Chapter 2. Life before meeting Nithyananda🔗

Sometimes it is hard for me to think about how life was before meeting my Master Paramahamsa Nithyananda. It feels like it was only the other day I was the Vice President of Global Supply Chain at a Fortune 500 company, pushing a business unit to transform itself. Along the way I was stressed out since I felt that it was 'me' who was doing the pushing. Now I realize that even large corporations who spend millions of dollars a year transforming their organizations can learn real basic truths as all of us have, during our spiritual journeys.

One will find streaks of these truths in successful turnarounds in major corporations as well! Transformation of an organization can only start with the transformation of the individual. If I did not transform personally, how can I in turn contribute towards the transformation of the organization or corporation? I now see why it takes so long for successful companies to transform and why so few are truly successful at it. I now realize that all of us live (and torture ourselves) with basic emotions and our same old mental set-up. Until we can breakthrough these barriers through personal transformation, it is hard to sustain the transformation. I now know that the pearls of wisdom Swamiji shares with the world can be applied to all spectrums of transformation – the individual, the group, the organization, the country and humanity. However, all of this can only happen through the individuals!.

Years seem to pass by so fast while living around the Master. There is so much going on every moment, so muchwith intensity, so much passion and living in the present moment. You really do lose track of time. We can recall all the times when we were stuck with spending time with a boring person, when we would keep looking at the watch every five minutes to see when the meeting would be over. Time would never seem to pass. On the other hand if we were meeting someone whose company we truly enjoy, we feel hours have passed without even we realizing it. This is what I mean by saying that years pass by so fast while living around the Master's abode.

Yet it is only now when I sit back and reflect at this incredible journey, I am realizing that while time just flew by, I have lived and done so many things which would have taken decades of time earlier in my life. I note with great gratitude that I am several times more productive at work being at the feet of the Master. And one very BIG difference – in the usually, all of this gets accomplished through incredible amount of long hours, stress, tension, and worries, where as in the integrated lifestyle with the Master, all of this and more gets accomplished with no stress, with complete awareness, with incredible efficiency and besides all, with joy, bliss and intensity. I will share more on my demeanor and state of mind before meeting Swamiji, in the next chapter.

I wanted to take this opportunity to briefly talk about my background, family and life before my journey of personal discovery, the period I would like to refer to as ‘Before Nithyananda’ (BN)! When I sit back and reflect on this life, as mystical as it may seem, I now understand that the Master was always with me, pointing me to learn from my life’s situations, helping me to use these experiences in life as the guru and preparing me right from my childhood to make the so-called final jump into the inner world and ultimate liberation. For this I am eternally grateful to my Master, Paramahamsa Nithyananda

I was born in an upper middle class family in Kurnool in the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) and was the youngest child in the family. My family was from an agricultural and business community in Andhra Pradesh. My father, Dr. Satyanarayana Murthy was a brilliant physician. He was an intense person and served as the Principal of Guntur Medical College in Andhra Pradesh. There were three elder sisters and me.

My grandmother from the father’s side, an extremely intelligent lady (most women from the part of AP I am from tend to be quite shrewd. In fact she ran her own money lending business where she made a decent profit lending to villagers at the rate of 2% interest per month!) prayed to all gods that she should be blessed with a grandson. So when I was born, like most people from Andhra Pradesh whose names are a mile long, I had the fortune of being named 'Vallabhaneni Venkata Siva Rama Krishna Chowdhary'!!

My father was born in a lower middle class family in a village in Krishna District in Andhra Pradesh. He used to walk almost 10 km by foot to attend school and always worked hard and was at the top of his class in school and medical college in the subsequent years. He was intense and had a lot of career desires and aspirations. However, he always taught me that money was not everything and that we need to look beyond fame and fortune. I am grateful to him for having instilled these values in me so early in my childhood. If it were not for this I would have had to struggle in the later years while taking the decision to explore the spiritual world as well.

My mother, Sujatha Murthy hailed from a very well educated upper class family. Her family was also from Andhra Pradesh. They came from a wealthy agricultural background. My grandfather from my mother’s side served as the Chief Engineer of Southern Railway under the British Government. He was in charge of laying most of South India’s rail lines and building of railway stations in South India. Grandfather’s position with the British resulted in the family traveling all over South India. They lived in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu when mother was growing up. My mother would tell us stories of their travels in luxury rail coaches, with butlers and all the paraphernalia typical of an officer of the British Raj. They lived in Erode, Tanjore, Madras (now Chennai), Vijayawada, Trichy and other towns, as grandfather was busy building the South Indian rail system infrastructure.

My grandfather, Parvathaneni Sivalingiah Chowdhary was quite a character. He set out to study Civil Engineering at Cambridge University in early 1900's. In fact, he lived in England for almost eight years. I understand he was quite happy living in England and refused to come back immediately after his engineering education. My mother's side of the family was large – they were six sisters and one brother in all and when grandfather left for England, he was married and my great aunt was born. As a result of his extended stay in England, there was a large age difference between my grand aunt and other siblings in the family.

Since my mother's side of the family spent a lot of time in Tamil speaking region of the then Madras state, most of the sisters spoke Tamil. Therefore growing up, we have been exposed to Tamil. Luckily this is now helpful to me, years later, to understand my Master's native language. My mother completed her B.A. degree in English from Stella Maris College in Chennai and was married to my father in 1956. Since she was brought up in a very high class society, with butlers, maids and servants, social status, money and wealth were important to her.

Growing up in a family where parents were from these diverse backgrounds was interesting. Father was quite careful, frugal and dharmic. He tried to instill a value system of hard work, whereas my mother was more drawn towards outer world comforts and desires.

My father served in the Andhra Pradesh Government services and since he was a dynamic young doctor, he was transferred constantly to many places. We lived in Kurnool and then moved to Tirupati, Kakinanda and Guntur where my dad worked in medical colleges and government hospitals as an administrator and professor of Medicine. As we were moving every few years, my eldest two sisters were placed in boarding school for a few years. They spent 4 to 5 years in Rishi Valley School in Madanapalli which was started by J.Krishnamurthi, an enlightened master who lived in India and US until the 1980s. After staying home for the first 10 years of my life, I was promptly packed off to a boarding school, Hyderabad Public School in Hyderabad, in 1973. The school in those days was quite preppy and I spent time away from home ever since.

When I look back and reflect on key turning points in my life which helped me in my current journey, there are a handful of incidents that come to my mind. I am now grateful for these experiences in that they helped me to recognize and not to miss the Master when He came into our lives. The following are some key turning points in my childhood and adult life before I met my Master:

1. Father's death at age 48

I will spend a few moments describing these events since I sincerely believe that my Master was always with me during these times in my life trying to help me internalize these experiences, and to help me look inwards. I am sorry if I may sound illogical to the logicians out there, but I too was a logician, but now I realize that every incident and experience in my life was showered on me by my Master to internalize and to not miss Him when He finally appeared in the physical form years later in 2003.

My father passed away in 1980 at the age of 48. He served as the Additional Director of medical services in the Government of AP and was heading to be nominated to the post of the Director of Medical Services, the top medical post in the government. He was also the Principal of Guntur Medical College, a college from which a large number of Indian doctors living in USA hail from. He was a juvenile diabetic (something which was never told to us until his passing) and died of complications from diabetes and hypertension. More than his death, my reflections of his life, and his demeanor during his life was my early guru during my formative years.

I was 15 years old when dad passed away, and then I was left to myself to discover myself. When my father was alive I had looked up to him to try and work hard and excel in my academic career. After he passed away so young, it took me 3 to 4 years to completely overcome my sorrow of not having a father to look up to. However in the years that followed, I found that there were a lot of traits I acquired from him that directly helped to me in the spiritual path. For one, my dad was never attached to money. He was a brilliant doctor and all his childhood friends were millionaires and always urged him to leave government service and build a medical practice. In fact it was he who helped them pass their medical examinations by teaching and training them prior to the final examinations. Father was quite adamant that money was not everything and that he enjoyed what he did and felt that he was able to serve the people through the government service which he could not do if he practiced in the private sector.

I also realized later after meeting my Master that I too was following the footsteps of my dad very closely and very dangerously. In fact I was working hard, with a lot of stress, with a career ambition next to none and was diagnosed with diabetes in 1995 at the age of 32. So my life was dangerously turning out to be a carbon copy of my father's. It was only after meeting my Master when I was confronted with taking the 'jump' I had a chance to reflect on what was important. Reflection of my father's life and his passing away made me realize the futility of taking one's career so seriously.

I know that so many of us meeting the Master are faced with similar decisions to make. Yet a lot of us decide that the time now is not for spirituality. We often think, let me get into this after my children complete college, or, I am too young to jump into the spiritual path, or, this spirituality thing is not for me. My father's death at a relatively young age made me wake up and tell myself that the time is NOW. It made me realize that we need to chill out and not take life so seriously. All of these experiences made me realize that the so called 'intensity' that the outside world believed in, and which I considered to be the strong point of me and my father, was really not intensity, it was indeed a weakness. It was due to deep inner emptiness and ego to prove that we are better than others. This emptiness forced me to focus on outer world achievements in the corporate sector and I got the ego boost with every promotion, as I climbed up the corporate ladder.

When I first met my Master, seeing so many dimensions that He was effortlessly and gracefully radiating, gave me the yearning that I too wanted to experience such a state. I too wanted to explore myself. Seeing Him live His teachings made me realize that I wanted to experience the space in which He was living. This coupled with the reflection of my father's life enabled me to take this journey. I will discuss more on the topic of this jump in the following chapters.

I would say that this second incident in my family further drove home the message that life is fragile and that we need to make the best use of the time we have in the present moment. My elder sister was married to a doctor in 1978 when she was 20 years old. They were blessed with a daughter in 1981. My sister's husband was quite overweight and never took care of his health. As they started facing challenges in their marriage, he started taking to drinking. At this point I would also state that my sister too had an equal role to play in this drama. She was in her early 20's and had her own fantasies of a relationship, probably mirrored along what we see in the movies. Within the short span of three years, my brother-in-law went from a healthy doctor to an alcoholic. His food habits were erratic and he was depressed and obese. In 1981, at the age of 28, he suffered from internal bleeding of the liver and passed away suddenly. This incident happened during my first year exams while I was studying Chemical Engineering. This incident too served as a guru to me in hind sight. While I went through the incident with great sorrow, I can now say that it deeply entrenched into my psyche once again that life was too short and in that short span, one cannot miss the Master after meeting Him.

My second sister, Sunitha, was a bright girl who always studied well and stood 1ˢᵗ or 2ⁿᵈ in her class at high school. Our father never pressurized us that we needed to do well in education. However, he was a gold medalist all the way through his medical school and post-graduate education, an achievement that was rarely forgotten among the social circles. While growing up, our family friends and relatives would come and say, "Your dad is such a bright individual," "Your dad always stood first in his class," etc. Our father would only tell us, "Work hard and do the best you can in school."

But however, these comments by the society wer quite a pressure for us while growing up.

Each of us responded differently to the pressure they put on us. It is only after meeting Swamiji I realize that each of us has different prarabhda karma (the karma that we bring with us when we take this birth) and differences in our samskaras (engraved memories) make us respond to situations differently. Two of my other sisters were not at all impacted by these societal pressures. However Sunitha took this quite seriously. Just around her 12ᵗʰ grade, she seemed to lose focus and waivered in her studies. She did not get into medical school and had to pursue one year of B.Sc. degree and study for her medical college entrance examination. While taking an extra year to get into medical school is quite normal in India, it seemed to dig deeply into her consciousness that she was somehow not good enough and not as bright as her father.

The reason I am sharing this experience with you is, this is an all too familiar incident in India. A lot of kids are subject to these kinds of pressures and most parents do not even know the depth of the wounds this drives into one's self. I have now realized that I too have been pressurizing my children to excel in their education while we lived in the US.

Sunitha was in the 2nd year of medicine and I was just about to appear from my 12ᵗʰ grade examinations when our father passed away. She seemed to lose focus, but somehow passed medical school with average grades. While on the surface she seemed to brush off her average grades, little did we know that her feeling of 'mediocrity' was driving a deeper and deeper wedge into her self-image. She completed medicine and during the course of medicine she was treated for depression. She was given shock therapy and all kinds of medications which caused erratic mood swings in her.

After she completed her MBBS degree, she was quite inspired to pursue her MD degree in general medicine just as our father did 35 years ago. She could not get into the government college entrance exam since there were only two seats for people belonging to the forward class in India and there were several hundred who took the entrance exam. She was admitted into a private college in Manipal in the state of Karnataka. Staying in the hostel all by herself, forced her into depression. She was given allopathic pills to keep her hormonal balance and when she did not take these pills, her depression would get worse. She tried committing suicide a few times – once by drinking a household chemical at home during vacation. She was immediately rushed to the hospital and treated. In 1990, when I was in USA I received a call on one chilly, wintery morning that she hung herself to the ceiling fan in her bedroom in the middle of the night. My mother found her hanging from the ceiling that morning and by then it was all too late.

Luckily in my case, I used the source of this societal pressure as a source of inspiration to perspire during my studies. I was somehow able to juggle a lot of balls and compartmentalize myself well. I would always hang out with my friends who really, really did not take to books. This was the group that took 6 years to complete the engineering degree! I am sure several of you, especially those from India know of such groups in their colleges. I always partied with them all evening and hit the books for a couple of hours when I got back to my hostel room. My friends on the other hand continued their festive atmosphere 24 x 7. So I was fortunate to complete my education with good grades and a gold medal, while a lot of my friends did their 5 to 6 year stint in engineering college!

I realized what a mistake my sister made by committing suicide only after I attended the Nithyananda Spurana Program (now called NSP or LBP Level 2 program) almost 10 years after my sister’s death. In this program Swamiji gives us utter clarity on death and what happens to us as we move on in our journey from one lifetime to another. Swamiji explained to us in no uncertain terms that when we take birth, it is we who clearly decide on what we want to do in this life, how long we want to live, the kind of parents we chose and the lifespan we want to live. Swamiji also told us that those who die prematurely and unnaturally will have to live without a body until their chosen time for the current life for which they came down for, expires. He taught us that people who commit suicide, unfortunately have the worst kind of pain at their being level – a deep desire to have a physical body while they do not have a physical body.

Fortunately at these programs and during other rituals, Swamiji performed shraddha ceremonies (a ceremony performed to help passage of departed souls) for departed souls. At one of these ceremonies at our old Ananda Sabha (the first meditation hall; a thatched hut which was situated in front of the current temple, in whose place the sacred bull and flag staff in the temple complex are now installed), Swamiji asked us to let him know if any of our family members departed unexpectedly and to recite their names during the ceremony. He told us that he would take care of these souls. I mentioned Sunitha’s name and my mother, Sujatha’s name and He assured He will take care. While I do not have a certificate proving this, I know my Master has liberated these souls and they have been taken care of. I have seen so many incidents around Him where He simply brought people from death/near death, that only an enlightened master can do.

It was October 2003. I met Swamiji in August 2003. By then I was quite certain that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my Master, trying to help in any way I can with His mission. We started the mission in USA and have been active reaching out to various cities to spread the mission. I will discuss more on the early days of the mission in the following chapters. Actually the process of getting involved with the mission is really a process of trying to help myself. The Master really does not need our help. His compassion is the only reason why He allows the devotee to become a disciple by making Himself available.

The reason I am sharing my mother's passing away incident is to only inform the reader that after meeting the master, I was a completely different person in terms of the impact such a tragedy had on me. While I was older now, the passing of my father took me 3 to 4 years to completely reconcile to his death and face reality. However with my mother's passing the understanding of what happens at death and the assurance from the enlightened master that He will take care of that being, was enough. I for one felt that she was taken care of and felt there was no reason for sorrow since she has now moved on in her journey.

It was October 2008. A lot of experiences were happening in our home in Oklahoma. My two daughters, Nithyananda Sree (earlier called Swetha) and Nithyanandi (earlier called Rithi) who were 12 and 7 years of age respectively, were deeply touched by Swamiji along with my mother-in-law, Ma Jesusananda (earlier called Swarnalata Devi) and my wife Ma Nithya Sachitananda (then Ragini). They have had numerous darshans of Swamiji at our home and His presence was with us all the time. A few hours before the accident, between 4 am and 5 am that morning, Ma Jesusananda woke up Ma Sachitananda and informed her that she had a dream wherein spirits of three ladies who she could not recognize, rose up from flames. That morning at approximately 6 am, I received a call from my cousin that mother along with two of her sisters died in an auto accident in Haridwar. The driver, after a heavy lunch, dozed off momentarily while driving and the car tumbled down a ravine. The driver of the car along with my mother and two of her sisters died instantly. My uncle, who was also traveling with them, was thrown off the car during this tumble, but managed to survive.

My first thought after this accident was 'Swamiji'. I knew he was with us and made sure that these beings were taken care of. I somehow found it difficult to cry or become emotional. I was somewhat surprised with myself. I immediately made airline reservations and left for Houston to get my Indian visa (I had not traveled to India since I was naturalized as a US citizen). I met up with my sister in Houston and we flew to Hyderabad for the final rites. After the funeral I made a trip to Bidadi, Bangalore, my first trip to the ashram, the place I now call home, to take blessings from my Master. I shared what Ma Jesusananda saw in her dreams with Swamiji. He simply laughed and said, there is truth in these dreams and visions and that He will take care. It is not that one needs to cry profusely when someone leaves us. Swamiji gave us the clear understanding that leaving this body is simply no different than hanging up the coat when we come home. Seeing this understanding translating into a very different demeanor in me as I went through this incident in my life was quite interesting. Sometimes this can be wrongly understood by relatives, since crying profusely when a departed one leaves tends to be the norm in India to express love and concern.

I realized that nothing remains the same once you meet the master. I have narrated this incident to share how blessed I feel to have met Him and how just His presence washed away the deep rooted societal conditionings in me. The master is like a beacon of light that shines on our consciousness, to awaken us, to give us confidence that we too can experience the space He is living in, that we can love somebody and can let go of them when they have moved on. He has given me the direct experience to deal with tragedies in a graceful and sensitive manner.

By the second year of my undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering in 1982, I had decided I wanted to go to the US for higher education. Most of my cousins now lived in the US. Like most middle and upper middle class families, there was a significant exodus among doctors and engineers to USA in the 70's and 80's since opportunities in India were limited. I applied to seven universities to pursue my Masters degree in Chemical Engineering. I was notified of being awarded a full research scholarship at Clarkson University, a small private university in upstate New York which was quite well known for its academic excellence in Chemical Engineering.

I left home for US on August 10, 1984. Incidentally, my first meeting of my Master was almost to the same day nineteen years later, on August 9, 2003! I landed in upstate New York in a small town called Potsdam near the Canadian border. The University had several students from India. An apartment was located for three of us to share. I had roommates from India since it made it easy to share cooking and other chores.

Living in USA was quite a process of self-discovery. I have been away from home from the time I was 10 years old. However the social support system in terms of joint families, friends or relatives is quite helpful for us to feel secure in more ways than we think. In USA, it is the land where individuality and independence is very important. While there are so many wonderful things in USA in terms of outer world sciences, the feeling that it is only you who needs to fend for yourself causes quite a dent in one's inner space and consciousness. It is this sense that personally pushed me to complete my education as soon as possible to find a job and to start the process of getting a green card.

I have learnt a lot from living in America. Unlike India, it is a land where it really does not matter who you are, what your family is, who you are connected to. If you work hard and contribute to the success of your company, you saw immediate results in terms of your career growth. This aspect has been good for me professionally. However all of this has come with a psychological and emotional price. This feeling of individuality and the feeling that you need to fend for yourself created a much insulated social system. Let me explain this to you with a personal experience.

It was winter of 1991/1992. We were living in Voorhees, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. At that time I was working for a large Fortune 500 chemical company. My neighbors were second generation Italian Americans. It was a particularly harsh winter in terms of temperatures and snow storms. One hardly sees the neighbors during the long winter months. Especially Ma Sachitananda and I, were pursuing the so-called American dream with full vigor and inspiration! She would have to travel 70 miles northbound to a major pharmaceutical company and worked in the area of information research. She was helping marketing groups in the company in the areas of how they can position their drugs for various diseases. She provided information research on the societal costs of various diseases so that they can prioritize what to work on. I was driving 55 miles to work in Delaware.

Our neighbor’s father was living with them. He spoke no English. He was in his mid 60s and was an avid gardener. All he would do when he sees us is, wave at us and smile! In the following spring when he would be very active getting prepared for his vegetable garden, he was noticeably absent. I thought he may have gone home to Italy. Later in the summer of 1992, I happened to see my neighbor and asked him if his Dad was on holiday in Italy. To my surprise he said, “I am sorry to tell you, Papa passed away last winter.” This incident hit me hard in that it makes you sit back and wonder how mechanical our lives are and how everyone seems to be living in their own insulated lives in this doggy dog world. Certainly in India, when we were growing up, we knew our neighbors, we ate at their homes, we sometimes even slept at their homes, and we helped each other at times of need. However, as Swamiji reminds us, the India we grew up in no longer exists in most of the cities of India, but luckily is alive and well in the villages of India.

Living and working in the US made me realize that I was fortunate to experience the best of the material and professional worlds, but this came with a heavy price – one of complete isolation where we really lived with our immediate family within the four walls of a home/palace (or prison?). We often wondered why we cannot have the best of both worlds, a system of working intensely in the outer world and a system of living intensely in the inner world. Little did I know that almost a decade after this incident I discovered that, yes, there is such a system, that both inner and outer worlds can intensely co-exist in complete harmony (or even in complete chaos with a beautiful inherent order!). Whatever I felt was missing when we lived in the US has been supplemented, thanks to the grace of my Master and his enabling to experience this beautiful zone. It is only now I feel that I am living all my dimensions and that I can be so much more efficient and so much more effective in this beautiful space.

After living in the east coast of the United States for almost 10 years, I tried a short stint with dot com companies. This was the brave new world of internet and e-commerce. We were told that the internet is going to revolutionize everything in the world. So I took the jump to a startup company in pursuit of the internet gold mine. It was the greed of stock options that created instant millionaires in the US that gave me the motivation to jump from a large multinational corporation to a startup in Chicago. Two years into this, it became clear that the internet revolution was really an evolution and that the promise land of millions of dollars of stock options never materialized.

Just around this time a headhunter approached me wanting to hire me as a senior executive for an Oklahoma-based multi-billion dollar company in the oil & gas and chemicals business. They wanted to hire an executive with experience in the specific chemicals business I worked in while in the east coast. So with the promise of the ‘internet millions’ behind us, we packed our bags and moved to Oklahoma City in May 2002.