I attended private classes to obtain my high school diploma, and later, when I studied law at the University of Vienna, I had to rely on my own resources again and attended evening courses at a private school. The curriculum of the first part of my studies also included canon law and church history, and the lecturer continually amazed me with his discourses on the numerous falsifications and the lack of authentic works. It was wholly incomprehensible to me that the church was teaching things as the truth that theologians have long known to be falsifications and tendentious literature.
Probably out of curiosity, one evening after the First State Examination I attended a lecture by a 'Society for the Unification of World Christianity', which took place in a rented room at the University of Vienna. At that time I had no idea whatsoever about sects, so I thought I could talk reasonably to the nice young people who had come to the lecture. A nice young girl, barely fifteen years old, was immediately assigned to me as a kind of counsellor. After the lecture, I accepted the group's invitation to talk and was amazed to hear that a certain Mr. Moon from Korea had come into the world as the new Messiah to succeed where Christ had failed. However, I soon realised that the talk was not about the unification of Christianity, but about a new edition under the leadership of Mr. Moon. The main enemy was considered to be the “evil communism.”, which was universally condemned and cursed to hell. Some passages of the so-called 'Divine Principles' disseminated by this group struck me as downright childish and ridiculous. Certain historical accounts did not correspond to what I had learnt as a student about church history. I raised my objections and, for the first time in my life, noticed how friendly and seemingly truth-loving people listened attentively without paying attention to a single word.
After many conversations and excursions together, the leader of the group took me into his room and told me that the time had come to make a decision. He asked me to join the group and work for them, or not to visit them in the future. This inhuman demand for mental and physical slavery surprised and shocked me beyond words. Firstly, I came from the mountains - my parents were mountain farmers - and had no idea of this particular kind of brutality; secondly, I liked the girl and didn't want to lose her.
Even then I suspected that Mun, as the new Messiah, was not without danger. He spoke of love with every breath, but his love seemed to end with those who thought differently, especially the communists, whom he saw as a new evil power. If people thought according to this new sect, they were good and useful; if they thought differently - perhaps even communist! - they were evil and satanic. The sentence I had heard somewhere began to pound inside me: 'If you don't want to be my brother, I'll smash your head in! No and no again, I would not sell my soul for anything!
So began my search for the truth. More painful disappointments followed, I even changed my plans for the future and dropped out of law school. For many years I then searched through the maze of different doctrines and studied all sorts of subjects until I finally realised why people wander through this world as if in a fog, not finding the truth and not even knowing what they are, where they come from and where they go after their earthly demise.
At first I spent a lot of time in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The sect members had told me about spiritual experiences and claimed that they could talk to the dead. They fasted for a few days and experienced something. I tried it, of course, and after three days of depriving myself of food and fluids, I discovered forces within me that were somehow turning. I felt quite clearly that some of them were much larger than the body and how they entered and exited, so that I could estimate their size from the time between leaving and re-entering the body. Only later did I learn that in Far Eastern thought these forces are called 'chakras'.
In the National Library I found enough books on spiritual communication with the afterlife. Some books seemed to me not to have been written by madmen, but in an open and sincere spirit. In particular, I found a so-called factual report that quickly captivated me because it seemed so kind, open and sincere, and because it gave a scientific answer to the question of the origin and meaning of life. I visited the editor, an elderly gentleman, who I soon realised could not possibly be the author of the factual report. So I visited the so-called mediator, a gentleman over eighty who had been a tram driver in Vienna. He was a friendly man who told me how he had been trained as a mediator and how he had been used as a writing mediator for a long time. He described how his hand began to write at night without his intervention and how he had written many pages in the morning, the contents of which he could only marvel at. I am convinced that he could not have written this report on his own.
The author of the report claimed to be called John and to have been a disciple of Christ. He had been commissioned by the beings on the other side, specifically the disciples of Christ, to write the account for humanity and to transmit it through the mediator. He explained that Christ had called the God of the Jews evil and had therefore been persecuted by them. All the records of Christ's disciples had been destroyed by the forgers and replaced by misleading claims. What Christ had really taught and said, he, John, had recorded in his factual account.
The longer I studied it, the more the account fascinated me. For example, it was claimed that Christ came from the Essenes and not from the Jews. In fact, a few years after the factual report, numerous writings were found in Qumran by the Dead Sea, which indicated that Christ came from the Essenes!
All would have gone well, and I might have become an ardent supporter of the factual report if I had been a little more religious. But as it was, I couldn't stop thinking about every unclear or obviously false statement. To my surprise, I even found a second factual report that differed significantly from the first in some chapters. How could there be - for heaven's sake! - how could there be two different versions of a factual report of the afterlife? Naive as I was at the time, I couldn't digest this fact. It took me an enormous amount of time and inner turmoil until one day, in a fit of despair, I threw the entire factual report into the oven.
I was able to dispose of the book in the oven, but I couldn't erase it from my mind. The thoughts continued to have an effect, and I had to rethink and reexamine them again and again until I finally managed to understand the contradictions, retain the good and take note of the disappointing.
Not long after finishing my law studies and a few years after burning the report, I became a youth worker in an home for problem children because I wanted »to do something good« in the spirit of the factual report. I soon found my feet in this profession, too, and eagerly studied the CVs of the children and young people who were housed in this home. Another disappointment came with the realisation that it was impossible to educate children and young people in such a home. How could hundreds of children and young people from difficult family backgrounds be housed in a barracks-like building and cared for by far too few carers? Were the carers not overtaxed? Were they even able to give the children and young people the security they needed to develop in a reasonably satisfactory way? I once dared to ask an educator why he had arrived for his night shift ten minutes before closing time. But he didn't think it was necessary to give an explanation to a young carer like me, so I made an entry in the service book, especially as the same carer liked to make impossible remarks about the youngsters. The head of the home was delighted with my supposed courage, the other educators were outraged and began to ignore me, whom they had previously called 'dear Mr. Sauerschnig'. My misfortune was that I didn't know that the educator I had noted in the service book had been playing cards and drinking with colleagues.
Matured by this experience, I left the teaching profession and became self-employed in a profession I had never practised before, but for which I had been granted a trade licence on the basis of my school-leaving certificate. I set up a reproduction centre, started doing all kinds of typing work, gradually bought printing machines, copying and typesetting equipment and even a reproduction camera. A few years later, when I bought a computer and started writing my own programs, other companies asked me to improve their programs or write new ones. When a dealer expressed the intention of even offering my programs at an office trade fair, I changed my job again and founded a software company in the Waldviertel.
However, I not only did programming work, I also sold hardware and taught computer courses at an educational institute offering adult courses for high school graduation. I also became interested in the structure of computers, their functions and basic programmes, and increasingly understood what it meant to have ideas and to use them to bring a device to life. I compared the programmes to biological processes and noticed a certain similarity. So I immersed myself more and more in the study of biology and physics to understand the connections.
Soon after I began my search for the truth, I began to study intensively the question of how different world systems could coexist. If there is an afterlife, I said to myself, then there must be an answer to the question of how two or more world systems can coexist. At that time, however, I was still very much influenced by the thoughts of the factual report and was not yet able to see things more clearly.
The Factual Report described impressively that everything is spirit, whereby spirit must be imagined as a force (energy). Many other reports and treatises also assumed that everything was spirit. Einstein indirectly and impressively confirmed the otherworldly theories that assumed that matter (mass) was only a form of energy (spirit). It was only many years later that I realised that energy, like space, colours and shapes, can only be effects of spirit.
Today I am sure that everything is spirit and that everything that exists is based on the expression of the will of spirit.
I buried my belief in the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God (as Yahweh claims) with increasing doubt about the accuracy of the factual record. Above all, I realised that it is impossible to consciously comprehend many events side by side. Imagine a particularly intelligent person and put him next to a simple person. What is the difference between them? The difference is that the particularly receptive person can be more imaginative than the person for whom ideas don't really want to come. But both can only do one thing at a time. Reading, writing, singing, watching television, cooking, observing animals, etc., not even the highly intelligent person can do all this at the same time!
The following personal experience made me realise that there is more to life than what we perceive: one day I was driving to Amaliendorf with Christine and her two children. Christine was driving and I was sitting next to her in the front seat. Suddenly I had a very strong feeling that we were going to hit a car, even though I couldn't see one. Lo and behold, a car appeared on our side of the road a short time later! Just before the collision, the oncoming driver managed to swerve out of the way. How could I have felt that a vehicle was threatening us? It couldn't have been an illusion, because Christine's son later told me that he had had a similar strange feeling.
I was also particularly struck by certain dreams. In the early years, when I was searching intensely for the truth and had questions, I would often dream the answer and wake up at a very specific time. There were even times when I didn't wake up, but was awakened by some other sound - a child screaming, for example. A glance at the clock showed the same time again, to the minute! One day I had some unanswered questions again and had a dream - but, lo and behold, I dreamt that I would no longer receive such dreams and would have to go my own way. Since then I have not had such dreams, and I do not wake up at this time, although I have often wished that I would.
These are personal experiences, of course, but they could certainly be taken seriously from a scientific point of view. I am convinced that many people have spiritual experiences of all kinds, but keep quiet about them because they don't want to make a fool of themselves.
I have seen on television a shaman's tongue being cut off and then growing back. Walking over hot coals without burning your feet may not be proof of the existence of the spirit either. But all these facts and experiences are clear indications that there is more to it than we are prepared to admit today.
As an entrepreneur, I have employed many people over the years, and as a programmer, I have gained insight into hundreds of companies. I've seen people's strengths, their weaknesses and their mistakes, and I've enjoyed the business side of things. I have tried to write easy-to-use and self-explanatory programs to serve the many people in the commercial sector. In the process, I learned about the limitations and the flood of laws that have to be created for such a society. In a state where everyone tries to get the best for themselves, there will never be enough, despite great technological progress, the state will always become insolvent. In a community in which the strong try to become even stronger by investing their wealth well and by being able to work without their own strength, in a community in which people can mark their boundaries which no one is allowed to cross without permission, there will always be the privileged and the disadvantaged, the poor, the hungry and the starving. If the rich are allowed to get richer through speculation and not through work, if people with certain opportunities can quickly increase their money while others are paid next to nothing for their work, then there will always be regions, continents and sections of the population who have to 'live' in poverty, misery and on the brink of starvation. In such an unjust world, new ideologies are constantly emerging which claim the right to take away the benefits of others by force.
It is clear to all non-primitive people that living together is only possible in true spirit and love. No one needs to stand up and shout about how bad and evil people are and how incapable of love they are. It is not that simple. In paradise it may be easy to sing hallelujah and shine all day long, but here on earth we find conditions that often make us cry rather than sing.
Many of our major problems have their origins in the natural laws of this world into which we are born. Helpless, at the mercy of our parents, we arrive here and leave this world tired and exhausted. Between our arrival and departure, however, we work our way up, seeking support, recognition and some satisfaction of our desires.
As a father and educator, I have never encountered bad children, only adults with mountains of prejudice. Perhaps there really are bad children, and perhaps some people are bad by nature, but I have never personally experienced this. The so-called difficult children with whom I lived for a while were problem children because they had grown up in unacceptable conditions; for me they were not proof that people are inherently evil, that they are born with original sin, as the Church suggests.
Our prejudices are very detailed and we often don't recognise them as such. Everything that has to be or is supposed to be like this screams to heaven and turns children into what adults later become. They begin to believe all kinds of nonsense and carry a rucksack full of prejudices with them until some of them collapse under them.
What is so important to us! The ladder of constraints begins at birth and ends only at death. How much knowledge children have to take in! If they are not gifted enough, they get worse grades, as if a child of lesser intellectual ability were worse than a naturally gifted one. Instead of nurturing ability, we shower children with knowledge to make it easier for them to enter the next level of constraint, the workplace. And that's where it really starts! Produce, make money, increase sales, increase productivity, pay taxes, outsmart the competition, modernise, automate, get bigger and bigger and bigger to the point of madness! Those who are not good enough are weeded out, put on unemployment benefits or pushed onto the sidings like a broken-down locomotive.
Ever since Darwin showed us that evolution is based on a successful struggle for existence, the strong and the cunning have been spiritually nourished and confirmed that in this struggle for survival it is permissible to pull out all the stops to gain an advantage. Thinking in terms of advantage has grown like a weed, and today it is taken for granted that everyone is looking out for their own advantage. Whenever we do something, we ask ourselves how it will benefit us. Everyone sells themselves as best they can, everyone takes what they can from the state, from the community.
When a guilty conscience sets in, many become true artists of repression and reinterpretation. They create theories and justify what can be justified. Many accept medals and titles, look to supposed role models, people who live in beautiful villas, drive yachts, wear nice clothes and spend more in a day than many families do in a year.
What good is it to claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds?
The fact is that far from being the best of all possible worlds, this is a cruel and harsh world that forces us to behave in repulsive and disgusting ways. Is there anything worse than the fact that one living being can only exist at the expense of the life of another?
Christ says beautiful words in the factual report: One living being serves another in charity. Fine words, perhaps, for the eater, but certainly not for the eaten!
I simply object to the fact that we constantly lie to ourselves and go through life as hypocrites, great and small. Let's take the facts as they are and not constantly disguise them with all sorts of lies, big and small, that only make things worse!
Many people talk about truth and mean what they mean. Many talk about justice, but mean what they want. Many believe in God, but the God they believe in is a God of their own belief. He should be and act as they themselves think is good and right.
This can lead to a spiritual quagmire and a lack of knowledge about life from which there seems to be little escape. But truth has first and foremost to do with truthfulness, with sincerity, openness and charity. If we really want to get to the bottom of life and not be satisfied with beliefs of any kind - no matter how scientifically packaged - then we must first behave truthfully, break down our prejudices and recognise ourselves.
After many years of searching for the truth, I have come to the conclusion that not everything in this world is a coincidence. But we will only understand the meaning of life and gain insight into spiritual processes when we begin to understand the spirit and ourselves, when we leave the present spiritual level and turn to truth and charity.