And The Heart Is Mine

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.’

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(3) were to be found, in the crypt below the altar room. 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’ (4). 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.’

Adi Da

Although I had never read any books about India and its religions were alien to me, I was pulled to go exactly there. The people who have invented yoga could not be all bad. In preparation, I bought four maps of the entire Indian subcontinent, a Hindu dictionary, and in a lengthy procedure I sewed an outfit of a troubadour for myself. I composed my will in which I bequeathed my belongings to my friends. I took off in October 1987, shortly before my twenty-third birthday for Mumbai, back then called Bombay, with no particular destination in mind.

I landed at the airport in Mumbai, situated in the middle of the slums and there I experienced my first deep disappointment. Never before have I seen so much misery and suffering, so much grief crowded together in an apparent infinity of space. The impoverished and neglected looking children of the slums had their noses glued to the windows of the airport building, and the policemen were shooing them away with harsh words. All my co-travelers were telling me to leave the city as soon as possible and I took their advice and went on the same day by bus to Goa. There I acclimatized in a quiet, beautiful, paradise-like bay, which was still untouched by tourism and felt very dreamy, with a fresh water lake surrounded by a huge banyan tree right behind the beach. On my first walk on the beach I met an Indian man with the name of Kali. He was a follower of the guru Babaji from Haidakhan who had just passed away. He gave me some suggestions about holy Hindu pilgrimage places, all of which I visited within the next few weeks. He also invited me to come to Babaji’s ashram in the Himalayas. In the night he would often sit by the fire praying, he chanted in honor of his goddess Kali whose name he bore. He didn’t let the flames go out day and night.

During my further travels to Hindu places of pilgrimage I generally slept outside or in the temples. The sadhus I met in many cases looked sorrowful and sick, scarred by the asceticism, and only a few had happy eyes. The suffering of women and children in the villages was terrible and merciless. The Untouchables were sleeping everywhere, and everywhere one could see women and children doing the heaviest road construction or road repair work. The Indian society was alien to me. How could a religion allow something like this? And at the same time, I was meeting more laughing and happy people than I have ever seen before anywhere.

After four weeks of traveling around I arrived at a nature reserve in South India, feeling quite disillusioned. I found sleeping accommodation with a German guy whose name was Klaus and who had married an Indian woman. He lived from growing pepper and from renting to tourists who stayed with him.