Gaining an Awareness and an Understanding of Life

Gaining an Awareness and an Understanding of Life

Tracking Down the Secret of Being

Thomas Kloevekorn & Walter Eckert


USD 23,99

Format: 13.5 x 21.5 cm
Number of Pages: 258
ISBN: 978-3-99107-444-1
Release Date: 13.12.2021

Reading:

We would like to dedicate this book to our fellow human beings

and in particular to those
who are seeking orientation and questioning the meaning of their lives,
who are open to the secrets of life,
who are striving to find the truth,
who believe in goodness, but have not yet found it,
who are disillusioned by their situation in life
and are seeking consolation,
who are looking for a faith that carries conviction,
who are not really convinced by what the churches preach.


Herr and Frau Kloevekorn spent more than four decades on a quest to discover the secrets of life. As people involved in creative activities – she as an artist, he as an architect − they searched for and found answers to many questions of life. Among the conclusions they came to was the following:
‘Life exists independently of material. The essence of life is not to be found in material. Life is something that transfuses material. Life uses material to express itself. We human beings use the activity of our minds, our spirits, to inform our bodies, in order to comprehend the world, in order to learn, so that we, as living Spirits, are bound up with material. Among the insights that help us to understand life is the recognition that we exist in a relationship of tension between forces that influence us, and it is up to us to decide how we will conduct ourselves in respect of these forces.’
The first part of the book contains a concise overview of vital concepts that are needed to gain an understanding of ‘life’. Many of the secrets that life holds for us can be deciphered using sources from the spheres of eternal life, and so afford the reader valuable assistance in reaching a better understanding of life here on earth.
In the second part of the book, ‘Source of Living Water’, some of the messages communicated by Walter Eckert, whose conceptions have been essential in shaping the content of this book, are being published for the first time. Walter Eckert helps people today to live their lives in such a way that they can experience hope once again.
The reader can use the sources listed at the end of the book to go into the subject matter more deeply and thereby win further insights for his or her own life.
Further information can be found at: www.das-leben-erkennen.de


part one
Preface
Freedom through Truth: ‘for the Truth will set you free’.[103] [p.972] But what truth? Who knows what the Truth is? If we seek to define Truth and accept as true everything that unites us with the divine, then we possess that Truth which makes us free from the opinions of others. If our aim is clearly defined as being to accept God as reality and as a model for us, then we have the opportunity to become free, independently of other people, religions or institutions; then we can confidently decide for ourselves what is good and what is not good, because God is the yardstick by which we orientate ourselves. Then we will really be set free because God does not force us to do anything. He allows us to exercise our free will.
We will become really free if, in our thinking and our behaviour, we come closer to the Divine. To do that, we have to get to know God. This book will familiarise us with God and show us a way to become free. Anything that takes away our freedom is not from God, but arises out of thinking and actions that are remote from God.
Of course, there is also an objective Truth. It would be naive to believe that there was no absolute truth. Just as two and two make four, there are also things in the spiritual realm that are absolute, that are binding on everybody; only we human beings are not in a position to see and recognise all this for ourselves. Because each of us sees things from a different point of view according to the nature of our personal development, everyone makes their own experiences and draws their individual conclusions from them. To that extent, each person here on earth has their own truth, and it would be presumptuous for any person or institution to proclaim a truth that is binding on everybody.

According to the Athpedia encyclopaedia, the expression ‘true’ corresponds to the word ‘emet’ in Hebrew. It refers to the ‘trustworthiness, the unbreakable load-bearing capacity of a thing or a word’, a quality which we seldom find in the human sphere, and yet which I got to know over a period of over thirty years of my life through being involved with a unique phenomenon − and that is what I wish to write about.


‘How little do people know of what life really is.
How little does humanity grasp of existence, of life.
Man wanders like a sleepwalker through a world he does not comprehend.
Yes, man is a sleepwalker in the habitation of God.’
Eckert/Kloevekorn, Silberklänge (Sounds of Silver), p. 46


What Is Life?
Life is a perfectly everyday thing to us. We live our lives without knowing why. ‘You walk around all over your world and you know nothing about it.’ [01] On the other hand, life is also something mysterious, something we are unable to comprehend, and the more we concern ourselves with the nature of life, the more thrilling the task of solving the riddle of life becomes. ‘There are very few people who in the course of their lives experience what it means to learn about the reality of this world.’ [01]

To me, life is like travelling by air. I know that I am flying, and that this journey has a beginning and an end.

But this comparison ignores a fundamental difference: when I get onto an aeroplane, I know why I am going on this journey and I know where the flight is taking me. Where my life is concerned, however, I generally don’t know these things.

That is why I attempt to track down these secrets of life.

To me, my life in the here and now is just one link in the long chain of development of my personality.

As I get older, I perceive life more and more as an opportunity

- to free myself from the fetters of my own inadequacies,
- to devote myself to the service of my fellow human beings,
- to promote peace between all us members of the human race and
- to enable all forms of life to continue to live in a manner that is worth living, now and in the future.

I now see it as the purpose of my life to make good use of this opportunity.

There are moments when we human beings ask ourselves what the significance of life really is. We are born, we grow up, we work in our occupations, and then everything comes to an end again. Why is this? What is the use of it all? Only the perpetuation of our own species? Is that all?
All of us have some kind of inkling that there must be more to it than that. But what is that ‘more’? Who can give us a satisfactory answer to this question? Religious bodies do not seem to be very good at this, because their answers to the question are not always convincing. Their messages are too permeated by a human way of thinking and by patronising paternalism.
But there simply must be answers, even in our enlightened age, that can satisfy a critical inquirer because they make sense. Answers that we can believe: because we understand them, because they are consistent and are amenable to logical thinking. In other words, they must be credible.
I need to be able to find these qualities in what I seek to communicate in the following pages. So I must ask my readers to free themselves from some of their own convictions, or perhaps prejudices, or at least to put them on one side for as long as they need to understand my arguments. It is quite possible that this will lead readers to adopt a quite different view of the world afterwards, so that their ways of thinking and their lives are changed.
It does not take very much to be able to understand the basic features of life. As I see it, there are only a few fundamental things that people need to be able to understand in order to comprehend what our lives are. Unfortunately these fundamentals remain hidden to most of us: because we have been preconditioned in our ways of thinking from childhood on by old, distorted conventions and are no longer able or willing to think differently, and because our society believes that other ways of thinking are far removed from reality and therefore, deliberately or perhaps unconsciously, closes itself to many truths.
I myself have been involved with seeking to understand these fundamental factors since the 1970s, and during this time they have convinced me that there are ‘more things in heaven and earth’ than those we can see with our eyes. My wife and I ceased to be members of any religious grouping in 1975. As a result of this, we can now go our own way without being restricted by any church institution. I observe repeatedly that many people who are adherents of a religion are not free enough to talk about things in the content of that religion that seem odd to them, or are not consistent with how they understand their faith. They are not free enough to open themselves up to other concepts.
Now the reader will perhaps be surprised that I nevertheless consider myself to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ’s life and work here on earth were such as I imagine those of an ideal human being to be, and I do not need to profess any creed in order to understand this. I have a rather different view of Jesus Christ from what is taught by the Christian churches. They, for example, again and again attempt to present Jesus Christ and God as one and the same being. This is something that I cannot logically grasp, for it was his Son that God sent to earth, and Jesus Christ here on earth always referred to his Father in Heaven. ‘Christ never said of himself that he was God. He always called himself the Son of God.’ [02] Why can the Christian churches not be content with Jesus Christ being the Son of God? Does being the Son of God not make him big enough for them? ‘The realisation that Christ is God’s highest creation, but not the same as God, solves many of the doubts and objections that confuse people today.’ [02]
It is an enormous pity that the Christian church holds fast to its dogmas so determinedly and does not open itself up to a credible understanding. I believe that the number of people who give up their church membership could be reduced if their church were able to give them more credible answers to their questions. What radiant light a faith community could shine on the members of its fellowship if it were able to arouse their enthusiasm through its power of conviction! Instead, the state churches are turning into social undertakings: as such they no doubt also perform important work, but work which alone is not enough to captivate a person who is seeking the truth. It is a very long time since Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that ‘God is dead’ revealed an urgent need for action. A turnaround is necessary. Church members should be able to experience once again the original values of Christianity. This would be an enormous gain for any congregation.
Religions have been the cause of much evil in our world, and even today there are still wars between people of different faiths. Unless there is a turnaround in our ways of thinking, this will continue endlessly. What we need is to live in a ‘world order’ which brings all people together. We must try to find the truth, to reveal it, and to make it accessible to all people, whatever religion they follow.
Christ attempted to lead us human beings to the Truth; but during his short life he was only able to reach and convince a few people. How difficult it was for him to put over his own ideas against the established faith community of his time. Even his own mother was surprised by what he said when it diverged from the traditions and teachings of the scribes and Pharisees. In addition, much of what Christ taught was later changed, and unfortunately also distorted, by the people who handed it down.
We earthly beings are not free of inadequacies. The reason for this lies deep within us. It is up to us to recognise these inadequacies and to overcome them.
But who will give us answers? Who will present the truth to us? Particularly in this age of digital media, this is a question that is becoming more and more urgent.


Steps Towards Understanding
Among the prerequisites for gaining experience with spiritual subjects are openness, joy, and the readiness to accept new things into one’s self, i.e. the ability to experience ‘enthusiasm’ in the true sense of the word. The reader who possesses these qualities will be able to profit from the questions dealt with in this book.
As is well known, life on earth is a training course. But what are we intended to learn? The ancient Greeks had a guiding principle expressed in the saying ‘Know yourself!’ And indeed, we can find all the answers to the questions of life in God’s creation, in ourselves, for example in our ‘vital spark’ or ‘spark of life’, because through it we are a part of his creation and a part of him.
The basic cause of our being here lies far back in the past, at a time when the earth did not yet exist. At that time, we still lived in the spiritual realm, in an immaterial world. This is also called Heaven. But Heaven is not as far away as we perhaps believe. ‘Heaven is in the midst of us’ (see also the chapter with the same title), only it resonates on a different waveband from the earth, from what is material, for material is only a condensed form of the spiritual. Our body too is material, and as such is subject to the physical properties of this waveband.
Our Creator made the earth for a very particular purpose. We are creatures, that is to say beings created by God, who are permitted to live on earth for a limited time, in order to learn something that we have lost: nearness to God. The more distant we become from God, the more we lose the things that could bind us to him: peace, harmony, happiness, joy, love. The more distant we become from God, the closer we come to what turns us into darkness, which is ultimately death; whereby death means nothing other than distance from God. Nearness to God means life; because everything that is alive has a part of him at its core, the spark of life that I have just mentioned. Whether it is a question of a mineral, a plant, an animal or a human being, we all draw our ‘aliveness’ from the power of God and through our spark of life we have a part of God within us. It is this living spark that links us to God.
‘There is something that you have been endowed with within your being, something of eternity, something of the eternal life that comes from the eternal divine fire: the light of your personality, the spark of your spirit, your ‘aliveness’, your inner life, your alliance with eternity, with God.’ [03]
God has given us life. It is his will that we should recognise that, that we should belong to him. God wishes us to seek and find him voluntarily and without compulsion. The earth with all its creatures gives us plenty of opportunity to find God.
I began my search about forty years ago.
Until shortly before I took my school leaving examination, the ability to ‘have faith’ was to me something only for uncritical, credulous people, but not for me. Despite this, I had an experience that made me think considerably more deeply and caused me to change my opinion when in my last year at school, during a German lesson, I first heard of the Bridey Murphy case. Our class teacher read us a report concerning evidence, indeed proof, that there must have been a life before life. A woman named Virginia Tighe had talked about it while under hypnosis.
The confrontation with this possibility led me to the unavoidable conclusion that in that case, a life after life must also be a possibility. From this time on, completely new perspectives opened up to me which spurred me on to pursue this viewpoint further. A life that was not limited by death? This aspect filled me with hope and inner joy.
My interest in the subject was already so enormous at that time that I set off in search of the secrets of life; and today I have no regrets about having gone down this path because I obtained some completely new insights that entirely changed my life.

We would like to dedicate this book to our fellow human beings

and in particular to those
who are seeking orientation and questioning the meaning of their lives,
who are open to the secrets of life,
who are striving to find the truth,
who believe in goodness, but have not yet found it,
who are disillusioned by their situation in life
and are seeking consolation,
who are looking for a faith that carries conviction,
who are not really convinced by what the churches preach.


Herr and Frau Kloevekorn spent more than four decades on a quest to discover the secrets of life. As people involved in creative activities – she as an artist, he as an architect − they searched for and found answers to many questions of life. Among the conclusions they came to was the following:
‘Life exists independently of material. The essence of life is not to be found in material. Life is something that transfuses material. Life uses material to express itself. We human beings use the activity of our minds, our spirits, to inform our bodies, in order to comprehend the world, in order to learn, so that we, as living Spirits, are bound up with material. Among the insights that help us to understand life is the recognition that we exist in a relationship of tension between forces that influence us, and it is up to us to decide how we will conduct ourselves in respect of these forces.’
The first part of the book contains a concise overview of vital concepts that are needed to gain an understanding of ‘life’. Many of the secrets that life holds for us can be deciphered using sources from the spheres of eternal life, and so afford the reader valuable assistance in reaching a better understanding of life here on earth.
In the second part of the book, ‘Source of Living Water’, some of the messages communicated by Walter Eckert, whose conceptions have been essential in shaping the content of this book, are being published for the first time. Walter Eckert helps people today to live their lives in such a way that they can experience hope once again.
The reader can use the sources listed at the end of the book to go into the subject matter more deeply and thereby win further insights for his or her own life.
Further information can be found at: www.das-leben-erkennen.de


part one
Preface
Freedom through Truth: ‘for the Truth will set you free’.[103] [p.972] But what truth? Who knows what the Truth is? If we seek to define Truth and accept as true everything that unites us with the divine, then we possess that Truth which makes us free from the opinions of others. If our aim is clearly defined as being to accept God as reality and as a model for us, then we have the opportunity to become free, independently of other people, religions or institutions; then we can confidently decide for ourselves what is good and what is not good, because God is the yardstick by which we orientate ourselves. Then we will really be set free because God does not force us to do anything. He allows us to exercise our free will.
We will become really free if, in our thinking and our behaviour, we come closer to the Divine. To do that, we have to get to know God. This book will familiarise us with God and show us a way to become free. Anything that takes away our freedom is not from God, but arises out of thinking and actions that are remote from God.
Of course, there is also an objective Truth. It would be naive to believe that there was no absolute truth. Just as two and two make four, there are also things in the spiritual realm that are absolute, that are binding on everybody; only we human beings are not in a position to see and recognise all this for ourselves. Because each of us sees things from a different point of view according to the nature of our personal development, everyone makes their own experiences and draws their individual conclusions from them. To that extent, each person here on earth has their own truth, and it would be presumptuous for any person or institution to proclaim a truth that is binding on everybody.

According to the Athpedia encyclopaedia, the expression ‘true’ corresponds to the word ‘emet’ in Hebrew. It refers to the ‘trustworthiness, the unbreakable load-bearing capacity of a thing or a word’, a quality which we seldom find in the human sphere, and yet which I got to know over a period of over thirty years of my life through being involved with a unique phenomenon − and that is what I wish to write about.


‘How little do people know of what life really is.
How little does humanity grasp of existence, of life.
Man wanders like a sleepwalker through a world he does not comprehend.
Yes, man is a sleepwalker in the habitation of God.’
Eckert/Kloevekorn, Silberklänge (Sounds of Silver), p. 46


What Is Life?
Life is a perfectly everyday thing to us. We live our lives without knowing why. ‘You walk around all over your world and you know nothing about it.’ [01] On the other hand, life is also something mysterious, something we are unable to comprehend, and the more we concern ourselves with the nature of life, the more thrilling the task of solving the riddle of life becomes. ‘There are very few people who in the course of their lives experience what it means to learn about the reality of this world.’ [01]

To me, life is like travelling by air. I know that I am flying, and that this journey has a beginning and an end.

But this comparison ignores a fundamental difference: when I get onto an aeroplane, I know why I am going on this journey and I know where the flight is taking me. Where my life is concerned, however, I generally don’t know these things.

That is why I attempt to track down these secrets of life.

To me, my life in the here and now is just one link in the long chain of development of my personality.

As I get older, I perceive life more and more as an opportunity

- to free myself from the fetters of my own inadequacies,
- to devote myself to the service of my fellow human beings,
- to promote peace between all us members of the human race and
- to enable all forms of life to continue to live in a manner that is worth living, now and in the future.

I now see it as the purpose of my life to make good use of this opportunity.

There are moments when we human beings ask ourselves what the significance of life really is. We are born, we grow up, we work in our occupations, and then everything comes to an end again. Why is this? What is the use of it all? Only the perpetuation of our own species? Is that all?
All of us have some kind of inkling that there must be more to it than that. But what is that ‘more’? Who can give us a satisfactory answer to this question? Religious bodies do not seem to be very good at this, because their answers to the question are not always convincing. Their messages are too permeated by a human way of thinking and by patronising paternalism.
But there simply must be answers, even in our enlightened age, that can satisfy a critical inquirer because they make sense. Answers that we can believe: because we understand them, because they are consistent and are amenable to logical thinking. In other words, they must be credible.
I need to be able to find these qualities in what I seek to communicate in the following pages. So I must ask my readers to free themselves from some of their own convictions, or perhaps prejudices, or at least to put them on one side for as long as they need to understand my arguments. It is quite possible that this will lead readers to adopt a quite different view of the world afterwards, so that their ways of thinking and their lives are changed.
It does not take very much to be able to understand the basic features of life. As I see it, there are only a few fundamental things that people need to be able to understand in order to comprehend what our lives are. Unfortunately these fundamentals remain hidden to most of us: because we have been preconditioned in our ways of thinking from childhood on by old, distorted conventions and are no longer able or willing to think differently, and because our society believes that other ways of thinking are far removed from reality and therefore, deliberately or perhaps unconsciously, closes itself to many truths.
I myself have been involved with seeking to understand these fundamental factors since the 1970s, and during this time they have convinced me that there are ‘more things in heaven and earth’ than those we can see with our eyes. My wife and I ceased to be members of any religious grouping in 1975. As a result of this, we can now go our own way without being restricted by any church institution. I observe repeatedly that many people who are adherents of a religion are not free enough to talk about things in the content of that religion that seem odd to them, or are not consistent with how they understand their faith. They are not free enough to open themselves up to other concepts.
Now the reader will perhaps be surprised that I nevertheless consider myself to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ’s life and work here on earth were such as I imagine those of an ideal human being to be, and I do not need to profess any creed in order to understand this. I have a rather different view of Jesus Christ from what is taught by the Christian churches. They, for example, again and again attempt to present Jesus Christ and God as one and the same being. This is something that I cannot logically grasp, for it was his Son that God sent to earth, and Jesus Christ here on earth always referred to his Father in Heaven. ‘Christ never said of himself that he was God. He always called himself the Son of God.’ [02] Why can the Christian churches not be content with Jesus Christ being the Son of God? Does being the Son of God not make him big enough for them? ‘The realisation that Christ is God’s highest creation, but not the same as God, solves many of the doubts and objections that confuse people today.’ [02]
It is an enormous pity that the Christian church holds fast to its dogmas so determinedly and does not open itself up to a credible understanding. I believe that the number of people who give up their church membership could be reduced if their church were able to give them more credible answers to their questions. What radiant light a faith community could shine on the members of its fellowship if it were able to arouse their enthusiasm through its power of conviction! Instead, the state churches are turning into social undertakings: as such they no doubt also perform important work, but work which alone is not enough to captivate a person who is seeking the truth. It is a very long time since Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that ‘God is dead’ revealed an urgent need for action. A turnaround is necessary. Church members should be able to experience once again the original values of Christianity. This would be an enormous gain for any congregation.
Religions have been the cause of much evil in our world, and even today there are still wars between people of different faiths. Unless there is a turnaround in our ways of thinking, this will continue endlessly. What we need is to live in a ‘world order’ which brings all people together. We must try to find the truth, to reveal it, and to make it accessible to all people, whatever religion they follow.
Christ attempted to lead us human beings to the Truth; but during his short life he was only able to reach and convince a few people. How difficult it was for him to put over his own ideas against the established faith community of his time. Even his own mother was surprised by what he said when it diverged from the traditions and teachings of the scribes and Pharisees. In addition, much of what Christ taught was later changed, and unfortunately also distorted, by the people who handed it down.
We earthly beings are not free of inadequacies. The reason for this lies deep within us. It is up to us to recognise these inadequacies and to overcome them.
But who will give us answers? Who will present the truth to us? Particularly in this age of digital media, this is a question that is becoming more and more urgent.


Steps Towards Understanding
Among the prerequisites for gaining experience with spiritual subjects are openness, joy, and the readiness to accept new things into one’s self, i.e. the ability to experience ‘enthusiasm’ in the true sense of the word. The reader who possesses these qualities will be able to profit from the questions dealt with in this book.
As is well known, life on earth is a training course. But what are we intended to learn? The ancient Greeks had a guiding principle expressed in the saying ‘Know yourself!’ And indeed, we can find all the answers to the questions of life in God’s creation, in ourselves, for example in our ‘vital spark’ or ‘spark of life’, because through it we are a part of his creation and a part of him.
The basic cause of our being here lies far back in the past, at a time when the earth did not yet exist. At that time, we still lived in the spiritual realm, in an immaterial world. This is also called Heaven. But Heaven is not as far away as we perhaps believe. ‘Heaven is in the midst of us’ (see also the chapter with the same title), only it resonates on a different waveband from the earth, from what is material, for material is only a condensed form of the spiritual. Our body too is material, and as such is subject to the physical properties of this waveband.
Our Creator made the earth for a very particular purpose. We are creatures, that is to say beings created by God, who are permitted to live on earth for a limited time, in order to learn something that we have lost: nearness to God. The more distant we become from God, the more we lose the things that could bind us to him: peace, harmony, happiness, joy, love. The more distant we become from God, the closer we come to what turns us into darkness, which is ultimately death; whereby death means nothing other than distance from God. Nearness to God means life; because everything that is alive has a part of him at its core, the spark of life that I have just mentioned. Whether it is a question of a mineral, a plant, an animal or a human being, we all draw our ‘aliveness’ from the power of God and through our spark of life we have a part of God within us. It is this living spark that links us to God.
‘There is something that you have been endowed with within your being, something of eternity, something of the eternal life that comes from the eternal divine fire: the light of your personality, the spark of your spirit, your ‘aliveness’, your inner life, your alliance with eternity, with God.’ [03]
God has given us life. It is his will that we should recognise that, that we should belong to him. God wishes us to seek and find him voluntarily and without compulsion. The earth with all its creatures gives us plenty of opportunity to find God.
I began my search about forty years ago.
Until shortly before I took my school leaving examination, the ability to ‘have faith’ was to me something only for uncritical, credulous people, but not for me. Despite this, I had an experience that made me think considerably more deeply and caused me to change my opinion when in my last year at school, during a German lesson, I first heard of the Bridey Murphy case. Our class teacher read us a report concerning evidence, indeed proof, that there must have been a life before life. A woman named Virginia Tighe had talked about it while under hypnosis.
The confrontation with this possibility led me to the unavoidable conclusion that in that case, a life after life must also be a possibility. From this time on, completely new perspectives opened up to me which spurred me on to pursue this viewpoint further. A life that was not limited by death? This aspect filled me with hope and inner joy.
My interest in the subject was already so enormous at that time that I set off in search of the secrets of life; and today I have no regrets about having gone down this path because I obtained some completely new insights that entirely changed my life.

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