The Most Sophisticated Version

There’s an instance of my early childhood that has triggered a decisive change in the way my world view was constructed back then. But please let me elaborate on some background facts to get clearer idea of this point in my life. My parents were in their early thirties and at the very beginning of their professional careers. Hence, as both needed to be near to where they worked and their financial means were fairly limited, we moved into in a small flat in a high-rise in the outskirts of the Ruhr region. As we lived on a higher floor, it was easy to have a rather clear view of the surroundings and this way I was offered the opportunity to perceive a panorama here that was a commonplace aesthetic dinginess of modern day urban living, so to speak the West’s equivalent to the satellite towns on the other side of the Iron Curtain in the late 1970s. The entire horizon consisted of nothing but these symmetrically placed blocks of flats and, due to the fact that it was a starlit night sky, one could clearly see the vast number of illuminated windows, one exactly like the other, impersonal and exchangeable. I cannot recall what exactly my thoughts were when I stood there and took this glimpse of this particular dead end of human civilization in, but I can still feel how it left me with a sentiment much too heavy-hearted and disillusioned for my young age. However, I couldn’t turn away and a long time passed, until my focus gradually began to shift to the night time with all its shining and sparkling stars. Their clear and unmatched beauty seemed to exceed everything, elevated and far beyond any comparison I could think of. This was especially reflected by the fact that it was impossible for me to imagine the incredible distance from the very point I happened to gaze at them. Overwhelmed by this beauty and grandeur, the stars became a point of orientation and their tacit majesty a secret code that carried a much deeper personal meaning.

The best of my remembrance, this was the first time I apperceived the deep feeling of alienation from the mentality and conventions of the herd, this imprint that put into the solitary position I found myself in. Unlike the majority of my peers from Kindergarten to high school who almost automatically turned into younger copies of their parents and had started to adopt their value system from early on, what I considered as meaningful impetus was way out of this fairly narrow frame, but was yet still a vague idea for the most part. My focus and orientation remained as upheaved, paramount and unpaired as the stars admired on that very special evening. And there was this crystal-clear realisation that I would never settle for anything less and content myself with any of the mental sedatives that keep the masses in line. It simply would not do the trick for me, none of these manifestations of irrelevance, the common treadmills that the herd is caught in, their minds obsessed with surpassing their mediocre neighbour in terms of status and the related acquirable symbols as an end in itself. Even back then, my ideas of success had been much broader, involving many of the fundamental matters of survival and the ambition to remove the limits commonly seen as axiomatic.

So where was I to begin and how was I to unfold the necessary thrust to make it to the point of being my own creator, leaving all the limitations of conventional thinking behind and determining the venues of my future exclusively alone? For quite a long while this remained more of a philosophical and theoretical question, given that it appeared incredibly difficult to identify any proper starting point to initiate this transformative process. What I did not fully comprehend back then was that many small steps were already being made on an everyday-life-level, often intuitively. And it was there in the often overlooked areas that numerous tools for personal growth were waiting to be discovered. And in astonishing ways detecting one very soon led to finding the next qualified and often more refined means. Hence over time, numerous pieces of the big puzzles came to join and form patterns that provided even more junction points to connect previously discovered isolated elements. The next stage consisted in testing patterns that led to success in one given area in a different field. As I was in the fortunate situation of having an ample collection of books at hand in my parents’ home, I focussed on biographical books of famous and successful individuals to begin to search for the specific formulas that had earned them their success. This way I came across some astonishing similarities, in fact too many to be just coincidental. By implication, drawing my conclusions from the mistakes of others soon became an additional method of learning as well. And gradually I taught myself to apply all of this knowledge to my personal advantage whenever I could. In retrospect, there have been two main determining factors in how I derived benefits from life situations: a strong sense of pragmatism and eclecticism. And as I learned to find more and more ways around the stereotyped thinking that controls the herd, I opened up to even learn my share of lessons from those I otherwise despised, provided that there was any potentially gainful knowledge in a specific field to be obtained. By this point, I had realized that this eclectic approach could be applied to about any concept or philosophy. The growth curve I found myself on had started to turn my quest into much more of a delight.

Yet for a very long time, one very important unanswered question remained: Was there any kind of nucleus, or major hub, where all the different threads I had discovered met? In a way “The kernel of the brute”, as it says in Goethe’s Faust. And it was probably not by chance that this phrase, as well as the core topic of the work resonated strongly with the urge I was being driven by. And it was exactly this urge, this thirst for knowledge and growth combined with a deeply rational worldview, devoid of any superstition, that finally showed me the way to where the answer was to be found. There was not a shred of a doubt about that when I discovered the philosophy and the organization that Doktor LaVey had brought to life. Satanism and the Church of Satan reflected the essence of my deep-felt urge and all of the understanding of the mechanisms I had discovered in perfection and the purest form. And beyond that it has finally closed the circle by confirming my assuredness that any barrier on the way towards my continuing transformation into the most sophisticated version of myself will be broken down.

Citizen Prometheus