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 22nd 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.

There was a very special girl in my village. I felt very attracted to her in a way that was very difficult to describe. Her Shakti radiated out of her being like a fire. Her body and her laughter shone with lust and joie de vivre and she carried this without any kind of inhibition. We only had to look at each other and the energy sizzled through our young bodies, which then sparked at the first touch into overwhelming lust and submerged us into self-oblivion.

She had no fear of her own sexual energy nor of my masculine power, and our kind of loving had an uplifting quality that left us totally mesmerized. We were like two uninhibited magnets that attracted each other tremendously and couldn’t let go of each other once we came together. She could sense my presence and my unexpected appearance already minutes before, and at that point she would go into a kind of a feverish state. Her body glowed with lust and passion. We made love throughout many nights without a minute of sleep. On the occasions that we were not together physically in the same room we even slept together as we met during the same night in our dreams. Finally here was somebody who could participate in my world.

However, I couldn’t quite put into words my actual love for her and I had never felt the impulse or the need to have a so-called normal relationship in the way my friends were living it or were striving for it. The end of every love affair seemed to me to be both unbearable and unavoidable. It didn’t require the tragedy of ‘Romeo And Juliet’.

I couldn’t endure this love any more. She couldn’t continue living like this any more. After a final night of passion ending early in the morning in the sand dunes at the edge of a lake, she disappeared forever and I never saw her again.

At this point in time my visions and experiences slowly began to disappear completely. Together with my closest friend from my youth I went into an old cemetery in the woods, equipped with a shovel and a bottle of red wine. During the night of Good Friday, and as a last fatalistic ritual, in an old grave I buried a can with a note saying:

‘God is dead. God can kiss my ass.’

Together we had started reading Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, other philosophers, poets and much more.

My friend had become an atheist, and in the end I had to agree with him, even though I had a funny feeling about it and felt a resistance to it within me. In this world there was no god any more. Nobody else seemed to perceive that which I had experienced as ecstasy. When I was fifteen years old I had experienced a day of perfect happiness. I had woken up in the morning and was simply utterly happy without any reason or without having to do anything for it, just simply happy without a cause. Over the next few days this condition disappeared again. However there remained a trace of an insight in my consciousness that my experience was something absolutely true and no effort whatsoever was needed to experience that state.

Thus my youth ended in a forgotten forest cemetery, with desperate cynicism and with a growing contempt for this world and the humans in it. We celebrated this special event with a glass of red wine, sitting on a gravestone with feet freely dangling in the air. We drank to our new life and sneered at all the humbug, which the monotheistic religions and this western society were selling as the truth. None of it was true.

Eat up or throw up

‘And sorrow is the illusion of emptiness.’

Adi Da

My school time came to an end. I was now nineteen years old, I had my high school graduation in my pocket and I now wanted to somehow participate in this world that so far was alien to me. Since my very early youth I loved to design and create. Already in my early years I used to sew all kinds of crazy clothes for myself and others. I set myself the goal, after completing an apprenticeship in dressmaking, to study fashion design or costume design at the university in order to add beauty and creativity to this world.

The whole attempt ended in a disaster. In 1984 I came to Karlsruhe, a city full of clerks. During the first few days I would stroll through the pedestrian section of the city and was completely unprepared for the shock that hit me when I realized how gray the people were, how bottled up everybody was, rushing around as if badgered. Everybody in the city seemed to have internalized the same manner of living. I had never imagined it like this. I grew up in a protected rural private school of the Catholic Church, mainly with young, sympathetic, progressive teachers who came from the 1968 movement. At the apprenticeship place, however, there existed open sexism against women; almost everybody was hypocritical towards the top and pushy towards the bottom. In my naiveté I was caught totally unawares and didn’t want to accept that the work environment could be so cruel and dishonest. It was a torture for me that lasted for the entire two and a half years of the apprenticeship. I fought against the structures in vain and experienced the graduation as a welcome deliverance.

Shortly before the end of the apprenticeship I started looking for a place to study at university. I visited Vienna, traveled to Munich and finally ended up in Berlin. As I stood in front of the Free University looking at the huge entrance to the building I was seized, as before, by a spontaneous and obvious conclusion. I saw thousands of young people swarming out of the entrances and quite suddenly understood that THAT was not what I was looking for and that here I was not going to achieve what I wanted; even though I didn’t have an exact idea what THAT actually meant or what my goal actually was.

If so many people were acquiring the alleged (and phony) knowledge about existence and the beauty of the arts, yet the human world was so loveless and gray, then something was missing in the transmission of this knowledge. In fact, there had to be something fundamentally wrong regarding most knowledge of and about the world. At that very moment my university studies were finished.

Now meanwhile I was living in the house that, at the age of five, I had inherited after the deaths of my father and grandfather. They both died within two weeks from each other and I was the one left as sole heir. My step-grandmother also had lived there after the death of her husband. It was a very nice house, situated in the middle of the village directly on a slow flowing river. It had two floors, a basement, a granary, a large barn and a garden. In front of the house was a stately linden tree that my grandfather had planted directly by the river before the 2nd World War.

My step-grandmother didn’t like our family, and even after years of trying my mother and I couldn’t establish any kind of friendly relationship with her. When she died seven years later we took over the entire house, however I never shared the house with my mother. My mother didn’t like the house and remained in her village.

When I was fifteen I began to renovate the first floor and worked slowly, room by room. At that time my much older stepbrother occupied the second floor and lived there for a few years.

So, when I was nineteen I finally moved in. The furniture was kept very simple. Just a washing basin, a stone sink, two gas burners for cooking, a big French bed in the middle of the room, wooden shelves on the wall, and that was it. The toilet was outside the apartment, and could be reached across a veranda. This house was to be my sanctuary and my abode of rescue for the next several years.

I had tried to participate in ‘normal’ life, but after a very short time I realized that it made most people deeply unhappy. The crazy philosophers and writers were also not able to point me to a real access to truth and happiness, even though together they had written thousands of books. Where were the facts and the actual reality? Only in the mind? Whose life had really been changed? Where was happiness? Where was the one who understood all this and could explain it? Most of those people whose writings I really loved had ended up in madness over their own mind. The world was still drowning in a permanent swamp of brutality due to wars, armament, and unrestrained exploitation of humans and nature. School had prepared me for many things but not for this cruel and relentless life.

So I then started looking for some other possibilities. I read books about other cultures and traditions that had chosen to live differently, some of which had for instance allowed women to have positions of power or where women influenced the society. I looked extensively into the basic ideas of feminism and ultimately, however, had to realize, after having read and studied countless books, that nobody, but really nobody had the perfect solution for the entire dilemma of the human existence, or could even explain it in a conclusive and verifiable manner. The mind seemed to permanently want to masturbate with itself in order to gain pleasure and satisfaction and thus as a direct consequence remained confined within itself. All of it just didn’t make any sense.

After it was clear that the university studies were not going to happen, I looked for a place to substitute my military service with a civilian service in a school, doing community service for severely disabled children. I let my hair grow even longer and was now dying it red with henna. I met the woman of my dreams; I fell in love with my own utopian imagination of a wild-galloping Amazon with blue eyes who danced barefoot through the city, with bells attached to her bare legs. We failed miserably in our relating after only three months, which was all about wanting to relate but not being able to. The pain of not being able to carry out a true relationship with this world threw me totally off the tracks, once and for all.

I began to fast for longer periods of time so I wouldn’t feel the pain. That made me bulimic. I would overeat three to four times a day and then throw up. I would scurry through the supermarkets in search of food that I hadn’t tasted before. I withdrew more and more. I walked around barefoot; I tied little bells around my legs. I taught myself yoga using a book that a friend had given to me. In the morning and in the evening I would practice yoga exercises for 90 minutes. In the resting pose of sawasana, I was able to escape from the perception of this world and finally feel peace for several minutes at a time. This was a huge relief.

Bulimia really had no connection whatsoever with any kind of weight problem for me. I didn’t even know the word bulimia then, and had no idea that my behavior was actually a clinical disease. Instead, it was a slow self-execution that amounted to gradual suicide. Sexual desire dried up completely. I was staying in my house, isolating myself more and more. I congratulated myself proudly that once again I had managed not to talk over the entire weekend and that I hadn’t had contact with any human being for entire three days. Most of my friendships ended. My best friend of many years prophesized madness for me and begged me urgently to stop reading philosophical books. He could no longer tolerate my life and my growing despair, and he was more concerned about my wellbeing than about his own.

I, on the other hand, could no longer stop it. Incessantly, the wheel kept turning. After the break-up with my wild-galloping Amazon a kind of madness took hold of me, which would later reemerge again and again. I simply had to be on the road. Travel! Run! So then, shortly after my twenty-first birthday, one day before Christmas Eve I took off to southern France, equipped with a sleeping bag and a small backpack. I wanted to walk the distance, barefoot if possible, through Camargue from north to south and visit the gypsy pilgrimage Saint-Marie de la Mer on the Mediterranean. An overnight train brought me to the French city of Arles, where I stood in awe before the house of Van Gogh, which unfortunately was closed. It was early in the morning, the air was cold and foggy. In the city I once again had a ‘feeding frenzy’, then began to walk to the pilgrimage. After a few hours of the hike I realized how crazy the whole thing was. There was no one on the road. I couldn’t see a thing through the dense fog, neither horse nor landscape. Only some blue patch in the sky that would appear now and then accompanied me through the uncomfortable atmosphere. I had a map that was supposed to show the way, but my inner feeling of being lost was overwhelming. I began to sweat and deep anguish and despair built up inside. A black, oppressive and infinite loneliness spread over my heart. In the late afternoon I found a barn to spend the night. I lay down in the hay, looked to the ceiling beams and was grabbed by an irrepressible urge to end my life. The thoughts were racing around in my head and I just wanted to escape this nightmarish loneliness and this feeling of being driven. I don’t know any more how I managed to survive that night. I struggled to remain present and not to give in to the destructive impulses. In the early morning I left the barn and knew that now I could turn back. My ‘goal’ had been achieved for now. I had done what I had to do.

I hitchhiked the rest of the way, arrived at the place of pilgrimage where the three Maries⁽³⁾ were to be found, in the crypt below the altar room. They would be presented in May in a holy procession, richly adorned and embellished on a ship. Now they were just standing quite un-holy on a simple table, almost like a window decoration, and I couldn’t resist inspecting them more thoroughly. I lifted their robes, looked at all the rosaries, read the countless notes full with inscriptions of gratitude and inspected all the other things that had accumulated over the decades. Upstairs in the church the floors were being cleaned and waxed by industrious women for the Christmas celebration. All of a sudden I found my sense of humor again, and I had to restrain myself from doing something really stupid with the statues.

After that I went to the beach. The entire coast was totally engulfed by fog. One couldn’t even see the water - only the passionless little waves splashing so insignificantly against the shore were visible. I sat down in the sand, shaking my head, overcome by spontaneous joy and had to think of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days’ (4). A deep and liberating laughter arose suddenly from my throat.

Nothing was happening here. And probably nothing so-called ‘holy’ or special ever happened. The place was empty, filled only with faith, just like me.

I went to the nearest café and bought four croissants, then hopped on the next bus. In the evening of December twenty-fourth I got on the night train back home, moving through the papal city of Avignon, feverish with pre-Christmas shopping.

I adored my work with the severely disabled children. I could understand them although none could speak or express themselves. I couldn’t comprehend the sorrows and awkwardness that these children triggered in most people who got in touch with them or those who avoided contact with them. They lived in a completely different world and we could not really judge their degree of happiness or misery. The work with the children and with my colleagues required a minimal amount of social engagement. In my house, however, I completely lost any kind of control over my eating habits. The toilet bowl was now my place of worship and my truth. Nobody knew or even had the slightest idea about my bulimia. I determined periods of fasting, then overate and threw up. Place and time didn’t matter. I was doing it everywhere.

The end of my civil service was coming close. I had never desired a normal professional career. Money as such didn’t mean much to me. It could be there or not there, I didn’t care. I didn’t need much for living and I never really missed anything.

I needed to take off again. Had to be traveling. Away. Away from my eating- vomiting- disorder. Away from western culture and away from the world dominated by men.

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

‘The Depth Is not in you, the Depth Is in Me.’

Adi Da

Although I had never read any books about India and its religions were alien to me, I was pulled to go exactly there. The people who have invented yoga could not be all bad. In preparation, I bought four maps of the entire Indian subcontinent, a Hindu dictionary, and in a lengthy procedure I sewed an outfit of a troubadour for myself. I composed my will in which I bequeathed my belongings to my friends. I took off in October 1987, shortly before my twenty-third birthday for Mumbai, back then called Bombay, with no particular destination in mind.

I landed at the airport in Mumbai, situated in the middle of the slums and there I experienced my first deep disappointment. Never before have I seen so much misery and suffering, so much grief crowded together in an apparent infinity of space. The impoverished and neglected looking children of the slums had their noses glued to the windows of the airport building, and the policemen were shooing them away with harsh words. All my co-travelers were telling me to leave the city as soon as possible and I took their advice and went on the same day by bus to Goa. There I acclimatized in a quiet, beautiful, paradise-like bay, which was still untouched by tourism and felt very dreamy, with a fresh water lake surrounded by a huge banyan tree right behind the beach. On my first walk on the beach I met an Indian man with the name of Kali. He was a follower of the guru Babaji from Haidakhan who had just passed away. He gave me some suggestions about holy Hindu pilgrimage places, all of which I visited within the next few weeks. He also invited me to come to Babaji’s ashram in the Himalayas. In the night he would often sit by the fire praying, he chanted in honor of his goddess Kali whose name he bore. He didn’t let the flames go out day and night.

During my further travels to Hindu places of pilgrimage I generally slept outside or in the temples. The sadhus I met in many cases looked sorrowful and sick, scarred by the asceticism, and only a few had happy eyes. The suffering of women and children in the villages was terrible and merciless. The Untouchables were sleeping everywhere, and everywhere one could see women and children doing the heaviest road construction or road repair work. The Indian society was alien to me. How could a religion allow something like this? And at the same time, I was meeting more laughing and happy people than I have ever seen before anywhere.

After four weeks of traveling around I arrived at a nature reserve in South India, feeling quite disillusioned. I found sleeping accommodation with a German guy whose name was Klaus and who had married an Indian woman. He lived from growing pepper and from renting to tourists who stayed with him.

Even in India, throughout the whole time my daily place of worship was still the toilet bowl. As my desperation grew, I was filling many pages with writing in my dairy, but I was living the same life as in Germany. There was no escape. I was not looking for an ashram, or a guru, I wanted to be free.

One night I was sitting on the porch in the full moon night, with the three-meter high pepper shrubs in front of me. Once again I was overcome by the almost compulsive desire to put an end to this life, to just go mad and leave the body. I just couldn’t stand it any more. Everything ached from the incessant overeating and throwing up, and I had an infection in my mouth, which I got from greedily eating unripe papayas. I wrote and pleaded imploringly, praying to the moon goddess, and I managed to survive yet another night.

The following morning Klaus told me about Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation technique that he had encountered in a meditation center in Igatpuri, a village near Mumbai. There, all of a sudden, was a way out. The same evening I packed my stuff and took off in a hurry. The journey took me more than 2000 kilometers from Kerala, a state in the south of India, all the way up north to the Indian state of Maharashtra and the small village of Igatpuri, some five hours east of Mumbay by bus. Day and night I was traveling by bus, and thanks

to the support of many friendly people I managed to arrive there in time for the beginning of the meditation course in the morning. The last part of the bus ride led through an extremely wide plain bordered by a very large mountain range. The sky was radiantly blue and clear. Sleeping Indian people surrounded me, wrapped up in their blankets and scarves, in order to protect themselves from the early morning chill while the bus went jolting along the ramshackle road. In a little town about two hours before my destination a young man got on the bus. He was dressed in dark red clothes. He set next to me. We started a conversation and he told me that he was on his way to Ganeshpuri ⁽⁵⁾ to the ashram of his guru, a woman whom he called Gurumayi. I couldn’t understand a thing he said. Ganeshpuri seemed to be a village that was only a few kilometers further than Igatpuri. He took out a picture album and showed me colored images of Gurumayi. She was also dressed all in red, and looked very beautiful, erotic and sublime. During the remainder of our conversation he begged me more and more imploringly to come along with him to Ganeshpuri to see his guru. I still couldn’t understand what he actually wanted from me, and I refused his pleas in a friendly but determined manner. As I was leaving the bus the man began to cry. Tears were flowing down his face. He looked at me with disappointment through the bus windows as the bus continued honking on its way.

I soon forgot the strange encounter on the bus and I rushed up to the meditation center, which was situated above the town. The streets and alleys were filled with the noise coming from the honking cars and many speakers playing Hindi popular music. A huge pagoda with a high golden spire dominated the Buddhist center. At that time the center could hold several hundred people in one meditation course. After registration I was asked in a friendly manner to change my clothes as I was dressed in my troubadour outfit, which was very extrovert. I was given a lunghi ⁽⁶⁾ and a simple T-shirt to wear for the duration of the course. This Vipassana course was taught in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin and his disciple Goenka, who had brought this forgotten meditation practice from Burma back to India. It took place over a period of ten days, in total silence. The participants sit in meditation in a special hall where they receive instruction from both men and women teachers, practicing from very early in the morning to late at night. Everything happens in silence and in a sitting position. The first three days of meditation consist of Anapana, the observation of the breath as it flows in and out. In this way the attention is sharpened and the mind becomes quieter. From the fourth day onwards the Vipassana technique is taught. The meditators begin to observe the body, the emotions and the thoughts in a certain manner that becomes increasingly finer. This is how Anicca ⁽⁷⁾ is revealed – the understanding that everything comes and goes.

I immediately felt at home. I no longer wanted to run away. My favorite part was the silence and the temporary freedom from the responsibility for my eating disorders. The meals were served in the morning and in the evening, in the afternoons there was only fruit available, and that was all. The meditation sittings started in the early morning hours, interrupted only by short breaks and meal times, and went on into the late evening. Then we were given instructions for the next day.

I followed the discipline and the rules exactly, and I even stepped it up by extending my sitting sessions. Through the application of my will I wanted to break through the limitations of physical pain and psychological despair.

On the fourth day the image that I have had of myself completely collapsed. I gave up my pointless self-flagellation. I recognized my deep contempt for human life. I clearly saw my impulse to self-destruction and my hidden cynicism. It was a fundamental and harrowing metamorphosis, as if layers and masks were being peeled off from the body. I was afraid that everybody in the center could now see that up until now I had been merely wearing a mask of friendliness and that underneath that false surface there slumbered a categorical contempt for all things material and superficial. However all the other participants, hundreds of them, were having similar experiences, and I had to laugh about my newly acquired concerns. I had no more visions nor spiritual states. My gorging attacks finished quite abruptly. However, I felt the anxieties and the joys of the world more intensely than ever before. After the course I left this wonderful place as a different person. It was called Damma Giri and was the headquarters of the Vipassana academy. It was very difficult for me to leave, and I had no idea how I was going to get on with life now. A strange flickering sensation was now surrounding my body and just to look at another human being gave me great trouble.

I sat on a simple wooden bench at the bus station of Igatpuri, deliberating on how to proceed from here. I spontaneously decided to drive into the desert of Rajasthan. There was also a Vipassana center in the city of Jaipur, which I wanted to visit later.

I had bought some different clothes for myself and now looked like a western sadhu. I gave away my old clothes.

The longer the journey into the desert lasted the more I felt uncertain and confused. What had happened? What did all this mean? It didn’t make any sense to meditate for such long periods of time. Sure, I felt so much better. But my fear of humans had actually only increased. The meditation had set free some forces, which I could not control any more. As the bus drove ever deeper into the desert of Rajasthan I felt how this strange flickering sensation was increasing in my whole body. As usual, I chose my destinations intuitively, very often just on a whim, because I liked the name of a place. Two days’ journey from Jaisalmer, the brilliant desert fortress in Rajasthan, I stopped in a small town and quickly bolted into a simple hotel for pilgrims. Minute by minute my own body felt increasingly unbearable. Slowly the next crisis was approaching. Lying on the bed of the hotel in the darkened room, I began to write again. Everything that came up in my thoughts I put it down on paper so I could understand what was going on. I lay down on the floor and continued writing. The scribbling became more and more illegible. In the end only wild strokes were covering the paper. I lost all control over my body and was just scratching the paper. Suddenly I found myself, half willingly, half pushed, doing a headstand, and my mind seemed to plummet, circling and falling into infinity. This had to be the entrance into madness. That thought quickly arose as the room started to spin and colored circles swirled around me. But I was not afflicted by madness.

Suddenly love took hold of my heart, of my naked body, of the confused thoughts. At the very bottom of my crash I actually found love. The origin of everything is love. Everything is made of love, everything lived by it. This feeling spread into every cell. Love. It was so simple.

I immediately left the room and walked through the little town in wonder and amazement. To this day I still don’t know the name of that little town. I entered a chai-shop, which was empty, entirely painted in light-blue paint, and lit with bright neon lights. I stared out onto the street where it had, oddly enough, very lightly started to rain. Originally, everything is permeated by love. Everything. That is the only meaning of life. Love. The owner of the chai-sop beamed at me with huge eyes, as if he had known this all along, and I smiled back. I went back to the hotel, packed my things and took the next bus early in the morning.

In Ajmer, my next stop, I left the bus and walked through the city. Over time I had gotten used to being stared at, but this time something very strange happened. I had just sat down at a table in a chai-shop located in the middle of a very large plaza, as more and more people evidently started pressing around my table. After a while I realized that their eyes were on me and I looked up confused. A huge crowd of people had gathered around my table. A stately older man, proud and with piercing eyes and the typical moustache of a Rajasthani, appeared beside me, and asked me in an energetic manner to come along with him. This was not the right place for me. I should avoid such places. I told him that I didn’t want to buy anything, didn’t want to see anything ‘on any account’ and that I would much rather stay here instead. Finally, however, he convinced me and led me through the curious crowd to his shop, which was in a narrow street. The shop was filled to the brim with antiques and jewelry from Rajasthan. Tea was served, and we sat through several hours together while he showed me all his treasures in the shop. When we were parting he again told me to avoid places with lots of people, and then he brought his two young sons to me so I could say good-bye to them. In the same manner, the remainder of that journey was filled with more extraordinary circumstances in which total strangers invited me graciously into their homes.

I was so happy to be able to finally withdraw into the meditation center in Jaipur.

This place of meditation, called Dhamma Mahi, is situated in a very quiet valley and is much smaller than the Vipassana academy of Igatpur, and when I arrived, there were only a few meditators. The center was behind a small hill called the Monkey Hill that towers over Jaipur, with a simple temple on top of it where the sadhus and the babas are chanting to God Rama day and night. On this little mountain live hundreds of so-called holy monkeys, which are fed by truckloads of bananas. Up on the hill the view encompasses the entire city of Jaipur and the extraordinary Maharaja palace, ‘The Palace of Winds’, painted in entirely in pink. To the right the enormous Nahargath Fortress towers over the entire city. The noise rising up from the city is deafening. Behind the Monkey Hill on the long walk to the Vipassana center there is an ancient dilapidated temple and a beautiful park full of flowers inhabited by screaming peacocks and wild parrots.

The meditation center in the hills of Jaipur also has a pagoda that can accommodate about one hundred meditators. There was a great silence in the valley, which was disturbed only by the screeching of the parrots early in the morning. I began a so-called self-course, which had the same daily rhythm that I was already familiar with, but which had to be organized by myself without any teachers or instructors. My meditation sittings were interrupted only by a couple of hours of daily gardening work. Aside from the caretaker I was the only person in the center. All in all I spent nearly five weeks in this center, and signed up for two more guided meditation courses lasting ten days each, and basically spent the entire time in meditation.

I left this quiet place towards the end of January together with a friend whom I had met in the center. The muscles in my entire body were so relaxed that I could barely hold a pencil. All my obsessions were gone. My eating habits were totally normal. Also, the impulse to want to escape from the world and its challenges was no longer there. I felt cleansed. It felt extraordinary to be able to allocate my attention once again to the normal hustle and bustle of the world.

Together we decided to travel into the interior of the country, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We traveled by train along the Narmada River. A few kilometers outside the city of Bhopal we took a bus, which took us into the mountain region that is now called Satpura National Park. My companion was very familiar with this region, as he had been living in India for the last fifteen years. He was certainly double my age, and had previously been a junkie. He had successfully overcome his drug addiction with the help of the Vipassana meditation. We drove deeper and deeper into the mountains, and in a small town on a high plateau we bought food supplies for two weeks. Then we started hiking into the middle of the Indian jungle to a place called ‘Shiva Mundi’, ‘The Silence of Shiva’, by the original indigenous people, the Gond-Baba of the Adivasi tribes ⁽⁸⁾. Shiva is one of the few gods whom the non-Hindu tribe Gond-Baba also worships. According to the legend, a demon was chasing Shiva in this area and he leapt from hill to hill, leaving his traces everywhere. Now these are places of worship and ritual. This entire region is littered with caves and cult sites that can be traced far back into the early history of mankind, where the people of the Stone Age were already living. In many of these caves one can find cave paintings of the Stone Age. Years later I learnt that Hindu and Buddhist monks were already using these sites as meditation and retreat sanctuaries centuries ago.

Because the indigenous people regard trees as sacred there are enormous ancient specimens of immense strength overwhelming majesty everywhere.

We cut across through very high and dense bamboo forests and encountered some mango trees, which were of enormous size and in whose crowns the monkeys were shrieking and romping around dangerously. In one of the main holy places in Shiva’s honor we once again refilled our food supplies and again saw dozens of caves, many of which were adorned by an erect black cobra carved from stone, a mark of Shiva. We criss-crossed on some difficult paths deeper and deeper into the jungle and finally found the place we were looking for.

An Indian Baba looked after this place in the middle of the jungle. It consisted of twenty to thirty small and large caves spread along the mountain ridge. Some of the places and caves were accessible only by a rope ladder. This place was dedicated only for meditation and was surrounded by deep silence. The cave of the baba was at the foot of a ravine and was in that way centrally located as a kind of a reception. An enormous palisade made of tree trunks surrounded his cave and protected it from leopards, tigers and other wild cats, for which this jungle was a habitat. At a first glance the Shiva Baba was completely neurotic and crazy. His eyes were somewhat brightened and totally veiled by the incessant smoking of marijuana. He was very friendly and made sure that we did not get disturbed during our retreat in this secluded area. He presented us with some tea as a welcome present.

We chose the last big cave, which reached deep into the mountain at the very end of a steep ravine and set up our camp place. All the items of everyday life had to be carried up through scattered boulders and paths carved in the stone. Every day we carried water with great effort up the hill in buckets after climbing down thirty minutes to a fabulously beautiful river. The same for fire wood. We had to keep the flames going throughout the entire night, because wild animals were swarming the place all around us. This included some really big wild cats, one of which had attacked a local and had injured him badly just a few days previously. We hung our food supplies on ropes from the rock ceiling. In spite of this the rodents of the night were trying to catch their share by jumping up high like acrobats.

We slept directly next to the fire at the entrance to the cave. Veiled in twilight at the very back of our accommodation there stood a man-size black cobra hewn from the rock. The Gond-Babas, gracefully moving around the forest carrying their axes and the machetes, would visit our cave every few days and put flower malas around the snake and perform Puja. They hardly took notice of our presence there and simply went about their business.

We would alternate watching the fire during the night and in the early morning hours our meditation would begin. Everything was done in silence, without speaking. All of this was an unprecedented challenge for the body and the mind. In the beginning we would meditate in the morning in the cave or on the platform in front of the cave overlooking the green valley that stretched before us. Every day after lunch we would descend, take a bath in the river and sit on the river-bank in meditation until evening. We did nothing else but observe everything that was happening inside the body just allowing it to come and go. After a few days I heard the voice of the river echo in my ears as a melodious symphony. It felt like a hug. I would sit for hours without the slightest movement and slowly an immense sadness, stirred by the song of the river, arose in the depths of my heart. What was I doing here?

As always I was sitting directly by the water when I suddenly became aware of death, my own and that of others. I was overcome by the memory of the death of my father, in all its horror and its repercussions, which I had experienced as a five-year-old child

Absolutely nothing had changed. The principles (laws) of the world were still the same as before. I could not escape them, not even through ceaseless meditation. I wept incessantly. My companion was slowly becoming uneasy, in spite of all his years of meditation practice, as my grief would not end. Just as before, when I was overeating and throwing up, I was now addicted to endless meditation in order to somehow master my existence, in order not to have to feel this basic knowledge of death. Other people could anaesthetize this unconscious notion with career, money, women, men, by having retirement insurance and fire insurance, and other kind of insurances. I didn’t have to have these illusions.

I had never referred to the Eastern spiritual paths as such, because I never knew exactly what spirituality is or what a path is, and because I had never cared to think about these things, but obviously they also had no real solution at hand. Some dissatisfaction and unrest, some pleading prayers, and an endless battle always remained. Why should I still stay here?

The following day we spontaneously terminated our meditation retreat. I had already decided to return to Germany as fast as possible. Halfway back to civilization we again stopped at the bank of a river, which flowed into the Narmada River somewhere down the mountain in the valley. This was our last day in the mountains. We would have to go through enormous effort to reach this magical secluded spot, radiating fairytale-like beauty and stillness, once again. The river was still very narrow at this spot, high up in the mountains, and we had to circumvent big boulders eroded to roundness. The water flowed in absolute silence and serenity through the jungle. The night descended. The full moon slowly rose up in the sky, reflected in the water. Bit by bit the reflection of the moon approached the shore where I was sitting. My body was totally exhausted from the exertion of the hike. Upon arrival I had just let myself fall onto the rock and lay motionless for a long time. I was finished.

Now I was sitting next to the fire, my companion had already gone to sleep. The moon was shining huge and bright and seemed to express more truth then my entire ruminating. My whole dilemma had revealed itself again just a few hours earlier when we visited a place that didn’t seem of this world. It was alongside a lake, which lay in front of a huge cliff wall. Below the cliff there was an old village of the Gond-Baba, who had built their houses right in front of the Stone Age caves. Right at the waterline there was a huge fire. Dusk was falling, and the people gathered around the fire. We were climbing down into the ravine along a narrow path hewn into the cliff where Shiva had visibly manifested himself in the rock. Yogis and ascetics were sitting in the cliff niches on narrow projections. Laughing, they called out words to us, made jokes and gave us incense, ash and Prasad. The path took us deeper into the canyon. At the end of our path a space opened up, completely adorned with flowers, incense and candles. In front of Shiva and Parvati were standing, united in a dance, shrouded in the deep blue atmosphere of a natural cave. Everything seemed to be alive and vibrating. I sat down in the midst of the evident devotion and reverence of this place and the dance of consciousness and energy.

How did consciousness and energy fit together? How could I embrace this world and be happy at the same time? Why were there always two? How could one ever accept the death of the beloved?

I received no answer despite this incredible fullness and the breath-taking otherworldly atmosphere. In my opinion the ancient peoples of this earth had also not found any useful solutions.

The slowly gliding river in front of me didn’t seem to move. I again looked at the full round disc of the moon reflected in the water at my feet and simultaneously at the sky. Who was reflecting whom?

I didn’t want to be an ascetic, hostile to the body. I didn’t want to have to chasten myself, just to find the truth, only to somehow be able to endure all of this. The lunar disc came closer and closer and seemed to laugh as the water rippled in waves on the shore. Fucking questions! I smiled back at the moon and lay down to sleep, totally exhausted.

The next morning we packed our few belongings together for the last time. I forgot and left my little bells, which I had always worn on my feet in the jungle because of the snakes, between the rocks. A very peculiar man had invited us to a breakfast. He lived near the river, and I was very much looking forward to it. Already from a distance we could see him in front of his house. He had his feet up, was sitting on his veranda dressed in a military combat uniform and greeted us politely. My meditation companion had told me earlier that we were about to meet a tantric guru, and supposedly he was able to perform all kinds of supernatural things in the river. This man was also looking after the people in the village, he found work for them, and was making sure that the village was kept clean and that the kids went to school. Just now there was a group of villagers gathered around the television set watching an Indian soap of the Mahabharata⁽⁹⁾. While he was having a conversation with us, ever smiling, and repeatedly encouraging us to eat, he chanted mantras incessantly between the words: ‘Ram, Ram, Ram, Sita-Ram’. The entire time he was rocking back and forth on his chair and he told us that during the war with Pakistan he had to kill a lot of people. This was the most ‘unholy of appearances’ that I had ever encountered in India, and for some reason it felt good to me. I felt his bright love, his respect and his truthful interest and compassion as I had never previously felt with any other human being. His eyes were glowing like headlights. While he laughed about our meditation practice, he simultaneously praised it, and as we were leaving he gave us the advice to find a guru if we wanted to avoid spending many more lifetimes in meditation. We also laughed and left the place highly delighted.

We took the next bus down to Bhopal. There we went our separate ways. My meditation friend went to Orissa on the Indian East Coast, and I was never to see him again. I took the train to Delhi in order to fly back to Germany with the next possible airplane. Three days later I landed in Frankfurt airport. It was spring, 1988, and I was twenty-three years old.

My ‘Skirt’ Time

‘Not-Two Is My Characteristic. No-“other“ Is My Characteristic.’

Adi Da

The arrival was a very unique experience, worthy of a Shakespearean comedy. I had completely forgotten how totally different this western world was. There I stood at the arrival terminal, after just having passed through the passport checkpoint, staring, totally flabbergasted. There was an unbelievable hustle and bustle and all the people around me seemed to be running. Some people were staring at me and were obviously turning up their noses at me. I was carrying a faded cloth bag that looked like a sack wrapped around me, on which a coconut shell serving as a drinking cup dangled. On my naked feet I was wearing worn-out Indian slippers. A faded red skirt that I had sewn myself was wrapped around my legs, and around my torso was wound in an old, threadbare linen blanket of natural color, which had served me faithfully on all occasions. I was wearing on a string around my neck a biggish piece of wood in form of a vagina, which I had found in the jungle by the river. I looked like a young Catweasel ⁽¹⁰⁾, who had landed in a wrong century. The smell of perfume and plastic was unbearable. The restless gray-blue coats and the business suits that were hurrying around just didn’t make any sense in my brain any more.

I entered the arrival terminal and sat down in the closest restaurant that did not appear too exclusive and I ordered – water. When I saw the doubtful but friendly look on the waitress I realized that my clothes must have an incredibly strong smell of fire, food, and Indian soap. My entire body, each cell in me smelled of India and jungle and meditation. I probably looked like it too. I got up and looked for the rest rooms – perhaps I should take a look at my appearance. I left all my things behind at the table in the restaurant and took the escalator down to the lower floor. I had scarcely found the rest rooms, grinning at my image in the mirror, sitting down on the toilet seat, honestly admiring the German cleanliness, and holding my head in my hands trying to comprehend where I had landed, when I suddenly heard my name being called through the speakers. Yes, it had to be me. I was to come immediately to the security service point.

Partly in panic, and partly laughing, I let my skirt back down and looked for the service point. Several gentlemen and a friendly woman were already waiting there. They were holding my luggage in their hands. Everything was unpacked and they were also holding my passport and some other stuff. What was to come now? Are you Mr. Petrus Faller? What a question. I nodded and laughed. You are not allowed to leave your pieces of luggage in a restaurant. And your passport has to be on your person at all times. I was back. This was definitely the western civilization. I grinned and pointed out to the gentlemen that without the passport they would not have found me. I packed my stuff and walked away with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t tell these people that everything was impermanent and that death will also come for them one day.

I went to a phone and called a woman friend of mine, who could not believe that I had made it back again. While waiting for her to pick me up I went into the nearest supermarket but did not know what to buy. In the end I decided to buy items that were part of my former habit of overeating and vomiting. I sat down in the arrival terminal on a bench. There I spread out all the food carefully on my lap ready to show it to everybody. After the first few bites I had to stop. This world had to be mastered differently. I allowed the urge to feel contempt pass and then threw most of the food into the trash bin. I lay down on the bench and fell asleep exhausted, trusting that my woman friend would find me.

It took more than half a year to acclimatize myself again. I slept on the veranda outdoors or with the windows wide open. The walls in enclosed spaces seem to crush me. My senses seemed to have become so refined that I could literally smell fear. I read clearly what was going on in other people’s thoughts. I saw their hidden emotions and I could feel if they had just had sex. Much of the stuff that people normally hid behind their social and acquired behaviors was like an open book to me.

So I preferred to stay at home, did my daily yoga and meditation practice and gradually settled down. I first made myself some new outfits, long and flowing. For a small amount of money I leased a piece of land so I could grow my own vegetables. I resumed the renovation of my house, put in a pond, planted flowers and herbs in the garden and gave away my car, a Fiat 500 Bambini. I enjoyed the quiet life of a hermit and worked once a week in a health-food store. The wages for my work I got paid out in food. I had an additional small income through producing and selling herbal oils and natural clothes. I was the picture book Muesli-Man - drop out hippy.

Money had never been a high priority in my life. During my childhood my mother’s monthly income was just enough to last us exactly a month. In my youth I would take various summer vacation jobs to fatten up my pocket money. I financed my journey to India with savings I had made during the time of my apprenticeship and civil service. My journey hardly made a dent in those savings. Money was not a priority in which I invested much energy and it was not attractive to me, as neither in general was the rest of normal life. I participated in it to a degree, but it did not really interest me.

In that way, on an emotional level, I completely missed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I was living in a kind of a pseudo-nirvana and had the feeling that it was time to go into an early pre-retirement. I was still reading a lot of books, mainly dealing with old myths, cultures and religions, which saw the feminine principle as the primary doorway to truth and happiness. Although I was practicing a Buddhist meditation technique, that went back all the way to the teachings of Gautama the Buddha, I had to put away the scriptures about the basics of mindfulness pretty much after a very short attempt to study them. My mind just did not want to absorb anything, and even after several attempts it was clearly futile. The same was the case with the ancient Vedas, the religious scriptures of the Hindus. This was not my world, and something inside of me was rebelling, but I could not grab hold of what it was. All this was just too structured and too thought through – too cerebral. What about the heart and human love?

When I was a child it was absolutely clear to me that I did not have to do anything in order to be happy or to just BE. Absolutely nothing! There was a sentence by Lao-tzu in my decaying school notes: “The path is eternally without doing, but nothing remains undone’.

This was pretty much how I felt. However, the western world constantly demanded that happiness is to be found in objects and the frenzy of consumerism. Similar to the pathology of bulimia this western philosophy could be summarized with one technical term: “Devour”. The spiritual paths wanted to get rid of the matter or, at any rate, saw a serious problem in it and were striving for emptiness or becoming one with something from which one is basically separate and which goes beyond matter. To stay with the terminology of bulimia one could summarize it with: ‘Vomit out’. Neither of these approaches really satisfied me, however I became a bit more relaxed.

At this point I attempted to work on the dramas of my childhood, and left the really big topics aside. The books of Krishnamurti also had a calming effect on my psyche. They strengthened my conviction that I had already experienced everything that is important.