Ambihemispherical Holosophy´s 12 Translucidly Mindful Words # 11: Friedfertigkeit – Readyness For Peace
Peace can only be when we are ready for it. The German language has a special word for this readyness: “Friedfertigkeit” – Readyness for peace. The word encompasses a package of brain state caracteristics from which the willfullness of a person to be ready for peace derives. Peace not as a stoically forced quiteness and repression of your inner expressions of your drive for life but as a freedom to fully be oneself in all expressions of life. Inner freedom. Inner peace. Empathy. Love of life.
What great goals are these for each single one of us. They are sounding so simple and yet are, apparently, so difficult to achieve that entire libraries of psychological and spiritual literature are full of teachings of how to get there. The German language points at the easiest way as I will quickly show below.
Very often in my life of philosophical questioning it was not my actual stream of thinking that brought me to an idea but simply the bumping into the wisdom of German language in my stream of consciousness. In that difficult question of how to achieve “Friedfertigkeit” – readyness for peace – there is an answer deeply embedded in German language: “Befriedigung” – coming fully to peace. Which is much more than appeasement or statisfaction.
“Befriedigung” is a brain state of complete inner quiteness of all longing and unstilled desires thanks to the deep coming to balance that feels weightless on all sides of the personal needs of an individuum, of their likings, lusts, psycho-physical necessities – all of that what our brain, body and heart seeks for in order to be in inner balance as the living person you are right now.
„Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it – and in this order“, stated psychiatrist Dr. Wilhlem Reich. He pointed at the necessity for a human being to find inner balance “Befriedigung” in all three of these areas. A recent article in TheGuardian online edition is discussing a new book that is hinting toward a necessary rediscovery of his observations and theories. See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/17/wilhelm-reich-the-strange-prescient- sexologist-who-sought-to-set-us-free
“Befriedigung” in all three areas of life that Reich named:
When it comes to love, “Befriedigung” will be for you what will be corresponding to the sensitivity of your heart, the strength of your libido and the dedication in your empathy.
When it comes to work, it will be whatever corresponds to your wish to express yourself and your talents in your work and to perform a good job in your chosen profession.
When it comes to knowledge, it will all be about the strength of your brain‘s naturally predetermined talents, curiosity, vivacity, creative abilities and intellectual hunger for knowledge and reflection and your wish to be sharing it with others.
Sure, everybody has different energies in these three areas of life calling for “Befriedigung”. In love relationships it is known how important and deeply fullfilling it is to find the “perfect” match. “Befriedigung” is clearly not about consuming something or someone as much or long as to have had enough of it or until you need more and ever more of what might temporarily satisfy you. “Befriedigung” is the opposite of satisfaction and instant gratification through consumerism.
In German we use the term “sexuelle Befriedigung” for sexual satisfaction and Dr. Wilhelm Reich uses the term in the sense of that deep inner balance that feels weightless like a light hearted dance and may endure throughout life in a profound sense of joy that a fullfilled loving sexual relationship may give us. Maybe the ability to live in this joy is a basic human caracteristic and truly what most of us really need, and not the consumation in sex that was so important to Mick Jagger that he shouted out lout “I can get no satisfaction, and I try, and I try ….”, no matter all the drugs and the woman he had consumed at that point. An amazingly great energy on all levels of life, love and zest for life, work dedication, curiosity and libido that needed to find a match.
In German, this difficult to get “thing” is not a “Genugtuung”, a satisfaction of getting or making enough of something and needing greeding always more. The term “sexuelle Befriedigung” means we come to peace with the electromagnetic caracteristics of our own very personal body-brain functions in loving delivery and union with the person that matches and flows in our own range of libido, vibrations, rhythms, preferences: to find complete balance and inner tranquility of all your soul and physical body in its inner workings through (the act of) love. It is this inner peace in a brain state of an openly flowing ambihemispherical balance of our brain and our heart with its little brain features that may make us a truly peaceful human being (find article in Translucidmind´s bibliographical archive https://translucidmind.com/a-new-3-d-map-illuminates-the-little-brain-within-the-heart/ ).
Beware of all those preachers of sexual abstinence who might just have a very low libido or a deep history of sublimation of their sexual drive. Might they be happy and peaceful in their very own personal body the way they want as the true Guru or religiously devotee may be. If they religiously impose their abstinence as a law on all of us, they are the ones who cause the most painful psychological diseases and the most cruel violences through their intolerance. We all have the right to be happy in whatever our personal body and soul need to be balanced, with the condition that we will not harm others.
German language tells us, very generally for all of us: in delivered love, that is an expression of love true to your very nature, lies your personal peace with yourself as living human being in your relationships and with your surroundings, and it is possible to the degree of a perfect transmitter balance and brain state of loving joy. Many psycologists wrote about the importance of the sexual “Befriedigung” for general peace among humans, nobody more profound and supported by his direct medical observations as a medical practitioner than Dr. Wilhlem Reich.
Reich points at the repression and inhibition of sexual drive in many cultures and religions from childhood on, the punishment, causing embarassment and guilt through parents and churches, religious cults – which are especially detrimental during puberty. He researched in a strictly medical way on the strong electro-magnetic decharge through lovingly delivered orgasm and its effects on the entire health of the human body and brain. In his times the long-term health effects of an ambihemispherical opening of the brain through what follows brain states of ecstatic extasy had not been known yet.
Two of his books show the individual impact of “sexuelle Befriedigung” on one side, and on the other side the consequences on the mass psychology of our societies. “The Function of the Orgasm” and “ The Mass Psychology of Fascism”. More recent literature has hinted towards the fact, that unfathomably cruel fascist dictator Adolf Hitler himself had a severe psychiatric sexual disorder. It is reported by a German actress who accompanied Hitler to the movies that he showed clear signs of sexual arrousal in scenes where people were killed (see book https://www.20min.ch/story/war-hitler-ein- sexuell-verwirrter-serienkiller-414933119097)
Many have written about the link between repressed sexual drive and anxiety, neurosis, psychiatric conditions and aggression after Dr. Wilhelm Reich. An anthropological study about the connection of passionate sexuality and an all over general appeasement between humans is “Passionate Enlightenment” by Miranda Shaw about tantric fullfilment, which is including sexual liberation in ”the left handed path of tantrism”. Just imagine for a couple of seconds the electromagnetic energetic force of an uncontrolled free male sexual delivery and wonder where all that energy goes if sublimated and not lived out. Depression, aggression, drug addiction, insanity, violence, wars. In woman we find often, more directly visible, – beyond depression and lip dropping bitterness – all forms of hysteria: the nervous desesparation of a biological brain-body system not being in peaceful balance.
The prohibition of “Befriedigung” in religions, the diabolization of sexual delivery, seem to give most cruel proof of those researcher’s conclusions: the worst individual sadical violence from one human to another is executed in an insane psychopathic sexual arousal, and the worst phenomena of mass or group violence are executed by groups in which sexual prohibition and inhibiton are part of the group’s laws and identity giving status, recent examples are the massacres of mosts cruel violations of woman by Islamist terrorists.
Unnecessary to say that all those acts of violance are executed in far away from balanced brain states. The catholic´s church disaster of pedophilia, which is another way of sadic satisifaction by violating the intimacy of a young human being that is on all levels inferior and intimidated is part of the big picture. Note: the victims are always the defenseless physically, socially and often legally inferior, which says a lot about the perpatrators and their more or less hidden sadism.
Recent studies on balanced brain states show that inner peace can be achieved by life long practicing of meditation and spiritual learning, by well dosed use of psychodelics such as ayuhasca, psilocibine and LSD. They all induce electromagnetic resets of the brain that allow trance states, the famous “Flow” in ambihemispherical balance, which, at the end, it again and again all comes down to. The origine of any inner peace and “Friedfertigkeit” with your surroundings lies in the ambihemispherical balance of the brain as a sensible, emotional empathic experiencer and as an intelligent interpreter of the world, see the book The Master and his Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist (new expanded edition, 2019, Yale University Press).
The simply naturally given, most balanced, profound and liberating electro-magnetic decharge and recharge of energy to be experienced by humans, though, following the observations of Reich, we find in the deep flow states of sentimentally loving intimate “Befriedigung” (difficult to measure though but known very especially to the left hand school of Tantric practitioners since millenaries) – not in the mere physical (nowadays most often porno induced) satisfaction that Mick Jagger did not get enough of in his song despite the rumor of the thousands of woman he had and of which Islamist terrorists dream of as a heavenly reward for the killing in the name of their God.
To be ready for peace. When are we ready for peace? I am neither a psychologist, nor a political writer. To keep it very basic and simple, I have never seen people who are deeply enjoying on all levels of their life “Befriedigung”: sexually satisfied and happily delivered in love, satisfied and joyful in their work and in their sharing of knowledge, who would be easily ready for depression, aggression, anxiety, drug addiction, insanity, fights or trouble, and less, for hating or abusing anybody.
Copyright Susanne Steines, 22th of November 2023