Who is Frater L.e.N.e.? - Part 2

After having my first spiritual awakening when i was 19, i knew that the Search for Light will be the most important factor for me in this present incarnation.
I felt a deep longing for the gigantic feeling of Divine Love that i have experienced in these split-seconds, and 15 years later i still feel this longing burning in my heart.
But i still was very young and wild and therefore would not have the persistence to submit to a daily discipline of spiritual practise.
Also, i was not sure if eastern practises would be the best option.
Although i already had a copy of Israel Regardies "Golden Dawn" in my possession, i did not know that it is a workable system even without an existing Order. I just had a few glances at the Initiation Rituals in there and thought them to be far too complicated to do something practically with it, on myself and without any group or teacher.

At the age of 20 i moved from Southern Germany to Berlin, feeling that my environment had become too narrow-minded for me to fulfill my dreams.
In this crazy town that i still love so much i first started to go to school again, preparing for my high-school exams at a school for adult education.
For the next 5 years my interest in spirituality faded.
I was too busy in exploring what adventures my new habitat had to offer me, made many friends, went to a lot of parties and also engaged in small art projects.
Eventually, this somehow spiritual unfocussed life-style led to a deep personal crisis.
After a violent breach with a man that i was deeply in love with at this time, i suffered severe feelings of depression and loss of identity in the year of 2000.
I could not open the door for visiting friends, did not want to read a book or listen to music, could not do anything except for eating and sleeping, and just shut myself up in my house, awaking every morning with the deep feeling of not knowing anymore who I am. Often, the days in this year started with tears and desperation and ended with panic attacks on the street when i tried to go to the supermarket.
But, as it is normal with every spiritual crisis, there was a little glimpse of Light that shone through all this desperation and that finally helped me to come out of it again, fortunately without having to look for professional help.
It happened that one time i picked up a book from my bookshelve, and more or less out of chance it was a book by Carlos Castaneda, that i have read and admired when being a teenager.
At random i read a small passage about the concept of Tonal and Nagual, with the Tonal as everything that can be perceived and termed as reality, and the Nagual as everything that lies beneath and beyond this material reality. It also said that if a person once made contact to the Nagual and after that did not care about the implications and impact of this experience, s/he would ever suffer a feeling of undefined longing, a longing that could never be stilled with any material act.
By reading these few sentences, i suddenly began to realize the true meaning of my present and completely unpleasant state of mind.
So i started to think about what i really want out of this life and made some serious decisions.
I started to prescribe a daily routine of fitness training and meditation to myself and entered one of the local universities to study comparative religious sciences.
With this, the interest in the occult was enflamed again.
I bought every book about magic i could lay my hands on, and especially read everything from and about Aleister Crowley.
In the years of 2001 and 2002 i experimented with some kind of self-styled auto-erotic magic on a regular basis by creating one personal sigil per month and charging this with sexual energy and will-power with the intent to come into closer contact with my Holy Guardian Angel.
I somehow also began to realize that without help from any spiritual teacher or school that fitted my temperament and character, i could not progress further.
This thought was quite new for me, seeing that up to this point i have always regarded myself as some sort of spiritual and solitary warrior.
Eventually- i heard about the inauguration of a local Golden Dawn temple in Berlin at the end of the year 2002!
I was totally surprised because i had thought that the famous Golden Dawn was dead long ago!
Of course, i went to this public event where our Chief Adept held a lecture about the Golden Dawn and its system, and introduced the Hierophant of the new temple to the guests.
I was deeply impressed by the sobriety and solemnity of this lecture and event and had a very peculiar vision when the Chief Adept provided a Skrying session with one of the main symbols of the tradition.
Straight after this event i bought the "Ritual Magic Manual" by David Griffin and at home performed my first Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and Middle Pillar along its outlines.
From this moment on i knew that eventually i had found the spiritual techniques that i was looking for for so long!

So in April 2003 i got initiated into the Neophyte Grade of the Golden Dawn and therewith became a member of the local temple.
I consider this initiation as the most important day in all my life.
It was truly a new beginning and i will always be grateful for having got this remarkable opportunity. No word can truly describe what this initiation meant to me.
I was 28 then and time was ripe and perfect for a disciplined, practical and scientific approach to the spiritual heights i have sworn myself to reach long ago!

And here I am, still a member of the german Temple and international Order, and all i can say is that the Order and its brilliant system of attainment did never disappoint me at any given time.
Over the years i have realised that attainment is not a single event, but more likely demands a life-long endeavour and willingness to tread the path, no matter what grade you are in.
I also realised that spiritual development comes gradual only, that the powers of the Soul unfold subtle and slowly and only with a great amount of personal discipline and perseverance, and that
the process of going through the grades is often an unpleasant one, because you are forced to reflect deeply on every trait of your personality.
In order to establish contact with the Divine, you first have to establish balance in your Microcosm, at least to a certain extent.
This is what the elemental grades of the Outer Order aim at- they prepare your sphere for the cultivation of Soul. And at the same time, you are made perfect in the performance of basic magical techniques like Banishing, Invocations, Skryings, Consecrations and Divination.
I will ever be grateful for the founders of this system and everybody who is willing to teach it to the aspiring student, because i can see that its initiations and techniques are truly able to unlock the doors of Heaven and of Hell, and finally lead to the Summum Bonum, True Happiness and the Stone of the Wise.
I do not consider myself as super intelligent or genuine, in fact i think iam a quite lazy person and there may be times when i am not able to do more than the prescribed and necessary work. I know that also there will always be people who progress faster and display more intellectual brilliance than me.
But i think this is not the point.
The point is that i truly believe that i have found my spiritual homeground and that iam willing to dedicate my whole life to the study of hermetic sciences and the cultivation of my Soul, and thereby to delve ever deeper into Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of the Divine, to hopefully to become more than human one day and then to help other aspiring students to realize the same.


By the Truth that is One and Ineffable,
Summa Scientia Nihil Scire,
Frater L.e.N.e.

Who is Frater L.e.N.e.? - Part 1

I was raised by very loving and tolerant parents in a small village in Southern Germany and since early on i had a deep hunger for everything occult, religious and mystical, although my parents were no regular church-goers and didnt lay this interest on me.

But of course we had a bible in our house and this should be the first occult book for me to read.

I didnt get through the Old Testament, although i tried it, and i dont remember if i went through the whole New Testament, but i remember clearly reading the Genesis and Apocalypse excessively again and again.

Also from early on i was excited by any scary and horror movie, and although i was still very young, i managed to convince my mother to let me see all the cruel late night movies that i wanted to see on TV.

From early on it was clear for me and my family that i am not like other boys in my age.

As a child and teenager i was damned to look like a girl and in my first years on this Earth i was very silent and self-sufficient, up to the point that my mother was already thinking iam somehow autistic, but the doctors were assuring that, apart from my hayfever, iam totally fine.

Later on i did not like to go playing football outside with the other boys from the village, due to my hayfever but much more because i was satisifed with either reading at home (i have learned reading on myself before entering school) or playing witches with my very best friend, a girl that i was closely befriended with since kindergarden on.

We played spirit medium and made table-turning and glass-moving, tried to evoke ghosts in deserted places around the village and even created an imaginary friend that we shared.

We did our best to scare our neighbour children with our ghost and witch stories, and we were hunting after every local legend that had something to do with supernatural things.

In fact, my childhood seemed to be very "Buffy".

When we were 10 or 11 we bought a book at the local trainstation bookstore that was called "The World of Magic". It was a heavy paperback and in it i read about Aleister Crowley for the first time, and as you can imagine-

i was totally fascinated.

I trained myself to read everything backwards and even walk backwards, because i read that Crowley was doing this to un-do his mind.

We tried every magical recipe we could find in this book.

One time we were trying to evoke Beelzebub (!) by reciting some strange hebrew verses backwards- i think at this time i did not even know that it was hebrew, but i remember words like Adonai and Tetragrammaton. We were doing it at my room in my parents house, after school, when my parents were still at work.

We were chanting the verses many times and came into a wild frenzy. It was so fun that we didnt want to stop, but suddenly we heard a heavy bang from the top floor, like something really big has crashed to the floor, and we abruptly stopped chanting, with faces full of fear and expactation. Of course we went to the attic to see what has happened, and to our disappointment we did not see anything, but at least i can swear that we smelled a heavy sulphurous odour that made us fastly flee downstairs again!

When my mother came home from work she noticed that i had spread flour on the floor of my room because i had read that when ghosts or entities show up at night, they would leave footsteps in the flour.

Another time my friend and me were collecting all the plants that were necessary for a magic witch salve, a recipe from the book which said that all the witches in the past were using this to fly.

In our childish innocence, we picked Datura and Belladonna from the local nature reserve, and in the following weeks my friend made a slimy thick and pink salve from these plants and other additives.

We used to celebrate Walpurgis Night every year, alone in the party cellar at her parents house.

We played mixed tapes with spooky gothic songs and used to dance along mystically.

So this one Walpurgis Night we planned to rub our bodies with the magic salve, feeling that this Night would be perfect to test it.

I do not remember much of this special night anymore. In fact i think i had many blackouts.

I only remember fragments of it, like laying next to my friend on the floor of the party cellar, naked and sweating really heavily, and then suddenly coming to consciousness again and it is already long after dawn. This was the first night that i have not spent at my parents house, and i fastly ran home because i thought my mother must be very angry, which she was not by the way.

Today, after over 20 years, and knowing about the (side-) effects of magical plants i think that we were very lucky, having this sort of special children protection from high above, and that maybe apart from natural sleeping and dreaming our astral bodies really were travelling for the first time.

It must have been around the age of 12 that i began writing poetry.

Soon, and more or less out of accident, i got discovered by a local newspaper that was printing my poems in the art section and a lot of people from local art projects began being interested in me.

I was praised by the local media as a poetic "wunderkind" and i started to hold readings in several cities of Southern Germany, and was involved with a off-theater-group that was organising musical poetry readings for me.

I even managed to get my poems published in an anthology of young writers when i was 14, and made a TV live appearence by reading one of my poems on my 16th birthday, dressed in full gothic style and surely scaring the hell out of several of the millions of people that were watching this certain german art show on one of the two main channels at this one sunday afternoon in the early nineties.

But this was not the beginning of a straight-forward artistical career, although there surely would have been a bit of potential.

I was either surrounded by people who had (too) great expactations or who were predicting loss of interest and talent the older i get. Therefore i was tensed by pressure and the fear of loosing.

But moreover, i detected that iam gay when i was 14, and the time was ripe for my coming - out and for exploring what love and life had to offer me.

So i completely delved into a bohemian lifestyle, seeing that the experiences i had made in my early teenage years had programmed me not to want to live a "normal" life like many other people, including following a well laid out plan for making money.

I deeply fell in love, several times, sometimes lucky and sometimes not, and especially one time so heavily, that i was convinced to have lost my identity when the relationship broke up when i was 18. This was the time when my interest in mystic and religion was enflamed again.

I started reading everything about buddhism i could lay my hands on. For two years, I read through piles of books about this subject and started experimenting with certain tibetan meditation practises.

At the age of 19 something happened that i consider as my first and certainly one of my most groundbreaking magico-spiritual experiences and kick-starts i ever had.

I was at a home party and suddenly, and completely out of chance, fell into a out-of-body-experience.

I was sitting on a sofa next to a friend, and one second after i saw myself standing maybe 100 meters in front of me, tiny and small, and bathed in complete darkness, a blackness i have never experienced before.

Then i saw a Light rising in front of my body, a huge and warm golden Light, and this Light was so intense and gigantic like the Sun and so full of Love that i saw my small body shaking, hardly bearing the sheer intensity of it.

I have never experienced such a full power feeling of Divine Love before and after.

Only one small beam or even the reflection of a tiny beam from this source seemed so powerful that it could destroy my small and insignificant being in one million of a second.

Then a voice was whispering to me that this is the Divine Core that is hidden in every human being and that it is my task in life to firstly find the way to this Light on my own and secondly to tell every human being i meet from now on about this special experience.

Then i was back in the room again, sitting next to my friend, noticing that only a few seconds had passed, and desperately trying to verbalize the experience, which i could not manage this very night.

To be continued….