(from Goddess and the Guru):
Though based in Bombay, Guruji’s work took him all over India, meeting with scientists, industrialists and intellectuals across the country. One seemingly typical business trip in 1977 found him in Hyderabad, visiting the Electronics Corporation of India for discussions on mini-computer programs. But back in his hotel room near Nampally Station (a local name for Hyderabad Deccan Station), Guruji felt inexplicably restless. After tossing and turning through several hours of fitful sleep, Guruji finally gave up and decided to step outside for some fresh air.
“I went out at about 4 a.m. and started walking aimlessly,” he recalled. “It was quite cool. I eventually arrived at a stairway on a hill made by the Birlas, called Naubath Pahad (‘Turning-Point Hill’).1 There was a temple of Balaji glowing brightly on top;2 on the way up there was a Hanuman Temple. My early childhood flashed by like a film reel in my mind’s eye.”
Guruji was reminded of the old Hanuman Temple opposite the Prabhat Talkies Theater in Vizag, where he used to go with his friends for prasadam (a divinely blessed food offering) as a child. He had never really frequented temples since those days, and now, in his mid-40s, he maintained no particular religious beliefs or practices. “I was not exactly an atheist,” he said. “Rather, I was neutral—I considered religion as ‘not my domain.’ I had developed, let us say, a highly questioning attitude toward it, almost bordering on the irreligious, to the point where I was unable to identify myself with any rituals or activities like that. I used to think, ‘What is the need to believe in something that is a fact? You only need to believe in something if it is not a fact.’ I also used to think, ‘Why should I believe something that I don’t experience? God is not verifiable! I don’t see God, do I? So why should I believe in God?’ Such was my attitude. Pure arrogance of science.”
Amma recalled that when their daughter Radha was born in 1963, “she was a blue baby and Guruji’s mother was afraid. She prayed to Lord Venkateswara, saying, ‘If you make her well, I will come to Tirupati!’ Guruji got annoyed and said, ‘Why do you always try to bargain with God?’ Even when his mother finally completed her promised visit to Tirupati almost 12 years later, Guruji was still not interested in entering the temple. But then, in 1977, Balaji himself called him inside…”
Indeed, Guruji suddenly felt almost as if he were being pushed from behind as he mounted the steps toward the brightly lit temple above. Halfway up, at the Hanuman Temple, “I took the vermillion, put it on my forehead and continued further up,” he said. “It was 5:30 or 6 a.m. by that time; early morning, misty. Music was playing. There were, I think, four or five people ahead of me waiting for darshan [the ritual viewing of a deity]. An old man prostrated before Balaji—who is a female goddess in a male form; female on the inside, male on the outside—and for some reason I was prompted to prostrate also. The old man’s gesture acted as a trigger for me to do the same. It was quite unusual for me. I was not the type to prostrate before an icon, a symbol. I did it without consciously knowing what I was doing.”
As he did so, however, a sensation gripped him like nothing he had ever experienced before.
“I felt a thrill passing through me that lasted about 10 or 15 minutes, I think,” he said. “I really lost all sense of time. You know how sometimes you get an experience of horripilation, where every hair stands on end? This thrill ran even deeper than that; it was something entirely new. Every atom in my body was thrilling. I was transported to a different plane of existence—an ecstatic state.”
As he had in his first childhood vision, Guruji experienced the entire universe spinning rapidly around him in a broad vortex, steadily drawn into him at its center. Before he could even begin to process what was happening, Balaji appeared before him, saying in a soft but clear voice, “I am Lord Venkateswara; I am Bala, Balaji and Bala Tripurasundari” (the final appellation usually referring to the child form of the goddess Lalita, who is central to the Sri Vidya tradition that Guruji would later embrace). Balaji then intoned:
oṁ pūrṇam adaḥ pūrṇam idaṁ
pūrṇāt pūrṇam udacyate
pūrṇasya pūrṇam ādāya
pūrṇam evāvaśiṣyate
From the whole arises the whole,
From the complete arises the complete.
Deducting the whole from the whole,
The whole alone remains
When the vision ended, Guruji slowly stood and looked around himself, somewhat disoriented and only gradually realizing that less than half an hour had elapsed since he entered the sanctum. Nonetheless, he felt profoundly changed. Something revelatory had happened, some sort of epiphany—but he was at a loss to say exactly what it was. “If I told someone else about it, they might have shrugged it off, like, ‘Come on, you must be kidding,’” he said. “But the experience was undeniable to me. I knew Balaji had come to me, and I considered it as diksha, a formal initiation. At that moment, it is fair to say, Bala became my first spiritual guru.”
Lost in the wonder of the moment, Guruji walked out of the temple and slowly made his way back down the stairs to the street. “I made a mental note to myself,” he said. “Yes, maybe I am missing something by not worrying about my religion and ignoring the spiritual aspects of life. I must look into it.”
With the benefit of hindsight, many of Guruji’s disciples today point to his experience at Balaji Temple as the pivotal moment that transformed him from scientist to spiritual teacher. Guruji did not entirely disagree: “Then and there,” he would later affirm, “I decided that whatever life was left in me I should utilize for the welfare of everyone, and definitely not for destruction.”
But at the time, there were few outward signs to indicate that any change had happened at all. “Strangely, there was nothing much,” Amma said. When Guruji told her about the incident, “all I could think was, ‘Oh, he did a full prostration to Balaji? That’s odd. He would usually never do that.’”
But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Balaji Temple experience marked the beginning of an internal shift that would gradually transform the way in which Guruji related to the world. “In some sense, it added fuel to the fire of an inward-looking process, which began around that time,” he said. “So it did indeed mark a turning point in my life, from a search for truth in the external direction to a search for truth in an inward direction. Perhaps moments of enlightenment only really come when there is a deep conflict.”
In the years that followed, Guruji would continue to experience frequent visions of Lord Balaji, albeit usually in the female form of the child goddess Bala Tripurasundari. But while these encounters would open his mind to vast depths of spiritual experience, Guruji said, his original vision at Hyderabad was the primary goad, intensifying his sense of dissatisfaction with his life and priorities as they then stood.
“At the Balaji Temple,” he said, “I was given an experience—a jolt that made me question my attitudes. Why had I devoted so much time, passion and energy to my profession, and so little to my spiritual life? I thought, ‘Why don’t I investigate what is happening in my mind?’”
In a way, he reasoned, meditation was just another form of structured scientific observation, but with one major difference.
“Unlike in scientific investigation, the object wasn’t something ‘out there’; it was me I was observing,” Guruji explained. “The observer is me—but the observed is also me. And the fact that I am observing would, in turn, make the observed observe me back. In other words, I have a say in what I am observing. The object and subject being the same, I can change the object even as the object is changing me.”
For Guruji, the revelation was ultimately life-altering.
“It was quite a new feeling,” he said. “It’s not at all the way we generally interact with the outside world. It was more like a mirroring participation between the seer and the seen. It felt like, ‘I am a part of the world, and the world a part of me. But how can the part also be the whole?’ That bit was bothering me. So anyway, I decided to explore my inner world.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Guruji commenced a regular practice of meditation, usually sitting late at night after the family had gone to sleep, and continuing until long after midnight. As an initial goal he tried to reaccess the transcendent sound he remembered from childhood, and was both surprised and pleased when it returned almost at once—if anything, stronger than ever.
“I would sit up on my bed at night, meditating at 2 o’clock in the morning while my wife was sleeping next to me,” he said. “I’d just listen to that humming sound coming from within me, which started out like the sound of a radio before the station comes on air, around 300 hertz, and then gradually went up into sharper frequencies, increasing in pitch as I observed it. I remembered hearing those sounds as a young boy, but now I realized that it wasn’t just a single frequency—it was a spectrum of audible frequencies, passing over into visible experiences.”
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| Guruji saw this image and commented on it, "Can You imagine how much violence exists in this picture of creating galaxies? |
For the first two days of these meditations, “nothing much happened; a little calm and peace descended upon me.” On the third night, however, he lost consciousness—then awoke to a sensation of terrifying disruption. “As I was waking from unconsciousness, there was suddenly a huge blast,” Guruji recalled. “I felt as if a bomb had been placed in my heart, and that—with a tremendous noise and unbearably bright light—I had exploded into bits and pieces, every particle of my body thrown off to the ends of the galaxies.”
The terrifying vision was, however, accompanied by what seemed almost certainly to be the message he had been seeking. “At the same moment, I saw a sort of screen before me, upon which about 10 Sanskrit stanzas were written. But before I could read even half of the first line—I remembered only that it was ‘Isavasyam idam sarvam’—it vanished, and I blanked out. When I woke up, I was really scared. I thought, ‘How could such a dangerous explosion take place in meditation? What would happen to my wife and daughters if I died? Who would look after them?’ Remember, I had lost my father at an early age, so I was thinking in those terms. And I decided then and there to stop all such dangerous activities.”
The sheer intensity of his visions made Guruji decide not to share them with his wife in any great detail just yet; he did not want to worry her unnecessarily. As a result, Amma said, she initially underestimated the transformation he was undergoing—because outwardly, once again, he was simply not showing any significant changes at all.
“Yes, sometimes he would awake from his meditations and say he was afraid,” she noted. “But I would usually tell him, ‘Just drink a little water and try to go back to sleep.’”
