In Memoriam (1 July 1938 – 2 April 2015): by Ashana (Silvia Fischer).
After six years in São Paulo, Brazil, and six months in Stockholm, Sweden, I moved to Munich. I walked into an esoteric bookshop looking for adverts for apartments. “Go to the Osho Tao Center”, the bookseller suggested, “there is a list of people who are travelling and renting out their apartments for the time they are away.”
That’s how I came to know the Osho Tao Center in Munich.
I loved it there and participated in the daily meditations and in many weekend workshops, one after the other. I loved to eat at the Centre and even lived there in one of the rooms when not living in a room of some sannyasin travelling in India…
One day I met Krishna Pat. I was 33 years old and he must have been 63 at the time. Thirty years difference. We became very good friends. He often invited me to go hiking with him in the Alps. We would take the Bayrische Oberlandbahn to go from here to there, and he showed me so many beautiful paths and scenic spots in the mountains.
While we were hiking he told me many interesting things which I had never heard before. “Ashana,” he once said, “you have to take care of yourself. If you don’t, nobody will.”
He also told me that many years before he had gone to southwestern France to look for a treasure. He spoke about the Holy Grail which had been in the hands of the Cathars in Montségur. In 1244 they had to move the Holy Grail to another place because the Catholic Church was trying to kill them all, as they were deemed to be heretics. He was sure that he had been one of the Cathars in a past life. “We dug near Rennes-le-Château, but didn’t find anything.”
When we were walking in the mountains, he also told me about the Nazi gold. I had never heard of it before. That one night at the end of the war, the Nazis had, somewhere, stashed tons of gold – and that the gold has never been found.
He also told me that he was only eating fruits in the morning, and started eating other foods only after 11am, “because the body takes a long time to digest in the morning and fruits are easy to digest. If you eat something else, digestion stops. I took that wisdom from the book Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, two American authors.”
So I learned a lot from him.
Then one day I lost contact with him.
The last time I met him was by pure chance, on a walk. It was at the Kirchsee near the Reutberg Monastery, Bad Tölz. “I now live in Bad Tölz”, he said to me.
Several years later I moved to Southern France. It was my dream to live without money and at the end of 2008 my dream came true. I lived without money for a whole year. Nearly without money… because in 2009 I spent 88 Euro!
I let myself be guided. And I was guided, to Aix-en-Provence first, and the following year to the so-called Cathar country. I was walking in the footsteps of Mary Magdalene. I came to the exact place Krishna Pat was talking about, the place where he had been digging for a treasure. I lived only five kilometres away. That was a big coincidence. I learned that many people came here to look for treasures, until it was completely prohibited.
And now, twenty-five years later, while living in Germany again, I remember his words, “Ashana, you have to take care of yourself. If not, nobody will.”
Yes, he was right. I have to take care of myself. More than ever before. If not, nobody will. I have to re-learn this because in the meantime I had taken care of so many others. And now also I understand that seeds, in the form of words which someone might have said sometime, can grow to plants or trees many many years later.
Last year at the Summer Festival in Osho Parimal I met a visitor. I told her about the book I had just published about the time when I lived without money in France. In German the title is, Der Vagabundenblog: Vom Leben ohne Geld (A Vagabond’s Blog: Living without Money). She liked the idea and bought a copy.
One day we visited Berlepsch Castle together and, I don’t know how, we came to talk about Krishna Pat. She said she also knew him, and that he had passed away five or six years before. “He only had very few friends. That was extraordinary that you were friends. I know about it, because I’m a friend of his former wife.”
Yes, and because it was so extraordinary, I wanted to share my story with you, just to show that some seeds grow only many years later, but they do grow!
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