Every story has a beginning…

It has been a while that I started this blog and it was not until today that I knew how to continue.

Every story has its beginning.. so I wrote. And looking back at my life and the still limited amount of what I know now, it dawned on me that my life has many beginnings. Like several threads woven into the fabric of who I am now. It rather feels that I lived many lives already in this lifetime. Recalling my experiences in meditation and expanded states of consciousness I am quite sure that this is just one of countless lifetimes throughout infinity making the question for one beginning of my story utterly silly. So where to begin…?

Yet today a realization first appeared like a fleeting shape in the clouds in Berlin’s summer sky. It happened when I talked about my experiences to a dear friend who is going through a rough time. When I was talking story about my insights, hoping it may be of support, it became a reminder to myself about my believes, my experiences, my values and it was in that moment that I understood what it means that we are all connected.

Sure, I have experienced Oneness in meditation or expanded consciousness. Yet this time I saw it from a different angle and one of the filaments that build the fabric of this lifetime started to shine. It started pulsating, calling my attention, when I mentioned that we often don’t allow ourselves to see our own brilliance and inherent Divinity within. Saying it to my friend it became clear that this was also what I needed to remember as I am struggling to accept and be at peace with not having a clue where life will take me next, where I will find a job and in what field of work, how to pay bills and so on.

I followed the filament and it led me to the beginning of one story:

‘My ambiguity with God’

In Germany you are born into the church. Still today the separation of state and churches has not taken place. There are two state churches ‘Roman Catholic’ and ‘Lutheran Protestant’. Depending on the registered faith of your parents you are born either as protestant or a catholic. As a baby you have no say in it and it is not until you turn eighteen that you have a choice to declare to leave the church, done at the lowest regional court by signing a legal document. I was born a protestant and baptized a protestant with being given Psalm 23 “The Lord is my shepherd..” as a guidance for my life. 
 
 My parents were not the religious type. My father severely damaged by his experience of WWII, fleeing from the Soviet Army from Berlin to than West Germany as a child. He was a bitter, unhappy and fearful man, a hot-tempered alcoholic. My mom grew up as an orphan. Her father had died a few weeks before the war ended in a Yugoslavian prison camp. He had refused to teach the Nazi curriculum at school as a teacher and was sent to the front as punishment. Her Mom had died a few years later of a broken heart, her body riddled with cancer. Goodhearted my Mom was too soft to set her limits, too worried about what will become of me and my brother than to have the courage to divorce my father. I have not been raised a protestant however the protestant church’s youth programs and the church’s choir had become a safe haven for me many times. 
 
 From an early age on death was all around me. I was eleven years old when a biker lost control of his bike in a curve and broke his neck right in front of me while I was walking along the street. A mentally disturbed woman jumped from the roof and landing in front of my feet when I sneaked back home trying to get back trough my bedroom window on the back of the house after one of my many nightly escapes. I was twelve at that time.

I went to the mandatory afternoon school at church to learn the catechism to prepare for the ‘confirmation’, the initiation service at age fourteen, when I was to be introduced as an adult into the church’s community.

The day of the confirmation service approached. It was spring and a warm sunny day. The whole family was present, my brother in his formal military uniform as he was serving at that time. The church was a modern post-war structure and with its concrete hull and post-modern bell tower resembled more a ‘rocket launch pad for souls’ as my Mom liked to coin it. Who knew how close her view would be to what was about to unfold.
 
 I remember how the elected president of the church’s community started to give his address to us ‘confirmants’, sitting in the front row, our heart nervously pounding. He addressed all of us personally and when it was time to address me, he stood in front of me, behind him the altar bench and the huge wooden cross. He started to recite my birth psalm ‘The Lord is my shepherd..’ when his face suddenly turned green and blue, his eyes fixed on my eyes with a look of shear terror and disbelief. Stiff as a board he started leaning towards me about to fall on me. Than he fell backwards, breaking his neck on the altar bench. As it was revealed later he was already dead when he broke his neck and had died of a sudden cardiac arrest.

Needless to say that I started to question my faith. The Christian concept of an almighty God separate from me, the concept of being a born sinner (even if not that pronounced as in catholic believes), it never did resonate with me. And what kind of a God would take a man’s life during church service and on top while addressing me with my birth psalm during my initiation to the church’s community? Was I evil? Was I cursed? With all the death around me prior to this event?

These thoughts kept haunting me. A couple of months later my Grandma outed me as a gay man to my family. I was still fourteen and while I already knew then that I was gay it put me on the spot. Yet that is a whole different thread of the fabric of my life and to be told another time. It just added to the turmoil in my mind about my faith and believes. Was I damned to be gay? Would God accept me? Where would I go when I die?

At age fifteen I had a minor surgery that required a full anaesthesia. During surgery I suddenly woke up. I saw bright lights directly in front of my eyes. I could not make sense of it and turned around. I saw my body on the operating table, while the doctor and nurses preparing to use the defibrillator to reanimate me. Confused about what happened I turned around once more. There was a tunnel of pure light in the left corner of my eyes, it was calling me. After all that had happened before, I was stricken with panic. If I would go into this tunnel, would I be sentenced to hell? I tried as hard as I could to get back into my body. Yet something like an energy field blocked me from getting back in. The last thoughts I remember are of utter fright and despair.

Four hours later I regained consciousness. I was in a hospital bed, my arms and legs tied to the bed, as I had turned violent when coming out of the anaesthesia still not fully conscious.

So that was the beginning of my spiritual path, when my quest for answers what happened during surgery became an obsession for many years to follow. My obsession with the questions about the meaning of life, of existence, the mystery about consciousness was again and again fuelled by near deadly accidents, miraculous survival of life-threatening events and more death around me as I had to accompany and bury most of my friends dying of AIDS.

I dove into quantum mechanics and quantum theories. I devoured book after book about western and eastern philosophy. I went to self-realization workshops, joined esoteric groups and teachings. It went on for more than three decades before I found peace and understanding when I discovered with The Monroe Institute a path and technology that finally allowed me to get into meditation and expanded states of awareness. I started to understand that all religions, traditions and philosophies are just different languages, including science, trying to explain something that ultimately is only to be experienced in expanded states of consciousness and meditation. I found my own path and own language to understand consciousness and existence, while also coming to the profound insight that our individual perception and senses are so unique that talking about Oneness and trying to explain it to others is hardly possible. Oneness remains ineffable and only to be experienced. The best I can do is to support others to find and walk their own path without holding any judgment.

Yet until today, until talking to my friend, using the word God, Divinity or even the word Prayer always had been accompanied by an uneasy knot in my stomach. While having experienced Oneness and the warm feeling of unconditional Love beyond the notion of ‘I’ a number of times for short glimpses there was still an uneasy feeling about accepting to be a holographic fractal part of the Divine consciousness born into human form to allow Oneness to experience itself through infinite ways and forms.

I just had finished to talk to my friend on Facebook. The fleeting image of a heart shaped cloud in the sky gave way to the knot in my stomach to unravel. Streams of intense emotions erupted from my heart, flowing through my body. Goosebumps on my skin and tears of joy in my eyes I started to recite:

I am the Lord, my shepherd. I shall not want.

I make myself lie down in green pastures, I lead myself beside the still waters.

I restore my soul, I lead myself in the paths of righteousness for my name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for the Divine is within me, its rod and its staff they comfort me.

I prepare a table before me in the presence of those who don’t understand me, I anoint my head with oil, my cup runs over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the realm of Oneness for ever.