DISCOVERING MY OWN HEAVEN


“Just show me one single difference between Karl Marx and Jesus Christ!”

My voice was sharp while I watched my sister provokingly. I knew she could not answer because she’d never read anything about Karl Marx. And, I knew she looked up to me because I read Sociology at university, something I rather prided myself on, of course without saying so. My ego was proud of me.
I had put the question to her because she was much in favour with Anthroposophy, while I felt disgust at anything related to religion or spirituality. Anthroposophy in particular, as it believed in reincarnation of all things! The very thought of it; maybe something for lost souls in India, but surely not for the West, for Holland? This was typically my vague sister. Who, as I saw, was nervous trying to find words she couldn’t find. Without letting off I went on, “You know why you can’t say anything? Because there is no difference! Jesus was a communist, the first one, he shared his bread with someone else. He preached that all are equal, and all are equal whatever their status or origin. And Marx said exactly the same thing, even made a study of it, just you read Das Kapital!
The last thing I added to make an impression for I hadn’t ever been even near the book. But I more or less believed what I said. Not quite, though, for I was still seeking answers to my questions, to gain experience as much as possible.
Now, I think, this may have been a reaction to my previous ‘life’ that I spent for many years at the seamy side of things. It was the time when I earned a living playing guitar every month in a different German town, in nightclubs, smoky basements and shady places behind the Reeperbahn in Hamburg or the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. Groupies offered themselves freely, whores and easy girls were my companions, drinks were aplenty, and amphetamines and drugs were on sale by the pound (though I mercifully shied away from them). Rough fighting was the done thing, and I lived in the dark, seeing the sun but rarely and was cut off life in general since I never opened a paper.
But it was where I did live.

Though all of that was only three years before, it seemed ages ago. I longed to catch up, to gain knowledge and to develop myself in any way possible – socially, culturally, in economics and politics and in religion. Every day I read a book, papers I read as many as I could, and I took out subscriptions to leading Dutch opinion magazines, which allowed me also to find my way in the various political parties in my country, the whole gamut. These were the sixties and the early seventies, remember, when the world was alight and everything seemed to be renewed. And I was in the middle of it, let my hair grow and called myself progressive. I felt I was with it and enjoyed it hugely. But always keeping my reserves, knowing that this was the spirit of the day and it would pass. Which it did.

I wanted to understand, also in matters religious. I really wanted to know who or what God was, and what such a Supreme Power would look like. Ignorant as I was, I decided to put the question to Jacques. Jacques must have been 28 or 30 at the time, and though he was a priest I rather liked him. He had told me that he always wrote his own sermons, which impressed me, thinking, as I must have done at the time, that you’d hire special people for that. Anyway, one day after lectures I invited him for dinner, and he was happy to come along. After talking about this and that I said, “Jacques, could I ask you something?” He must have heard by the way I put it that it concerned something important to me, because he stopped, watched me from behind his thick glasses, and said, “Yes?”
I frowned, and put my question: “Who or what is God?”
He shrugged, asked, “God?”
“Yes, God,” I said.
He recovered somewhat and said, “How am I to know?”
“You are a priest,” I answered.
He nodded.
“Then surely you know who God is?”
He drew a breath, spread his hands, and said “How am I to know. Not the faintest idea.”
I was aghast, and remained aghast when later I cycled back home with my head full of questions. If even a priest didn’t know who or what God was, how would I then ever know?

Somehow it confirmed my feeling that there could not be a Supreme Power. Seeing a world full of conflagrations and injustice around me, I really couldn’t imagine one. How would Love ever allow the madness of apartheid, look away from the carnage and hunger of two million people in Biafra, or tolerate that in the name of peace villages were bombed out of existence and innocent people were incinerated in Vietnam? The usual questions, each one of them justified. And to be frank to the reader, even today I still don’t understand – and don’t talk to me about collective karma and similar crap.

No Highest One for me, thus, for a number of years. Till changes occurred in me around Christmas of 1990. Perhaps I can call it: getting a feeling of profound compassion. Just like that, out of the blue. When my family invited me for Christmas dinner, I replied that I preferred peace to pudding, and spent the days working as a volunteer with drug addicts and at a help centre for former detainees. It gave a kick. I went to see friends whom I hadn’t seen for ages though I knew things were not all right with them or their family. I also went to help prisoners, as well as a lady friend of mine who had been diagnosed with cancer.

Then came in 1991 the day I shall never forget: April 4, the fourth day of the fourth month, and the day I changed totally. It was the day of my rebirth. I cannot find words in our language to describe what happened, how it seemed that Heaven descended on me. In a split second I felt one with everything, and everything was in me; I was the universe, and the universe was in me. I was everything, knew everything, experienced everything. I was every plant, animal and human being. I felt how everything and everyone breathed, watched, flew, walked. The full power of Love was in me, and I became that energy that till then I knew only from hearsay. Every atom of my body was vibrating in total bliss, and this now became part and parcel of myself. It was almost too much to bear, even though it must have been only a hint of what it really is – just enough for my measure.

At that, I could only cry and cry. Cry out, I should perhaps say, cry out the supreme Love and the supreme Happiness. I knew that only Jesus or another Master was able to make me this gift, to have it happen, and then and there I realised what I knew deep within: yes, a Supreme Power does exist.

It took me years before I could discuss this objectively. A few weeks after it had happened I told my family, who listened to me fascinated and in silence, even after I had finished speaking. Then my sister cut the silence, and asked, “So now you won’t ever ask me again the difference between Karl Marx and Jesus Christ?” I broke down, and cried, and softly said, “Never again.”

And so it came to pass to me, for so He wished it to be. A single moment changed me a full 180 degrees and put spirituality in the core of my existence. This can happen if there is a good reason, and there had been one. It was so to say the benediction of a totally new period that I had worked for very hard, all 49 years to be precise. All these years I had been preparing something, inside rather than outside, and yet never really working with it. And me thinking I was unemployed! All that time I had been prepared for the thing I had freely chosen before my birth: being a medium. But all that time I had had to experience myself, at earthly level, what suffering really means; I needed it so as to be able to communicate emotionally with a person who might approach me and ask for help. That time had come, for me to carry out my duty as it was. Indeed, some discovery!

But much remained to be done before I was really ready, and after months of euphoria I entered the period of apprenticeship that almost fifty years had prepared me for but that no-one can give except Heaven itself. There are no manuals here, you have to find out yourself, and though there is no visible corrector around, his presence is certainly felt, sometimes a bit too much perhaps. But when something happens that is really beyond your powers, you will meet somebody to help. Two of them I wish to mention.

My spiritual apprenticeship was fully geared towards preparing to receive, and to keep, new energies. Both of the healing kind and those of mediums. This was a daily activity, much energy was passed on to me and I simply had to stow it away as well as I could, on my own. The procedure was that I was brought in trance, after which the kundalini moved with force, all parts of my body contorted themselves, sometimes painfully, my intestines and all chakras vibrated intensely, and even my hands were sometimes used for a purpose. I heard voices, saw colours and light, understood things, felt what others felt, drew and wrote automatically. At the time I didn’t realise that I had to be enabled to connect with all energies in all of Creation, and therefore I felt that what I was given, and that all changes caused by it in myself, was really too much and in particular came too violently. I disliked it and at a certain moment decided to disconnect – whether or not it was my duty. “With due respect,” I said into thin air, “Could I go more slowly? I cannot handle this, I don’t understand it and things move too fast. I know I have a duty to carry out and I want to do so as well as I can, but I need a thousand percent certainty that whatever is done, is pure. Otherwise I don’t go on.” I was really angry then.

Shortly afterwards a friend told me she’d be writing a book together with a medium, and a very good one. “Who may that be?” I asked. “One Marieke de Vrij, who is gifted with clairaudience and you can put questions to her, and she gets the answers from her spiritual guides,” she answered. I understood the message immediately and thanked Heaven soundlessly, and rushed to meet the lady, who could fix me an appointment quickly. I had no inkling then that Marieke would become one of the most respected mediums in the country. She has been the one who gave me certainty. She told me that she recognised what happened with me, that it had happened with her too, and that all of it was good and pure. In addition she gave me some suggestions that I could use well. One of them is a lovely metaphor, concerning the errors an apprentice healer and medium may make.

“Do you know what is important in our way of learning?” she asked
“No,” I said
“That you are like a tired old dog.”
She laughed and so did I.
“That you become like an old St. Bernhard,” she clarified. “You know, when somebody falls into a gorge, they send out such a dog to rescue with a little casket with brandy around his neck and then dear big doggy goes off into the mountains and rescues the chap. Nothing special. He does what he must. And that attitude we must acquire eventually. You see, whether I heal or pass on messages or do the washing up, it is all in a day’s work. Only when we stop thinking that our gifts are so special we can avoid the errors!”
Such an important gift, wrapped in such a gentle and moving paper, is something you’d like to keep, and I felt at ease and relieved and thankful.

But then, all of a sudden, I spoke. There was nothing untoward about speaking, of course, except that someone else spoke, not me. And not someone but more – more Masters of Light to be precise, like Jesus, Mother Mary, the Buddha, El Morya, the Prophet, an archangel and others too. I had heard about mediums who would transmit messages from one Master, but would all of those Masters have taken me as their spokesman? And if all of this was pure indeed, who was I then, to be given such a privilege? Had I not spent most of my life doing what God had forbidden? No, these must be the powers of evil, and I would have no part of it, never!

I took the decision to quit, there and then, and told the Lord. Then, feeling somewhat in between relief and disappointment, I went into town and upon coming home late I put on the TV and sat down thinking I’d be left quiet at last. Nothing of the sort! Suddenly I heard a voice pronouncing one word: “Zohra”.
I jumped up and looked around – no need to do so, of course, since the voice came from myself.
Zohra? I wondered and felt immediately that I was bound to contact her. However, could this be? I had serious doubts, because I knew who Zohra was: my country’s greatest medium, of the highest integrity, through whom the Christ would speak. She was the person whom He had given the command to establish a spiritual movement called ‘Psychosofia’, with the express purpose to explain that no human being should seek Divinity outside himself, but inside himself. She gave many inspiring lectures about the subject. I also thought that she was the person whose esoteric knowledge and wisdom was unsurpassed.
And her I should make contact with, then? I did not at all feel like doing so, as I thought I felt myself to be too unsure still. I thought of an excuse, and soon enough found a brilliant one: I’d strike a deal with Heaven!
I raised my eyes to Heaven, and said something like: “I have the feeling that I should contact Zohra, but I only shall do so if You speak her name three times”.
I thought this would do the trick, but it didn’t work because immediately I heard “Zohra, Zohra.”
I took a deep breath, thinking, “Now, He really does do it, for altogether He has spoken her name three times!” So, I couldn’t get out, had to keep my promise.

I stood and went to the telephone. I knew that Psychosofia has its offices in the Dutch town of Bilthoven, and there was no time wasted getting through to Zohra, who ‘happened’ to be present.
“Hello, Zohra here,” I heard.
“Hello Zohra,” I replied, “This is Max Alkadrie. You don’t know me – “
“Who is that please?”
“Max Alkadrie,” I replied, “You don’t know me, but – “
“You were born in Malang?
“Excuse me?”
“You were born in Malang, in Indonesia?”
“Eh, yes, I was born there.”
“Me too,” she replied. “I know you because I saw you there often, with your parents. I know who you are.”
I cleared my throat, hands shaking, and muttered that this was really a coincidence.
“Yes,” she said, “It is remarkable.”
I managed to tell her what had happened and that I had the impression I had had to contact her.
“I am sure,” she replied, going on “Correct. I hear that we have spent many lives together, Max, and that there would be some sort of working together, and that I’d be helping you. Why don’t you drop in?”
I just managed to hold on to the receiver – why indeed would I not drop in! We checked diaries and made an appointment for one afternoon.

It was an afternoon I am not likely to forget. The moment I saw her, I felt the profound love that is the privilege of kindred souls, who have been connected in friendship for many lives. It was a warm meeting. We talked about then and now, about our parents, about our life, and about the way Zohra’s soul had followed. I absorbed each experience eagerly, the more so as she repeatedly gave beautiful images of the lives we had shared. Then the powers who guided her told her that she was given permission to treat me, and she asked if I felt like being treated. I have never heard of a person who’d refuse such an offer. This was the treatment that obliterated every doubt I had concerning my spiritual schooling, in particular because of what the Christ told me through Zohra:

“Surrender yourself in trust, through the loving relation you and I have. You shall communicate through the spirit. Your healings will touch people deeply in all the aspects of their soul. I am in you. I am the One who brought the Cosmic Christ into reality two thousand years ago and you… you were there with me …”

And also:

“Know that you are a servant of God and that the road ahead will not be easy, but it is the one you have chosen to be the servant of Humanity.”

This is what I needed – this meeting, this reunion with an old friend, to carry on with my apprenticeship. I would walk the way of Trust, which appears to be such a long and difficult one, perhaps painfully and slowly, to let go of certainties and the illusion of control, to trust the unknown though it may be frightening, to accept the eventual Submission. You must accept that there is nothing you need to do yourself, for everything that is needed, is given to you and you are provided for always.

It has taken me altogether about seven years to accept that everything I have been given is fully and totally pure. Only then I had the courage to declare myself, and to be prepared to help other people with the gifts and experiences that were now mine.

In retrospect the major discovery I made was not so much that it took me fifty years before I knew that I had such a beautiful and wide ranging task ahead, though this by itself was quite a discovery. But it was rather the awareness that all of my life, down to the minute details, had been a preparation for this most rewarding work that I may now carry out, even though I myself had thought that I had been making all the wrong choices and had accomplished nothing at all.
However: my life was in fact, as every life can be, a lifetime journey towards the discovery of my own inner reality, until time decided she was ready to reveal the hidden treasures I had discovered and was being called upon to pass them unto others.

And so it is and will go on, further, further…

Max Alkadrie

(Published earlier in the Dutch language magazine
Communicatie 2005 (4) pages 13 to 17)

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