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‘There is no God on Shakespeare’s stage, but only human complications…’

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 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⁽¹⁾ 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⁽²⁾ 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 dreamt the child’s name: Petrus. 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.