I never met Master EK physically. However, his call reached me already in the early 80s of the last century and it increased over the years. A retrospect.
I first heard of Master EK around 1981/82 through Rudolf M., a mysterious individual, who deeply influenced my spiritual path directly or indirectly over several decades – a story about which I haven’t blogged yet, being very strange. I only mentioned him once anonymously in a blogpost on “Birthday of H.B.P. – An Way into the Secret Doctrine.” It is another story, though deeply linked with my further contacts over 20 years to Master EK.
In the beginning of the 80s, Rudolf gave me several hectographed texts of a still unpublished book, the “Vishnu Purana” by a certain Dr. E. Krishnamacharya (Master EK). Rudolf didn’t mention where he had the papers from. I later came to know that they were from the IPS in Geneva, with which I later was loosely related for a number of years. In the foreword of a later publication of the book, it says: “It all started in 1981, when we asked Dr. Krishnamacharya to give a seminar on the Yoga of Patanjali at the IPS headquarters in Geneva… The articles on the Vishnu Purana were published for the first time in ‘My Light’, the magazine of the World Teacher Trust in India. Dr. Krishnamacharya authorised the IPS to reproduce these articles and helped edit them for the Western mentality. This work was discontinued some years after he passed away, so that only 53 chapters are now available through the IPS, either on paper or through the internet….”
Although I was with an Indian teacher for 8 years and even became a meditation teacher and more, I could not understand the texts and put them into a box in the basement. But somehow the seed of interest was sown.
Rudolf found my then spiritual teacher a fake and told me, probably in 1981, that a real Indian teacher would come and give classes on Spiritual Astrology in Munich, this Dr. Krishnamacharya. I should go there. I said no – I didn’t want to change gurus nor leave my then teacher.
But one year later, summer 82, I left the teacher and his movement and, a little later, also cut the contact with Rudolf for 5 years.
The meetings and the breach with Rudolf happened in my old home town in Germany. In 86, I moved to Switzerland and in 87, I wanted to present this mysterious man to my then girlfriend, my later wife. During the visit, he gave me a booklet with “a very powerful initiation mantram”, the “Mystic Mantrams” booklet (PDF) of Master EK. I was impressed. During about 2 years, I regularly meditated these mantrams every evening.
In autumn 1988, Johannes Weder, a mid-octogenarian theosophist, visited us in our then home in Switzerland. He had heard that we were in contact with Daskalos, the “Magus of Strovolos”, Dr. Stylianos Atteshlis (1912 – 1995) in Cyprus and wanted to know more about him. My mother-in-law had sent a friend to Cyprus to search for Daskalos, and then we went 4 times to Cyprus visiting him (another untold story).
We had a profound exchange with Johannes and he invited us to come to his home in Rodgau near Frankfurt, Germany. He had a huge library with many theosophical books, and, before he might pass over, he offered that I could chose the books I was interested in. We visited him in summer 1989 – and when we left, we had two big banana boxes with treasures of rare old theosophical books and also all the books of Master EK published until then, and further all the manuscripts of Albert Sassi, whom Master EK had met several times in the Nilagiris.
First, these books slept in the banana boxes. I went through them but it was much too much for me to read.
In summer 1990, Rudolf M. settled in Switzerland and initiated the Agni School (dissolved since over 15 years), which I joined for 10 years, from January 1991 on. It must have been beginning of 1992 that Rudolf asked me to translate for the group a longer text which he had written himself, as he said. When I started translating, I felt, I had seen the text before …. in one of the two boxes in the basement. I searched and found it – “Music of the Soul“, by Master EK.
I was much confused and confronted Rudolf, whom we started regarding as a Master, with my finding. He said, “You don’t understand anything.”
I felt shy and intimidated. I now continued translating with this book and when ready, I gave it to the Agni group. Over the next 8 years, until I left, I continued translating other texts of Master EK for the group, about 16 books and booklets, nearly all not published. But the work helped me to go deep, and I thus dived deep into his teachings. The German translations became a great treasure shared on request.
I came to know more about the World Teacher Trust, but members of the Agni School were told not to contact members of other groups, except when we, as a group, contacted the groups. Otherwise, it was considered spiritual treachery.
So I was very much with Master EK but without any contacts to members of the World Teacher Trust. This changed in August 1997, when the Agni School group met with Master Kumar and other members of the World Teacher Trust at a seminar in Germany. From then on, slowly an opening started – it lead to my leaving the Agni School in April 2000, my joining the World Teacher Trust and starting the Circle of Good Will.
I met many people who had met Master EK and told me about their experiences. My inner contact with Master EK kept growing deeper. I started studying all his books, bringing them from India and distributing them for free to seekers. It went again much deeper when online study groups started from 2015 on where we read his books in English and in German.
Yesterday, a German group member told me “A few years ago, with the approval of the Master (KPK), I started a project called ‘My Way to the Trust’. I interviewed people and recorded it at the same time… Since many people didn’t want, I stopped it.” This gave me the impulse to tell this story, on the occasion of Master EK’s 95th birthday (Western counting: 1926 – 1984) on 11 August 2021.