M/19/m

M1

I don’t know where to start, because I don’t know when it started, though I guess it started with my birth or even before? When I was seven or eight I wanted to be a caterpillar on carnival. When I got older I felt like one and I was longing to become a butterfly.

I felt, that something is wrong and a long search for truth started … now I have 36 times surrounded the sun on this planet and have not found my true state of being. Who I am? I don’t know and I feel deeply stuck. That’s why I’m writing you.

Right now I’m siting in a very small, old and simple wooden hut without electricity in the swiss mountains, half an hour away from the next village (by walking and cycling), where I help two or three days a week on a farm. There I have internet access and can charge this MacBook.

A few moments ago, I was sitting outside in the sun on a rock and was surrounded by nature – half cultivated, half wild – and reread the chapter about the archetype Ahab in your second book. (By the way, I read your books in german and german I speak) The thoughts the writings caused, aroused uncomfortable feelings in me. Ahab is so radical and the thought, to step into his footprints, makes me sick, makes me afraid. Why did I chose to come here and start a spiritual autolysis? Sometimes I wish I could burn your books and with them all the seeking to become true. Why can’t I just be normal and live a normal life? Why don’t I just continue painting and be an artist? Celebrate beauty, which is all over! I know, that it want work. I’ve tried it before, several times and every time, I fell out of this dream, I felt wrong and untrue, I felt like wasting life to create an illusion, an illusion of beauty. Instead of creating a medicine to heel the world, what I really wanted – thought I probably wanted only to heel myself! – I created a sleeping pill. No, thats not what I want … but find the truth? Do I really want that? You write, that nobody can want to find the truth. Must I become a ‘nobody’ to find it? I guess so and what does that mean and how do I get ‘nobody’?

Since five years I’m running around, in circles, working on farms, looking for other people, searching for answers, for a home, for an stable ‘I’, for a ground to stand on … and on this desperate search somebody told me about your books and last december I start to read ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ . The book accompanied me through a very troubling time and at the end of the year, all I wanted, was that somebody takes care of me, I was afraid to get insane and I was already looking for a clinic … two weeks later I was full of chaotic energy and alone in Berlin in a flat of friends, when I read the last two chapters of your book and suddenly it made ‘click’ in my head.

When I started to read your book, I first thought that your not enlightened for certain and I thought you ignorant and sometimes even a real asshole! Sometimes your words made me sick, because the possibility, that they could be true, was so frightening, so terrible in my own experience, that it just couldn’t be true … this Jed must be wrong or else the truth is a horror. But I continued to read and chapter by chapter I began to swallow your bitter pills! I took into consideration, that your words might be true.

I always thought, that something is wrong with me, that I was not able to live a life like the most people around me do or at least seem to do. I thought and even meant to feel, that I’m missing something … I felt hurt, handicapped, like Ahab – I read Moby Dick a few year ago and felt, that I was related to Ahab, but I wanted to be Ishmael, I wanted to be saved and not a monster!

Through your books, I started to realize, that this wound is not the problem, it’s not wrong, it’s rather a door to an other truth, far beyond common truth and that the concept of what I am supposed to be, my ideas of ‘I’ are wrong, this story of me, which I’m constantly repeating, thinking, creating … must die and not me as human being.

Well when it made ‘click’ there was suddenly a distance between … I don’t know how to call this new or old state of being and this ‘I’, named ‘Michael’. All my troubling feelings were gone, vanished in this inner space. No chaos anymore, just something like calm and peace and it really was like looking at myself or rather at this self, I thought to be and played all me life. It was like something woke up (but what?) and this being remembered oddly things, I meant to remember how it felt to be born into this body, into a body which didn’t react properly, which felt strange and way to small, like a prison. And I remembered, how comforting it felt to realize, that I or what ever I was, was not alone and that there was a world around this little body and that this world took care of it and so I slowly became this being, this Michael, how they called me and then this other and older state of being vanished … and now woke up again for the first time. It was not special, nor wonderful (that it is now, when I remember it, when I think about it!!!), nor anything else, I just ‘was’, tough even that sounds created! I don’t know what it or I really was at that moment.

But what I suddenly understood, was why all the zen-students in the zen-stories want to be tested by their teachers, if they really realized satori or just some other illusion! I wanted to know, if that was real or an illusion, true or false!

Since it lasted this clear only for a few hours and got smaller and weaker the following days … it fell asleep again and though I can somehow and very weekly remember it, it doesn’t wake up again. Why not? It’s like a closed door I was not aware of before and now I’m standing in front of it and can’t open it anymore. I miss the key and don’t know where to look for it. Already the next day I doubted it to be enlightenment and I was sure, that I’m not through jet and it was then, when I decided to spend this summer hear and finally start a spiritual autolyse. I have to know! Please help me to find out!

With that experience in the beginning of this year a lot of the chaotic energy and most of the drama vanished out of my daily life and the more time passed the more comfortable I felt in this new state of being … not a caterpillar anymore. I know, that I’m not a butterfly jet … rather in a cocoon-state, but only half dissolved. Stuck in the metamorphose … when I was a boy, I was chasing butterflies, killed them and collected them. Later i stopped killing them an try to rear them. Then to make, to paint something as beautiful as I saw them, to create something similar. And all the time I wished to be one myself, to be as beautiful and true! But I felt empty and wrong, heavy like a stone in a deep hole … and always thought, being enlightenment was something like being a butterfly, but did not realize, that the caterpillar must die, must be destroyed and that this process might be painful and not comfortable at all. Where do I find the motivation to continue this dissolvation or resolvation into …?

M2

As metaphor for the process of writing i choose a house, a city-house with several floors – i don’t know yet how many! The first door lead me into a flat of a messy. It’s full of books, newspapers and magazines … all I read and all I want to read. It’s terrible, each time I enter a bookstore, I would like to by books – luckily a don’t have a lot of money (actually always to less), else I would have even more books. I spent thousands of Swiss Franken for books and they have always been my friends and enemies, specially, when I had to move. They are heavy and each time I felt, that they like a heavy chain, which holds me back, imprisons me. So I started to bring some of them to antiquarian and kept only the most important ones. Still to many stayed with me. Why can’t I let them go. Often, when I felt their weight, I wished to burn them and very often I imagined that the house burns down.

This imagination always feels good, I feel free and I imagine myself going on a long journey – finally I would go, leave for an unknown place … Years ago I realized, that other people spend their money on traveling and I on books. Not only money, but also time. Though I love to travel – mainly in countries I understand the language – books seem to my the more secure value. They stay, they don’t change. Yes, I felt secure among books and the stories they tell.

A incidental remark: Do you know somebody speaking german I could write to? Because I am very slowly in thinking and writing in english. On the other hand it might be a good practice to be patient for me. I’m rather impatient and always want to be there, before I have even started. Yesterday I felt totally blockaded and I had to go for al long hike. I had to move physically, because mentally I was paralyzed. I took your book with me and read now and again and thought al lot hiking through a wonderful mountainside. Thinking and walking goes very well – to do it on a table is much more difficult. When I cam home in the evening, I wanted to write to you all about I have been thinking all day long … it was terrible. My head was full of thoughts, but its ability to translate them into english way to slow, so that I could not write at all. I almost exploded and felt terrible, like a little baby, unable to say, what it wants! Well today, I try to go step by step and write as good and slowly as I’m able – I have to look up a lot of words and for sure I have to get your books in english to quote you and to refer to your writing without to translate it back into english. Still, it would be much easier and maybe appropriate for me to write in german!

Back to the books. When I was a boy and started to read, the library was one huge treasure-house for me. I loved to read and the books were a great door into an other world. Now I realize, that it was manly an escape into a world, that could not harm me. I still went out and played with other children and got hurt, but the world of books was one full of magic and ‘real’ adventures! Why seem the written characters often more real than the existing ones? They are condensed and constructed and this way much easier to perceive for our mind … fiction is less complex, more primitive and predictable. It’s a product of the mind and made for other minds … not like the world. Though does the world exist at all? You write, that there is nothing like a world, only me and a endless nothing … and ignorance. But isn’t there a way more complex world around me, than I’m able to perceive? In all direction, where ever a look, touch, taste, hear, smell … the world is endless. With each step I take, another and more detailed world appears. Yes, the world appears with me, but can I really be this complex? You write, that all, that separates me from whatever, is the Ego, is ignorance. Does this mean, that this thought, that there is an world way more complex than me and any human being, is ignorance, then it creates a world outside of me, a world different from me and human mind. Does non-dualism mean,to be this world? A world only existing here and this very moment. One that is endless and therefore true, if truth is endless. And truth is actually all always right in front of me and I don’t realize it, because I think myself as separate of it, bound to my thoughts, my concept of being? If it is that way, then truth is very simple and to stay within this truth very difficult. How can I get rid of all my thoughts? By Katie Byron’s ‘The Work’? You write about burning them, bring light to them, illuminate them to get enlightened. My flat bursting full of writings is still there. Is the problem not the fact of their existence, but the way I think about it? The value I give them, the feelings I connect to them? Is there a difference between traveling and reading a book? There seams to be one on a physical level, but not in a absolute one. Our body is limited and if truth is unlimited, then our body, our physical existence, the way we perceive the world, the universe is not true, but limited. That reminds me of the experience I made in the beginning of the year and of which I wrote you in the last e-mail. It was like my physical existence and my mental existence, that means, all I thought and believed to be, my story, my identity was one and I or what ever I meant to be was somehow looking at this world as one and in the same time I was more the this, without a beginning and an end. Is this how it ‘feels’ to walk around in the cinema or was this a step outside? I don’t really know what it was! Why did it disappear? That still bothers me! Then I didn’t want to find something, because I didn’t know, what there was to be found and it happened without my adding. A gift? Now I want to regain this state of being and the door stays closed. It’s God’s or Allah’s will or the one of the Universe. If it is not my will, why do the writing at all? You write that sooner or later every human being will be enlightened. I felt in hell at the end of the year and the door opened … the weeks afterwards I several times thought about this fact and wondered if this door will open as long I feel in heaven … and since t most of the drama and the uncomfortable feelings were gone, I felt pleased and therefore in heaven. Is it really my heart, that as long it is not to much troubled, it won’t give away its power. My heart is my dictator and my deceptor, the jackal of Maya and I am their slave? The last few years, I had this suspicion, that especially my heart has something to do with my suffering. I always thought, that my sensibility, my sensible heart is one of my highest gifts and I cultivated it. My so open heart help me to get love and recognition, women, sex, … and it made me an addict, an addict of feelings, good and bad ones, as long I felt something strong, I felt alive. I was someone, because I felt something. The strange thing about that other state of being was, that I didn’t feel anything and still I was! My whole life has been a long seeking for Love and I realized soon, that this is my destiny or even curse. I always thought or believed, that the lack of love, that I experienced when I was a little baby – eleven months after my birth another child entered my family and occupied all love from my parents and I was forgotten – was the reason for most of my suffering or for my being driven to get loved. This lack was my mane motivation and e-motion throughout my life. And right now I start to realize, that it might has been my greatest luck, because it led me to this point. All the pain and suffering, this wound was an opening for something beyond this prison. Is it possible to be among humans, being on the marketplace and not being ruled by my heart? How do I earn my living? Just do what there is to be done? Whatever or wherever I am? Just stop believing my thoughts and the feelings they cause? Is it just a long and hard practice? I always felt comfortable alone in nature and each time I met someone there, I felt wrong, false. Being looked at by other human eyes always felt revealing. Who am I? How can I get rid of this impression of being a lie? That you wrote about this impression of being wrong, playing a role, hiding my true nature, being a lie, help me to continue reading your book, because I knew this, because I’ve experienced it. But my heart didn’t want to accept and still does not, that we all are supposed to be alone, truly alone … as long we are someone and not nobody.

I’m sure, that in one of the flats in my metaphoric house will be a wide and wild land and another one will be crowded with all the women I fell in love with, which I wanted to touch, to smell and kiss, to enter and leave and in the same flat or another will be a room full with all the men I admired and wanted to be appreciated by. And one flat will be a museum, a temple of culture, where I wanted to be a priest … another one will be a church, which always attracted me. What attracted me in museums and churches? Why did I always think, that I absolutely have to read this or that be book, just because another so called expert said so? Why do I want to know every thing? Why do I want do be able to do every thing? It drove me sometimes almost insane, to realize, that I will never be able to read all the books, that I will not be able to see the whole world, to fuck all women, to climb all mountains, to know all there is to know, to draw and paint like the old masters, … I wanted to understand, to be all, to be the world … because I felt disconnected, because I didn’t feel as an part of it! I always felt alone and empty … and then you came and sad, that exactly this terrible impression is true and that it is the truth.

What is in the cellar of the house? I have an nightmare, that haunts me since years. I dream of the sea and in the deep dark water swim sharks and orcas and they want to kill me, they want to eat me … and in the cellar is something similar! I know and feel that and suddenly I feel sick in my stomach … there is an endless ocean, dark and deep, without a ground and full of monsters … the non-existence. Oh, there is another cellar, one full of hate and rage, of killing-energy and the fear of being hated by other human beings. This fear of being banished or even killed be society … is even worse. Oh my heart, why are you so little and weak? Ego, why are you so afraid to die? It’s you who is afraid of not existing!

You write, that you still have a role in this play we call life, but that you don’t identify with it anymore. Is this still your ego? Does it vanish or does it get healthy?

Do you rule your Ego and not the other was around?

Oh, there is another room in the basement, it stinks and is full of garbage and a hobo is in there … there is a lot to look at in this house!!!

Since the battery of this machine will be empty every moment, I’ll continue writing on paper and write to you tomorrow …

Slowly something like thank arises in me … thank for your books.

M3

Late on friday night the mobile-phone rang and close friends asked, if they could come and visit me over the weekend. Well, I said yes and since their call was very unexpected, I thought, that the universe wants to teach me something and it is therefore it’s will, that this couple and their little child stay with me for two days. Well right now I see this ‘I’ and that this ‘I’ likes them and gets e-motion out of this relationship – ‘I’ was working with them on a farm this spring and to be honest, ‘I’ fell a little be in love with her and being around them weekend the wish to do an autolyse! I got involved / entangled with them!

Before I sat on this machine, I read in your second book the chapter about the connection between Ahab and Pip. It fits very well! As soon Johannes and Magdalena (the visiting couple) arrived, I felt empty and was longing for chocolate, coffee, alcohol … things I didn’t miss anymore the days before! I don’t really understand it yet. Why do I not feel whole, when other human beings are around me? One of the flat in my metaphor house is full of women. I had a lot of girlfriends, lovers, partners, … my heart was always looking for company and appreciation. In every relationship I felt both comfortable and locked in. Sometimes, especially when I did not feel well, when I felt, that there is something wrong with my life, that I’m not true, I got angry on my partner.

Sometimes this anger became hat and even thoughts of murdering them appeared in me! This was always the absolute horror! Even only thinking such a terrible thought made me want to kill myself! I felt like a monster and this monstrous thing may not exist! I always felt wrong, because I was unable the get really involved with another person. Now after having read this chapter of Ahab and Pip, I wonder if this inability of so called ‘ to love’ is not rather an expression of the existing of the one question U.G. Krishnamurti is referring to: “How?” How can I get rid of this servitude? Involving myself with a women felt on a certain point always like giving up another part of myself, a wider part. To walk through a forrest with a girlfriend was never the same like doing it alone. Alone I felt often as an part of nature and being with another human I felt disconnected. Other human beings always pull me out of an larger truth and entangle me with an human world, with culture and it’s restrictions. Krishnamurti says, that life wants to destroy this restrictions and that whenever we realize cracks in this heavy walls (my translation! I really have to get your books in english! But for that I have to organize a credit card of someone!) we try to fix them. My longing for chocolate, coffee, alcohol, tobacco … isn’t it just like that? I tray to close those holes, through which an impression of being not whole enters into my awareness. And is an depression not the constant and helpless attempt to hold the truth back? My metaphor house, my identity is nothing else than on e huge try to hold back the truth! I realized it, when I draw it and looked at it and saw, that the house stands on fear and on this endless ocean full of monsters … to free them, to free the truth, I have to pull down this tremendous construction. I have to get read of all I am! In the beginning of the year, I did not know anymore, who I am and this crisis was like an earthquake and this house probably fell together and was ‘gone’ for a short moment … but ‘I’ rebuild it more quickly than I realized! I realized, that each time I reacted emotionally to the world, the space in between, the cracks and holes in the identity became smaller and each time a part of the truth fell asleep again, was caught and imprisoned! How can I pull this house, this identity down? During this terrible crisis at the end of the year I searched help by a therapist (I was in Leipzig and went only once to that women), because I really was afraid, that I turn insane … I probably was frightened, that my constructed identity could fall apart. Well she made an inner journey with me and on this imagine journey I ended here in this place. In vision, I sat on the bank of the river on the bottom of the gorge next this little hut and saw my heart carried away by several butterfly. They flew with it over the river and I felt calm and peaceful! In this hut hang two pictures for Jesus and Mary. I first put them away, because I saw only catholic kitsch in them. They show the suffering and therefor sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary and I did not like them at all. But the owners of the house, which are very religious felt insulted be my act of taking them from the walls and told me to put them back up, because they believe, that those pictures protect the hut and if one takes them out of the hut, misfortune will enter! So they hang again and I looked at them more closely: Jesus burns his heart with fire and in the heart of Mary sticks a knife! They both are destroying their heart! To become what they were (awake?), we have to do the same! I am sure almost nobody sees this truth in this two pictures, because they show us only one side of the truth! It is a shame what is going on! Jesus and Mary look at us out of this pictures as if they wouldn’t suffer at all. Their looks say: ” Don’t worry, every thing will be alright! Just worship and love us and you will be safe and with us in heaven … ” No sight of the fight they fought, of the real suffering and pain, fear and horror they went through to torn out their heart and to burn and stab it. Terrible this hypocrites! It’s the same with all the Buddha -statues: they show us buddha after his breakthrough, calm and peaceful – like a sleeping pill!!!

They show us a truth, but not how to get there!

M4

Yesterday I worked all day on the farm and wondered several time, if this brings me any further or if it only sticks me more to this apparent reality. Within the gardening team are several conflicts alive and I struggled not to get involved emotionally! My heart, my heart doesn’t want to hurt, because it wants to be liked and not be rejected. Terrible! The emotions are really like energetic tendrils sticking me to illusion. It was so difficult not to join the bad talking about other persons and even more difficult to say to those how were there, the ‘truth’, like that they have to take responsibility for their own emotions and that other persons are never the cause of any emotions. Brigitte – who I know from last year – reacted very emotional to me not supporting her and confirming her and my heart wished to put my arm around her and comfort her … and it bled, realizing, that she is very disappointed in me and didn’t like me at all that very moment. Well I said what I had to say and did not try to comfort her and though it hurt me to see her crying and self-pitying, I could not act different, because how can I find truth and become true, if I stay a slave of my emotions and wrong self.

In Passolini’s film about Jesus (the title of the film is something like ” the gospel by Matthew”), Jesus comes the a village and somebody comes up to him and tells him, that his mother is there and because Jesus does not react, he asks him, if he doesn’t want to see her. Jesus looks at him and says, that he has no mother. When I saw and heart that, I was deeply impressed by this radicalism and something within me realized, that it is true and that it is necessary to leave all behind, to wake up!

I am still afraid of this radical step and I wonder how anyone can do that, at all! How can I survive that? You say that this ‘I’, the ego and wrong self, cannot take this step and will stay behind. It’s all about fear! I fear to be alone and I fear the unknown. And I fear, if I don’t get rid of this limitations, the ego and wrong self and all the thoughts and emotions it creates, I sooner or later will end up in a psychiatric clinic or kill somebody or kill myself. So why not risk it and kill my wrong self, my history and identity and all I think and believe to be and finally Be. I want to blow up this house and become true.

It’s interesting how this house is constructed: on the lower floors I put things about which I knew, that they limit me and arouse uncomfortable feelings. The higher it gets in my house, the lighter get the things and the further away I thought them from fear and pain, which are in the cellar at home and on the top of the house I put those, of which I thought that they don’t matter at all! Know I realize, that they are the roof of it all and that they protect this house! I wrote there on my drawing: singing and dancing. Now I think there should also be sex, masturbation, sweets, alcohol and coffee, … all things which concern my heart and its endless seeking for being one with the rest of the world. It’s the human drama! We all seek to get home into paradise, to be one with the world and the other human beings and follow our hearts in which this yearning for totality and wholeness is cultivated by maya and we don’t realize, that this way is completely wrong. Is it really wrong? Is it true, what I just wrote? The last four years I often went to a community near Berlin (www.zegg.de – I’ll have to write more about it one day) and one of the things I loved most there – there it is: ‘I’ loved most! Isn’t that answer enough? – were the mantra-singing-evenings. Being among fifty or even hundred people in one room and singing mantras together was so fulfilling, so wonderful, that I almost bursted because of all the love floating through my veins. I felt melting into the other persons around. I felt surrounded by love and this love entered me through my eyes, ears and my open and singing mouth and I felt carried by love, I was love. Whenever I looked at another person smiling and being happy, I felt so too and if this person even look back at me and into my eyes, another flood of love exploited in me. I felt finally at home, among others, in peace and love … all an illusion? If truth is unlimited, then all this is wrong, because those mystical moments were all limited and dependent on certain circumstances. Are those moments nothing else then smoking a joint? A trip? All there is different is that I meant not to be alone. I had the illusion to share it with other human beings. You write in your first book about a similar situation: the evening on the fire behind your house in Iowa. Everybody seems happy and in love and this mystical-shit-trip is real, but not the truth. My sticking to those moments is the problem. I am addicted to this mystical trips. For years, I thought that I could find peace and love in that community and that it will solve all my problems. Free love and less personal space and belongings, sharing my live with others, become more than a selfish modern man. I experienced the happiest and worst moments of my life there! That place was always like an emotion-accelerator for me. It was very mind-expanding and let my consciousness grow. I always wonder wether consciousness is unlimited an therefor true. Does an growing consciousness one day overcome the false self? Gary Snyder writes, that our consciousness is the world and surounds us. The more conscious I get, the more complex and wider gets the world around me. Is it only pushing the limitation to a point, where we hardly ever hit those borders and therefor we believe to be unlimited? Instead of tearing down all our border-walls, we just move them to a place out of our daily sight. Let’s get together and feel alright! Let us confirm each another and forget our limitation … and to dream on, we need drugs or rock and roll, sex or religion, a family, career … I have a dream! Oh, I never thought about this sentence before! I always had a dream! A dream of awaken human race! Only a dream? What does it mean to wake up?

Half a day later:

When ever I read trough, what I have written before, I have a strange impression. It seems to me, that I’m constantly constructing an identity. There seems to be a force in me, which wants to put things together and construct an unity. I’m here because of this and that.

Right now I once again don’t understand, what I am doing. Ok, I am drying to find the truth. I want to be true and no lie anymore.

And then I read in your book sentence like: Her (Maya/Illusion) sorest point is, that she has no mass, no substance. There is no ‘It’ and to see that, you only have to give it a check.

I don’t understand that! There is this computer and my fingers tip on it. It seems to have a mass, because my fingers feel an resistance. If I run into a wall, I get hurt or at least my physical body gets hurt. I know that from a scientific point of few, that there is nothing like a mass. Nobody knows what mass exactly is, but for me as an human being it exists, that means, there are limitations for my body. He cannot go through walls and does not fall through the earth. My body stand upon this earth, which at least in his point of few exists and has substance. Ok, as I experience myself, there is more to our existence than this physical body. I have read that we at least three bodies. The physical one of the daily lief, the one of the dreams and the one of the deep sleep, which is said to be one with the universe. You wrote, that we are not human and not out of this universe. Ok, if I take this for true, than this world and its limitations are an illusion or at least not all there is. How does this illusion work? Does it only exist, because I believe it? About a hundred meters from this hut is an gorge and I often sit on a rock at the edge of it and look down. I sit there and often think, if this all is only an illusion, then nothing happens to me, if a take another step. I know, that for my physical existence, for this Michael, it would be the end. He dies, if I take this step. Although I don’t know what happens, when Michael dies – what happens to the other bodies? – I don’t want to try it. Ok, I see, that I can’t be sure, if this world is really how I perceive it with my senses. All I really can know by sure is that I am. Not because I think, I am, but because I am, I am and because of this fact, I can not think this truth, I only can be it. I guess it only makes sense from the other side. Come and see! How? How do I get to the other side? I have been there in january for a few hours … have I been there? As far as I can remember it, I was not that limited existence anymore and I could look at this Michael. Was there any It left? The world was still there, but there was also a space between my new or old or true state of being and the world. You never write about an inner space. You write about adherence (by the way, I finally ordered your books in english and I’m really looking forward to read your original writings and see what words you use) and yes, I was not stick to this world and my identity anymore. Why did I get sticked to it again? It had to do with feelings, with emotion. I felt it very clearly. With every arousing emotion, good or bad, more and more tendrils stuck me the world, to the illusion and it became reality again. How can I free me from this adherence? What arouses emotions? Where do they come from? What or who causes them? Where is the heart, the source of the emotions? Where do I have to shoot my arrow at? At my heart? Or at my brain? Both? Somewhere else? This world is how it is and it is real within its reality, but there is more to it, there is something behind it. It is only like an illusion and it depends on the perceiver and exists only within their consciousness.

Okay, I try to look at it, as if this was true and observe what happens.

Thanks for all,

M5

I’ve just read in the chapter “the birds nest” Julie’s writings and each time I read her words I get sick in my stomach, because I have the impression to do something wrong with my writing. Why don’t I fell like there is a huge fire raging over the landscape of my self? I felt like a atomic bomb before, I know that feeling of wanting to destroy all there is around and in me, all that limits me, all my fears, doubts and hesitation. I often wished to be able to tear down the masque glued to me, this terrible unsuitable identity. Each crisis was like one of those fires running through my self and destroying a lot of what I believed to be and with it my self confidence … and each time it was so tiring to start all over, to build up my self confidence again … I never thought about going on this way of self distraction. I always thought it’s the wrong direction and that I cannot live without an identity. Yes, I was afraid to be alone, to fall out of society … and I kept falling out and it was always I fight not loosing contact. Now, I’m sitting here and want to go this way of the spiritual autolyse on purpose and I am confused, because there is no fire accompanying me.

After having over come the first attack of panic after accepting, what I always tried to avoid – to fall out of society and into this black and endless see of meaninglessness – a certain relief overcame me. Reading, that what I have done unconsciously, is a path that might leads to truth, if I only keep on going further and further … I so often repeated the mane passage of the heart sutra – gate, gate, para gate, para so gate, bogi sowaka … (or something like this) … go on, go on, go further and beyond this further to the other side – and went the whole time the wrong direction. I hoped, that this sutra is like a medicine for my bleeding heart and did not realize, that it is my heart which makes me suffering.

Oh, this ego is so tricky! Now it is taking advantage out of this process. It feels better than the other people sleeping their sleep of self contentedness. I used to be jealous about their apparent successful and happy life and was blind myself and now I feel superior – how childish! There is this sick hope or wish in me, that one day, I’m going to show them that they are wrong and I am right. I’m going to be the guru they look up to me! This ego is so ugly and little! I want to puke it out … this ego wants to have power and rule the others. It wants control and influence, it wants to be admired and loved, it wants revenge and sacrifice, it wants to be worshiped! I always wanted to be holy, to be a saint. But all the scum of the earth is a part of ME of my EGO, of I … nothing is safe from this insatiable hunger of this greedy ego and wrong self. Eat yourself you bastard! Eat your friend and servant Fear. And my heart, too. My heart, I always believed I could trust you! I always believed, that I only have to follow my heart and it would lead me to … to what? What was I looking for? For a home, for love … what do those words mean? I was looking for an end. I wanted it to stop, to end. What? This struggling, this fear, this feeling of being alone, all feelings … I didn’t want to be human. In my eyes, death often promised to be a relief, freedom. When I was five or six years old, I said to my parents, that I wished to be one of those flowers over there … because they don’t die. They live on in their roots and grow again next year. I was afraid of life and all the feeling connected to it. Oh, this childhood stories, this myths are also a part of my identity, which has to burn … I feel it! I get calm and confident telling those stories. Telling how special I was and am … this boosting my own ego, this masturbation … it is nothing than a lie. It is the try to hide my own emptiness, the absence of substance of the ego … masks without anything behind them, emptiness, pure emptiness, there is nothing but a fake, an illusion.

But why am I not shocked by this words? Do I only write them and not be them? Why is Julie almost getting crazy and I sit on this chair and stay calm? What is going on? Where am I?

Go further and beyond this further … going on step by step. I don’t know where it leads me to.

Is it to early to think about the future? I often wonder about what I will do in the winter. How am I going to earn money. Is this a helpless attempt of my ego to gain control again? Why worry? Because I have to loose something? Only my ego has to loose something! Oh, there is the fire!!! Immediately panic arouses in me and a loud and anxious voice in me cries: I can’t just give up! What is going to happen to me? I need money to by food and clothes and to rent a home! You can’t just stop swimming! How shall I live? There must be a difference between giving up this life, so to say to kill myself and giving up my wrong self. It is not the same, isn’t it? Giving up my wrong self means for example to do what ever there is to be done. To do any kind of work, wether it is well paid or not. Is that true? Isn’t it only fatalism? Run by fear too? It is not about becoming a empty hull, that is what I am now. But what is it then? You write, that you still have preferences, things and places which you prefer and other which you avoid. What is there active in you? You still take responsibility for yourself. But what is this self? You do whatever life, god or whatever you call it wants you to do. It seems to be clear to you, that your ego is not ruling yourself anymore. Your identity is only the most suitable part to play on this stage called life. You don’t identify anymore with this part and your are not bound to it by feelings. And still you feel. How does it feel? I always try to remember how it felt in january. The feelings entered through this part – Michael – I’m used to play and believe to be. What would it mean to stay in this distant state of being I experienced then?

Right now I’m sitting here and two men from the farm I work on for two or three days a week (for this hut I’m staying in and some food) cut the grass around this hut and there is I voice in me telling me, that I should help them. This voice gets energy from the thought, that they could think, that I am lazy. If they do so at all, then it is just their thought and still it bothers me. Why? Because I would like to be liked. Why? Because I fear to be alone. Why? Because things go on without me … because they could forget me and if so, I fear to stop existing. If nobody thinks about my, I am not anymore. Is that true? No! I still am. But what am I, when nobody thinks about me anymore? What if everybody forgets me? I often thought about killing myself and came always to the point, that it cause only a lot of suffering – caused by wrong selfs and illusion – and bad vibes. I felt, that one purpose of killing myself is that exactly this would happen, that other people suffer. Last summer one brother of my mother vanished from one day to an other. For me it was clear, that he killed himself and that he made it by purpose the way, that nobody finds him, so that everybody looks for him … I often imagined my own funeral and the emotions of the people. It was the helpless attempt to feel important. I felt, that I actually wanted to be loved and did not know how to get love and therefore wanted to kill myself, to provoke feelings of lost by those who I wanted to be taken care of. I always thought, that a real suicide should be the way, that all traces of me would vanish the very moment of my death, that everybody would forget, that I have existed and therefor no feeling at all would arouse out of this suicide. Strangely, this idea felt more right and like the only correct possibility to get off this stage. But it is not possible. Or is it? My parents will always feel connected to me, as long they stay alive Is that true? Can I absolutely be certain, that this is true? No, I only think so and probable hope so,too. What happens, when I stop bothering about the feelings of others? What if I stop being concerned about what other people think and feel about me? Would I be free and true. Free of the fear to dislike, to be different, to be me? Who would I be without this concern and connection to the thoughts and feeling of others? Alone? An outsider?

My Ego, my Identity is a creation of the human race, of the nature of evolution, it was created step by step over millions of years and keeps on getting more and more complex, more conscious … an endless process. Nothing does matter in this wholeness, there is no wrong or right. A few weeks ago I went for a walk with little Salome in a manduka on my breast. This six month old being fell asleep and while I was walking I started think about what would happen, if she stopped breathing or something else happens to her and I imagined all the pain and suffer … and suddenly I realized that nature or the whole would not suffer, that nothing is wrong, when Salome would die, because, there is no end and no beginning and all pain and suffer would only arouse from our thinking, that it should be different, that Salome has to live … so on. Only our thoughts cause feelings, which stick us to this world. And also the attempt to avoid feelings stick us to this world.

Still, does this world exist? Are even this thought nothing but a faith? It has to be, than I can not know if it is different. I don’t and cannot know, what happens, when Salome dies. There might be a world behind this world, one full of angels and they might be sad, whenever something dies. I don’t know! I only know, that as far as I’m conscious of the world around and in me, there would be no feeling, if I would not worry about other persons feeling. Why am I imaging a world without feelings? Why am I afraid of them? Because they are uncomfortable? What is pain? If I wouldn’t care about feelings, there would still be pain. If I cut myself, pain tells me so. That’s all. Suffer arise only by my thinking or wishing that it be different. I believe, that I should not feel pain and therefor I suffer. Same with anything else. If I’m in a pleasant situation, like looking at a flower, which arouses the impression of beauty, I start to suffer as soon, as I want this feeling to last longer than it is alive. Things come and go and it is all right and true, as long I don’t want it different.

In the evening:

I have the impression to be not very concentrated. I’m writing of this and that and while I’m writing I have the impression to chase something, but when I read it through later on it seems to me like if I were wildly shooting around me, without knowing what I want to hit, where my target is and what threatens me.

I might have to concentrate more on the metaphor house and illuminate the flats.

Beneath the roof in the attic flat, I found dancing and singing and also sex and masturbation, alcohol and sugar … things and situations in which I used to be able to forget myself and which I used to fill up the cracks in the hull of the false self. The effects were never lasting long and often they left a bigger crack behind.

Why do I always write in metaphor pictures and not about the situation itself?

Oh, I have to continue tomorrow! I’m to tired to write in english and continue in german tonight …

The next day:

Yesterday night I kept on writing and was looking for a question that lights fire. I ended up with an old and well known question: Do I do it right? Is it right this way? As long as I can remember I was always afraid to make a mistake! I avoided so many things, just because I was afraid to do it wrong, to make an mistake. I stopped singing, I stopped talking in front of a lot of people and if I had to it was an terrible stress! I hated to stand in front of people and have to say something … acting was one big horror. I gave up so endless much power to other people. I gave them the right to decide, wether I am good or bad, a good student or a bad one, a good lover or a bad one, a good child or a bad child, … and I developed a very high sensibility of what other people miss and wish, even before they know themselves. This way I became popular, people liked me and felt pleasant around me, the women loved me and I was a good lover and good student and good friend and … and … very often I disregarded myself, sometimes even abused myself and all this just because I was afraid to be rejected. And if I was rejected it was terrible and I turned into a furious and aggressive being, I raged and wanted to destroy all around me and often, when I was stressed and felt, that my environment does not appreciate me unconditionally, I felt like an angel of revenge. I was Michael the arc angel with its sword and swung it around me and wanted the world to stay away. Leave me alone! But I first gave the power to rule upon me to the world around me and with it the decision wether I have the right to exist or not. And I myself was often Michael the arc angel with the scales in my hand on the Last Judgment. Only good things have a right to be! I was always thinking in right and wrong and at this judgment I still stand and there is this huge question in front of me: Am I right or wrong? Do I the spiritual autolyse right or wrong? Am I a good student? I was good at mathematics and it seems to me, as if I still think in terms of mathematic questions and there is always a right answer. I only have to find it and there is only one way to get there. It is all an logical process … and now this process of the spiritual autolyse is different. There is no right or wrong, there is only one way: go on. That confuses me. What is confused? Me? What is this ME? An construction itself! It did not start with my birth, it started hundreds of years before. It is and old fake and has been past on for generations and it has grown strength since thousands of years. Oh I hear my mother say: We don’t do that. Look at you, I have to be ashamed with you! … She was so afraid that other people could think bad about her. We are all afraid of another and that is why we are all so nice to each other and we all carry smiling masks and it is all only an hypocrisy, a terrible play. And all because of our week and anxious heart. How much we count on this organ and how proud we are about our feelings and believe, that they differ us from animals and we believe, that feeling have something to do with love and believe that love is at home in our hearts. Oh it is one big lie. We are slaves of our hearts and it is made out of fear. and not love. Love is a state of being and not feeling! How can I over come this mistake? How can I free myself from my heart and its addiction for confirmation, my addiction for feelings? Get rid of feelings? Do I really want that? Who am I thought them? Is that possible at all? Are the right and wrong feelings? What are feelings? The heart does not think and so I wonder if it is a slave itself. It functions this way and not another. It pumps the blood through the body and its emotions are the drive for my way of looking at the world, for my believes and thoughts. Do I have to cut those emotions to cut the adherence to the illusion that there is a right or wrong or do I have to change my thoughts and if I stop believing my thoughts, the emotions will loose their power? Do thoughts cause emotions? Are they really only reactions of the body to thoughts? It is the fear of bad emotions that sticks me to the world and makes me do and not to do thing. My heart does not want to feel pain and unpleasant feelings. What is a bad emotion? What is true and what is an illusion?

So, I have to recharge the battery of my MacBook.

Thanks for all.

M6

Yesterday I noticed, that my metaphor house has no doors and nor windows and then I realized, that the experience I made in january was like leaving the house for a moment and looking at it from outside. Though it was not actually me leaving it. Who left it? Why did I go back in and have been trapped again? What woke up and looked at me? Well, I didn’t know how to stay outside and maybe it is not possible at all. This house is somewhat like my consciousness, my limited few of the world. This self is maybe necessary to be on stage, to be in this overwhelming illusion. And then suddenly I had the impression, that this house is like a boot floating over an endless ocean of fear. What I saw or meant in the cellar is all over, is the ground or just this ocean and my identity is the boat that carries me over this ocean and it is my illusion of the world. And isn’t there in each flat somehow like a person, a part of me? The lover and the artist, the hiker and the dreamer, the son and the dancer and … does not the whole ship of Ahab has to ground, so that Ishmael can survive? Aren’t all those different characters on the ship chasing Moby Dick parts of the old and false Melville? There is a Sturbuck and a Queequeg in me, too! I know their voices well, telling me to do that or this and lets turn back and go home to wife and child – you know, in one of the flats lives a dreamer, who dreams of a house and family and an honest work and in another flat is an almost forgotten wild man at home and when ever a visit an ethnological museum and look at all those wonderful artifacts, a little earthquake shakes me through and wakes up this wild man and he gets homesick and feels imprisoned and I always get wet eyes and wish me far away of civilization, somewhere among native people, which still leave in a respectful neighborhood to wild nature. Looking at those artifacts a grate yearning overcomes ma hand and they wish to do things like I look at and which tell me or wake up an idea of being imbedded in an inspirited world of nature. And it makes me sad, because I know, when I try to copy those artifacts, it would be kitsch and a lie. I always wondered how to make something as beautiful and as true! Whenever Melville writes about Queequeg, I feel that he felt similar. I wished to have a friend like Queequeg – who does not know this wish? I am sure, that it is not a coincident, that Ishmael survives on the casket of Queequeg. Turn this whole construction to a casket! Let all other characters ground. And when I saw this ship of my believed identity, I realized how big it is and how much work it will be to destroy it and how big this Leviathan must be to do that! At the same time I realized how unbelievable great this work of Maya is. A sat on a bank and looked into the mountain and saw one huge wonder! And for the first time I ‘felt’ the absence of substance of this great illusion. Even the mass is not true! Really unbelievable! And when I read at the end of your second book, that who ever wants to wake up and to give up this Ego … also has to develop a healthy self-contempt. I often disdained myself, because I felt like a lie and I always believed it to be my own mistake and a consequent of my wrong behavior and I wished so often, that I could change it, that I could make it all unhappened … and be happy and a good person. And suddenly I realized, that it all may not have been my will and that it all happened for the one purpose, that I am at this very point I am at! There is something active and this wants me to wake up, to be true. And I sat there crying, because I realized, that there is nothing wrong or right and that there is only this tremendous illusion and as much ignorance and the truth behind it all. And as far as I can see the truth, I’m amazed at its radicalism. It is really unbelievable and no wonder everybody prefers less radical believes and more comforting faiths.

Since there is a painter among my crew, I often try to imagine the way this illusion is functioning. To stay with your adaption of the parable of Platon, I wonder how this cinema is working and I also want to find out, where its borders/limitations are and where the exit is. I like the metaphor of tendrils which stick us to the world of Maya. Like plants are rooted to the earth, which they need to survive, our self is rooted in the world around us. The Ego wants us to believe, that there is nothing than this movie playing and the cinema is our consciousness, which creates the illusion of a world around us. Like our body is run by three systems – blood, nerves and hormones – this outer body is weaved by our senses (which perceive and collect all the waves), thoughts and believes (our mind connects all to one and our faith makes it solid, creates the illusion of substance) and feelings (which keeps it all vivid and alive). Animals are mobile and not like plants bound to the ground. They have somewhat cut the roots and carry that, what the sole is for the plant with them around. Parallel to this introversion of the earth, they created a world around them within they move. Since we are also animals, we have created a human world around us. And it is interesting to observe, that the more distance our way of living got to they way animals live, the more human our gods turned. And this precess of differentiation went on for thousands of years and our world grew and got more and more complex and with it the film we watch and also the cinema, the technique creating this world. Our conscious grew and all I do right now is get more conscious myself. Now, what would it mean to leave this theatre? Would the world vanish? Where am I, when I enter deep sleep? Where am I when the world is no longer appearing in my conscious during phases of deep sleep? This ground upon the world and our dreams appear must still be there, when I am awake. There is no way to talk or write about what I am if I am not. There is nothing around this cinema or at least nothing I can be aware of. There is no I or Self outside of the theatre. Is even that I am an illusion?

Do those thoughts bring me any further? What is the truth? What is true? What is true of me?

In the evening:

I have started to read in Bernadette Roberts book ” what is self” and to be honest, I understood the first few pages until she starts to write about self-awareness and consciousness and unconsciousness and got totally confused and all I understood is, that my try to describe consciousness as a parable of being rooted into the world like plants into the sole is way too less precise and that I have to look at it more detailed! Well first of all I’ll try to understand, what Bernadette writes about it. But not tonight, or at least not at the moment.

I would like to write about something else, that bothers me almost since I can remember: sexuality. I always wondered why you did not mention it at all in your books. You write about almost anything, but not about how you deal with sexuality. Does it not matter for you at all? You describe Julie as a very attractive young woman and you say to Sarah, that you don’t want to be seen holding such a young and beautiful girl in your arms. Well, there are one or two other scenes in your books you write about a certain attraction of young women, but that is it. Why? You write, that you eat when you are hungry and sleep, when you are tired and I wonder if there is ever a sexual desire active in you. Since you don’t write about it and since I’m sure you would write about it, if it were something that is active in your life, it must not be so. Well, sexuality is a vivid desire in my life and bothers me quite a bit. One of the flats in my metaphor house is crowded by women I had some sort of sexual contact with. My parents told me, that I invited only girls to my fifth birthday-party and since kindergarten I had an girlfriend or was in love with at least one girl or woman. Even now, though I don’t have a girlfriend and nether fell in love with one particular woman, several of them appear regularly in my daydreams. Today I went down into the gorge and took a bath in river down there. I do that always naked and I know that almost everybody does so, because hardly anybody goes down there and nobody else sees you. Now, every time I go down there, this irrational thought or hope that there might be already a women naked down there arise out of my unconsciousness. This happens often, when I am alone in nature and sometimes I have the impression, A part of me would like to live in a soft-porno-movie, because only there imagination like this are alive! Well, I loved to watch those movies, when I was a teenager and this illusion must have burned itself into my unconsciousness, where it is still alive and active. Back to the facts: The attention of women was always the most important source of confirmation for me and I did almost anything for that. What felt confirmed by this attention of the other sex? Why did I feel like a hero kissing the girl of my choice? Even better touching her breast, her body, her vagina, … ? I felt powerful and the ability to stimulate a woman was my highest stimulation. I enjoyed this power and felt important and needed, wanted and loved. What felt so? There is like an inferior part of me, who feels disconnected, who feels alone and separated from the world, from the other human being and this part is longing for connection. The sexual intercourse always felt like a impossible try to become one with the woman, to melt together and finally be someone. This illusion ends with the moment of the orgasm and I never liked it very much and sometimes it even hurt and I felt disappointed and thrown back into my impression of not being whole. It seems to me, as if sexuality is one of the highest cards in the hands of Maya in this game! It separates my from the other human beings, because I believe to need another to satisfy it. Masturbation is pure illusion and not satisfying at all and highly addictive. Sexuality is related to hunger and tiredness, but not the same. I cannot just have sex when I feel horny, like eat something when I’m hungry or sleep when I’m tired. Is that true? What about prostitution? I never went to an prostitute, because in my opinion prostitution is a kind of abuse. Opinions and beliefs are not true, I know and all the same prostitution seems wrong to me, not true ether. Is sexuality not true ether? An illusion itself? An illusion of what? The illusion to be whole and not limited without waking up? Dreaming enlightenment? Well, sexuality is necessary for humankind to stay alive and be present on this planet – in this illusion and so it is for the illusion itself necessary, that there are humans, than without us it would stop. Maya would vanish with us. Is Maya not different from us? Are we Maya? What are we? Consciousness? Is sex just a huge trick? Is sex any different from eating a apple? What makes it seem different? Feelings? Is sex only a trump in Maya’s hand, as long we mix it up with feelings, with our hunger for love? Is it possible that two waken up human beings have sex together without falling asleep again? I can’t make out a reason why this should not be possible. As every thing else, sex itself is not the problem. It happens on stage as anything else. Although, I’m sure it is difficult not the stick to sexuality or to illusion by sexuality, because it arises a lot of especially strong feelings. But once again, it is not the sexuality causing this feelings, it is our heart and its reaction to our thoughts, conscious or unconscious like: “I need this woman to be happy.” Or: “This is the most beautiful woman and therefore I am the greatest man!” Or: “With this woman I finally found a reason to live for.” And sex glues this thoughts and feelings to the partner and us to illusion. Does this all happen because we ignore the power of feelings to keep us asleep. To be honest, he thought, that wakening up and realize truth, could mean not having sex anymore, is not motivating at all. It feels actually like a huge loss and I am afraid of that! Amazing! I guess, being enlightenment does not extinguish sexuality, but since there is no wrong-self anymore there is also no desire and wish to satisfy any sexual need. Anyway, are there any needs left at all? Is the sexual need a basic one like hunger and thirst? I have to look at sexuality again! It’s still dark around it! More light, please!

And more electricity to this computer! Thanks, Michael

M7

Sometimes I wonder who is reading this and if someone is reading it at all. Anyway I feel sorry for who ever does so – I have the impression all my writing is just garbage and reading it a wast of time, though I really try to write about essential things. But every time I take a second look at it, all turns to unnecessary Small talk. Well, I will continue all the same and give my best!

Every time I write a sentence with ‘I’, I struggle and have the impression, this I is playing a game with me – who ever this self is. And then I am looking closer at it and try to take of its mask and its clothes and there is always another mask and dress beneath. And every time this I meets another person, it changes and put on an mask the other likes, it’s like mimicry. Well, at least I begin to notice it and sometime even feel encouraged enough to stay with a truer self and say, what is to be said, if the other likes it or not.

Today I had to go into town and now I’m on the way back to my hut in the mountains. On the way I will make a short stop in a small city to see an art-performance of a god friend of mine. I wonder how I will react … The City troubled me today quite a bit and I was full of worries and fears concerning my future. Maya really did its best! I just don’t know, what I am supposed to do among all this foreign human beings. If this ‘I’ just wouldn’t want to be connected to them, be a part of this whole circus. I start to realize, that not only society is nourishing this wrong self, but also my fear, its own fear to fall out of it. How this world is appearing to me, is my false self and Ignorance! Nevertheless, I somewhat keep on falling out of it. I don’t feel at home any more among common people. Your comparison with a vampire fits quite well! Sometimes it really feels like I have been bitten by a vampire and my transforming self is afraid of the unknown future and today it almost panicked! What is going to happen to me? Where will it all end? And the wrong self throws out fears and worries like a safety line, like a anchor to stop this ship. My sick self is longing for a meaningful task, which could stick it back to illusion and sometimes it even wishes to go on a real Whaling! Is this another trick of Maya? I often think about that. What would correspond to whaling today? And all I can think of is just what I already do. Hiss the sales and go on a whaling on the inner ocean! This ocean is still the same wild one Melville knew and met on his own travel and this endless ocean is still full of whales and sharks and I know very well, that there is also my very own Moby-Dick on the way through this endless sea. My false self is just afraid of it and does not want to chase it, because it would be its own end. Instead it would even prefer to go one a chase in the ‘real’ world and rather risk my live than his own! I guess, even suicide would be its victory!

The next day:

Well, where am I? I’m on this metaphor ship on my inner ocean of fear and I and my crew are looking for whales to hunt. Several member of the crew would prefer to go back on land, to women and other appearances. They conspire behind my back and I admire Ahab for his achievement to win his crew for his own personal goal. How can I make them swear to follow me! Do I have to find a reward for them? Do I have to deceive them.

Oh, today I feel sleepy and dreaming. The opening of the exhibition yesterday evening was quite a shock. I haven’t been on one for a while and I have almost forgotten how it is on this stage! Several of the so called experts were there, people how decide which arts is in or out. They make your carrier and if you don’t flatter them, it’s hard to be someone in this business. Almost every body was dressed up and looking attractive and important. See and be seen! I felt like in a kindergarten and wondered how I looked myself! Was I any different? Were my eyes more awake or just dull like the one of the other ones and only looking for conformation? Does she look at me? Does he remember me? What do they think of me? I left the place right after the performance, because I could stay any longer, I couldn’t stand them any longer, I couldn’t stand myself any longer. I didn’t want to be confronted with my own yearning for recognition. I got sick of looking at those people or to be true, I was sick of looking at my false self. All I saw, was my own consciousness! I looked at myself! I created this place, this illusion is rooted in my thoughts and believes, my feelings, longings and fears. And I create the world around me this very moment too! Not only the bad and unpleasant moments are illusions, but also the conforming and comforting, pleasant and flattering ones! What is true then?

Yesterday night, when I walked home in the dark, I was observing my consciousness and the world it lets appear. Since my eyes could hardly see the ground, my consciousness lost control over the space surrounding me. It could not any longer create the illusion of a whole. My feet felt like walking in the ground and the ground seemed to be much closer, than it actually was. The space was like compressed, more like a liquid, through which I floated. When ever an unexpected sound appeared, my animal body startled. Hairs stood up and an adrenalin kick ran through my body! Unconscious reactions. I start to understand, what Bernadette writes about consciousness and that it is integrated into the total body-mind functioning. “From this integration man derives an unconscious subjective sense of physical form, or experiences himself as a discrete, separate entity or being.” Thats how the illusion of mass comes into being.

Nevertheless of the increasing amount of knowledge I also start to understand, how important praying might be. As long my hand are on the steering wheel, I’ll run in circles. My will is so much influenced by my false self, that not my will shall be. The will of the universe shall be. I am ready to give up control.

M8

Getting up in the morning is often the toughest moment of the day. If there is no appointment, if there is nobody waiting for me or nothings has to be down, if there is nothing expecting me to get up, I hardly can do so. Something in me just want to sleep and dream on. Why is that so? Almost every morning I feel depressed! Without the impression of being needed – for what so ever – I have the impression of being senseless. Why do I live? What is alive at all? What is this self, which needs to be wanted and waited for by others? It always feels like having a hangover! And that though I did not drink alcohol or take any other drugs. There is no physiological reason to feel like this and still I do so! Why does this ‘I’ feel so? Does it has a hangover? Does it need something to feel good? Is my false self addicted to something? Definitely! It is looking for a reward and if there is non insight, it fleets into daydreaming, out of control of those part of my mind, which could see its falseness! Just avoid the dark black cloud! How often did I just start to think of women. It was such an easy trick! Whenever I couldn’t sleep in the evening, because something was still bothering me or in the morning, when I did not want to look into the eyes of meaningless, I imagined being with a woman. Talk to her, flirt with her, have sex with her … that made me sleepy and the imagination became a dream and I feel asleep. What fool I am! I outwitted myself! I keep on dreaming! Shit! How can I overcome this addiction? Why do I want to overcome it? I am sick of this impression being a ballon. Every morning feeling shrunk and having to be blown up! Blown up? With what? With lies and delusion? I am sick of this state of being. No wonder sex has so much power over me! It’s a blow job! The swelling of the penis is makes the ego swell, too.

Oh, it is all about feelings! This false self only wants to feel good. It does not want to be reminded of its emptiness. It wants to feel whole and hates uncomfortable feelings. It is afraid of fear. All day long ‘I’ avoids fear! You write, that fear cannot be confronted or slain because it is fear of nothing, of no-self. The desire to slay fear is itself a fear-based emotion. Fear can only be surrendered to; the thing feared, entered. What does that mean? Arjuna fears his own heart, his own feelings. He is afraid to kill his heart in this battle. He is afraid to erase his heart, his love and all he believes to be, all that is worthy to life for. He fears to extinguish himself, to become nothing, no-self, nobody. And Krishna persuades and convinces Arjuna of taking up the sword all the same and start the battle of his own destruction! What does that me for me? How is Krishna? Your writings? They only arouse something and are not the cause of it. There is something in me, that wants me to go on, that wants me to battle me heart. What is it?

I always wished to find out one day, what reason my life has. I wondered so often, what all the troubling and struggling is god for. Will I every reach a point of which it all makes sense? Where will all the paths come together? I never expected it to be on a battlefield! Here I stand and it all makes sense. Every wound, every so called injustice I meant to suffer, all suffering, all loving, all feelings, good and bad, all success and disappointments, all comes together here, this very moment. And I stand here and don’t know what to do. Fight it or surrender? How can I enter fear?

Does it mean to stay in bed and stop trying to swim, stop trying to construct meaning and purpose? Dive into this ocean of meaningless? Stop construction needs? Nobody needs me and nobody is waiting for me! Not even my parents were waiting for me. All they were waiting for is self conformation, too. All they were hoping for was meaning, a meaning of life, a reason to live, a purpose to keep on going. They did that all unconscious and believed to do it out of love. But all they wanted was a glue that stick the world together, to avoid the falling apart of the illusion.

The whole world functions like that.

Purity of intent! Are my intention pure? Am I driven by a Monomania? Am I ready to jump out of the window? Is the house burning at all?

In January the house was on fire! I was desperate and saw no way out. I was yearning for the firewire to rescue me! I wanted to go to a psychiatric clinic, that the extinguish this fire burning in me, that they stop the bomb ticking in me. And I also had your book with me and though I first did not like, what I read in it, I took it for true and jumped out of the window, out of the lie, out of the hope enlightenment is an safe, peaceful and comfortable exit. Jumping was like accept that what I read is true.

And a lot of the attachments fell off. For a few hours I was aware of my false self and could look at it and there was a new state of being – an new consciousness? – that somehow still was integrated in this body-mind functioning, but not in the role this body-mind used to play, believed to be.

And now I wish to reach the same point and cut through the attachments to the dreamworld. I want to wake up again.

But are my intentions pure? Am I not just wanting to get there, without going there – into the fire – again. What price am I paying now? Isn’t it way to comfortable here? Isn’t it a false compromise?

Write a little bit, work a little bit! And all the time being an marionette of Maya! As soon its getting twelve o’clock, she pull one of the lines … come on Michael, get up, cook something, you soon have to go, they would be disappointed if you don’t show up, you have to do something for the food you get, you don’t want to starve do you? …

If I really had to wake up, if I couldn’t do anything else than to find out what is true, because the lie is eating me up, is burning me insight out and my life is hell … would I really care about what the people on the farm think of me? I probable would only work the absolute minimum to stay here and did not want to be involved in their problems, in their discussions who does right or wrong. I just work and leave again. Moving the body a little bit does not hurt and wakes at least the body up. I often wished to be totally free and not limited at all. Just be for myself and have all day and night to write and read. What holds me back to do so? Feelings and thoughts causing uncomfortable feelings! And instead of focusing on those feelings and what they cause, I wish to be somewhere else, where nobody knows me. The idea of being able to by a house somewhere to just be for myself for one or two or how many year ever. Great! Why great? Avoiding feelings? Hoping to wake up! Believing it would be easier that way? Right now I believe it’s to only way to wake up! Another false believe?

Your books arrived and I read some of the Bonus Material, which is missing in the german version. It hit me quite a bit! Why am I writing to you? Am I expecting anything of that? And if not, why do I do it all the same? Is it Maya doing me doing that? Well I thought about this all morning and came to no end. Well it was not my intention to write to you, but I just did not know, to whom I could write instead. And not addressing my writing to anyone was like cutting with an blunt knife and writing to you was like trying to sharpen my mind! So it is just useful to write to this address! I was actually surprised to find this address on the homepage of wisefoolpress. How ever this terry is, I do not care! I’m just pleased to have an address to write to. Well there is one hope and it is that someone would answer, if I’m on a totally false path … well, that presupposes, that someone reads all or at least parts of it! But even that kick in the ass is in your book! Like that letter to william (zen and the art of self mutilation):

“I’m Happy to tell you that right up front. Waking up is kinda dump. There’s no point. It’s not merely pointless, it’s pointlessness. Who would do such a thing? Only someone who absolutely couldn’t not do it. Once you become the person who can’t not do it, it’s a whole different thing, but trying to do it before absolutely must is as ludicrous as slicing off parts of your body.”

What does that mean for me?

You know, sitting here and writing, looking at my self and what this self might be and try to find out, what it is really true, what really bothers me, what really made life hardly livable … feels right! Feels right? Is it a feeling? Well, every time I go to the village and on the farm, I wonder why all those people are not doing the same! Just for having food and a roof over the head, we wouldn’t need to do what we all day long do. Why all this stress! Why spending vacation in this village? Well it is a wonderful scenery and still, why isn’t every body studying the truth? I hardly ever see anybody alone, they all come in pairs or families, in groups, but not alone. Why? When I started to read ‘spiritually incorrect enlightenment’ and first read parts of Julie’s Spiritual Autolysis, I almost exploded! I got so fucking angry about myself and my lazy bud, that I almost stopped reading! Well, that probable would have been the appropriate reaction! Stop reading and start thinking yourself, now! And not half a year later, when the fire stopped burning! Well, at least I started … blablabla … Maya you are really unbelievable smart and tricky! Fuck! I wrote it before, my greatest fear is getting insane or become a murder one day, if I am not waking up, if this nightmare doesn’t stop soon. Sooner or later, I will kill myself or kill somebody else … I never want to feel like an atomic bomb again! It is the absolute horror to feel, that it only need one another little push and I blow up.

Since I feel it cooking in my stomach it might be a god moment to look at those crisis:

It felt always like an huge depression is insight of me. Like there is an fucking crazy amount of energy blockaded. What blockades the energy and what is this energy? The blockade is fear of showing myself. I was afraid to be honest, because I feared to be punished doing so. I feared to be expelled. First of all, I wanted to be part of a group of human beings. I yearned for company and confirmation not to be alone. And to get this, I dissembled myself. I did rarely say what I thought, especially, if I thought differently. I was smiling and saying nothing, instead of standing up and say, that I think this is all a big bullshit. I was afraid of saying no and being rejected for being myself, for being honest. I was afraid of leaving those groups, though I felt very clearly at the wrong place! My fear of being alone was often that big, that I stayed in relationships, though I had to deny myself. I abused myself for the feelings of being accepted of being part of a whole. The Blocked was and is fear and the energy were and are feelings.

And I tried so many things to solve this live threatening problem and it stayed alive and appeared over and over again.

And your and Bernadette Roberts books, that means, what I could understand so far of the writings printed in them, seem to hit the target, to strike right into the heart of problem.

The cruel world and my self are the same. My false self is creating this false world around me. The world is nether wrong nor right, it is undifferentiated and just perfect the was it is and it is my false self, with creates the differentiation, which differs between right and wrong. As you write: self is distortion: distortion by design. Everybody looks through an individually distorted lens – the undifferentiated universe creates differentiation through distortion and exactly this distortion is Individualism and ego. What causes distortion? The whole body-mind! Culture, society, religion, science, body, nature, …

So, Maya is pulling one of her lines sticked to my heart: I have to go and as I promised, to work this afternoon on the farm.

Till tomorrow in the same theatre.

M9

A few moments ago I came up to your question toward Jolene: ” So why not press it?” Why not press the button to kill all the swiss and never be blamed for it? The very moment I knew, this is a question for me too. What would I had answered? Tonight I came up to the answer, that I don’t care if anybody knows or not, I knew it and I wouldn’t want to live with this knowledge and I couldn’t live with it. Well reading that she pressed the button and grinned, made me imagine doing it too! What a great feeling! I never would have imagined it to be so freeing. All the sudden I realized how paralyzing moralizing thoughts and believes are and that they all are based on fear. Fear of doing something wrong and being punished for it. Being guilty and being banished. Fear of losing innocence and becoming bad and disliked … Out of this fears, I did so many things not do! What might have been exactly the right way to go, who knows! Letting this fear go for once, was really freeing. I went out into the night, dancing and singing! Wonderful! Something I do often, when I feel alone!!! Out of fear that other people might think bad of me, I don’t do it when other people are around. Let the others think for you and don’t think for yourself! What a stupid strategy to avoid being lonely! What poor devil this false self is!

The next morning:

This compassion thing stroke me today again! You know, reading that you fly all over, staying here for a while and then go on somewhere else, parachuting, flying with a helicopter over New York, driving a jeep on the beach, … things I forbid myself to do, because I think (do I really think?) it wrong and egoistic. I’m not writing this, because I am proud of those thoughts, I am only honest and right now rather ashamed of them. I never got a driver’s license, because I am (or was?) convinced that cars manly pollution the air, make noise, waste space, kill and separate people, make them lazy and lonely. I wanted to prove the world, that we don’t need to be able the drive a car and still live a normal life. To be honest, I once thought differently – for example I was on a exchange year in the States when I was seventeen/eighteen and learned and loved to drive cars, loved to fly and travel around like you do, there was a whole world to explore and it was very exiting! – and wonder now, why and when I started to think differently and out of which motivation. Several years ago, I even swore to myself, that I never again step into a airplane and fly, if there is another possibility to get, where I want to, if I absolutely have to get there at all! This convictions gave me a strong identity and made me feel better then most of the human race. I got stiff and rigid like an old man. I was very serious and lost quite an amount of humor. No wonder I often almost exploited! What a dump man I was! Full of fear to do something wrong! I thought this compassion thing will be a matter of a few sentence, but now I see it is an important thing and I have to dig deeper! It has also to do with my so called sensitivity, of which I always was proud and now I realize, that it was caused by fear. Oh my God, I always believed to be sensitive out of an vivid connection toward something holy, right or a higher truth. I felt special and was told so. I had a big heart and was always shocked, when something totally different like hate and rage arouse out of this very heart. Ups! Am I this too? Hopefully not, because I always wanted to be like a saint. I don’t want to blame my mother, but I want to find out where this faith comes from – She wished to get three sons like the three archangels and would have called them by their names. This delusion to be good and well-behaved is like a family decease – well not only family, but cultural. Anyway, I did so, because I wanted to be loved and this love was supposed to protect me from feeling alone and since I was forgotten for a while as little baby, I must have developed a high sensitivity for needs of others (or rather for desires or even fears of others?) to know what to do to get love and confirmation. Wasn’t I manly attracted by unsure women or by those who desperately were yearning for love, for confirmation, for a hold in their own lonely sea? Yes, we all stick together and try to dream a solid world! And I was a pro in feeling, where I could get self confirmation, where I could get a kick of love, strong feelings to fall deeper asleep, to dream on … and I went on in a high speed! My teenage years were full of alcohol, drugs, sex and rock and roll. I flirted all the time, abused fear – mine and the one of others – to feel high, to forget, to feel connected. I was surfing on fear and thought to be a God! But on this very selfish, false-selfish trip I not only abused myself, I also hurt a lot of people and one day I suddenly felt in a nightmare, because the whole construction of lies, fell together. I trapped myself in the net of lies I weaved myself. All along this fearful trip I stayed sensitive and now I see, that the heart was not only the motor of this nightmare, but also its own trap. When I was twenty, I stood there and felt like one big asshole, a monster destroying other life. One night I was walking home and suddenly on a dark path through a small wood, I meant to have stood onto a frog and was totally paralyzed. I was afraid to take another step, because I didn’t see the ground and feared to stand on another frog. It was the absolute horror and I stood there crying, desperate and wished life to end. This wish, that life would end, that someone with a big hammer may come by and hit my head and kill me, accompanied me the following years, During this first crisis – was it the first wakening up? – my sperm was full of blood and this inflammation of the prostate was the first of a long series of inflammations of this area in my body. All the sudden I didn’t feel free anymore and felt guilty and sick. The fear of hurting another life started to dominate my life. All I wanted to prevent was being the cause of pain for any other being, including animals and plants. I imprisoned myself for what I believed to have done. I don’t know, if I really understand and see clearly yet the whole complexity of this entanglement of my heart with the false self, which profited of my blindness and fearful thinking and wishing. I was totally blind! I felt on the absolute right way, I believe to have found the one true way to go: be honest and do nothing, what you not want to be done to yourself. I still tend to believe it true! But is it really true? Why did I not want to fly anymore? Why did I hate to noise of airplanes in the air? Why was I totally happy a few months ago, when the volcano ashes stop all the planes? Yes, it was peaceful and quiet, thats true, but I felt so good, because it was peaceful and quiet insight of me! I did not have to look at the airplanes and think of all the people sitting in them and flying somewhere I wished to go too! I was not jealous for once! I – this false self is full of jealousy! I’m jealous of your way of living, Jed! I am jealous of Julie and her house in the woods and her awakening! This ‘I’ is sick! It is nothing but the fear being less then others, fear of being hated and not loved. Your are so right: compassion is just another way of keeping our attention turned safely outward rather than destructively inward!

There is a huge false self – jet to destruct – full of fear, addiction and attachment keeping me running! Ruling my life by false believes – yes, no believe is right! – by faith!

What do I believe? This state of the planet earth has to be protected! Is that true? What am I afraid of could happen, if not? I suffer and die. Why should I suffer and die, when the climate changes dramatically? Well all the beauty vanishes. What beauty? Does beauty exist? All that would vanish is my notion, how nature has to look like. I am just afraid of the unknown changes in a uncertain future! What about all the species vanishing from this planet? Species have come and gone! We all will get sick and ill and suffer from new diseases. All fear! Drinkable water will get less and wars will be fought over it and millions of people, children will die, will starve and die of thirst. Does this not already happen and hasn’t it happened as long human or life is on this planet? But I’ll be guilty of this happening, if I don’t try to avoid it! What really causes all the suffering? Do I really know what is true? What happens after death? All those hundred thousands of children dying every day, although we know, that there is enough food on this planet! I can’t just live on pretending this not happening all the time. Is it really true, that this is wrong? I hardly can think this question! Could it be right or even true, that this is happening? What happens at all? Every day millions of animals are killed to become human food, to become human … to become illusion? Is it all a illusion? Cutting the grass on a field – what happens there? Isn’t this also like a war, which destroys all? Can I be sure, that all this suffering – going on already right now and probably will increase – is not supposed to happen? There might be a will wanting us to wake up, the realize the truth or at least get into a true relationship with the universe. What is needed to wake humankind up? Peace and happiness? Well, the daily struggle to survive is not helping to wake up ether, isn’t it? Is that true? Is a higher consciousness and a certain level of life necessary to wake up? I experience myself, what it means to work hard and be exhausted and only think about sleep and how to do this work as fast as possible done to get to bed. Being so tired ends all longing for truth. Is that true? What made me work that hard? Wasn’t it also fear pushing me working harder that my body was actually able to? Didn’t I disregard my limits out of the fear people could be discontented with my work and thus with me, my false self? Maybe the universe creates strong discontentments to push as into the first step? Maybe it is really perfect, the way it all is! All the injustice, all the murdering, all the suffering, all the destruction, of man and nature, all the pollution … is just perfect? What if this is all true? Isn’t all this just caused by our thinking, our faith and false selfs? Aren’t it our thoughts creating god and bad? This world is our false self. Is that true?

The next day:

The ” Mannahatta” text is very essential for me and I am very glad to have ordered your books in english! If there was a reason to write to you, than it was at least this one, that I get this text to read! I see know very clearly, that I was like Jolene, I was not normal and even as little boy I was driven by this very urge to attach! I wanted “to join up with people, a group, be a part of something, something big and safe and respectable.” I was desperately grabbing “ahold of something”. As boy I tried to grab onto Catholic Church and its faith, than to fast cars like the porsches the father of my best friend sold, than came women, sex, alcohol and drugs, music, … and it all got to get more and more and when I first struggled, fell on my face, I grabbed to a honest and correct lifestyle of avoiding pain and suffering, pollution and war – a very conservative faith, one which beliefs nature holy and that we have to conserve it! The past was better and we have to go back and bullshit like that. The same time I was grabbing to the hope, becoming an important and celebrated artist, famous and admired. But it all did not work, I always fell off. And last I tried to get a hold in communities, here on this farm and in Berlin at the ZEGG and in Leipzig and every time I struggled and did not understand what was going on! Why cannot I just be normal and join other human beings and forget all, dream on? I thought myself ill and strange, a stranger on this planet, lost and dammed. Now reading your words, it is obvious. It was never possible to attach. I was chasing “mirages in a dessert”. Everything I tried “to grab at disappears”. “You can’t grab anything because there’s nothing to grab.” Do I really see that yet? Have I realized this truth? That there is nothing to attache to? Am I not still trying to attache to things and persons? What about Johannes and Magdalena? The idea of joining them on a farm, what is it? I imagine myself living there in a separate house of flat, helping them for food and lodgings, so that I can continue my Spiritual Autolysis. Is this intention pure? Or is there not also the false hope of not being alone undercover? Don’t those two and with their little daughter Salome three stand for the belief, that a happy family life is possible? What does it mean to be truly alone? What would be the price? I had to find a at least average paid job, to be able to afford a own place and then I would hardly have time to write. With Johannes and Magdalena it would be a compromise too – not being totally on my own, but have much more time to write. Is that true? What if I am honest with them and tell them, what I really want. Would they support me? Do I need support? What is your will, universe?

“You want a friend? A companion? Let death be your companion. That’s the one thing you really have, the one thing that’s really yours, that no one can take away.”

Death!

Death has always accompanied me and often it was an friendly option, sometime a wish, but was it ever ” guaranteed absolution; freedom and forgiveness all in one.”? There swung always a catholic note with, something telling me, that it is a sinn to kill oneself. Well you are not talking about suicide, you talk about death, as it will strike every body. One of the very first things, which made me look east and at the buddhism was the book “Siddharta” by Hermann Hesse and especially the passage where he wants to kill himself in the river and almost drowns. This very moment he realizes, that he has not to kill himself, but a part of himself, the false self, though Hesse does not call it so. That was a very important moment of my life and probable kept my alive. Still, I often thought of death as a liberation of all the struggling, of all the terrible feelings, of the hate of myself , … but it was never the guaranteed absolution. What about sinn and karma? All Judeo-Christian bullshit, Hindu and Buddhist Bullshit? Bullshit which creates fear and attachment? That I will have to pay the bill for all my false behavior during lifetime after death is a very deep believe active in me. In my false self? Keeping it strong and vivid? What is the purpose of this faith? Isn’t it just a instrument of power to control the herd? To make it belief and worship the dominant religion? What power did it have on my life? It made me feel wrong and guilty and made me behave well. What is well? Do what is expected? What is the power doing me so? It is just fear, that the suffering will go on after death, that it is no exit. How can I change and overcome this faith? I heard so often that I am just afraid of life, that I started to believe it true. Am I afraid of life, of all the feeling it causes, god and bad? Or is it nevertheless fear of death “That’s liberation; knowing that nothing is yours or can be yours, knowing that you have nothing to lose.” Is that true? Am I not holding to books; trying to grab on the paintings I made, although I often wish to throw them all away, to burn it all, so that I am free, liberated from these chains? What are this chains made of? There not made of pages and paint, they are made of fear and false beliefs. The fear of letting go an identity. The fear of taking off my own clothes, though there are not clothes at all. The belief, that it is my responsibility to clean up, before I go. I believed, that I have to take care for my belongings and treat them well. That I cannot just throw away, as if it belongs not to me, as if society tells me what to do and how to behave. Work and buy and be responsible; the more you have, the more you are, the better you are, the more likely you will enter heaven, … it’s all there and active insight of me and fear keeps it alive. The fear not being normal and being banished from the herd.

“You have to jettison all sub-identities. Be a bad person, a bad citizen. Stop shaping yourself to the world. Shape yourself to your task and let the world despise you or, preferably, forget about you. You want to be a good citizen? Vote? Study issues?” I ponder and nod. “Fuck it. be a crappy citizen. Better, don’t be a citizen at all. Simply abandon that identity. Chop it off. You want to be a good daughter? Friend? Sister? Husband someday? Father? Forget it. Let it all go. Simply cut away all these anchors. All opinions you have of yourself are like the timbers of a false structure. All must go. All will go. The process has begun. The less you resist, the easier it will be.” This is the opposite of what I believed to be right! And I tried to live my life this way and suffered all the time, because this little bastard within me kept on fighting! What a hero!!! And the more I tried to resist, the harder I tried to be part of the false game, the harder he fought and the worse I felt. Oh, it’s all so clear! How could I have been so blind! I always felt like being torn apart and thought to be torn between fear and longing and did not realize, that all the longing and yearning was also based on fear. The fear of No-Self! The battle is going on between this fear of No-Self and the Hatred of False-Self!

Oh, I have to copy all your words. That’s important stuff for me and I want them to be written into my mind and body! And therefor I’ll change it into first person:

” If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, how much would this really matter? That’s absolution. Pre-absolution. That’s what death is, guaranteed absolution; freedom and forgiveness all in one. If I understand the fact of my own death, that it’s always here with me and that it’s a certainty, then I’m free. That’s liberation; knowing that nothing is mine or can be mine, knowing that I have nothing to lose. Other people push death away, deny it, but I don’t have the luxury. I have to pull death close, embrace it, carry it in my heart and mind … like something I carry in my pocket and always have one hand on. There are two kinds of people in the world, make-believe people and serious people. I’m a serious person, that’s what I’m becoming. I’m in the game and I have to play by the rules. What does that mean, being a serious man? Focus. It’s all about focus. I have to learn to be an utter failure in ninety-nine precent of my life. I can accept that because I’m not a failure in the one part that matters. I have to jettison all sub-identities. Be a bad person, a bad citizen. Stop shaping myself to the world. Shape myself to my task and let the world despise me or, preferably, forget about me. Do I want to be a good citizen? Vote? Study issues? Well I used to do so! Fuck it. I’ll be a crappy citizen. Better, I don’t be a citizen at all. I simply abandon that identity. Chop it off. Do I want to be a good son? Friend? Brother? Artist? Husband? Father? Forget it. I let it all go. I Simply cut away all these anchors. All opinions I have of myself are like the timbers of a false structure. All must go. All will go. The process has begun. The less I resist, the easier it will be.

This is where it’s all going anyway. I have this whole life; My home and family, my schools and friends, career and communities and all that, everything I’ve done, everything I am, the future that was laid out before me, but all that has to be released for me to go on. And it will be. All my choices have already been made. I don’t chose whether to let it all go, only whether or not to struggle against the process, and the thing that makes an easier transition possible is death. These false layers are like my skin. It can be torn away slowly, with excruciating pain, or I can just slough it off like a snake, layer after layer, just letting it all fall away. The way to do that, to allow the process rather than battle it, is to embrace my own death. Keep one hand on my death and fight my battles with the other.”

What a fool I was! I was like battling for the wrong side! I had in one hand a shield of fear and in the other one a sword of false faith and hope. I had an bow and arrows made of longings. And all the time I was only hurting myself, cutting myself, trying to hold on to a process which I cannot stop. And death was alway standing behind me and I often looked back and begged him to help me to end this endless fighting. Asked him to release me! Oh, and all the women, alcohol, sugar, … were just an short release! And the battle went on afterwards even harder. Oh come on death, be my friend. From now on, I want to hold your hand and let the process happen.

“And I wanted to attach. Thats was the urge that brought me here. I wanted to join up with people, a group, be part of something, something big and sage and respectable. I sensed myself spinning off into oblivion and I was clawing desperately to grab ahold of something. This was the big trap, the one that pulled me in and spared me from the paradigm shift, the point of no return, the First Step. We’re all treading water in a shoreless sea and we huddle together into groups to convince ourselves that our situation is other than it is. That’s make-believe. I as a serious people want to confront the real situation. To do that I have to leave the group and stop treading water, surrender to the inevitable rather than live of pointless struggle. I have to go off by myself and allow myself to sink. This is the point no one goes beyond. This is what everyone lives in denial of; what they must, at all costs, stay away from. The emperor has no clothes. It’s that simple. It’s all just make-believe. When I want to stop playing make-believe, I become a serious man. Of course everyone sinks alone anyway, but the serious person can’t stand the lie of pretending the sea isn’t shoreless or that the darkness isn’t absolute or that death isn’t always a breath away. The urge to attach is the survival urge; the urge not to drown, not to sink into the blackness. It’s natural to panic and that’s what I was doing at the end of last year. That was what all this trying to hook up was about. I was in a life or death struggle to survive and the job of the universe was to help me die. It helped me indirectly. It has been trying to help me grab onto that group in Leipzig so that I can see for myself that it can’t be done. The process works, it doesn’t need Jed McKenna or anyone else. Now I’m starting to see that it’s no longer possible to attach. I was chasing mirages in a desert. Everything I try to grab at disappears. I can’t grab anything because there’s nothing to grab. Maybe I think now I can grab onto this book and its words, but that won’t work either. Do I want a friend? A companion? Yes! Well, I let death be my companion. That’s the one thing I really have, the one thing that’s really mine, that no one can take away. There will soon be a power shift in me. Rebel forces will overthrow the old regime. A new constitution will be imposed and the excesses and frivolities of the make-believe regime will be swept away. A new government will assume control and impose martial law and a wartime constitution that has no place for anything but the machinery of destruction. Identity will wither. Preferences will fade. Relationships will be abandoned. Love itself will be forgotten. That’s the First Step. I’m going to tough places. I’m in for a whole different type of life than I see people living around me. I’m getting a glimpse now of what aloneness looks like and there’s plenty ahead. But this too shall pass, I’m sure. The pain of the transition will pass, not the aloneness. The aloneness actually has already becomes more comfortable, than it was before and it will be very comfortable one day. I have to go beyond the place where death is a morbid and evil thing. Beyond the false faith of the make-believe regime, that there is a after death payment day. It’s about liberation, not at the end of life, but during, when it matters. Death makes life possible. It’s how I can know what life is and what to do with it. Life will be a war and people hate war because they fear death, but death is my best and most certain friend. Not Jed Mckenna, not the Tibetans or the Japanese, or some pop guru or coffeehouse mystic-in-training. Can I really do this? I am doing it! This is it. One step at a time. Sometimes I’m scared, though I don’t know of what. I want to find out! That’s how I know where to go. I have to follow the fear. Go into it and light it up. Inside my fear is the next door, the next thing holding me in. Let fear be my guide.”

What scares me? What am I afraid of? Where have I to go?

Next day:

What scares me? At the moment I often think about the future. That means, I worry, how I’m going to live and earn money. What bothers me exactly? The not knowing what to do. But that’s not where the panic comes from. I’m afraid of having no money any more, to stand the without a penny. I don’t have any savings and in december will my money run out, if a don’t find a job. Just any job? No, thats also bothering me, I don’t want to do just any job and I’m afraid ending up with a terrible one. So, I fear to have to do something I don’t want to do. How does not want it to do? I! So it is this I, which is afraid of loosing credits, becoming poor and less respected. isn’t it the false self itself, that does not respect every kind of work. It thinks in terms of valuable and poor, god and bad, … it is dualistic! Wake up and be aware of the no-dualistic truth! Does it really matter what I do? My only concern should be, if the what-so-ever job is supporting me wakening up or if it’s sticking me to the dream world. The universe knows very well, what I need to make the nest step. I just have to let it happen! I have to go into the fear and light it up! So what am I afraid of? What’s making me panic thinking about the nearby future? I see myself asking Nicola for money, though I’m already in debt to him. What so bad about that? He can say no, if he does not want to give me any money. I am ashamed of not being able to stand on my own feed and earn my living. I feel inferior and like a little boy. What makes me feeling so? The thought, that every body should be able the earn his living. Couldn’t be also, that I have the impression to be lazy and to comfortable to the my fingers out of my ass and work? Am I not just avoiding any effort to earn money? Now it’s getting hotter! Don’t I just want to overcome this bothering world and not want to be involved to it at the same time and if I could wish, than I wished, that other have to deal with it to support me? I want to be liberated by others! Lazy bustard! I have gained a certain distance to the world and I am afraid of having to get to close to it again, to live on. I am afraid of getting sticked to it again. Of becoming overthrown by the armies of Maya and ending up in a psychiatric clinic all the same. Is that true? Having to work might be just what I need to overcome this fear. I can’t just sit here and wait till somebody is coming and giving me money to go on, what ever I want. Isn’t it just that? I want to be able to do what ever I want? Am I just afraid of giving up so called freedom? Isn’t this my false self fighting for this freedom? I’m comfortable here, so alone and free and panic arises, when I imagine myself among people. Why? Because I play a false role among them? I hide and try to avoid any conflicts and to do so, I swallow and keep down all what that little bastard in me wants to overthrow. I imprison my seek for truth and thus feel terrible and I don’t want to get there again and just don’t know what to do! There we go, I am afraid of loosing control. My false self want to gain control for any price! Get of the steering wheel! Let it go! Now!

The Batteries! Till tomorrow.

M10

I doubt I’ll get anything straight today, but I’ll try.

Yesterday evening I was trying to get some light in the flat with all the women and ended up writing letters to some of them. What a mess is in there! My Childhood should better have finished with fourteen, so to avoid all that what fallowed! It has been one huge disaster! It’ll take me a lot of time to clean it all up, lighten it up and burn, what caused it.

Late at night I started to read the chapter “The Whole Truth” in Spiritual Warfare and I still don’t like this chapter. Already, when I read it in german I got confused, because I don’t understand in which meaning you use the word “cogito”. As far I speak latin, it means “thinking” : I think therefore I am – Cogito ergo sum. But is this “I am” a thought or rather a feeling? Wouldn’t it be more true to say: I think therefore I am a thought? Or: I feel and therefore I am a feeling. I think therefore I think. I feel therefore I feel. You write God introduces himself to Moses as: I am that I am. I only knew it as: I am the I am. Shouldn’t the truth be thus: Sum ergo sum?

Anyway, I was tired and had to sleep and decided to go on reading in Bernadette’s Book today, because I have seen, that she differs between a knowing-self and a feeling-self.

So today, I tried to read and understand her view on the subjects of consciousness, self, ego and so on … and it took me all day to read a few pages. It is very complex and difficult to understand, ad least for me. I had a hard time and now I am even more confused and my head is bursting full of terms like unconscious, conscious, awareness, self-awareness … and I am very discontent, because I want to understand and overview the whole thing and realize now, that this wish to understand, to master it, nothing else is than the wish of my Ego to benefit and keep control. The false Self wants wisdom and because it doesn’t get it right away, it’s very discontent.

When I read, what Bernadette writes about the Ego, I was shocked and ashamed to recognize myself in her words about the ego and what feeling it causes. Her definition of ego. ” the ego is the experience of self-will, a will turned solely on itself that seeks its own fulfillment and benefit” makes absolutely sense to me and covers very well with my own experiences. And I know much to well the tantrum behavior of this self-will, if it doesn’t get, what it wants! ” It is the cause of true psychological and spiritual suffering and always symptomatic of an imbalanced and immature psyche.”

Yes, I recognize myself! Imbalanced and immature, a 36 years old Child, stock in Childhood. And then you write; ” Human Childhood, though, is itself just a symptom of the one core disease from which all others radiate, fear.” and wonder now, why does Bernadette not once mention fear?

Think for myself!

Do I want something, because I am afraid of something else? I this will – “itself, the deepest experience of the feeling-self or center of consciousness” Is this true? Do I really and truly understand that? – turned solely on itself, because this immature feeling-self is afraid of not being? Does the fear arise out of the will to want something and because the will moves toward or from something away, it becomes desire and is no longer in its profound immovable state and thus is not anymore; is not “being” anymore? “Being, is the will prior to its movement in any direction, a will that finds no lasting peace until it rests in its divine center.” The fear of not being, of no-self arises out of the movement of the moving will, the desire? Do I fear, because I want something or want to avoid something? Or do I want or avoid something, because I fear not to be without or with this object of desire or desistance? Does fear start to exist the very moment, the will is not any longer resting in its divine center? What is the divine? Is Human Childhood ending from the moment, I focus my will on the divine center? Is that the first step? Stop focusing my will on my own fulfillment and benefit and turn it instead on the divine?

And you write or I read in ‘your’ book: ” This (the knowledge of captivity in Human Childhood and desire their freedom. Desire?!) is where the sincere seeker must make the most rigorous and concentrated effort. If we don’t get this, we don’t get anything. I’s not enough to kind of get it. We have to grok it, live it and breath it, make it our own personal religion and become fanatic about it.”
Oh yes, since I really hate this ego-experience and want to overcome this false self, I want to get Human Adulthood. Stop! There is again a desire! I want something! Is this still a ego experience? How do I stop wanting something and all the same be totally focused on getting somewhere? A moving will! Is it this belief – to have to get somewhere – false, because it all is already right here?

“…, but your ego is much smarter than you, way smarter, and if you don’t recognize that and respect it, you stand very little chance against it.”

Respect ego and hate it at the same time?

“Ego doesn’t need to be killed because it was never really alive. You don’t have to destroy your false self because it’s not real, which is really the whole point. It’s just a character we play, and what needs to be killed is that part of us that identifies with the character.”

What part of us identifies with the character? What is the character? The false self? What is the self? What is the ego? Do you use those terms in the same meaning as Bernadette does? Does it help me to go on, if I understand her definitions? If there is only one truth and you both have realized it, than you must talk and write about the same one truth. But does that also mean, you talk in the same language, the same words and terms about it? Do you two only pack truth into different words or do you talk of a different truth and thus one of you has not realized truth? Or have I only to think more for myself and figure out, what is true? I am the only expert! Am I? Do you exist? Does Bernadette exist? I am just ignorant? Ignorant I am for sure! How can I overcome it? Think for myself!

Two days later:

After a day of work on the farm, I wrote yesterday a long e-mail to a man I know know for a little more than I year. I met Stefan last year in June in northern Germany, where we two went through a five day Male-Initiation coordinated by Richard Rohr. Being here in this hut often seems to me, like I carry on something which has started then during that initiation. It was the beginning of looking behind the illusion or at least the try to realize, that it all is an illusion and not the way we believe it to be. Nevertheless the SA is much more rigorous and a sharper blade to cut through the layers if delusion! The week point of the Initiation-Project of Richard Rohr is, that it is imbedded into christian faith and that might also be a shadow on Bernadette Roberts writing – it is not free of faith. Or is this just the limited few of my own ignorance?

Well, maybe Richard is heading for Human Adulthood and not Truth. Any way, Stefan seems to be from my point of view a Human Adult. Ten years ago he had within a major crisis a heavy bike accident and broke his neck. When he was lying off the road alone in the woods, waiting for someone discover him, he felt himself deeply and absolutely profound asked: Do you want to live on? One turn of the head and he would have died!

This experience change his whole life and was his second birth. When I first met him, I was sitting at the same table and heard him speak to another man and his voice and what he said impressed me very much. Since then he became something like my soul brother and although we have seen us only once since the initiation, we often write each other and try to push us further.

From the moment I started to take your writings for true and started myself doubting what I believed to be true, something happened between Stefan and me. It was like I have taken a hung step forward or where ever to and from my new point of view Stefan was sleeping and dreaming, living in a illusion. On the other hand I still feel much inferior to him, like a Child to an grown up man. What happened and what is going on?

Is he wakening up within the dreamstate and I try to wake up from it?

You write:

“The main benefit most spiritually inclined people can derive from having a clear understanding of what it really means to be truth-realized is not so they can achieve it, but so they can dispense with it and reset their spiritual sights on something worthier than enlightenment, which is, literally, the biggest nothing of all time.”

and

“If I were to give advice, I would recommend Adulthood to everyone and Enlightenment to no one. … Spiritual Enlightenment is pointless and meaningless, and should only be sought by those who have absolutely no choice in the matter.”

What would you recommend Jolene nowadays? What would you recommend me? Is it pointless to ask this question, because if I had no choice, than I had non! Try to grow up and if you have to wake up, you’ll wake up, what we all will anyway one day. It’s not our will and if I meant to have a will, it is ego making me belief so and it is its own will solely turn on himself!

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on the table with friends and their two little sons. We ate cake and after having eaten two pieces, the two children left the table. After a while one of them cam back and asked for another piece of cake. Well the parents said no, because he left the table and when he did so, they asked him if he had enough and he said yes and now he wants suddenly another piece and that want work. Anyway, the boy started to cry and stamp on the floor and almost started to hit his mother. I was sitting there and for the first time I saw right into the mask of Ego and I felt something shaking in myself too. I know this feeling from other similar occasion and always thought or rather believed to just suffer with the suffering child and even meant it compassion! How ignorant! Now, it felt like looking into a mirror and looking at myself. I saw my own child hiding behind a mask of an adult and the only difference between me and that little boy seemed to be, that he wore no mask. This very moment of tantrum the child was nothing but Ego and my own childish ego was shocked and ashamed to look at himself and wanted to turn away! The trembling feeling in me was ego itself! Trying to avoid de-masking!

This morning I received a phone call and was asked, whether I want to work in October and November for an artist, helping him to do some architecture projects. Well it would be a interesting and god payed job and the money I have to earn somehow anyway soon, would aloud me to go on writing over the winter. On the other hand, I don’t like this artist very much, because he makes a big deal out of himself and his work and he has no interest in any spiritual questions at all. So I wonder if this a trap of Maya trying to stop me writing or if it is a gift of the universe, which tries to teach me something and which wants to support my going on and growing up. How do I find out? Am I afraid of saying yes or am I looking for security? Where is the fear hidden making me hesitating to accept?

How are the pattern of fear and Childhood and how look those of a adult self and how those of the truth?

Thanks of all.

M11

I’m sitting in the train to lucerne, where I work the next two weeks in the art museum, to earn some money. I am not very happy about going back to the city, to my room at the Industriestrasse and being among all those people, I have been around for too long. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why am I hesitating leaving that place? I am afraid of the unknown! Where shall I go? This is switzerland and if I ride the train for a hour any direction, this country ends or an other language is spoken. How can I survive? I don’t have savings nor to I have any diploma, than being a artist. All for my good? I don’t have anything to grab on and I am on my own. Now, I am right staring at one of my greatest fear: becoming a hobo, being nothing, a nobody, avoided by everybody, alone, starving, frizzing, stinking, dying. Wasting life. But didn’t I feel like wasting my life before? Especially in the atelier? On the other hand, wasn’t I already an hobo in truth matters? Isn’t this world full of spiritual hobos? What does it mean to embrace fear? To go into it? To go and be what I am afraid of? Pack a back bag and just start walking, not knowing where to go and where to stay over night? Is it necessary to do so? Where would that lead me to? Trust? I’m sure, you saw the movie ” into the wild” or even read the book. I saw that film and recognized quite a bit of me. I wished to be that encouraged, that flexible and pure intentioned like this young man. In my early twenties I was much more encouraged and didn’t fear the unknown. What happened to me? He wanted to get into the wild. Where do I want to get? To avoid being a lie, do I have to leave society? There is something like a wish to become exactly, what I fear. I wish to get to the ground: what if I lose everything I have? Is there still a will to live on? Is there something, that does not brake? What is the core of life? But is this wishing still ego? Is it still a desire, a movement of the will? Not my will shall happen! What does that mean? I wasn’t asking to work again at the museum, because I quitted this job this spring after ten years working there!

Two days later:

Well,well, here I am and stare at a field covered by weed, weed of thought and beliefs. Every time I start writing at you this field – where I am looking for the truth – looks like nobody has ever touched it. Haven’t I taken some of this weed away the last time? How did it grow so fast again?

I miss writing and I hesitate nevertheless to write on tonight, because it is late and tomorrow I have to get up early and if I don’t sleep enough, I’ll be in a bad mood and … who is in a bad mood? Why? Pure intention? Who or what is controlling me here in town? Is there any difference between being alone in the mountains or here in the city among all those people? Isn’t it all the same stage? It is all here too! What is the difference? Why does it feel different? Here I am much more confronted with my ego than being alone in nature! My ego wants this and that and I am full of desire and it’s tricky to focus on the divine, on the search for truth! What am I supposed to learn here? There is a reason, that I am here!

More another day or night. I am very thankful to have brought your books with me to town and reading the printed words on those pages help me to stay focused … at least some hours a day.

Thanks for all

M12

That was one of the first thing I read when I came back to this hut and it hit me directly at the center of my thoughts about the last two weeks in Lucerne. It was like a two week fight I fought! First I did not notice, but after a few days my body changed: I was getting stressed and that’s how I walked and breathed. My body was almost always on a panic mode and my shoulders got tense and I just kept on going and going and after two weeks I stood late at friday night in front of a bar, where I used to go quite often years ago and got totally pissed off at myself! How the fuck did I get there!

Looking at all those drunken people, with no light in their eyes, I only saw myself, my childish ego trying to grab on old friends and habits. I felt terribly ashamed and frustrated. How can I change my life? How do I get out of these old structures?

Until now I thought, that I have to fight my heart, that I am facing a army like Arjuna and now I read, ” that we are both the protagonist and the antagonist in this conflict, both attacker and defender. This is the paradoxical nature of the struggle. We can’t win by fighting. The very thing that fights, that resists, is the thing we seek to overthrow. Only by vanquishing ego can we prevail. Only in surrender can we find victory. … Surrender is victory.”

What does that mean? To what have I to surrender?

Thinking about surrender, I think of my dad having given up his dreams and having surrendered himself to the regime of the good citizen. When he was in his early twenties he saw the film ” one flew over the cuckoo’s nest” and this film impressed him very much and made him want to change his life, but somewhere on the whole process he stopped and surrendered in my eyes to the unwillingness of my mother to change her life too. When I was in my late teens, I was terrible pissed off my dad, because he did not realize the things, he was talking about. I hated him for his weakness and insecurity and I got furious whenever he sad, that he has no choice and that he does it all for the good of us. I did not want him working all the time and hardly be at home and if so only with a headache. I wanted him buying a farm and restore it and do really adventurous things. I wanted him to fight the corrupted world, but in my eyes, he gave up and failed and all this resonates in the word ‘surrender’.

What does it really mean to surrender?

What does it mean for me?

What am I fighting?

What am I afraid of letting go?

What am I trying to become?

In lucerne I feel lost and I don’t know what to do, that means, I have no idea of how to earn my living. In the art museum, they appreciate my work very much and they asked my again to stay, but I have been working there for teen years and I feel very much imprisoned doing this job. I want to get out of this false world.

I am not a artist any more and fell out of the scene and don’t belong to any other. I am lonely though living together with twelve other human beings in my age. I am not interested anymore in their way of living. But I don’t know how to get out of it all, because it all fits together just to perfect. In the house I live, I hardly pay any rent and because of that the job in the museum was enough – it’s only a 30% job – and most difficult of all to overcome is, that I had a lot of time for myself. I felt for a long time free and life felt well adjusted, but something changed and now it does not fit anymore.

I fell out of my character on stage and I don’t know anymore who I am. The last two weeks showed it very clearly, I can not play my old character anymore.

But what direction shall i take? What is to be done next?

Does surrender mean to give up my old character and stop trying to play it and fight to stay in it?

I am afraid of doing it!

The last few years, I tried to let it go by step by step and left lucern over the summer and sometimes even in the winter for months, but did not give it up totally. Was I trying to cheat? Moving without to move?

Does surrender mean for my to let this last security go? Is it of any good at all? Is this place not rather a heavy chain holding me back than a safety belt? Did I draw a line, but crossed it only with one leg? Have I been standing there over this line the last few years? Paralyzed with fear to move any direction?

Is there a way back at all? Where wants me the universe to go? It clearly wants me to cross the line and yes it is the fight against my ego which holds me back the same time. Fighting the fear, fighting my heart keeps me turned towards the old character, keeps me on the old side, the side of my childhood, with it’s feelings and hops, disappointments and angers, love and hate … my parents and sisters … old friends and places … my old identity, of Michael who so many people are glad to see again, whenever I am back in town and this appreciation is like a sleeping pill.

I want to go on!

And I try to surrender!

Thanks, Michael

M13

The process keeps on going thought I don’t really like, what is happening here in town with me or what I let happen with me. To be on my own in that hut in the mountains was easy compared to here. Here I start to see even more clearly what army I am to fight, if I want to grow up and the army multiplies thinking about wakening up. There is so much I have to let go and leave behind. The last few days I have been confronted with so many childish dreams and hopes, wishes and beliefs of my childish ego … and it is so difficult to see them as what they are. This place is under control of my heart and it is fighting with fears and delusion; it tries to keep me asleep and it often wins the fights. I am looking forward to get back to my hut!

Today after work I went to the cinema and saw “inception” the second time. When I first saw it, I was sitting in the movie theatre and thought, that this film was only made for me and that to see it was the reason to spend this two weeks here in lucerne! This film helped me very much to realize, how my unconsciousness is controlling my consciousness. The way I see the world is totally influenced by my unconscious wishes, hopes, beliefs, … things I took up from my parents and they did the same from their parents and so on … and I also realized tonight, that the way people are reacting to me is influenced by their unconsciousness and that those children within us conspire to keep us children. We avoid all together to grow up! Sometimes I feel like in a trap and it scares me, how fast I forget my intention to wake up and stay awake!

And I do that and this and think that I have to do that too and this also and don’t sleep enough and drink to often alcohol and suddenly I don’t breath right anymore and get stressed and that keeps me awake in the evening and so on and on and time passes by and Maya is laughing, while I am dreaming.

Thanks for your writings,

M14

It’s amazing! I’ve read “Spiritual Warfare” before, but this time every new chapter is like another slap in my face! Wake up! Stop dreaming! Stop dreaming another world, an alternative world!

Oh yes, I was a dreamer and have not woken up yet! Will I ever be able to? Or have I breathed to much of that so called spiritual smoke? It’s all about truth! Is it true? Over and over again … Right now I am fighting the one community I have visited so often the last four years (ZEGG – Zentrum für Experimentelle Gesellschafts-Gestalltung, Center for experimental design of society) and where I have experienced to most delighted feelings and also the most horrible ones. Strong feelings! Yes! And they caught my heart and bound it to this place! When I read the chapter “Alternative People” and realized, that if I want to go on and further on, I’ll only fool myself, if I continue to go there, I almost panicked. It tears my heart apart and it hurts so fucking much imagining to never ever go there anymore! I feel like a junkie thinking about being forced to quit taking heroin! What did this place to me? Why got I so stuck there? What is going on there? Is this hell or paradise? What is it? Is it only my ego making it ether hell or paradise? Or is it like your write: “It also enjoys the same curious immunity from accountability enjoyed by the religions and whacko cults it falls between, such that users blame failure on themselves and not on the belief package they bought, or the people who sold it to them.” It is definitely not a place to wake up, though it often discomforted me that much, that this discomfort kicked my lazy ass to move. But is it a place to grow up? Are there only children or some adults too? On one hand I felt free there like nowhere else before and on the another one totally imprisoned, but manly in myself! I felt so inferior and limited, so afraid and shy. I wanted desperately to become a part of this community, but never really felt welcome. I felt too serious and sad. Something insight of me was fighting against something there. What was I afraid of? I was afraid of giving up my free will. Is it really about overcoming Ego? Was I holding on to my childish ego? What attracted me most, was the hope to finally find a place, where I could be myself without feeling wrong and like a lie. I believed to have found the place and the people among them I could be whole. Why do your words hit me so much? “Rather than detaching from their ego structures, alternative people merely reshape them along more heart-felt and self-centric lines, their multifarious goals and ideals reducing to personal happiness via removal, avoidance, and denial of unhappiness.” Is that true? I myself wanted to become more heart-felt, but not self-centric! I did not want to become more egoistic, egocentric! Are they self-centric? It didn’t seem to me! They probably all try and “seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish”! That’s exactly what I wished to do and I thought that they know exactly how to become holy, happy and unselfish! By free love and community life, by Spirituality rather than Religion or whacko cults! It seem all absolutely perfect to me! Did they just change the masks? Hide false self behind another mask? A more generous one, a more social one, … ? But I could nor stop being unhappy! I have met the black cloud and could just not forget it. Why did I blame myself for not finding a way to stay and become happier? If eighty people say, it is this way, how can one person say something different? Aren’t they not right? Majority is always right! What a stupid belief! But it is democracy! It’s all within the same paradigm. One of my oldest and closest friends lives there and he often tried to tell me, that I have to take more care for myself and my limits, when I was there. Don’t give up yourself! He told me, that one thing he had to learn himself, was to say no and take responsibility for his own needs and limits. To survive within a community you have to become more individual. More self-centric? But they do so much for each other! For all human or only for the ones within the group? They talk about commitment. They confirm each another. Is it all about confirmation? Is it all about creating strong feelings to catch the visitors? Do they need visitors to ease their addiction? Was I just new and fresh blood? Are they blind? Or do they commit a crime? What’s the crime? There is no distinction between deceiver, deceit and deceived. What does that mean? Was I deceiving myself? Was I creating the deceit? Was I deceived? Is there anything wrong with them? Within their logic it is all just perfect. Well not quite, because they slowly realize, that they don’t get younger, but older! They look for young people! And the young people don’t come. Are they victims of their own idea? Is the community they created, the phantom trying to get ride of them, because it needs young and attractive human beings to survive? I heard several of them speaking about wishing to become enlightened. Are they slowly realizing, that it is not functioning their way? Back to myself. Go inward! I wanted to have it all, but not to share it! My will was totally self-focused. And I felt limited, because I saw, that I was only self-centric. A lot of the others seem more open and less focused on themselves. Was I deceiving myself or was I deceived by them? Why was I wanting to belief, that they are better and further than I was? What is this self destroying thing inside of me? Is it truth? Where does this impression to be a lie come from? Did I not get the curve there, because my ego is too weak to hold truth back? Too weak to protect my false self from non-self? Was the missing of love in my early childhood a blessing? Did I not get enough mother-love to fall asleep deep enough? Ego needs feelings to live and if it does not get love it tries to cause hate, to be nourished?

What makes me panic that much thinking about not going there in november like planed? What am I hoping and seeking to get there? One daydream of myself is to get sex. To be attractive to women. To get strong emotions. To get appreciation. To get something. And for sure not to lose something. I am afraid of losses! And this here is all about losing! Losing this hold! Losing the hold on to the ship! Somehow I was like Pippin. I got into a situation of which I was not capable to master and I got afraid and jumped of the boat over and over again and each time I felt so helpless lost and alone and with each time my seek to grab on grew stronger and the more desperately I felt being all alone again on the endless dark sea. I almost got crazy there! And still there is something insight of me trying to grab on this place once again! Cutting it of hurts! Yes id does. It is really like killing myself. Killing my very hope. Killing my beliefs and my heart. Is there no other way? What is true?!

And it is begging for mercy! Please don’t kill me! And it is cunning! It tells me to go there all the same, because I have still to learn something there! I have to see the lie with my own eyes and see for myself if it is really true! Like testing truth! The battle is on the battlefield! But where is the battlefield? It is not somewhere out there! It is insight of me! And if every thing is alway the best, what can be wrong about going there again? Well, I am sure if I will go there, it will be the best thing to have done, because it will be. But maybe it will only take more time to wake or grow up! What am I trying to avoid? Pain! Addiction! How can I overcome this addiction? Kill the addicted? How? By truth? The ugly and hurting truth.

The ZEGG is a kindergarden. Children playing adults. This place is ruled by a self- and heart-regime! Not only a delusion, but a dictatorship! Ugly and highly addictive. A brainwash.

The next morning:

As soon I turned off this computer all the memories of the seeming good experiences showed up out of my unconsciousness and all the sudden there was a huge army in front of me. The ZEGG stands for more than my parents and my family. It is much more! It was or still is the one hope to find a place to attach! I felt helplessly lost and alone before I met this place and to be there often was like coming home, like having found my true home! And now all the sudden I realized, that if I want to go on, I have to overcome this family. I have to fight it, if I want to pass it. The army is enormous! And way back on a proud horse I saw my heart. It is its army! And I discovered all my friends among its soldiers. All my example, all the men I am looking up to. All the women I love and wished to be loved by. And I feel so terribly alone! So week and lost. What am I doing here?

But are they all true? Are they what I see in them? Isn’t it all a delusion of my own ego and false self? Is this all Maya? And what causes this delusion? Strong feelings of lost and loneliness. Is this whole army anything else, than another delusion created by the Mayas to create strong emotions to reinforce ego? Oh, I wish I could tore out my heart and stop this bullshit.

Is this whole house, this whole ship of my false self nothing but a creation of the false self itself to cause feelings to protect itself from non-self by ego? The whole thing, even the cellar with all the fear and horror is nothing else than ego structure and the attempt to create a delusion of hold. Is this ship the hold of my false self, the one and only hold to grab on in the endless sea of non-self? If so, what does this mean? Is even my attempt to get rid of all what is not true on this ship, the Spiritual Autolysis a part of the delusion?

What am I if not all this? What is awake and what is asleep? What dreams and what is? How am I? What am I not? I am not this life. I am not this I. Am I not a human being? Am I a being? I am. Am I?

Untruth-unrealization.

What is not true? Who was I before my birth? What am I if all falls off what is not true?

Untruth-realization is self, the false self. Self-realization is the opposite of Enlightenment. My whole fucking life was one huge attempt to realize myself! Self-realization! The whole life long I was looking for a place to realize myself! I always thought, that there must be something within myself that is real and wants to incarnate into this world. I only have the find it! This Buddhism Bullshit about a hidden diamond within all human beings only waiting to be discovered, is nothing else than another false attempt to find true-self! ? Is there only cover, but nothing to discover? The one thing I was hoping to find is the thing that hides and all there is to be found is this covering.

Is Truth-realization not possible? Is Non-self-realization possible?

How to live a true life?

M15

This morning I read the chapter “Spiritual Dissonance” and stumbled over the words ‘magical’ and ‘miracle’ : ” Or as I think, it is all magic. The dreamstate is a magical place and we are part of it. We are it.” and “I’m saying, it’s all a miracle.” I stumbled, because those words reminded me of my artwork a few years ago. Several time I did an installation called ” On the way to wonderland” and the last show I did had the title:” In Childhood some trees rustled even at windless days.” You write also in the same chapter:” Real thinking is invariably destructive and pain-causing.” What I always tried to realize with my artwork was exactly the opposite! I tried to construct and stop pain. I always tried to create a world which reliefs people from Spiritual Dissonance. In my eyes most of contemporary art was sick and only focusing on pain – I had the metaphor that society is a body and art is the pain within this body, trying to draw it’s (the society’s) attention to its wounds and illnesses, misbalances – and I wanted to do it differently and heel and create a medicine against the disfunction, instead of just pointing at it.

I was full of Spiritual Dissonance and my inner world, my beliefs were grinding like hell on the world as I saw it. As I was it? This is amazing and heavy stuff! I loved the little roman churches in the mountains and was dreaming of doing rooms like them. To create a magical world within this sick world, to forget what is happening around us and to connect with something larger the this limited world. Was I trying to build prisons? I wanted to build holy places which heel people of disbelief, of greed and vanity, of suffering … I wanted to sensitize people for beauty, for the perfection of nature, for the miracle of the world, but I did not want to destruct the old one and cause pain! I tried it the tranquil and serene way and failed all the time, at least in my eyes, because people loved my art! All I created was empty and dull and I was unable to tell a heeling story. When ever I tried, it ran like sand through my hand. And I was totally frustrated and got angry and violent and was shocked about my own ‘bad’ behavior and pain and it all ended up in a terrible mess! What was I doing? How was I? How am I?

The next morning:

“Am I wrong in thinking that Maya has thoroughly captured the hearts and minds of those who would seek to escape her?”

I wanted to change the world and got more and more stuck in this attempt. The more I tried the stickier it got. I felt like a freak, insane trying to create a prefect world, one without mistakes and falsity and got totally lost in making surfaces, shiny and glittering, but absolutely dead, not alive. I felt imprisoned in my atelier and did not realize, that I am imprisoned in myself, in my false self and that I was suffering, because the world, my own world, I was not perfect at all. I felt like my artworks empty, senseless, dull, dead, a lie, false, … I hated myself, I hated the world.

“Are they not completely indoctrinated, enslaved by orthodoxy?”

When I quit my own artwork, I tried to become any traditional calligraphist and started to study it at the university. Every day I practiced, for a year and another and anger and frustration stayed my mane feelings and got even worse! I was into Zen and imprisoned me more and more. Until I freaked out and got so fucking angry, that I broke a finger hitting the table. I wanted to become a master, like the old one, the beloved and adored ones. I was looking for tradition and backwards, where I saw a golden age.

“Are they not sitting with their eyes closed, trying to quiet their minds and stop their thoughts?”

Zazen made it always worse! I wanted my mind desperately to calm down and stop thinking! I so often wished, that somebody came by and hit me with a hammer and make it stop. I was imaging myself becoming blind, because I did not want to see the word anymore and finally not being enticed, tempted and seduced. I wanted to become holy and all I did was trying to escape the world, to transcend it, to become a saint. Fuck, that was and is so sick!!!

“Are they not promoting peace and tranquility and silence as spiritual ideals?”

Thats all I did! Those were my ideals and I almost killed myself, because there was an atomic bomb ticking insight of me! I was a threat to my own beliefs! There was a killer alive insight of my! And fuck, all this strong emotions of hat and anger, of frustration supported this terrible unstable belief system! I was really stock! Am I free now? Am I really not stuck anymore?

“Are they not practicing a heart-centric, emotion-based spirituality?”

And then I went on this farm here and also to a community which still tries to live free love and base everyday life on spiritual concepts. Peace, Green-Peace, Free-Love, be happy and enjoy life, let’s sing together and love each other, … and first thought to have found paradise and struggled because I just couldn’t stop being sad and think for myself. But I only thought and believed, that my heart is just not open enough and I opened it and stopped looking for myself, everybody was welcome in my heart until it almost bursted and rage entered! I so often walked around with an imaginary sword and cried quiet: leave me alone!

“Do they not posses strong convictions and deeply held beliefs that bind them more securely than chains?”

O my God, I don’t know, if I really realized the whole truth, but as far, as I can see it, I was totally fucked up and chained to my sick convictions. Be quite and nice! Love and do not hate! Don’t kill! Don’t steal! Don’t desire! Don’t rebel! … I was or still am chained by the ten laws. What are this chains made of? Why am I this way? Who am I? Why is it so fucking complicating and hard to get rid of this enchainments? Emotions! Is it all made of emotions? I am addicted to emotions. How can I overcome this addiction?

“We have taken the simplest of all possible things and complicated it beyond comprehension.”

Well I don’t understand it yet! What is so simple? The whole thing? Life? Ignorance? Illusion? Dreamstate? The Truth? What is true? True is, that it itched and I keep on building up shields to relief this itching Spiritual Dissonance! I am still looking only for Consonance! This I causes the itching and it is my very self, my false-self chaining me to its own beliefs. Is that true?

“We have dreamed up these ridiculous spiritual ideals to which we can perpetually aspire but never attain.”

Why should we do that? Why did I do that? Where do those ideals come from? Why did I want to be a saint and perfect? Is the purpose of the unreachable ideals to keep on failing, to never be able to attain them? Is this the most powerful emotion-power-station for my Ego to protect my false self from non-self? Is this the true miracle? It is no miracle! It is self-wanted, it is self. I am Maya! And I am Bob or for sure was like him.

“We have bought darkness in the name of light, lies in the name of truth, and ignorance in the name of knowledge. We have convinced ourselves that what could not be closer is most distant, that what is for all is only for few, and that the one thing you cannot not attain is hopelessly beyond reach. That’s the perfect recipe for a long and happy failure. In other words, that’s the work of Maya.”

Failing to stay a lie. And I even failed that and now I am confronted with truth and it is a huge Orca, with a wide open mouth in a deep and dark sea …

Oh, thanks Universe, that you made this words appear through Jed.

M16

A few days ago the farmer of the farm I worked from March till the end of May called me and asked, if I would like to work for him over the winter. The couple which was supposed to be there, wants to leave earlier and it is to much work for him alone and since he has cancer and will probable not live to long anymore, he rather would like to spend more time with his little grandchildren, than to work all the time.

I don’t know how to decide!

If I work 100%, I worry, that I will have no time and energy left to continue the Spiritual Autolysis and that’s the most important thing. So, that is what I know for sure, but what does “unconditional surrender” mean? Do you mean by unconditional surrender the process of opening ones eyes and see for oneself or do you also mean by it to surrender unconditionally to the whole life, to whatever appears, to whatever is? “It’s about taking control of your life and that means one thing; releasing it.” What do I have to do to do so? Stop judging whatever is? Is there right or wrong?

During the two weeks in Lucerne I thought a lot about the near future and worried about my income and living. On the way back here I remembered, that I actually wanted to practice to release the tiller and stop controlling my life. At the same time I wondered, how I am supposed to find a job, without looking for one! How is this supposed to work? And now this call! What does it mean? This job is not, what I had in mind, thinking about my future. Is this not the exactly the point of surrender? What is thinking this? What is afraid of all the hard work? My childish Ego?

Nevertheless, I also worry that it could be a trick of Maya to get back total control over my life, because exhaustion is poison to the doubting of my false-self. Being exhausted and tired focuses the mind on outside things and during the time I was on the farm in spring, the impulse to start a Spiritual Autolysis got very week and I almost did not start it! I am afraid, that a similar tiredness and will to sleep could overcome me and that I close my slowly opening eyes once again. What is this doubting all about? Is there a part of my thinking childish and another one is grown up? Or is it all childish and egoistic? Or is this thinking that I already have started to open my eyes just another belief and evidence of my dreamstate? Am I still deep asleep?

“It is owning entirely to our belief that our eyes are open that the spiritual quest is doomed from the start, and that so many who think they’re well along or finished have never really begun.” Where am I? “You have to open your eyes, that is the answer. Look at life honestly, see it clearly, and everything else follows naturally from that.” “We begin seeing clearly by first seeing that we are asleep; locked in by our constricting coils of our own emotional energy. Once we truly understand that we are asleep within the dreamstate, then we can begin in earnest to awaken ourselves, which is done by hacking away at these constricting coils.”

What are the constricting coils in the matter of the decision, wether to work on the farm or not? First of all I am afraid of the unknown future and that I soon have no money left, if I don’t find a job. Is this already faith? Can the world be different from my beliefs? And now I am afraid of making a wrong decision. Emotions! All these fears and worries keep me asleep and therefore I don’t see the “perfect and unerring will of the universe”. What do I see, when I stop to worry and fear? I see a question. Alfred – the farmer – asks me, if I want to work for him. He did not say how often and how much I would have to work. It might be up to me to decide! I might be an appropriate possibility to continue the Spiritual Autolysis and still earn at least a living. Maybe I can work only three days a week and use the rest of the time for writing? Do I assume, that the universe could make an error? How do I differ between the universe and Maya? Maya is the fear within myself! The fear of being disliked for shaping myself for my task. The belief that I have to shape myself to the world instead to have the right to live.

“My surrender to the perfect an unerring will of the universe – which I do not perceive as a thing apart from myself – is absolute.”

My emotions hold me back to surrender! And my false beliefs, too! Is whatever happens, always for the best, if I stop to worry and hope, to believe and wish, seek and fear and just surrender?

The next day:

Candide is the one book I remember best of all the books I read in school! It had a major influence on my life and the way I thought about the world. Especially the very end of the book, where Candide says, that we have to cultivate our own garden. I am not sure, wether he – Voltaire – wanted to say that we have to look inward to change the world or if he rather proposed to flee the world and life in a small private world. At school I understood it the second way and thought that there is a backdoor to paradise. And what else were my art attempts? Did I not just try to create this own garden? But the cruel world never stopped knocking on the door and one day I just could not any longer pretend that there was not a cruel and corrupted world. What did I do? I stopped trying to create it artificially and was looking for people and groups which try to create gardens within the real world. I never stopped believing that the world is bad and humans corrupt. And whenever somebody said the opposite, that the there is no right or wrong and that it is all just for the best, I got fucking angry and pissed off, because this assertion what a huge threat to my unstable and weak faith that there are victims and culprits, good and bad. On the other hand I also believed that the human race is becoming better and better and three years ago I was happy to learn about “Spiral Dynamics” which seamed to confirm this belief. Was this belief anything else but the attempt to make myself and my time better than the cruel past and it’s crimes? Does not any generation believe that it’s better than the previous generation? Do I believe in evil to be able to continue to believe in god? Does the belief of god create evil?

What about all the children starving to death? Do they vanish with my ego? Does the pain arising from knowing about them stop? Does the itching stop? Does all the Spiritual Dissonance stop?

They will not vanish, when I open my eyes, but what will I see? Ego? Ego causing all this suffering? Their ego and all the other egos? My ego? Would there still be victims and culprits? Would there still be a desire active within me to change it?

How’s fault is it, when a little cuckoo throws the other ‘true’ little birds out of their parents nest and kills them by doing so? What fault? Where does the idea of a fault come from? Is there something like ‘killing’ at all? Is there an end and a beginning? Is nature cruel? It is for sure a very sharp knife! Is that true? What is sharp and what is blunt?

If Death is true, what dies? An idea? A thought? Is there a world? Am I?

There is Being. But what is it?

What is Being? Is there Being without consciousness? Do my feet exist, when I am not conscious of them?

All is for this world.

M17

I am missing the right words … what is going on and where hell is the way out of this fucking nightmare!?

Yesterday on the way to lucerne (once again), I read the part about “killing the parents” and was sure, that I have done that and that I am through with that. I thought I did it years ago, when I was 18 … they are living such a different life, that I did not realize, that I live just an alternative one and not a really different one! It is just another package around! It looks different, but is not! I don’t really care about my mother. In my eyes, she is boring and absolute average. I hate her for only wanting the good and nice, cute and lovely stuff … she is a kitsch-aunt as we say in german – Kitschtante. But am I any different? Not at all!!! I was always looking for the beauty, the light side of life. Well I saw the ugly side, but tried to make it disappear! Oh my god, all I am writing in english is so fucking nice and I am way to slow to write down, what is going on right now inside of me. I am not a little bit better than my parents which I always thought asleep and like teenagers and thought, that I am much older, grown up, better, whole …. I am a fucking looser! Deep asleep, probably deeper asleep than they ever were! Fuck is this a bullshit! I used to hate my father because he sold is soul for security, for a regular income. I hated him, because he sold his dreams … what am I doing now? Trying to life his dreams? I am fucking afraid of having no regular income! I am fucking panicking, because I don’t now where and how I am going to earn my living. I am dreaming! It is a nightmare! I have not taking one single step! Not one! Still dreaming the same dream for generations! This makes me sick.

Is there a way out of this labyrinth?

When I look at them, I only see myself! Have I ever really seen the world? What am I looking at?

I always admired Goya for his etchings which show the world without make-up – cruel and horrible, false and mendacious, … but I was to fearful to follow him. I was afraid of loosing my mind, to turn insane if I open my eyes and see and look at truth! What is true? There is nether hell nor heaven, but within the dream they seem alive and real and the opposite of each other, but they are one and the same. And supporting the one is enforcing the other … there is not one without the other. Can not be! Is that true?

What are this books? Undercover double agents? What stupid comments are there on the covers! “I have been waiting for this book all my life.” How can somebody wait for this? But its not the books, isn’t it? Its our own will to delusion ourself, isn’t it? What am I doing with this life? Since I have gone so far, I want to go further … first of all start to go …

M18

To many days have past since I last wrote you! This is no good! I just couldn’t stay in the process and fell for some days and now have a hart time to get in again. The longer I wait the worse it gets, it’s like taking no shower for days and weeks and it start to itch all over, but there also grows fear … fear of doing it not right, of being a bad student, fear of what you think about me, when you read my stupid mails … fear of failing …

What does it mean to surrender and stop fighting? Fighting against what or who? Against what IS? I don’t understand it!

Well here I am again and it seems to get more and more complicating. Am I just inpatient? No, I am not focused and waste way to much energy for all the thousand connection to other human beings … I wished to be on my own. How would it be to be alone for 40 days? Go into a dessert and be absolutely alone. What would happen? Or being cast away on a lonely island? Knowing to be alone for the rest of my life? Right now it sounds good to me! Why? I feel confused and distracted and as soon I am among people I think I have to get this and that and that I miss so much and all this fucking bullshit … and its all in my head. What is going on? Do you also get confused and unfocused among people?

The last few days I started to get a clearer few on what it really means to wake up and stop dreaming. It would mean to give up my human identity – this Michael I meant to be all my life long would have to die. Well as long I am on my own this doesn’t sound to bad, but as soon a friend calls or a sister, the parents … they all want to get in contact with Michael. Am I supposed to tell them, I am not existing anymore or that I don’t want to be Michael anymore? Just forget me! I started to write a letter to my parents and sisters about this. I want to say goodbye to them … and tell them to let me go. Surrender? Is it enough if I don’t care about them anymore? Do I want them to make the step instead of me? Do I have to let myself go? Is that surrender? I still don’t understand whom or what to surrender to! Fear? To the fear, that they think bad about me? That they come together and say things like: what happen to Michael? Did he lost his mind? Do we have to put him in a clinic? He is so strange! What am I afraid of? Being hated? Causing bad feelings in other people? Family is probable the most difficult part. The emotional chains are way stronger than toward other people. This is the core structure of the character – the family! The way I talk, the way I think, my deepest believes, the core needs were defined the were first few years, what I missed then I still miss now … this is Michael! Even my name! Am I brave enough to let it all go? To let Michael die? How? This is really like overcoming gravity! Where do I get the necessary energy? Focus? Pure intention? Death awareness? Witnessing? Patience? I wished to have a really sharp sword to cut through all emotion-chains, cut off all entanglements … Am I just missing the humor? Why can’t I just enjoy the amusement-park? Why do I want to get out of it? Because I am a nobody within it? Because I am a looser? Is it all about becoming something, something special? Oh yes, Michael has to stay in the dream! It is not possible to take him out if this. Is he the dream?

What is the next step?

You write that it has to do with the right question. That there is always a question in the way, like a wall in front of which I stop and don’t know how to get past. How can a question be that? Is behind every question a false believe? Does every true question refer to the outmost layer of delusion, the very skin to get rid of?

Up to now, I followed your writings and almost each chapter was like a kick in the ass and the questions arouse out of your books. When I came up to the bonus material of spiritual warfare and to the passage, where you quote Franks e-mails and write about authority and that there is only one authority and this is one’s own judgment and one’s own powers of reason and comprehension, I felt discovered! What am I doing with all your thoughts and writings? Just belief them? Take them for true and keep on sleeping? Where am I and what is next? Do I want to skip steps? Oh Yes, I wished to be trough, to be like you! Like a little boy looking up to his daddy! Killing the parents! Demolish and rebuild. It all sounds so easy! Just surrender and stop fighting! What the fuck is going on?

What am I reading? What am I able to understanding? Who are you? Are you at all? Are you true? Or just another illusion? Is ‘cogito ergo sum’ true? What does cogito mean? It’s not thinking. It’s not feeling. Is it being? There is a ‘I am’, but is it also, if I don’t think or feel? In deep sleep, I am not. Where am I and what is my body, when I am not there? How does it function? Is unconscious life like being deep asleep? Is life unconscious? If so, what does differ? Is all just one? Nothing? Is No-self like deep sleep?

I am looking for a bomb, to blow up the world. A sword to cut through the chains and end up always by the word: surrender.

Surrender?

Some hours later:

I’m not focused at all and feel sorry for who ever has to read this stuff … well I’d be still surprised if somebody would read this at all, but still, this is no reason to write all this bullshit. Maybe I should just stop and continue oder begin again, start new, when I really know what I want. I once knew, but then I didn’t know the price to pay and now I know it and hesitate, doubt, struggle, … and already fell? Am I afraid of getting up again and go on?

Something has to change! I want to find a place where I don’t have to work every second day and where I don’t know people and get involved all the time, where nobody knows me and where nobody wants to visit me … I have to find a place where I’m not getting distracted all the time and where my false self doesn’t feel at home and easily finds thousands of opportunity to distract. I know, it has to do with focus and a closed heart, it is about war and revolution, about killing a dictator, chasing a whale …

And if this means, that I first have to work some months and earn money to free me to go on, well I go for that, though I don’t like this perspective!

M19

Tonight is the last night here in this little hut and I want to try to write you some words about where I am right now.

Looking back at the last three months I see a lot of false self and very little real steps ahead. There was so much trying to do something right and be a good aspirant for truth. My struggling ego wanted to impress you and wished to be acknowledged and praised for that! It’s unbelievable! And looking at that truth, is not very comfortable! I have the impression, that I misunderstood Spiritual Autolyse for a process of trying to understand the false self instead of simply try to write something that is true!

So, I try for once to write something true and not just a quotation of the truth read in your books! What do I know for sure?

The price for truth is damned high, so high, that nobody can tell me now, that he or she really wants to pay it! That is so stupid! Well I myself believed to be willing to pay it, but it was all just a nasty trick of my ego to become or be someone very special! Who else is as highly respected as a enlightenment person! Oh, I was still the little boy trying to impress mama and papa!

Surrender hurts! Surrender means to lower the shields and stop fighting for my false self and stop protecting it. It means to look into the ugly face of my false self and stop pretending not to be the face behind the lovely mask. It is embarrassing and really tough to keep the shields down and let my self be confronted with not-self. It sounds so easy, but is very difficult to realize that all I believed to be, is just a lie. I believed to be a mask. I believed to be this lie! But what am I if not this lie? Is the ugly face just another mask behind the lovely one! Is that another lie? I don’t know. I didn’t get further yet.

Maya is somewhere insight of me and I don’t know where. She fools me all the time and I have a really hard time to trust any of my thoughts at all! They all seam to be just faith and lies. She turned you into an authority and me into a blind follower.

Right now, the only thing, that seams to weaken her is to lower my shields and stop pretending to be someone, to know something or to understand anything at all. I just stoped fighting to be what I believed to be. And again, it is so fucking easy to write this down and infinitely difficult to live it and go further.

And is this I-want-to-go-further not just another shield?

There is no end to be reached! Sounds more like truth to me! Truth is there where no end is … where nothing finite can get, my-self included.

Michael – even this is part of the price! Michael is the name of the lie.

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