And The Heart Is Mine. Petrus Faller

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