My tryst with Samarpan Meditation

From my college days I had a curiosity and a bent of mind towards the spiritual. I did not have even a foggy idea of the meaning of spirituality, but I used to go and attend Swami Chinmayanand’s discourses on the Bhagwad Geeta, and because of my uncle being a Secretray to the Tribal Ministry, we got to travel with him and meet a lot of Saints. I had the fortune of being blessed by Gagangiri Maharaj at his Khopoli Ashram, had met whom we knew only as Navsari ke Baba who was a devotee of the Sun God and Swami Pranavanand at Chaalisgaon in Maharashtra. I guess I was blessed to meet these holy souls. I have always had a very powerful inner voice which I ignored in my youth and which always ended in my being a loser for not listening to the inner voice. Whatever trials and tribulations I have faced in life, I think were just preparation for me to be introduced to Samarpan Meditation as taught by Parampujya Swamiji.

A friend of mine and an ex-colleague, Mr. Ramnath Kamath came to my office at the instance of another friend to talk on meditation sometime in December 2008. I actually met Ramnath after almost twenty years. We talked and discussed meditation and other matters of the soul for an hour or so. He handed over CD’s of the Surat Shibir and a couple of other CD’s along with the introductory booklet on Samarpan Meditation. I took those CD’s and went home. The CD’s were just lying in the house for a month or so – sometime in January this year I reached home early and as only my mother was at home, I decided to listen to the CD on the home theatre system. The moment I started playing the CD, I was hooked, my eyes did not open for two hours, the duration of part 1 of the CD. The next day I came home early just to listen to the next part – on Muladhar chakra and again my eyes did not open for the entire duration of two hours. This time my family members, I sensed, were becoming uncomfortable, and I did not have the portable MP3 player, hence I stopped listening to the CD so as not disturb the balance at home. On February 1 my friend called me at around 4pm and asked me if I would like to attend the eight day camp on meditation which was being held at CIFE new campus at Versova. I work in Andheri East and at such short notice there was no way I could leave office and go, so I told him that I would come from the next day. So from February 2 I continuously attended the shibir along with my friend and my driver, Raju, – coincidentally it was a video shibir of Surat, the one I had already started listening to. The camp was from 6.30 to 8.30 which was a comfortable timing to leave office and reach CIFE.

On the fifth day, that is the day when Swamiji introduces the sadhaks to meditation and asks them to sit in the lotus position in the dhyan mudra with eyes shut and says that now you will experience something, cold waves on the hand, vibration, heat or nothing. My hands for five seconds or so went ice cold – like a block of ice was floating above them – after that I was hooked. The next day when I went to office I told my boss, that I had at last found my Gurudev. The next day during the course of the discourse, Swamiji mentioned that all you have to do is pray to Him for anything which is self less, not material and to alleviate the pain of someone else. Incidentally one of my office colleagues uncle was missing for the last four days or so and the uncle had a son who was to appear for his SSC examinations this year. The girl used to be very worried as the son had gone into depression and had stopped studying. That morning during my prayers, I prayed from the bottom of my heart to Parampujya Swamiji for this family to get news of the missing gentleman. I reached office at nine in the morning and was going through my e-mails, when at around 9.30 this girl comes online and informs me on Instant Messenger that they had just located her uncle somewhere in Nasik. I told myself that was really fast for a prayer to be answered – there are those who told me that this was just a coincidence but I choose to believe that it was through the power of prayer that this happened. If one does not have belief then I personally think it would be very difficult to progress spiritually. When at the end of the eight day camp I was asked to speak about my experience this is what I had cited.

After the eight day camp, we were told that we needed to do a follow up of 45 days of meditation to be eligible to be admitted to the Samarpan family. The timings were 5.30pm to 6pm at CIFE, my first reaction was that this won’t be possible and I asked our Acharya, rather naively, whether the timing could be changed, and he said no. I decided to leave early for office everyday so that I completed my due time in office. I decided to leave office everyday at 4.45 pm so as to reach by 5.30 pm and informed my boss accordingly. In normal days it takes about an hour to travel from Andheri East to Versova with all the construction activity of the Mumbai metro in progress – but you will not believe for those 45 days it took us (Raju and me) only 20 minutes to reach CIFE for meditation – it looked like the roads were kept free and signals open for us to reach well in time! I just missed two days – the first Sunday, when dhyan took place at 6.30 am and on another day I could not go because government officials were at the office and did not allow me to leave.

In these 45 days my entire demeanor changed, I became more calm, irritability stopped, temper disappeared, in fact my entire approach to life underwent a transformation. Raju also had a wonderful experience – he had a daughter who had not commenced walking even after eighteen months. Doctors had tried everything, and said she was normal, but they did not have a clue as to why she had not started walking. During the 45 day period she started walking – both of us are of the opinion that it is with Parampujya Swamiji’s blessings that she started walking.