Due to my interest in NLP I came to this particular workshop by recommendation of friends. They had already gone through this whole process of sifting and questioning their beliefs and identities. They told me that instead of yet a new knowledge, instead of yet new discoveries, they had experienced an "unbelievable" way of being which nevertheless made them feel at home completely.

So, here I was, ready to take part in this workshop that was supposed to deal with the belief systems constituting what we call our "I." More precisely, the workshop dealt with the Original Belief the most important and first belief that takes root in every human being during infancy. This Original Belief is necessary for the growth of what we call individuality. At the same time it is the core belief that keeps us shackled as the seperating identity. At first, the exercise did not seem to be more than an exploration of the foundations of my personality. In fact, it proved to be a real descent into hell allowing me to discover emotions and mental structures which I thought forever forgotten. This exploration had a peculiar quality in the way that I was supposed to use the best of the capacity of discernment and of decrypting what's going on within me; it became necessary to retrieve most of the skills acquired in my former NLP training. The beginning of this process brought me into contact with enormous and unexpected emotional forces. Quickly the pauses necessary for my internal ecology became vital for me. A kind of 4Dbodyconsciousness took place within me, an astounding profoundness of internal states. All this was accompanied by a kind of "eagle's view from high above," and the mental dissociation of the surrounding events became more and more refined. On the other hand, paradoxically, an ardent desire to understand what this was all about arose within me. Reaching the final borderline of my own feelings and sensations put my intellect under severe stress: a kind of short-circuit invalidated each and every reasonable interpretation. First this led to resistances within me against the continuation of the exercise. Later it became utter rebellion. I got the impression that the foundations of my intelligence were pulled from underneath me. My mind's logic, my perfectly structured explications of what life is about - it all disappeared !

Then, after two days and one night in which I hardly slept, I got to that perceptive state that Wolfgang, the group leader, calls pre-sensory perception. I was just there, sitting on a little mattress, quite surprised by the quality of my consciousness. Almost impossible to describe: consciousness of being conscious of what is incomprehensible. Consciousness of existing beyond thought.

No more thought, no more internal dialogue, no more cogitation, no deductions, no more filling of consciousness by words. And all this in a very natural way. Except when I gave way to the intention to think. Then thinking appeared, reduced to its simple functioning of inner theorization and not as a way of experiencing reality.

An evidence: there is no experience in thinking! Only the idea of experience. The breakthrough to a nonintellectual comprehension: the reading of the world is a direct one, it has nothing to do with what we learned at school or what was induced in us by education.

The years of identifying with only one single part, with an isolated function of being, which is thinking: what an enormous error, and how ridiculous.