All great politicians surely understand that they must walk a tight rope in a performance hovering above the masses. They must never lose the sympathy of the audience below and, of course, they do not want to fall. Meanwhile, as they are balancing to keep from falling, they are also balancing between the twin roles of clown and magician.
Most Kosmopols are aware of politics in three dimensions -- personal experience, spectator sport, and, power structure. That is, the dimensions (1) of our own participation as citizens in what remains of our democracy, (2) of entertainment, and, (3) our treatment by the government in all its branches.
The power structure dimension (as it impinges on our daily lives) doesn't usually get much attention here at Daily Kos -- unless one of us is ordered to Iraq or receives a midnight knock on the door from the FBI. However, I do not propose to focus on that nor even on the dimension of our personal participation as citizens -- although, IMHO, it is that dimension of participation that is the meat and potatoes of Daily Kos.
It is the third dimension - entertainment or spectacle - that I want to discuss. I am not talking about the endless chit-chat around personalities from gossip about Hillary and John (McCain) to speculation about Tammy Duckworth and what are her politico-social beliefs. I am talking about politics as providing entertainment in the same way that myth provided entertainment in the days before rationalism in the guise of science demystified the universe -- thus severing our emotions and unconscious minds from our experience.
We know that most people, while maintaining a superficial allegiance to science as the foundation of our shared worldview, are actually uncomfortable with it in practice. That is, we cannot deny science -- considering things like electricity and nuclear bombs -- but none of us, including scientists, really understands the world through a scientific worldview. Fischedick quotes the nuclear physicist Hans-Peter Durr:
"Natural science does not focus on the actual reality of original world experience, only on a definite projection of this reality. One can filter out reality through good observation according tot the standard of detailed instructions in experimental handbooks... Usually we do not observe nature directly but use ever more complicated equipment. This equipment works like an extended pole allowing us to touch what is remote, to go back a bit and - on account of its great length - move between us and nature so that the instinct for grasping reality as a whole is lost. The more differentiated the methods of natural science, the weaker becomes the reality content. The poles become longer and longer." (Hans-Peter Durr, Natural Science and Reality, quoted according to J. Sudbrack, Mystik, 1988)
In the absence of any other shared worldview, the inadequacy of the scientific worldview results in such phenomena as the post-modern turning toward fundamentalisms, pseudo-mythologies such as "the American dream", and, to get specifically political, manipulators of the pathological condition of the public mentality -- manipulators such as Rove and Luntz.
A valid question thus presents itself: how can we effectively oppose such manipulators as Rove and Luntz? Do we need to hire better advertising people and opinion manipulators? Find better "branding" or "values" analysts? Or is the only valid approach to get back to basics and cure or heal the underlying pathological condition of alienation? I think that we need to do both!
As enlightened beings, we cannot lower ourselves -- even if we wanted to, we could not lower ourselves to the level of the neo-con manipulators. Rather we must look deeply into the murky waters of the unconscious part of the public mind and discern therein the elements of spontaneous healing taking place there. Once we identify the healing elements within the collective unconscious, then we can foster and cultivate those elements.
POPULISM
I think that all seasoned office-holders understand this dimension of politics. They understand that the public's mind is a mysterious thing, sometimes unpredictable and capricious. Those politicians who are least bothered by the fickleness of the public are those with a gift for what is known as "populism".
So, let's face it then: if we want to successfully oppose the Republican mind-control machine, especially since it is they who dominate the media, we have no option but to embrace populism. This prospect bothers many, if not most, Kosmopols, because Kosmopols tend to equate "reality-based" with rationalist. That's fine, as far as it goes, but politics operates in a world of mythic "reality".
You can scientifically and rationally analyze mythology -- dissect the various ancient fairytales and discover similar themes, and so forth. That's the Rovian or Luntzian analytical method. But that will never get you into the higher realm of SYNTHESIS. So, that's how it is in politics -- with "reality-based" (narrowly defined) analysis, you will never connect with the collective unconscious that is the bottom line in the evolution of social consensus. To really connect, you have to practice control over your own ego sufficiently to accept yourself as a just another face in the crowd. Fischedick writes:
"Whoever values his own nature, the world of his unconscious and his drives as raw and wild parts that must be suppressed, restrained and controlled will also experience the nature outside as a hostile wilderness that must be tamed and dominated. On the other hand, whoever affirms one's own nature and lives in harmony with it will also thankfully respect, use and preserve the nature outside."
All great politicians surely understand this. They also understand that they walk a tight rope in their performance hovering above the masses. They must never lose the sympathy of the audience below and, of course, they do not want to fall. Meanwhile, as they are balancing to keep from falling, they are also balancing between the twin roles of clown and magician.
I am relying here on something that recently appeared on Portland Indymedia, translated from the German of Heribert Fischedick, a theologian and psychotherapist, and translated by Marc Batko of Portland, Oregon.
Batko has titled the piece "The Way of the Hero and the Loss of the Center", but the title of the book, from which Batko has translated several sections, was simply "The Way of the Hero" -- or, "Der Weg des Helden". (Published in 1992 by Kosel Verlag, Munich.)
http://portland.indymedia.org/...
The translator provides this very brief synopsis:
"The demystification of the world by science is both a gain in enlightenment and a loss.. Natural phenomena have lost their symbolic content.. We no longer experience ourselves as part of a world in which everything is significant.. Myths, fairytales and biblical stories give us maps."
A FEW EXCERPTS FROM FISCHEDICK --
We all form our life according to a script that results from our perception of the world. The meaning of our own existence depends on whether we can develop forms of life and relations in which we are authentically ourselves and experience ourselves as inwardly rich and powerful.
The old myths that excite new interest today are stories that help us discover meaning in our own life. In their pictures, they speak of the inevitable themes and tasks of life and the possibilities of their mastery. . . . Biblical myths are full of deep life experience and their pictures offer a wisdom that has nothing to do with the rigid complex of themes of faith and conduct characterizing our church world of faith. Rather they are stories of commissioning and transformation full of creative power that speak of our calling to abundant life, awaken delight in the journey and contain orientation assistance for the transforming way of personal development - the way of the hero.
I have encountered many more "heroines," women who were open and ready to discover their calling and set out on the transforming way of adventure and testing.
What is presented in fairy tales as an outward event corresponds in truth to the unconscious inner reality of the child.
[Fischedick quotes developmental psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, as follows:] "For a story to captivate a child, it must entertain and arouse his or her curiosity. To enrich life, it must stimulate his or her imagination and help in developing intelligence and clarifying emotions. The story must be coordinated to his or her fears and longings, grapple with problems and offer solutions for these problems. In short, it must refer to all aspects of personality. Children's distresses must not be minimized but taken seriously in their gravity. The child's trust in him- or herself and his or her future must be promoted."
[A]dults also need stories like fairy tales. [Quoting Maria Kassel, The Eye in the Belly. Depth-Psychology Spirituality, 1986:] "As the only living beings who develop a (self-) consciousness, we humans have concentrated mental perception more and more on the conscious. In the scientific civilization, this development has even been pushed to an extreme. What can be seen and identified through rational conclusions by scientific experiment is regarded as the only real development."
In the scientific consciousness, everything ultimately falls into the distance and is objectified into a thing, an opposite number and a non-person. The scientific view of the world rigorously separates the observer and the observed.
The stones, plants and animals no longer speak to us. Natural phenomena have lost their symbolic content. They are simply without any more significance as the natural sciences explain them. When we describe something as "significant," this is only because it is extraordinary, first-rate or demands respect. We no longer experience ourselves as part of a world in which everything is significant in the sense that it has a deeper importance and message to ourselves. . . . The one-sided reliance on the powers of intelligence led to the loss of the inner world. . . . I am no longer what I experience but am simply an observer of the outer and inner world.
These developments cannot be cancelled. . . . Integration seeks the middle through the reconciliation of the one-sided world of rational consciousness with the world of pictures. Regression or retrogression to an early stage of development and consciousness is not envisioned. More and more people feel this loss and develop a deep longing for the middle. However they lack stimulation and support that could show ways and give them courage. To awaken the longing for the middle and joyfully set out on the search, we need a special language, the language of poetry. The scientific language of information and directions for use and conduct cannot satisfy this longing, only the language filled with archetypes.
Even Aristotle, the master of pure reason, said: "The friend of wisdom is also the friend of myth."
For the sake of our existence in the world, the mastery of our life and the search for meaning, we need a language that can transport and release feelings.
The myth researcher Joseph Campbell was convinced that myths fulfill a mystical and pedagogical function. Firstly, myths impart the experience that the whole world, oneself and life are miracles and awaken awe for this mystery. Secondly, they show how one can lead a human life under all circumstances. Both functions correspond to our deficits. Given a nearly colonialist way of appropriating and subjugating the world, myths and mythological consciousness could mediate a new respect for what surrounds and encounters us. Given a coldness that often approaches the experience of meaninglessness, they can also engender a new respect for oneself and what is done is one's life and in the lives of others.
"One learns how people are bound together as brothers and sisters since these pictures address everyone. One discovers unity with all things." (Hermann Weidelener) Finally, with these pictures myths are joined with our central desire to be happy. Myths are essentially honest. No myth says one can live without suffering. Rather myths tell us how to deal, understand and utilize suffering.
The symbol is the language of religion (Paul Tillich) when and as long as there are experiences in religion. Experiences are mediated through symbols. Symbols are capacities of the soul that make events into experiences. . . . What takes place first in an outward event is understood in its inner significance, condensed in a symbol and ultimately developed in an interpreted narrative or myth. . . . If the experiences of a religion are understood this way as pictures instead of facts in an outward sense, they become messages for inner experience and life.
Myths come from the same source as dreams. A myth is a public dream while a dream is a private myth. . . . In the myth, collective experiences, the experiences of large human groups with central themes of life, are described and developed into powerful symbolic stories. . . . While the dream gives information about our personal conflicts, themes and experiences, the myth offers insights about one side of our being that is not personal but universally human.
Institutionally bound Christians are often frightened by the biblical stories. They customarily understand the depicted events as the reproduction of outward historical events that happen similarly and could have been recorded with the video camera if it had existed at that time. When they hear the biblical stories are myths, they imagine at the same time they are untrue. Their truth concept is strongly oriented in outward facts - corresponding entirely to natural science thinking.
"The hero is the person whether man or woman who was able to struggle beyond personal and local-historical limits to the universally valid human forms. The hero's visions, ideas and inspirations come uncorrupted from the original sources of human life and thought." (Joseph Campbell, The Hero in a Thousand Forms, 1953)
The mythological understanding starts from an historical core. A universal and timeless significance comes to individual historical events that can only be further communicated in the language of inner psychical pictures.
Our encounter with biblical myths is similar to that of the Samaritan woman in the conversation with Jesus at Jacob's well (John 4: 1-42):
CONVERSATION ABOUT WATER AND DRINKING
So he came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her: "Give me a drink." For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, `Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." The woman said to him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?" Jesus said to her, "Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw." Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come here." The woman answered him "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, `I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly." The woman said to him, "Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet."
This conversation takes place at a well. Many fairy tales and myths occur at wells. On one hand, they are natural junctures at the foundation of all life, water, and on the other hand, holes in the ground opening up access to the depths. In this depth, there are baneful beings and forces that can prevent or poison the flow of the well as well as good, redeeming beings and forces that change the fate of people. . . . The water itself represents life and vigor and the deep dimension of the unconscious in the person where sinister and redeeming powers are hidden that can change the fate of a person to the good or bad. . . . However Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman was also like a dreadful speaking past one another, a classic example of disturbed communication. The Samaritan woman spoke the language of this world. She seemed rooted in her native soil, practical and intense in her persistent questioning. Jesus, on the other hand, speaks a "nebulous language"; he appears unrealistic, elevated and set apart. Although both use the same terms, worlds separate them and make understanding nearly impossible. . . . Thus while the Samaritan woman mirrors our rational way of perception, Jesus personifies the pictorial or figurative language of the soul. Every first encounter of these two worlds must be as incomprehensible as this conversation. . . . No dictionary helps here, not even a dictionary of symbols. . . . the Samaritan woman persisted in dialogue with the myth until the truth of her life until the truth of her life was revealed to her. The leap from the outer to the inner, from the marginal to the fundamental and from the rational to the symbolic occurs with the apparent change of themes from drawing water to her relations with men. She did not only listen but learned this in a deep sense as the truth of her life, her unquenched need for an absolute love, when she had to confess "I have no one." All her "attempts at drawing water" were unsuccessful and could not quench her "thirst." She praised the myth as prophetic - as something that could make the truth of her own life understandable. . . . This is the purpose and power of myth. When theology makes prose out of the poetry of myth by creating a collection of theological works and codes, it eliminates this plane of transcendent experience. Thus Carl Gustav Jung once said, religion is resistance against the experience of God.
THE MAGICIAN
What initially is experienced as a bloody tension should be united. When a person turns too much to the earthly material side of existence and neglects the other side, he loses the middle or center. The one-sided orientation becomes a shortage of the essential. This is a dominant problem today since many people ignore the spiritual dimension of their life and feel themselves inwardly empty and unfulfilled despite all "rationality" and material abundance. Under some circumstances, it could take decades before they are aware of this atrophy.
[On the other hand] [w]hen a person turns too much to the intellectual-spiritual side and neglects the earthly, he loses the middle and lacks the essential. That is the problem of many "philosophers" innocent of the world and of life who lose themselves in pompous speculations and insights but cannot cope with life and people. With them, it can also take a long time until an experience finally leads to the fall when the neglected side of their existence is harshly recalled. Thus the heavenly, intellectual and spiritual must be brought down to earth and the earthly-material spiritualized. In this project, we encounter the archetype of the magician in us.
THE RETURN TO THE MIDDLE
The magician outfitted with the gifts of the universe stands on his own feet on the ground of this world. He knows the eternal laws of becoming and passing away, the order of creation and realizes on earth what he has discovered. Conversely he gives a concrete form to the ideal reality in his life. "According to complementary interpretations, the clown or magician represents the person who finds the balance in himself and therefore stands effortlessly in the middle of his world (at the market or on the mountain). The left and right halves of his clothing are opposites as to color and decoration but this does not worry him. As the eight in his magic hat shows, the magician recognizes the divine unity of the world, the good in (or behind) all the forces seemingly opposed and fighting each other." (Sergius Golowin, Symbols of Tarot, 1989).
THE ORIGINAL ORDER
And on the seventh day God finished his work, which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work, which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work, which he had done in creation. These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up-for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground-then the Lord God himself formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; delium and onyx are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one, which flows around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. ----- Genesis 2: 4-17
This narrative does not answer the natural science questions about the genesis of the world. As a story about the origin of the world and humankind, it is a picture of what the person and the world originally were in their innermost order and innermost core. As a result, paradise does not describe a geographical place or an historical time in the outward superficial sense but a state of basic existence. Therefore paradise is a symbol for the original determination of the person from which he has become estranged.
The narrative begins with a negative delimitation, "before plants were in the earth" (v.5) and explains the following order as a necessity on the background of chaos. Order is creation, life and development while dis-order represents non-being, death and destruction. In order, life is gained back from chaos and the uncivilized. Thus a creative process occurs . . . "The archetype of the magician teaches us something about creation, abut our ability to bring into being what never existed, about the claim of our role as co-creators of the universe." (Carol S. Pearson)
Collaboration in creation presupposes becoming aware and affirming the universal order. To many persons, this sounds too mystical and inconsistent with a rational and scientifically oriented interpretation of the world. The research of modern nuclear physics is a becoming aware of the given facts and laws that are only found and not created by people.
In his spirituality, a person surpasses (transcends) the narrow framework of his individual history and personhood to find connection to time and the realities of the cosmos, heaven and earth arching over the individual. This means joining mysticism and reason as two ways of knowledge. No one less than the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein saw there a very natural foundation of true science. "The deepest and most sublime feeling of which we are capable is the experience of the mystical. True science germinates from the mystical alone. Whoever is alien to this sense and can no longer be astonished and lost in awe is already psychically dead. The knowledge that the unsearchable really exists and reveals the highest truth and most radiant beauty about which we only have a dull suspicion - this knowledge and this suspicion are the core of all true religiosity." (Albert Einstein, My Worldview, 1957) . . . In the 20th century, great pioneers of natural science understood the necessity of connecting rationality and mysticism as two different ways of apprehending reality and being open and astonished over the hidden order behind all things.
The biblical narrative describes this basic order in the picture of the garden created in the East as living space for people (v.8)... The person is set in this garden so he recognizes it as his home to till and cultivate (v.8.15). That "the person enters a pre-given order that he did not create or design but should preserve is a typical characteristic of paradise-garden narratives." (Wolfgang Teichert) Our association with the world is largely anthropocentric. From this vantage point, the person understands himself as the center of the world and feels authorized and called to use this world and subject it to his own ideas. In contrast, the ancient garden stories were more humble. In them, the task of the person is to recognize that mysterious order and adapt to it by observing and fulfilling its immanent commission. A tree, not a person, is in the middle of the garden (v.9). This is the tree of the worlds, the axis of the world around which everything turns. Heaven and earth, the celestial world and the underworld, divine and human and the conscious and unconscious are bound together. Therefore the tree of the worlds is a symbol of the center and of the order united from a center. Thus a stream starts from the middle that irrigates the whole garden (offering the foundation of life) and then flows in four rivers to the world..
The magician's task is to bring his existence in harmony with the cosmic order.
ORDER AND ORDERING
Magicians understand that a new kind of discipline is necessary, namely clarity and will-power, to always act in agreement with the deepest wisest self." (Carol S. Pearson) This assumes a new experience of humility and obedience. . . . Humility easily sounds like humiliation, being made shamefully small, suffering without a murmur and a petty-bourgeois modesty. The virtue of obedience and self-abandonment are equated with a voluntary or forced submission under foreign determination to the authorities. . . . Whoever has such experiences and tests must search for his own identity as a wanderer, stand up for his own interests as a warrior and learn love without self-loss as a martyr before he or she can live humility and obedience as self-expressions. In the influence of the magician, humility gains another quality and meaning. This is expressed in correct ordering. Magicians know they are not the navels of the world. They are important and their actions help shape the universe but they are only one contribution. Therefore their way of thinking, feeling and acting is not the only right and possible way. Rather magicians recognize and affirm diversity as an expression of abundance. Their own contribution consists in surrendering by simply being themselves and letting others be themselves, not in refusing life. The mastery of the other archetypal learning tasks is the prerequisite for experiencing and living humility this way. The abandoned always see in magic a remedy promising fast solutions and rescue without their own contribution. . . . Without the warrior lesson, humility can be mistaken for capitulation and without the martyr lesson refection can be confused with self-abandonment. While the abandoned want to be saved from the experience of powerlessness, isolation, fear and pain, the warrior fights for redemption from these experiences, the martyr voluntarily seeks them, the magician accepts them as part of life and opens himself for the lessons they bring. The developed form of obedience involves in the first place a careful listening... Obedience consists in attentiveness for these communications and readiness to follow their messages. . . . The magician succeeds in changing perspectives. He is able to see the mysterious behind the superficial and the order behind the coincidental and pointless.
[About Jesus healing the blind man]
What is obviously central is that mystery paraphrased by "The Little Prince." "Here is my mystery. It is very simply that one only sees with the heart. What is essential is invisible for the eyes." (Antoine de-Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince, 1956). Our conventional reason-oriented way of seeing can make us blind for grasping what is important. The scientific perspective is like a voluntary limitation to the world of the factual and empirically verifiable, that is to a limited way of seeing.
[T]he philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer lamented . . . "As the animal lives without looking around for anything but his needs and isn't astonished about the world as it is, so people of trifling aptitude are without noticeable astonishment about the world. They find everything natural or obvious. Some extraordinary phenomenon surprises them and makes them eager to find out its cause but are unaware of the marvelous quality of their own existence." (Arthur Schopenhauer, Introduction in Philosophy)
THE NEW VIEW OF THE WORLD
Why we are anxious and should not be anxious.
Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin: yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying what shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? Or what shall we wear? ----- Matthew 6:25-31
To a superficial contemplation of world reality, this address must seem like sheer cynicism. Not unjustly, many people worry about their daily life and survival and the survival of those entrusted to their care. Not unjustly, people worry about the survival of humanity generally. I often experienced that listeners reacted with shock and resentment to this text and asked whether they should not "irresponsibly" abandon their calling and concern for their family or their political engagement and simply live in the day. Whoever as an abandoned one sees mainly the imperfection of the world and feels helplessly delivered up to the exactions or demands of onerous life, this speech sounds like mockery. To the warrior who fights for a better world with all his or her strength, it must sound like ridicule or scorn. The martyr also hears an exaction on his thinking and feeling. As a "summons" to carelessness, this address must be disconcerting to everyone.
What is central here is a way of looking at things that can only result from a certain state of being, not an attitude that ignores existential experience.
You have heard that it was said, you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. ---- Matthew 5: 43-48
This message cannot be lived as an ethical-moral demand any more than carelessness. Love of the enemy as an emotional attitude of good will cannot be forced even with the logical conclusion that God ultimately loves all people. .. . The Sermon on the Mount - rightly described as the center of Jesus' proclamation - does not design a new ethos but is the stirring vision of a magician. For him, God's universal love is not a theological working model developed out of dogmas, treatises and biblical quotations and taught from writing desks but the personally experienced awareness of the divine being sung in hymns.
Magicians are not masochists. As they do not see the world as an adversary, they do not consider other persons as opponents. As they see the superficial phenomena of the world in their profound meaning, they also see the superficial being and actions of people on the profound dynamic of self-estrangement and self-development.
Myths are humane stories that do not overstrain us with any morality but speak of the possibility of choosing life instead of death (Deuteronomy 30,15ff). Therefore they can promote respect for our journey.
[T]he organized churches will exist for a long time and fulfill an important function as a starting point for individual journeys. But I'd like to encourage going beyond this and understanding yourselves as seekers oriented in experience in a worldwide ecumene on the way to becoming one with the supreme reality.
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