Petrus Faller - And The Heart Is Mine

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.

‘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.