A Journey to Auschwitz
I always knew that I would one day visit Auschwitz and that if I visited too soon the experience would destroy me. Haunted by ghetto dreams since childhood, I have played the role of ruthless defender many times, battling against impossible odds, and that of helpless fugitive, too terrified to breathe. This terror held me in its grip for years until I remembered the life of Petra, a little girl who died at Auschwitz in 1942, having spent her infancy in hiding, forbidden speech. I had been vigilant since November 2004, when I first presented my ‘Winds of Heaven’ Sacred Play. This focuses inspiration and includes a section devoted to the Vision Quest. Unexpectedly, while holding space for participants, I had a profound vision which indicated that I should go to Auschwitz within a year. This would be a healing journey on which I would be accompanied by my friend T. In the event, we left on November 1st 2005, All Saints’ Day. Neither this nor the fact that we travelled with German partners was accidental. My account here is limited to personal impressions.
Why should an Irishman want to visit such a place, or write about it? I am aware that survivors and their advocates urge that people who weren’t directly involved have no right to offer commentary, much less forgiveness. Despite this, I feel impelled to write now even as I felt impelled to travel before, in peril of my soul’s destruction. Part of me feared the journey, despite multiple intimations of synchronicity and Grace. What if all my words about Spirit, Love and Light were to wilt in face of the Abyss, sucked into a black hole of humanity’s deepest despair? Notwithstanding apprehension, my spiritual awareness knew that everything was in place. I was also conscious that Shadow holds our disowned Gold as well as our rejected pain and that both are always seeking to come Home. Remembering countless Petras, I resolved to offer myself fully to the occasion, whatever that might entail.
November 2 was unexpectedly sunny and bright. Crowds flocked to village cemeteries on the road from Krakow, honouring ancestors on their special day. I found myself acutely sensitive to every sign of civilisation in what I had wrongly thought would be a grim landscape. Perhaps the camp itself mightn’t be so grim? What could this possibly mean in regard to a place where over a million people had been deliberately killed? I didn’t know.
Auschwitz I has the outer façade of a State Museum. Apart from sobering notices in the car park - Who would have thought Auschwitz could have a car park? - the approach buildings might be taken for a gallery. Inside the foyer, large notices in many languages commemorate the victims of Nazi genocide, always under the implicit rubric ‘Lest we forget. Lest this should happen again.’ A documentary film compiled from contemporary footage detailed a catalogue of unimaginable horrors, identifying perpetrators repeatedly and specifically as Nazis. The many teenagers present knew they were being exhorted not to grow into bad types such as these had been, long before their time of Benetton and Coke. The impact on a group of Israeli cadets was more particular.
The camp itself was smaller, more concentrated, than I could have imagined. Apart from a death’s head insignia it looked almost cosy and familiar. I gathered myself to pass under its infamous gate, leaving personal preoccupations aside to be an instrument of Grace. I had no idea what this might involve. The energy was strangely serene, almost beautiful, despite a macabre battery of signs designating various sites of punishment and execution. An undertow of terror was everywhere. Nevertheless, I felt a distinctly reverent energy as I walked through the barracks and around the edge, my Heart open to all impressions, breathing in and out the Breath of God, admitting floods of recollection as I passed. Our human spirit, Spirit as such, had been annihilated here, or the effort had been made: reduced to administrative units, confined, contracted and crushed. Why? Sometimes humans must do terrible things in order to remember how much we love. Spirit is not exclusive. All of One Heart, we remember this when moved. Forgetful, we need moving so that hardened hearts may open past frontiers of exclusivity and our consciousness of unity be restored.
Auschwitz is a place where many have been deeply moved. For every murder committed, thousands of candles have been lit and flowers left. This pattern has been enacted with reverence over sixty years. It is particularly evident on this All Souls’ Day at the execution wall. Moved - really moved - to pray, human beings transform reality. This is why Auschwitz has become a sacred place, beyond the agony and despair of those who offered themselves as part of a great sacrifice to return a supposedly rational, functional world to the awareness of Love; to make it holy (sacer facere) again.
These were not intellectual realisations. My Heart was broken open with every step and absorbed ever deeper impressions the more it opened. In the depths of my soul I was crying. The Sorrow of the World was in full flow and I a hapless instrument of Grace. I moved through various exhibitions, noting horror upon horror, hearing different guides recount hideous things Nazis had done. All spoke in controlled tones of tacit dissociation. My soul was crying ‘There is more! Spirit isn’t exclusive. This is no place for judgment. Judging reinforces the split we come here to heal.’
I walk past rows of photographs, images of victims from many countries, calling them into my Heart. There is an outline map with Auschwitz at its centre. Energy lines pour into it from all directions, marking the routes followed by death trains from transit camps all over Europe. I stand before this map a long time, transfixed as if by a mandala. I find the Romany exhibition especially moving and study it reverently, absorbing every image, inviting each of these beloveds into my Heart. Then I walk into another world: well-fed Himmler, polished Heydrich and other leading Nazis sit, plotting their Final Solution. I hesitate. My Heart freezes. Could I invite these perpetrators in for healing also? Spirit is not exclusive. To judge a part is to cripple the whole. These judges were in need of healing. No flowers are ever left for them. I open and a dam of sorrow bursts deeper still inside me.
Then I am drawn, unwittingly, as if by irresistible momentum, to the gas chamber. An impromptu shrine of wreathes and candles honours the sacrifice of those who released their spirits in order that we might remember ours, exactly, here. I recognise the spot where Petra died, led there by a man who saw she was afraid and alone. I stood in that corner, back against the wall, breathing in and out the Breath of God, moved beyond tears by the beauty of what human Spirit can endure and transmute. Again, the power of Grace is tangible here.
Now outside the camp perimeter, I approached the entrance again to meet my friend. Paused at the gate, I feel a surge of energy pouring in from above. It passes through my body into Earth. I recognise this energy as Sophia (Holy Spirit). T is a hundred meters distant, similarly engaged. We stand facing each other for twenty minutes, anchoring what he called a Pyramid of Light into Auschwitz I.
Later we go to Auschwitz II, Birkenau, a much larger camp designed specifically for extermination. A culminating manifestation of deranged human dreaming, Birkenau was built by slave labour on an open plain. Only chillingly deliberate placements of barbed wire separate its interior from beautiful sunsets and memories of Nature as abundant. It is weirdly soulless, a totally functional space conceived with murderous intent. And yet it is heavy with Spirit, subdued perhaps, not yet expressive, but pregnant with gifts of utmost sanctity and devotion, the opposite of what its creators had envisaged. There could be no mistaking this: a place designed to crush Spirit, over a million people murdered between 1942 and 45, mostly within hours of arrival. What could possibly have motivated this enormity, and sustained it?
A chill enters the air. The sun begins receding in pale beauty. I am struck by a sense of spaciousness. How difficult it must have been for people so ‘concentrated’ even to notice. I experience a searing, momentary realisation of brutal cruelties inflicted, back-breaking labours and savage punishments assigned with manic zeal, constricting awareness so that every note of grace might fall away, stripping victims and their perpetrators. This had a perversely equalising effect, given Nazi attitudes towards Jews as ‘chosen people,’ aloof in their arcane mysteries while showing dangerous signs of excellence in worldly pursuits.
Here, in a manufactured scramble for survival, rabbis, professors and first violins were shown to have no more dignity than their tormentors or, failing that, extinguished. Here proof was adduced that the ‘chosen’ were no better than their captors, themselves fragile aspirants to racial supremacy. This whole maya was born of vast shame! A jealous inferiority sense veiled by acts of power over, stupidly read as a mark of superiority by amnesiac humans who choose without awareness to project rather than own our shadows.
Never admitting wounds that keep Hearts closed and Spirits imprisoned, we (need to) create a world that reflects this inner condition where Spirit is imprisoned and evidence of other possibilities destroyed. Auschwitz I and II was such a world. Our calling now is not to judge its architects nor dissociate ourselves from them but to learn what they have taught and then open our Hearts beyond what they were able to achieve.
*
Such awareness wasn’t born of clever thinking. My whole time in the camp was spent in meditation, suffering all impressions that arose into my Heart, allowing them to receive whatever healing was available and releasing them to continue as they must. This is a practice refined over years, a particular form of breathing in and out the Breath of God. It has become a reflex to activate Source Consciousness when faced with impressions of disorder. Those noted above came all at once, as if they had erupted from the Body of the Goddess; from an Earth stricken and in recoil but seeking now to shake Herself free of mortification. They burst upon awareness whole, forcefully and beyond equivocation. I felt as if my Heart and mind were blown wide open; then as if I could breathe more freely as a result.
*
A railway line runs from the main gate to the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria at the rear of the camp. We walked its length in reverse, back towards the gate. As we did, I felt like we were walking the Middle Pillar of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. (Kabbalah is a mystical tradition within Judaism. The Tree of Life is an esoteric map that God is said to have given Adam following expulsion from Eden in order that humanity might find its way back Home.) The Heart Centre on this line is the spot where Nazi ‘doctors’ selected which of the new arrivals were fit for work and which must die. Many hearts were broken in this place, torn from loved ones under conditions of peak anxiety and mistrust.
We walked a little the path the ‘unfit’ followed to their deaths. The way is marked by the most poignant photograph I have ever seen, taken by the SS. An old woman accompanied by four children shuffles towards Eternity. I cannot say which of them embodies or elicits the most love. The endurance of this image surely represents a turning point in our fall from innocence? I thought this more in yearning than belief. Then I felt many souls who had walked this way stream into my Heart and out to Light. I gave myself to this process for as long as it took. A couple passed from the opposite direction, eyes lowered to avoid my greeting. I noted a similar tendency in all who let themselves be engaged by the complex, harrowing energies of this place.
Despite the compassion it evokes, Auschwitz is presented as a monument to shame, a warning of depths to which humanity can sink if… If what? If Nazis were ever to regain power? This attribution is too specific. There is nothing one wo/man can accomplish that any other, in principle, is incapable of. It’s a question of how deeply we realise our Love. Spirit is not exclusive. We are of One Heart. Because we know this ‘unconsciously,’ we feel deeply shamed by our failure to live accordingly. Yet we can’t achieve this as long as unconscious wounds prevent us from relinquishing ego control and daring risks involved in opening our Hearts. Instead, like traumatised children, we hesitate to let old memories go for fear that reduced vigilance will permit a repetition of the patterns that induced our ancient hurt.
Auschwitz reminds us of our shame and our compassion; our fears as well as grief. Thus we mistrust ourselves, not knowing what might happen were we to slip our leash again, not realising that the unhealed condition of our wounds is what impels us to destroy. This is true for all humans. Fearing the image of ourselves that Auschwitz presents, we cling tightly to it, keeping ourselves trapped at the level of Nazi survival consciousness, where the only fulfilment available is to be the one/group with most control so that it can never happen (to me/us) again. We repress our spontaneity and longing in favour of a soulless, functional world characterised by suspicion, uniformity and death.
I left the camp unsure what had been accomplished or even set in motion. Later I dream:
My Heart, pink and swollen with love, opens softly. A large stone is pushed out. There is no struggle. It is something dead, the relic of a past now fully lived. In its place a new seed has been planted, born of the old, delicate and fine, pregnant with the promise of new times. My pink Heart closes easily around it, incubating, hopeful and warm.
I am on the edge of Birkenau, alone. All barbed wire has been removed and it is winter. I stand before a vast expanse of snow. My gaze is drawn to a clearing between two clumps of trees. My soul urges me to move towards this but part of me stays rooted, fearful of being shot if I dare to pass beyond camp boundaries. I know I must step out and do so tentatively, feeling very exposed against the snow. I make my way slowly, waiting to be shot. Step after step I continue and still no bullets come. My pace quickens. I feel a huge weight lifting from me as I walk, as if my soul is being unburdened. Then, just as I reach the clearing, a cattle truck appears before me, like those used to transport Jews. I know I must go in. As I enter it transforms into the Ark, burning in pure white fire. Letters of the sacred alphabet rise up as flames and with them my Spirit is set free.
God and Goddess are making love, creating worlds over and over. A mighty wave comes crashing. Their orgasm rips through Cosmos, birthing stars. A corridor of golden light opens in my Heart, running straight to the Heart of Goddess, my Beloved, at Auschwitz II. All Souls who ever walked the Paths of the Holy Tree there stream into my Heart and through it to the Sacred Heart of Birkenau, the point on its Kabbalistic Tree of Life where hearts were torn apart for those lost years. I am amazed to see such brightly coloured souls, SS among them, lift the consciousness of Earth, restored in awareness to Mother’s Love. She grows brighter and more vibrant as they enter. Suddenly the influx is complete. The Goddess erupts, sending waves of shimmering light, pale gold, cascading out in all directions. As the energy of this first eruption fades, a Fountain of Light pours radiantly from the Heart of Auschwitz II, honouring the alchemy of all that enduring human Spirit can transmute, showering waves of Grace all over Europe.
2006
