“I believe that everyone is born with a destiny or a purpose, and the journey is to find it” (Senge et al., 2004, p. 227) and “My Life seemed to unfold according to a transcendent order” (Jaworski, 2012, p. 73), these attitudes towards human life from Joseph Jaworski transformed for me into something as running like a golden thread through my own life.

 

On the one side, because of my own age, it is challenging to ask for such a ‘purpose’ and ‘transcendent order’ to deepen the view about myself, on the other side for me it becomes more and more crucial in this time of tremendous disruptions to exchange with others – and enabled through the IT Technology – globally how they experience their ‘destiny’ and how their journey is going on. In other words: The personal destiny is a common one and the destiny of humanity depends on our personal life. So, the key topics are: Destiny or purpose, transcendent order, Education for an Inclusive Universal Society – but all symbolized and actualized in my own personal biography until today and for an (still) emerging future.

 

It was in 2014, when Professor Frank Mueller from the University of Bremen interviewed colleagues engaged in Inclusive Education in the >Federal Republic of Germany and later published the results in two volumes titled ‘Looking back forward – Pathfinders for Inclusion’ (Mueller, Blick zurueck nach vorn – WegbereiterInnen der Inklusion, Volume 1/2, 2018). The intention for describes Mueller as follows: “Within the scope of the project ‘Looking back forward’ guiding scientists of Integrative Education has been interviewed to talk about their personal experiences, to their own approach to the Field of Integration, their research key topics and their future challenges. The interviewees traced the history of integrated classes against the background of their own biographic development and outlined in their synopsis the development until the present time… and to ask for chances and connecting factors for the future.” (Mueller, 2018, bookcover).

 

The dialogue in 2014 with Mr. Mueller gave me the chance to look back on my (mostly) professional life and at the same time an emerging future began to show up and let me sense a new quality of my ‘Being’. It was especially the encounter with Jeremy Johnson and Nura Learning in 2020 from where derives the impulse on the one side to translate this view on my life into English, to share aspects with the Jean Gebserian Community and ‘other analogue disposed people’ and at the same time to deepen my personal view on what’s going to come and which part I - and we all too - do have to play. Though I ‘discovered’ the opus magnus of Jean Gebser already a few years after his death in 1973 and trying to include his ideas in my academic work at the beginning of the 1980ies it was like in the fairy tale of ‘The sleeping beauty’, it wasn’t yet time to cross the hedge of roses without losing orientation – in the fairy tale the princes even lost their lives! But now time sems has to come, where ‘winds of change’ are kissing the princess and she awakes not only to a new life – and for the cook in the kitchen it seemed to be sufficient just to continue the ‘old life’ while clapping the apprentice on his cheek so punishing him for his mistake – but for a new conscious, an integral life.

 

With this awakening consciousness I am looking myself newly on the Interview – with Otto Scharmers hints I am turning the beam of attention integral consciously on myself – and I am very curious if unexpected aspects may appear.

 

 

Back-Forward View

 

The starting point of the following thoughts, remembrances and emerging future visions was a four hours Interview of Frank Mueller. After he sent me the transcript I felt, that the content couldn’t be brought in a written design. It wasn’t only the ‘formalistic aspect’ which was unsatisfying. The questions of Professor Mueller moved something in myself and I became aware, that the tide of events took mostly the direction to the future and there were only few lines of thought going backwards to the past, though remembrances of course are playing a basic part of my and everybody’s life. I am Mr. Mueller grateful that his Interview activated to follow my Life-Way (Lebens-Weg) once more back mentally and emotionally too. The traces go back to my childhood, a few moments of my study time will pass my ‘inner eye’ and I am reflecting some of my written papers and what they mean for me still today.

 

 

Transcendent Order – a ‘Narrative of Inclusion’

 

‘Back-Forward View’ awakes a remembrance to one of my teachers of my study time – Education, Philosophy and History - at the Eberhard Karl University in Tuebingen. Professor Martin Wagenschein. Wagenschein’s Autobiography is entitled ‘Remembrances for Tomorrow’ (Erinnerungen für Morgen). In its preface we read: “I am convinced that causality isn’t sufficient to understand, what is better understood as destiny (Fuegung)” (Wagenschein, 1983, p. 9). In my own remembrances I discover traces, which seem to be connected causally but which closely touch the sphere of destiny. Therefore, Joseph Jaworski resonates deeply in me: “…my life seemed to unfold according to a transcendent order.” And reflecting ‘Inclusion’ is in my case connected with my Vita and therefore much mor then a question of Institutions, Laws, Teaching and Didactics. And there is a mood, that ‘Inclusion’ is also a kind of ‘Watermark’ of our time indicating the phenomena of ‘Integrality’ which is ‘shining through’.

 

At this point the interview of Frank Mueller started with the first ‘official’ question: ‘What brought you to ‘Integrative Education’ (Integrative Paedagogik), how is your biographical access?’

 

I think, for people engaged with disadvantaged groups biographical elements are interwoven in the personal and professional path of life.

 

Zwiefalten: Lunatic Asylum of the Country Baden-Wuerttemberg

 

 

Zwiefalten

Benedictine Abbey and Lunatic Asylum since 1812

I was born 1940 in the city of Balingen in Baden-Wuerttemberg. In 1943 my mother moved with my two-year elder brother and me – my father was as officer in the war – from Balingen to Zwiefalten on the Swabian Alb, the place, where the parents of my mother lived.

 

Looking back to this early childhood, pictures come up of the Lunatic Asylum Zwiefalten. Big walls surrounded the former Benedictine Abbey – founded in 1089 -, interrupted by break-through portal but closed with strong iron grid.

 

Seeing with the eyes of a six-year-old child, just started as a first grader, two impressions are deeply engraved in my soul: On the one side the Abbey with its gorgeous towers and inside the Baroque Grandeur with a huge crucified Christ at the entrance. On the other side I saw people walking behind iron grids in dark, poor clothes, looking behind metal-grilled windows or uttering strange sounds, which I couldn’t integrate in my life as a child. – On a small farm, directly beside the Abbey, a few people of the Psychiatry have been working during day time. I remember there a small grown and infantile looking man, who always turned agile a short wooden stick with a cord between thumb and forefinger and his face seemed to signalize that it was a pleasure for him to do this. From time to time he moved abruptly to a crouch and quickly up again. We first grader, for whom the Abbey with its wide grassland and the neighborhoods have been a wonderful playground, we had fun to talk to him and ask him to speak ‘his Prayer’. Then he began: ‘Fatherrrr, Motherrrr and Brotherrrrs and Sisterrrrs…Amen…Rrrr’.

Not far from Zwiefalten the small castle Grafeneck – built in 1560 - is situated.

 

Grafeneck (Foto from the Internet)

 

It became the first Nazi-Killing Centre for handicapped people in 1939. In 1940 – the year of my Birth – about 10.000 mostly mentally handicapped persons from the near Home of Mariaberg have been gassed. Has there been an ‘emotional and mental atmosphere’ in which I was born into ‘listening decidedly and unverbalized things’, the ‘darkness’ of them sensed in my life as a child?

 

Mariaberg (Foto from the Internet)

 

 

Village fool

 

1947 we moved to the small village Heselwangen near Balingen in my grandfather’s house. In that village live ‘Karle’ (Charles). We primary school boys – being taught in a two classes primary school: Grades 1 to 4 in one room and grades 5 to 8 in the second one – had our fun with him. We enjoyed to see the more than ten years elder young man who never went to school man weeping when we frightened him while saying ‘Karle, you will be brought to Mariaberg!’ While weeping he was also strongly jumping at the bit. Mariaberg – though the NS Regime was gone – meant for him not only to be taken from his parents and his home, but supposedly the name ‘Mariaberg’ was the reason of a deep anxiety being murdered.

 

"Still today I feel this darkness ‘present in myself’. Is here grounded my craving not to exclude people or even kill them but to experience oneself always as a part of the whole, belonging and that means to meet all ‘with full respect and love’? Later I found the book ‘If This Is a Man’ by Primo Levi. There he describes his time in the concentration camp Auschwitz during the second world war. The task assigned to one of the physicians in Auschwitz, Doctor Pannwitz, was to select the Jews who were still able to work from the ones who were not in order to kill them.

 

According to Levi, Pannwitz did not look at the detainees as fellow humans but as animals, as if observing fish in their aquarium, allowing to be annihilated and killed at any time. It might be allowed to ask, in how fare this ‘Pannwitz Stare’ – title of a movie from 1991 – hasn’t yet gone."’"

 

 

Exclusion and Helplessness

 

Once I experienced a deep kind of ‘exclusion and helplessness’. Still, I see the situation clearly before my face. I was about nine years old, when I was playing on a free place in the village – villages have so many special and small places – with other children and youth. On the place there was wood of about three meters stacked stocking and we enjoyed to climb up from different sides. It happened that single pieces moved and a smaller boy younger than I somehow hurt himself. Quickly I was found as a scapegoat though I didn’t recognize myself not at all as a causer because we have been all involved. Two elder boys put my arms so I couldn’t escape or defend and the smaller boy could strike me. Perhaps it was less the pain hurting me but to be helplessly at the boy’s mercy and the injustice attack. All became worth when I was running home that my mother didn’t have the courage to confront herself with the situation and to take the group to task. Only quite many years later I realized that the Nazi-past of my mother and father – my mother was a leader of the ‘Bund deutscher Mädchen (BDM)’ and my father was, as already mentioned, Officer in the war and as teacher also a hj guide of the ‘Hitlerjugend (HJ)’ – made them being gaged in a village which was before the Nazi-Regime mostly social democratic and partly communistic oriented. Though somehow a ‘son of the village’ my father’s status of denazification made the standing of our family very difficult. The silence of my mother, her helpless striving to convince me ‘don’t take it too serious’ doubled my defencelessness. Leftover is a serene disposition of my soul, until today. In special situations – similar to those when I later encountered people called as ‘severely disabled’ – I am reminded to those moments when I faced such a superiority from outside

 

 

Failing

 

As I mentioned I went for three years to a school with only two classes, each including four age groups. At that time to enter the High School (Gymnasium) one had to pass an examination. The teacher who had to care for the age group for primary class students didn’t or couldn’t care for me and the need I had to pass the exam. The result was: I failed in my first attempt. I had to stay for one more year in the upper class. I still hear the sneers and I feel the smirk eyes. It was a hard time.

 

The years on the countryside included on the one side precious experiences. I learned much about clouds and the sky and the meaning them. I got acquainted with the different birds and their singing. The seasons from spring to winter taught me so much about growing, blooming, harvesting and the dying of nature. I felt – and later dis-covered – myself as part of a mysterious whole, of ‘something holy’. At the same time segregating ways of living and unspoken ressentiments felt narrowing and loading. Still today I feel rooted in a primordial experiencing of nature and as well I still yearn for ways, how to transform unreflect partly strongly ritualized living together through conscious awakening dialogues.

 

"At a very later date - around 2000 – the ‘Watermark ’ somehow ‘appeared’ - like a photo in the process of being developed and slowly is showing up -, and since than the makes my life translucent for such a WAY of LIVING. At the same time following since 1970th Jean Gebsers research about the ‘Integral Consciousness’ opened mind, heart and will for superseding my mental-rational standing in this world to a new attitude out of and towards ‘The Ever-Present Origin’.

Now - looking back to my life and to an emerging future – there are coming moments where the ‘traces’ become more obvious which guided me ‘since a long time’. To look to them, point to them and how they grounded in a transformational energy, to reveal such context is my deep wish on the way ‘awaking myself and the world’".

 

 

Volksschullehrer

 

After High School I started in 1960 a two-year teacher training course in the city of Stuttgart. At that time already after two years we got the admission to teach in the ‘Volksschule’. I chose a school in the small village of Endingen (Württemberg). I was responsible for the first two grades being educated in one room. To the first grade belonged 12 and to the second 9 students.

They had different curricula but the main experiences during the school time we shared together. Being in that school let me feel very happy. Every morning these young children came – mostly – smiling and with full of energy and shining eyes somehow ‘symbolizing’ or ‘reflecting’ the LIGHT of the ‘Ever-Present Origin’.

In spite of two wonderful years of practical teaching I felt pressed to learn more about education and philosophy and to widen my knowledge. From 1964 until 1971 I studied the Eberhard-Karl University in Tübingen Education, Philosophy and History. My teachers in Education have been Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, also Willi Meyer and Friedrich Kümmel. In Philosophy Otto Friedrich Bollnow too and especially Walter Schulz, Johannes Schwartländer und Richard Schaeffler.

Just in the first two years happened a self-inflicted experience which burdened myself for a long time strongly. Because I had to give up my civil servant status as teacher when I started to study, I asked at the University for a scholarship which was allowed. But after the first term of support, I had to make an oral exam which should confirm my ‘earnest’ studies. I asked the assistant of Professor Bollnow , Dr. Braeuer, for this exam and got a date where the Professor also was present. The topics were about ‘philosophical anthropology’ which I personally liked very much. But I noticed during this oral test about the difference between ‘time’ (Zeit) and ‘temporality’ (Zeitlichkeit) and ‘space’ (Raum) and ‘spatiality’ (Raeumlichkeit) – these themes I still remember – that I wasn’t prepared enough or in other words, I experienced a lack of consciousness about the levels of daily thinking and reflecting in a philosophical way. The result was: I failed.

“Thinking back to these phenomena I become aware that already so early there was ‘something in myself’ – time and space – which wanted to be questioned, but my ‘sleepy consciousness’ couldn’t yet ‘become aware’ of such a latency!”

 

This was a very hard moment in my life. I still feel with all my body the sensations flowing through myself. I was disappointed, because the scholarship was stopped. But much more I felt deeply ashamed adverse my teachers.

There are reasons, why this happened. Firstly: The beginning of my studies after having taught for two years in a primary school was in so fare quite hard and somehow boring because of my studies in Philosophy and History I had – at that time – to present the so-called advanced Latin proficiency exam (Großes Latinum). My Highschool was more natural scientific and modern languages (French and English) oriented, so I never had learned Latin. Now I had to catch up on this ability in a very short time, exactly in two years. So, every day I was drilling hours and hours Latin. At the end to translate Livius was quite joyful.

Secondly: It is said that student’s life is tempting. I was tempted through the possibility to get a job in the Student Travel Agency run by the Student Committee. The task was to arrange cheap journeys in Europe during the semester break and to guide the students on them. My participation was free of charge. For four terms I did this and all my free time was focused on these activities. A really overstrained time. And thirdly it took time to recognize what it needed to dig for the treasures hidden in myself to be revealed.

Ashamed but not resigned I continued to study eagerly what Professor Bollnow was teaching. I was courageously to give a presentation in one of his seminars about ‘Temporality and Spatiality’ with the title: ‘Making a leeway – The Time-Loop’ (Das Nachholen des Versaeumten – Die Zeit-Schleife).

After the presentation was finished, Professor Bollnow asked me to stay for a few minutes. He spoke to me, saying that he would like to support me in my studies (from now on). This deep, undeserved trust gave me back the ‘faith in myself’ and I could find step by step to myself and I could ladle courage and power which continues until today. Later I found a connection to Professor Bollnow – intensified through our encounter in Japan – which I want to characterize as ‘paternal’.

 

‘Nature’ as ‘Culture’

 

During my studies at the Eberhard-Karl University in Tuebingen I was especially influenced by Max Scheler and Helmut Plessner – both acting as scientists also at this University – beside Arnold Gehlen. With their ‘cosmological view’ named as fathers of the ‘philosophical anthropology’. Plessners ‘eccentric positionality’ and Gehlens interpretation of man as a ‘Being with shortcomings’ (Maengelwesen) helped me to understand why the human being has to create a culture, an artificial or second nature to find its own positionality and to compensate what he lacks. Conclusion: From ‘nature’ man is a ‘cultural being’.

 

Anthropology

 

Bollnow himself developed a ‘anthropological questioning’ (anthropologische Fragestellungen) in the context of Education and called it ‘Anthropological Approach in Education’ (Anthropologische Betrachtunsgweisen der Paedagogik) or ‘Education from an Anthropological View’ (Paedagogik in anthropologischer Sicht).

An important role got in the 1950th philosophers like Jean Paul Sartres, Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who can be subsumed under the term ‘Existentialism’. I came in touch with them in my first teacher training epoch (1960-1962) when I read Bollnows book ‘Existence philosophy and Education’ (Existenzphilosophie und Paedagogik). I feel, from reading it came later the impulse to study in Tuebingen and to get in closer contact to Bollnow.

 

“Through these sketch-like remarks about a time between 1964 and 1971, the years I studied in Tuebingen, runs like a common thread what I later ‘discovered’ in Joseph Jaworskis hints: ‘Everybody is born with a destiny and the journey is to find it’ and to lean on David Bohm ‘…my life unfolds according to a transcendent order.
But my journey in those years resembled more a walk-through deep fog or a cruise on a heavy sea without Lighthouses and a clear direction.

From the bird-eye view today I become aware of this order which unfolded at that time and still reveals new traces, every day.
It was the crisis of a relationship with my classmate since High school days combined with those aspects of phenomena in human life as the anthropological questioning underlined which ‘guided’ me in the field of anthropological questioning in medicine and here to the practical medical work and scientific research of Viktor von Weizsaecker.”

 

Introduction of the Subject

 

I started a Doctor Thesis Project as a monography about the lifework of the medical professor Viktor von Weizsaecker. The title was: ‘The pathosophical thinking of Viktor von Weizsaecker. The contribution of the medical anthropology to an anthropological based Education’ (Das pathosophische Denken Viktor von Weizsaeckers. Ein Beitrag der medizinischen Anthropologie zu einer anthropologisch fundierten Paedagogik).

 

Viktor von Weizsaecker established with what he called ‘Introduction of the Subject into Medicine’ a new ‘gate-way’ to what we call the essence of the (ill) human being. Illness, being ill and becoming ill are ‘Organa’ to approach the human being and to dis-cover aspects until now not perceived: “Each illness is moral, each physiology theological, each anatomy mythical” but also “each guilt is mechanical, each fear chemical, each hate and each love energetic” (Dreher, 1974, p. 14). These views relating human and natural scientific fields let me sit up and take notice something new. A new Anthropology became apparent, a genetic-dynamic general view of man, including contemporaries and environment.

 

I must confess that for me as a person not taught and experienced in medical profession it was a very hard work to enter the world of psychosomatic medicine. I got much new knowledge, but a deeper re-cognition I found not until I entered the field of ‘Heil-Paedagogik’ (Special Education). What this study time accumulated have become ‘building blocks’ out of and for this ‘transcendent order’ which Jaworski mentions.

 

Gestalt-Circle (Der Gestaltkreis)

 

Weizsaeckers treatise ‘Gestalt-Circle’ influenced my way of thinking and gave me late in the 1980th and 1990th system theoretical impulse. The topic of the relationship to our body as ‘corporeity of our existence’, the body which’ we live in and inhabit’ as Merleau-Ponty put it and the Physicians Herbert Pluegge and Alfred Nitschke opened a new world of seeing humans. Those medical experts – today may be not known anymore – impressed me strongly.

 

Incarnate (Leibhaftig)

 

What I took from the work of those Physicians I condensed in the last phrase of my doctor-thesis: If Education doesn’t want to be behind time – as so often -, then it has to take the chance which offers the experience of the Logos-Incarnation in man and the spiritualization of its corporeity. Then Education meets the ‘incarnated man’ (leibhaftige Mensch). But it must be a transformed or just now transforming education (Dreher, 1974, p. 228). – ‘Incarnated’ (leibhaftig) could be a term also for today to underline the sensual perception of the other person. But it could also refer to this ambiguous essence of the body as Merleau-Ponty described as ‘inhabiting’. I have a body and I am my body. We live not only ‘in’ but also ‘à travers’, somehow through or diaphanous to the body. Looking back to this time of approaching such ‘strange’ views I notice that here are the roots that I could later near Aron B. Bodenheimer when Bollnow introduced him to me. Bodenheimers position, elaborated in his work (Elements of Relationship’ (Elemente der Beziehung), accompanies me still today.

 

“At this point it becomes clearer to me today, that Viktor von Weizsaecker, Merlau-Ponty, Bodenheimer ’prepared organs’ in myself which enables to overtake the task and chance today what it could mean ‘Seeing through the World’ as Jeremy Johnson express it.”
But frankly speaking when I came to an end of my Dissertation Project it was difficult to bridge to questions of Education practically and theoretically. So, I took an anchor in Georg Pichts thoughts – surely it was too shortcut, but for me the moment to set a point on my quite long studies and to take off for a new epoch in my life: Japan.”

 

Education as Therapy

 

Georg Pichts paper about ‘Education as Therapy for Society’ (Erziehung als Therapie der Gesellschaft’ served me to build a small ‘bridge between Medicine and Education’. Quoting a phrase: “To speak about humanity is only possible, where a partnership between strong- and week man, healthy and ill, just and unjust, believers and not believers realize, that without the other it’s impossible to exist, where each assigns dignity to the other and out of this freedom for all can grow up.” (Dreher, 1974, p. 227).

To understand such thoughts came later, when my ‘Path’ led me into the ‘Fields of Heilpaedagogik’ confronting me with the question about strong and weak. A question which follows me until today, but now – similar to Klaus Doerner – but the Fields widened to Economy, Society and Culture in general. In the beginning of the 1970th I only could sense that something old is breaking down and something New is going to emerge. All this was like a preparation of the ‘Project Inclusion’.

 

Education for mentally and severely handicapped persons (Geistig­behinderten­paedagogik)

 

What brought me to Cologne? Towards the end of my studies, I seized the suggestion of my doctor farther Bollnow to stay for some time in Japan. His close connection to this country opened the chance to follow my personal interest in Zen-Buddhism. From 1971-1975 I was teaching as a lecturer in the field of language training and German culture at the Reitaku University in Kashiwa.
It was in 1974 that I met a group of teachers of special education on an excursion to Japan. Coincidentally one of my former fellow students, Theodor Hofmann, now already advanced to a Professor of Special Education for mentally impaired in Reutlingen guided this group. How I came about to take note of this upcoming visit during a visit of myself in the Ashide-Gakkuen – a famous, 1970 from professor Miki established school and sheltered workshop for mentally retarded -, in January 1974 would be another ‘numinos particle’ of the ‘transcendent order’ shaping my life.

 

At that time Hofmann was offered a chair at the Paedagogische Hochschule Rheinland, Department Heilpaedagogik, in Cologne. (This Paedagogische Hochschule Rheinaland was 1980 incorporated as Heilpaedagogische-Faculty into the Albertus Magnus University of Cologne) Just starting to form a team for this new work and knowing me from our joint study years he asked me if I would be interested to share his new task as an Assistant (Akademischer Rat). Consequence: At the beginning of the summer term 1975 I found myself in front of a group of about 80 students. Most of the students have been already teachers for different school types, but now they had changed to schools for mentally retarded and they wanted a post-qualification in special education.