“God was inside me, waiting for me.”

The writer Henriette Yvonne Stahl, of Romanian origin, is not a very famous personality. Her life was characterized by a continuous search for the “meaning” of existence, by a strong desire to find ‘perfect and permanent’ happiness.

“The inborn need of perfect happiness, the unfounded, poetic nostalgia, which every soul acknowledges in certain moments, must be a clear proof for the existence of this perfect happiness. Repeating over and over again the triggering of joy through different forms, I understood that I was a centre where joy lived and that this joy exists as virtual eternity, in each one of us”. In her work, “Witness of Eternity”, she describes her meeting with her spiritual master, the one who guided her on the path of non-duality, towards the experience of Self realization.

“My struggle became tangible. I was touching the things around me as if I wanted to convince myself of their existence; I was looking at people with the certitude that soon they will all be dead. I knew that, inevitably, I will also die. Shall I die without understanding why I came into this world, why I lived, why have I suffered and what have I searched for? Or shall I become Superhuman and see only sufferance all around me? Of course, sufferance is not the only thing that exists in the world, but joy does not wipe away tears, lamentation, and sadness.

I was definitely obsessed; this was all I could think about day and night. Oh, these nights when my spirit never rested fully, and these days when, numbed by misunderstandings, I lived waiting for the miracle that could have explained everything! I would have liked to ask God to have mercy on me! And I prayed to that God, in the existence of whom I did not believe. I asked him to have mercy on me. I remember the hour, the exact hour of that submission. But, even though I was begging, I was not completely surrendered. I was surrendered to the prayer, but I was determined to challenge Him: I was going to wait for Him forever, until the end of my life. My soul was longing to launch towards love. I spoke to God as to a virtual lover and, with insane desperation I promised Him I would not love anybody else as intensely as I loved Him.

Kneeling, I acted meekly. Tears were pouring down my face; my body, my entire being was tense and I could hear my voice consecrating the “deal” between me and God. I was asking Him, I was begging Him to show Himself to me, promising that afterwards I will serve Him forever. Without knowing why I took this decision, I also promised that “afterwards” I would no longer abandon people – these beings which He created so far away from His perfection, and yet who declare themselves similar to Him. Exhausted, unable to kneel anymore, I lied down on the ground. I stayed there for a long time, coiled up, crying; then, with my last strength, I got up and dragged myself into bed.

A moment of relaxation, with my eyes closed. Involuntarily, I remembered that exercise with the rose, which I read in one of Rudolf Steiner’s books. I imagined a rose. This rose was red, velvet like and very fresh; dew drops were shining on its petals. With my eyes closed, I looked at the rose. It was beautiful and pure, standing almost in front of my face. I felt its fragrance. This fragrance glided into my heart. After this, there was no rose anymore. The essence of the rose had absorbed everything. It was as if the essence of the rose had replaced me inside my heart. Then, emptiness. A huge void inside me, keeping me awake. I fell into this void, identifying with it. And in the void inside my being, God found His place. He was there, waiting for me.

The moment when we make place for God inside us, is like dying. The “you” which has been until that moment dies. I felt this myself, but this is exactly what freed me from my “I”. It was eternity living inside me, then. A sacred fear helped me to assist this death in my own being, giving me a limitless happiness and then giving me the chance to understand what it means to be born again. It was impossible to know how long this unique experience lasted: two minutes? A quarter of an hour? One hour? Coming back to everyday consciousness, the first thing I realized was that I could not breathe normally. I assumed I had not breathed at all for a while. So, one can be alive without breathing! So, life is independent from the body! At that moment, these thoughts had little importance; they crossed my mind, in a flash.

What was important in that moment was the quality of joy that overwhelmed me. A calm, profound joy. It was not similar to drunkenness; on the contrary, it was an awakened state of fulfilled love. A sacred love. Every fibre of my being was nourished by this revelation. But the most important thing was to discover that besides everything that we can think or feel, there is something unknown, hidden within us, beyond any expectation and any imagination.

The sacredness of this discovery was overwhelming. No cerebral means, no willing force could have helped reaching this new dimension of consciousness. Being absolutely outside the logical frame of the mind, it was obvious that human language could not be an adequate instrument for expressing something existing in an ultra-mental dimension. With humbleness, I realized that it is not fair that saints, mystics, yogis are being reproached that they do not speak about their ecstatic experiences. Even if they wanted to, they could not. Not being able to express this happiness, this state of grace, becomes torture for the one who, after he experienced ecstasy, in his immediate “reality”, finds it impossible to share everything with the ones close to him who also want to understand. The only way one can express this is through the example of his own life. Can one express music to someone who is deaf, when in fact in order to understand music, one has to listen to music?”

“As the Witness of Eternity awakened within me, I myself became aware of this Eternity. The fusion between consciousness and eternity being done, each moment had also become eternal, through its taking place in this Eternity. To be means only this: To be. Eternity, which contains infinite modalities, also contains Illusion. Paradox had no value anymore, whether it was about affirmation or negation. Any extra thing did not in any way modify the initial, absolute perfection of Eternity. It was touching, it was practical, it was natural, viable, real, exalting. I did not depend on anything. I existed. I existed eternally.

This openness, which could operate within man through a natural expansion of his being, continued in another dimension. Man gets carried away by it, with lucidity, in control of himself and able to take responsibility for his life. An ecstasy, an unconscious beatitude was one more human experience and, however extravagant, it remains more or less equal to any other human experience. Nevertheless, a direct connection to the Absolute – being established in the Absolute – was an experience that could project you outside everything that is known, beyond the mental; in other words, it allowed you to overcome any experience, by encompassing all experiences.”

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