No, I wasn’t a princess as I stood there: about five or six years old, a little chubby, quite small, with freckles on my face and shy in my heart, with long dark spaghetti hair. Like many times before, I was with my friends. Always a little lonely inside, different from the others, however and wherever I happened to be.
It was summer, and we had played all morning on the sandy path that led past our gardens.
“Actually, you are a princess.” Suddenly there was this voice, that strange perception.
There were certainly no real words I had heard, merely a kind of hidden idea behind them for which I did not have an apt interpretation.
But it was right: I am something special – however, not in a stupid or arrogant way but in a real and true sense. I was told something that I had to acknowledge as being true. It was nothing to distinguish me from the world around me. But it was something revealing a connection. This was perhaps revealed to all people?
From the outside, the others did not behave as if they knew about it. However, neither did I which meant that this could not be the one and only criterion. I did not think people were of similar type. This is why I remained lonely – at least inwardly. I did not dare to share my yearning, my loneliness and my perception with somebody else. Nobody seemed to be of similar type and I would even have missed the words …
Other worlds
At the age of eight or nine, I was on a bike tour with my stepfather and my mother. We did that on many weekends and I really liked gliding along with my bike, eying the world. On a long road, quite incidentally as if it was normal, it was suddenly there, the picture, the impression: a gigantic building right next to me. The façade did not protrude vertically into the sky but tapered slightly towards the top and was made of light, cream-coloured stones shining in the light of a glistening sun.
Although this had nothing to do with a daydream, as the perception was as real as the natural world around me – it was nothing I might have told somebody. It felt as if cracks had appeared in my own system.
The “princess-experience” was a kind of rip in the curtain veiling the innermost. This was now the rupture to the outside. It gave me confidence! There are other spaces, a bigger being which, however, cannot be experienced with normal senses.
Confronted with this insight I felt panic because now the world had become more unpredictable for me. Nevertheless, there was great relief, a gasp of relief because a foreseen perspective began to open up, offered the potential for development, in order to experience healing.
God – not quite so dear anymore
A few years later, as a teenager, I attended the philosophy project group at school. The meetings took place on a voluntary basis with our religion teacher in the afternoon. What a collection of guys – all of them intellectually active, all of them a bit quirky, all of them a bit alternatively, however, all of them very individual. I loved it. It brought me magnificent moments of insight. By means of his input, the teacher was able to initiate thinking and insight.
Although in a way of unconsciousness he himself was a searcher, he was full of yearning and enthusiasm thus being able to share the things he already found.
Plato’s Parable of the Cave, in which it is shown that man can only recognize the shadowy images of the real, was a revelation for me. But the greatest amazement and the most formative insight popped up in me when the question was asked: Is God a good God considering all that is happening in the world?
At first, I vehemently defended “my” God. And he was good, unbelievably good, the best of all ever! The objections of the others were partly clever, seemed to be mature, however, in their materialistic focus they were not at all acceptable to me. But I came up against my limits. How could I bring the conditions in the world into harmony with my idea of the “dear God”?
There was only one way out. I had to agree to the widening of my conception of God. It was kind of painful and I felt helpless not knowing what was missing in my conception. I only felt that something was missing, that was for sure. In this space cleared from intellectual sensing, there was a sudden inspiration: to the universal God belongs freedom. And it also belongs to the human being, in which a divine seed is planted.
We don’t have to be good and well-behaved if we want to approach the divine, but rather learn to be free, gain knowledge from it and make the right decisions.
