Through a childhood characterised by mystical experiences under the most difficult life circumstances, the Master "unrecognised" accompanies His disciple's spiritual search to India, who takes refuge in meditation and retreat, until the brightly radiating, transcendental spiritual revelations of the Heart-Master, as the Divine Person, the Maha Purusha, the promised God-Man, in the Old University of Freiburg im Breisgau. The search ends from one moment to the next and the disciple's life takes an unexpected turn and undergoes a profound transformation. In the eternal relationship between Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da and His devotee, the path of Avatar Adi Da's 7th stage of Perfect Realisation is revealed step by step. After many years of waiting and countless visions, the author finally reaches the longed-for island of Naitauba. All his expectations and ideas about the ashram of a Maha Siddha and the island community are disappointed on all levels. He is confronted with an insider cult of the first generation of devotees. The wisdom teaching of the Heart Master has fallen prey to a revision and a "monarchist" insider cult, behind which the first generation of disciples hides with high priestly words and empty proclamations. Despite this difficult and unexpected circumstance, the disciple receives the Transcendental Spiritual Revelations and teachings of his Heart-Master. The Transcendental Spiritual Reality emerges as the source of all beings and things in the face of the greatest possible failure, confrontation with the fatal insider cult of a spiritual community, exile and banishment.
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momo pete
The Wound
of
Love
In the Spiritual Fire
of the
Ruchira Buddha Adi Da
Translated from German by Vidya Marina Bolz
Chapter 6-11 translated by Momo Pete with support of artificial intelligence.
The book
A captivating spiritual autobiography in the blazing fire of the ancient and mysterious relationship between a true Spiritual Master, the Ruchira Buddha, Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da, and His devotee on this side and beyond the manifest world of appearances.
Through a childhood marked by mystical experience under the most difficult circumstances of life, the Master "unrecognised" accompanies the spiritual search of His disciple in India, who takes refuge in meditation and retreat, up to the luminous, Transcendental Spiritual Revelations of the Heart-Master as the Divine Person, the Maha Purusha, the promised God-Man, in the Old University of Freiburg at Germany. The search ends completely unexpectedly and the student's life undergoes an unexpected turn and transformation.
In the eternal relationship between Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da and His devotee, the path of the seventh stage of life – the Perfect Realization – of Avatar Adi Da is revealed step by step. The path of the heart becomes tangible and visible in the manifestation of Reality Itself in everyday, simple life. The Dharma of the Heart-Master and His Wisdom Teachings proved themselves over almost sixty years on all levels of existence and the inevitable crises of a true spiritual life.
The author
Momo Pete lived in the Fiji Islands from 2017 to the end of 2022, which fascinated him since he was a child. For him, books and book writing have always been a search for truth, for perfect happiness. To sum up happiness and the revealed reality in words or, in other words, to reveal them with words, to make them visible, understandable and tangible is a great concern of his heart and at the same time an almost infinite challenge, but nonetheless the “Daimon” of his life.
For my daughter
When Reality kisses you
Don't shy away from her.
Allow the eddies of her play
To draw circles within
And feel – you are the Heart.
Contents
Introduction
Prologue
Aham Da Asmi
Chapter 1
The Search for God – Or The Fear To be Human
Eat up or throw up
What’s your name, what’s your country?
My ‘Skirt’ Time
Princess Julia
Death and the two spoonfuls of earth
Sundance
CHAPTER 2
Entering the Wisdom Teaching
Doubt and Initiation
Avatar Adi Da visits Europe
Bhakti–Fever
Chapter 3
Naitauba – The Island of Bliss
The first journey to Naitauba
Vedanta Temple – Hollywood
CHAPTER 4
The business world – Scene one
The business world – Scene two
Three suns and five rainbows
Death is far from the end of things
The illusion of death
Second journey to the Mountain of Attention
Chapter 5
Love-Ananda Mahal Hawaii
Goodbye
The second journey to Naitauba
Master and Devotee
Black Shadows
Business World – Scene three
Love story
Chapter 6
Mahasamadhi – The Death of Avatar Adi Da
The third journey to Naitauba
Atma Nadi Shakti Loka – The Brightness
Struwwelpeter
Chapter 7
The Call – Dream of incarnation and the prophecy
The Chocolate Way
The fourth journey to Naitauba
Chapter 8
Moving to Fiji
The Fall
My House
Chapter 9
Indigo Swan – The bay
Indigo Swan – The house of stone
The Rose garden
The Veranda
Chapter 10
The interrogation
Padavara Loka and Atma Nadi Shakti Loka
The flying sword
The Ruchira Buddha
The journey into exile
Chapter 11
Taveuni – Falling out of life
Suva – A great love
The banishment
Apeiri Katharsi
Epilogue
The Promised God-Man
Appendix
A short History of the island of Naitauba
Glossary
Sources
Booklist
Imprint
Introduction
The first edition of this book went to press on 27th November 2008 under the German title "And The Truth Stands Up!", under my author name "Karl Faller". It was the morning when Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da left His body. The present expanded edition will be continued on that very day with the 6th chapter, until the year 2023. The new publication bears the changed book title "The Wound of Love" and will be published under my Fijian author name "Momo Pete". The English translation was published in 2013 with the book title: “And The Heart Is Mine”.
There was no reason for me to continue my autobiographical writing in this form after the death of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da. The extended chapters shed light on why I felt compelled to continue my writing in 2023. My biographical writing is primarily intended to give the interested public and the succeeding generation of devotees of Avatar Adi Da, from an unusual, and admittedly, subjective and limited point of view, insight into the Realization process of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da's Wisdom Teaching, and to show developments in His Sangha (Community) after the Heart-Master's death. It is a call not to fall into certain childish or even adolescent errors and to use the sound mind of the heart, a call to humility for all those who have received the Wisdom Teaching of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da directly or indirectly. My writing testifies to, and is a confession for later generations, of the attempt to establish and structure the monumental Blessing Work of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da by His first devotees during the years 2017 to 2022 on the South Sea island of Naitauba and in the worldwide community of Adidam. My observations during my stay of almost four years in the Ashram of Avatar Adi Da Samraj on Naitauba lead me to only one conclusion, that this effort to establish the Dharma in the sense of the Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da has on many, if not on all levels, come to a dead end, if not even failed for the time being. It is obvious to me that the next generation must take a different path if the Wisdom Teaching of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da is indeed to one day blossom in all its diversity, be understood, and be made truly accessible to all. The path of the first generation of devotees now propagated in 2023 is almost word-for-word the same as Avatar Adi Da's essay "Do Not Enact The Cult of False Adidam" published in His book "Recognition Of Me Is Liberation".
My writing is intended to demonstrate that the Sacred Dharma of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da and the Proclamation of His Divine Avataric Self-Emergence as the Maha Purusha, the Divine Person, the Conscious Light, were never intended to establish an insider cult or a childish, monarchistic structure of any kind, thereby turning His Work, the Heart-Master Himself, or segments of the community in leadership into absurd cult figures.
These insights are embedded in the Realization process of the seventh stage of life of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da and the Guru Yoga–the ancient relationship between a Master and His disciple. In doing so, a radical insight is given into the Transcendental Spiritual Process, the Sadhana, that a devotee undergoes in relationship with a true Maha-Siddha Master. Traditionally, these stories, which deal with the life and relationship of the disciple with his or her master, are portrayed very drastically, almost brutally, at the beginning of their "hero's journey". However, at the end of these legends and myths, which we encounter frequently in Hinduism or also in Tibetan Buddhism, there is usually a high level of realization or enlightenment–the coming to rest of the spiritual drama, the difficult Tapas, which are supposed to purify the Karma. The permanent failure of the supposed heros, during his or her trials by fire in the relationship with their masters, is often "esoterically-spiritually" transfigured, trimmed down for the public, so that no one is immediately put off or runs away in shock if true interest is aroused. This book offers a different revelation and expanded insights into the real experience of these inevitable crises that every genuine spiritual path continually brings with it. All Masters of genuine spiritual paths are also permanently exposed to this process, of a seemingly "crisis-ridden" life, in their function as Guru or Gurumai, when they act among their disciples or in secular and conditional world. Even realization at the highest level does not contradict the heroic and unconventional teaching methods of spiritual Masters. True realization does not take place on a Yoga mat or in the meditation hall; at best, these places serve as preparation.
In the Transcendental Spiritual Process in the Way of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da, the Master unconditionally serves His disciples and ALWAYS demands everything from His disciples, really EVERYTHING! It is a constant and eternal purgatory, without a so-called "happy ending", even in the face of the undeniable and irreversible Love-Bliss, the gift of the innate perception of the absolute and perfect Reality Itself.
The serious difference from other spiritual paths is that in the path of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da Samraj, the devotee experiences Realization at the beginning, the tacit and intuitive sense that he or she is always already free and always already happy. In this first perception of the Divine Self-Revelation of Avatar Adi Da, as the Truth Itself, the Path begins, in which layer upon layer of egoic patterns–by Grace alone–fall away, are understood, and this perception expands, establishes itself and "radiates" more and more into the lives of the devotees, until they themselves are only, as the revelation of the absolute Reality Itself, but paradoxically still at the side and feet of the Maha Siddha, the Heart-Master, surrendering themselves in eternal service. In this progressive realization process, in the ancient Guru Shishya Yoga, with the Heart-Master, the whole misery of egoic delusion, in all its tragedy, drama and ignorance, comes to light, is experienced, suffered, truly understood, and surrendered to the Conscious Light. We transcend not only our own egoic limitations, but also the egoic patterns of our apparent counterpart, for we also ultimately bear responsible compassion for this "other". The higher the intensity of the Conscious Light, the darker the shadows that dissolve in surrender to the Heart-Master. Only when the entire cosmic mandala, in this graceful process of translation into the Divine Spherical Self-Domain, outshines, or rather is radiated, does this path of "Not-Knowing Sadhana" end.
May my writing give you inspiration, intrepidity and more understanding into a real spiritual process with a true spiritual Master.
OM MA DA
Freiburg, December 2023
Prologue
Aham Da Asmi
“Aham Da Asmi – Beloved, I Am Da.” Avatar Adi Da
In 1994, on November 22, something happened in my life that went far beyond any kind of expectation that my life so far had presented me with. Two weeks before this date I was walking the streets of Freiburg, a city in the South of Germany, just doing some errands. I had recently started training as a psychotherapist, finally finding some peace in my desperate and extreme search for the Truth and with the experiences of my early childhood. This constant sense of being driven, the compulsive urge to want the world to be different than it was, the desire to run away from the challenges of daily life–all of this seemed to have exhausted itself. Deeply sobered and deflated I was staring blankly at the Bertoldsbrunnen, the central fountain of the university city of Freiburg. In one corner near the cobbled square that surrounded the fountain there was an electrical box that, as always, was covered with a myriad of event posters and announcements of all kinds, colors and sizes. On one of those posters I read the name Adi Da, introducing a talk about the Wisdom Teachings of the Master. Topic: Death and Dying. A voice inside me said: “Don’t be intolerant, a spiritual Master, you are going to check this out.” I read the name Adi Da again and again. Adi Da. Adi Da. His name just wouldn’t leave me during the remaining days leading up to the event. The evening of 22th November I found myself in a lecture hall of the old university. The room was filled with the thirty to forty people in the audience. At the very front was a large image of Avatar Adi Da. There was a smell of incense and flowers decorated the table on which his picture was standing.
The lecture started and I listened to the words of the speaker, his readings from the scriptures and instructions of the Master. What was conveyed in this lecture was more than astounding. The words were charged with so much power. The longer I listened the more I was overwhelmed with an attraction and a deep feeling of Truth and grandness which exceeded everything I had ever experienced in my life, in my endless search. Then doubts began to encroach. What I was hearing couldn't possibly be true. This couldn’t be the place where the deepest Truth was revealed about our existence out of Nothingness. Not here in this very simple and ordinary little German town, so totally without any extravagance or adventure, far away from any holy place and, what’s more, without the actual presence of the Master himself. But the power of the words of Avatar Adi Da resounded everywhere in my entire being as Truth and spread out to such an extent that it felt like the entire world existed in it. My mind couldn’t grab hold of it any more. It was so much bigger.
The lecture was coming to an end. Many of those present were very churned up inside. Some were angry, arguing heatedly, in the mood to fight. Others were silent and thoughtful. I just sat there not comprehending anything any more. As a conclusion there was a video presentation in which Avatar Adi Da was giving Darshan. He was sitting in a chair, as he usually does, and the people present were gazing at him silently. The room was completely darkened, his image appeared on the screen. At this moment my perception of space and time disappeared. My body felt like a thunder went through it. Everything around me began to vibrate in a kind of fire. My heart shattered and was lost. A feeling of infinite and eternal love rushed into my body from above, yes, into my entire life, like a waterfall that had only been waiting for this moment and this opportunity.
In front of me sat God incarnate, the Truth, the eternal, limitless unconditional Love that I had been looking for incessantly and desperately in life after life. The prophesied figure of the God-man. My heart just knew it. Could it be? Here in Freiburg? Now? It was unearthly! That which has no name sat in front of me in human form and shape. At that moment I fell into this infinite love, I couldn’t grab hold of myself any more, I couldn’t think. It was as if lightening flashes of love were chasing through my body and each lightening flash confirmed that the Truth, the Reality as such had assumed a human form in front of my eyes. The event came to an end. Without words and completely churned up inside I bought a brochure in German language, which contained translated excerpts of the Dawn Horse Testament. I immediately began to read it while slowly leaving the room. ‘Beloved, I Am Da.’ I had to read it again and again. It was just not comprehensible. Outside, it had begun to rain. The city lights reflected off the wet cobblestone, everything shone and glittered a thousand times. My friend Julia was coming towards me on the sidewalk. I still couldn’t stop reading. She looked at me: ‘Your eyes look like fireballs! What happened?’ I could hardly speak: ‘It’s just too incredible! Too overwhelming! I can’t talk about it right now!’
Over the next days and weeks I dreamt of Avatar Adi Da every night. Upon waking I felt His presence around me all the time. The whole room was full of His presence. He was with me now, literally, at all times. Every night I now wandered with him through different spaces and different times. In the dream Avatar Adi Da appeared younger. He laughed, continuously edged me on to go further. He asked questions and told me so many things about the peculiarity of these dream places. Very often these places were just mere stones and ruins, broken down temples, stone deserts, rocks, mountains, places that clearly have had a life in the past, or perhaps in the future?
This way of being with Avatar Adi Da was very exhausting for me. After about two weeks I knew that I shall never be without Him again, not even for one second of my life, and that I shall never forget His name again. He only laughed and made friendly jokes about me, who gave so much importance to all of this. I kept going on as usual with my work in the health food store, but I continued thinking of Him at all times, about the Power, the overwhelming Love, the Truth that He exudes and that He represents with utter perfection. My life was totally taken by His presence. One day I was working alone in the store when the shelves began to gradually emanate a radiant light and there was a loud voice that suddenly manifested itself in the space out of nothing: ‘ How much longer do you actually want to spend your time like this?’ That was just too much. I was shaken to the bone, totally shocked and afraid. Now I saw with certainty that this encounter with Avatar Adi Da would ruin my entire life and all my cherished experiences. It was just too dangerous. I didn’t want to dream any more, or to feel, or to read any more. I panicked and shoved Avatar Adi Da away. Quiet. Distance.
One month later, in January, I traveled to Munich. The next stage of my education, Hakomi, a body- oriented psychotherapy, was on the schedule. In the group room of the seminar house my colleagues were already gathered. The head of the department had partially emptied her library and her books were piled up in stacks in the room. I walked down the two stairs into the room, stumbled on the last step and fell head first into the middle of the room and right into the stacks of the books. I lay there flat on my belly, under me the books, my face on the floor. Perplexed by the sudden fall I slowly got up. Under my chest was a book with young Avatar Adi Da on the cover. It was His autobiography ‘The Knee Of Listening’. I saw his picture and in that same instant I gave up. My resistance was broken.
I understood and accepted His gift. I wanted to be His devotee. I wanted to be with Him, never again be without Him. The search had lasted too long, life after life, one drama piled on top of the other, the truth nowhere to be found, the happiness never perfect, always a remnant of dissatisfaction hidden in a secret corner of the heart. Which then snowballed into new heroics and new adventures and into more despair and further searching. I have never actively searched for Avatar Adi Da. I had always hoped for Him, but never really expected to find Him. His appearance and His Revelation have not the slightest connection with space and time. Also, even against the background of the deepest spiritual and mystical experiences, He has nothing in common with our way of seeing the world. His Loka and His Revelation of the Reality Itself go far beyond any of that. Happiness had finally found me, and everything that I had experienced and lived before was reduced to absurdity.
Chapter 1
The Search for God – Or The Fear To be Human
“There is no God on Shakespeare’s stage, but only human complications…” Avatar Adi Da
The way our society looks at the meaning of life, as the global media generally represents it these days, and the set of conditions that have been created for political and interpersonal relationships is characterized by pure materialism. We use the so-called scientific knowledge in service of the urge to have total control over both the planet and the human being results in the latter being regarded as ‘the other’ in the best case and the enemy or adversary in the worst case. The rational-materialistic thinking of the western world has taken over the entire mankind. Everything becomes an object for a business transaction and for an alleged scientific research. Each event gets converted into material values, becomes subject to selfishness and to greed in form of consumerism. The main motive is the total control over the masses of humanity and the ruthless exploitation of the earth’s resources, supposedly for the benefit of all, which is an utter deceit. This absurd pursuit is utterly doomed to tragic failure. It is a complete illusion. The human mind and its creative power is not the absolute measure of all things. The mottos of ‘the independent individual’, or ‘having your own business’, the propaganda that each human being exists separately and has an inherent natural impulse to search for his own happiness and self-fulfillment is a fatal fallacy and a lie. Neither the search for absolute control over the material world nor the ‘holy’ way, via the spiritual quest to find the absolute truth, will ever be crowned by success. All the expressions in our times and in all the previous periods are the proof for it. All searching is unnecessary and there is not ‘something’ that has to be achieved. Only the Truth exists – above all things – without any action on our part and without any kind of benefit having to arise from it. The Truth has always been free, not tied to any path or any point of view.
I was just thirty years old when Avatar Adi Da entered into my life so explicitly and with such divine vehemence. My life prior to that was marked by a spiritual search and by escapism from the challenges and the horrors of the world. I ‘remember’ the events prior to my birth as I was pulled again into this reality of the physical- material existence, or more specifically, how my predispositions towards this world initiated the process of my reincarnation. My future father was visiting the market fair at the time when my mother’s pregnancy was approaching. He was looking for a present for my mother at one stand and chose a sculpture of a black woman with her hair pinned up, beautiful naked breasts, a golden necklace and a golden bowl, that was firmly resting next to her legs. She was elegantly sitting on her heels, had bright red lips and was exuding a juicy eroticism. All in all, quite nice, aesthetic and kitschy–as one would expect from an object from a market fair. The Shakti or the form of energy that this particular sculpture so mysteriously epitomized for me, and my father’s desire to beget a child drew me to this couple, my future parents, and I ‘chose’ this family. This sculpture of the black woman that had radiated such an immense attraction for me in later years was sitting on our living room table, and the golden bowl was unfortunately used as an ashtray that had to be emptied every day because it was constantly overflowing. I always gazed at the sculpture with affection, loved its presence, hated the smell of the cigarettes and the dirty golden bowl and had no idea that one day many, many years later this sculpture would play an important role in my life. I regularly carried it to the trash bin and turned it upside down to get rid of the ash and the cigarette butts. The signal or the impulse to again enter into the cycle of Being-Born-Again was initiated decisively by the simple purchase of this black sculpture. At some point, already months into the pregnancy, I suddenly realized that this hitherto unconscious process meant reincarnation. There was a momentary sudden vital shock that affected all my physical cells as well as those of my mother. During the last phase of the pregnancy my mother was lying down for several weeks because she was facing a possible miscarriage and in danger of losing the child. I wanted to interrupt this process immediately. I didn’t want to come back to this world and yet a power pulled me in a very mysterious way. Shortly before the actual birth my mother dreamed the child’s name: Pete. She told my father about it. He, at first shocked, later agreed and elaborated that the child should become a priest. In that way I received my vocation and my predestination – which I was never going to fulfill–even before I saw the light of day.
My parents didn’t impose any faith or any kind of religious teaching upon me. They were both affected by a ban from the Catholic Church, my father because of being divorced and my mother because she had married a divorced man and by bringing an illegitimate child into the marriage. They were both, in spite of the exclusion from the sacraments, very religious people. They went to mass regularly to churches outside of our village in order to be able to receive the Holy Communion ‘unrecognized’ by the local priest.
The earliest memories of my childhood are of cigarette smells – both my parents were chain smokers – recurrent anxiety attacks, the smell of alcohol, along with the affectionate voice of my father that meant love and comfort although he could also give a terrible thrashing. The 2nd World War with its gruesome repercussions had impacted the family circumstances of my parents in such a way that their childhood and younger years were a sheer nightmare. My mother grew up with nine siblings in a large family. She had lost her favorite brother and her father in the war. Her father had refused to give the Hitler salute. He sympathized with communist ideas. He was sent to Dachau into a so-called education camp and died in the first years of the war in Poland. The family of ten was tormented by the most severe restrictions of the Nazi regime and denied any kind of support by the state. Two of her brothers came back from the prisoner of war camp with the most severe injuries. She herself experienced the war and the constant presence of soldiers as a permanent threat of encroachment and sexual harassment. As she gave birth to a child out of wedlock right after the end of the war it became a lifelong stigma for her. This circumstance was tantamount to a mortal sin in the rural Catholic setting. Even within her own family she was insulted and labeled a witch. Together with her older sister and her mother she had to provide for the rest of the family in the post war years. She was an incredibly passionate woman, very attractive with long red hair and an irrepressible zest for life.
My father came from a respected and wealthy family from a small village at the foot of the Black Forest. When he was fifteen he was assigned to the front in the last months of the war and was severely wounded. He came back with wandering shrapnel and chronic pain in his body. He could never really settle down in his life. He had many jobs, adored and loved women, frequented the pubs and the dance halls and died at the age of forty-two in my mother’s arms. I was five years old. Due to the unexpected death of my father my mother suffered a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. She continued to work on an assembly line in a factory and the shift work now divided our life into ‘early’ and ‘late’. ‘Late’ meant we saw each other in the morning for breakfast and then not any more for the rest of the day. ‘Early’ meant we saw each other in the afternoon when my mother came home, exhausted and disheartened by the piece-work, and we could spend the evening together.
After the sudden death of my father my life changed dramatically. Now it wasn’t just fear that was my constant companion but also aloneness. I had time to do everything – or nothing. Mostly I was spending time in the streets or in the woods. I ran, I had to run, I lived in a different, very energized world that for most of the people around me appeared strange or even crazy. There were no boundaries, neither regarding education nor the imagination. Via the power of my imagination I could hallucinate myself into any possible place and could envision just about anything in my mind. All my actions contained a great deal of energy and passion, but rarely could I find rest, so I stumbled about as if driven. That caused my shoes to wear out at the soles or the seams were falling apart at a rapid rate and my mother had to buy new ones every two to three months. The record in durability for new Adidas shoes was two weeks. The energy shot out from my head and from my feet. What could I do? In the night during sleep I would feel how my body would lift up slowly as if it was rising up like a balloon. When I became aware of my floating body I would wake up and crash down onto the bed.
When I was six years old a luminous circle started appearing above my bed on a regular basis. It spoke to me, seemed full of happiness but also was quite insistent. It appeared whenever it wanted to, I had no influence over it. On one hand it made me feel happy but on the other hand it made me feel somehow pressured in a strange fashion. In later years I drew the connection between the light and Jesus, because this was the religious atmosphere that was surrounding me while I was growing up. However, both my aversion and my fascination remained. Why did this stupid light appear above my bed? What did that mean? I neither wanted to become a priest nor have any kind of so- called vocation. But I spoke to no one about it.
When I was nine I became an altar boy in our Catholic community. I loved the nuns when they were praying in devotion kneeling down on benches in the front rows, even though some of them looked like iron brooms and had withered faces. I sat in front in the chancel, red skirt, white shirt and red collar, squinted while looking at a candle and sank into the light of a bright star, which slowly rose in my inner eye and directed my awareness into a shining radiance. That was my happiness. I didn’t need more. I didn’t want to do any altar service, I was afraid of it and I found it weird and boring. I didn’t want to make any mistakes and thus catch grumpy glares from the priest. I didn’t want to talk or to always repeat the same monotonous prayers. Only to sit there in silence and gaze – that was it. Our Catholic priest was from the old school. He was extremely fundamentalist in his views. He scolded and preached against everything that was not Catholic. He had refused, years ago, to give my father the last rites because he was divorced. He even had to be persuaded to perform the funeral ceremony because at first he had refused to do even this. Naturally, the priest intuited and felt that I wasn’t really interested in doing the altar service. And I on the other hand knew that he was jealous of my ecstatic condition, which I didn’t try to consciously create but was spontaneously drawn into.
Deep in my heart I felt that everything that was happening here in the name of Jesus had nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus himself, with his real presence or the Revelation. ‘He’ felt so different. While the creeds were addressed I deliberately remained silent. After only a short time I knew the liturgy by heart and was very proud when I could detect an ‘error’ or an omission in the liturgical texts. Guilt and atonement struck me as strange concepts, and my first confession was also the last because I didn’t know what I should tell and to whom. Even the deep happiness that I often felt during mass I never really connected directly to Jesus. It was much broader, without any name or a person. It was the space itself that simply shone and radiated. It was happiness, infinite fullness, self-oblivion – and only the heart knew it was true. At the same time I was becoming arrogant and presumptuous when I became aware that the others were not able to perceive the same happiness. I let them feel it, especially the priest.
When I played with my friends I connected with them more on an emotional and psychic level, with that which was not so very visible, rather than on the level of what they apparently said or did. The connection to my mother was very close in spite of, or perhaps because of, the limited time we had together due to the work in shifts. I could feel her even when she was not present.
One day, in the beginning of my puberty, approximately at the age of eleven or twelve, some strange things started happening in my proximity. I was sitting on the toilet and was staring at the floor. Suddenly there appeared a face on the carpet, I looked at the wall, and there was also a face, on the ceiling, again and again the same face everywhere. Jesus. When I went into the hallway his face was everywhere. I became scared and didn’t want to look anywhere any more. Everywhere Jesus. In the evening I told my mother about the phenomenon. She nearly jumped out of her skin: ‘Are you totally mad? Stop that immediately otherwise I’ll have to go with you to the doctor!’ That was the only and also the last time that I told anybody about my perception and the phenomena. These visions lasted for a while and then they died away. On our altar boy excursions to famous Catholic shrines and monasteries I started to collect amulets of holy men, holy women and martyrs, which I bought in souvenir shops. All these little pictures were dangling on a chain around my neck until there were about 15 of them, including the cross of Taize. They all adorned my neck and my chest.
My favorite movies on TV, in addition to “Daktari’ and ‘Laurel and Hardy’, were the Easter passion and movies about saints. After a film about Frances of Assisi, into which I drowned like a dry piece of bread into a wine sauce, I was wildly ecstatic. In the final setting of the movie Saint Frances is lying on a big rock dying, with the stigmata of Jesus that very impressively appear on his body. I saw his devotion, joy and ecstasy even at the moment of death. That image wouldn’t leave my mind any more. One day on the bus on the way to school – I was in my puberty and I remember distinctly how I felt in that hormonal state as well as the cool clothes I was wearing – a throbbing pain in my hands and my feet suddenly started manifesting. I stood in the aisle of the bus near the exit holding myself firmly to a metal rod, but the pain became increasingly worse so that I hardly could stand it any more. I was sweating; I didn’t know what was going on. I looked at my hands and the pain was creating a red patch on the palms of my hands that seemed to penetrate deep inside. The chakra points on my hands and feet were burning like fire. The pain seemed to know no bounds. I panicked and was glad when I could get out. I could hardly walk.
I decided to ignore the whole thing just as I frequently did in my childhood when I had all those visions and saw phenomena. I didn’t want them. They were an emotional and physical torture. I couldn’t make any sense out of them. In the movie Saint Frances on his rock looked much happier. I experienced this phenomenon several more times, but I couldn’t distinguish any more whether it was my imagination or my fear of being dominated by something alien, which I couldn’t control. I didn’t want to ‘comply’ with this Christian path, which had absolutely nothing to do with my own way of experiencing and perceiving happiness and ecstasy. What I found most abhorrent and off- putting was the grim and cruel portrayal of Jesus on the cross and the debasement of the feminine in the non-accessible, immaculate virgin. Why were there no female priestesses and why was it that female beauty and passion was shrouded in black and white robes until their eyes looked bitter and dry. One half of the human race was apparently excluded from participation in the sacred and the ecstatic.
After entering puberty the boredom started to grow inside me, each year increasingly so. The school curricula absolutely didn’t correspond in any fashion to my longings. The transmission of school knowledge, which was supposed to prepare young people for the western style of living, was agonizing and inconsequential. My ecstatic states became increasingly rare. I was spending most of my time with my best friend. As we just turned fifteen towards the end of the seventies we started exploring the ‘night life’. He, the gambler, smoker, and drug consumer, and I, the crazy fashion freak who used to design all my clothes, never touching any soft nor hard drugs, were always hitchhiking on the road. After the first few visits to the disco it became quite obvious that the main agenda for this ‘night fever’ was ultimately sex. It was all about checking out, flirting, fantasizing, and then either on drugs or without daring the first step. We were at home in the freak scene, in alternative youth centers as well as in the over-trendy glamorous scene. I wanted to dance with abandon and admire the beautiful girls, who themselves were into catching some older rich gentleman. My friend on the other hand threw himself totally into the drugs and gambling scene.
This went on for more than three years. At the end of this period of making the rounds through the pubs and discothèques several times a week until the early morning hours, it became quite clear to me that this world with all the glamour, the overtly displayed wealth and the non-stop drug use was not able to open the doors to the reality which meant so much to me: the reality of ecstasy. It was obvious that the drugs and the exhibition of money were sheer manipulation of this earthly reality. I saw the laughing friends who were stoned. Some of them proceeded to harder drugs, but nobody looked really happy. I saw the beautiful girls in the passenger seats of the snazzy cars racing away with their older men, a brief and meaningless momentary pleasure high, soon reflected as such on their faces. Why did I end up in this strange and empty world?
Sexual desire and the energy experiences that were connected with it played as vital a role as the apparitions and the visions that I had experienced before. I began to masturbate quite early and in my youth practiced it several times a day without allowing ejaculation. When I was fifteen years old I had my first real sexual experiences with a girl, thanks to the support of the youth magazine BRAVO. I rushed fiercely and vehemently into this pleasure because the magazine proclaimed that now was the right age to experience sexual intercourse, or at least that was the way I understood it then. The first time I failed miserably and at the second attempt I was relieved when it was over. Only after that did the pleasure gradually begin to develop. Luckily, the girlfriend was the same each time so that I didn’t have to come out of the experience as a total failure.
There was a very special girl in my village. I felt very attracted to her in a way that was very difficult to describe. Her Shakti radiated out of her being like a fire. Her body and her laughter shone with lust and joie de vivre and she carried this without any kind of inhibition. We only had to look at each other and the energy sizzled through our young bodies, which then sparked at the first touch into overwhelming lust and submerged us into self-oblivion. She had no fear of her own sexual energy nor of my masculine power, and our kind of loving had an uplifting quality that left us totally mesmerized. We were like two uninhibited magnets that attracted each other tremendously and couldn’t let go of each other once we came together. She could sense my presence and my unexpected appearance already minutes before, and at that point she would go into a kind of a feverish state. Her body glowed with lust and passion. We made love throughout many nights without a minute of sleep. On the occasions that we were not together physically in the same room we even slept together as we met during the same night in our dreams. Finally here was somebody who could participate in my world. However, I couldn’t quite put into words my actual love for her and I had never felt the impulse or the need to have a so-called normal relationship in the way my friends were living it or were striving for it. The end of every love affair seemed to me to be both unbearable and unavoidable. It didn’t require the tragedy of ‘Romeo And Juliet’. I couldn’t endure this love any more. She couldn’t continue living like this any more. After a final night of passion ending early in the morning in the sand dunes at the edge of a lake, she disappeared forever and I never saw her again. At this point in time my visions and experiences slowly began to disappear completely. Together with my closest friend from my youth I went into an old cemetery in the woods, equipped with a shovel and a bottle of red wine. During the night of Good Friday, and as a last fatalistic ritual, in an old grave I buried a can with a note saying: ‘God is dead. God can kiss my ass.’
Together we had started reading Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, other philosophers, poets and much more. My friend had become an atheist, and in the end I had to agree with him, even though I had a funny feeling about it and felt a resistance to it within me. In this world there was no god any more.
Nobody else seemed to perceive that which I had experienced as ecstasy. When I was fifteen years old I had experienced a day of perfect happiness. I had woken up in the morning and was simply utterly happy without any reason or without having to do anything for it, just simply happy without a cause. Over the next few days this condition disappeared again. However there remained a trace of an insight in my consciousness that my experience was something absolutely true and no effort whatsoever was needed to experience that state. Thus my youth ended in a forgotten forest cemetery, with desperate cynicism and with a growing contempt for this world and the humans in it. We celebrated this special event with a glass of red wine, sitting on a gravestone with feet freely dangling in the air. We drank to our new life and sneered at all the humbug, which the monotheistic religions and this western society were selling as the truth. None of it was true.
Eat up or throw up
“And sorrow is the illusion of emptiness.” Avatar Adi Da
My school time came to an end. I was now nineteen years old, I had my high school graduation in my pocket and I now wanted to somehow participate in this world that so far was alien to me. Since my very early youth I loved to design and create. Already in my early years I used to sew all kinds of crazy clothes for myself and others. I set myself the goal, after completing an apprenticeship in dressmaking, to study fashion design or costume design at the university in order to add beauty and creativity to this world. The whole attempt ended in a disaster. In 1984 I came to Karlsruhe, a city full of clerks. During the first few days I would stroll through the pedestrian section of the city and was completely unprepared for the shock that hit me when I realized how gray the people were, how bottled up everybody was, rushing around as if badgered. Everybody in the city seemed to have internalized the same manner of living. I had never imagined it like this. I grew up in a protected rural private school of the Catholic Church, mainly with young, sympathetic, progressive teachers who came from the 1968 movement. At the apprenticeship place, however, there existed open sexism against women; almost everybody was hypocritical towards the top and pushy towards the bottom. In my naiveté I was caught totally unawares and didn’t want to accept that the work environment could be so cruel and dishonest. It was a torture for me that lasted for the entire two and a half years of the apprenticeship. I fought against the structures in vain and experienced the graduation as a welcome deliverance.
Shortly before the end of the apprenticeship I started looking for a place to study at university. I visited Vienna, traveled to Munich and finally ended up in Berlin. As I stood in front of the Free University looking at the huge entrance to the building I was seized, as before, by a spontaneous and obvious conclusion. I saw thousands of young people swarming out of the entrances and quite suddenly understood that THAT was not what I was looking for and that here I was not going to achieve what I wanted; even though I didn’t have an exact idea what THAT actually meant or what my goal actually was. If so many people were acquiring the alleged (and phony) knowledge about existence and the beauty of the arts, yet the human world was so loveless and gray, then something was missing in the transmission of this knowledge. In fact, there had to be something fundamentally wrong regarding most knowledge of and about the world. At that very moment my university studies were finished. Now meanwhile I was living in the house that, at the age of five, I had inherited after the deaths of my father and grandfather. They both died within two weeks from each other and I was the one left as sole heir. My step-grandmother also had lived there after the death of her husband. It was a very nice house, situated in the middle of the village directly on a slow flowing river. It had two floors, a basement, a granary, a large barn and a garden. In front of the house was a stately linden tree that my grandfather had planted directly by the river before the 2nd World War.
My step-grandmother didn’t like our family, and even after years of trying my mother and I couldn’t establish any kind of friendly relationship with her. When she died seven years later we took over the entire house, however I never shared the house with my mother. My mother didn’t like the house and remained in her village.
When I was fifteen I began to renovate the first floor and worked slowly, room by room. At that time my much older stepbrother occupied the second floor and lived there for a few years. So, when I was nineteen I finally moved in. The furniture was kept very simple. Just a washing basin, a stone sink, two gas burners for cooking, a big French bed in the middle of the room, wooden shelves on the wall, and that was it. The toilet was outside the apartment, and could be reached across a veranda. This house was to be my sanctuary and my abode of rescue for the next several years. I had tried to participate in ‘normal’ life, but after a very short time I realized that it made most people deeply unhappy. The crazy philosophers and writers were also not able to point me to a real access to truth and happiness, even though together they had written thousands of books. Where were the facts and the actual reality? Only in the mind? Whose life had really been changed? Where was happiness? Where was the one who understood all this and could explain it? Most of those people whose writings I really loved had ended up in madness over their own mind. The world was still drowning in a permanent swamp of brutality due to wars, armament, and unrestrained exploitation of humans and nature. School had prepared me for many things but not for this cruel and relentless life.
So I then started looking for some other possibilities. I read books about other cultures and traditions that had chosen to live differently, some of which had for instance allowed women to have positions of power or where women influenced the society. I looked extensively into the basic ideas of feminism and ultimately, however, had to realize, after having read and studied countless books, that nobody, but really nobody had the perfect solution for the entire dilemma of the human existence, or could even explain it in a conclusive and verifiable manner. The mind seemed to permanently want to masturbate with itself in order to gain pleasure and satisfaction and thus as a direct consequence remained confined within itself. All of it just didn’t make any sense.
After it was clear that the university studies were not going to happen, I looked for a place to substitute my military service with a civilian service in a school, doing community service for severely disabled children. I let my hair grow even longer and was now dying it red with henna. I met the woman of my dreams; I fell in love with my own utopian imagination of a wild-galloping Amazon with blue eyes who danced barefoot through the city, with bells attached to her bare legs. We failed miserably in our relating after only three months, which was all about wanting to relate but not being able to. The pain of not being able to carry out a true relationship with this world threw me totally off the tracks, once and for all. I began to fast for longer periods of time so I wouldn’t feel the pain. That made me bulimic. I would overeat three to four times a day and then throw up. I would scurry through the supermarkets in search of food that I hadn’t tasted before. I withdrew more and more. I walked around barefoot; I tied little bells around my legs. I taught myself Yoga using a book that a friend had given to me. In the morning and in the evening I would practice Yoga exercises for 90 minutes. In the resting pose of sawasana, I was able to escape from the perception of this world and finally feel peace for several minutes at a time. This was a huge relief. Bulimia really had no connection whatsoever with any kind of weight problem for me. I didn’t even know the word bulimia then, and had no idea that my behavior was actually a clinical disease. Instead, it was a slow self-execution that amounted to gradual suicide. Sexual desire dried up completely. I was staying in my house, isolating myself more and more. I congratulated myself proudly that once again I had managed not to talk over the entire weekend and that I hadn’t had contact with any human being for entire three days. Most of my friendships ended. My best friend of many years prophesized madness for me and begged me urgently to stop reading philosophical books. He could no longer tolerate my life and my growing despair, and he was more concerned about my wellbeing than about his own.
I, on the other hand, could no longer stop it. Incessantly, the wheel kept turning. After the break-up with my wild-galloping Amazon a kind of madness took hold of me, which would later reemerge again and again. I simply had to be on the road. Travel! Run! So then, shortly after my twenty-first birthday, one day before Christmas Eve I took off to southern France, equipped with a sleeping bag and a small backpack. I wanted to walk the distance, barefoot if possible, through Camargue from north to south and visit the gypsy pilgrimage Saint-Marie de la Mer on the Mediterranean. An overnight train brought me to the French city of Arles, where I stood in awe before the house of Van Gogh, which unfortunately was closed. It was early in the morning, the air was cold and foggy. In the city I once again had a ‘feeding frenzy’, then began to walk to the pilgrimage. After a few hours of the hike I realized how crazy the whole thing was. There was no one on the road. I couldn’t see a thing through the dense fog, neither horse nor landscape. Only some blue patch in the sky that would appear now and then accompanied me through the uncomfortable atmosphere. I had a map that was supposed to show the way, but my inner feeling of being lost was overwhelming. I began to sweat and deep anguish and despair built up inside. A black, oppressive and infinite loneliness spread over my heart. In the late afternoon I found a barn to spend the night. I lay down in the hay, looked to the ceiling beams and was grabbed by an irrepressible urge to end my life. The thoughts were racing around in my head and I just wanted to escape this nightmarish loneliness and this feeling of being driven. I don’t know any more how I managed to survive that night. I struggled to remain present and not to give in to the destructive impulses. In the early morning I left the barn and knew that now I could turn back. My ‘goal’ had been achieved for now. I had done what I had to do. I hitchhiked the rest of the way, arrived at the place of pilgrimage where the three Maries, were to be found, in the crypt below the altar room. The relics of the three Marys, Mary Jacobe, Mary Salome and Sara, who is also called “Black Sara”, should be guarded in the crypt or in the church. The “Black Sara” is revered by the Catholic Roma and the Sinti as their patron saint. They would be presented in May in a holy procession, richly adorned and embellished on a ship. Now they were just standing quite un-holy on a simple table, almost like a window decoration, and I couldn’t resist inspecting them more thoroughly. I lifted their robes, looked at all the rosaries, read the countless notes full with inscriptions of gratitude and inspected all the other things that had accumulated over the decades. Upstairs in the church the floors were being cleaned and waxed by industrious women for the Christmas celebration. All of a sudden I found my sense of humor again, and I had to restrain myself from doing something really stupid with the statues. After that I went to the beach. The entire coast was totally engulfed by fog. One couldn’t even see the water–only the passionless little waves splashing so insignificantly against the shore were visible. I sat down in the sand, shaking my head, overcome by spontaneous joy and had to think of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy-Days’. A deep and liberating laughter arose suddenly from my throat. Nothing was happening here. And probably nothing so-called ‘holy’ or special ever happened. The place was empty, filled only with faith, just like me. I went to the nearest café and bought four croissants, then hopped on the next bus. In the evening of December twenty-fourth I got on the night train back home, moving through the papal city of Avignon, feverish with pre-Christmas shopping.
I adored my work with the severely disabled children. I could understand them although none could speak or express themselves. I couldn’t comprehend the sorrows and awkwardness that these children triggered in most people who got in touch with them or those who avoided contact with them. They lived in a completely different world and we could not really judge their degree of happiness or misery. The work with the children and with my colleagues required a minimal amount of social engagement. In my house, however, I completely lost any kind of control over my eating habits. The toilet bowl was now my place of worship and my truth. Nobody knew or even had the slightest idea about my bulimia. I determined periods of fasting, then overate and threw up. Place and time didn’t matter. I was doing it everywhere.
The end of my civil service was coming close. I had never desired a normal professional career. Money as such didn’t mean much to me. It could be there or not there, I didn’t care. I didn’t need much for living and I never really missed anything.
I needed to take off again. Had to be traveling. Away. Away from my eating- vomiting- disorder. Away from western culture and away from the world dominated by men.
What’s your name, what’s your country?
“The Depth Is not in you, the Depth Is in Me.” Avatar Adi Da
