I learned in school that light was sometimes a particle or sometimes a wave, according to which experiment we try. But they both can’t be light at the same time. Particles are always spatially localized, while waves are not. Particles and waves are only pictures that we use to help us understand light, yet pictures don’t match reality. I think I know why mankind will never understand what light really is: Light is always a step ahead of us. It moves at the speed of light which we human beings can never reach because we are bound by our mass. How could we understand something which is too fast to even get ahold of?
Light is a very good example that shows how easily we mistake reality if we dissect it microscopically. But this is precisely what is being practiced today almost everywhere in modern science. Particle physicists dissect atoms into “elementary particles” hoping someday to find a universal “world formula” which can help them to better describe the world. They are pasting together a theory of everything3 feverishly, but an atom that has been dismantled loses its atomic characteristics and is no longer an atom! Molecular geneticists dissect complex forms of life into parts with the hope that they can someday get a closer look into the secret of life. They render a living thing into many parts and find genome after genome, but a dissected thing that was alive is no longer alive! Science is best suited to describe facts or processes in our world, yet it cannot explain why something is the way it is.
What can we learn from this? To get closer to the nature of reality, we can see that it doesn’t work to dissect it into pieces. Reality is a single totality which can only be understood as a whole. Even the thought of a world that I must face and choose to investigate would be fundamentally wrong. There is never a “world and me”, but at best a “world with me”. Nature is us! All suffering that we cause to her and all love that we give to her we do to ourselves. If we just think about it a little bit, we can see that reality is one big picture that can neither be dissected into two parts nor into seven billion “human individuals”.
We will apply this new view of reality to freedom and happiness in the chapters ahead. They stand very high on our list of values that help to give us meaning during the course of our lives. But it seems that we must still learn how to cope with them once they are granted to us. Very few people are aware of what true happiness is: to live! Not to mention freedom—who can really say that they live beyond all the temptations and hazards of life?
Freedom and happiness have much more to do with each other than we might first expect. We get an important clue from the English language: “Unfettered joy” comes to us not by chance. It is an old phrase from a treasure trove cherished from many generations of experience and shows us that happiness comes with being free from desires. Our will for possession and power always takes us in the wrong direction. Money generates more and more greed and never brings peace and happiness.
This is the common thread that runs through every page of my book: I question our concepts of the self, reality, light, freedom and happiness deeply. From all of this, a new self-awareness arises which we may awake to if we truly value ourselves. I won’t give anything away yet. I am going to share it with you. So be prepared to read something very inspiring peppered with food for thought!
I am happy that you have taken notice of my book and that you have permitted me to familiarize you with a very unusual view of life and the cosmos. It is your choice to decide how you will use the words that you will read. I do not intend to bring you around to my line of thinking or to change your views in any way. I want precisely the opposite thing from you: I expect you to question and scrutinize everything that you will be reading in this book. Only in this way will it be possible for a world view to develop among us human beings—a world view that is whole and in unity with everything that we know about life and the cosmos.
Markolf H. Niemz
Life is giving.
Most of our institutions separate us: We have a currency that makes us compete with one another; we have countries that fight one another; even our religions separate us—from others and from God! All of this makes us believe that we could also shut ourselves off from nature. We fool ourselves into thinking that we could exploit her at our convenience. Nature wouldn’t be the same as us anyway. Gradually (and hopefully not too late) we’re learning that we were wrong. Whatever we do to this wonderful planet, we do to ourselves.
What can we do? We must wake up and change our self-awareness. As soon as we discover that we are one humanity that yearns to live in unity with nature, we will become mindful. We will discover life again as a precious gift—a gift from the earth, from nature, to us. We are not here to take, but to give. Life is giving.
Self-Delusion
SELF-DELUSION IS THE PRIMARY CAUSE
OF ALL SOCIAL CONFLICTS.
A few years ago, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published a controversial book: The God Delusion. 4 He treats religion as a profound psychiatric disorder that has inflicted many negative effects on modern society. Dawkins not only sees religion to be directly responsible for inciting fear and terror,5 but he also blames religion for the spiritual traumatization of children and youth in families who follow religious beliefs.6 No matter how disputed his points are, it is to Dawkins’ credit that he takes damage to our society seriously and that he looks for solutions.
But Dawkins as well as his critics are overlooking an important point: People, not religions, wage bloody “holy wars” and traumatize other people. Religions are not living beings that could take responsibility for anything. We alone are responsible for all misdeeds in our society. But who are we? Most of us view ourselves as persons—with bodies and minds—separated from others as we struggle through our lives. Today more and more people consider this life to be their one great chance to find and “to realize” themselves. This way of thinking gives rise to many questions: Who or what is the self? Isn’t it just the same thing as me? Could a self—if it were actually real—still realize itself?
The main point of this book comes from my conviction that individuality has developed to such an inflated state that it is the primary cause of all conflicts our society suffers from today. I don’t mean “God delusion” like Dawkins, but self-delusion. People just can’t see things through the hearts and minds of their fellow man, nor does it seem that they have any interest in doing so. In almost every case, they focus on themselves at the expense of others. I separate self-delusion into four types and combinations:
– interhuman self-delusion,
– economic self-delusion,
– political self-delusion,
– religious self-delusion.
Interhuman self-delusion is the cause of all suffering that human beings inflict on each other, and consequently it is the cause of the other three types of self-delusion as well. It has likely been inherited through evolution—from power struggles that we also see in the animal world. But there is one significant difference: Animals fight with each other for food and procreation. Food and procreation are vital for continuation of its own kind. When human beings face each other, there are almost always other predominant and selfserving factors at play: greed and power. Economic selfdelusion comes from greed; political and religious selfdelusion come from greed for power and control. In the pages ahead we will look at all four types of self-delusion, put a finger on the breeding grounds that cause them,
