Going to Daddy
It would be good if we know where we came from, also in the spiritual sense, if we know our heritage. It may be useful, and it may help us better understand about ourselves, about our destiny in this world. Almost the same as when you want to know who you are, nearly the same as seeking your real ‘me.’
However, if someone stumbles upon it, admires the unique ‘me’ and the special person, then such a kind of seeking leads nowhere, because someone started this from the wrong place, looking into oneself, asking about one’s self. It’s impossible to ask, who I am. Who is asking? Who might answer?
If you only like to believe you belong somewhere, or that you have some spiritual heritage or that you represent somebody from a higher dimension or higher reality, as you came to this world from heaven or from anywhere, then it would be better to forget such kinds of thoughts altogether, because this is just vanity.
It’s merely a wish to show it as a badge of honor, this is just a wish to feel oneself somehow better, chosen over others, and therefore to get for yourself some privileges or additional abilities or rights. They shut Phaeton down because of this. Don’t immediately use your miraculous abilities and create cosmic chaos.
It is essential to rise higher from everyday beingness, from previous experiences, opinions, and knowledge, and to put away all kinds of personal relations, assessments. Put all that away, drop it down, go to solitude, to the stillness and to see and understand everything in a much more general way.
Your spiritual heritage says nothing about your personality because your personality is purely the result of your earthly life and experiences. The religious heritage can give hints about what would be better for you, what suits you, what would be easier to reach, complete, to achieve for you.
So you can avoid unnecessary troubles and worry because of things which need little troubling and worrying over. Just forget your unique ‘I, me’ - your particular personality, and to drop off all the related troubles, worries, problems, and sufferings.
This is still a question of belief, and there is nothing concrete, sure, real, and there cannot be a kind of clarity. It’s freely possible to err and to think yourself as somebody with nothing changing, with no consequences at all. Perhaps there must not be a change or anything, and you can take it as a game, like a play. Why not?
The change begins with us. If you want something to change, then change how you look at it or feel it. Everything we think, believe, see, understand is our creation. It is felt, considered, seen, understood by ourselves. We create our universe; we have invented ourselves.
Nothing is real, and nothing is unreal either. Each of our thoughts changes the universe already. So nothing will remain the same. We are the creators of reality. There is no difference between ‘me’ and ‘he,’ between this side or that side, between material and spiritual. All is one, and one is all.
Yet already this feeling is great and beautiful, when we start to understand, to believe something or somebody who is much bigger, larger, more powerful, more eternal, Already this is a fine feeling, if somebody could understand what it means, ‘our Father which art in heaven’ or ‘Father into thy hands I commend my spirit’.
If we recognize sisters and brothers even among trees, people, animals or rocks, and let them know about your happy understanding, about your joyful recognition, with hugs for example - it’s beautiful. However, no need to take it too seriously, no need to drown in it.
How to find this Spirit who has sent us to this world? There are many options, but no need to seek him. If needed he will show himself to you. However, in most cases, it’s unnecessary. We are built, created in this way we don’t know the reason we are here. We don’t understand the meaning of our life, and perhaps it is better, maybe it’s good we don’t know. There is no need to burden ourselves. We have many troubles already living here. No need to create additional ones, to involve ourselves with more complications, to worry about this too. We can live freely without such knowledge or beliefs. We can live merely acknowledging that a God sent us, and that is enough. Can live without thinking and reasoning about the meaning of life at all.
If you want to know, then you can seek him by yourself. They give hints all the time. Already the horoscopes in daily newspapers, even though they might seem naïve and ridiculous, it doesn’t matter, already your astrological sign, i.e. the sign in which the Sun was at the moment of your birth, can give a hint. If you have a more profound interest, you can see your full birth chart or horoscope and you can find more suggestions. Such kinds of approaches are natural and right because apparently the Spirit who sent you, prefers certain times and relations at the moment of your birth, the moment of your beginning of beingness.
It’s not an absolute and firm sign. In Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, and also in other traditions there are various methods to discover and to determine your God or Buddha or Bodhisattva. You can try to use these kinds of ways too, but if there is a lack of a deeper understanding, more profound knowledge, then it may lead nowhere.
Also, you can get directions from esoteric tools like Tarot cards or I-Ching, and any kind of magic, mystic, occultism, clairvoyance, numerology, prophecies, omens, signs, etc. You can get visions, can approach somebody like a daemon or guarding angel, who then announces or shows something. You can learn the methods to find your totem, your tree, or animal, or bird or defending spirit in various shamanic traditions too.
And also meditation. One of the Zen practices is already to reflect on who you were before your parents even met each other. When the Buddha was meditating for a long time and reached enlightenment, he announced: “You are seen!”.
No need to drown in it. If he cannot instantly and easily be found, then apparently that was not important. So you can freely forget it for a while, and later, if you remember, you can again reflect or meditate about it - investigate something different.
Anyway, there is no need to believe the first hint instantly as if somebody is saying something about you, or some dream or omen or sign appears. If there remains the slightest doubt, if there is a lack of absolute clarity, then don’t take it seriously, don’t bother yourself with such things. You can trust even your ignorance. You can understand that such knowledge is at the moment neither needed nor useful to anybody. Even Moses was not sure who was talking to him from the burning bush.
However, at last, you can recognize it or him. It’s like finding the right key, it’s like a still, silent sound while the lock is opening. Yes, this is like an opening, enlightenment or awakening when one can see and understand where we belong, where we came from and go again. When we realize how everything is connected and related, when we recognize soulmates, brothers, and sisters through the ages. It’s wonderful.
We could at least see and investigate some of these forces or powers, spiritual or divine beings, and maybe find characteristics or incarnations recognizable in our world. Quite an intriguing example might be the one which is best known as Lucifer. Although, with the current pop-culture, it might be not so intriguing after all.
In ancient Rome, Lucifer was the planet Venus, meaning ‘light bearer.’ It was also seen as the Sumerian goddess Inanna, Babylonian Ethana, Greek Phosphoros or Heosphoros or Aphrodite; a fallen angel, rebelling against Father-God, Baal (Bael), Beelzebul (Beelzebub), Satan, the source of Evil, governor of Hell, Knight of Darkness, Devil, brother of Jesus, Antichrist, but also as Jesus himself, and much more even.
He is a savior, a guarding angel, or even the right God opposing to Jahveh in Luciferianism and Gnosticism. He reigns in Hell by Gothic heritage, may incarnate as a cat, a frog or a spider, he governs East, has a loud voice, and his month is October. According to Rudolf Steiner, Lucifer represents an intellectual, imaginative, delusional, supernatural force which might be associated with visions, subjectivity, psychosis, and fantasy. As a supersensible being, he had incarnated in China about 3000 years before the birth of Christ.
Frequently ‘good’ and ‘evil’ forces are both rooted from the proto-Indo-European term *deywós - cf ‘deva’, ‘devil’, ‘divine’ etc. These are opposite forces in ancient Persian Zoroastrianism. Independent ‘evil’ doesn’t have an important place in the old and new testament, and even Satan doesn’t appear in the Bible frequently. Also, he is not a very influential character in it. They considered this force or power to be evil during the 17-18th centuries, in the time of the hysterical witch hunting in Europe.
Anyway, it can give rise to questions about ethics and morals, questions about acknowledging good and evil, about the sin and falling into sin. Are these questions at all eternal, absolute, universal, or are they temporary and relative - earthly questions?
We don’t have many sources outside of our world, and therefore we are limited with these sources which we have in our society, despite how likely these facts or truths might be. If we could find at least one moral or ethical norm which has always and everywhere been valid, in all human societies with no exception, then we could carefully suppose that maybe there are at least some eternal laws or norms. Unfortunately, we cannot find anything like this in the history of humankind.
There is no single ethical norm or moral rule which hasn’t been ignored and corrupted knowingly and consciously, and frequently it’s done even with a broad consensus in that society. It’s sufficient to remember countless wars during which it was accepted and regarded to be normal to create sufferings, to torture, to kill and steal and rape. Sufficient if we remember how kings and queens have been beheaded, how people are openly burned, hanged, crucified and so on, as joyful entertainments for the members of society.
There are some meta-ethical categories like guilt, shame, honor and so on, but in different cultures and in different times they are put into practice in remarkably different ways because these categories are also created and built up by that very same religion and society, and the same age. There is nothing permanent. These categories have no eternal truth. According to Nietzsche: “Life is, after all, not a product of morality.”
The spiritual powers in question are outside of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, high and low. They are out of dimensions, beingness. These are in non-being, and we can confidently say that they don’t exist. They have no relations with good and evil, so they have no characteristics which could be evaluated or compared at all. We may also see these powers and imagined, both as a male or female shape since they have no gender.
The purpose of this passage above was to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings concerning this spiritual power.
In the legends of Faust and elsewhere, its incarnation or representative is Mephistopheles. According to J. W. Goethe:
It is clearly noticeable that the particular character is only a part of some larger wholeness, power or force, and the option to find more of such kinds of representatives is also valid.
The guests at the Satan’s grand spring ball in the novel “Master and Margarita” were all representatives of this power, apparently both Bulgakov and Goethe. The main character of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is Satan, in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s play “Prometheus Unbound” this power is represented by Prometheus. Milton’s poem was translated into French by Voltaire, and William Blake and Salvador Dalí illustrated it, among others. The last also illustrated works of Marquis de Sade. Voltaire himself was very influential for Byron and Shelley, and Goethe and Victor Hugo highly appreciated him. The last supported passionately Charles Baudelaire, who was in trouble because of his book of lyric poetry titled “The Flowers of Evil.” Marquis de Sade influenced Baudelaire himself, he admires Richard Wagner, and his translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are since admirable. Wagner wrote music based on Victor Hugo’s poetry. Lord Byron’s poem “Don Juan” was written directly by Shelley’s influence. Goethe was very impressed.
Like it somehow relates them all. They appreciate each other profoundly. They all are very interested in esoteric and fantastic powers, and Lucifer is not the least among these. Even their appearance seems to have something in a familiar, specific ugly face or similar attitude. Maybe they were soulmates, perhaps in them resides the same spiritual power, maybe they all even were aware of ‘the flowers of evil’...
P. B. Shelley:
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats through unseen among us, – visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.