The soul designates the immortal essence of a being. The soul is the seat of the personality and true character of a person.
Most of the large religions accept the soul as the most important and ethereal substance of a human being. However, there are – depending on the respective religion – different concepts about what happens to the soul after the death of a person.
There is no official and exact definition of spiritual growth. We – and many others – use personal spiritual growth as synonyms for other terms like e.g. personal spiritual development, to develop higher awareness or to develop higher consciousness.
With our understanding of spirituality , one can also define personal spiritual growth as way to integrate spirituality to a higher and higher degree in our daily live.
Often we reduce the role of children to reproduce the society, to keep the number of people at the desired level. Children need to learn our language, understand our behaviour, culture and rules, etc.
Who could transfer this knowledge better than professionals, people educated to teach exactly this? – If you look at it from this point of view, it would be most economical to give your children away for education after birth as soon as possible.
There is of course another point of view: What is the most important role of children?
Sooner or later the question arises as to why we «must» influence our subconscious in order to develop permanent harmony within ourselves. Why «must» we ourselves want this development so that it takes place? If this goal is somehow «somewhere» within us then why doesn’t this development automatically take place towards this goal without our having to do anything and without effort!
The answer to these objections can more or less be found in the goal itself: According to the basic rights of existence each living being has the equal right to live here, to develop and to carry out its tasks. Each can decide for himself toward which goal he wants to develop. No one forces us to live the basic rights of existence, or to strive for our own internal perpetual harmony. We can do what we want or not – however we must also live with the consequences of our decisions.
Let’s first turn to the question of objectivity: How objective is our perception in reality? A statement is objective if it is neutral and not influenced by prejudices, feelings and interests. An objective statement is consequently independent of the person who makes this statement. The objective statement corresponds with the facts. We often tend to view our own perception of things or events as objectively correct. What others think of the same events or things we frequently categorize as incorrect or subjective (perceptive reality).
A good example is the weather: Two weeks of sunshine, high temperatures and no rain for many people is seen as desirable and good. The farmer however would like some rain in between times because otherwise his fields dry out, older people are not so happy with high air temperatures because it causes breathing difficulties etc. Who is being objective here? Obviously our assessment of the weather depends amongst other things significantly on what we want to do (swimming in an outdoor pool, working in the field, working in an office, travelling, resting etc.), upon our mood and our state of health. Exactly the same weather on a given day gives one person great pleasure and another one annoyance. But even within ourselves the assessment depends strongly on our plans: If we are working in an office three successive days of rain normally would not bother us too much. If however we are on a beach holiday we would want other weather!
We have so far mentioned many times that we are confronted «by life» with situations which permit us to learn the ability to live the basic rights of existence. If for example we are to learn to let things go, then we are constantly put into situations where we have to decide whether we want to cling on to something or let it go. In reality these things could be for example articles, money, dear friends or relations, or the results of current or earlier activities. It is in no way necessary for us to know ourselves on which lesson we are currently working. «Life» already knows!
Returning to the question put at the outset as to how the respect for the basic rights of existence can best be learned. Actually we are all ready to practise this – however we are not normally aware of it. Let us therefore consider the development of human beings:
In our everyday life we are confronted with many situations in which we can observe or violate the basic rights of existence and the resulting laws. It is not necessary to look very far for such situations, every action, even every thought offers us this opportunity: What shall we buy, how do we cook, how do we treat our fellow human beings (partner, children, colleagues, boss), how do we treat animals and plants, nature etc.
In the previous section we compared human development with the building of a pyramid where each stone must be set in place one after the other. The question is therefore now posed as to how the observance of the basic rights of existence can be practised in order to reach the desired state of total harmony and happiness as quickly as possible and in particular how to remain in this state. How do we build on our pyramid of personal development in the most efficient way possible? Can we attend courses on it or is special training offered?
The good news is: Yes; there are lots opportunities for such training, they do not cost money and are on offer always and at any time – these opportunities arise in nothing other than our daily life! In that we live, we automatically participate in such training. We will come back to this again below.
From the above thoughts we can conclude that the desired state of harmony on the earth can only be achieved if the basic rights of existence are followed one hundred percent. The less frequently we violate the basic rights of existence, or the better we live a life of unconditional love, the closer we find ourselves to our highest of all goals, internal harmony as well as harmony with our environment. If other beings violate the basic rights of existence, this only influences us indirectly at the most. We can decide for ourselves whether we wish to respect the basic rights of existence in a given situation or not, therefore the achievement of lasting harmony for ourselves and for the environment depends entirely on us! It is entirely us alone who can control how quickly, or whether, we wish to achieve the highest objective of all people. We will come back to this in later chapters.
The foregoing discussion calls in the question as to who then establishes this law if it «may» or must not be established by human beings. Who disciplines the «wrongdoers»? This question is all the more interesting because we all presumably violate this law several times a day. Let us leave open this question of a judge and consider what happens when a being violates this law:
In observing the needs of people we have seen that first we try to safeguard our physical existence and only at the highest level do we seek total happiness, self-fulfilment, internal harmony and peace – or whatever one may consider the highest objective of all. We can probably assume that there is an analogous needs hierarchy amongst animals and plants, in other words that they too aim for a state of total fulfilment.