Once being able to look out of the eyes of an infant! Once to be allowed to perceive the world in this unaffectedness. Without a previous: „This is so, this is so and so is the name for it. And the name has its reason in the qualities of what you are looking at and these qualities are based on the fact that ….bla……..h, blah, blah, “ Without that. Once again you are allowed to see with the perception of the just created creature, which a short time ago was still on the one hand part earth and on the other hand part beyond and now has just become a being by the wonderful bringing together of thing and non-thing.Maybe we can still remember it deep within us. But now we are full of knowledge about our environment. And since our mind is the one that collects this knowledge, it is exclusively of a material nature. It collects and collects. It names and names. It divides and dissects. The thing, the world, the space, the time. Without ceasing. Nothing may remain whole. Upper category, subcategory, sub-subcategory, and so on. Once he has divided something, he puts it back into context with other divided aspects of something else and compares it. He himself creates an indescribable mess and complains about the chaos that supposedly reigns in nature.Now the bits and pieces that he has collected and the connections that he wants to have recognized have to go somewhere. Where they are useful. For this purpose, there are drawers in each of us. These drawers get a name. For example „tree“ (Of course, it does not remain at that. There are then drawers named „oak“, „trunk“, „roots“, „branch“, „leaf“ etc.) or „shaman“ or – quite fatally – „soul insight“ or „sense“.Then everything is packed into these drawers what our administrator of the material world has recognized in the past and has assigned to the name of this drawer. This everything becomes then the truth. To the personal or also general. For example the connection tree = firewood or furniture. Or boat. In pre-industrial times, there was not so much to sort out for people in the countryside. Their radius of action was limited. Their perceptions of the environment were largely made at some point. And their most extraordinary drawer was perhaps that of the inhabitants of the next village but one, which they had never visited. This drawer was perhaps only populated by travelers with more or less reliable information about their mysterious neighbors. So the drawers were small, few and not particularly full. If we go back in time even further, to the hunter-gatherers – our ancestors – for example, we can say that there was a time when all the people in the world possessed only a few, small and rather cluttered drawers.This has changed. In our time the offer of information is so large that many drawers on the one hand already overflow and on the other hand are filled also still completely indiscriminately. They contain now not only own past experiences and learning knowledge, which one mind conveyed to the other, in order to find oneself in the world of the things right. No. Today the drawers contain opinions about opinions, from the 300 television channels, from the 100000000 opinion pages in the Internet. Everything is commented on, everyone gives their two cents and everyone reads it, takes it into their drawers, opens new ones, inevitably has to somehow relate them back to other drawers and slowly but surely loses all orientation. Think of the esoteric publishing catalog above.The concept of drawers is running hot. If it originally had the sense to store experiences which should help the material mind to survive halfway in the material world, it leads itself ad absurdum with its overcrowding. The desire for maximum knowledge, which in itself is based on erroneous assumptions, fails because of our own limitations.Even if I grant the drawers a right to exist: The concept does not get beyond the things, because the mind cannot get beyond the things. It claims vehemently that it collects facts – facts – but by its drawers and its connections and the production of connections it is actually it which makes interpretation possible by it. Through interpretation he creates opinion. With opinion he generates liking and disliking, he generates right and wrong. He creates the chaos, which he despises so much, himself. He creates the subjective idea, which has nothing to do with facts anymore, of things or incidents himself. Let’s just take the drawer „Tibet“. The Tibet drawer is filled with so many ideas, wishes, desires, opinions, judgments, prejudices and images that the Western conception of this country and its society composed of them is to a large extent to be regarded as a product of fantasy – as a subjective conception composed of drawer contents. This is not only true for Tibet. It also applies to hair shampoo. And here we are actually only talking about things. We are talking about the realm of which the mind claims to have full control and the world is clearly in front of it.I must say: grasping the unity of our existence actually seems much easier to me… It is in no way as complicated as trying to grasp the meaning of the world through fragmentation. But maybe that’s exactly why it seems so difficult to many. It is too simple. Nowadays, nothing can be simple anymore. Without complexity no adequate function. A few years ago, even a renowned newspaper dismissed as banal the advice on lifestyle given by the Dalai Lama during a visit to Germany. They were so simple that apparently there was no need for the advice. Only the newspaper refrained from explaining why no one adheres to these simple pieces of advice when they seem so well known. Perhaps the Dalai Lama should have combined this advice (among other things, to eat healthy and get enough sleep) with a complex yogic exercise. Possibly that would have satisfied the article author’s desire for a higher degree of complexity (and perhaps exoticism). I am not a Dalai Lama follower or Tibet activist. This newspaper article is just an example that I noticed while reading it. The advice, too simplistic for a feature article, could have come from someone else entirely and I would have quoted it. By the way, I looked up three times how „feuilleton“ is spelled. My mind was desperate to use this divisive and delimiting technical term. Because it was a little pissed off. Stupid, isn’t it?But I wanted to briefly touch on the examples of drawers that I gave at the beginning. Drawer „Tree“: wood, different uses for wood, root, photosynthesis, brown, green, forests, height, girth, age, water, oxygen production, CO2 storage, shade, „Buchen sollst du suchen, Eichen sollst du weichen“, „Am Brunnen vor dem Tore, da steht ein Lindenbaum…“ etc.With this information, the tree remains a thing. It remains exactly such a thing as also we are then in such a context. Sometime existing. Then, after certain years, again disappeared. No longer see the tree as a „drawer tree“. To look at it and to be – if possible – empty of these ideas, that is worth a try. To recognize it as … Nothing. Or as … Everything. He is just as much an expression of the otherworldly events as we are. He is soul become thing. That, what we see as his qualities, is the expression of the events beyond – reduced by the mind to the small details, which it thinks to recognize. Just as the shaman travels to the otherworld and there does something…. something …..nothing…. does to create a change in the material world. He does this in a great prayer. Because the soul journey is not something else. It is the great prayer for healing. So this also happens always and everywhere without the intervention of a conscious soul traveler. Through our soulness we are all always soul travelers. Even a good word (or an evil one) changes the world for the person concerned on the level of his soul. He feels better, he feels stronger – or worse. In shamanic terms, he thus gains or loses a part of his soul.To recognize this unconditionally is prevented by the limited and purely material content of our drawers.Above I still mentioned „shaman“ as a pigeonhole example. It is always a pleasure and also a certain compulsion for me to break out of this pigeonhole again and again. Now this is easy. I am not a shaman. I don’t live in a shamanic society. At best I practice shamanic techniques. Anyone who has recognized how to look a little more closely would then be a shaman – and there are many who can look. We do not get to know most of them. That is how far they are from wanting to work in the earthly realm and peddling their knowledge. They certainly don’t write books. So be it. „Shaman“ is the label (on a pigeonhole) that I first get when people match the information they gather about me with their pigeonhole contents. When they then meet me and talk to me, some – especially those who think they have created particularly well sorted and extensive drawers concerning shamans and comparable persons – are irritated. It turns out for them: The guy is still under 60. He was never in Nepal or in North America with Sun Bear or Tall Bull or in Central or South America with someone whose name usually begins with Don and ends with something like da Cruz or da Jesu. He does not have a wrinkled face with kind or piercing eyes, does not wear amulets (IT DOES NOT WORK WITHOUT PROTECTIVE AMULETS! Everybody who watches TV knows that!) – but clothes off the rack – , at least he has a drum! But it is not even self-made. If one asks him about the current questions of energy and vibrations and Maya calendar, Christ prayer, holothropic breathing and other things, he says apologetically: „Unfortunately, I know nothing about it“. If one names the healers and spiritual teachers currently traveling in Germany, he usually says, „Unfortunately, I don’t know them. No, neither does their latest book.“ He never once stares blankly around, nor does he say anything particularly enigmatic, nor does he occasionally tell you that he just saw his grandfather sitting somewhere in the corner. But at least he has a beard! But it is somehow a bit too short. Because with shamans the beard has always the meaning that …….laaa, laaa, laaa ….
To reassure you, I would like to reply: I often stare blankly into space. And I am often confronted with mysterious things. But I don’t have to do this in front of an audience and I don’t have to talk about everything either.People with these pigeonhole contents – if they get to know me – abruptly lose their interest in me. Since I do not correspond to the pigeonhole shaman, I then come – so it seems to me – into the „again one of these guys who have no clue and think they have seen something“ pigeonhole. When I meet these people again, we can have a nice chat, but there is no attempt whatsoever to start a conversation with me again about spiritual topics. I am then categorized, well tucked away in the drawer, and down. I am so glad then. I’m always glad to be perceived as a regular guy. It’s good to be unnoticed.And very briefly to the other two drawer-examples from the beginning: „mental cognition“ and „sense“. I think one sentence is enough: If we look for these two things and rely on what the contents of the drawers put together by the mind tell us, then we are betrayed and sold.