I studied in my hometown until I was eighteen and from my childhood I used to wonder who the real God was. My community traditionally emphasizes the importance of the guru—the one who takes us from darkness to light. So from childhood I also wondered, ‘who is my real guru whom I can trustingly follow?’

My father was a great yogi (5) , even though he was also a chief district government accountant. At times I saw him meditating for hours and hours at a time. He considered his guru, though long dead, to be Shri Shri Laharimaharaj, (guru to the famous yogi: Yogananda Paramahansa) and he deeply followed Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (6) . I saw people coming to him to learn meditation and asking about yoga and pranayama (7).

One fine day I asked him my deepest question, ‘Who is my real guru?’ He replied: ‘I am your guru’. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘you cannot be my guru, because you are not a transformed man and I don’t see the perfect qualities of the true guru in you.’

Many times I had read in the Indian scriptures words pointing to the True Guru saying, “ The Guru is the one who is the Creator, controller, withdrawer of the universe and is the one who destroys the weeds of ignorance and sin; to that Guru I salute.” I knew this to mean that only the Supreme God alone can be the True Guru, one without the slightest blemish and not simply a Self-realized man, an Enlightened man, a self proclaimed man, or one proclaimed to be guru by another man.

Now I was wondering, who is that guru whom himself is God? I’d asked my father and others but I found their answers unsatisfactory. I became obsessed with wanting to know who this unknown guru really was. I often sat with my school friends discussing this matter of the guru and the real God, since these two things were one.

Unfortunately, there are so many different gods worshipped in India. The discussion brought up many qualities of the true guru, called the sadguru (true guru), yet I could find no one, nor had I heard of anyone, to match the required qualities of the Sanatana Guru. Even the great gurus I had heard of in my country were evidently flawed in character and far from the standard required by scripture.

Since my father was a yoga master and a famous Tantric (8) yogi, I asked him, ‘What should I do?’ He answered: ‘I will teach you some Tantric practices, so that you can be your own guru.’ He also told me that if you want to be perfect in these things you have to have the anointing and the blessing of some god or goddess. Therefore he said that I should worship the god Durga (9) and told me to chant Durga Saptasati (10) . This is a mantra. Further, he told me to do it in a specific style and way for seven days. I started doing just that.

Now, something happened in the midst of all this. It was a very dangerous and frightening experience. While sleeping one night, during the period of doing that seven day practice, I was suddenly awakened, and there, as clear as can be, was a goddess whose face was that of a pig, and what a horribly terrifying face that was! ‘Amazing,’ I thought to myself, ‘These thing are real.’ This spirit entity was sitting right near my feet. Seeing that, I was terribly afraid. She spoke to me, saying, ‘Come with me, I have come to take you.’ I covered my head with the bed sheet out of fear. My body became very hot. There she was at my feet, disappearing and appearing all night. I couldn’t sleep a wink.