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Shivabalayogi in 1956.
The photograph was probably taken on Mahashivaratri
day.
Below: Hindi Master at the Adivarapupeta ashram in 2000.
Hindi Master
Sri Bikkina Venkata Suryanarayana Sreeramamurthy taught school in Chodavaram, a small town near Adivarapupeta. He taught some Hindi, which is why everyone called him Hindi Master. He became a fixture at the Adivarapupeta ashram. He was the leader of the bhajan group and he ruled it with a bit of an iron hand. Maybe having been a school teacher made him a little surly, because he could be gruff with the villagers. Actually, it was a bit of a show and he liked teasing people.
After Swamiji entered mahasamadhi, and before the old ashram building was torn town, Hindi Master lived in what was the cramped front room that served as the ashram office. Every morning he would wake early, put away his thin bedroll, bathe, and then do puja to Swamiji’s Samadhi, the tomb where Swamiji's body is resting, which was the main room next to the office. No matter who might be trying to meditate there, he chanted and sang as he cleared up the Samadhi, decorating it with fresh flowers, ringing bells and burning camphor.
He passed away a few years ago.
Hindi Master came to Swamiji on Mahashivaratri day, the only day of the year that Swamiji gave public darshan. Swamiji was still in tapas, meditating facing North. By 1956 when Hindi Master first visited, the upstairs room in the Dhyana Mandir had been completed. Swamiji would be carried up there and people filed by for darshan.
Hindi Master became close to Swamiji through M. G. Kabbe and Rumale Chennabasaiah, two devotees of Tapaswiji Maharaj. After Tapaswiji visited the Adivarapupeta in 1951, he publicly praised Swamiji who was meditating 23 hours every day. On August 7, 1957, Swamiji completed tapas in all four directions. For the next four years, he meditated only twelve hours every day. It was during that time that Kabbe, Rumale and Hindi Master used to meditate with Swamiji in the Dhyana Mandir.
Hindi Master would come to the ashram after he finished his work at the school where he taught. He would arrive at about six-thirty or seven in the evening and Kabbe and Rumale would be here. The three would then enter Swamiji’s room and Swamiji would ask them to do meditation. In the morning, Hindi Master would leave the ashram to teach.
Swamiji had asked them to increase the meditation day by day, but Hindi Master and Rumale could do only one hour. Swamiji promised that if they reached a level of twelve hours a day they would get the power to travel to any world (loka).
Kabbe kept increasing it, one hour, one hour and a half, two, two and a half, then three. As Kabbe reached the level of twelve hours, he started traveling to other worlds. Swamiji told him he would see some messages as if written on a blackboard. Kabbe would get up from meditation and describe the message to Swamiji. The other two would write it down and these notes were saved by Rumale. [They were among Swamiji’s papers that he made available in 1994. TLP] The messages were like lines from the Upanishads. Swamiji told him that he would get 105 messages, but Kabbe could get only 85 messages over the period from 1959 to 1963. His father came and took him away to get married.
Hindi Master would describe how, during the late 1950’s, Bhag Singh Lamba first had Swamiji’s darshan. Lamba thought he had attained something through his spiritual practices. He came to Adivarapupeta for Mahashivaratri, then he wrote a book, Spiritual Science published in 1961.
Hindi Master was with Swamiji in Dodballapur in 1963,when trance — bhava samadhi — was still new. The scene that Hindi Master saw there, he told us, cannot be explained in words. All of them were in trance, young and old.
Adivarapupeta bhajans in 1963
(Above: Hindi Master, bottom center, is looking at the camera)
and in 2008 (below)
Lamba was also there in Dodballapur. Until then, Lamba had thought that all the spiritual experiences he was having were through the power of his own meditation. Lamba used to massage people, and his massages were very effective giving people relief from pain. He would place his hand on a person’s head and that person would have an experience. It was only in Dodballapur that he realized that there was something called trance. He realized that he had been getting trance and it was the trance that was really doing everything.
Once Hindi Master invited Lamba to Chodavaram. Hindi Master arranged for bhajans, and only when the bhajans were going would Lamba get trance and find himself curing people.
Completion of Tapas
“Several of us received indications that the tapas was complete. Before I went to sleep on the night of the 31st, I meditated as usual. Faintly I could see Shiva and Parvati in front of Swamiji. That morning when I and some other devotees quietly entered the Swamiji’s room, we found him in ordinary consciousness. Swamiji told us that the gods had come to him that night and his tapas would be completed in a week. It was then that I realized the significance of the vision Swamiji had given me the night before.”
Hindi Master talked about the public message that Shivabalayogi gave on the day he completed twelve years of tapas, and how the crowd could not understand what Swamiji meant by traveling to the world of the sun. He still had copies of the Telugu language flyers that were printed and circulated the following day. They had a picture of Swamiji and the text of his speech.
Hindi Master had also saved a tattered copy of another flyer, probably printed by the Mummidivaram ashram, with photos of the seven balayogis who sat in tapas in that general area. Hindi Master knew that Swamiji was the only one who completed twelve years and mastered all four directions, and Mummidivaram Balayogi completed twelve years facing east. He also knew a little of the history of the other five balayogis and he had known Pichaya, who had taken Shivabalayogi's initiation into tapas.
If you would like to hear Hindi Master leading a bhajan, listen to shri balayogisha, the fourth bhajan in the Adivarapupeta for Mahashivaratri collection on the Adivarapupeta Bhajan page on the Handloom website. It was recorded the same afternoon Shivabalayogi returned to Adivarapupeta for the last time in 1994.