a fundamental and harrowing metamorphosis, as if layers and masks were being peeled off from the body. I was afraid that everybody in the center could now see that up until now I had been merely wearing a mask of friendliness and that underneath that false surface there slumbered a categorical contempt for all things material and superficial. However all the other participants, hundreds of them, were having similar experiences, and I had to laugh about my newly acquired concerns. I had no more visions nor spiritual states. My gorging attacks finished quite abruptly. However, I felt the anxieties and the joys of the world more intensely than ever before. After the course I left this wonderful place as a different person. It was called Damma Giri and was the headquarters of the Vipassana academy. It was very difficult for me to leave, and I had no idea how I was going to get on with life now. A strange flickering sensation was now surrounding my body and just to look at another human being gave me great trouble.
I sat on a simple wooden bench at the bus station of Igatpuri, deliberating on how to proceed from here. I spontaneously decided to drive into the desert of Rajasthan. There was also a Vipassana center in the city of Jaipur, which I wanted to visit later.
I had bought some different clothes for myself and now looked like a western sadhu. I gave away my old clothes.
The longer the journey into the desert lasted the more I felt uncertain and confused. What had happened? What did all this mean? It didn’t make any sense to meditate for such long periods of time. Sure, I felt so much better. But my fear of humans had actually only increased. The meditation had set free some forces, which I could not control any more. As the bus drove ever deeper into the desert of Rajasthan I felt how this strange flickering sensation was increasing in my whole body. As usual, I chose my destinations intuitively, very often just on a whim, because I liked the name of a place. Two days’ journey from Jaisalmer, the brilliant desert fortress in Rajasthan, I stopped in a small town and quickly bolted into a simple hotel for pilgrims. Minute by minute my own body felt increasingly unbearable. Slowly the next crisis was approaching. Lying on the bed of the hotel in the darkened room, I began to write again. Everything that came up in my thoughts I put it down on paper so I could understand what was going on. I lay down on the floor and continued writing. The scribbling became more and more illegible. In the end only wild strokes were covering the paper. I lost all control over my body and was just scratching the paper. Suddenly I found myself, half willingly, half pushed, doing a headstand, and my mind seemed to plummet, circling and falling into infinity. This had to be the entrance into madness. That thought quickly arose as the room started to spin and colored circles swirled around me. But I was not afflicted by madness.
Suddenly love took hold of my heart, of my naked body, of the confused thoughts. At the very bottom of my crash I actually found love. The origin of everything is love. Everything is made of love, everything lived by it. This feeling spread into every cell. Love. It was so simple.
I immediately left the room and walked through the little town in wonder and amazement. To this day I still don’t know the name of that little town. I entered a chai-shop, which was empty, entirely painted in light-blue paint, and lit with bright neon lights. I stared out onto the street where it had, oddly enough, very lightly started to rain. Originally, everything is permeated by love. Everything. That is the only meaning of life. Love. The owner of the chai-sop beamed at me with huge eyes, as if he had known this all along, and I smiled back. I went back to the hotel, packed my things and took the next bus early in the morning.
In Ajmer, my next stop, I left the bus and walked through the city. Over time I had gotten used to being stared at, but this time something very strange happened. I had just sat down at a table in a chai-shop located in the middle of a very large plaza, as more and more people evidently started pressing around my table. After a while I realized that their eyes were on me and I looked up confused. A huge crowd of people had gathered around my table. A stately older man, proud and with piercing eyes and the typical moustache of a Rajasthani, appeared beside me, and asked me in an energetic manner to come along with him. This was not the right place for me. I should avoid such places. I told him that I didn’t want to buy anything, didn’t want to see anything ‘on any account’ and that I would much rather stay here instead. Finally, however, he convinced me and led me through the curious crowd to his shop, which was in a narrow street. The shop was filled to the brim with antiques and jewelry from Rajasthan. Tea was served, and we sat through several hours together while he showed me all his treasures in the shop. When we were parting he again told me to avoid places with lots of people, and then he brought his two young sons to me so I could say good-bye to them. In the same manner, the remainder of that journey was filled with more extraordinary circumstances in which total strangers invited me graciously into their homes.
I was so happy to be able to finally withdraw into the meditation center in Jaipur.
This place of meditation, called Dhamma Mahi, is situated in a very quiet valley and is much smaller than the Vipassana academy of Igatpur, and when I arrived, there were only a few meditators. The center was behind a small hill called the Monkey Hill that towers over Jaipur, with a simple temple on top of it where the sadhus and the babas are chanting to God Rama day and night. On this little mountain live hundreds of so-called holy monkeys, which are fed by truckloads of bananas. Up on the hill the view encompasses the entire city of Jaipur and the extraordinary Maharaja palace, ‘The Palace of Winds’, painted in entirely in pink. To the right the enormous Nahargath Fortress towers over the entire city. The noise rising up from the city is deafening. Behind the Monkey Hill on the long walk to the Vipassana center there is an ancient dilapidated temple and a beautiful park full of flowers inhabited by screaming peacocks and wild parrots.
The meditation center in the hills of Jaipur also has a pagoda that can accommodate about one hundred meditators. There was a great silence in the valley, which was disturbed only by the screeching of the parrots early in the morning. I began a so-called self-course, which had the same daily rhythm that I was already familiar with, but which had to be organized by myself without any teachers or instructors. My meditation sittings were interrupted only by a couple of hours of daily gardening work. Aside from the caretaker I was the only person in the center. All in all I spent nearly five weeks in this center, and signed up for two more guided meditation courses lasting ten days each, and basically spent the entire time in meditation.
I left this quiet place towards the end of January together with a friend whom I had met in the center. The muscles in my entire body were so relaxed that I could barely hold a pencil. All my obsessions were gone. My eating habits were totally normal. Also, the impulse to want to escape from the world and its challenges was no longer there. I felt cleansed. It felt extraordinary to be able to allocate my attention once again to the normal hustle and bustle of the world.
Together we decided to travel into the interior of the country, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We traveled by train along the Narmada River. A few kilometers outside the city of Bhopal we took a bus, which took us into the mountain region that is now called Satpura National Park. My companion was very familiar with this region, as he had been living in India for the last fifteen years. He was certainly double my age, and had previously been a junkie. He had successfully overcome his drug addiction with the help of the Vipassana meditation. We drove deeper and deeper into the mountains, and in a small town on a high plateau we bought food supplies for two weeks. Then we started hiking into the middle of the Indian jungle to a place called ‘Shiva Mundi’, ‘The Silence of Shiva’, by the original indigenous people, the Gond-Baba of the Adivasi tribes (8). Shiva is one of the few gods whom the non-Hindu tribe Gond-Baba also worships. According to the legend, a demon was chasing Shiva in this area and he leapt from hill to hill, leaving his traces everywhere. Now these are places of worship and ritual. This entire region is littered with caves and cult sites that can be traced far back into the early history of mankind, where the people of the Stone Age were already living. In many of these caves one can find cave paintings of the Stone Age. Years later I learnt that Hindu and Buddhist monks were already using these sites as meditation and retreat sanctuaries centuries ago.
Because
