Preface

Baptized, confirmed and married as a Protestant Christian, I lived many years without knowing exactly what it really means to be Christian, although I had since my childhood a deep inner relation to Jesus of Nazareth. I always asked myself sadly why He, who had only done well to people, was put to death so painfully.

My life would have probably proceeded in a common way if something decisive had not occurred. As my “fate” wanted it, I had the opportunity to work for some time in India. After having well prepared ourselves, my wife, our two sons and I set off to that country. When we got over the initial uneasy impression and also the first diseases during the Monsoon season, a new life, so to say, began for me. In fact, when someone lives in India and is interested in getting acquainted with the country, its people and its religions, he has to concern himself intensely with those subjects.

I could immediately understand and adopt the doctrine of reincarnation, in its fundamentals, as taught in Hinduism and Buddhism. I felt to be on the way which, as I presumed, helped me to know what basically “holds the world together”. But on further consideration, I also realized that the eastern doctrine of reincarnation could not be the whole truth. Indeed I always had Christ in mind. Thus, it became gradually certain to me, deep in my inner being that Christ and reincarnation belong somehow together.

In India people have much time, and so did I, too. Having since many years the desire to occupy myself a great deal with Goethe’s works, I seized the opportunity then to do it. And as he had a particular liking for the New Testament, this gave me the decisive impulse to read it, thus becoming my main reading matter.

Then the certainty gradually strengthened in me that the message of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Math. 5-7) and the subject of reincarnation are closely associated and that both are parts of the divine truth. In my view, reincarnation is neither Christian, nor Buddhist, nor Hindu, but just a fact.

The knowledge of reincarnation was a matter of fact to many western great poets and thinkers like for instance – to mention only a few – Pythagoras, Plato, Goethe, Hölderlin, Schiller, Fichte, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und Voltaire.

On my path to God I became conscious also of the necessity of meatless nourishment. Some famous vegetarians were: Francis of Assisi, Leonardo da Vinci, Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoi, Wilhelm Busch, August Bebel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, George Bernhard Shaw, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Eugen Roth, and many more.