Germany - Shedding A New Light On A Perennial Cultural Question

If one adopts the widest angle of vision Germany is located topographically within the Milky Way galaxy which is part of myriad galaxies and clusters of galaxies of the cosmos - whose size, according to astrophysicists, approaches hundred billion light- years - on the planet earth, at the very heart of Europe.

With regard to its mental coordinates, however, its position does not seem to be so easily definable in the eyes of many national and international contemporaries. Our neighbours have been trying to clarify its mental and physical topography since after the second World War by integrating it irreversibly into the Western hemisphere, concretely the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) militarily and the European integration policy economically which started with the Iron and Steel Union in 1951 and was expanded into a more comprehensive Common Market or European Economic Community (EEC) founded by the Treaty of Rome in 1957 that has, over four decades, developed into the European Union with the Euro as a single currency. The integration process over time has oscillated according to the dynamics of consciousness and culture and was characterized by cycles of expansion and contraction ranging from euphoria to empty chair policy by member states. Now everybody, friend and foe alike, seem to be able to fairly clearly state, where Germany with its fluid borders, regimes and waves of culture stands politically, economically and ideologically. As far as the surface is concerned, the West has ensured that there would be no doubt about its mental and physical topography. And the Soviet Union led East has ensured that historians might be able to state the same about the Eastern part of the country; two worlds, to visions of the world. Since 1989 the two visions of the world have merged and the German West assimilated the East in line with the existing balance of power. That is the historical horizon most contemporaries are familiar with through global media. Germany has become another brick in the wall of Western democracies and this has been reinforced through the falling of the Berlin Wall which confirmed its democratic foundation and attractiveness. So much about the surface picture which allows us already to state that the expansion of consciousness in ideological polarization processes, however, is a double-edged sword because it can serve the purpose to better contract and to increase associated dialectics.

We occupy a spatiotemporal window of eternity and infinity and are creatures in the making. The beginning, the rationale and the finality of this singularity of nature are shrouded in a veil which can only partly be lifted jointly by physics and metaphysics. While the big bang occurred ca. fourteen billion years ago and nobody knows about its finality, humanity has only evolved over some few million years to its present state. And, according to wise men its psychological level of evolution seems to be close to that of cave man. As all other planets, continents and of course countries, the spatiotemporal coordinate under review is mere dust in the wind in the infinite space of the universe; a wave in the ocean of eternity, rising, gaining momentum to be engulfed again. It is good to also be aware of the most comprehensive design we are part of in order to illustrate the grandeur and the insignificance of who, where and how we are, because it can put the obsessions with ourselves in our psychological make-up in a more realistic perspective and thereby defuse some issues which seem to have no way out. The widest optic is helpful to give due import to what happens right under our noses. Indeed in line with the quantum paradigm metaphor we are supposed to extract complementary perceptions and insights through complementary optics.

Those are some of the contextual conditions all man irrespective of geographic and cultural background are sharing. The common spatiotemporal condition binds humanity together. One of the questions to be looked at will be whether we can also get the big picture in terms of consciousness in addition to specifically human and cultural consciousness. Can we map the totality of the psychological consciousness as we can map the totality of the physical universe and learn to better navigate them in their totality? After all they are interdependent in the sense that they have evolved largely concomitantly. And there might even be common principles applicable to both of them. For example both seem to be able to expand nearly infinitely and with formidable speed and luckily at least only components of them so far provided evidence that they can shrink and implode which is a problem in the universe of physics and of consciousness. Stars and minds alike can get out of their destined orbit which causes cosmic and consciousness disorder with environmental fallout. Can we infer a physics of consciousness? And can we get a complete understanding of life as a whole without falling prey to presumptuousness and blasphemy?

Obviously these questions transcend the bounds of this format and all countries, nay all of humanity, is concerned alike. So, if one considers a specific culture such as the German for example in the widest perspective, one notes that most fundamental things are universally applicable. It is important to see that the greater part of cultural questions have a common foundation which ralativizes the cultural and points to the universal dimension of mankind as a whole. But this integrative dimension of consciousness needs to be evidenced and leveraged for man's future.

Yet, the small percentage of cultural diversity seems to acquire overproportional importance in our days of unprecedented poly-cultural honeymooning and crises. The relativized importance of cultural diversity from a wider cosmic perspective materializes in this study in the fact that Germany is only dealt with by indirection, based on the perception that in spite of diversity, unity is the more important fact, because the laws of consciousness and the principles of their culturally relevant management are universal. It is the divorce of cultural phenomena from their consciousness background that makes them so diversely cryptic because the underlying principle of consciousness and its management is discarded.

In the following, further below, I would like to represent a holistic model of the universe followed by a holistic model of consciousness from a transcultural management standpoint. Both have comparable dynamics in terms of contraction and expansion with similar impact. Levell and 2 of the Model of Consciousness or Transcultural Management Model or Profiler represent the maximum expansion of consciousness. Shrinking or contraction and expansion seem to be principles in both systems. They are universal systems with their astrophysical or cultural subsystems and comparable fundamental dynamics which are the vital existential categories with regard to impact in both systems. Obviously astrophysicists are unsure whether the expanding universe can also contract or shrink as a whole. Beyond this the connection between the universe of physics and the universe of consciousness needs a special in depth inquiry. But one can note that there is also an asymmetric relationship between the two universes in the sense that the seemingly irreversible expansion of the physical universe is paralleled by reversible expansions and contractions of the universe of consciousness as long as it remains time-bound. To establish itself in a socially sustainable and healthy expansion so as to at least encompass mankind as a whole it needs to go beyond time boundedness, for only there reversibility and change end. And this is the critical issue in the human psyche with its grossly material mind which functions dialectically in time and that part of the human psyche which can transcend the realm of dialectics and time. Therefore this latter can be called eternity or the divine. In consciousness terms one could differentiate specific human, i.e. a more limited form of conditioned consciousness in time and all encompassing unconditioned consciousness beyond time, which one could call divine consciousness. In order to solve the problems created in time it is necessary to bridge the gap and merge the two modes of consciousness, whereby the timeless redeems the time-bound. This unique alchemy is meant by salvation of which man is only incompletely capable. And that is where true religion, in particular that of Christ enters the scene of human destiny, because His mission is to reconcile the two universes of the human and the divine. The consciousness metaphor is only a mental construct for practical pedagogical purposes, for that which is pointed to can hardly be captured by mental conceptions. It seems to be of a different kind, transcendent and yet immanent.

Any human hubris, personal, group-cultural, national, racial, ideological, professional etc. in the light of man's condition of dependence, irrespective of conditioning, from but also liberation through the divine should therefore instruct and guide human thought and feeling. It is the liberation from the contracted human consciousness by the divine consciousness which reintroduces a form of symmetry between the physical universe and the universe of consciousness in the sense that by virtue of the big bang of liberation of consciousness the latter also acquires the capacity of infinite expansion. And on this expansion freedom from the constraints of mental consciousness depends. This process appears as a panacea for the conditions inherent in a limited consciousness and it allows man to step out of the dark tunnel of the cave through the grace of a liberating transformation of his consciousness.

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