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.’
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
