Divine Light Center

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The Divine Light Center (English for “divine light center”) is a religious center in Winterthur that was founded in 1967 by the Indian Swami Omkarananda . The members come from different faiths. The supporters gained notoriety in 1975 through an attack on the house of the Zurich SVP government councilor Jakob Stucki .

history

The association of the same name was founded in Winterthur in 1966 . A wealthy woman asked the Indian monk Omkarananda Saraswati to come to Winterthur and made her villa available to him, where Omkarananda then founded the Divine Light Center. In the period that followed, the DLZ acquired more and more buildings and painted them light blue. The spiritual community, simply called the “blues” because of its corporate color, was vegetarian and refrained from consuming tobacco , alcohol or other drugs . For example, she devoted her time to meditation , which consisted of the repeated recitation of Vedas and mantras . When the behavior of the supporters of the DLZ and the purchase of more and more new villas in the neighborhood slowly met resistance, Omkaranda simply used straw people to buy more properties, so that the DLZ finally comprised six houses lying next to one another on Anton-Graff-Strasse. In the meantime, residents were wondering where the religious community got all the money from. A Vedic temple has existed on the premises of the DLZ in Winterthur since 1974 .

Politics and the judiciary were called into action through the acquisitions, and an interest group of around 80 members accused the religious community of buying over a dozen properties in 1972 and accused the believers of telephone terror in the neighborhood; these in turn described their critics as "senile" or "frustrated". Mayor Urs Widmer described the DLZ in an interview as a “foreign body in our city” and SVP government councilor Jakob Stucki let the police investigate the Divine Light Center and Omkarananda. The Winterthur municipal council also dealt extensively with the religious community and on January 15, 1973 approved the purchase of a house at Anton Graff-Strasse 73 in order to forestall the religious community. A motion by the BGB also called for the creation of a purely residential zone on Brühlberg in order to prevent the Divine Light Center from spreading further. Only the youth party Junge Löwen rejected the resultant further escalation of the conflict.

The Anton-Graff-Strasse in 1975 with the light blue painted houses of the DLZ

The situation escalated and the supporters of the DLZ defended themselves with 102 defamation suits, 52 civil lawsuits, 26 criminal charges and four private criminal complaints and filed more than 60 appeals. An event on June 29, 1973, when a 29-year-old supporter was lured into the house of a local resident, where her mother wanted to free her from the "sect", also contributed to the escalation. The neighbor called the police and stated that the girl was drugged. This accusation, which later turned out to be a lie, led to a scuffle with supporters of the DLZ when the police drove up, and several members were arrested. They felt they had been treated unfairly and responded to the alleged judicial scandal with even more reports. In 1974, the flood of lawsuits led to both chambers wanting to stand out in a trial at the Winterthur District Court . The threatened expulsion of their guru as a result led to a further radicalization of the religious community and the use of poisoned chocolates and acid attacks on their opponents. A black magician was brought from India to Winterthur, who was supposed to silence the opponents of the DLZ with the help of black magic - but this like many other things without the knowledge of most of the DLZ members. When Omkarananda was finally to be expelled, the situation worsened with an attack on the house of government councilor Jakob Stucki in Seuzach and another failed attack on a lawyer from Winterthur on October 8, 1975. Of the eight bombs placed, one exploded.

Finally, on July 10, 1976, Omkarananda and a few of his followers were arrested. During the house searches, a shooting range and a number of weapons, including machine guns, were found in the basement of the temple. Another important piece of evidence was tape recordings made by DLZ supporters of almost all rituals. Omkarananda was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment and expelled from the country in 1985 for 15 years by the federal court in a judgment dated May 22, 1979 . Other DLZ members were sentenced to several years in prison. In addition to the DLZ, Omkaranda founded other religious communities, e.g. E.g. 1982 in Rishikesh , India, and 1986 in Langen near Bregenz in Austria.

Even after the guru's arrest, the DLZ remained active; around 1980 around 50 people were still living in the Divine Light Center. They fought for the rehabilitation of their guru after the sentencing and were convinced that the conviction was illegitimate. The view of an official conspiracy represented by the DLZ was supported at the end of the 1990s by a report made possible by leaked files by a Tages-Anzeiger journalist who, among other things, drew attention to an alleged supporter of the DLZ who was not arrested during the house searches and then was also no longer traceable by manhunt. The DLZ took the view that this was probably a smuggled agent of the police. The Federal Councilor Arnold Koller then commissioned an administrative investigation with the former Federal Court President Jean-François Egli . The final report of this investigation found irregularities because the defendants had not been informed about undercover investigations in court and were thereby curtailed in their rights of defense. However, the report was unable to confirm the main allegations.

On January 4, 2000, the spiritual head of the DLZ in Langen near Bregenz died unexpectedly of flu. In 2001 a foundation for the preservation of the Vedic temple was established in Winterthur. There is also a publishing house with a printer, the DLZ-Service cooperative, to distribute its own publications such as the “Divine Light” magazine, which has been published every two months since 1966, or the monthly “Thoughts on the Day” with texts by Omkarananda and various books.

Todays situation

Today the community still consists of 20 to 30 people who still own 19 properties, many of them outside of Winterthur. However, the houses are no longer painted light blue. The members continue to meditate, listen to the sermons of their spiritual teacher on tapes and also do research in the 50,000-title library, the results of which they do not publish, but only for the purpose of gaining their own knowledge and the “synthesis between religion and science”. There are also regular public lectures. On Sundays, a fire ceremony takes place in the DLZ's own Sermon on the Mount in Zell . The members of the DLZ come from different directions of Buddhism as well as Christianity .

Literature and Sources

Web links