I am visiting this place almost daily for meditation. The serene ambience and friendly people make this a very unique spiritual experience amidst a busy city life. There is also a Backhaus where you can drink and eat food with optional donation. Best place to meet new people and have a frenzy-less after-work activity. I would highly recommend this place to the people living in Berlin. You don't have to be a religious Buddhist to practice it (I'm not). The meditation is for about half an hour, and an instructor will read a passage in a very soothing voice with occasional vibrative sounds (English on Thursdays). We then read a long Tibetian poem together, which evokes a sense of trance and a calm ambiance. There is a large handheld statue of a Begtse inside the meditation hall. The statue contains insane amount of details, with contrasting colours, pompous exhibition, dynamic movements, complex shapes and primal expressions. There is a lot of minute attentions to detail and individual points of interest, but each and everything only adds up to a complete, menacing, thematic image of the Mongol-Tibetan God of war. It seems to me that if a human being was to imagine the ultimate primal expression of manifestative violence, this image is the maximum s/he could come up with. Each and every space of it screams of violence, with flames all around Begtse. Even Begtse's eyebrows and facial hair are covered in flames. Its third eye reminds me of Shiva, again, the symbol of manifestation (I am not posting it's picture, as I have not taken a picture of it. I feel it diminishes it's value. If I want to see it, I better go to the place). I was so engulfed that I spent a solid 20 minutes to relish each and every detail of it. Some people joined with me after some time, and we shared our impressions on the statue.
I met a Greek DJ there. Currently living in Berlin, he mixes music as a side profession under the name of LeTrip. We visited the bar of the Zentrum where we were offered chips and fruits. He showed his SoundCloud profile and I showed him mine. We then had a casual and superficial cultural exchange on Karma and Dharma. I confessed to him that the only modern artistic impression that I have on Greece is through a film called Attenberg. To my misfortune, he hadn't heard of it. I then had a brief talk with an Italian, of our life so far, about my project, her work, and some cultural exchange on Italy. This place is my haven for a good and healthy social life.
