Embryosophy – Key to the mystery of the human?

GESTURES OF BECOMING MAN

The poet at word:

I may not be born yet.
Heaven extends from my forehead on,
A membrane belonging to my growing.

My feet dance in the pain
that is called labor, see I am bound
to cords, as long as life.

A magnificent Madonna blue
perfects me inside this woman.

G. Achterberg

This image is by Robert Fischer and is called “Ein neuer Tag”
If you see a hidden embryo in this landscape, you are on the right track …..

Embryo in motion – journey into ourselves

Many people have pitifully little knowledge about our – which in fact is their own – embryonic existence. Yet there are so many ethical, medical and moral decisions and choices being made, so many judgments being pronounced nowadays about embryos or, if you wish, about human beings still finding themselves at this stage of their development. Who knows how many people there are, who still honestly believe, that an embryo of three weeks old is a sort of ‘cluster of cells’, which can be regarded as nothing but a bit of tissue and a few cells. There also is a category of people who, in the framework of their professional training, have at some stage been introduced to embryology as a discipline of science, and who have been left with the impression of it being a useless bulk of knowledge consisting of many incoherent facts and many difficult words. Maybe left behind with the question What does this all have to do with me as a person?

I was fortunate enough to encounter the embryo in a different manner. If, however, you immerse yourself into the journey of the embryo as being a thrilling process of becoming a human being and you ask yourself the question ‘WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO WHILE BEING AN EMBRYO?’, the way I do, you first have to wipe off  the ‘dust’ of the contemporary scientific embryology. That does not see anything but ‘cells, genes, hormones, proteins etc. etc.’ anyway. Fascinating, off course, but far from home! That has precious little to do with becoming a human being.

If, however, you open your heart and try to put yourself into the position of the embryo and join in experiencing the gestures of growing that are taking place there, all at once the embryo will tell you a very different, and then well very profound story. It will tell you the story of becoming a HUMAN BEING, of the struggle of the person and his spirit to come to light through the tough resistance of cells, genes, tissue. A human being performs so much work and lives so intensely while being an embryo!

You have to put on a different pair of glasses, however. Don’t worry, you don’t have to start floating or ignoring the perceivable facts like cells etc. But by looking at the embryo through a so-called ‘phenomenological pair of spectacles’ you can ‘see’ GESTURES (Gestalt if you wish), and getting to know the embryo suddenly becomes a journey into yourself. Nothing human is unbeknown to the embryo. To say it without much ado: “Did you know you had already walked and breathed before you were born?” The embryo tells the dramatic tale of becoming a HUMAN BEING. Surely the greatest secret of a human being is that he/she has the characteristic of BEING an embryo! This fundamentally distinguishes him from the animals. We carry a unique potency within us which we owe to our BEING an EMBRYO.

Embryo – a key to the Mystery of Man

Science gives many answers nowadays, many explanations as to HOW and BY WHAT MEANS. But what about the questions as to WHY? Natural science (including the current embryology) gives no answers to questions concerning SENSE and MEANING. And how could it? They play no part in its methodology and its paradigm. It does not consider it to be its business. The only problem with this attitude is, that ’science’ (including the current embryology) often DOES claim to have the one and only answer about reality. As if there were no other (scientific) ways and means of acquiring insight into and understanding of man and reality! In my view, after four and a half centuries of so-called positivistic science we have no need for further horizons but for ‘new eyes’.

I can’t be satisfied by arguments like ‘It’s all coincidence’ or ‘It’s nothing but genes, cells and matter’. Not that I shouldn’t want to, but I EXPERIENCE life differently. Science and people who are convinced that only the hard and rational reality is THE realty always look at things, the world, man, as if these were outside myself, as if they were objects. Today’s science turns me into an ONLOOKER. And I want to TAKE PART in life, the world, nature! I can’t help it, that is the only way I experience it. I experience mystery, miracle, secret, spirit, creation. And then I should have to suppress all that and deny it as being figments of the imagination, because I should not be able to ’see’ it or ’make it tangible‘? Yet I also want to remain scientific in a modern way. How can that be possible?

Within the human embryo I have found answers to questions regarding the mystery of man. Questions like Where do we come from? and What could be the meaning of our existence? It’s really quite simple. If you don’t enter the marvelous world of the embryo with the detached and cold contemplation of the onlooker, but you open your heart and your soul and join in to EXPERIENCE what’s happening there, you will be able to discover behind the facts nothing less than the activity of SPIRIT. Creative spirit, creative man. There is nothing illusive or floating about this. You are just left with the enormous satisfaction to discover that it’s possible to RE-UNITE the domains of science and religion, of explanation and understanding, which have been kept strictly separated for so long!

Embryo –  a whole evolving world

All you need to do , is to learn understanding the ’language’ of the embryo. Then all at once you can read there about the evolving of the human being and mankind. Old myths will appear in quite a new perspective. As well as that, your own story may gain in depth and perspective through this. The blueprint of every person, the essential ingredients of your existence you can read there within the embryo almost literally(!) and in still the purest form. In image, in gesture the microcosm of the embryo contains a whole macrocosm. “He who does not recognize the small form, will not be able to grasp the larger picture”.

Your whole life long it’s a matter of ’taking off coats’. To be born will turn out to be a gesture of ’dying out of…’. The philosopher Mansukh Patel says: “When we die, we just take off a coat. Actually we don’t do anything else right through our lives. We shed the body of the baby to step into that of a toddler. Next we put on the body of a child, adolescent, adult etc. The embryo can teach you a great deal about the real dynamics of growth and development, about dying and being born.

Your attitude towards the human embryo will undergo a revaluation, too. It won’t be a matter of ’clusters of cells’ or ’nothing but a code on a DNS chain’ or ’just a coincidence’ any longer. Off course, you may still (have to) decide or make choices regarding the life or death of an embryo, about sense or nonsense of the embryonic existence, but you will be able to do it with more insight, once you know: What do we do and who are we while being an embryo!

Want to learn to see with ‘new eyes’?

There is a course about THE OTHER EMBRYO. A collection of stories, scientific facts and other things worth knowing, poetry and sometimes art. During this seminar you will follow the actual events which mark our embryonic existence embraced by fundamentally getting to know and co-experiencing the mysteries of CONCEPTION and BIRTH. (Hopefully) you will be amazed to learn that a human being does NOT ‘reproduce’ himself, that conception is NOT a matter of ‘making children’, that to be born is a gesture of ‘dying out of a different dimension’, that ‘God’ and ‘Spirit’ are no abstract concepts but tangible, recognizable and active principles in human (embryonic) development. That, if you so wish, you can ‘see’ the incarnation of the ‘spirit’ into the body during the third week of development for instance. And it is possible to make all this visible by looking at the facts of embryonic existence with ‘new eyes’. It is not true that the human embryo ‘doesn’t have a soul yet’ or ‘still has to receive a soul’, but that it IS soul!

We are not going to ‘float’. A lot of modern ‘New Age’ thinking moves NEXT TO the factual world of science and biology and hardly looks for any connection with it. Or it appropriates scientific findings to itself without being aware of the paradigm which encompasses these findings (and which consequently belongs to these findings). And in this way it still gets entangled in the disastrous duality of spirit (soul) and body, which the Cartesian philosophy has burdened us with, or the idea, that spirit (soul) is a kind of product of the brain and subsequently of the body. This seminar has its roots in embryology (as starting point) but tries to enhance it to become insight (embryosophy). In regard to approach and method: we will try to link feeling and thinking, intuition and knowledge, a kind of ’empathetic understanding’, better known as Goethean phenomenology.

For information about assisting a course or as the organization of lectures and courses you mat go to then page ‘course content‘.

The body developed
out of us,
not we from it.
We are bees,
and our body is a honeycomb.
We made the body,
cell by cell we made it..

RUMI (1207 – 1273