Temptation
The Devil – My Brother
All heaven’s glory is within and so is hell’s fierce burning.
Angelus Silesius
You must yourself decide in which direction you are turning.
height 150 cm, width 120 cm, depth 80 cm
Many people who know me are probably wondering why I made this sculpture. And why I call it The Devil – My Brother.
I am by nature a very optimistic and happy person. As a child, I didn’t believe in the existence of evil. Until I met it myself. And that encounter was so terrifying and gruesome that it almost cost me my life. The horrible fear it created threatened to swallow me up, and because I threatened to lose myself in fear, I unintentionally opened the door even more to what I was afraid of.
It is said that whatever you encounter in the course of life – you also always have the strength to overcome it. Otherwise you would not encounter it. For me, this makes sense.
In my despair and in search of help, I met the healer Gustav Hossenfelder. He works with shadow constellations. I will be eternally grateful to him, because through him I learned a lot.
He told me that I was the victim of a long, Christian history, through which the belief in heaven and hell, in God and the devil, propagated by the church, had been deeply imprinted into my subconscious over many lifetimes. This dichotomy and this great misunderstanding now had to be overcome, because actually this dichotomy propagated by the church does not exist. It is an illusion.
God encompasses everything. And for those who have problems with the word God, since this word has also been misused by the church authorities, one could translate: life encompasses everything: both light and shadow, day and night, “good” and “evil”. Ultimately, everything is a part of a greater whole, for outside of life or outside consciousness nothing at all can exist.
This absolute truth is overshadowed by the reality created by our own thoughts, comparable to clouds that have pushed themselves in front of the sky. This reality created by ourselves is therefore not synonymous with truth. But it also does not change the underlying truth, it only overshadows it. Ultimately, life is about overcoming the apparent duality created by our thoughts.
It was Gustav who explained to me what a demon or a devil is. He explained it to me like this:
Every thought is followed by energy. And this energy manifests itself in one way or another. Therefore we should be mindful of our thoughts, because they ultimately create our reality.
When a person has hateful thoughts, it creates a certain kind of energy. This energy then manifests itself, let’s say, as a dark cloud – to make it very simple and descriptive. If more people have hateful thoughts, then that is the same kind of energy, manifesting itself in the same way and causing the dark cloud to grow denser and denser – until it is so dense that it takes the form of a soulless existence of its own. So in the end, demons are creatures born of negative and destructive thoughts, comparable with large parasites which like to physically occupy people in order to drag them into separateness and fear, the opposites of love.
My own shadow and all the self-created images – the hell, the devil, guilt and fear… how afraid I was of them at that time, and thus I unconsciously gave these self-created entities so much space inside of me. But at the same time I learned a lot from them.
We all know feelings like fear, malice, sadness and anger. They are our shadow children slumbering in the subconscious – segregated, condemned and rejected by ourselves. They long for nothing more than to finally be seen and recognised for what they truly are – our self-generated children. Just like every child, they too long for love and recognition. Whether hatred, despair, jealousy or anger – all these things are basically neither good nor bad – they are simply what they are and also want to be seen and loved for exactly what they are.
If you enter a dark cellar with a lamp, it will become light. The darkness must always give way to the light, because the light is stronger than the darkness. If we manage to recognise and embrace our own shadows, they dissolve. What happens then is like a miracle. A great inner change takes place. We literally heal ourselves, we become whole again.