Shivabalayogi - Tapas

Tapas

Sathyaraju became known as Adivarapupeta Balayogi, the boy yogi of Adivarapupeta. Many of the villagers believed he was acting, probably to earn fame as a holy man (sadhu) and make money. Some abused the boy, hitting him, pouring sugar water over his body so ants would bite him, and even throwing a burning, gasoline-soaked rag on him. The Balayogi was in samadhi twenty-three hours a day. In samadhi, Shivabalayogi later explained, there is no awareness of the body or its physical surroundings. Each midnight he would return to ordinary consciousness and would then feel the pain that his body was suffering.

The Balayogi moved the place of his meditation to a field where the villagers buried children who died while very young. It was a place the villagers feared at night, so they mostly left the boy alone. There his body suffered from insect, rodent and cobra bites, and the skin on his legs began to rot during the rainy season. His body became stiff from the constant meditation until, as Shivabalayogi described, the yogi who had initiated him into tapas, his divine guru, cured all but his hands. They always remained frozen in the way he clasped them during meditation.

For eight years, the Balayogi meditated twenty-three hours every day. In that time, he mastered meditation in all four cardinal directions (east, north, west and south). Then his divine guru instructed him to meditate twelve hours a day for another four years to complete a full twelve-year cycle. Through this process, he achieved nirvikalpa samadhi which is described as follows:

"Thus with all doubts and thoughts extinguished, His mind now absorbed back completely into that Self from whence it had originated, He rested now in that complete Peace beyond all experiences, from which he would no longer go out."

Shivabalayogi defined tapas as continuously meditating for at least twelve hours each day until one attains God realization. "If the duration of meditation increases to about twelve hours then it becomes tapas. Tapas begins when you get into the state of samadhi. One has to do a minimum of twelve hours of tapas a day... When this samadhi stays for an extended period, something like twenty-four hours a day, then God will come down and awaken you." The final realization occurs with Sahaja Samadhi when the Yogi becomes naturally established in the Self (Atman) and sees the world and all in it as different forms assumed by the one Atman. Shivabalayogi has clarified that it is the same Atman that manifests either as pure Atman, or appears in the form of the 'Ishta Deva' .

Shivabalayogi emerged from his unusually intense tapas on August 7, 1961, before a crowd of tens of thousands. Using a microphone and amplifier, the young yogi spoke to the crowd and that first public message was broadcast over radio, then printed and circulated on flyers. In his message, he emphasized the importance of proceeding directly to the goal of spirituality, the supreme peace of Self-realization, and eschewing the temptations and visions along the way which create more ego and are nothing but hallucinations of the mind.