It had been an exciting experience to be together with many people for an extended time. Walter became friends with some. They met for coffee, or someone cooked a meal. Some weeks passed, and the energy he had received from the group experience disintegrated into the usual day-to-day routine. Going for walks in the park or lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to be patient, as the I Ching told him to be.
One very annoying development turned out to be the Sunday’s events that Margaretha and Kavita attended together. These were the days he usually spent with his girlfriend. Now the two women disappeared into what they called “The Center” in Bockenheim, one of the Indian guru’s branches in Frankfurt. They participated in an open house kind of affair with meditation and tea drinking. Walter became even more depressed as he felt his girlfriend slip away from him while he cooked in his own miserable juices.
He liked eating at a particular Chinese restaurant, which he remembered on one of those Sundays. There was nothing to do in the big city on a lazy Sunday afternoon, when the world appeared to be at a total standstill.
He thought, Let me have lunch at the Chinese and see.
The choice of lunch location included the thought that perhaps he would be able to catch a glimpse of what they were doing at the Bockenheim Center. The restaurant was right next to the backyard entrance of the guru’s place.
Walter seated himself at a table behind the curtain right next to one of the windows and seemed to be the only guest in the restaurant. The spot gave him a covered but clear view of the yard with the entrance door of the center. As his rice with chicken and almonds arrived, a group of people exited the door of the meditation place and gathered in the yard. Some took seats at a round table made from a large cable reel. Lo and behold, there she sat: Margaretha with a red face and what appeared to be still-wet hair. He observed her sitting in the hazy afternoon sun, drinking something out of a cup, and frolicking with people. All of them were clad in reddish outfits.
Walter did not meet with her that day. He went home, feeling lousy and scared.
Later that night, he said to himself, “Enough is enough! This is too absurd.”
He needed to find out for himself. Why had he been scared, and what were they doing in the center? Next day, Monday, before noon, he walked the twenty-minute distance from his apartment to the narrow street in Bockenheim. Through the open gate of the courtyard, he came to the building’s entrance door and saw flyers in a plastic container at the wall. Walter pulled one of the flyers out and viewed a schedule of events. He sat down on a chair at the round table and read the schedule very carefully. A three-day event was coming up in two weeks that caught his immediate attention: “Encounter with Ma Prem Purna.”
In the reception area, downstairs in the basement, a friendly woman asked him how she could assist him. Walter told her he would like to try one of the events on the schedule and that one in particular attracted him. He asked the woman in red what she thought about it. His question triggered an energetic, informative, and rather lengthy response that made him quite excited.
The woman told him, “You are lucky, because the good therapists from Poona are traveling all over Europe and elsewhere. Don’t you know, Bhagwan left India and is in the United States now? The therapist of the Encounter group is from Bavaria and has been with Bhagwan for a long time. It will be a great experience for you.”
Walter signed up for a self-awareness group that would change his life.
Surprisingly enough, from the moment he filled out the application form to the time the Encounter experience began, an energy change occurred within him. It was as if his signature on the piece of paper triggered happiness and a sense of worth. When he met his girlfriend the next day and told her about his decision, he could see on her face that she had not expected anything like it.
Her jaw dropped for a moment, and then she swallowed and said, “Oh, I want to do this group as well.”
That rather puzzled him, but he thought, We might as well. Momentums flipped back and forth, their dynamic forces transformed, and the couple ended up in Walter’s bed. One more time, the two enjoyed each other very passionately—how compatible they were together during lovemaking.
The following two weeks became the most erotic period they had been blessed with. Walter used his Nikon to shoot rolls of black-and-white film, capturing Margaretha’s immaculate, naked body in all imaginable erotic positions: standing up next to the window, lying on his bed on the side, and with her legs spread wide apart. He used the zoom lens to shoot details of her pleasure zone from the front and back. Afterward, they became so horny again that they made love standing up. Margaretha enjoyed the act so much that she started to weep with pleasure.
They visited Olof and Kavita and went out for dinner, enjoyed a weekend at the gravel pit in the nude, and spent as much time together as they could. In due course, the two weeks passed, and on a Friday evening, Walter walked with his bag to the center in Bockenheim. He had packed a towel and a change of clothes.
A group of people was already gathered in the reception area, chatting animatedly while looking left and right to evaluate who would be in the group and what to think about it. After the administrative check-in procedure, a line of individuals filed into a large basement room with wooden parquet. It looked and smelled very clean. The crowd stood around, not knowing what to do, until the door opened again. A medium-sized, stocky woman in her mid-forties and two young men in her company walked into the room.
She said, “Undress, put all your clothes along the wall over there.”
Lo and behold! Walter thought. It’s true what they wrote in the newspapers—it’s happening nude.
For a brief moment, he looked at and checked on Margaretha; a fleeting feeling of jealousy passed through his mind and then went away. He gazed around and saw all the naked bodies while trying to find a vacant spot in a circle, which formed under the direction of one of the two men. Once everybody was sitting with their naked butts on the parquet, it became quiet in the room. Walter recognized that a formidable number of people had signed up for the Encounter, and most of them were women.
The woman who had given the initial order to undress and the two men joined the round as well. “My name is Ma Prem Purna,” the woman said. “We shall have a lot of fun together for the next three days.”
After the initial introduction of herself and her two assistants, as well as the intention of the group, the participants had a chance to say their names and additional information if they wanted to. There were first exchanges of glimpses across the room, a smile or looking the other way. All of them had read or heard something about Encounter, but most had never participated in a group before. Purna explained the meaning of the word encounter as, “You have to encounter yourself in your totality. You may feel sick because you will see animalism coming out. You could never have imagined that human beings can be such animals. But that animal is within you, just repressed. By repressing it, you cannot dissolve it.”
One could hear a pin drop to the floor, and the energy in the room turned almost icy as people tried to digest Purna’s speech, realizing that this would not be a joke.
“Get up on your feet and dance like you have never danced before in your life, as if this will be the last time.”
Popular music flooded the room from enormous speakers, and the group members began dancing for their life. Walter felt uneasy but was still in a familiar milieu; he had always loved to dance. Although the setting was changed this time, he managed to shake off his anxiety.
The music stopped. “Find yourself a partner and stand opposite each other. Look into the eyes of your counterpart. Feel yourself in your body. Tell your partner how you feel. When you are done, let your partner tell you.”
A variety of exercises followed in short succession. Then Purna said, “And now prepare the space for the Kundalini.”
There was a dinner break after the meditation, followed by an evening session. The group gathered again, naked, in the basement room and formed the circle. Nobody said anything. People started to look around; the atmosphere in the room appeared to condense. Walter could not avoid feeling very uncomfortable, as if he had done something wrong.
“Look at them,” Purna said to one of her assistants condescendingly. “They are so full of fear, you can smell it. Come on people, who wants to say something?”
A large woman who had been breathing loudly and frequently for a while suddenly said, “I need to say something. This man across the room. He has been looking at me for a while now, and I do not like it. It feels unasked for, somehow disgusting. I want him to stop.”
Purna interrupted, “Why don’t you address him directly? Go ahead and tell him.”
The large woman turned a little to someone unidentified at the moment and said, “I do not want you to look at me. Stop it.”
“Who are you talking to?” Purna asked.
The woman jumped up and ran through the space in the circle, pointing her finger at a man who smiled for no reason at all.
“Sit down and tell him again.”
Once the woman placed herself in front of the man, she looked at him, breathing very deeply with increasing speed. Her shoulders vibrated and her arms shook.
Suddenly she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Do not look at me. I hate you, I hate you,” many times until she ran out of breath and started to weep.
The tension in the room turned into a flood of raging emotions, where other people started to cry and wanted to say something, but Purna stopped the rising havoc. “Close your eyes, watch your breath go in and out, and feel yourself.”
After a while, she read from a book of the guru and then left the room. The group prepared for the night. Walter had no idea where Margaretha positioned her mat or whether she even spent the night in the room. He did not care; the events of the previous few hours set up enough emotional and mental material to ponder about and basically left him too exhausted to worry about anything. He laid himself down on the sheet-covered mattress, pulled a blanket on top of him, and fell asleep right away.
As with the massage training, the schedule of the day for the Encounter group began early, at 6:00 a.m. with the Dynamic. Walter was, to a certain degree, familiar with it but still not really comfortable jumping up and down and screaming at dawn. He went through the motions, took a shower together with many other naked bodies, and had muesli with herbal tea in the break room. Most people from the group were quiet, kind of dazed-looking after the shower, sitting at a table with their light breakfasts.
Purna began the morning session with a circle and asked whether anybody had anything to say.
Silence filled in the room for a while until a young man opened his mouth and said in a loud voice, “I do not like the smile of this guy over there; it looks false, as if it is not real. As a matter of fact, the whole person looks phony to me.”
Walter realized at this moment that the man was talking about him. He became wide awake.
Purna asked the man, “Does the smile, the person, remind you of somebody?”
After he thought for some time, the man’s lips began to tremble and Walter thought he saw tears. He said, “He reminds me of my father, the son of a bitch.”
He began to knead intensely one of the pillows in the middle of the circle, his voice choking but steadily staring at Walter.
“I despise the smile. It makes me mad, and I could kill him.”
He began to hit the pillow so hard with his fists that an assistant had to reinforce it with a second one underneath it to soften the blows. The agitated man began to shout throaty sounds out of his mouth with clenched teeth. It took him almost an hour to get the issue out of his system and become friendly again toward Walter.
Meanwhile, a variety of individuals had been infected by the vile energy in the room. Some worked on their own issues with people from their past whom they did not like because of what they had done or not done to them. Purna and her two assistants had their hands full engaging with all of them. The majority of the group members observed quietly with serious faces.
“Listen up, people,” Purna said, “let’s play a little—you will like it. Form a long line and sit very tightly behind each other. We are going to play train. You can put your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you. You can caress the person, you can touch, and you can do whatever you like playing the choo-choo train.”
Cheerful music provided the background for the group, which, sitting one behind the other in a line, crossed the large room in its entirety. Walter felt very lucky to sit behind a woman he thought of as the most beautiful in the whole group. She had a very elegant appearance, and her body had fully developed curves, not large at all. When he took his lucky spot behind the woman and touched her sides with the insides of his thighs, he could feel how soft her skin was. She also still emanated a fresh odor despite all the sweating going on.
The line of people waved to the sides and back and forth. The moment his member touched her lower back, it stiffened harder than it had been for a while. The head rubbed against her back, and he had the impulse to just lift her up a few inches and let her sit on it, to relieve the pressure. Walter suppressed the impulse but caressed the peachy skin softly and wherever he could reach with his hands. The choo-choo train game turned into somewhat of a torture session for him because of his large, painful member. He did not dare follow through with his animalistic appetite, and most of all, the woman in front of him did not show an inviting response; she might have been as afraid as he was.
Most of the troop left the center during lunch break, to walk in the sunshine for a while. When they assembled for the afternoon session, the room smelled fresh, and some flowers had been placed in a vase below the big Bhagwan picture on the wall. There was electricity in the room that had not been there before. It felt as if a cloud had been lifted to allow a more pleasant spirit to safeguard the atmosphere.
When everybody settled down and stopped the chatter and giggles, Purna pointed to the picture of her master and said, “Bhagwan is here with each and every one. He actually does the work. I only speak for him. So look around vigilantly and dare to ask or do what you wanted to since you arrived here.”
Before Walter collected his courage to do something he always wanted to do, the tall woman who had previously worked on issues gazed at him directly. “Can I come over to you, Walter? I want to ask you something.”
He nodded, and she shyly crawled through the middle of the ring and situated herself on her knees right in front of him.
“I really would like to make love to you. Would you do it with me?”
“Sure, yes,” he replied without thinking, and after gazing into his eyes for a long time, the woman grabbed his hand to pull him away from the circle.
Together they walked a few yards away. The woman picked a mat and placed it on the floor.
“How do you want to do it?” he asked her.
She did not say anything but pulled him down next to her, where they began kissing and fondling. Before the woman asked Walter, his idea had been to propose the same idea to the other woman from the choo-choo train session, but now it did not matter anymore. He felt his erection while he caressed the long, strong, and fleshy thighs of his partner. From the beginning of this therapeutic exercise, it was simply that: a practice. Even though he had an erection, he did not become emotionally involved. He went through the movements, and when she asked whether she could sit on him, he agreed. She positioned herself on top of him, doing it the way she wanted.
Both of them could not avoid the fact that they were not alone in the room. Now and then, one or both would view the scene in the room and recognize that a lot was going on behind their backs. No detail of it stayed in Walter’s memory. Half an hour or more must have passed. The woman on top of Walter realized that the deed did not include the usual vicissitudes of passion and that her partner had not climaxed.
The therapist called her group to order. “Let’s get ready for the Kundalini upstairs in the meditation room.”
Walter looked around the room. He did not recognize anything in particular but saw Margaretha getting up from the floor and dressing herself. The woman on top of him lifted herself off and smiled at him. The two hugged for a while, and then Walter put on his loose pants and T-shirt and proceeded to the first floor.
Walter got to sit on a wicker chair in the reception area. In front of him was a little desk with a framed black-and-white picture of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Walter’s back was pointed in direction of the others, waiting. As he watched the picture for a while, his awareness focused on the image, and the noise and chatter disappeared into the background. Walter became conscious that his vision of Bhagwan’s likeness in the image had altered. From the crisp, clear picture of a man with a gray beard, a cap on his head, and wearing some kind of ornamented garment, it transformed into a moving picture. A live version of the guru smiled at him, beckoning. When Walter gazed even deeper into the man’s eyes, he saw nothing at all anymore. For an undetermined length of time, the observing Walter disappeared. When he resurfaced, a large amount of energy was going through his body and brain like a strong current, an unfamiliar force, which bordered on being uncomfortable but at the same time very welcome.
Walter realized that people had entered the meditation room for the Kundalini. He also knew that he wanted to become a disciple, one of Bhagwan’s Sannyasins.
After dinner, when the members changed into fresh clothes and with the realization that the worst of the group must be over, Margaretha began the session by stepping out for the first time. She told Purna and the group that she did not like the previous event because of what happened with Walter and the tall woman.
“It was unfair, we came here as a couple with a relationship, and I had no intention of getting hurt like that,” she said while tears started flooding her eyes.
Purna asked Walter, “Do you want to help her?”
Walter said, “Of course.”
“You two, sit opposite each other, look into your eyes, and feel what is going on.”
More tears came from Margaretha.
Then the situation changed into exclamations and escalated into her hitting a pillow while looking at Walter screaming, “I hate you so much.”
The session took an hour before she calmed down.
At the end, Purna asked both of them, “Do you want to continue your relationship or not?”
Margaretha said, “I do not know, but I think I want to go on with Walter.”
Walter knew he needed to end it. He did not want to continue a relationship that had caused suffering, and he said so.
Purna wrapped up her Encounter group with the words, “See you all very fresh in the morning for the Dynamic.”
Walter left the group room for a breath of fresh air in the courtyard and sat down on one of the benches. He rested there with his closed eyes, contemplating what had occurred during the previous forty-eight hours. He tried to comprehend the magnitude of it but could not. Walter did not remember a time in his life when he had undergone a comparable mixture of vital forces and events and at the same time felt calm and at peace.
Someone was sitting next to him on the bench, he realized after a while, and opened his eyes. She was the one who advised him initially when he came to the center the first time. During the two days in the group, he had noticed her serving food and taking care of a variety of duties. The woman told him her name was Tara.
“Well, how are you doing?” she asked smilingly in the warm, nightly summer breeze.
Walter did not know what to say. He put his left arm over her shoulder and moved closer to her.
“I want to take Sannyas,” came out of his mouth, and he started to cry.
Tara turned toward him and hugged him with both of her arms.
“Do you want to stay with me in my room tonight?”
He could not think of anything better to do than that. The two went to the second floor of the building, where she had a small room with a large mattress on the floor. Tara and Walter cuddled up very sweetly, and then he fell asleep instantly. When the alarm clock rang, she hugged him again very gently and smiled with her blue eyes sparkling. Walter tried to apologize for falling asleep, but she dismissed it and let him leave for the meditation room.
The remaining hours of the last Encounter session continued in mellow ambiance. Most of the attendees looked different. There were many faces in the room with clear eyes, their voices hoarse but smiling. The bags packed, people gathered outside in the reception area and courtyard to say good-bye to each other. Walter noticed his fantasy woman and understood then why she had not responded to his lustful conduct: she sat on a bench in the courtyard with the center’s leader, holding hands. When she saw Walter looking at her, she smiled and waved at him.
The time immediately following Walter’s Encounter experience evolved into active, vibrant weeks, during which he sometimes felt as if he were moving into the Garden of Eden. Nearly every morning before six, he drove to the Mada Center for the Dynamic Meditation. At night, he went back to do the Kundalini at seven. He met with Margaretha, who picked up some of her stuff in his apartment and made sure that he was OK. She also told him that she had spent time with one of Purna’s assistants, who had become very infatuated with her. Walter thought that their new relationship felt increasingly lighter and friendlier.
When he told her that he wanted to take Sannyas, she became very serious. “Are you sure?” she asked with concern, but at the same time confessed that she had already filled out her own application.
Walter obtained a passport picture and dropped off his form at the center. There was a lot of talk about what recently had happened with Bhagwan. Apparently, he left Poona and the Ashram to fly to New Jersey in the United States. The gossip circled around the purchase of a large property in Oregon, known as the Big Muddy Ranch. Sannyasins were about to turn the ranch from an empty rural property into a city called Rajneeshpuram. Walter was not sure whether and where Bhagwan would get his Sannyas application, but center insiders assured him that the master would receive it and assign a new name to him as he had requested.
A waiting game began during which he went through many different emotional stages. What if the master declined him? Would he really look at his form and picture? What name will he get? And so on.
On the outside, Walter enjoyed the time of his life with frequent and variable intercourse. There always appeared to be a beautiful and willing Ma at the center who liked to share the bed in his apartment for a night. At home, he dyed any piece of clothing he owned that could be colored red. His roommate, Rudi, appeared astonished when he noticed all the activities and different faces coming out of Walter’s room. He had no objection whatsoever to his sister’s and his roommate’s transformations and stayed with sympathy in the background.
Then one night, with a firm grip, destiny seized another creature and would not let go any more.