Initiation Changed My Life!

Daryai Lal Kapur, author of several Sant Mat books, was initiated at a fairly young age, an event which would change the whole direction of his life. In Call of the Great Master he tells of the impact it had on him:

This shower of miracles began to rain down upon me from the very day of my initiation – or, I may say, even before my initiation was completed. It was during the initiation that I had my first experience. … It took me less than ten minutes to memorize the whole instruction. My other companions took a full hour for this purpose.

While they spent this period in full concentration, repeating the holy names, I spent mine in tediously waiting for them to finish with it. In addition, I fell prey to vain conceit. A feeling of pride about my superior intelligence and memory overpowered me. The result was that when the Great Master returned after an hour and taught us how to connect our soul with the sound current, all my companions heard the celestial music within – but I could find no trace of it.

When this fact was brought to the notice of the Master, he asked me to come forward and made me sit in the proper posture of meditation in front of him. Touching the centre of my forehead with the index finger of his right hand, he said, “Don’t you hear any sound here?” With the touch of his finger it seemed as if the reservoir of Sound had burst. Church bells began to ring loudly and clearly. There was an upward pull, and the soul current began to withdraw from the body. I do not know how long I sat there. To me it appeared a few minutes. Then I burst out into a sudden spontaneous laugh and unintentionally opened my eyes. The Great Master also laughed and asked, “Did you hear the Sound?” “Yes, Sir, by your grace,” I replied. After that, for several months the Master was always with me inside, and a sweet bell chimed day and night.

I think all this was prearranged and happened by the will of the Great Master with a purpose. I – a young man of twenty with atheistic tendencies and whose mind had been rendered totally irreligious by Western education – needed some such shock treatment. I had not come to the Dera for initiation or to seek God. It was Christmas vacation and I, with some other student friends, had come to the bank of the river Beas for a picnic and some boating. Full of high spirits and frivolity we all had attended the Great Master’s discourse that evening as a matter of curiosity. My mind did not catch much of it. It went out wool-gathering as soon as the satsang started. I only remembered that some stress was laid on the great value of human life, that it was only in this life that God could be realized, and that he was not to be found anywhere outside in the world but only within the body. But who cared for God at that time? The next day was the day of initiation, when a number of people were to be given ‘Nam’, as they called the initiation. A relative of mine was a satsangi, and he had asked me to breakfast with him. After breakfast he said, “Why don’t you get Nam? It is a rare opportunity and you should not miss it.”

I said to myself, “Why not enjoy this fun also?” and agreed to go. It was with this background that I had joined the initiation. But God fulfils himself in many ways. I was frivolous, irreligious and whatnot. But the Master saw in me the soul only – a son of God that he had come to save. The initiation changed my whole life! Had I heard the inner sound at the first instance, as my companions did, I would have thought it an ordinary, automatic and normal affair. I would not have realized the great power of the Master. This experience was necessary to convince me that here before me was one who looked like an ordinary man, but who had the superhuman power in him to raise the souls of sinners to that high centre of spirituality where the celestial music resounds in beautiful harmonies.