Scholé News – December 2023

“Who will reach liberation sooner – a person who loves God or a person who hates God?”

The answer to this Hindu teaching example shocked me when I first heard it. It goes: “The person who loves God needs 6 lives to reach liberation. The person who hates God needs only 3. Why? Because he thinks of God more often.” Is hate still a stronger engine than love? Looking at the concerted efforts of the forces of darkness to subjugate the world, and the modest successes of the lightworkers who rely on love and understanding, it may seem that this is still the case.

The legend of the Buddha and the highwayman

But perhaps appearances are deceptive! A Buddhist legend sheds light on a deeper aspect of the relationship between hate and love, good and evil. It tells of a highwayman who lay in wait for Gautama Buddha in a forest. Although the monk walked ahead of him at a leisurely pace, to the robber’s utter astonishment he could not catch up with him. He was at the end of his strength when the Buddha finally turned to his pursuer full of love and compassion and invited him to follow him instead of pursuing him. The invincible inner strength of the holy man awakened the Buddha nature in the multiple murderer at a stroke – a state that many pious people hope to approach gradually over many lifetimes through sacrifice and prayer.

What is this legend trying to tell us? That enlightenment has less to do with being good than with the intensity of one’s feeling for life. A highwayman who risks his own life every time he attacks travellers needs fearlessness, courage and determination. He does not need to be awakened, because he is already awake. He only needs a new direction for his striving: instead of transient outer wealth, he will from now on strive for imperishable inner wealth. This sudden turnaround was brought about by the living example of an enlightened person who made him feel his own transience and the eternal connectedness of all beings for the first time. So the encounter with the Buddha turned a fearless robber and murderer into an equally fearless, determined and courageous fighter for the good cause.

Hot, cold, lukewarm

A famous quotation from chapter 3 of the Revelation of John describes even more unmistakably what matters: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!” As long as a person loves passionately or hates passionately, they can be reached by the voice of God, the voice of their heart. Blind and deaf to everything that makes life worth living are the lukewarm, the jaded, the INDIFFERENT. They are spat out, because in exchange for questionable securities and comforts they have given up a self-determined life, freedom and enthusiasm. A truly devilish bargain!

We sell our souls when, out of cowardice and opportunism, we subordinate ourselves to some authority or other and silence our living feelings so as not to cause offence anywhere. No feeling person can seriously believe that the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of people serves peace. No conscientious doctor will inject a patient with an untested genetically engineered substance. No empathetic teacher would think of tormenting children with useless subject matter and humiliating them with bad marks. No loving mother would be able to tear her child out of sleep regularly. No responsible politician would go along with hard-earned tax money being wasted on senseless and destructive projects.

So how can it be that all this nevertheless happens every day? Because so many people indifferently let it happen. Because the rulers have succeeded in implanting in the minds of their subjects the conviction that they are weak, sinful, inferior, unworthy and dependent on powerful “protectors”. Because the suppression of all authentic feelings has been on the agenda for so many generations that “one” perceives it as normal, indeed as without alternative. Because everyone is only doing their duty. Because technical and social progress allows us to hand over personal responsibility for ourselves and our fellow creatures to anonymous institutions – crèches, schools, old people’s homes, hospitals, psychiatric clinics, animal shelters, courts, parties, banking consortia, world organisations…

The universal message of water

In the 20th century, the wisdom teachings of Hindus, Buddhists and Christians found contemporary confirmation. Using greatly magnified images of individual ice crystals, the Japanese water researcher Masaru Emoto was able to show that water is the universal carrier of information. Human feelings and intentions, whether expressed in music or in words, cause dramatic changes in the structure of water molecules. To illustrate this, Emoto developed a very simple experiment that has since been repeated countless times in kindergartens and schools: cooked rice is divided between three glass jars placed so that temperature and light are the same everywhere. The children are then told to greet the rice in the 1st jar joyfully every morning and praise it gratefully. They are to insult the rice in the 2nd jar as if it were a dangerous poison. The rice in the 3rd jar is to be ignored completely.

After about 10 days the result is as follows: the gratefully praised rice in the 1st jar has dried out but is still white. The fiercely insulted rice in the 2nd jar has gone mouldy and spoiled. But the rice in the 3rd jar, which was totally ignored, looks worst of all: it has turned into a foul-smelling, greenish-black mass. Beyond all religions or ideologies, this experiment impressively demonstrates that indifference is the worst of all evils!

The flip side and the opposite of indifference

People to whom everything is the same don’t even notice when they are lied to and cheated. They can be seduced without resistance into complicity in unforgivable crimes and misused as will-less cogs in the machinery of business and politics. Only their feelings could tell them what is right and what is wrong, but they have given up the luxury of their own feelings for the sake of material and social advantages. To compensate for their monotonous existence, the indifferent occasionally need extremely strong sensory stimuli. Shopping sprees, ear-splitting music, drugs, sex orgies, war games and the like are nothing other than the flip side of indifference!

The opposite of indifference is SERENITY. It awaits at the end of a long road, when a person has lived and suffered through the whole range of authentic feelings, from the deepest pain to the most sublime joy. Serenity grows and flourishes through tireless work on oneself, through compassionate helpfulness and unshakeable trust in life. Each individual who goes through this inner process of development influences world events: around them, the structure of water changes and carries the message of positive change out into the world.

May the challenges that await us in 2024 finally shake many of the indifferent awake and strengthen the self-confidence of those who woke up earlier! When we understand that we change the world through our feelings and intentions alone, we will root ourselves ever more deeply, amid the storms of change, in the wondrous state of cheerful serenity and confidence…

In this spirit, a happy New Year to you all! Alexandra

2nd edition of “Lernen ist wie Atmen” (Learning is like breathing)

The 2nd edition of our book meets a completely changed readership.

In 2017, the idea that learning outside school was possible at all was considered the eccentric notion of a few outsiders. Since then, all parents, whether they wanted to or not, have had to deal with forms of learning outside school.

The number of children withdrawn from school has exploded since then, and alternative learning projects are springing up like mushrooms.

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