I lived what I wrote …

“I lived what I wrote ...”

On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of his birth this commemorative booklet concerns the man who has left as a legacy his three-volume main Work: The Grail Message “In the Light of Truth”. For many human beings throughout the world it has become the staff and support in their quest for spiritual recognition.

Born Oskar Ernst Bernhardt on 18th April 1875 in Bischofswerda (Saxony) he, as the author of the Grail Message, called himself “Abd-ru-shin”, a name that for him was inseparably linked with the task which he lived his life to fulfil. When he began to publish the first parts of his Grail Message he was 49 years old. In the decades until then the young businessman from the provincial Bischofswerda had become a worldly-wise, astute man. Extensive travels across the Ancient Orient and to the “New World” had educated him and stimulated his literary creativity. During this period life had brought the experiencing of many vicissitudes – tribulations and calamities, troubles, entanglements and anxieties, joy, happiness and sorrow, the ebb and flow of human existence on this earth – both in his domestic affairs and on his journeys and, above all, through the First World War during painful years of internment abroad.

Out of such life-experiences a background for understanding was formed that was essential for him to acquire. It provided the firm basis in human life for the knowledge he bore within him from his origin. Only thus could Abd-ru-shin – blazing the trail – clear pathways to liberation and recognition and consolidate them with his Word, for those struggling to rescue themselves spiritually from the imprisonment of a world darkened by errors and confusion.

Abd-ru-shin laid aside his literary work when in 1923 he began to write lecture after lecture concerning the crucial questions of our human existence. Questions such as those concerning the meaning of life, concerning God, Grace, faith and man’s destiny, concerning the relationship between the sexes, concerning “guilt and atonement”, death, birth and reincarnation, and many others. He thereby “responded” to whatever approached him through human beings whose hearts had been prised open by inner distress, who felt they must despair of God, the world and themselves and who could no longer discern a path to redemption in traditional “beliefs”.

In 1931, and again during the latter years of his life, Abd-ru-shin arranged his individual lectures in book-form as a complete whole. In doing so he followed a definite, what may be described as “educational”, concept: the sequential arrangement of the lectures leads the reader step by step and in stages to an ever more expanding and deepening insight into the manifold connections between the “topics” – until finally the lofty path to knowing and liberating conviction opens to him. However, this benefit from the Grail Message will only be drawn by the one who personally, in all objectivity, examining and weighing, comes to terms with its contents.