Lupelius - The School for Gods

What we perceive as unexpected always needs extensive preparation. There is nothing that aman could possibly encounter, no event that could possibly happen to him without firsthaving, knowingly or unknowingly, journeyed through his being or psychology. The world isconnected to our emotions, passions and thoughts. They are the drive belt between the innerand outer world. By managing our emotions and thoughts, along with everything that wefeel and experience in a specific moment, that is by mastering our states, we can take over thehelm of our existence and set the direction of our destiny. This is where the Roman concept offortune and of homo faber had its roots, in contrast to the Greek and Middle Eastern visionwhich represents Fortune as a blindfolded goddess distributing events at random anddirecting them according to her whim.It is commonly believed that external events condition our attitudes and determine ourmoods. Something happens, we meet someone or receive some news, and we believe that thepsychological state we experience ‐ irritation, anxiety or surprise ‐ is a result or a consequenceof that event, meeting or news. In the same way as, until the invention of photography, it wasimpossible to determine the exact sequence of the hooves of a galloping horse as thesemovements were faster than the eye could follow, so thoughts, emotions, perceptions andfeelings travel like electronic flashes through the mysterious forest of our neurons at speedsclose to that of light, making it seem impossible to establish the exact temporal sequence inrelation to external events. Something happens and we believe the psychological state we feelto be the result of that event. So we justify our state of being by reference to that externalevent while in fact exactly the opposite has taken place. In reality, it is our states of beingwhich announce and determine the external events of our lives. Our negative emotions intime metamorphose into the adversity of which we then complain. To encounter a certainkind of event, be it good or bad, I first have to create the conditions within myself which willcreate such an event.Man’s biggest illusion is to believe he can change external conditions and change the world.We can only change ourselves, work on our own attitudes, modify our reactions and notexpress the negative emotions we feel.The universe is perfect the way it is. The only one who must change is you!We are convinced that a man’s energy and good will count for very little compared to theevents that happen to him in life, which appear to be largely fortuitous and inevitable. Thetorrent of events that continuously submerge us is too varied and confused to be foreseeableand much too powerful for us to imagine that we might go so far as to direct it.According to Lupelius we need to ‘see’ that our own self always lurks behind events andstates. No solution is possible unless we first change ourselves.He who is able intentionally to achieve the slightest elevation in the level of being can movemountains and projects himself as a giant in the external world. By acting on our inner states, onthe quality of our thoughts, on the way we feel and on negative emotions ‐ starving some andnourishing others ‐ we will not only change our attitudes and consequently also ourrelationship with the events which confront us in the external world, that is to say how we26