Sunlit meadow grasses against a mountain ridge

About

A childhood question, an experience that reopened it, and the work that followed.

How it began

Portrait of André Dupke
André Dupke

I was born on 30 March 1975 in Hamburg. In 2012, during a near-death experience, I met what I have called the Absolute ever since. The experience struck me as so significant that, from that moment on, I wanted to devote a large part of my attention to the realisation of my existence, the I Am.

My journey began with that decision.

This project is dedicated to the importance of absolute awareness, in the knowledge that every outward distraction can only lead away from it. From this stillness, the Absolute can become a source of insight. Scale-Time Theory, which took up a question carried since childhood, arose in just this way. Yet such knowledge is not the path back to the Absolute, and to engage with it is already to move away from it, for the Absolute can only ever be found and preserved in the silence of realising one's own existence.

Curiosity about reality

Even as a child, up to the age of fifteen or sixteen, I was deeply drawn to quantum mechanics, relativity, astronomy, and science in general. My mother worked as a bookseller, and whenever something new appeared in this field she would bring a copy home for me. Alongside the Hawking books, I remember titles such as Curved Space and Bent Time, Five Reasons Why the Universe Can't Exist, and The Discovery of Nothingness.

I didn't always understand everything, but I came away with the feeling that something in the standard cosmological picture did not fit. It seemed to me that nearly everything was right, and that only a single detail still needed to change before it was truly right. I was sure the error was obvious and that I could find it if only I thought hard enough. So I read these books again and again, expecting each time to uncover the mistake. That was a boy's confidence, not an argument.

Eventually, other interests took hold, and my search for that error faded for many years. From then on, I spent most of my time in rehearsal rooms and recording studios.

Binary awareness

In 2012, I had an experience that would change my life decisively. What I met I can only describe as absolute awareness: the realisation of my own existence, with nothing of thought, concept, space or time left in it. There was nothing but the realisation, I Am. Then I awoke again in what felt like a hundred thousand situations: in a bed, in another bed, on the street, on the beach, in a hospital, in yet another bed. Each time the feeling came, Oh, here I am, it was time for the next situation.

Afterward, I asked myself: I had been in absolute awareness, awakening in a hundred thousand different situations, yet aware of my existence the entire time. What, then, am I doing in my "normal" life, when I am not aware of my existence? In that moment I realised I was no longer present in my own everyday life. There were stories, ideas, assumptions, dramas, the narratives of others, but I myself was absent. From that experience I took the conviction that self-awareness is binary: either you are aware of your existence, or you are not.

This realisation felt so profound that I made myself a promise: that from then on I would never again forget the realisation of my existence, and would always remain aware of myself. What followed would not only transform my life, but also lead me back to the question of my childhood.

The nature of space and time

One night I stood on the terrace of our house in the Andalusian mountains, looking up at the stars, trying to rest completely still in the realisation of my existence. Then a thought came to me: Those stars up there, perhaps they no longer exist, because their light has been travelling for so long. And although I had never heard voices before that moment, I heard one now. It came from the upper left, and it answered me.

Yes, and if you find the past in the large scales, you will find the future in the small scales. The Absolute

It struck me at once as the answer I had sought so intently in my youth, and as a different way of looking at the Big Bang model: not the obvious flaw I had been so sure of as a boy, but a question I have been working through ever since.