Origo

There was an uncomplicated girl in my class. I did not find her beautiful, but I visited her often. With her, I could be who I truly was. Once, as I was leaving her, my heart grew very warm, and I had the feeling that I would even give my life so that she could be happy. A boundless peace came over me, and this love embraced the whole world, even people who hated one another. No infatuation, no "butterflies in the stomach" feeling that I had experienced until then came even close to it. At that time, the girl wanted to begin a relationship with someone else. I let her go, because her life was more important to me than my own. But the feeling remained. That was exactly what I wanted to experience one day with my partner.

Today, however, love at first sight stands at the centre. What I had experienced had nothing to do with it. Its roots lay in safety, trust, getting to know one another, and the freedom to be allowed to be myself with this girl. I wanted to understand whether love really exists and how it can come into being. I had the impression that the world deceives us with the idea of love at first sight, but I knew no other explanation. So I set out to understand it. It took about two decades before I believed I could recognise recurring patterns in the way a man's love develops. I encountered the same thing again and again: with one woman I could be myself, I felt safe, I knew her, and she was interested in my life.

Women's love, on the other hand, I could not truly study, because I suspect that society today does not allow women to truly fall in love. Nevertheless, I had a method through which I might perhaps find out something about it. I arrived at a hypothesis that fairy tales also convey: a woman falls in love with what makes a man who he is inside, when these qualities make her life better.

It was hard to arrive at this hypothesis.

It had all begun in a completely different place. When I was eight years old, I had endocarditis. My mother was a doctor and decided to treat me at home. I was supposed to swallow an antibiotic, but the tablet seemed to me as big as a walnut. Because of this, my father beat me so violently that the marks of his hands could still be seen all over my body for hours. My mother did not have to fear being beaten by him herself. Nevertheless, she watched and did nothing.

Mum loved me to the point of idolising me. I had to be a model child who never lied and was decent under all circumstances. When my mother became sad because I brought home a D, I almost broke down inside because I had done that to her. Also at the age of eight, at the end of the school year, in a holiday house far away from home, I thanked my mother for having studied with me and for my having received an excellent school report. My father was there too. My mother had raised me to be a good child, so I felt that I must not fail to thank my father for the report as well, even though he had never studied with me. So I thanked him too. After that, my mother treated me as if I were air for three days.

A small child is at the mercy of its mother. Even if I had done something wrong, I had only done what she had taught me. In hindsight, I also know that she herself lied regularly, although she had taught me always to be honest. She expected behaviour from me that she herself never modelled. She sent me into the adult world without ever having given me an example of how I should put her own demands into practice in life.

From the age of fourteen, with every idea I had about which profession I wanted to take up later, she frightened me and explained to me why this profession would be bad for me. In the end, I could not stand up to her and chose the profession she wanted for me. For this, I lost my friend, the activities I loved, and my goals. I broke down completely. I had the feeling that everything had been taken from me and that no human being had ever been more unprotected and more exposed than I was.

Never again did I want to experience anything like it. I thought about how I could prevent it and asked myself what I myself could change about my situation. The thought occurred to me that perhaps the way I behaved had contributed to what had happened to me. That is why I decided to get to know my unconscious behaviours and, as far as possible, also the way the brain works, because my brain determines my behaviour.

So I began in complete uncertainty. I came from a family that had not given me a reliable foundation for life, and I lived in a society that, in my view, conveys an untruth to people about precisely one of the most important moments of life, the choice of a partner, an untruth from which most people suffer to a greater or lesser degree. On top of this came other life experiences. At work, for example, I experienced countless times that the patient's well-being was not the priority, but rather that my superior wanted to be proven right. Neither my family nor society offered me a secure foundation for my life.

And so my actual path began: I wanted to understand my own unconscious behaviours, in the hope that this would allow me to avoid unnecessary suffering. This understanding was meant to give me security in an insecure world.

At nineteen, this path began with an insight. In a grocery shop, I pointed at a cheese and asked the shop assistant for it. She misunderstood my gesture and did not give me the cheese I had pointed at, but the one next to it. I did not like it, but I accepted it anyway.

A month later, in a flower shop, I pointed at a carnation in a bucket full of flowers. The florist reached next to it and gave me a different carnation.

Then the situation with the cheese suddenly came back to me. "Wait a moment," I thought. Everything was different: the shop, the goods, the shop assistant. But in fact exactly the same thing was happening. I wanted something specific, received something else, did not like what I received, and accepted it anyway.

That was the first moment in which I left the unconscious world of my childhood and stepped across into the world of consciousness. For the first time, I recognised a reaction that I had until then shown automatically, without being aware of it.

As if obsessed, I began to explore my unconscious behaviours. Within a few years, I believed I had understood and changed countless of them. About eight years later, I realised that in reality nothing had changed.

And yet something had happened during this time that was to become very important later on.

I had spent about five or six years learning to look at myself objectively from the outside and to describe my behaviour in an observable, measurable form, and likewise the behaviour of other people and living beings. I learned to recognise connections between posture, actions, mood and other things. I got into the habit of only claiming something when I had evidence for it. I believe scientific thinking had become second nature to me.

However, this also brought some problems with it.

For example:

I operated on a man who had broken his elbow. When he came for his follow-up examination, he brought with him an X-ray that had been taken in another hospital. It looked terrible: it seemed as if the metal used for fixation had slipped out of the bone.

But something would not let me rest. I looked at the image again. And again. Then I imagined that I myself was the X-ray beam, passing through the elbow from this oblique angle. And suddenly I recognised it: the metal had not moved. The image was misleading.

I was a young doctor, just out of university. In a meeting, I had to present the images to experienced colleagues. They instructed me to operate on the patient again. I tried to explain what could be seen if one looked at the image from the direction of the X-ray beam. In vain.

What do you do in such a situation?

Do you obey?

Or do you believe what you see yourself?

The next day, my superiors tried to frighten me. Nevertheless, in the patient's interest, I ran back and forth like a man possessed between the patient, the radiology department, the operating theatre and the director. In the end, a new image was taken, this time in the correct position. The metal was exactly where I had suspected it would be. The responsible superior cancelled the operation.

Months later, after the elbow had healed, I removed the metal. It had been sitting exactly in its place.

I, on the other hand, was dismissed because I had contradicted my superior, and that had happened more than once. A young surgeon puts his career at risk with such behaviour, because his superior decides whether he is allowed to operate.

The world looks completely different when you understand how it is connected. Suddenly you recognise that much of what society claims can be wrong. But if you act on what you have seen through yourself, you are attacked.

As I already wrote, about eight years after the story with the cheese, I realised that I was still accepting things I did not want at all. By then, however, through my study of connections, I had recognised that feelings maintain unconscious behaviours. That is why, among other things, I spent a great deal of time examining the relationships between my feelings and my behaviour.

During this time, I perhaps also had unusual experiences. Several people around me told me that I had said exactly what they were thinking. Sometimes it even seemed to me as if I could hear their thoughts. To my astonishment, they afterwards confirmed that my guess was right. Once, thanks to my gut feeling, I won second prize in a raffle. And so on. So I had experiences with a side of the world that is perhaps unknown to many people today.

It seemed to me as if events followed certain patterns and as if the future could already be sensed in the present. I had the impression that the Pythagoreans, feng shui and astrology were concerned with such things. It also seemed to me as if things had a non-material quality that could be perceived. The world of spirits, which societies today often remember only as fairy tales, suddenly seemed real to me. So I occupied myself with a great many things, because I wanted to replace society's ideas with reliable foundations: not only with how love comes into being or how I can recognise unconscious behaviour, but also with the origin of life and of the human being.

I did not have many tools. I had my observations. I knew that in life there are drives such as hunger, fear and the wish to survive. These are such strong forces that, if you know them, you can calculate what might arise under their influence.

One of my greatest problems was that, both in the story from surgery and in the rest of my life, I experienced again and again how people abused power and kept up a beautiful appearance so that what was actually happening would not become visible. What I had experienced as effective, on the other hand, was based on my own observations. Gradually, the impression grew in me that humanity is maintaining a world that fundamentally contradicts its own biology.

It seemed to me that the capacity for understanding that I was using was perhaps an original human quality to which we owe our survival. The abuse of power, by contrast, was displacing this capacity more and more. And unlike other species, when choosing a partner, human beings did not examine the abilities that serve the continuation of the species, but above all outward appearance. Nothing reliable arose from this; relationships were damaged, and from this, in the end, wars and catastrophes caused by climate change could emerge.

Of course, up to this point one could say that I had only spoken empty words. After all, after eight years of effort, I had not yet achieved any change in my own behaviour.

But after I had recognised that feelings maintained my unconscious behaviours, I also understood why I had accepted the wrong cheese back then: I was afraid that the shop assistant might attack me if I rejected the cheese that had already been cut. I imagined her saying: "And how am I supposed to sell this now?" My fear was not entirely unfounded.

From that moment on, however, my life took a fundamental turn. I asked myself where my fear drew its power from. And it became clear to me that I lacked the behaviours with which I could have protected myself.

By this time, I already knew the laws of communication. I could describe my own behaviour from the outside and estimate how others in a particular environment would react to a behaviour that I myself had never shown before. I began to think up new behaviours and to play through which reactions they would provoke. They all worked exactly as I had calculated in advance. I was terribly afraid whenever I did something I had never dared to do before. But my calculations were confirmed.

A good deal was at stake, for example my job.

Once, one of my superiors pointed at one of my diagnoses and said that a letter in it was wrong. I recognised this as the beginning of a power game. If, through my emotional reaction, I showed him that he had hurt me, I would have lost. Then he could use me again and again to vent his tensions on me. Instead of recognising his own behaviour as wrong, he would justify it to himself by telling himself that I was a bad person. This could escalate to the point where I would be dismissed.

So when he pointed at the wrong letter, I did not react at all. He became angry and said it was as if I wanted to sell my car dirty. Again I did not react. Then he became even angrier. He shouted: "You are sensitive!" I left his office. Never again did he try to attack me in this way. On the contrary: afterwards he behaved kindly towards me.

That is only one of countless examples in which I reacted completely differently from the way I had learned in my childhood.

It took me twenty years. Then I had earned myself a feeling of security, in a world that, in my view, often does not know security at all, but only creates the appearance of security through the abuse of power and outward appearance.

I do not know whether I will succeed in the next step. My path is not yet at an end.

To this day, I experience attacks. But I am no longer helplessly at their mercy; I have learned to stop them. I would like to come home to a woman who is interested in my life and with whom we feel at ease together. I long for love: not merely hormonal attraction, but the love I have come to know, the love that arises from understanding.

For me, this is a great struggle. Because this woman is not at my side, I suffer from sleep disorders. Sleep deprivation was already used as a method of torture in the Middle Ages. One can imagine what it is like to live with such sleep problems. But the world holds on to its ideas of love, especially to love at first sight. It is not only I who suffered from this at a young age. In my view, couples also suffer from it, and perhaps every child whose parents, when choosing a partner, never examined whether they are able to understand how a person's personality develops and how a child's unconscious behaviour is shaped.

I suspect that the entire human world suffers from the consequences, and, through human beings, other living beings as well. In my view, children are wounded emotionally in the process. People then often try to cover up these wounds for a lifetime through the abuse of power. From this arise conflicts on a small and on a large scale, and perhaps even a climate change under whose consequences humanity could collapse.

What I have experienced and achieved could, so it seems to me, perhaps open up a possibility for many people, possibly even for humanity, to avoid this collapse.

It would undoubtedly be a different life: not the exercise of power, but understanding. A life that rests on understanding from birth to death.

For me, life means struggle. I struggle because the people around me and the world do not want to hear that there could also be a different way of living than the one society speaks of. I have the feeling that society does not allow a love that rests on mutual understanding to return. So I remain trapped in my sleep disorders and my suffering, while the same world at the same time wants to benefit from the additional understanding that I bring to my work.

This struggle has not yet been decided. I do not know whether I will succeed in winning people over to consciously applying understanding again. And yet this is actually nothing extraordinary. Already at the age of three, the question of how things come into being is among a person's most important interests. But in my view, our society suppresses precisely this curiosity.