Stage 7
The completion
Body, soul and spirit form a unified whole. The soul is our life – full of inconsistencies, abysses, hopes and desires, darkness and light. It was and is our purpose to view this unity in a dynamic manner. This life can fail, or it can lead to fulfillment.
If everything is immaterial and indifferent, stagnation will rule, and there is no goal to achieve. Even if this stagnation is disguised by the hectic life and lack of rest, every movement is stifled.
The soul can either identify with material things – this leads to materialism, egotism and isolation – or it can strive upwards, be open for the encompassing wholeness and transformed by the spirit.
One leads to darkness, to death (symbolic for unconsciousness, isolation from the whole), and the other leads to “light”, to “eternal life”. This requires humility – the courage not to hold fast onto the Self, but to surrender oneself to the whole, to let oneself be transformed. We can lose the Self, but not the personality.
The “person” is what lies behind the outer appearance (per-sonare = sounding through: this comes from the mask in Greek tragedy, which comes to life by the one heard from behind it).
We are not eternal in this life, but open for eternal life.
Wolf Leo (Germany)
