Last week I was given the occasion (I cannot say unfortunately because it was a good lesson for me) to see one of the persons who little more than a year ago pretended to be my friend, lying in court about the yoga school without any problem! And he was committing this cowardly act driven by fear and the feeling of revenge. I could have also named this chapter “JESPER STRIKES BACK” because it was KARSTEN BRASK FISCHER who was the lying witness in court!

I will give some explanations about this case since I find it a highly significant example and also because of the very big audience (according to the internet traffic) of the “WHO IS JESPER?” lecture. (I am even considering putting some parts on YouTube).

However, let’s start with the beginning of this hallucinating story. All the information is taken from the documents presented in the court and from situations that I encountered personally. I will make the story as short as possible while still taking into consideration all the details because he is able to deny the conclusions due to some simplifications we made.

In the Bhoga case in 2005, it was Karsten who chose the law firm to represent us. Later on he also chose the same law firm in the creation of the structure of a foundation. He worked with these lawyers for a while, also in other cases, and after a while he started to tell me that they are not really what we needed and that he didn’t trust them. After attending one meeting with Karsten and the lawyer who was taking care of this foundation building, I was shocked to discover that they had not prepared the files they were supposed to study before the meeting. After I heard that they were charging us a lot of money for a meeting that they were supposed to prepare before, I told Karsten that I personally don’t trust them. In the following days he told me about more situations in which the lawyer from this firm was behaving strangely in the Bhoga case, showing a pessimistic attitude regarding the case. In front of the whole board of NATHA in the administrative meetings, Karsten repeatedly explained how bad these lawyers are and that we have to find a solution with this situation. Then we received an exaggeratedly large bill for a meeting where they again came unprepared. Karsten called the law firm and on the phone they agreed to cut the bill in half! What an amazing proof of unprofessionalism. This was another sign that the law firm was treating us superficially and they were not interested in anything other than money. Karsten was the one in contact with them and therefore we were just listening to his considerations. We were thinking that after the first step in the Bhoga case we will have to end this cooperation with this firm for the Bhoga case and to only continue with them for the construction of the foundation, but to our big surprise, three days before the court meeting the law firm announced us that they are terminating all cooperation with NATHA. After a while they started to send bills for the work they pretended to do for NATHA and for a while we paid, out of a kind of inertia. When we talked about this subject in the administrative meeting, Karsten presented the situation and again spoke very badly about the law firm in front of us all. He personally told me how indignant he was about this kind of behavior – cheating a non-profit organization by overcharging them. We (the group included Karsten who had the initiative himself) all decided to stop paying the bills until the situation would be clarified. Then Karsten started his “trip” out of the school (which you can see in the “WHO IS JESPER?” Lecture) and shortly afterwards he moved out of the ashram to “take care of his coming baby”. In a short time, his desire for revenge, some personal issues, and cowardice made him start to spread lies amongst his friends when giving reasons why he left the school.  Meanwhile, the law firm was threatening NATHA with a trial if we didn’t pay the remaining money from the bills.  NATHA was toeing the line by demanding explanations and documentations for the work claimed to be done by the lawyers, but never received anything except court threats. Several lawyer friends advised us that the bills were insanely big for the services provided by the law firm.

The next step was that the law firm called Karsten Fischer into court since he was the one mainly dealing with them. By this trick they tried to scare him…and it worked. Later they called NATHA into court for not paying the rest of the bills. Karsten contacted Sahaj (the one taking care of NATHA’s administration) and asked for a paper from NATHA stating that Karsten had nothing to do with this case. He made this request to his friend in front of whom he had said how badly these lawyers were doing their job! After speaking with some advisers we came to the conclusion that the only honest way would be that Karsten will go to court and say what he knows about the case. In this way, together with NATHA, he will for sure win the case. From here the story starts to show its “sleep of the reason” side.

Together with Sahaj, Karsten worked for hours writing his statement that would be sent to the court. The deal was that we would send his statement as soon as our lawyer friends approved that all is in order with the papers. The whole statement was made by Karsten on his initiative!!! He knew the situation very well. While awaiting the results of the research with our advisers, Karsten tried to call Sahaj a few times, but Sahaj was teaching and his phone was turned off. When Sahaj called back Karsten said “I am sorry, I found another solution!!!”. At the same call he started talking badly about the school, saying that he is very disappointed by the attitude of his former friends (without any connection with the case!). One week later Karsten sent a letter to Sahaj claiming that all he wrote in his statement was no longer valid. The strange thing is that even under pressure he could have called the court and asked for a delay of his statement, but instead he used this excuse to make a deal with the law firm. At the same time we heard from the court that the law firm had withdrawn the case against Karsten and they now have him as a witness against NATHA!!! IS THAT A COINCIDENCE OR IS IT THE MONSTER CREATED BY THE SLEEP OF REASON? I don’t believe in coincidences, do you?

“GOYA’S painting ‘THE SLEEP OF REASON CREATES MONSTERS’

fits very well with Karsten’s attempt to lie in court

and create a strange victimization image of himself, hurting the people around him.”

Just to top this up with more juice, at the time when Karsten was changing his statement he’d written by his own will, he and Celia decided to accept the proposal to appear in the media as a witness (the Jesper character) and later the media scandal started! (The evidence about his cooperation with the journalist was presented live to all the participants at the “WHO IS JESPER?” lecture).

To summarize until here, since there are so many details: when in NATHA, Karsten worked with a law firm for NATHA in two cases: the BHOGA case, and building a legal structure. He is the one who was not happy with the work of the lawyer in the BHOGA case and spoke against the law firm. They overcharged us and even admitted it on the phone, reducing one of the bills to half. The law firm decided to stop all cooperation three days before the trial with the BHOGA case. We decided to stop paying the remaining sum of money after receiving a lot of feedback from lawyers who considered that the bills were too big. Karsten was part of the decisional team (there are several witness). After this he left the school and started a personal vendetta against it. The law firm started a court case against NATHA and a separate one against Karsten. Karsten asked for help from NATHA and he agreed to go to court to say what he had said to NATHA’s board earlier. He made his written statement to be sent to the court. Two days later, claiming that he couldn’t find Sahaj on the phone, he made a deal with the law firm to go to court for them if they stop the case against him.  At almost the same time, he started to cooperate with journalist Orla Borg, resulting in a slander campaign in the newspapers against NATHA and me. Fascinating series of “coincidences”.

Last week the court meeting took place. Karsten came as a witness for the law firm!!! Under oath he admitted that he was not happy with the lawyer in the BHOGA case. But then he stated clearly that he believed that the law firm was doing a good job and all the money they claimed were correct!!! When asked by the judge and by Sahaj (we defended ourselves because a lawyer would have been expensive) why he changed his statement, Karsten claimed: “I was influenced by the pressure the community put upon me and therefore the statement was not representing my own opinion”!!! But his written statement was given ALMOST ONE YEAR AFTER HE LEFT THE SCHOOL AND HE WAS THE ONE COMING TO US FOR THIS. He tried to appear in the court as a “victim” of the group of people around him; that he couldn’t stand for his own opinion because of them. What he avoided to present to the court was the fact that by the time he wrote the statement he had not been in the school for a while and, furthermore, when he was in the school he was the one who had had the most radical and independent opinion.

From the sequence of events, it is clear that Karsten was lying again, this time in front of the court and under oath, just to save his situation and to hurt the ones whose only guilt was to trust him in the past!!! Indeed, in his case “the sleep of reason creates monsters” painting fits very well. He has become a person who has sold his honesty for his own career and security. What a sad sight to see him in this situation and to hear his lies that he dares to utter in front of the people who already know the truth.

For me and the others who were present in the court it was a good spiritual lesson about the decadence of the human soul in absence of some spiritual guidelines. This is also the reason I choose to write this experience here, as a reminder about the importance of keeping your own principles in life, no matter what the temptations are along the way.

P.S. GREAT TIMING!!! while writing this post, Karsten just wrote a message on the blog. I will only partially publish it due to the fact that in his desperation to keep his image clean, he tries to involve people whom he previously hurt. As you can see from his post, he is trying to save his image while attacking those people he was hurting until now for the reason that they disagreed with some of his decisions and actions in life!!! It seems in Karsten’s case the sleep of reason is indeed deeper than I’d thought and the monsters are in fact bigger. Goya’s painting fits very well within this frame. I will comment on his post soon as I’m now very busy.

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