3 Body Breathing and Emotions

And then again and again the nagging questions: How and why and especially what was there still experiencing anything after the death of the body at all? What would hear when the ears are dead and gone? What could see when the old eyes became rigid and milky, and more over what would be there to comprehend anything when the leftovers of the brain are a smelly, gray, soft mess?

I was caught in this scientific worldview, influenced by my upbringing and the rather simple-minded ideas and fears of the people around me.

On one hand I used to be very skeptical, but on the other hand there were interest and curiosity. I wanted to open up for the secrets of Being. Existentia. The explanations I got from my parents, teachers and friends were not convincing at all. Looking back, I realize that in those days and in my age it was still considered courageous to ask such questions. Though one would expect these questions as very obvious, simple, typical questions for a well educated Central European person of the sixties. But people didn’t like to think about death back then. Death was taboo and when someone had died, people tried to forget her as soon as possible, and that was true already for the funeral feast. A funeral feast was like to close a case of some kind and we drank alcohol to forget and basta. But to me one big exciting question remained: Could there be an invisible self that could perceive and think without any physical body? Something like an I, or – why not even an I-illusion? Or even a soul? A consciousness principle? Whatever? Something? My grandmother used to say sometimes: „Believe me: I know who I am!“ I can remember that I carried this remark of my grandmother around with me for weeks, because she obviously had no idea of what she was talking about, and it kind of triggered me and I told it on parties and LSD-trips as a give-away. Sure – it was somehow funny, but how could an old lady say that and believe it? Well the thing is that this question did not touch her all. As far as this was concerned she was on a level of cheap gossip.

Now this Book of the Dead was a Buddhist text? And we Buddhists like to assume that we only imagine ourselves and that the illusion of a stable I arose only due to habit and out of a certain primal fear stabelized by hate and greed? Just before, I had read about Atman and Anatman, Self and Non-Self, in Buddha’s teaching discourses and began to understand it somewhat. And also I had previously internalized Sartre’s „First there was Existentia and only from that did matter (Essencia) arise. What a great asumption! I could not let got of it. What would that mean? And how could matter be so firm? Even diamonds?

And the book of the dead was a Buddhist text after all, wasn’t It? Was my understanding of the Book of the Dead just simply wrong? Naive? Or was this Book of the Dead written for simple and simple-minded Buddhists for whom the question of Self and Non-Self was not a big issue? Maybe it was a yoga just for uneducated simple minded Buddhists? Or maybe for very experienced and wise Buddhists who had transcended such basic ideas and believes? I wanted to know this and I started to read the book over and over again. But over and over again I got lost pretty soon. The text seemed to digress several times into a kind of wild psychodrama that I couldn’t follow and didn’t understand. Protectors were mentioned, who looked like humans but had animal heads, and also luminous meditation Buddhas of different kinds? It was also about sex in some ways, which was still new to me. Of course I knew that I wasn’t particularly smart. Maybe I was just too stupid to understand the Tibetan Book of the Dead? Nevertheless it continued to affect me through its mere presence by my side. It lay there, magnificent, holy and dignified. A real treasure! Was I holding a treasure map in my hands and just didn’t know which way to hold it?

Meanwhile I bravely went again to my Godesberg bookstore – and as always the salesgirls seemed to be amused deliciously once again about me, the crazy, long-haired, good-looking youth for whom they always had to search for Buddhism, Anthroposophy, meditation and yoga. Giggling and cackling? I suspect by now that the girls weren’t particularly familiar with their offers at all. They seemed overwhelmed to me and perhaps covered that up? On the other hand I actually used in fact to be somewhat of an unusual appearance as far as clothing and hairstyle were concerned even for the mid-sixties. And more over, I have to remind the gentle reader that there was no internet at all back then. Data was organized exclusively on paper, in endless card files or on film strips. Therefore it was particularly helpful that you would find in almost all books references and hints to other, related books – for example those that had inspired the authors themselves – and exactly that helped me quite a lot back then. That was my luck and a blessing, because I was really very much by myself in my searches, a lonely warrior so to speak!

The girls found a yoga book for me: „Yoga for Everyone“ and later another yoga book with the exciting title „Pranayama“ by the same Belgian author. I decided to start with the exploration of the body – as long as the ears and eyes and other senses were still functioning. And that’s exactly what yoga seemed to be about to me back then, and I found that confirmed.

I should first thoroughly explore my own body. I had to work my way into the world of yoga completely on my own, and that was quite laborious. Back then there wasn’t even one yoga teacher near by. There were even quite few all over Germany.

The first yoga book described various body postures that one should assume. Each morning the exercise cycle began with a so-called body scan. Lying on the floor one tried to be aware of  all single body parts one after another, thus directing consciousness from one body part to the next. So: toes, feet, calves, lower leg, knee, thigh and so on up to the crown. I went through the whole body extensively daily from now on. A body awareness exercise: feeling the body conscious piece by piece. In the following various yoga body positions (Asanas in Sanskrit) after this body scan, I could have – from today’s perspective – continued to remain quite conscious and aware of details and listen inward, but actually I regularly fell asleep for minutes in the various body positions. I sank into dreams, fantasies and thoughts and that again and again in each single one of the nine daily body postures of the so-called Rishikesh series. That considerably extended the daily yoga sessions, but I could afford that back then, and I felt good about it because I could do something concrete. And the relationship to my body actually changed drastically. I now regarded this body with more respect. What a masterpiece it seemed to be? My heart would beat, and I contemplated the blood circulation. How ingenious. Day and night this heart didn’t stop, and the blood continued to flow through my body. Then there was this strange nutrition system, it made hungry, consumed, digested and organized excretion. There was also an incredibly finely pixeld, high speed communication system: The senses, seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting and so on. An elaborate breathing system. Then reproduction! Everything very good and efficient. An alarm system that made one aware through pain, discoloration, diarrhea and similar things when something wasn’t right. Also various, super-intelligent self-healing systems!

I had been socialized as a natural scientific-materialist like all young people in the sixties. When everyone around you assumes from earliest childhood that thinking is biological and takes place in the head, then one automatically considers this head to be the seat of the spiritual, of thinking and of will. And although I used to be Catholic, and we still did received regular corresponding religious teachings in schools, the education was purely materialistic. Nobody took Adam and Eve and the good Lord really seriously anymore. Even our religion teachers had a scientific materialistic worldview and they understood Adam and Eve and the holy Lord symbolically and incidentally only talked about it very reluctantly. They considered themselves to be very “modern”.God was probably rather embarrassing to our teachers themselves and a child naturally senses something like that. But each of my religion teachers could explain the Big Bang by far better than God’s love for us. And this circumstance wasn’t even conscious to them? A Christian could easily explain that consciousness and intelligence were originally random products of matter and within some biological, energetic change and striving of many universes, purely by chance a randomly question had arisen such as for example: Where am I? Or What is this? Or who am I? And from there everything else had then developed over the course of millennia and evolutioned up to today’s humanity? Randomly and purely by chance.

But back to the yoga body exercises:
The perception of my body, and my self-perception and self-understanding in general changed. Of great significance for the changes were certainly rest and boredom in connection with consciousness. Because I spent so much time simply motionless in the various asanas during the daily yoga exercises and since there were otherwise little distractions, I grew more and more into a kind of intangible vastness? That was as magical as it also was boring at the same time. But my curiosity prevailed. This openness and vastness? Why did nobody talk about it? That was phenomenal and extraordinary? There was apparently a whole universe of intangible aspects of being for which I didn’t even have names because it wasn’t talked about anywhere. Consciousness was intangible on one hand, but at the same time also predictable, roughly like a tame pet: Consciousness had its own will and often went its own ways, but with some skill I could direct and guide it, just in case it was in the mood and didn’t just want to spin around on its own. Was that what yoga was about? My rather arrogant, scientific worldview – „I know how the world works“ – crumbled more and more. What was actually behind all this? What was the driving force or the meaning of me, my being and consciousness, the other beings around me and the whole world in general?

But whoever considers this body and this consciousness scientifically gets scientific answers. As well one could just as easily assume a body posture and try to feel like a tiger? Or like a peacock or like a king cobra? And one could even simply let go of thinking and the search for explanations. Like dancing. A dancer practices her dance steps very controlled over and over again, but when there’s a performance, then she leaves alone all technical details gives up control and dances in a kind of flow. That’s how I wanted to handle yoga too. From today’s perspective, I was surprisingly disciplined and open to taking on efforts and pain and regularly and repeatedly exerting myself.

Rudolf Steiner seemed to have had similar problems as I, and decided in his book „How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds“ to distinguish between a gross-material body-body, an astral body and an ethereal body. That sounded exciting and was really very helpful at first! Maybe he even got the answers to my questions about the self or the non-self hidden there? Did Rudolf Steiner have the answers to my questions?

Is this physical body actually permeated by more or less congruent non-material bodies – thus as an ethereal body and an astral body? Both if not completely non-material, yet at least very subtle?

And how did these three bodies hang together?

And then naturally the question quickly arose again: What happens when the gross-material body – the body-body – dies to these two subtle bodies?

Anyway and to begin with: How was I supposed to imagine this ethereal body?

The ethereal body reveals itself in acupuncture for example, Tai Chi, yoga, Jin Shin Jyutsu and similar energy techniques. It was astonishing how tangible this ethereal body became when one took the time to get in contact with it through energy work. My Jin Shin Jyutsu teacher Mary Burmeister repeatedly said: „Energy work is not a technique, but it is art.“ And really, when one opens oneself to something like that and takes time for it and leaves it some space, then inspiration, alertness and magic are literally ignited and kindled. And it is remarkable what an obvious and clear influence such energy work also has on the physical body.

When the body-body has aches and pains, for example, then one can easily influence them by working with the ethereal body. At first one has to get used to it, but once you penetrated into the world of the ethereal body, and learned one or the other method to harmonize and activate it, then almost everyone tends to ask: „Why has nobody told me about this before? Why do I stumble upon these obvious possibilities purely by chance?“

Now, one of the problems in dealing with and researching this ethereal body is certainly that it takes a lot of time and patience to even get in contact with this ethereal body in the first place. And in the western world, knowledge of the existence of such an energy field was also still very new back in the sixties! And besides, navel-gazing was frowned upon. But when the contact to one’s own energy field is there, one doesn’t think about it anymore and takes the time to influence this ethereal body, and not necessarily only when one feels bad. On the other hand people already got used to simply pop pills against physical or psychological complaints (because that only takes a few seconds), instead of connecting with one’s ethereal body in long sessions through breathing, consciousness, imaginations and pulsing techniques. One can also simply go to acupuncture, but even that is still relatively time-consuming and needs to be organized, even if one then no longer has to feel into her ethereal world herself but leaves that to a alternative practicioner? Blind flight so to speak?

Back to the question: What happens to ethereal body when the body-body dies? Acupuncture on a corpse makes no sense, and breathing and pulsing techniques are also no longer feasible. So it seems obvious: The ethereal body also loses its significance with the death of the physical?… And what happens to the astral body in the moment of death? What about this astral body described so colorfully and dynamically by Steiner anyway? Five chakras (energy centers) with wonderfully dancing and turning Lotos blossoms. So colorfully and sensitive.

Maybe I would find what I was looking for here, with answers to my questions about what or who can still perceive and experience after death at all. Maybe this astral body continued to exist after death! So I finally came closer again to the original question of what actually happens when I die, and to what the the Tibetan Book of the Dead was all about.

There was no other way then to learn to live with doubts and uncertainties. Patience was required here. I had to learn to let impressions work on me for longer periods without the compulsion to immediately have an explanation ready, without immediately categorizing or defining and naming. But that suited my natural laziness and even stubbornness very well. From today’s perspective I would even say that I was already a spiritual snob back then – or to say it more nicely I used to be an „artist“ already. Somewhat dim-witted, but good-looking, always a distant look and I definitely had a certain charm too? In many respects a slow and lazy understander, but on the other hand al lot of certain ambitiousness and curiosity as well. I even was considered by some people back then to have some secret insights and methods.

Okay – highly esteemed readers – at this point please take a moment to lean back again and think about my journey so far. Please sit up straight again.

In my defense I can say that I actually asked good and direct questions, and also that I remained reasonably sincere and honest with myself and others.

Part of this astral body are the emotions, feelings, interpretations, spontaneous inspirations, fears, hopes, memories. Thus a very multi-layered world. But could this astral body really be what we call the self? The soul? The I? Did this field of forces offer the possibilities to feel oneself as an I and to confirm oneself in it again and again? Maybe that was the point. I wanted to know that! I wanted to finally understand that. Looking for straight answers? Why was it so difficult to simply perceive oneself, as oneself? And far and wide nobody who wanted to discuss questions like these not even my closest friends. And even less so on our LSD-trips.

Maybe there was a mirror of some kind to mirror me, myself, my soul or my consciousness? Maybe the self was the mirror itself?

Rudi described a complicated and very colorful and spirited chakra technique to get closer to this astral body, but that was really too much and too foreign to me back then, and I could not follow it and quickly got lost in it anyway. I was still light-years away from something like that back then.

Through my observations of myself and others – in search of a self, I stumbled upon the „secret agenda“. That was a great moment! Was this secret agenda that we all maintain perhaps even the I itself? Is one of these open secrets that we all have a secret agenda. Even with our best friends we never share the whole truth, but always only the truths up from a second layer, and we all keep our first layer secret, the so called secret agenda?

My gentle reader may lean back at this point again and look inside herself and search for her secret agenda. When one observes precisely and openly and honestly, then one can recognize that we humans actually without exception are never completely honest. Just think about what secrets you have from your partner? Or do you share your ulterior motives. The secret agenda indeed is kept secret even from yoursel? If nobody makes us aware of it, then we don’t even know it exists. It’s kind of self-evident. And one must really look at oneself very precisely to even recognize one’s secret agenda. And in a way it always remains intangible. People behave very generously, for example, but when one stands next to them, one notices that it’s about their own recognition and not at all about the welfare of the gifted beings. And so on and so on. Often all the bystanders even see and know this and even the donor believes in her great compassion. The secret agenda is very secret and not so easy to pin down. Sometimes the reasons for a secret agenda seem to be for the benefit of others. For example, we know that somebody ist going to die soon and we are waiting for the wright moment to mention it. For some people it seems to be out of fear or insecurity, or one tries to hide one’s greed or is afraid of injuries. The secret agenda camouflages itself well. We finally make the marriage proposal and even think up something extraordinary for it, but basically we just want to finally have peace, create secure conditions, and unabashedly unpack the slippers and watch TV. When I had first read about the secret agenda, it wouldn’t let me go. An open secret. Super interesting and more and more I became aware in the search for myself how significant and dominant this was. Nothing stood closer to our I than this secret agenda!… Incidentally, I didn’t really get closer to my self in my numerous LSD sessions either, because when one wants to work with LSD, one must be able to let go. If one is too tense on LSD or wants to direct or even searches tensely, that can have serious harmful consequences. I visited acquaintances from LSD trips in psychiatries over and over again back then. Not everyone can let go so easily and possibly unconscious entanglements in dense traumas can have unhealthy and fatal consequences under LSD. On an LSD trip one therefore better does not question his secret agenda or even search for it. Quite simply for self-protection! When I read this I feel the urge to laugh. To be or not to be indeed has some funny aspects.

And again and again these unpredictable emotions? This search too had to be artfully designed, dancing and without compulsions. The disadvantage was that you would not find tangible results. Well, I could have tried to paint my I, but I wasn’t a good painter, or to dance it, but unfortunately I never got the idea? In a way I did write some poems about it though. But before you ask: They are lost.

I did not particularly want to drive myself crazy.

Basically I stumbled again and again over my fundamentally scientific approaches trained at home, in schools and society and media over years, without even noticing it myself (just like Rudolf Steiner. He was trapped in exactly the same way). We were all victims of the scientific age. Though media didn’t play a big role back then yet. There were only two TV channels, and from midnight both showed a test pattern.

Despite the newly discovered spaces and psychedelics, it basically remained a search for Essentia, for matter? For the naked core of the poodle (Goeth)?

In all of this I still held the version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with the 400 annotations in my hands. Here too, more questions piled up on my concrete questions. New aspects kept coming into my life – let’s call them insights – but the situation didn’t become more manageable as a result. On the contrary!

I over and over tried to star fresh. For example: When life leaves the body, then we speak of death. That’s what it was about: What can I do when this body dies? And to this the Tibetan Book of the Dead actually gives very concrete answers. But exactly at these points I unfortunately no longer understood this Book of the Dead. I had to imagine sitting at the bedside of a dying person and reading the text of the Tibetan Book of the Dead aloud. But the question remained: how is a deceased person supposed to hear me? On the other hand it says that consciousness should preferably leave the body at the crown of the head after death and nowhere else. That was more concrete, but seemed too unscientific to me. The secret agenda behind the distinctions between three bodies of Rudolf Steiner was also based on a scientific worldview. Steiner applied scientific methodology. Maybe Rudi also recognized his scientific bias in 1912 fortunatly. I actually do think so, but these considerations do not belong here. In any case, I myself discovered this compulsion, this scientific worldview, so to speak in 1970.

So my highly esteemed readers:
Here it comes! A wonderful opening up: End of dissecting, defining, ordering, distinguishing and comparing. I took my first steps into a magical world:

I had to take a completely new and fresh look at my worldview! Okay, distinguishing three bodies was certainly progressive, but it didn’t open up a really new worldview. That was still extremely and typically scientific. I behaved almost like a physician. Now the scientific worldview is also taught from an early age, quasi from the moment when the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus die, this worldview is seriously preached, and confirmed and shaped over years by the people and media around. This is strong and tough. One doesn’t get rid of something like that so easily.

We disenchant since millions of years all phenomena by giving them names. To control and categorize them, but by that they loose their magical components and aspects – their radiance – maybe for ever.

For me the triggers for a change were the rediscovery of joy and happiness… Yes, I admitted to myself that I increasingly felt inexplicable joy and intangible happiness. For example when I looked fascinated over a landscape or at a work of art, or enjoyed music, and whenever something deepened, whenever I discovered new dimensions, then there was often immense delight, enthusiasm and joy. I also experienced the magic of a love relationship and sex for the first time back then. That was fantastic! Was I – was my I – perhaps quite simply joy? Is the self, Atman, the soul quite simply the possibility to feel joy or even this joy itself? But why seemed there behind in the invisible always a further seeker and doubter, an enjoyer, a free rider, or an agenda to hide?

I had to change radically. I wanted to get a free view. I could not see any wa out other than a distictiv break. I wanted to learn more and to know better. I had to pilgrimage to the Orient myself? Go and meet the Buddhas amoung Tibetans.

So I dropped out of business school and became a factory worker for exactly one year to finance a journey to the Orient with the saved money.

It was a wonderful time! I looked very hopefully toward India and Nepal and in April 1973 I finally really started my journey to the east.