The Search for Visions
by Ruth-Inge Heinze

I began the search for what was missing in my life in early childhood. I remember gazing at the triangular piece of sky, visible from one window of our third-floor apartment at the south end of a small courtyard. I remember walking through cities painted golden on billowing clouds by the evening sun. I felt caressed by the wind and nourished by the song of birds.

At night I listened to the fog horns of the freighters floating down the nearby river. I knew the Spree was flowing into the Havel and the Havel into the Elbe and then the Elbe would merge with the North Sea and become part of the world oceans.

When I was still of pre-school age, we used to go to a small coastal town at the Baltic Sea (in Pomerania, now Poland). One day, I found myself standing alone on the beach.

The sea touched the sky and I was breathing with the waves. I entered the rhythm of the waves and felt a sudden rush of energy as the sun, the wind, and the sea were coursing right through me. I became the sun, the wind, and the sea. There was no "I" anymore, "I" had merged with everything else.

A door had opened. All sensory perceptions—sounds, smells, tastes, shapes, touches—melted into brilliant light. I became part of this pulsating energy.

This was the first time I experienced the "interconnectedness’ that seemed to be lacking in my life. Not only my mind and body connected; my feelings and my soul reached out and became one with the Source. There was brilliant light, extreme joy, quiet rapture without excitement, peace and harmony. Nothing was static or crystallized in separate forms. I felt the "Flow of Creation." Coming into life and dying were only transitions.

Visions continued and kept reminding me that I could "interconnect" to be "in the middle of the stream, dancing."

During the Third Reich, I became an actress because the stage was a safe place. Actors spoke the words of the author. But then came World War II. The bombing of Berlin began in November 1942, when I turned twenty-three. For two-and-a half years we were attacked by air up to five times each day and up to five times at night. We had to come to terms with death. I had the choice of being destroyed or destroying myself, becoming insane or completely numb. None of these alternatives felt right. So I invoked Death, and Death materialized. We "talked." I felt the awesome presence of all forms in the world, dying and being born, in constant change. I surrendered, taking Death into my body. Each part of my body gradually became icy cold, one by one. I experienced the process of dying in my body, mind, emotion, and soul. And then the coldness turned into a flame that burned all residue. I stepped out of the flame like a tool that had been steeled in the fire. In surrendering to Death, my mortal fears had disappeared.

Knowing that Death was present at all times was like signing a contract. We fear the process of dying but forget that we begin to die at the moment we materialize (birth) and that we enter Infinite Life at the moment of dematerialization (death). During the period between these two transitions, we have to accept our responsibilities in the material world. Knowing death, I was now ready for the task to help the living as well as the dying in the service of death.

This heightened awareness of Death saved my life. One evening, for example, I had not been able to reach the air-raid shelter and remained at an entrance of a locked building. I could see the bombs falling. Since they were released from high-flying planes, several minutes passed before they hit the ground. Suddenly, I left the scant protection the entrance niche had offered and, disregarding the rain of falling shrapnel from the anti-air-raid guns, ran out into the street. The moment I reached the next building, the house where I had stood a few seconds earlier was hit by a large bomb and completely blown to pieces.

Nobody has counted the people who died slowly in the provisional air-raid shelters underneath their houses, crushed during the collapse of buildings and then burned by incendiary bombs. Many were caught in the fire storms which swept through the streets of Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg. There was death on a massive scale, inside and outside the concentration camps. Berlin, a city of four and a half million, became a pile of rubble. The smell of burning flesh permeated the air. One day I saw a human hand on the sidewalk. I was walking through human dust, nothing else had remained of that human being.

Amidst of death and destruction, humanity began to blossom. We helped each other and put out the fires in neighboring houses. We saved each other’s belongings, sometimes it was a bird cage with a bird that had already died. Sometimes it was an empty violin case. What mattered was that those who suffered knew they were not alone.

I waited for a sign to convince myself that I should survive. Why did God allow such atrocities? There was a petrified sea urchin I had picked up on a beach at the Baltic Sea when I was a child. It had survived thousands, if not millions of years. It was perfectly preserved in its essence. The stone provided the metaphor for survival. My body could be destroyed (and, at that time, death appeared to be a relief), but the essence could not be touched. So I put everything of my culture—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, great painters, poets and philosophers--into this stone. When Jews and Germans together can wash the atrocities from this stone with their tears, then a real healing can take place. I made a vow that, should I survive, I would never tolerate the perversion of the human mind under whatever circumstances.

In 1945, the Russian Army surrounded Berlin, My city became a war zone. In my free time, I began to work in hospitals. There were fourteen-year-old boys, drafted into the army in an attempt to save the lost cause, as well as sixty-year-old men. They cried for their mother, their wife, their children. I took them into my arms and rocked them into a gentle death.

I was twenty-five when Hitler’s reign and the horrors of World War II finally came to an end, but peace was not as pleasant as we had hoped. We could not understand why the Americas did not liberate Berlin. They stopped at the river Elbe and allowed the Soviet Army to occupy my city. We had dreamed of dancing in the streets on the first day of peace, but the streets were filled with Russian tanks and soldiers. The first eight days of peace were days of plunder and rape. No female was safe, from young girls to eighty-year-old women.

Starvation continued for another year. We lived on rations less than 1,000 calories a day—one slice of bread, a pinch of salt in hot water to fill the stomach. We ate grass cooked like spinach and boiled the bark of trees.

We were culturally starved too. Long before theaters were rebuilt, any suitable building was converted into a theater or concert hall. These cultural oases were filled to capacity each evening. I enjoyed being an actress.

I went to a theater in the eastern zone of my divided country. No performance was scheduled on Christmas Eve, so I lit a candle and turned on the radio. One station was broadcasting Bruch’s violin concerto. The music entranced me. I don’t remember going to bed. I must have entered several stages of consciousness. When I awoke in the morning, I still felt weightless, peaceful and interconnected with the universe. I realized that something had happened and I had to write it down.

I had been walking through a large house that looked like a shelter for people wanting to rest on their journey or like a refugee camp. I pinched myself to find out whether I was dreaming but I felt the pain.

While I was wandering through long floors, I saw many rooms, right and left, however, all the doors were closed. I cannot remember whether I actually saw a human shape or just heard a voice that told me I could not stay. There was no room for me. Not yet.

I was given a basket which one would use to collect fruit. Something was moving inside the basket. It was a red cat, purring and waiting to be caressed. As soon as I touched the cat, the house, the basket, and the cat disappeared and I saw a large garden in front of me.

The garden was on a slope, bordering a lake. People were strolling through the garden, talking to each other in soft voices. It sounded like the murmuring of a spring or the purring of a cat. The people wore timeless gowns of a grayish color. Under the blinding sun, all colors in the garden seemed to fade away.

Through the bright haze, a man left the crowd and walked toward me. He was an uncle, the brother of my mother. I had liked him because he always was of a cheerful and generous disposition. While he was talking to me, I realized that all the other people in the garden had died already. I recognized dead friends, relatives, and neighbors. At the same moment, I also realized that my uncle and I were the only living beings in the garden. There was nothing unnatural about it. I pressed my thumbnail against the palm of my hand and again felt pain.

When I asked my uncle why we were in this garden, he led me to a building to the left. It looked like a mausoleum. We entered and I saw two sarcophagi to the right. A neighbor who had been close to me when I had been a child was resting in one of them. My uncle decided to lie down in the other. I asked him why. He who had talked to me so freely before, continued to move his lips, but I could no longer hear a sound. It was like being under water where we can see but all noises are blunted. While I was trying to understand him and make myself understood, I woke up from the effort.

I wrote down what I remembered and put the report into an envelope that I sealed and gave to a colleague, asking him to open it only on request.

Rehearsals and performances asked for my full attention, so I forgot the experience. Six weeks later, when we were having lunch at the theater’s cafeteria, the mail was distributed. There was a letter from my parents. My actor friend asked me why I was so quiet and I told him to open the sealed envelope. Then I gave him my parent’s letter. They wrote that the neighbor who had been lying in one of the sarcophagi had died at the time I had seen him that night and that my uncle, with whom I had spoken, had been rushed to the hospital where he had died three weeks later. I had responded to the thoughts of dying people who had not been on my mind in "consensus reality."

Later, when I had begun to take participants on journeys, similar stories emerged. A female engineer, at a professional meeting in northern California, went during her first journey to her father’s grave. Her father rose from the grave and told her that the conflict with her mother (who was dead also) had been resolved and she should put her mind at ease. The engineer later actually traveled to the grave of her father on the East Coast and thanked him. When I facilitated journeys in Russia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany and the United States, messages from other dimensions were picked up and new insights revealed.

In 1955, I went to America. First I worked as an editor at a publishing house in Chicago and, one year later, I drove across the continent to San Francisco. Working as a technical translator in Baghdad by the Bay, I traveled during my vacations to Lebanon, Iran, India, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Germany, the United States and Mexico. I took up meditation in a Thai monastery and added more techniques to my tool chest—music, dancing, breathing, meditation, Reiki, acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine.

We have to watch where we are going. Outside influences and daily tasks put layers on the Inner Source and cloud our visions. We should be warned not to underestimate this process and its inherent inertia. I remember that once I felt depressed for an unusually long time. The Aurora Consurgens, an alchemical treatise ascribed to Thomas Aquinas, speaks of the "horrible darkness of our mind". This darkness stuns our senses, stupefies our reasoning and immobilizes us to the point of becoming unable to think or act. Suffering appears to be infinite and we feel hopeless. Escape appears to be impossible. So I decided to go on a "journey." Recalling the effectiveness of sound, I asked somebody to drum for me.

I found myself walking toward this "horrible darkness." Was I about to die? Darkness was ahead of me—infinite darkness. I had to walk into this darkness where nothing could be found. I knew if I would continue to walk, I would dissolve into nothing. There was no escape. I was convinced I was about to die. My fate appeared to be irreversible. The hopelessness was overwhelming and the pain unbearable.

But then I realized that brilliant light was touching my shoulders and the back of my head. Infinite Light was behind me. I was in the light. And there were others. We all were carrying the light into the darkness.

The vision had started with complete despair and ended on an ecstatic note. Nothing did actually change but my consciousness. It shifted. What is more natural than looking into darkness when we are in the light? When we are seeing the light in front of us, then we are in darkness.

This moment of clear perception made me aware of the brainwashing we undergo during the so-called acculturation process at home, at school, and during our professional career. I had allowed the memory that we are in the light to fade.

Today I live in the moment and continue my search for visions. And I facilitate the search for those who want an experience of the Source.