(The purgatorial nature of genuine discipleship)
The permanent failure of the supposed heros, during his or her trials by fire in the relationship with their masters, is often “esoterically-spiritually” transfigured, trimmed down for the public, so that no one is immediately put off or runs away in shock if true interest is aroused.
All Masters of genuine spiritual paths are also permanently exposed to this process, of a seemingly “crisis-ridden” life, in their function as Guru or Gurumai, when they act among their disciples or in secular and conditional world.
the Way of Heart-Master Avatar Adi Da, the Master unconditionally serves His disciples and ALWAYS demands everything from His disciples, really EVERYTHING! It is a constant and eternal purgatory, without a so-called “happy ending”, even in the face of the undeniable and irreversible Love-Bliss, the gift of the innate perception of the absolute and perfect Reality Itself.
the whole misery of egoic delusion, in all its tragedy, drama and ignorance, comes to light, is experienced, suffered, truly understood, and surrendered to the Conscious Light. We transcend not only our own egoic limitations, but also the egoic patterns of our apparent counterpart, for we also ultimately bear responsible compassion for this “other”. The higher the intensity of the Conscious Light, the darker the shadows that dissolve in surrender to the Heart-Master.
(The author’s first encounter with Adi Da)
Prologue Aham Da Asmi “Aham Da Asmi – Beloved, I Am Da.” Avatar Adi Da
I had recently started training as a psychotherapist, finally finding some peace in my desperate and extreme search for the Truth and with the experiences of my early childhood. This constant sense of being driven, the compulsive urge to want the world to be different than it was, the desire to run away from the challenges of daily life–all of this seemed to have exhausted itself. Deeply sobered and deflated I was staring blankly at the Bertoldsbrunnen, the central fountain of the university city of Freiburg.
The longer I listened the more I was overwhelmed with an attraction and a deep feeling of Truth and grandness which exceeded everything I had ever experienced in my life, in my endless search. Then doubts began to encroach.
The room was completely darkened, his image appeared on the screen. At this moment my perception of space and time disappeared. My body felt like a thunder went through it. Everything around me began to vibrate in a kind of fire. My heart shattered and was lost. A feeling of infinite and eternal love rushed into my body from above, yes, into my entire life, like a waterfall that had only been waiting for this moment and this opportunity.
That which has no name sat in front of me in human form and shape. At that moment I fell into this infinite love, I couldn’t grab hold of myself any more, I couldn’t think.
My friend Julia was coming towards me on the sidewalk. I still couldn’t stop reading. She looked at me: ‘Your eyes look like fireballs! What happened?’ I could hardly speak: ‘It’s just too incredible! Too overwhelming! I can’t talk about it right now!’
didn’t want to dream any more, or to feel, or to read any more. I panicked and shoved Avatar Adi Da away. Quiet. Distance.
The search had lasted too long, life after life, one drama piled on top of the other, the truth nowhere to be found, the happiness never perfect, always a remnant of dissatisfaction hidden in a secret corner of the heart.
His Loka and His Revelation of the Reality Itself go far beyond any of that. Happiness had finally found me, and everything that I had experienced and lived before was reduced to absurdity.
Chapter 1 The Search for God – Or The Fear To be Human
(Consumerism, spiritual searching, and the poverty of objects)
Everything becomes an object for a business transaction and for an alleged scientific research. Each event gets converted into material values, becomes subject to selfishness and to greed in form of consumerism.
Neither the search for absolute control over the material world nor the ‘holy’ way, via the spiritual quest to find the absolute truth, will ever be crowned by success.
Only the Truth exists – above all things – without any action on our part and without any kind of benefit having to arise from it. The Truth has always been free, not tied to any path or any point of view.
(Memories of incarnating and early spiritual sensitivity)
The signal or the impulse to again enter into the cycle of Being-Born-Again was initiated decisively by the simple purchase of this black sculpture. At some point, already months into the pregnancy, I suddenly realized that this hitherto unconscious process meant reincarnation. There was a momentary sudden vital shock that affected all my physical cells as well as those of my mother.
I didn’t want to come back to this world and yet a power pulled me in a very mysterious way.
‘Late’ meant we saw each other in the morning for breakfast and then not any more for the rest of the day. ‘Early’ meant we saw each other in the afternoon when my mother came home, exhausted and disheartened by the piece-work, and we could spend the evening together.
my awareness into a shining radiance. That was my happiness. I didn’t need more. I didn’t want to do any altar service, I was afraid of it and I found it weird and boring. I didn’t want to make any mistakes and thus catch grumpy glares from the priest.
Naturally, the priest intuited and felt that I wasn’t really interested in doing the altar service. And I on the other hand knew that he was jealous of my ecstatic condition, which I didn’t try to consciously create but was spontaneously drawn into.
(Ecstasy without a name, and the search that follows)
felt during mass I never really connected directly to Jesus. It was much broader, without any name or a person. It was the space itself that simply shone and radiated. It was happiness, infinite fullness, self-oblivion – and only the heart knew it was true. At the same time I was becoming arrogant and presumptuous when I became aware that the others were not able to perceive the same happiness. I let them feel it, especially the priest.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Eat up or throw up “And sorrow is the illusion of emptiness.” Avatar Adi Da
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I determined periods of fasting, then overate and threw up. Place and time didn’t matter. I was doing it everywhere.
What’s your name, what’s your country? “The Depth Is not in you, the Depth Is in Me.” Avatar Adi Da
(India, Vipassana, and the dissolution of the ego mask)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
(Breakdown in the desert and the discovery of love at the bottom)
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.
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.
Originally, everything is permeated by love. Everything. That is the only meaning of life. Love.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
Absolutely nothing had changed. The laws of the world were still the same as before. I could not escape them, not even through ceaseless meditation. I wept incessantly.
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 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.
My ‘Skirt’ Time “Not-Two Is My Characteristic. No-“other“ Is My Characteristic.” Avatar Adi Da
The smell of perfume and plastic was unbearable. The restless gray-blue coats and the business suits that were hurrying around just didn’t make any sense in my brain any more.
Are you Mr. Momo Pete? What a question. I nodded and laughed. You are not allowed to leave your pieces of luggage in a restaurant. And your passport has to be on your person at all times. I was back. This was definitely the western civilization.
I packed my stuff and walked away with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t tell these people that everything was impermanent and that death will also come for them one day.
My senses seemed to have become so refined that I could literally smell fear. I read clearly what was going on in other people’s thoughts. I saw their hidden emotions and I could feel if they had just had sex. Much of the stuff that people normally hid behind their social and acquired behaviors was like an open book to me. So I preferred to stay at home, did my daily Yoga and meditation practice and gradually settled down. I first made myself some new outfits, long and flowing.
The same was the case with the ancient Vedas, the religious scriptures of the Hindus. This was not my world, and something inside of me was rebelling, but I could not grab hold of what it was. All this was just too structured and too thought through – too cerebral. What about the heart and human love? When I was a child it was absolutely clear to me that I did not have to do anything in order to be happy or to just BE. Absolutely nothing!
However, the western world constantly demanded that happiness is to be found in objects and the frenzy of consumerism.
The books of Krishnamurti also had a calming effect on my psyche. They strengthened my conviction that I had already experienced everything that is important.
We would have sex with each other three to four times a day and we penetrated each other. I had no idea how much lust and horniness was hidden inside me and how wonderful it was to give oneself up and to be fucked in the ass. Heading back home after a few days, standing on the highway I felt like a lascivious whore, brimming over with horniness and lewdness from each cell. I felt that everybody was able to notice it immediately. As I had already found out on my spiritual quest: You become that on which you meditate, in my case right now: penetrate.
I expanded my daily Yoga schedule and learnt Tai Chi and Chi-gong in addition to it. I went for retreats two to three times a year to a recently inaugurated European meditation center, located in central France.
When the mind reaches a certain degree of quietness and the awareness scans the body, different kinds of sensations become noticeable in various parts of the physical body.
There is no sensation that is permanent, there is no good or bad. Everything comes and goes. Very often emotions, images or thoughts from the past are connected to these sensations. Everything that we have experienced is stored in the body and has its effect whether we want it or not: cause and effect.
When these sensations disappear deeper layers start emerging, experiences from former lives, memories, an array of possible new states and new sensations. And so it goes on and on and on. Every person who meditates naturally experiences his or her own individual process. Basically, this is the theory explained very simply. The period of time for the first layers of my sensations to dissolve became shorter and shorter. The body, and especially the spine, started to shake, releasing new sensations up to the surface.
My spinal column was gripped by incredibly strong energies, culminating during the meditation with the experience of a huge female snake, representing my own spine, spontaneously rising higher and higher. I could clearly feel and even see the snake as Shakti with shining silver scales, dark skin and shining black hair over her head, dancing in front of me for several minutes.
I was having doubts about this Buddhist path, which was, as I understood it, directed towards emptiness and was consciously avoiding and excluding everything that was evidently impermanent. These doubts of mine were mostly blocked out or repressed.
But I wanted to know exactly why and, in keeping with my character, I needed to persevere to the end.
Princess Julia “To be in a relationship is your cave.” Avatar Adi Da
(Love, ritual, and shamanic descent)
Meanwhile I had turned twenty-six years old. I had attempted to write a book during the months of winter, a debate on the subject of the patriarchal structure of our society, processing my bulimia and the experiences of my childhood.
And then, after all these years of abstinence there was also this strongly growing desire to feel the body of a woman, set aside and considered unimportant till now.
We made love into the month of May, under the twinkling stars, in the wet grass, under a red apple tree.
But, as so often in my life, without deliberating I spontaneously felt that fear was the original motivator behind all these actions, behind all these invocations and the beauty of the ceremonies. The knowledge of the mercilessness of the Universe is a fear that has to be mastered and controlled in some way.
Also in this tradition our utter helplessness has to be brought into a form and this seemed to be the main foundation for these rituals.
I looked deeper and deeper into a world that seemed endless until finally in each trance session only geometric shapes and a kind of multi-colored matrix appeared that seemingly kept re-creating itself forever. I did not want to be a shaman. I never wanted to be anything.
Parallel to the shamanic sessions I started taking sessions in Hakomi therapy and my life and living together with Julia took on tremendous intensity.
Death and the two spoonfuls of earth “And fear is the Visionary Mood of separatness. “ Avatar Adi Da
(Confronting death in the meditation hall)
The course began and I felt insecure. A premonition was crawling into my thoughts that all the previous meditation courses were merely child’s play compared to what was waiting for me now.
It felt as if there was a kind of an energy dome above the building, increasing in intensity throughout the meditation course.
Nonetheless I kept observing everything while feeling a strange weakness.
On the eleventh day of the course I was once again sitting in this chaotic energy flooding the formless body, in which there was no more distinction between inside and outside. In the middle of this nothingness I suddenly became aware of my right arm. On the outside of my forearm I felt an icy stirring that slowly started penetrating into my arm, or more exactly blew through it and then spread out within it like ice cold air. Suddenly I felt–death was here.
Buddha said: ‘Do not cry; do not be sad when this body goes. It does not mean anything and it will be reduced to ashes.’ These words were like a signal. Without me doing anything the cold wind of death returned. This time I felt how it began with the feet and slowly climbed higher into the body. Step by step, piece by piece. I lay there quietly, calmed myself down, observed it, but it went further and further. I imagined that if I did not do something now I would either go crazy or I would actually die.
I ran further away from the center and looking back saw that the outside walls of the building were dissolving and everything, all matter around me, was losing its solidity and was being pulled upwards like an inverted whirlpool. Everything, my body too, was vibrating in pure energy. All matter consisted of pure energy, but this insight was of little help to me in this moment. I ran further down the street, began to dance and to sing and to stomp on the ground, tong- tong, tong-tong, but everything remained in the process of dissolving. I called Kali, the goddess of death, with no idea of why I did so. I simply called her and she came. She materialized immediately right in front of me, gave me a few spoonfuls of earth to eat, spoke to me, put her arm around my shoulders, and walked me back to the center. In the dormitory, she rubbed my body with earth for a long time, then created a protective circle consisting of different beings and animals around me and told me to leave this place as soon as possible. Then she disappeared again, leaving only the protective circle behind.
All created in order to not feel the ever-present certainty of having to die. All just a consolation, an endless accumulation of futile effort. I looked into the early-morning faces of hurrying people and realized how everybody was completely aware of the reality of death but was relentlessly trying to escape from it. Behind the facades and the things that people created, the constant fear of death was hiding, and the people in the west were trying to chase it away through consumerism and the accumulation of goods of all kinds, and in the east through meditation and religion. I was not different from them. A deep bond, compassion and a feeling of oneness with all the people and things out there in the awakening villages flooded my heart. The world was hell, but strangely enough, I loved it even more.
At the time of my return from India, shortly before my departure from the mountains, Durga, the Mother Goddess appeared before me in a park. Seated riding upon a tiger, her statue was life-sized, displaying countless arms, sword in hand and with eyes that I could never forget. I left my walking stick with her. I had always loved her, and without even knowing it prayed to her in my deepest despair. She had accompanied me in different manifestations throughout my entire life, without me being remotely aware of it.
(Recognition of Avatar Adi Da as the absolute)
The reality of it flooded over me with such immensity that it would be futile to attempt to describe it. What happened came unannounced and without any kind of search. Immediately love, happiness, bliss, God as Such flooded into my life. Seeing Avatar Adi Da on a simple screen was enough. My being plunged into limitless satisfaction and bliss, the magnitude of which eclipsing everything, what the known universe has ever produced before. No words can describe it. The Truth itself had descended into the world.
It belongs to no tradition and is not owned by any group or any movement, neither is it a slave, nor a thesis of any dissertation or philosophical debate or analysis, let alone a science, nor can anybody put a copyright on it. It stands there Free, as it always has for all times. Although He has no name His name is Avatar Adi Da. And every individual person and the totality of all beings is this State. It has always been That. There has been nothing else, only That, only the Reality Itself.
What had I done? These revelations from Avatar Adi Da had come as a shock. I had betrayed my True Love and thrown away the gifts of my childhood.
How did Avatar Adi Da know all this? He completely took apart my Karma of the Eastern spiritual seeker and destroyed the subtle spiritual arrogance and secret hubris that this type of “holiness” brought with it. Avatar Adi Da’s Revelation of the Supreme Reality turned my life upside down and I consented freely and knowingly to it.
(Energy transmissions and the Master’s living presence)
Usually at dawn, while still in bed, I would suddenly notice a kind of helicopter-like rotational force that slowly and completely sank into my body, causing an incredible pressure. My breath would catch and I would feel a letting-go that amounted to a consent to death. Then the rotating vortex raced down into me, stopping at chest level and ebbing away, like a hurricane losing its force.
When I perceived normal reality again, I felt my energy system completely changed and rejuvenated, but I had no idea what had happened, nor what all this meant.
There was suddenly a thunderous blow into the water, as if a whale had raised its tailfin and slapped the surface.
I simply loved Avatar Adi Da, that’s all. His actual presence in the form of His all-blessing, spiritual presence seemed to me the most normal thing in the world.
All positive and negative behavior patterns have no meaning for our actual state, except to see the fact that everything arises from the self- contraction when seen from the radical perspective.
The Eternal Beloved entered the room and as He came in He looked in the direction where I was sitting. A clear, non-blinding column of white light fell into my body from above. This light had nothing to do with any kind of spiritual experience or mystical state. It was Avatar Adi Da Himself, and I, and my horror, ceased to exist. Later I could not even remember why I had been so full of fear before. My mind had been swept clean.
Should I actually activate my old “businessman pattern” again? As a stranded “wandering monk” who had not learned to walk on water, I would probably not get far in Fiji and would never get another visa.
Apeiri Katharsi “I Establish Myself As My devotee.” Avatar Adi Da
She had become even more airy and intangible and indefinable than in the past months. And what had actually happened between her and her former boyfriend?
One thing I had learned in my therapy training was that secret things emerge and show themselves when the place is absolutely safe and true trust is established. Nothing had to be forced or found out. Everything had its time.
A thoroughly toxic dependence on a man many years her senior who had manipulated, abused and exploited her at all levels. An ever-helpful “friend”. A flawless narcissist.
The man had made her completely emotionally dependent on him, using all kinds of tricks, and had also sabotaged our father-daughter relationship by the worst means, as she now told me.
But the All-Outshining light, rises only then, the ego-world destroys, if the heart humbly falls in the ignorant depths, at the holy feet to foretold Ruchira Buddha’s joys.
But only One Remains, forever, forever here. Forever DA! At self-centered misery, surrendering far and wide, uncompromising till the cosmic Mandala subordinates, subsides. For the very last time, the True Self in human form gives,
The Maha Purusha alone bestows the Seventh Stage Awakening, where it grows. True devotion, true life, in harmony blend. His Perfect Practice, His Field of Perception to transcend.