Scholé News June 2021

As announced in the April news, I would like to share a few thoughts on the Hermetic laws with you.

They are also called the natural, divine or cosmic law, because they are timeless and found all over the world – in the ancient high cultures as well as among the indigenous peoples of Asia, America or Australia. Since the modern era, the term Hermetic, that is, secret, laws has become established in our part of the world. This name suggests that they stood in the way of an increasingly materialistic world view and could therefore only be passed on in secret, among initiates. I believe it is high time to bring them back into the light!

EVERYTHING IS MIND is the first of these cosmic laws, which is today’s topic. In other words: mind is the primordial substance from which everything else emerges. In everyday life this law is child’s play to grasp: whatever people have created has its origin in a mental activity. Every idea first begins to take shape in our mind. Whether vessels, tools, weapons, works of art, writings, songs, houses, temples, cultivation methods, software or machines – every work created by humans began with a creative impulse that the intellect took up, worked on, put into words and finally implemented in concrete form.

As long as they have not yet been distracted by popular-science explanations, children know intuitively how the world came into being: there is obviously a wondrous power that created heaven and earth, sun and stars, stones, plants, animals, mum and dad, myself and everything else. And as long as they have not yet been driven out of the paradise of childhood, children sense that a spark of this cosmic creative power is also within them.

A true story on this: on a farm in a remote region of Australia, a little boy who wanted to help his father shear a sheep got his hand caught in the shearing machine and lost a finger. There was hectic activity on the farm that day, and the way to the nearest hospital was so long that they decided simply to bandage the wound, since the severed finger could not be saved anyway. A few days later, the five-year-old came running to his mother and said happily: “Look, Mum, my finger has already grown back a bit!” When the mother opened the bandage, she could not believe her eyes: it was true! The little one noticed her astonishment and added: “Why are you looking like that? Lizards grow their tails back too!”

We marvel at this rare “miracle”, but is it not just as great a miracle that our body cells constantly renew themselves without our doing anything? Or that huge trees grow from tiny seeds? Or that the sun rises and sets day after day and the seasons follow one another in the same rhythm? The few indigenous communities that have escaped extermination by representatives of our “civilisation” are still aware of the cosmic law EVERYTHING IS MIND. For them, mind is nothing abstract but the epitome of life, as present and natural as father and mother are to a small child. That is why they revere the Great Spirit as their father and the Earth, Pacha Mama, as their mother.

The biblical story of the expulsion from paradise represents in symbolic form the separation of humans from the divine principle of the undivided wholeness of humans and nature. Seen holistically or ecologically, everything created by God, the personified spirit, is good. On each of the 7 days of creation the Creator looked at his work: “And he saw that it was good.” But then the tempter, in the form of a serpent speaking with a forked tongue, enters the garden of paradise, where the first humans live happily and contentedly in unconditional trust in God. The serpent seduces Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge by promising them that it would make them like God.

The tree of knowledge of GOOD AND EVIL stands for the dividing, judging intellect. Unlike the all-connecting and affirming mind – symbolised by the tree of life – the intellect can only think in opposites: black or white, big or small, good or evil, master or servant. As long as people trust life unconditionally, they live carefree like children in paradise. But if they let themselves be tempted to trust their intellect alone and to divide creation arrogantly into good and bad, important and unimportant, above and below, right and wrong, then fear and greed, competition, strife and war are the inevitable consequences. In this way human society slides more and more into a rationalism hostile to the spirit.

Theologians and church dignitaries banished the living spirit to the hereafter. The natural sciences, which took over the leading role in humanity’s global development after the Enlightenment, would have preferred to abolish it altogether. Scientists who thought anything of themselves dismissed everything spiritual as fantasy because it can be neither measured nor weighed. Yet of all things, the two most exact sciences – mathematics and physics – initiated a dramatic paradigm shift more than 100 years ago. Brilliant minds such as Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Planck shook the foundations of the materialistic world view by proving that it depends on the researcher’s mental orientation whether the smallest building blocks of matter show themselves as particles with a certain mass or as massless waves. This means that research results can never be objective but are always co-determined by the researcher’s subjective attitude.

Although large parts of the scientific establishment still cling to the outdated materialistic world view, in recent decades a growing interest in phenomena that cannot be grasped purely rationally can be observed in many fields, from quantum physics to epigenetics. Engaging with such topics requires an enormous expansion of consciousness, and this expansion of consciousness has long since reached all sections of the population. In very different ways, more and more people worldwide are arriving at the liberating insight that they are not bodies but have a body. Their soul has evidently decided to incarnate for a while in order to have experiences that can only be had in the material state of aggregation of the spirit. Whoever opens up to their intuition and inspiration begins to perceive that matter is only one of many states of aggregation of the spirit – just as ice is a particular state of aggregation of water. Matter would then be something like “frozen spirit”.

In the humanities, the growing expansion of consciousness has also led, among other things, to a rethinking with regard to indigenous peoples. For far too long they were disdained as “savages” or “primitives”, and from this people derived the right to drive them out or even exterminate them. Meanwhile, many “civilised” people are studying the traditions and lore of the indigenous peoples and trying to save what can still be saved of their spiritual heritage. In view of the global devastation caused by technical progress, the realisation is gradually dawning on us that we cannot go on like this. Humanity will only have a future worth living if it learns to orient itself towards the indigenous peoples’ connection with nature.

We cannot defeat nature! Since we are part of it, in fighting nature we destroy ourselves along with it. As long as we have not understood this, we are also at war with our own nature and cut ourselves off from access to the subtle layers of our being. In small children this access is not yet blocked, and indigenous peoples have never lost it. They commune with spirits and the dead, communicate with plants and animals and know that after all the catastrophes of the dark world age, a new era is to dawn in the 21st century: the Rainbow Tribe will unite all peoples and cultures into a single human family – this is what their seers and calendar keepers predicted centuries ago.

Ahead of us, then, lies the age of the human family, which some also call the age of the Holy Spirit. Of course this will not mean a return to traditional tribal life. Rather, it is about the achievements of modern science and the technical possibilities of Western civilisation being fertilised by the wisdom of indigenous peoples. Their union could give rise to a completely changed consciousness of abundance and connectedness, manifesting itself in a colourful variety of new holistic ways of life. Instead of leaders or rulers, the human family will only need guardians of the Earth. THE WORLDWIDE RECOGNITION OF THE COSMIC LAW COULD CREATE THE INNER COHESION BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES. This law needs neither to be enacted nor amended, because by nature it is written in every human heart and is therefore beyond dispute.

Many extroverted contemporaries still believe that we are helplessly at the mercy of the plans of megalomaniac rulers and must let ourselves be steered and controlled by algorithms, like cogs in a machine. IN TRUTH, HOWEVER, EVERY SINGLE PERSON IS FREE TO DECIDE CONSCIOUSLY FOR OR AGAINST IT. Whoever comes into contact with their own inner self stops feeling like a victim of external circumstances. They discover, to put it poetically, their inner world-space. It is a boundless space with paradoxical properties: in this space I can perceive myself in my individual uniqueness and at the same time feel inseparably connected with everyone and everything. The division of the world into seemingly irreconcilable opposites loses its terror. Life and death, joy and sorrow, freedom and security reveal themselves as two sides of the same coin.

As small children we still had access to our inner world-space. That is why it feels so familiar, as if we were finally coming home after a long journey. I believe the children of the new age will not let themselves be driven out of their spiritual home so easily. Unlike many of us, they will hopefully not have to wander around for decades before they finally manage to overcome the blockages instilled in them by their upbringing. A very dear friend who works as a religion teacher at a public all-day school in Vienna’s 20th district is amazed again and again at the wisdom of the children of today’s generation. An eight-year-old recently said to her: “Now I know what Easter means: the warmth of the body passes and the warmth of the heart remains!”

Is that not the most beautiful and profound commentary on the first Hermetic law, EVERYTHING IS MIND?

Next time the topic will be the second Hermetic law, the LAW OF CORRESPONDENCE: as above, so below. As within, so without. As in the large, so in the small.

Warm-hearted summer greetings Alexandra

Newly revised: “Lernen ist wie Atmen” (Learning is like breathing) as an eBook

Together with two free-learning mothers, Gudrun Totschnig and Sigrid Haubenberger, we self-published it and have now also made it available as an eBook (in German).

We feel that, especially in this time of distance learning, experiences from free learning can help people find their bearings.

Let the reading sample inspire you, or buy the eBook as a PDF on the GAIA marketplace. GAIA members get a 10% discount when ordering.

Download the eBook (German)