my

mother when at home from the boarding during the

weekends and holidays. I was marginal always, and

other boys let me feel my difference, even violently

so. Today I am leading the most solitary life one can

imagine but I love my solitude, I love my company, I

love myself. I have finally got there, after so many

years of healing the early scars I suffered as a child.


311

I am glad to be different, to be myself, to have

eventually got to accept myself and to see the beauty

of being a creative person.


312

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Personal Notes

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Documents

Walter's Career Guide: Why Getting a Job is Not Enough