I was just thirty years old when Adi Da entered into my life so explicitly and with such divine vehemence. My life prior to that was marked by a spiritual search and by escapism from the challenges and the horrors of the world.
I ‘remember’ the events prior to my birth as I was pulled again into this reality of the physical-material existence, or more specifically, how my predispositions towards this world initiated the process of my reincarnation.
My future father was visiting the market fair at the time when my mother’s pregnancy was approaching. He was looking for a present for my mother at one stand and chose a sculpture of a black woman with her hair pinned up, beautiful naked breasts, a golden necklace and a golden bowl, that was firmly resting next to her legs. She was elegantly sitting on her heels, had bright red lips and was exuding a juicy eroticism. All in all, quite nice, aesthetic and kitschy - as one would expect from an object from a market fair.
The Shakti(1) or the form of energy that this particular sculpture so mysteriously epitomized for me, and my father’s desire to beget a child drew me to this couple, my future parents, and I ‘chose’ this family. This sculpture of the black woman that had radiated such an immense attraction for me in later years was sitting on our living room table, and the golden bowl was unfortunately used as an ashtray that had to be emptied every day because it was constantly overflowing. I always gazed at the sculpture with affection, loved its presence, hated the smell of the cigarettes and the dirty golden bowl and had no idea that one day many, many years later this sculpture would play an important role in my life. I regularly carried it to the trash bin and turned it upside down to get rid of the ash and the cigarette butts.
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(2) that affected all my physical cells as well as those of my mother. During the last phase of the pregnancy my mother was lying down for several weeks because she was facing a possible miscarriage and in danger of losing the child.
I wanted to interrupt this process immediately. I didn’t want to come back to this world and yet a power pulled me in a very mysterious way.
Shortly before the actual birth my mother dreamt the child’s name: Petrus. She told my father about it. He, at first shocked, later agreed and elaborated that the child should become a priest. In that way I received my vocation and my predestination – which I was never going to fulfill - even before I saw the light of day.
My parents didn’t impose any faith or any kind of religious teaching upon me. They were both affected by a ban from the Catholic Church, my father because of being divorced and my mother because she had married a divorced man and by bringing an illegitimate child into the marriage. They were both, in spite of the exclusion from the sacraments, very religious people. They went to mass regularly to churches outside of our village in order to be able to receive the Holy Communion ‘unrecognized’ by the local priest.
The earliest memories of my childhood are of cigarette smells – both my parents were chain smokers – recurrent anxiety attacks, the smell of alcohol, along with the affectionate voice of my father that meant love and comfort although he could also give a terrible thrashing.
The 2nd World War with its gruesome repercussions had impacted the family circumstances of my parents in such a way that their childhood and younger years were a sheer nightmare. My mother grew up with nine siblings in a large family. She had lost her favorite brother and her father in the war. Her father had refused to give the Hitler salute. He sympathized with communist ideas. He was sent to Dachau into a so-called education camp and died in the first years of the war in Poland. The family of ten was tormented by the most severe restrictions of the Nazi regime and denied any kind of support by the state. Two of her brothers came back from the prisoner of war camp with the most severe injuries. She herself experienced the war and the constant presence of soldiers as a permanent threat of encroachment and sexual harassment. As she gave birth to a child out of wedlock right after the end of the war it became a lifelong stigma for her. This circumstance was tantamount to a mortal sin in the rural Catholic setting. Even within her own family she was insulted and labeled a witch. Together with her older sister and her mother she had to provide for the rest of the family in the post war years.
She was an incredibly passionate woman, very attractive with long red hair and an irrepressible zest for life.
My father came from a respected and wealthy family from a small village at the foot of the Black Forest. When he was fifteen he was assigned to the front in the last months of the war and was severely wounded. He came back with wandering shrapnel and chronic pain in his body. He could never really settle down in his life. He had many jobs, adored and loved women, frequented the pubs and the dance halls and died at the age of forty-two in my mother’s arms. I was five years old.
Due to the unexpected death of my father my mother suffered a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. She continued to work on an assembly line in a factory and the shift work now divided our life into ‘early’ and ‘late’. ‘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.
After the sudden death of my father my life changed dramatically. Now it wasn’t just fear that was my constant companion but also aloneness. I had time to do everything – or nothing. Mostly I was spending time in the streets or in the woods. I ran, I had to run, I lived in a different, very energized world that for most of the people around me appeared strange or even crazy. There were no boundaries, neither regarding education nor the imagination. Via the power of my imagination I could hallucinate myself into any possible place and could envision just about anything in my mind.
All my actions contained a great deal of energy and passion, but rarely could I find rest, so I stumbled about as if driven. That caused my shoes to wear out at the soles or the seams were falling apart at a rapid rate and my mother had to buy new ones every two to three months. The record in durability for new Adidas shoes was two weeks. The energy shot out from my head and from my feet. What could I do? In the night during sleep I would feel how my body would lift up slowly as if it was rising up like a balloon. When I became aware of my floating body I would wake up and crash down onto the bed.
When I was six years old a luminous circle started appearing above my bed on a regular basis. It spoke to me, seemed full of happiness but also was quite insistent. It appeared whenever it wanted to, I had no influence over it. On one hand it made me feel happy but on the other hand it made me feel somehow pressured in a strange fashion. In later years I drew the connection between the light and Jesus, because this was the religious atmosphere that was surrounding me while I was growing up. However, both my aversion and my fascination remained. Why did this stupid light appear above my bed? What did that mean? I neither wanted to become a priest nor have any kind of so-called vocation. But I spoke to no one about it.
When I was nine I became an altar boy in our Catholic community. I loved the nuns when they were praying in devotion kneeling down on benches in the front rows, even though some of them looked like iron brooms and had withered faces. I sat in front in the chancel, red skirt, white shirt and red collar, squinted while looking at a candle and sank into the light of a bright star, which slowly rose in my inner eye and directed 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. I didn’t want to talk or to always repeat the same monotonous prayers. Only to sit there in silence and gaze – that was it.
Our