I don’t generally talk about myself much, but it seems important to lay out my path as a sketch at this point. Since it seems important, I do it:
Ten years ago, a call came to me. A call that changed my life. I am tempted to say that it changed my life „fundamentally“. People like to use that expression, but on reflection, it’s not true here. Not with me.
What changed at that time was not my life itself, but only the way my consciousness perceived this life and the world and came out with these perceptions. Only the outer appearance of my life changed. But that radically. The spiritual basis of my life, however, in which we are all sheltered and which always carries and nourishes us, never underwent any change. It remained the same from the time of my birth until today. I know that now.
Thus the call I received – for it was a spiritual one – was not that of a stranger calling me over to him from a distant shore into new and unknown spheres, but that of an old friend who had always been my companion and whom I had only left further and further behind me in the course of the years of my journey in our materialistic-capitalistic society. He thought it was time then, in a friendly way, to ask me to slow down a bit and rejoin his rhythm, the rhythm of walking that had once been our common one. So it was an old friend who helped me – at the right time – so unsolicited and unexpectedly – to recall eternal, soul knowledge and not just to stare ahead toward veiled ominous goals, as we are used to doing when the mind with its five senses is in command in our consciousness.
He, who was always there and who always had a watching eye on me when I stumbled and groped in the dark, now walks again – consciously – beside me. We hold each other by our hands and by feeling the powerful and resting warmth of his hand, I know that there are no goals to pursue. If I feel the warmth of this friend’s hand, then everything is accomplished and everything is in meaning. He is the goal and if I hold his hand, there is nothing more I could wish for. This friend is my mother, father, sister, brother and son and daughter. He is the spiritual family. Ten years ago I returned home and I cried with happiness for a long time. But just as I had never really lost my friend, I had never really left this home. As a child, this spiritual home and the earthly – material – existence were still one. I remember again how in the evening, in the twilight, friendly beings visited me at my bedside and at that time I closed my eyes, then everything swayed and swung and I fell deep into bottomless tunnels and met masks and animals and people. Sometimes scary and sometimes full of understanding. As alone as I might have been in my earthly existence – for my parents were fighting their own lonely battles in our soul-distant materialistic society – I was secure in my soul home. And in the resulting inner inexhaustible strength.
At the latest with the beginning of schooling (that is probably the correct word. Beschulung. „Feeding to organized education“ is written in the dictionary) the visits of the soul beings became less and when closing the eyes I then felt rather fear of what will come and hardly the former security, the soul knowledge. The mind began – systematically guided by the guardians of the „knowledge society“ – to take over my consciousness and to condition it to materialism. And materialism means „there is no soul.“ And actually, unspoken in its depth: „Life is futile and without meaning.“
I still remember how I asked myself at that time where the creatures and animals had gone. Why they did not visit me any more. My consciousness was aligned at that time by the one-sided materially working education system of our society completely on purely external perceptions and the laws of the logic and the understanding. For the perception of the real, the eternal home no more capacities were allowed to be provided. „Children’s fantasies“ is still today the common term – said and thought – when children make known to adults their spiritual experiences. Or also if adults do this with adults.
Thus oriented, I did what was expected of me familiarly and socially. I was sent to the best school in the place and somehow graduated. I studied what I thought was expected of me and graduated as an engineer. After graduation, I went to the employment office because there were just no jobs for my qualifications, so I was sent to a company that was looking for an engineer. I made an appointment, went there and got the job. Since I was assigned to a different field than what my qualifications were, I did a short training course at the company. The main thing, however, was that I had the office job that was so prestigious that it now pleased everyone(?).
After a few months, I happened to speak to the HR manager who had hired me at the time. He said, „Did you actually think of that as a job interview at the time?“ „No.“, I said, „Kind of not. The employment counselor told me to go to you. You’d be looking for an employee, and if the retraining was successful, I’d have the job.“ The HR manager nodded with a confirming and slightly amused grin on his face… I didn’t realize until that moment that it hadn’t been at all certain to those involved at the beginning whether they would even give me the job. Apparently it had been clear to me as the only one from the outset… Without knowing it themselves…. So ignorant and somnambulistic I let myself be put where I was supposed to be put from childhood. Not that everything was easy, as if in sleep. I was a mediocre student, the family situation was often difficult and, to make matters worse, I began to stutter at the age of six and only at the age of sixteen was I able to get halfway out of it by the skin of my teeth. Sleepwalking was rather the path itself through all these transformations of time. I let myself be led. By whomsoever. The friend was always there, the home never left. Only I didn’t know it anymore. Didn’t notice it anymore.
From a young age, I was interested in people. „What is behind their facade? What is the real person behind it?“ These were the questions I asked even as a teenager, without really being aware of them in this form or being able to fathom their cause. I had a deep – unconscious – love for people, but without the forgotten knowledge of the real home, I stood in deep perplexity before life, which even then appeared to me as only half. So I followed my way. Guided. And somehow without fear of the next day. During this whole time the connection to the spiritual home showed up again and again in individual situations. In dreams that showed me what was to come. In knowledge about strangers, what friends at the time jokingly called „Oliver’s quick psychograms“. No one knew what it was or where it came from. The world in which we stood held no explanations or interpretations other than „coincidence“ and „figment of the imagination.“ And we didn’t care either. „Actually, I want to herd sheep lonely on a mountain.“ I often said to my friends as we all stumbled on and on through the instances of the material machine world. And I meant it. After our diploma exams, we wanted to have T-shirts printed: „I’m a fucking Diplom engineer“ was supposed to be written on them…. But then we left it alone.
The office job – the staging post before the final goal of retirement – was good. I had a very good supervisor and really wonderful colleagues. Our interactions were open and friendly. There was no secrecy and we all supported each other where we could. I had a prestigious and well-paid engineering position in this company, carried high responsibility and was respected. Everyone was happy. My friends admired the way I flowed without having to be dogged, and my parents were happy to show my business card around. – I was, too, in a way, at first. I found the work „interesting.“ But little by little I realized that I couldn’t go on like this forever. Too distant was this existence from something I couldn’t name at the time. Something was missing, was not complete. In retrospect, I know: it was the longing for the true home and for the true family that left me so searching.
Now that I had arrived at a point after all the flowing, at an end point so to speak, I could perceive the lack in this resting position. And I thought: This is not life as it should be lived. And I waited and waited for my life to go on again, to flow on. As it had always been until now. Prompted by someone who would lead me again to another waypoint in my life.
For several years I waited. There was a picture inside me that illustrated for me at that time my path in life. I often „think“ in pictures. It was the image of a moving train and I am sitting on the roof of one of its carriages. It is a bright night. At some point, on the parallel track on the right, another train closes in on the same level with us and passes next to us at the same speed. He offers himself to me. I jump onto the roof of one of the carriages of this other train and it immediately accelerates its speed. We immediately reach a switch and my new train turns, makes a wide arc and quickly moves away from the old train on which I had been sitting before. So I figuratively felt the opportunities present themselves to me and how I took advantage of them. I just jumped over… – – Only now, while writing, I really realize how much this vision represents the generally accepted course of a person’s life within the materialistically-capitalistically determined society: The ways run on fixed rails and man is only a passenger who is led to a destination unknown to him. He can change the train by a daring jump, but thereby only the destination itself changes. The fact that it will remain nevertheless always hidden and unknown to him does not change thereby. He sits up in the airstream on an artificial machine, moved by unknown machine operators, and sees the natural world rushing past him only from a distance. He is isolated and only moves from one machine to another at night. – And so it went on with me for a long time. But now, after years of waiting, no other train came. Should I be on the way to the materialistic-capitalistic terminus to wait there for my own end?
I was still living in my student apartment and, among other things, I gambled away a lot of money on the stock market. There was more than enough money and gambling away was made easy for people thanks to the then newly emerged Internet stock market trading. It was clueless actions to do anything to somehow get my life time around without being able to follow the usual reassurance rituals of consumption, possessions and status, as these left me even more clueless. You have to do something with your money, right? Half-hearted attempts to increase it. If it went wrong – as it always did in the end – it didn’t matter.
I now had this job that I was supposed to have. I now had the money I was supposed to earn. I was a good and responsible employee for whom the job was not life’s work, but at least „interesting.“ Okay. Now what?!
After years of waiting, I was forced to make a decision myself(!). I had to leave the moving train without another one being ready on the parallel track. Without the system offering me another of its alternatives. So I finally discussed this issue with my partner Charlotte – she said, „You’ve wanted it for years – It will be good if you do it now.“ And so I jumped – with an even more daring leap – from the roof of the rattling train onto the silent and still nightly plain. – I rolled off. It had happened. I had not hurt myself. The train had rushed past me and, with dusty hands still kneeling on the earthy plain, I could see its red graduation lights fading in the darkness. Did I still hear an amused farewell mare (Or did the whistle sound different? Like „IDIOOOOOO-T„?) in the balmy, thyme-scented night air? Then I heard nothing more and everything was silent. The stars were resplendent above me, I stood up, knocked the dust from my clothes and was happier than I had ever been in my life. I had quit my job. My boss still said, „I already suspected something like this.“ He thought I would want to „improve“ myself professionally. My parents and friends couldn’t believe it.
This happened four years before the call came to me and I had not the slightest idea how to proceed from that point. No planning, no prognosis, no concept… – – I’m thinking right now: Maybe the call did hit me back then and not four years later. Before my decision to quit. Just quietly and powerfully hidden. Not so obviously recognizable in the glaring fireworks with which our mind stuns our consciousness every day. Maybe much, much earlier. Maybe already at the beginning of my life. Maybe even before that… In any case, the decision to jump off the train was not a mental one. Without planning, prognosis and concept it could not have been a head decision. There was too much trust and security involved. And far too little fear…
The path first led me to the people. With a college friend (the one with the T-shirts) whose employer had just gone bankrupt, I took over a corner pub. We had retired to a cottage for two weeks to plan our future. We didn’t come up with anything better than a pub. You can see the last sentence ironically or not. „Eat, drink, talk, fellowship,“ those are the basics of human togetherness, I thought to myself. „That’s where I find the human being,“ something else deeper inside me thought perhaps. Behind the thoughts, perhaps so. In any case, beyond our apparent attempts to „plan“ our future.
The work was exhausting and not lucrative. I was a mixture of confessor, news agent, life coach, chauffeur, conscience, technician, solo entertainer, lawyer, judge, peacemaker and social worker. I enjoyed it, unlike my college friend. I guess you have to love people to be able to listen equanimously to the same stories for the hundredth time from the only guest for several hours on a godforsaken Monday night for an hourly wage of the equivalent of 40 cents. Or to deal with rockers, thugs, convicted manslayers, pimps, fences and thieves, hooligans and teenage neo-Nazis, who were also part of big city life at night and occasionally found their way into our guest room. There were never any problems. Even when I had to expel them from the pub. I would not have been a physical match for any of them. I said to Charlotte at the time, „I couldn’t do all this if I didn’t always recognize something good in each of these people. Everybody has something good in them. „- – My inner ears slowly began to hear something again after they began to recover from decades of rattling from the iron train. I just didn’t know it at the time. – Perhaps I was aimless at the time, but at least I was no longer perplexed, for many things were already being quietly and almost inaudibly revealed to me on a soul level. But perhaps I was not yet aware of my real aimlessness. I walked in the plain still beside the old tracks. Out of habit and, yes, because I did not know it yet differently. Because I had never been taught otherwise. Or rather: Because I had forgotten what I had been taught in my childhood.
So the time of the corner pub came to an end after three years. My friend and I had fallen out completely and continuing the business was out of the question. He was burned out and with the nerves at the end and I also felt that it could not go on for me so. So we went our separate ways and I, still following the old tracks on foot, went into business for myself as a management consultant in my previous line of work. I felt the regression in it and I felt my anxiety before what was to come. Three years had passed and I had not yet arrived anywhere again. On the contrary. I seemed to run out of options and did what seemed easiest in this world: pursue my learned profession and thus re-enter it. But I didn’t want to do that at all! – I wasn’t just walking along the tracks now, feet still on the level, I was walking on the tracks now. Stumbled over the sleepers and the planks, which were made for iron wheels and were not the sidewalk for a human being.
The price war in the consulting business was murderous. Especially for a newcomer. Financially, there was even less left in the end than as a host. Charlotte contributed most of the money for our living with her work as an alternative practitioner. Now that I was walking on the tracks again, I became perplexed again, because with my gaze following the tracks towards the horizon, the question of the destination arose again more and more. After the morning. And since I wasn’t using these tracks according to their construction and driving on them, but stumbling along on them on foot, it became existential. Fear came into play. I could neither be free nor numb myself with a financially secure position in materialistic society. Half a thing. Half-measures don’t work. Not on any level. I still had to learn that.
So another year passed and it was a year in gloom. My mood became depressed. I could not go back and I saw nothing where I could go forward. My strength dwindled and I was worn down by the iron rails and the oak planks.
I didn’t know yet that I should have just gone out into the plain. In a wide arc away from the rails and their straight and iron path. And if someone had told me then, my consciousness would not have believed him. It would have been only words and thoughts. What lay behind them, I would not have been able to grasp it yet. Too much I was still arrested in the five senses and chained to the mind with its ideas of time, space and goal. My soul sense was not yet opened far enough. My consciousness had to give it first again the attention which was due to it in order to be able to let its perceptions flow again into my existence.
And this happened exactly 10 years ago on November 30. Five days after my secular birthday, I experienced my spiritual rebirth. The event itself was quite mundane. As mundane as spiritual events sometimes appear and come into the world. On that 30th of November my wife Charlotte said to me: „Today there is a shamanic healing journey in Duisburg. I think it is time for you.“ I didn’t know what a healing journey was at the time, and I couldn’t even have spelled the word „shamanic.“ I looked up from my notebook slightly doubtful-skeptical. Charlotte said, „I’m inviting you.“ I said, „Fine.“ And a new star shone in the firmament of the night sky, and without realizing it I turned toward it and moved away from the yoke of iron and oak that lay beneath me. Sleepwalking, I followed its still silent light. I strode into the plain and instead of the arrow-straight path of the tracks, I began to follow the course of the stars. The stars that had been shining all the time in this mild and silent night smelling of thyme and that I had forgotten because I was sweating and stumbling trying to follow the iron path to the unknown horizon.
In the healing journey on that November 30, my soul sense was opened again and all the old knowledge about eternity and infinity returned. Not in my head. Not expressible. Rather as a formerly hidden part of my existence that now became perceptible again. It was time. The divine forces had waited until it was time, in order to reveal themselves to me then fatefully and to receive me again with itself. The prodigal son. At the end of that evening I was as if struck before the head. Something unspeakable, something inexpressible had happened and the next day I knew that this was the revelation, the homecoming, the return. I knew what I was missing and what I had been thirsting for for decades. I searched for a teacher in the weeks that followed. Completely helpless and ignorant of how such a thing should even proceed. With this sha-ma-nish stuff. But I found him and with him I learned about shamanic healing and consciousness techniques. I took this path, because this way of gaining knowledge offered itself „in my“ „opinion“. After all, it was a shamanic healing journey that had brought me back into contact with my soul knowledge. The path seemed to have been paved for me in some way. In January I started. By April, I had learned everything I needed. I did not want to become a shaman (if you could say that I had anything to want at all at that time), but I was looking for access to the soul world. Everything was there as it had always been like this. Nothing was really new and I was in a state of inner ecstasy. Throughout. I didn’t need anything more. The path was within me and I wanted to walk it. I rejoiced: finally a means to bring healing to all those whose legs are broken by iron and wood. To make them see the course of the stars and free them in their own divinity. And I was angry. Why is our soulfulness kept hidden from us? Why isn’t this taught to children as early as kindergarten? The access to their soul? Why are people crushed in loneliness and not made into whole beings, when the knowledge is there? Where it is so simple!
I had a fever around 40°C for a week during this process of finding my way and sweated out all the liquids several times. After that I was a non-smoker. I learned in my fever trances that my body is a temple to be cared for and not destroyed. I got hellish back pain that lasted for several years. It was as if the higher power had grabbed me by the spine and didn’t want to give me a chance to label this happening as a crude episode of my life and look for a nice cozy and safe office job again. Old fairways were no longer allowed. No more half measures. From that point on, never again. (Do you know how hard that can be? No more compromises?) I cried in pain sometimes in the years to come and I could often barely sit or lie down. But I knew who it was coming from and I accepted it. Mostly.
And I thought of practicing. With what was in me, I wanted to help the burdened. Perhaps heal the world of my father and mother instead, who themselves have been so damaged in their lonely struggles. To give back to all the lost children what is their birthright: Their knowledge of their soulfulness! Their wholeness!
But I did not practice. Not permanently. The treatments I did were successful. Amazing things became visible. My soul moved through time and space in search of the lost parts of people’s souls, but as much as I had been able to get along with the most diverse people on the most diverse levels as a host at that time, I was unable to do so in the time after my return home. My consciousness was filled with the greatest holiness. A holiness that simply could not be grasped by „normal“ members of our material society to the same extent (and in the corresponding spiritual way). It hurt me so much when people came and were only looking for something exotic or wanted to have a look at what I was doing, who did not understand what it is actually about (the spiritual healing from all earthly burden! The return to God! The fulfillment of life with meaning! Unity! Clarity! Salvation! That’s how I felt.) who wanted to discuss things that were not discussable or assessable…. and I despaired of people, because we were suddenly infinitely distant from each other. In this perception of the holiness of life and action, no one could follow me and I, to whom everything was so clear and simple before my eyes, thought everyone had to hear it and – above all – grasp it immediately. It was so simple and holy and wonderful! We are all saved! It – is – all – true! So it happened that I had to give up almost all my friends, because what should I talk about with them, if not about the divine power? Not the right thing for a collection of consumerist materialists or rock music listening nihilists. No judgment at all. Our state of consciousness is what it is. Our influence on it is limited. Also mine. I simply could not talk about anything else at that time. Just as my friends had not been able to grasp this. „It’s not a cult, is it? No? Well, that’s the main thing.“
So I stood there with my God-experience – because that had been it, as actually now after ten years only became clear to me. Only now there is room for such unnecessary analysis and naming of the event at that time – and despaired only more. Why was this immeasurable gift given to me, which I could not use salutary with the afflicted people?…
At that time, despite this all-changing experience of divine power, I was still looking for a goal. An earthly one. The way I had been taught. The way we have all been conditioned. – Now I had glimpsed a microscopic glimmer of light of the divine behind ten thousand veils out of the corner of my eye, and yet I was still not free.
So the gloom of meaninglessness and helplessness returned in another form. For several months I spent my days in the woods in contact with the spiritual world, asking for the chance to act, to work. To heal and to create a sustainable existence for myself. This material desire for permanent security also played a role – at that time. Learn. was one answer. Wait. was the other. These were the only answers I received to this request. Again and again. It was too early for me to develop activity. Much too early. I didn’t know it then. What did I know then… (What do I know now…) So I learned all that was communicated to me and despaired because I could not become active in a healing and economic way. If I had known then how much too early it was to act and how long I should wait, I would have lost all courage. Too much and too often I probably still thought back to the familiar straight track with its unknown destination. Had in spite of everything still too much head and too little soul in my consciousness. Too much fear of the future and too little knowledge of infinity and eternity.
One night in this time of second despair, a book was announced to me in a dream. A wisdom book with short paragraphs on each page. This was followed by another dream about a marketplace where I was the first to set up my stall early in the morning. No one was present in this square except me, and I knew nothing about anything. When I woke up, I was disappointed because I was not told the name of the book and did not think about it further. That day, my wife and I had ended up at a flea market absolutely „by chance“ and despite completely different plans, and there the dream came true. The book fell into my hands at the only booth with a box of books. I was frozen. A wisdom book, the text divided into small sections, like in my dream. I got into conversation with the booth operator (She asked me if I wanted a chair. Then I could read the book directly at the stand. That was meant sarcastically. I must have stared at it for too long, stunned.) and she told me how she had been the first to stand alone in the square that morning and none of the organizers of the flea market had been there. It was a retelling of my marketplace dream! Everything was now clear. The book was the I Ching. It was completely unknown to me and was supposed to cost one euro. I took it with me!
I now studied the I Ching, the Book of Changes, and all pain and despair fell away from me. I understood (in the end mentally and not necessarily in the mind) that I had run in old blindness and material conditioning after head-made goals and had neglected thereby to include the natural change, yes, to recognize it as the basis of all happening. If I cannot act, then it is not time to act. If I am to learn, then it is time to learn. Very, very briefly. And so peace returned to me and I accepted the path that was destined for me and I began – still bumpy and with many setbacks – to trust in fate, in God. The I Ching was announced to me and then given to me. I was so full of joy and love for the one who held my hand and led me through the darkness into the dawn! If I have to learn now, then I just learn and don’t make any lofty do-gooder thoughts of saving humanity in a spiritual practice with good turnover. Your will be done.
At that time, signs upon signs were offered to me.
It was as if a higher power was doing everything to ensure that I did not deviate from my path. Signs that also convinced my sometimes still doubting and security-needy mind and left him no choice but to surrender to the guided events. The soul journeys with their almost unbelievable results had convinced him already so far that the way must be probably absolutely true, but whether it must be gone now so without all safety belts, of it he was not yet completely convinced. (The question of the existence of signs is difficult for many people to accept or believe, but my experience today has taught me that especially people who are in a state of spiritual upheaval, as I was at that time, receive more signs and indications. With the time it subsides again a little bit. These signs are clearest indications and clearest coming together of events of the most different kind. It is not so that one simply pays more attention to certain things and they are then more noticeable. The world is really changed for someone who is in a distinct spiritual borderline state. He is in resonance with all of creation and out of that oneness, the clues for him are born into the world. )
We had to leave the city where we had lived for 20 years. Their listlessness and hopelessness resonated with us and we were also caught up in the gloom that was there. Charlotte found a cottage for us. In a forest settlement in northern Germany. It was announced to us via many signs and then quite clearly identified as the place where we were to dwell. 50sqm with stove heating, single glazing. Not insulated. 2000sqm of forest land on a leasehold basis. I spent the first time there alone. I had to renovate and Charlotte was still running her practice in Dortmund. Very strongly I went in connection with the formerly there living people. I found stone age artifact after stone age artifact and learned and learned from the knowledge of our ancestors. That is why we should be here. The place and our ancestors had called us here. I almost lost myself there. Lost myself in the spiritual existence. Almost disappeared in the forest as a being, which was relieved of any relation to the material questions and worries of the people. But that was not allowed to me. I had to remain a human being. And to remain human means to remain with the people. So I had to decide consciously and did not spiritualize. I continued my way in the service of people and their healing. Without doing much. Through pure being. Through existence. A difficult exercise, when our mind always wants to do something.
In the beginning, just when I was finally about to give up all leadership, Pia, our Romanian street dog came into our lives. Led. Pia is a strong dog. A born leader in a dog world. Mercilessly unyielding in the natural laws she carries within her. Towards everyone. No matter if dog or human. She could do nothing with the human world. It had remained alien to her, as if she were on a foreign planet. She was like a wild deer and sat in the animal shelter for three years. Completely withdrawn into herself. Completely absorbed in her roots. We couldn’t unleash her for half a year. She would have simply left. Away from the stranger and back into her unity, on which she could rely. So she challenged me. Challenged me to be clear. To be her leader. To be the leader she felt her natural strength required to inspire her confidence. So instead of being able to finally give leadership, I had to become the leader of a very great leader. And so I learned from her truths that would have been worthy of a Dao Master. So I learned from her and from the ancestors the unmixed, the unthought truth. The teaching without words. – – Should the suspicion arise that I, as a dog lover, had just gone a little overboard now: You would not be the first who had this thought. But if these skeptics were then confronted with Pia, then they stood perplexed and confused before her and had to admit how incomprehensible this creature is. Not the dog one imagines… Aloof, leader, pharaoh… these are just a few terms people used to describe their feeling in her presence. One also called her „psycho dog.“ She didn’t come to him when he wanted her to. On the contrary. She always politely moved half a meter away – just an arm’s length – when the man approached her. Too autonomous for his taste. Too determined and too self-confident. She calmly and with little effort – simply by taking a few quiet steps – had absolute control of the situation. Natural wisdom.
For nine years we lived in this place, in this house. A place of silence and retreat. Forest is earth, is the mother, is the supporting and the nourishing. We were good with all the neighbors. We never took sides and were not too close with anyone. So we could be there for everyone without having to cut anyone off. I earned some money on my own and Charlotte also reduced her activities to a great extent. Each year we needed less money. We could never believe, when we looked at our tax returns, how little money we had made and yet had no problem making ends meet. We were close to welfare level financially. And we provided for ourselves and our two dogs – Sunny joined us after seven years – with organic food, had two cars and lived a reasonably normal and, above all, happy life. Because we did not work much, we had received something very valuable. And we could give this treasure to the people around us: Time. We could always be there. Whoever needed our help could have it. A dying friend could call us when she was in deepest fear and we could be with her at any time. It didn’t matter if it was morning, noon or night. Necessity dictated our schedule. Not the capitalist wheelwork that demanded the human being completely and utterly, with skin and hair and every second of life, for its own purposes. We always had a sympathetic ear when neighbors came by and each described his version of an „incident.“ We always tried to balance things out. We never took sides. So we served the people and were simply. We blessed in silence. That was our job. To be and to give this being to the people. Unconditionally and without judgment. In love. In unity.
After four years, I felt that our time in the forest was coming to an end and that we would soon have to leave the place, since it had given us everything to come to it for. I was ready and Charlotte was not. So we still stayed, because if we had not left in unity, we would have fallen into complete chaos. If one goes in fear, then he is in the head. If it is in the head, then nothing whole can grow out of it, because the inner knowledge and the confidence in the power are missing. So five more years passed until Charlotte said, „Now I feel it, too. The time here is over. Someone else must now take over this place and we must get out of the forest and back under the sky. Now I can go. “
I had felt the halfway point then. The cycle at its highest point. The first four and a half years of the cycle had been over. The movement began to regress. Another four and a half years later, the circle had completed itself. Everything happens at its own rhythm and time. Waiting. Learning. Knowing. Waiting.
We put the house on the Internet and after 48 hours it was sold. At a price that was three times the former purchase price. I think that was one of the few times I „succeeded“ in such a „money deal“. But it was a difficult act. There were four firm interested parties and we had to turn down three of them. All people who felt this place, who resonated and who realized what they could get here. There was disappointment, sadness and also some anger. It was bad because this place had never been made to inflict pain. What had happened? This place is a soulful being and by selling it or offering to „buy“ it, we made it a thing (as if it „belonged“ to us!). To an object on which people have directed their desires, their longings and their hopes for healing. I don’t want to experience something like that again, but it was a lesson to see how something pure of soul could become a source of pain through the mechanisms of materialistic capitalism. „Probably the right people will come and they will have no money and we will have to give them the house then.“ we joked several times in the run-up to our tour. After those 48 hours of selling the house, I wasn’t sure we shouldn’t have done just that. But there was also the money we „needed“? (or not?…).
We did not make it easy and sold the house to a young couple with two children. Not least because I had previously dreamed of them. A new generation that will continue to animate this place. To whom the place will make new demands and who will perhaps tell them different things.
We now had no idea where to go and two months to get our affairs in order. We gave away our furnishings to neighbors and, not knowing where to go, we stored the rest with friends in the basement. There wasn’t very much left. So we knew we had to move and, by magic, there was a big old motor home on the side of the road with the terse handwritten note „For Sale“ on a piece of paper in the side window. It was the right size for two people and two dogs and had the perfect layout. I knew the old man was hiding oodles of defects from me, but it didn’t matter. We had to buy this motorhome, paid the price and took it. There were tearful goodbyes the day we left and we almost didn’t get to drive. We had not been aware of how much we had arrived in the hearts of some people. After all, we had never been so close to the individuals. „Courageous“ was the word that almost everyone used and I believe that through this act of once again leaving everything behind without compromise and only trusting, something was set in motion there again in many a person. Not to persist out of fear, but to act in clear trust… To entrust oneself to the guidance. Listen to the soul’s voice and be active in the meaning….
Now we are four weeks on the road… and the place is left behind. Forgotten almost. We are on our way and await what will come to us. Here I sit now, writing the last sentences. The sentences that will be the beginning.
This is where the story ends – for now. Because in truth it never ends. And it never began. – And in a different way, with a different tenor, it begins anew in the next chapter. What follows is what I have learned during these years. What I have been told during these years. What I was able to attain because I became silent and learned to listen with the inner ear…… I wish that it can serve you on your way.
With love to you readers.
September 2019
10 February 2022
Now the book has still not reached you, my dear reader.
Much has happened, in the world, in the last two and a half years. The election campaign in the US, which has once again highlighted the insane state of the Western capitalist systems and the desperate disorientation of the people within them. Corona. Another rude hand tearing away the cosy blanket from the modern materialist civilisations that had made themselves so comfortable in blind complacency and leaving them, abruptly awakened from their plastic dreams, bitterly freezing in reality. Climate change, the end of the world, is the big issue. And the greedy capitalist dead huckster souls‘ haggling way of dealing with it.
I left the forest to find out if my findings can stand up in the world outside. They can. That is what I have experienced. The inner realisation of the many years in retreat coincides with what is happening in the outer world. It is as if the extreme events of the last few years had been used to focus a magnifying glass on the state of the world, showing it to people on a scale that cannot be overlooked. They only have to look and then understand what they are actually seeing.
As for me, apart from – or perhaps not apart from – the world events, I was sitting in my armchair yesterday and if I had had a revolver, I would have gone into the bathroom and shot a bullet into my brain without hesitation. But I’ll get to that later. It was a remarkable event, but all in order:
October 2019. Shortly after I wrote the above introduction, Charlotte and I parted ways. Only on the outside. Only for a time. And in love. After realising that our transformation could only happen if we each sought it alone for a while, Charlotte departed with the dogs in the car and I was left with the huge ancient derelict battleship of a motorhome.
Charlotte travelled from holiday home to holiday home. From friends to friends. I drove through Germany. Without time. And without space. Without a destination. Without a reason. Without substance, really. For six weeks.
We met again in mid-December near Nuremberg for our brother-in-law’s birthday. And after that, following a vision, I travelled to Portugal. To the Atlantic. For four days I listened to its oceanic rumble, its roar, its hiss, let myself be hypnotised by its eternal forward and backward. Its eternal give and take without ceasing. And on New Year’s Day 2020, the Atlantic had told me everything and released me, I drove back to Germany in a hurried forced march. To Thuringia. Far out into a village in the Schiefergebirge mountains. And there I spent the first four months of the pandemic on a manor. Charlotte joined us and we were reunited.
The reason for our stay was a pastor friend who, left to her own devices, needed help moving to a new pastorate.
The manor belonged to an acquaintance of hers. We spent beautiful days in almost princely luxury by our standards. And since we didn’t know where to go, we stayed there for the time being. Far, far away from the confusion that the virus brought to the world with each new day. We now had the wide sky above us. The long longed for, the long awaited. And we were glad we had the money from the house sale. Otherwise everything would have been very, very hard. As hard as it was for many others at that time.
One of Charlotte’s friends fell ill, had a pulmonary embolism and was put into an induced coma. She has spastic paralysis and is confined to a wheelchair. Charlotte went to see her in the city, the city we had left 10 years earlier, and sat by her bedside for a fortnight. Until she was woken up from her coma again.
Charlotte discovered a new flat. First for transition, for the time with her friend, and then when I moved in, permanently. An old bungalow. On a large and overgrown self-catering property that, once in the middle of fields, now adjoins an even larger development of terraced houses. Separated from it only by a two-metre wide pavement. A strange contrast.
I wanted to go into the city, to test myself and my insights. That came true. Charlotte had wanted a house with a nice big glass front for a long time. That too has come true. The one room we now live in has a continuous, draughty glass front in wooden construction. With a view directly onto the pavement. The property is very reminiscent in its wildness of the one we had left seven months earlier. So the wishes come together in sometimes the most wonderful way.
The owner passed away last year at the age of 96 and the six children are now having the property foreclosed on because they cannot reach an agreement. It will probably all be demolished. And levelled. We know that we can only live here for the foreseeable future. We are curious about what will come then.
And what was there to report apart from the geographical aspects of our further journey through life?
In the city, people experience that they can be lonelier among people than they would be alone. That is one of my perceptions in the city. One of the first. But it is not mine. It is that of the many people around me; only perceived and expressed by me.
All of us are connected. All of us feel everything. Some more strongly, some more weakly. Nothing we think, nothing we feel comes only from us. Nothing of what I have written is mine. It comes from the ether. From the cosmic wind that makes us all sway back and forth like grass on the vast plain in harmonious unison and rhythm. Sometimes calmer and sometimes more chaotic. This is a fact that can be experienced if the human being directs his gaze to the burning glass and is prepared to recognise what is presented to him there as knowledge.
As a young person I did not know why I sometimes suddenly became sad. I always looked for the external cause. Everything was actually fine. I never found it. Today I know: it was my parents‘ pain that overwhelmed me – hundreds of kilometres away. It was their existence in senseless remoteness; their suffering that they could not alleviate.
Not so many years ago, I thought the people I heard of who were struggling because they would feel everything and everyone so clearly were almost certainly hopelessly out of their depth. Until I realised that it was the same for me. That my perception of the world also consists of the perception of these countless little threads that connect everything with everything else. With this realisation, there were no more open questions for me. I realised that these connections are important. That they are meant to be. Today, this perception of others is normal for me. If people come up to me, call me, I have already felt their pain the day before, the day they decided to call me. Are they in fear or anger or exhausted. I already know. Have experienced it first hand. Am I suddenly incredibly powerful and full of vitality, someone calls me and tells me about their plans, their new life. It is his power, his blessing that has flooded me. I suddenly sing funeral melodies and later learn of the death of a relative. I dream and am in touch with others, dreaming parts of their lives. Later they tell me their experience and I smile, because I already know. After all, I was there with them. I want to cry with emotion as I write this. Not only do I want to. I do. Because it is so infinitely great. This connection is so infinitely great and it is healing and it could be so much more healing if man were aware of it. He could leave his prison that keeps him in futility and fear of death and loneliness.
Trump, conspiracy theories, alternative facts, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Corona, fear, lies, mistrust, measures AGAINST, open fear of death, disinformation, steering with violence and fear, resistance, fear, coercion, climate change, haggling, talking and tricking and opinions, opinions, opinions and ludicrous hole words of solidarity and community in the capitalist single struggle. Experts, studies, scientists, models, statistics. And buy, buy, buy, Amazon, ebay, buy buy buy. Electric cars with four exhaust pipes. Men dressed like schoolboys. All in front of their phones. All stunned in the face of the madness this world is crashing into. All just function, all just dead machinery for merciless capitalism. Repressed despair. The desire to only scream. Without ceasing. And no hope of salvation. No salvation in this hopeless plastic world. Hunger. Insatiable hunger. For meaning. For love. For the mother.
I experience THAT in the city. In my own body. Day by day. And I don’t have to see or speak to anyone for that.
In the beginning, back then in deep silence in the forest, consciously swaying in the cosmic wind, I realised to my surprise that soulfulness and materialism – thus also capitalism – are not compatible. Realised, truly amazed, my development into an anti-capitalist. Recognised the necessity of turning away from the capitalist system and turning, yes, towards a, a kind of, ensouled socialism, or something similar.
What I wrote then about capitalism was still full of bewilderment, filled with a sudden sorrowful recognition of the inhumanity embedded in this system. Today, in the city, in the focal point of historical events and in the focal point of people in capitalist captivity, delivered to this perception of all that confusion and all that suffering and all that loneliness, the words I draw from the cosmic swing are no longer surprised and sorrowful. They are like capitalism and like the people who struggle to survive in it. Partly full of rage. Partly raw. Partly full of endless pain. It is the cry of those who can no longer cry out. It is the warning cry of those who can no longer utter it themselves. And they cry out: „Back away! Go another way! This one leads to ruin. This one leads to infinite suffering and then to annihilation.“
A week ago, in a deep trance, a man with a white beard approached me (not God, no, no. No laughable clichés please). In his hand he held a steel carpenter’s hammer. And with this hammer he suddenly hit me twice in the skull with all his might. I groaned. Perplexed, frightened.
The next day things went downhill. The pain came and flooded me. Hour by hour it got worse. The senselessness drowned me in its black bitter waters. Still I could look from the outside: The old man with the hammer. With the first blow he knocked away the protective armour I had put on myself over the last two years in the city. And with the second blow he opened my inner gaze wide again.
This suffering! This endless suffering in this soulless world! The people. So abandoned. So lonely. So desolate. So senseless. And they could be so great. If only they could live their wholeness!
So, after days of increasing darkness, yesterday came. And there was nothing more I could have wanted in this world. All despair was upon me. And all I wanted was to die.
(Addition 2023: It was the eve of the Ukraine war. The first truly life-threatening situation that Western society has been exposed to in over 70 years – and still is. The fear of a nuclear escalation into which humanity could be torn and destroyed by irresponsible and uncontrollable political action. It was this maximum fear and this maximum collective pain that I perceived so overwhelmingly within me. Which had caught me completely unprepared. I did not know at the time why this unspeakable suffering was happening to me so suddenly).
I told Charlotte and she cried.
Sometime during this very darkest night of my life so far, I feel the need to hear a mantra. Chanted by a truly holy man. I knew it. But never actually heard it. Now I had an unquenchable thirst for that sound.
And I sit and I hear his voice. And all sorrow falls from me. All burden falls from me. I become light. I am blessed. I am back in my senses. I weep with happiness and with gratitude. Gone is every shadow. It took twenty minutes. Twenty minutes from deepest depression to the highest heights of meaning. Twenty minutes when your consciousness is flooded with the power of love! That’s all it takes! That was the answer. I was to experience this for the last time.
I go to Charlotte and say: „I am redeemed. Nothing clings to me any more.“
And so I can sit here today and write these words.
Hell is a collective work of people in materialism. Lonely and blinded by the materialistic dogma of the meaninglessness of all existence and without consciously wanting it, they tear themselves and the world deeper and deeper into it. Paradise is a collective work of people who – still – feel their soulfulness. Without knowing it, they save the world. It is consciousness. Everything is consciousness. It is up to the consciousness of human beings whether they will freeze to death in hell or whether they will walk in the balmy warm wind of paradise in peace and meaning.
In order to write these words, the old man with the white beard has cleared my skull. This I was to see and this I was to share. Then the Ukraine-war came. My despair had been a precognition.
From 2019 until today, I have continued to write. Again and again I put down and said, „That’s it now. There’s nothing more to say.“ And Charlotte laughed when I then sat at my desk again in the morning and wrote and wrote, trying to capture in words and images what the cosmic wind that moves us all has allowed to flow so wordlessly and imagelessly through the world.
If I compare my words of 2022 with those of 2019, I can clearly see the change my consciousness has undergone in the two years in the focus of materialism. I walk a fine line. Consciously chosen – or better: sent onto it by higher consciousness. The ridge between the spiritual and the material. Between security and despair. On this ridge, held within, I look out into the outside. Always balancing, always attentive, always secure in the spiritual, so that it doesn’t devour me skin and hair in an unthinking moment. Not overwhelming me and driving me into pain and despair in dark abysses. – As almost happened yesterday on the narrow ridge….
A trapeze trick it is. A predator act. Calculated, but always on the edge of the abyss. Performed to experience what the leap over the abyss feels like, the grip on the swinging wood, the hot, greedy breath of the beast on my defenceless nakedness. To experience how to endure the fall without surrendering to the pain and becoming its will-less servant. Like the fear in the jump without despairing. How to endure being torn apart in animal rage without becoming a raging predator yourself, in blood-red panic fear of death, in hatred.
Experiencing all this without fear of pain and without fear of death. And then, above all, yes, only for this reason: to expererience how man, who, deprived of his knowledge of his soulfulness, has to jump and fight, can be saved from this arena of his senseless and lost existence in materialism. And then to reveal this way to him.
Someone will say: „We have been mastering these feats for a long time. That is how man first became what he is. The ruler of the world. We secure ourselves with ropes and with nets. We train every professional grip. A thousand times until we get it right. And facing the animal, we carry hidden weapons and concealed armour. Have three hunters hidden in the wings within firing range.“
And that’s the fear I’m talking about. The fear that defines life. The life that the materialist looks at and then shrugs his shoulders in perplexity. „That’s just the way it is.“ That is how he is conditioned. That is how he has accepted his half-life, his life of struggle, his life of suffering, as having no alternative, as ‚God-given‘.
But the healed man: standing on the trapeze tower. With eyes closed, this whole man leaps. Knowing that his grip will be powerful. And if he lets go, it is not because he is tired or clumsy. He lets go because he can do it without fear and because he wants to. And he does not fall into the abyss. He flies down to earth. Gently. He meets the animal with his spirit and both leave the barred training ground and linger in peace on the light green meadow by the river. They look at each other in friendship. In trust. Nothing is hidden there. Nothing is there to repel…. This is the life that man is entitled to and that materialism denies man. That is declared to him to be an unattainable illusion at which he is called upon to laugh heartily and disparagingly. For in this life, fear no longer has power over man, for he knows about himself and his life and his death. Yet he knows of eternal truths. And he is calm. And he is clear.
But because he is to remain in fear, the very thought of this life is made ridiculous and unattainable to him. The fear of the abyss, the fear of the beast, the fear …of death… stoked. By whom? Well, by whom…
Hell is a collective work of man under materialism. Lonely and blinded by the materialistic dogma of the meaninglessness of every existence and without consciously wanting it, they tear themselves and the world deeper and deeper into it. Paradise is a collective work of people who – still – feel their soulfulness. Without knowing it, they are saving the world. It is consciousness. Everything is consciousness. It is up to the consciousness of human beings whether they will freeze to death in hell or whether they will walk in the balmy warm wind of paradise in peace and meaning.
Let these be the last words…
And now to the beginning. Twelve years back. To the first groping attempts to grasp the cosmic wind, the imageless and wordless, and to transform it into image and word and to offer it to the one who will read these words, who will see these images.
One last jump before that. One last one. A very short one.
2023. On 1 January we left our flat in the city. The heirs were delighted. A house sells much better without tenants.
We moved in with a friend. Left everything behind again. Gave away even more. Stored even less. Soon there will be nothing left.
2022 was another year of new realisation. For a change, not from my own inner perception. It came from a man. From a man who had already been announced to me 15 years ago. I waited for him too. For 14 years. I had not mentioned him until now.
At that time, four weeks after my reawakening, I had a vision. The vision of a man who looked like Father Christmas and who had put the universe in his sack. He gave this sack to the Easter Bunny. This sounds a bit bizarre, but the vision took place shortly after Christmas, so the image of Father Christmas for a man with a white beard is not necessarily unusual.
Furthermore, I saw a man with a trident, sitting on a throne on a snowy mountain. I thought he might be Poseidon. But on a mountaintop? Well, yes.
He became my spiritual teacher. My spirit guide. I learned everything from him, actually. Later I learned that he was Shiva. The god of the shamans. The adiyogi, the first yogi. I had never heard of him before. Nor of his sacred, snow-covered mountain, the Kaylash.
Now the man with his white beard has come to me and the first time I saw him in person was Easter 2022. At an event organised by the global citizens‘ movement Save Soil, which he initiated.
It was Easter and he offered me the universe. He is a yogi. A guru (and that has nothing to do with common western prejudices ;-)). His name is Sadhguru.
He was announced to me 14 years ago and he has accompanied and taught me all these years in the form of Shiva, as the universal consciousness. All that I have experienced, he is now saying it in a more refined, clear and universal form. I guess I had to wait for him. Now I am following his path. After all, it is actually mine. Only I know it now.
2023. On a 19th of August, I am sitting here. For four weeks I have been on the road in my old high roof station wagon. Again I have given up everything. Even more. Even less stored. Just a few things left in a car.
Charlotte and I decided to go our separate ways two months ago. In peace. Consciously and not in conflict. A union is supposed to be for mutual growth. We found that ours no longer does that at the moment.
So I left four weeks ago. With nothing. Hardly any money. With no past. With no future. not knowing what will happen. I wanted to go hiking. It rains a lot. I’m in my car a lot. That’s good. Barren. Limited. Fasting. Recognise. Centre myself. Remain in clarity. Avoid being overcome by fear or loneliness. Not to be overtaken by ego.
Life is finite. The cosmos is so big. What is my life that I could spend it in fear? I will serve the cosmos. In selflessness. In trust. As I have always been able to trust and surrender.
Easter – 2022 – I asked for the old me to die. It dies. And what will awaken again. I don’t know.
In 2010 I began to write. All that I had experienced and realised in the previous two years had to be put down on paper.
For the simple reason that it became more and more and I couldn’t forget it. My head was full of nothing else. If I wrote it down, it got better.
2023. And I sit in Neuenbeken on the old plague cemetery and am now really allowed to forget everything. Everything. Nothing I know any more. Everything is now offered to the world on the website.
2023. Now I may die. Omkarnath, the keeper of the vibrations, may now go. Who will rise again? How shall I know. It will happen as it is destined. And I am a servant of life.