Faith & Spirit Quote by Hans Bender

Bender’s line has the quiet daring of a psychologist smuggling a philosophical grenade into a self-help cadence: your cosmos is, at least partly, your projection. God and Devil aren’t presented as metaphysical endpoints so much as mental templates - dramatic figures the psyche uses to organize experience, distribute blame, and reassure itself that the world has a readable plot. The provocation is that you will “always find” them because the mind is a pattern-making machine; it hunts confirmation the way the body hunts oxygen.

The subtext is less kumbaya than it sounds. If benevolent gods and evil devils are creations, then moral clarity can be a comfort object. It’s easier to live in a universe of villains and saviors than in the messy middle of “countless facets,” where motives are mixed, outcomes are ambiguous, and you’re forced to own your part in the story. Bender’s “therefore” is doing heavy lifting: since the mind manufactures its symbols, the ethical task is curating what you feed it. Not in a naïve “just think positive” way, but as a disciplined attention practice - train perception toward the good because perception shapes action, and action shapes the world that returns to you as “evidence.”

Context matters: mid-20th-century psychology in German-speaking Europe was grappling with trauma, mass ideology, and the eerie ease with which people externalize darkness. Bender’s counsel reads like a preventative: if you don’t look into your own depth, you’ll keep locating demons outside yourself - and call that realism.