Ahen I was a teenager, I had lost my heart to someone who lived in Rome. I traveled to the Eternal City with no money, no plan, it was supposed to be a surprise. That went somewhat wrong. We ate a pizza together, otherwise I had a lot of time to myself. I spent many hours on one of the hills looking up at the sky. I thought about Einstein. What else. Everything else seemed too trivial. There, for the first time, I had an awareness of the whole. Not that I understood Einstein, although I felt like I did: looking up at the starry sky, I realized that everything is connected and interacts. That energy, matter, space, consciousness, time - everything is connected and can be transformed into one another. I still remember that moment today. It seemed so clear to me, so indisputable. As a result, I lost my self. From then on, it made no sense at all for me to speak of a self. Identity now seemed to me to be an ideological construct that was only valid on passports. The foundation for my philosophy studies had been laid.
