And The Heart Is Mine

Even in India, throughout the whole time my daily place of worship was still the toilet bowl. As my desperation grew, I was filling many pages with writing in my dairy, but I was living the same life as in Germany. There was no escape. I was not looking for an ashram, or a guru, I wanted to be free.

One night I was sitting on the porch in the full moon night, with the three-meter high pepper shrubs in front of me. Once again I was overcome by the almost compulsive desire to put an end to this life, to just go mad and leave the body. I just couldn’t stand it any more. Everything ached from the incessant overeating and throwing up, and I had an infection in my mouth, which I got from greedily eating unripe papayas. I wrote and pleaded imploringly, praying to the moon goddess, and I managed to survive yet another night.

The following morning Klaus told me about Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation technique that he had encountered in a meditation center in Igatpuri, a village near Mumbai. There, all of a sudden, was a way out. The same evening I packed my stuff and took off in a hurry. The journey took me more than 2000 kilometers from Kerala, a state in the south of India, all the way up north to the Indian state of Maharashtra and the small village of Igatpuri, some five hours east of Mumbay by bus. Day and night I was traveling by bus, and thanks

to the support of many friendly people I managed to arrive there in time for the beginning of the meditation course in the morning. The last part of the bus ride led through an extremely wide plain bordered by a very large mountain range. The sky was radiantly blue and clear. Sleeping Indian people surrounded me, wrapped up in their blankets and scarves, in order to protect themselves from the early morning chill while the bus went jolting along the ramshackle road. In a little town about two hours before my destination a young man got on the bus. He was dressed in dark red clothes. He set next to me. We started a conversation and he told me that he was on his way to Ganeshpuri (5) to the ashram of his guru, a woman whom he called Gurumayi. I couldn’t understand a thing he said. Ganeshpuri seemed to be a village that was only a few kilometers further than Igatpuri. He took out a picture album and showed me colored images of Gurumayi. She was also dressed all in red, and looked very beautiful, erotic and sublime. During the remainder of our conversation he begged me more and more imploringly to come along with him to Ganeshpuri to see his guru. I still couldn’t understand what he actually wanted from me, and I refused his pleas in a friendly but determined manner. As I was leaving the bus the man began to cry. Tears were flowing down his face. He looked at me with disappointment through the bus windows as the bus continued honking on its way.

I soon forgot the strange encounter on the bus and I rushed up to the meditation center, which was situated above the town. The streets and alleys were filled with the noise coming from the honking cars and many speakers playing Hindi popular music. A huge pagoda with a high golden spire dominated the Buddhist center. At that time the center could hold several hundred people in one meditation course. After registration I was asked in a friendly manner to change my clothes as I was dressed in my troubadour outfit, which was very extrovert. I was given a lunghi (6) and a simple T-shirt to wear for the duration of the course. This Vipassana course was taught in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin and his disciple Goenka, who had brought this forgotten meditation practice from Burma back to India. It took place over a period of ten days, in total silence. The participants sit in meditation in a special hall where they receive instruction from both men and women teachers, practicing from very early in the morning to late at night. Everything happens in silence and in a sitting position. The first three days of meditation consist of Anapana, the observation of the breath as it flows in and out. In this way the attention is sharpened and the mind becomes quieter. From the fourth day onwards the Vipassana technique is taught. The meditators begin to observe the body, the emotions and the thoughts in a certain manner that becomes increasingly finer. This is how Anicca (7) is revealed – the understanding that everything comes and goes.

I immediately felt at home. I no longer wanted to run away. My favorite part was the silence and the temporary freedom from the responsibility for my eating disorders. The meals were served in the morning and in the evening, in the afternoons there was only fruit available, and that was all. The meditation sittings started in the early morning hours, interrupted only by short breaks and meal times, and went on into the late evening. Then we were given instructions for the next day.

I followed the discipline and the rules exactly, and I even stepped it up by extending my sitting sessions. Through the application of my will I wanted to break through the limitations of physical pain and psychological despair.

On the fourth day the image that I have had of myself completely collapsed. I gave up my pointless self-flagellation. I recognized my deep contempt for human life. I clearly saw my impulse to self-destruction and my hidden cynicism. It was 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 the indigenous people regard trees as sacred there are enormous ancient specimens of immense strength overwhelming majesty everywhere.

We cut across through very high and dense bamboo forests and encountered some mango trees, which were of enormous size and in whose crowns the monkeys were shrieking and romping around dangerously. In one of the main holy places in Shiva’s honor we once again refilled our food supplies and again saw dozens of caves, many of which were adorned by an erect black cobra carved from stone, a mark of Shiva. We criss-crossed on some difficult paths deeper and deeper into the jungle and finally found the place we were looking for.

An Indian Baba looked after this place in the middle of the jungle. It consisted of twenty to thirty small and large caves spread along the mountain ridge. Some of the places and caves were accessible only by a rope ladder. This place was dedicated only for meditation and was surrounded by deep silence. The cave of the baba was at the foot of a ravine and was in that way centrally located as a kind of a reception. An enormous palisade made of tree trunks surrounded his cave and protected it from leopards, tigers and other wild cats, for which this jungle was a habitat. At a first glance the Shiva Baba was completely neurotic and crazy. His eyes were somewhat brightened and totally veiled by the incessant smoking of marijuana. He was very friendly and made sure that we did not get disturbed during our retreat in this secluded area. He presented us with some tea as a welcome present.

We chose the last big cave, which reached deep into the mountain at the very end of a steep ravine and set up our camp place. All the items of everyday life had to be carried up through scattered boulders and paths carved in the stone. Every day we carried water with great effort up the hill in buckets after climbing down thirty minutes to a fabulously beautiful river. The same for fire wood. We had to keep the flames going throughout the entire night, because wild animals were swarming the place all around us. This included some really big wild cats, one of which had attacked a local and had injured him badly just a few days previously. We hung our food supplies on ropes from the rock ceiling. In spite of this the rodents of the night were trying to catch their share by jumping up high like acrobats.

We slept directly next to the fire at the entrance to the cave. Veiled in twilight at the very back of our accommodation there stood a man-size black cobra hewn from the rock. The Gond-Babas, gracefully moving around the forest carrying their axes and the machetes, would visit our cave every few days and put flower malas around the snake and perform Puja. They hardly took notice of our presence there and simply went about their business.

We would alternate watching the fire during the night and in the early morning hours our meditation would begin. Everything was done in silence, without speaking. All of this was an unprecedented challenge for the body and the mind. In the beginning we would meditate in the morning in the cave or on the platform in front of the cave overlooking the green valley that stretched before us. Every day after lunch we would descend, take a bath in the river and sit on the river-bank in meditation until evening. We did nothing else but observe everything that was happening inside the body just allowing it to come and go. After a few days I heard the voice of the river echo in my ears as a melodious symphony. It felt like a hug. I would sit for hours without the slightest movement and slowly an immense sadness, stirred by the song of the river, arose in the depths of my heart. What was I doing here?

As always I was sitting directly by the water when I suddenly became aware of death, my own and that of others. I was overcome by the memory of the death of my father, in all its horror and its repercussions, which I had experienced as a five-year-old child

Absolutely nothing had changed. The principles (laws) of the world were still the same as before. I could not escape them, not even through ceaseless meditation. I wept incessantly. My companion was slowly becoming uneasy, in spite of all his years of meditation practice, as my grief would not end. Just as before, when I was overeating and throwing up, I was now addicted to endless meditation in order to somehow master my existence, in order not to have to feel this basic knowledge of death. Other people could anaesthetize this unconscious notion with career, money, women, men, by having retirement insurance and fire insurance, and other kind of insurances. I didn’t have to have these illusions.

I had never referred to the Eastern spiritual paths as such, because I never knew exactly what spirituality is or what a path is, and because I had never cared to think about these things, but obviously they also had no real solution at hand. Some dissatisfaction and unrest, some pleading prayers, and an endless battle always remained. Why should I still stay here?

The following day we spontaneously terminated our meditation retreat. I had already decided to return to Germany as fast as possible. Halfway back to civilization we again stopped at the bank of a river, which flowed into the Narmada River somewhere down the mountain in the valley. This was our last day in the mountains. We would have to go through enormous effort to reach this magical secluded spot, radiating fairytale-like beauty and stillness, once again. The river was still very narrow at this spot, high up in the mountains, and we had to circumvent big boulders eroded to roundness. The water flowed in absolute silence and serenity through the jungle. The night descended. The full moon slowly rose up in the sky, reflected in the water. Bit by bit the reflection of the moon approached the shore where I was sitting. My body was totally exhausted from the exertion of the hike. Upon arrival I had just let myself fall onto the rock and lay motionless for a long time. I was finished.

Now I was sitting next to the fire, my companion had already gone to sleep. The moon was shining huge and bright and seemed to express more truth then my entire ruminating. My whole dilemma had revealed itself again just a few hours earlier when we visited a place that didn’t seem of this world. It was alongside a lake, which lay in front of a huge cliff wall. Below the cliff there was an old village of the Gond-Baba, who had built their houses right in front of the Stone Age caves. Right at the waterline there was a huge fire. Dusk was falling, and the people gathered around the fire. We were climbing down into the ravine along a narrow path hewn into the cliff where Shiva had visibly manifested himself in the rock. Yogis and ascetics were sitting in the cliff niches on narrow projections. Laughing, they called out words to us, made jokes and gave us incense, ash and Prasad. The path took us deeper into the canyon. At the end of our path a space opened up, completely adorned with flowers, incense and candles. In front of Shiva and Parvati were standing, united in a dance, shrouded in the deep blue atmosphere of a natural cave. Everything seemed to be alive and vibrating. I sat down in the midst of the evident devotion and reverence of this place and the dance of consciousness and energy.

How did consciousness and energy fit together? How could I embrace this world and be happy at the same time? Why were there always two? How could one ever accept the death of the beloved?

I received no answer despite this incredible fullness and the breath-taking otherworldly atmosphere. In my opinion the ancient peoples of this earth had also not found any useful solutions.

The slowly gliding river in front of me didn’t seem to move. I again looked at the full round disc of the moon reflected in the water at my feet and simultaneously at the sky. Who was reflecting whom?

I didn’t want to be an ascetic, hostile to the body. I didn’t want to have to chasten myself, just to find the truth, only to somehow be able to endure all of this. The lunar disc came closer and closer and seemed to laugh as the water rippled in waves on the shore. Fucking questions! I smiled back at the moon and lay down to sleep, totally exhausted.

The next morning we packed our few belongings together for the last time. I forgot and left my little bells, which I had always worn on my feet in the jungle because of the snakes, between the rocks. A very peculiar man had invited us to a breakfast. He lived near the river, and I was very much looking forward to it. Already from a distance we could see him in front of his house. He had his feet up, was sitting on his veranda dressed in a military combat uniform and greeted us politely. My meditation companion had told me earlier that we were about to meet a tantric guru, and supposedly he was able to perform all kinds of supernatural things in the river. This man was also looking after the people in the village, he found work for them, and was making sure that the village was kept clean and that the kids went to school. Just now there was a group of villagers gathered around the television set watching an Indian soap of the Mahabharata(9). While he was having a conversation with us, ever smiling, and repeatedly encouraging us to eat, he chanted mantras incessantly between the words: ‘Ram, Ram, Ram, Sita-Ram’. The entire time he was rocking back and forth on his chair and he told us that during the war with Pakistan he had to kill a lot of people. This was the most ‘unholy of appearances’ that I had ever encountered in India, and for some reason it felt good to me. I felt his bright love, his respect and his truthful interest and compassion as I had never previously felt with any other human being. His eyes were glowing like headlights. While he laughed about our meditation practice, he simultaneously praised it, and as we were leaving he gave us the advice to find a guru if we wanted to avoid spending many more lifetimes in meditation. We also laughed and left the place highly delighted.

We took the next bus down to Bhopal. There we went our separate ways. My meditation friend went to Orissa on the Indian East Coast, and I was never to see him again. I took the train to Delhi in order to fly back to Germany with the next possible airplane. Three days later I landed in Frankfurt airport. It was spring, 1988, and I was twenty-three years old.