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

      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