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In 1975 when I was a young radical student
at the University in Aarhus I started to feel a strange attraction to
spiritual subjects.
This attraction was not coming from outside influence since we all -
friends and study palls - were glowing naive Marxist studying at the University in Aarhus.
But somehow I got hold of a book about Indian masters and meditation.
The book was describing the use of
mantras.
Just two weeks before I had been to a lecture about
Transcendental Meditation. It was a
quite new movement at that time in Denmark.
With my red colored Marxist glasses
I did not like the TM-teachers.
They looked like stringed puppets in their tied up
mormone-like
business suits covering their recent past lives as hippies.
But somehow they still still had an innocent glowing halo around
them that felt very attractive.
I went home and read in the my philosophical Marxist bible from the
DDR that mystics and mystic experience was somehow ok, but organized
religions were not ok. The DDR-bible was quoting the Communist Manifesto:
Religion is opium for the people.
(Funny...
on this point I still somehow agree with the Marxist view)
THE BLACK HOLE AND THE WHITE LIGHT
So I decided to try
meditation out for my self. I invented my own mantra - closed my
eyes - started to repeat the mantra and after a very short time I
disappeared into some kind of a black hole. I have no clue about how long
I was in this hole - I don't know if I was conscious or not - and
there
was absolutely nothing there or maybe there was - I don't know.
The only thing I remember vividly is coming back from this hole. I
opened my eyes into a new world of white light. I started to look at
things: a book...
a cup... a guitar and the grey concrete walls in the room: they were all in light! Everything I looked at
was penetrated by white light.
Also when I closed my eyes there was
light.
Everything was felt and seen in intense and crystal clear awareness - and waves
of happiness was arising from the chest.
I got up and started to walk around in utter amazement. My body was
not quite sure how to walk - but somehow it was no problem. Each
step I took was a blessing - each breath like a sensual kiss from a
beautiful woman. Each second seemed like an expedition into an
unknown virgin paradise. It was like waking up from the ordinary
waking state
into a paradise that I had not imagined possible - not even in my wildest
dreams.
This new ecstatic state of being lasted for about one year. In this
period I could not study anything on the University. I did not
care any more. I soon stopped talking to others about this experience. My leftwing friends looked at this Gunnar with disbelief when he tried
to talk about this nonsense.
There was no-one around to understand or being curious.
And so I lived - in two dimensions: in one reality as a university
drop out and in another, glorious one - just being busy enjoying the bliss of
being alive.
Coming down
One year passed like this in the Garden of Eden.
But now dark and depressive thoughts began to play in my brain. The
state the inner joy also somehow seemed to dry out. Instead weird
sensations in the body started to pop up. The spine sometimes felt
like fire or sometimes it felt like red ants had entered it. Or it
felt like the skin was burning with hellish almost unbearable fire.
One day I was walking in the street when suddenly it felt like a
grenade had exploded in my head and my identity was scattered like body-parts all over the place. I
got VERY scared and feared for insanity around the next corner.
There was no one to talk to about this.
And when these feelings and thoughts came up, I tried to fight them
or suppress them, but it was like a mouse fighting an elephant.
TM-TIME
In despair I went to the TM people
and today I think that it somehow saved my life.
I can say now that the TM-teachers did not know much about
meditation - actually they knew almost nothing. But they had one
tremendous important
information and I am very grateful for TM and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
for making it possible to get that little piece of life saving
information. Like everything valuable in life this information
was absurdly simple. After getting initiation from the TM-people I
told them about my strange experiences. My TM teacher smiled
and said:
Don't worry! It is just release of tensions in your body. It is a
completely natural phenomenon in meditation. Your body is in the
process of healing itself... Just relax.
I believed what he told me and from that moment on I stopped
fighting the strange body-symptoms or weird thoughts. Instead I
started to cooperate with them through relaxing into them. Almost
from day one a tremendous release happened.
I lost my fear.
The crazy thoughts almost stopped immediately, but the body symptoms
continued to play for many years. But now I even started to enjoy
them.
After 10 years of meditation practice they were almost completely gone.
Today they only come up after very deep and long meditations.
Back to earth and university
I also began studying again at the University and to my surprise I
was much more successful than before the dip in the black hole. For
the first time in my life I was able to spontaneously concentrate
for hours and hours. It became a joy to study and I started to get
top marks.
Spiritual feast - west meets east
The first years with TM was great! I got a lot of good friends. A few
of them are still
fellow travelers. Some of us made a vegetarian restaurant - we
coked, dish-washed and meditated together. Actually it was one great
party-time!
At the age of
25 And as our
cosmic
center of gravity we all shared and delighted in the
devotion of
our mystical and mythical Indian Father, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It
seemed like
Karl Marx in my case had been knocked out by a far more heavy
philosopher's stone ha ha.
The Wise old Man versus the Father Imago
But how come that we all had this longing for father figures?
Actually I don't think
we were looking out for a Father Imago, a term coined by the
outstanding psychologist C. G. Jung. Much more I see this longing to
be a revitalization of the arch-type Jung called the Wise
old Man. As I have explained elsewhere,
spirituality blooms in old age. In almost all archaic societies the elders - the
fathers of the fathers - had the role as a kind of guardians and
custodians, protecting and passing on spiritual knowledge to the
young generation. Spiritual initiation of youngsters is not a
father-job. Fathers have for thousand of years been busy hunting and
gathering - no time for introspection.
But with the upcoming of the industrial civilization the archetypical
function of the Wise Elders have become dormant.
Our initial spiritual longing was bound to revitalize the arch-type
the Wise old Man.
As a newcomer to the spiritual world one often feels like a
stumbling baby in an unknown territory. Some of the side-effects of
meditation can be pretty scary! And so
our old wise Indian Maharishi with the long white bird became
our guide and pathfinder in this for westerners virgin land.
But the honeymoon would soon be over. Maharishi was also a medieval
autocratic figure - he was bound to collide with my western democratic values.
Thus spoke the picture on the wall
As long as the Maharishi was a beautiful picture on the wall or was
video-talking about cosmic love and consciousness (as he did
wonderfully) there was no problem. Aloof as he was for us, he could
as well have died 2000 years ago.
But when he became real I became real too. Some goodhearted blue-eyed TM-teachers suggested the
Maharishi that we should create a more democratic structure - at
least in the Danish branch of TM - timber started to fall down on our heads.
I was there in the TM-headquarters in Aarhus, Denmark when the TM-rebellions were talking in phone with the
Maharishi.
The conversation was amplified so everyone in the room
could hear what showed out to be the voice of an angry old man.
GOOD BYE TO TM
Maharishi means Great Seer. It was for me a chock to hear
our great wise shaman almost scream in anger in the other end of the line.
The Maharishi of the real world did not tolerate any feed back or
criticism in
his top-down organization.
25 years later in India I watched the Maharishi in a TV program. Maharishi was praising the
dictatorship of General Musharaf in Pakistan. He furthermore argued
that democracy should be replaced by enlightened ruler-ship like it
was
practiced in India in the days of the golden age of the Veda's.
This was indeed a dilemma. On one hand this archaic ruler had
created an outstanding spiritual organization second to none in our culture.
On the other hand his top-down ruling was not
well digested by my guts.
I started to doubt. And this doubt was colliding with the Bliss I
felt from meditation. With inspiration from Descartes the choice
these days were between either being a happy cosmic pig or a
doubting unsatisfied human being.
It was difficult to leave this crazy honey
pot. And it was frightening to stand alone...
Monty Maharishi's flying circus
Not long after this incident - somewhere in the late 70s - Maharishi announced that TM would
create world peace. To accomplish this goal he had newly developed the
so called TM Siddhi-techniques. He claimed that these techniques could
make humans levitate.
He virtually had armies of scientist to back up this claim. TM is
still today branded as the perfect marriage between science and
spirituality.
This was for me the point of no return. From this incident onwards the TM moment began to fly - not
as they promised through physically
levitating - but more like good old
Ikaros.
And in these high flying attempts my grand old mythical father
showed out to have one more weakness: he was without grounding...
actually a quite charming flaw! I love great dreamers.
TM is still today not able to show the world their levitations and
still TM-people believe... It is really an interesting phenomenon!
It shows that we humans are willing to lie to ourselves in our
longing for happiness. But this kind of happiness
is always
purchased at too high a price. It is
like borrowing money from the mafia: you have to pay back with heavy interest.
With wings of wax - a world peace mission to the sun
At that time TM was very eager to mass-produce enlightenment. They
were in a rush to create world peace. I am sure that Maharishi's ultimate motives
were and are pure. He really wanted to help the world and I am also
sure that somehow he really did - but in a smaller scale than his
over-grandiose ambitions would be able to recognize. Maharishi was
one of first major "transfer-channels" of eastern knowledge into the
west. This achievement is truly great!
But the problem is that it is not possible to mass produce
enlightenment and
world peace! The only very easy thing to mass produce is
collective hysteria.
At that time I could not have formulated such thoughts, but somehow my stomach
sensed that shit was bound to happen. From the skeptical side-line I watched how many of my TM-friends were sucked into
this cosmic hype. They went deep into ungrounded and powerful group meditations and not
all of them were mentally prepared for that.
The power of many is awsome.
Before the world-peace hype-party, the TM-teachers in a way were checking
if unripe or mentally unstable people actually were ready for a full
meditation program. Even though meditation is primarily beneficial
for mentally healthy people it often tends to attract people with
psychological problems.
It is all natural that you start to search for relief when you have
pain.
But now in the rush to deliver, a lot of unripe people with problems
in the soul were recruited in the TM peace-army. Henry Ford would
have loved to see how TM at that time were able to mass produce
uniformly smiling people regardless of the quality of the used raw
material.
The promised land
It
is possible to create a mass-hysterical ecstasy through
fighting the devil or
the evil. TM did not do that. They had found another way of
hyping spiritual energy: By childlike aiming at bringing the moon
down to earth. Yes! The savior is just about to get born
around the corner and all of god's children are getting ecstatic in
anticipation of their Christmas presents. In this religious
connotated anticipation state people with all kind of soul-scars
temporarily will be able to forget their problems. But a forgotten
problem is a double problem. It will always return with demonic
force.
But
I
still cannot help having sympathy for these children believing that it is possible to
grab the moon. Now - even today the old Maharishi-child is creating
spiritual hype through grandiose plans.
But it is dangerous.
In
meditation you also need quiet room for
suffering alone in
order to get al-one.
And if you always are running out of breath in order to fulfill holy
missions outside your own self you are endangered.
This story is as old as the crusades - even much older.
The tragic murders
One of the workers at our vegetarian restaurant was going
through a hard time. He had actually
been among the ones to start the restaurant. Let us call him Tim.
He had just been left by his girl friend. She was a beautiful girl
with a warm heart. Tim was heartbroken and it was hard for him to
forget her since she was still working on the restaurant.
Tim also suffered from headaches after an accident with a
scooter 6 month earlier. At that time he was an ordinary TM-meditator,
but as destiny wanted he was now offered an
escape route: a divine role as a world peace levitator.
The siddhi-program was the one-way ticket into a paradise
without suffering.
He joined it with full enthusiasm and soon forgot all about his
broken heart.
A big room with thick mattresses all over the floor was created on top of the restaurant.
Here a lot of TM-people
were jumping up and down in ecstasy believing that they were
actually flying. Tim was among the most highflying bumper-jumpers,
but often I felt his staring ecstasy-eyes had an unhealthy shine -
and after some month you could sense a latent anger and fear in his
eyes as well. Tim did not like me... and my guts did not digest him
either. In this position I could not help and nobody else could. All
the responsible TM teachers were busy in the world peace hype. They
had no interest for trivial matters. But again it is the
small things that changes the world. I heard from a friend that Tim
had begun to sleep with a loaded gun under his pillow. He had also
persistently tried to get his girlfriend back even though she did not want to see
him any more. Of the same reason she had stopped working in the
restaurant.
While this incident took place I had moved to another town to work as a
teacher.
One morning on my way to work I was stopped by the headlines of the
newspapers...
Tim had murdered his former girlfriend and her brother with his gun. They were
both good friends... ... ...
I cannot blame any TM-people directly for this incident. But the
manic momentum the organization had at that time was dangerous.
Everybody was busy with the moon and no responsible people within
the organization had an eye for such small things as caring for
ordinary persons trivial love-problems.
Tim should never have had the
possibility to participate in the high flying
Siddhi-program!
Integral suffering and holding a healing hand of an empathic friend
might have helped him through this life
crisis.
But to tell about suffering is not good for the business... It is
not going to help creating grandiose religious momentums. But what
you avoid will always haunt you. This is the stuff demons are made
of.
I too was almost sucked into this hype. But in a dream I was
profoundly warned against going in this direction.
Dear reader: all
this is just to tell you that you should always always trust your own
self first! As long as there is the slightest feeling of doubt,
either you are not ripe or the thing you are about to jump into has
hidden agendas.
I find that the most beautiful of the Gospels is The Gospel of
Thomas. He was called Thomas the doubter. Doubt can be a
great gift!
The play of perfect folly
Looking back with 2006-eyes it is interesting to see how many
times I have done the same mistakes over and over. I will try
to mention them as honest as possible all in the following
philosophic self biographic pages ha ha.
At the same
time I am very grateful for all of these mistakes since they have
led into an integral spiral of life-experience.
So - dear reader - in a way I know that I have no holy mission in
warning you of possible mistakes on the path. I could rob you of your most precious
learning-processes!
I can recommend Kim Ki-Duk's movie Spring, Summer, Autum, Winter
and... Spring - This movie shows in the most beautiful way how
mistakes can be divine blessings in disguise.
The potential shortcomings of mantra-meditation
Let us go back to the tragic events at that time. I left TM. Many of my friends did too. One of
my closest friends had been an intimate friend to both Tim and the two murdered persons. It was a
hard blow for him. He started to study philosophy and later became a
great philosopher. I concentrated on my job as a teacher in my new
home town practicing meditation in solitude. But somehow the
meditation-routines had become uninspiring and bliss-less.
TM is fundamentally rooted in mantra-meditation. Mantras are pure
organic food for the head. And one of their great abilities among
many are that
they tend to clean out in the endless rubbish of useless daydreaming
thoughts that seem to follow us as a life long inner monologue.
Take
a close critical "look" at your thoughts......
Only 10 percent of
them are useful - the rest is bla bla.
But no matter how clear your head becomes, it is still rooted in a
body. Mantra meditation alone is hardly enough to make spirituality
a bodily thing.
It is easy to recognize TM-people or other only
head-meditating individuals by their lack of body-awareness. Their
bodies tend to be nerdy and a bit life-less.
DISCOVERING THE RED COLORS OF LIFE
Here on this site we believe in the magic of the body.
Head is also beautiful, but
body comes first.
The secret
multi-dimensional and non-verbal intelligence stored in the body is a Wonder of Wonders!
The birth of this body-knowing came through a voyage into the world
of Bhagwan Sree Rajneesh - also called Osho.
From head to body through head
The outstanding Indian Guru and Philosopher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was
for me the first to point at the magic world of the body.
A wonderful paradox is that Rajneesh was a man with a brilliant
head.
And through his head I started to discover my body. Rajneesh had
studied every
western book worth reading and combined it with eastern wisdom. Out
of this synthesis his clear enlightened brain had created a rainbow
of meditation techniques aiming at hammering at the ambolt of the
body.
His bodily grounded meditation techniques were furthermore
fertilized with the
groundbreaking psycho-therapeutic techniques that were developed in
the west in the 60ties and 70ties as a result of the
youth-revolution.
This cocktail was able to penetrate human relations in way that
ordinary mantra meditation was unable to do. In fact I am here just
passing on ideas very close to Rajneesh's own thoughts.
One of the most powerful and potent human relations is
sex. Through inspiration from the Indian Tantric tradition Rajneesh
showed the intimate relation between sexual desire and
enlightenment.
Sex and Spirituality
But before continuing with Rajneesh I have to tell a funny story
about a Guru so opposite to Rajneesh that he somehow came close to Rajneesh - but
in the non-cool way...
In the beginning of the 80ties there was a traditional Indian Guru
living in Denmark. He had built a successful clone of an Indian Ashram from
where he was preaching his teachings - essentially telling that sex was to be
entirely avoided in thought, word and action.
But how was one to to avoid sex in thoughts if ones Guru was
speaking about sex
all the time? This Guru reminds me of a saying from a good old
Danish philosopher, Ludvig Holberg, around 1700:
When the Devil is
ill, he wants to be a monk
The poor monks in this ashram had to live in complete celibacy and at
the same time attend the gurus preaching's about sex in the form of
anti-sex. No wonder many of them got fucked up.
The guru was later captured with his pants down his knees in close
intimate encounter with some of his female devotees.
The fact that this undigested piece of misunderstood traditional old
Indian religion could gain such a number of followers was for me a
pointer at the great spiritual thirst in our secular society. At the
same time it showed the vulnerability of us westerners. As innocent
spiritual analphabets we were an easy prey for any trickster with a little eastern spiritual knowledge.
A life saving all too sweet caramel
I have to narrate a funny incident that saved the innocent me from
this Guru.
I went to his Ashram to participate in a one week meditation-camp.
Every morning he was throwing pimpstone at sex and sexual desires.
After this passionate, almost sensual sermon he invited the newcomers to a private session. He
took particular interest in innocent me. He smiled lovingly and
asked many questions. I was very impressed by his words and
charisma. I was ready to shun sex as an evil thing. At the end of
the session he gave a sweet to me. It was an
Indian caramel wrapped in red paper. And with words as
sweet as the caramel he said:
Come again to
morrow my dear!
Indian caramels are extremely sweet. They are also very sticky. When
I put the caramel into my mouth it so happened that it sticked to
one of my back teeth.
The tooth broke and I immediately had to leave
the Ashram in search for a dentist. Thus I was saved from being
saved... ha ha
Body-explosives gets ignited
Rajneesh was also talking about sex - but in the cool way. He was
inspired by the ancient Indian Tantra-tradition, overcoming spiritual
obstacles like sexual desires or aggression through acceptance and transformation. I read all the
books of his I could find, and together with a few friends we
attended some of the Rajneesh courses. This was indeed a new world!
TM had revealed two absurdly simple, but yet great truths.
First: You should welcome and relax into strange body-sensations.
And second: You should never use effort in meditation.
The Rajneesh meditations now presented us with a new gift - the gift
to explore
an almost animalistic body-world
without any of the normal restrictions we or our society have put on
it.
Rajneesh had designed dynamic meditation techniques where mantric-sounds, deep or chaotic breathing, or
hyperventilation allowed the body to go totally bananas. These
dynamic catharsis-phases, arousing body-energies by going totally crazy, were
abruptly stopped by contrasting phases of body-control, where
you had to stop all movements of the body and just aware your body-self.
This second phase allowed the aroused energies of the body to sink
into deeper and deeper levels - into the Soul. What an experience...
Life is a sexual experience
This is not the place to go further into a description these
techniques - it is just to give a little hint of what revelation it
was suddenly really to feel being bodily alive and in an alerted
state of awareness.
Sex and sexual experiences in the traditional sense was a natural
part of these new feelings. Suddenly it felt obvious that the bodily
sensation of aliveness in their deepest nature was pure sex!
The time in and around the movement of Rajneesh was relatively
short.
I left the boat before it became a sinking Titanic relation-ship.
Oshos-Rajneesh movement had booked the
Ikaros Airlines to USA. A fall from
the sky was bound to happen.
But that is not my story.
MICHAEL BARNETT & THE WILD GEESE
Aauch... This chapter will hurt for some to read and for me to
write. Many of my
friends are still hanging around the cosmic artist & divine bandit
Michael
Barnett...
In 1985 the Rajneesh jungle drums had that a man called Michael
Barnett had
reached final Enlightenment. He was on his way to Denmark to make
some meditation groups. A lot of us former TMies and at present
Rajneesh supporters and hang arounds rushed to attend his
meditation-group... and we were not disappointed!
What energy! what charisma, whit, intelligence, humor he had and
what
groundbreaking spiritual experiences we had. WOW! Michael Barnett: a
dynamo, a philosopher, a dancer, a clown, a joker, an actor, an
improviser... and he somehow managed to make all these
cyclonic qualities dance around a peaceful center.
Here was an actual super-alive and super-empty body! Not mere talked
knowledge. This was a perfect anti-dote to the TM-head-spaceness.
This Michael Barnett had worked together with the anti-psychiatrist
R.D. Lang. They had written the book
People - not Psychiatry
together. Michael had a deep practical knowledge about a hole
rainbow of modern psycho-therapies. And this knowledge had then been fusioned
with the world of Rajneesh. And the result
was as it seemed: a marriage of the heaven and hell taking place
inside each of us. Never before I had felt the spiritual light going
so deep inside the body. It felt good to be in the body in a way It
had never done before.
The two hands of God
And Michael was definitely not denying any aspects of life. He was
drinking wine and enjoying good food after the meditation sessions.
He was also having girls -
a lot of them. It was party-time! Life began to oscillate between
deep silence and celebration.
Essential for this life celebration-happening to take place was
Michaels approach to dark energies - to so called negative energies.
In the TM-world there was no room for negative and dark spaces. The
result was that these parts of life returned the demonic way to the
colgate-smiling TMies while they was busy trying to hold the
life-pendulum in the sunny side of life.
But life needs God to create with both his hands: Jesus and the
Devil.
Don't call it anything - it's just energy
20 years before Eckhart
Tolle introduced the concept of the pain-body Michael had
introduced us to what he called the second level meditation.
In this meditation your constantly in a neutral mode watch the
"energies" in the inner-body. This is what Eckhart Tolle
conceptualizes as the pain body. According to my view
Michaels understanding is deeper since he doesn't give any spicy name
to this
phenomenon. When Tolle calls it pain, I am sure Michael would
reply:
Don't call it anything - it's just energy.
This created a channel for the dark,
muddy subconscious part of life to enter consciousness. Life became
full joyful suffering and without the mind making big dramas about
suffering as often in the case of people reading about Tolles
pain-body. The mind love to make stories about pain or
no-pain.
But this simple quote from Michael shows what is before the mind:
A master practicing lets life be the
way it is.
Later through my extensive travels in
India I came to know that this technique actually has ancient Indian
roots. You can read more about this
meditation
technique or more precisely: life approach here.
Groupie addicts
We started to follow Michael on every Energy-group he gave in
Denmark and later also, when holidays allowed it, to participate in
groups all over Europe.
The line of gratitude and respect
I am deeply indebted to Michael Barnett, former Somendra: chief
therapist under the early Osho Rajneesh-times. He is likewise in
dept to Osho, Rajneesh.
But I never heard him express gratitude from his heart towards his
former mentor. Strange how history repeats itself. A lot of people
came through Michaels Barnett's spiritual influence and guidance,
but never afterwards showed gratitude or mentioned him as their
mentor. I often heard him complain about this fact.
But it seems that what you cannot give yourself you will not
receive.
Now people are learning from "my" body. I already now see that
they will not pay me respect for that what "I" teach them. They will
forget me as soon as possible. But I am grateful for that. I don't
expect anyone to feel indebted to me.
Because I don't own any spiritual teachings. It is owned by
everybody.
So that is why I on the index site invite you to grab anything from
here as you like. Be my guest!
To be continued....
M |
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