And The Heart Is Mine

And The Heart Is Mine

A Graceful Life with Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Petrus Faller

Translated from German by Vidya Marina Bolz

For my daughter

When Reality kisses you

Don't shy away from Her.

Allow the eddies of Her Play

To draw circles within

And feel – you are the Heart.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1

The Search for God – Or The Fear To be Human

Eat up or throw up

What’s your name, what’s your country?

My ‘Skirt’ Time

Princess Julia

Death and the two spoonfuls of earth

Sundance

Chapter 2

Entering the Wisdom Teaching

Doubt and Initiation

Adi Da visits Europe

Bhakti – Fever

First interlude

Chapter 3

Naitauba – The Island of Bliss

The first journey to Naitauba

Vedanta Temple – Hollywood

Chapter 4

The business world – scene one

The First Journey to the Mountain of Attention1

The business world – scene two

Three suns and five rainbows

Death is far from the end of things

The illusion of death

Second journey to the Mountain of Attention

Second Interlude

Chapter 5

Love-Ananda Mahal Hawaii

Goodbye

The second journey to Naitauba

Master and Devotee

Black Shadows

Business World – Last Scene

Love story

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Glossary

Suggestion to the reader

Imprint

PROLOGUE

In 1994, on November 22, something happened in my life that went far beyond any kind of expectation that my life so far had presented me with.

Two weeks before this date I was walking the streets of Freiburg, a city in the South of Germany, just doing some errands. I had recently started training as a psychotherapist, finally finding some peace in my desperate and extreme search for the Truth and with the experiences of my early childhood. This constant sense of being driven, the compulsive urge to want the world to be different than it was, the desire to run away from the challenges of daily life - all of this seemed to have exhausted itself. Deeply sobered and deflated I was staring blankly at the Bertoldsbrunnen, the central fountain of the university city of Freiburg.

In one corner near the cobbled square that surrounded the fountain there was an electrical box that, as always, was covered with a myriad of event posters and announcements of all kinds, colors and sizes. On one of those posters I read the name Adi Da, introducing a talk about the teachings of wisdom of the Master. Topic: Death and Dying. A voice inside me said: ‘Petrus, don’t be intolerant, a spiritual Master, you are going to check this out.’ I read the name Adi Da again and again. Adi Da. Adi Da. His name just wouldn’t leave me during the remaining days leading up to the event.

The evening of 22^nd November I found myself in a lecture hall of the old university. The room was filled with the thirty to forty people in the audience. At the very front was a large image of Adi Da. There was a smell of incense and flowers decorated the table on which his picture was standing. The lecture started and I listened to the words of the speaker, his readings from the scriptures and instructions of the Master. What was conveyed in this lecture was more than astounding. The words were charged with so much power. The longer I listened the more I was overwhelmed with an attraction and a deep feeling of Truth and grandness which exceeded everything I had ever experienced in my life, in my endless search.

Then doubts began to encroach. What I was hearing couldn't possibly be true. This couldn’t be the place where the deepest Truth was revealed about our existence out of Nothingness. Not here in this very simple and ordinary little German town, so totally without any extravagance or adventure, far away from any holy place and, what’s more, without the actual presence of the Master himself.

But the power of the words of Adi Da resounded everywhere in my entire being as Truth and spread out to such an extent that it felt like the entire world existed in it. My mind couldn’t grab hold of it any more. It was so much bigger.

The lecture was coming to an end. Many of those present were very churned up inside. Some were angry, arguing heatedly, in the mood to fight. Others were silent and thoughtful. I just sat there not comprehending anything any more.

As a conclusion there was a video presentation in which Adi Da was giving Darshan ⁽¹⁾. He was sitting in a chair, as he usually does, and the people present were gazing at him silently. The room was completely darkened, his image appeared on the screen. At this moment my perception of space and time disappeared. My body felt like a thunder went through it. Everything around me began to vibrate in a kind of fire. My heart shattered and was lost. A feeling of infinite and eternal love rushed into my body from above, yes, into my entire life, like a waterfall that had only been waiting for this moment and this opportunity.

In front of me sat God incarnate, the Truth, the eternal, limitless unconditional Love that I had been looking for incessantly and desperately in life after life. The prophesied figure of the God-man. My heart just knew it.

Could it be? Here in Freiburg? Now? It was unearthly! That which has no name sat in front of me in human form and shape.

At that moment I fell into this infinite love, I couldn’t grab hold of myself any more, I couldn’t think. It was as if lightening flashes of love were chasing through my body and each lightening flash confirmed that the Truth, the Reality as such had assumed a human form in front of my eyes.

The event came to an end. Without words and completely churned up inside I bought a brochure in German language, which contained translated excerpts of the Dawn Horse Testament ⁽²⁾. I immediately began to read it while slowly leaving the room. ‘Beloved, I Am Da.’ I had to read it again and again. It was just not comprehensible.

Outside, it had begun to rain. The city lights reflected off the wet cobblestone, everything shone and glittered a thousand times. My friend Julia was coming towards me on the sidewalk. I still couldn’t stop reading. She looked at me: ‘Your eyes look like fireballs! What happened?’ I could hardly speak: ‘It’s just too incredible! Too overwhelming! I can’t talk about it right now!’

Over the next days and weeks I dreamt of Adi Da every night.

Upon waking I felt His presence around me all the time. The whole room was full of His presence. He was with me now, literally, at all times. Every night I now wandered with him through different spaces and different times. In the dream Adi Da appeared younger. He laughed, continuously edged me on to go further. He asked questions and told me so many things about the peculiarity of these dream places. Very often these places were just mere stones and ruins, broken down temples, stone deserts, rocks, mountains, places that clearly have had a life in the past, or perhaps in the future? This way of being with Adi Da was very exhausting for me.

After about two weeks I knew that I shall never be without Him again, not even for one second of my life, and that I shall never forget His name again. He only laughed and made friendly jokes about me, who gave so much importance to all of this.

I kept going on as usual with my work in the health food store, but I continued thinking of Him at all times, about the Power, the overwhelming Love, the Truth that He exudes and that He represents with utter perfection. My life was totally taken by His presence. One day I was working alone in the store when the shelves began to gradually emanate a radiant light and there was a loud voice that suddenly manifested itself in the space out of nothing: ‘ How much longer do you actually want to spend your time like this?’

That was just too much. I was shaken to the bone, totally shocked and afraid. Now I saw with certainty that this encounter with Adi Da would ruin my entire life and all my cherished experiences. It was just too dangerous. I didn’t want to dream any more, or to feel, or to read any more. I panicked and shoved Adi Da away. Quiet. Distance.

One month later, in January, I traveled to Munich. The next stage of my education, Hakomi, a body-oriented psychotherapy, was on the schedule. In the group room of the seminar house my colleagues were already gathered. The head of the department had partially emptied her library and her books were piled up in stacks in the room. I walked down the two stairs into the room, stumbled on the last step and fell head first into the middle of the room and right into the stacks of the books. I lay there flat on my belly, under me the books, my face on the floor. Perplexed by the sudden fall I slowly got up. Under my chest was a book with young Adi Da on the cover. It was His autobiography ‘The Knee Of Listening’. I saw his picture and in that same instant I gave up. My resistance was broken.

I understood and accepted His gift. I wanted to be His devotee ⁽³⁾. I wanted to be with Him, never again be without Him. The search had lasted too long, life after life, one drama piled on top of the other, the truth nowhere to be found, the happiness never perfect, always a remnant of dissatisfaction hidden in a secret corner of the heart. Which then snowballed into new heroics and new adventures and into more despair and further searching.

I have never actively searched for Adi Da. I had always hoped for Him, but never really expected to find Him. His appearance and His revelation have not the slightest connection with space and time. Also, even against the background of the deepest spiritual and mystical experiences, He has nothing in common with our way of seeing the world. His Loka ⁽⁴⁾ and His Revelation of the Reality go far beyond any of that.

Happiness had finally found me, and everything that I had experienced and lived before was reduced to absurdity.

Chapter 1

The Search for God – Or The Fear To be Human

‘There is no God on Shakespeare’s stage, but only human complications…’

Adi Da

The way our society looks at the meaning of life, as the global media generally represents it these days, and the set of conditions that have been created for political and interpersonal relationships is characterized by pure materialism. We use the so-called scientific knowledge in service of the urge to have total control over both the planet and the human being results in the latter being regarded as ‘the other’ in the best case and the enemy or adversary in the worst case.

The rational-materialistic thinking of the western world has taken over the entire mankind. Everything becomes an object for a business transaction and for an alleged scientific research. Each event gets converted into material values, becomes subject to selfishness and to greed in form of consumerism. The main motive is the total control over the masses of humanity and the ruthless exploitation of the earth’s resources, supposedly for the benefit of all, which is an utter deceit.

This absurd pursuit is utterly doomed to tragic failure. It is a complete illusion. The human mind and its creative power is not the absolute measure of all things. The mottos of ‘the independent individual’, or ‘having your own business’, the propaganda that each human being exists separately and has an inherent natural impulse to search for his own happiness and self-fulfillment is a fatal fallacy and a lie.

Neither the search for absolute control over the material world nor the ‘holy’ way, via the spiritual quest to find the absolute truth, will ever be crowned by success. All the expressions in our times and in all the previous periods are the proof for it. All searching is unnecessary and there is not ‘something’ that has to be achieved. Only the Truth exists – above all things – without any action on our part and without any kind of benefit having to arise from it. The Truth has always been free, not tied to any path or any point of view.

I was just thirty years old when Adi Da entered into my life so explicitly and with such divine vehemence. My life prior to that was marked by a spiritual search and by escapism from the challenges and the horrors of the world.

I ‘remember’ the events prior to my birth as I was pulled again into this reality of the physical-material existence, or more specifically, how my predispositions towards this world initiated the process of my reincarnation.

My future father was visiting the market fair at the time when my mother’s pregnancy was approaching. He was looking for a present for my mother at one stand and chose a sculpture of a black woman with her hair pinned up, beautiful naked breasts, a golden necklace and a golden bowl, that was firmly resting next to her legs. She was elegantly sitting on her heels, had bright red lips and was exuding a juicy eroticism. All in all, quite nice, aesthetic and kitschy - as one would expect from an object from a market fair.

The Shakti⁽¹⁾ or the form of energy that this particular sculpture so mysteriously epitomized for me, and my father’s desire to beget a child drew me to this couple, my future parents, and I ‘chose’ this family. This sculpture of the black woman that had radiated such an immense attraction for me in later years was sitting on our living room table, and the golden bowl was unfortunately used as an ashtray that had to be emptied every day because it was constantly overflowing. I always gazed at the sculpture with affection, loved its presence, hated the smell of the cigarettes and the dirty golden bowl and had no idea that one day many, many years later this sculpture would play an important role in my life. I regularly carried it to the trash bin and turned it upside down to get rid of the ash and the cigarette butts.

The signal or the impulse to again enter into the cycle of Being-Born-Again was initiated decisively by the simple purchase of this black sculpture. At some point, already months into the pregnancy, I suddenly realized that this hitherto unconscious process meant reincarnation. There was a momentary sudden vital shock⁽²⁾ that affected all my physical cells as well as those of my mother. During the last phase of the pregnancy my mother was lying down for several weeks because she was facing a possible miscarriage and in danger of losing the child.

I wanted to interrupt this process immediately. I didn’t want to come back to this world and yet a power pulled me in a very mysterious way.

Shortly before the actual birth my mother dreamt the child’s name: Petrus. She told my father about it. He, at first shocked, later agreed and elaborated that the child should become a priest. In that way I received my vocation and my predestination – which I was never going to fulfill - even before I saw the light of day.

My parents didn’t impose any faith or any kind of religious teaching upon me. They were both affected by a ban from the Catholic Church, my father because of being divorced and my mother because she had married a divorced man and by bringing an illegitimate child into the marriage. They were both, in spite of the exclusion from the sacraments, very religious people. They went to mass regularly to churches outside of our village in order to be able to receive the Holy Communion ‘unrecognized’ by the local priest.

The earliest memories of my childhood are of cigarette smells – both my parents were chain smokers – recurrent anxiety attacks, the smell of alcohol, along with the affectionate voice of my father that meant love and comfort although he could also give a terrible thrashing.

The 2nd World War with its gruesome repercussions had impacted the family circumstances of my parents in such a way that their childhood and younger years were a sheer nightmare. My mother grew up with nine siblings in a large family. She had lost her favorite brother and her father in the war. Her father had refused to give the Hitler salute. He sympathized with communist ideas. He was sent to Dachau into a so-called education camp and died in the first years of the war in Poland. The family of ten was tormented by the most severe restrictions of the Nazi regime and denied any kind of support by the state. Two of her brothers came back from the prisoner of war camp with the most severe injuries. She herself experienced the war and the constant presence of soldiers as a permanent threat of encroachment and sexual harassment. As she gave birth to a child out of wedlock right after the end of the war it became a lifelong stigma for her. This circumstance was tantamount to a mortal sin in the rural Catholic setting. Even within her own family she was insulted and labeled a witch. Together with her older sister and her mother she had to provide for the rest of the family in the post war years.

She was an incredibly passionate woman, very attractive with long red hair and an irrepressible zest for life.

My father came from a respected and wealthy family from a small village at the foot of the Black Forest. When he was fifteen he was assigned to the front in the last months of the war and was severely wounded. He came back with wandering shrapnel and chronic pain in his body. He could never really settle down in his life. He had many jobs, adored and loved women, frequented the pubs and the dance halls and died at the age of forty-two in my mother’s arms. I was five years old.

Due to the unexpected death of my father my mother suffered a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. She continued to work on an assembly line in a factory and the shift work now divided our life into ‘early’ and ‘late’. ‘Late’ meant we saw each other in the morning for breakfast and then not any more for the rest of the day. ‘Early’ meant we saw each other in the afternoon when my mother came home, exhausted and disheartened by the piece-work, and we could spend the evening together.

After the sudden death of my father my life changed dramatically. Now it wasn’t just fear that was my constant companion but also aloneness. I had time to do everything – or nothing. Mostly I was spending time in the streets or in the woods. I ran, I had to run, I lived in a different, very energized world that for most of the people around me appeared strange or even crazy. There were no boundaries, neither regarding education nor the imagination. Via the power of my imagination I could hallucinate myself into any possible place and could envision just about anything in my mind.

All my actions contained a great deal of energy and passion, but rarely could I find rest, so I stumbled about as if driven. That caused my shoes to wear out at the soles or the seams were falling apart at a rapid rate and my mother had to buy new ones every two to three months. The record in durability for new Adidas shoes was two weeks. The energy shot out from my head and from my feet. What could I do? In the night during sleep I would feel how my body would lift up slowly as if it was rising up like a balloon. When I became aware of my floating body I would wake up and crash down onto the bed.

When I was six years old a luminous circle started appearing above my bed on a regular basis. It spoke to me, seemed full of happiness but also was quite insistent. It appeared whenever it wanted to, I had no influence over it. On one hand it made me feel happy but on the other hand it made me feel somehow pressured in a strange fashion. In later years I drew the connection between the light and Jesus, because this was the religious atmosphere that was surrounding me while I was growing up. However, both my aversion and my fascination remained. Why did this stupid light appear above my bed? What did that mean? I neither wanted to become a priest nor have any kind of so-called vocation. But I spoke to no one about it.

When I was nine I became an altar boy in our Catholic community. I loved the nuns when they were praying in devotion kneeling down on benches in the front rows, even though some of them looked like iron brooms and had withered faces. I sat in front in the chancel, red skirt, white shirt and red collar, squinted while looking at a candle and sank into the light of a bright star, which slowly rose in my inner eye and directed my awareness into a shining radiance. That was my happiness. I didn’t need more. I didn’t want to do any altar service, I was afraid of it and I found it weird and boring. I didn’t want to make any mistakes and thus catch grumpy glares from the priest. I didn’t want to talk or to always repeat the same monotonous prayers. Only to sit there in silence and gaze – that was it.

Our Catholic priest was from the old school. He was extremely fundamentalist in his views. He scolded and preached against everything that was not Catholic. He had refused, years ago, to give my father the last rites because he was divorced. He even had to be persuaded to perform the funeral ceremony because at first he had refused to do even this. Naturally, the priest intuited and felt that I wasn’t really interested in doing the altar service. And I on the other hand knew that he was jealous of my ecstatic condition, which I didn’t try to consciously create but was spontaneously drawn into.

Deep in my heart I felt that everything that was happening here in the name of Jesus had nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus himself, with his real presence or the Revelation. ‘He’ felt so different. While the creeds were addressed I deliberately remained silent. After only a short time I knew the liturgy by heart and was very proud when I could detect an ‘error’ or an omission in the liturgical texts. Guilt and atonement struck me as strange concepts, and my first confession was also the last because I didn’t know what I should tell and to whom. Even the deep happiness that I often felt during mass I never really connected directly to Jesus. It was much broader, without any name or a person. It was the space itself that simply shone and radiated. It was happiness, infinite fullness, self-oblivion – and only the heart knew it was true. At the same time I was becoming arrogant and presumptuous when I became aware that the others were not able to perceive the same happiness. I let them feel it, especially the priest.

When I played with my friends I connected with them more on an emotional and psychic level, with that which was not so very visible, rather than on the level of what they apparently said or did. The connection to my mother was very close in spite of, or perhaps because of, the limited time we had together due to the work in shifts. I could feel her even when she was not present.

One day, in the beginning of my puberty, approximately at the age of eleven or twelve, some strange things started happening in my proximity. I was sitting on the toilet and was staring at the floor. Suddenly there appeared a face on the carpet, I looked at the wall, and there was also a face, on the ceiling, again and again the same face everywhere. Jesus. When I went into the hallway his face was everywhere. I became scared and didn’t want to look anywhere any more. Everywhere Jesus. In the evening I told my mother about the phenomenon. She nearly jumped out of her skin: ‘Are you totally mad? Stop that immediately otherwise I’ll have to go with you to the doctor!’ That was the only and also the last time that I told anybody about my perception and the phenomena. These visions lasted for a while and then they died away.

On our altar boy excursions to famous Catholic shrines and monasteries I started to collect amulets of holy men, holy women and martyrs, which I bought in souvenir shops. All these little pictures were dangling on a chain around my neck until there were about 15 of them, including the cross of Taize. They all adorned my neck and my chest.

My favorite movies on TV, in addition to “Daktari’ and ‘Laurel and Hardy’, were the Easter passion and movies about saints. After a film about Frances of Assisi, into which I drowned like a dry piece of bread into a wine sauce, I was wildly ecstatic. In the final setting of the movie Saint Frances is lying on a big rock dying, with the stigmata of Jesus that very impressively appear on his body. I saw his devotion, joy and ecstasy even at the moment of death. That image wouldn’t leave my mind any more.

One day on the bus on the way to school – I was in my puberty and I remember distinctly how I felt in that hormonal state as well as the cool clothes I was wearing – a throbbing pain in my hands and my feet suddenly started manifesting. I stood in the aisle of the bus near the exit holding myself firmly to a metal rod, but the pain became increasingly worse so that I hardly could stand it any more. I was sweating; I didn’t know what was going on. I looked at my hands and the pain was creating a red patch on the palms of my hands that seemed to penetrate deep inside. The chakra points on my hands and feet were burning like fire. The pain seemed to know no bounds. I panicked and was glad when I could get out. I could hardly walk.

I decided to ignore the whole thing just as I frequently did in my childhood when I had all those visions and saw phenomena. I didn’t want them. They were an emotional and physical torture. I couldn’t make any sense out of them. In the movie Saint Frances on his rock looked much happier.

I experienced this phenomenon several more times, but I couldn’t distinguish any more whether it was my imagination or my fear of being dominated by something alien, which I couldn’t control. I didn’t want to ‘comply’ with this Christian path, which had absolutely nothing to do with my own way of experiencing and perceiving happiness and ecstasy. What I found most abhorrent and off-putting was the grim and cruel portrayal of Jesus on the cross and the debasement of the feminine in the non-accessible, immaculate virgin. Why were there no female priestesses and why was it that female beauty and passion was shrouded in black and white robes until their eyes looked bitter and dry. One half of the human race was apparently excluded from participation in the sacred and the ecstatic.

After entering puberty the boredom started to grow inside me, each year increasingly so. The school curricula absolutely didn’t correspond in any fashion to my longings. The transmission of school knowledge, which was supposed to prepare young people for the western style of living, was agonizing and inconsequential. My ecstatic states became increasingly rare.

I was spending most of my time with my best friend. As we just turned fifteen towards the end of the seventies we started exploring the ‘night life’. He, the gambler, smoker, and drug consumer, and I, the crazy fashion freak who used to design all my clothes, never touching any soft nor hard drugs, were always hitchhiking on the road.

After the first few visits to the disco it became quite obvious that the main agenda for this ‘night fever’ was ultimately sex. It was all about checking out, flirting, fantasizing, and then either on drugs or without daring the first step. We were at home in the freak scene, in alternative youth centers as well as in the over-trendy glamorous scene. I wanted to dance with abandon and admire the beautiful girls, who themselves were into catching some older rich gentleman. My friend on the other hand threw himself totally into the drugs and gambling scene.

This went on for more than three years. At the end of this period of making the rounds through the pubs and discothèques several times a week until the early morning hours, it became quite clear to me that this world with all the glamour, the overtly displayed wealth and the non-stop drug use was not able to open the doors to the reality which meant so much to me: the reality of ecstasy. It was obvious that the drugs and the exhibition of money were sheer manipulation of this earthly reality. I saw the laughing friends who were stoned. Some of them proceeded to harder drugs, but nobody looked really happy. I saw the beautiful girls in the passenger seats of the snazzy cars racing away with their older men, a brief and meaningless momentary pleasure high, soon reflected as such on their faces. Why did I end up in this strange and empty world?

Sexual desire and the energy experiences that were connected with it played as vital a role as the apparitions and the visions that I had experienced before. I began to masturbate quite early and in my youth practiced it several times a day without allowing ejaculation. When I was fifteen years old I had my first real sexual experiences with a girl, thanks to the support of the youth magazine BRAVO. I rushed fiercely and vehemently into this pleasure because the magazine proclaimed that now was the right age to experience sexual intercourse, or at least that was the way I understood it then. The first time I failed miserably and at the second attempt I was relieved when it was over. Only after that did the pleasure gradually begin to develop. Luckily, the girlfriend was the same each time so that I didn’t have to come out of the experience as a total failure.