16/12/2025
Astazi Bert Hellinger ar fi implinit 100 de ani.
Mai jos pun un articol al sau despre a urma. Este definitoriu pentru mostenirea lui:
Following
Those who follow let others lead them. Whom do they follow?
As children we must submit. We do it largely out of love. Sometimes it may be under duress, because our need for survival leaves us no alternative. This is the outer process.
Children also rebel, often in a way that makes their parents despair. Do they have their own will and refuse to follow for this reason? Or are they entangled against their will, in a fate that wants to return order to something that requires restoration? They are on the trail of this order, to bring an excluded or forgotten family member back into the family. They do it subconsciously, and yet with a deep love, though hardly ever with success. They experience the same fate as the rejected or forgotten family members, without being able to turn it around. Their following binds them, but it does not take them further.
There are more ways of following that take our freedom away. They substitute for one’s own actions carried out on the basis of personal insight and within one’s own responsibility.
Those who became independent and self-reliant in their own way attract others who follow them, at least for a time. They allow this following, again for a while, and they release the others later on. They point to something they serve, something creative that transcends them. They leave other people and things behind, so that they, too, will look at this other power and leave the leader behind.
Are they following this creative spirit? Can anyone do this without at the same time refusing to follow? Nobody can be so presumptuous as to claim to be following spirit, as if we could do this out of our own volition and our own capacity. Yet once we have become alert and independent, we can experience ourselves being taken along into the movement of this spiritual power. We experience ourselves taken along creatively, creatively moved by it and with it. We agree to these movements, and we surrender to them without trying to follow this creative power, without attempting to imitate it or in any way contrive its meaning. In such devotion this power’s action and ours become creatively one.
What remains of the usual following? Can it even exist? Can anyone claim to be a follower? If yes, then only for a time, until we have sufficiently grown through it. Otherwise, such following becomes a dependence that gets in the way of the creatively new that arises from our obedience to the greater power that leads us on. Otherwise, the following becomes a repetition, oriented towards something from the past and already outdated, instead of towards one’s own creatively dared new. What is the result? Perhaps we also walk ahead of others and they follow us – for a while. We also leave these others behind after a while and we walk on in solitude, beyond what was achieved until this point.
Sometimes we are entrusted with an inheritance, perhaps even a spiritual inheritance, so that we step in and follow earlier generations. Here it also applies that only when we are willing to lead it beyond the hitherto achieved does it become our own after a while. While it takes the past along, it leads beyond it at the same time.
There is also the religious following, sometimes a petty form of it, impressed by fear. This heeds many laws that are often of an absurd nature. These laws bind us instead of freeing us. Can such a following connect us with this spiritual power that is constantly challenging us to take on something new, and that is different in every individual? Is it a following that also challenges us to abdicate our former beliefs? Does it take us into another breadth, into another depth, into another love?
Ultimately this happens in each of us alone, without rising above others or gathering them around us. Only on our own do we really give honour to the power that is equally at work in everything – and therefore also in everyone.
(Sunday Contemplations 2014-3)
Bert Hellinger, 16.12.1925. - 19.9.2019.
