Man is a con­scious being, and yet his con­scious­ness gen­er­ally works uncon­sciously. At times spe­cies-spe­cif­ic forces, high­er than the indi­vidu­al, also come into play. Now, among the sur­viv­al strategies of human­ity as a spe­cies are the tra­di­tion­al ways of life, voca­tions akin to pro­fes­sions, and per­haps, as a new phe­nomen­on, the renewed advance of holi­ness. The frame­work of exist­ence is not formed by the three dimen­sions of space – length, breadth and depth – alone. As a fourth we add time, or exten­sion in time, but we scarcely give thought to any fur­ther dimen­sions. Intens­ity, the emo­tion­al depths of life, we may safely regard as the fifth dimen­sion. The dimen­sions of space are encom­passed by geo­metry, the dimen­sion of time is the province of his­tory and of man's per­cep­tion of time, while the dimen­sion of intens­ity is per­haps best approached pre­cisely through spir­itu­al­ity, the spir­it, reli­gion. How fash­ion­able it is to be spir­itu­al, and how out of fash­ion to call your­self reli­gious…

A well-known example is the heavy­weight ath­lete who received a divine sum­mons: Be a priest! ‘Cer­tainly not, I want to be a wrest­ler!’ – the can­did­ate pro­tested, yet in the end he gave in after all. He was sur­prised only when it emerged that many oth­ers had taken up the priestly voca­tion without any divine call­ing. By con­trast, the case of the one who was called is a good example of how ideals have a great­er grav­it­a­tion­al pull than mea­gre human strength or know­ledge. The life of the priest, the monk, the ascet­ic is a great attempt to regain holi­ness. Those who live in the call­ing of holi­ness make use of dif­fer­ent means. The yogi approaches his goal by the path of mys­ti­cism, the priest through rite and ser­vice, the her­mit through the asceti­cism of with­draw­al, and the monk by way of feel­ing – but all are head­ing in one dir­ec­tion. Although not every man can become a priest or a monk, to remove holi­ness from human exist­ence means a grave loss of dimen­sion.

Yet tra­di­tion­al, insti­tu­tion­al­ised reli­gi­os­ity has often been the refuge of sub­ject­ive spir­itu­al misery, or else the choke chain of object­ive spir­itu­al ter­ror. This defi­cient and wretched con­di­tion was not resolved by the Enlight­en­ment or by the sci­entif­ic world view, nor by the indus­tri­al or the post­mod­ern world order: man still feels alone. The desire for dei­fic­a­tion, for becom­ing divine, would be jus­ti­fied. In some sys­tems of belief this amounts to blas­phemy, oth­ers hold it pos­sible, and oth­ers again regard it as noth­ing less than a goal to be attained. In days gone by, my favour­ite short story dealt with this theme. Its adoles­cent hero, asked in a school essay ‘What would you like to be?’, answered straight out: God. This he saw as the only real altern­at­ive to a human life hemmed in by lim­its, wretched and short. Of course, becom­ing a god is a hero­ic yet futile attempt; jus­ti­fic­a­tion, how­ever, is not. In his ulti­mate essence man is not mater­i­al in nature, but spir­itu­al. And a real path leads to this spir­itu­al essence: the path of the soul's self-real­isa­tion. Through it man is able to step bey­ond the lim­its of human exist­ence and can over­come his bio­lo­gic­al, social, cul­tur­al, spe­cies-spe­cif­ic and every other con­di­tion­ing. And this is one of the most start­ling ques­tions: how can the urges of human exist­ence be over­come? How can the soul be lib­er­ated from human self-iden­ti­fic­a­tion? Per­haps by embra­cing its heav­enly voca­tion? For while in the world of mat­ter order reigns, in the divine realm har­mony…