Guru Raghavendra’s Jiva Samadhi

Nityanandaji:

We went to Mantralayam on the first power journey with him (1998). That experience really blew my mind. We were visiting the jiva samadhi of Guru Raghavendra. In a jiva samadhi, the saint has taken final samadhi and left their body, but the body is still alive. I’d never even heard of such a thing. When taking jiva samadhi, the saint sits down and meditates, while they build a tomb around them. Generally, they build a six-by-sixfoot cube of granite rock. There’s no way out. After they build this rock structure around the saint, closing them in forever, the saint meditates until they enter samadhi and the soul leaves their body. But the body stays alive.

Guru Raghavendra’s samadhi in Mantralayam is a jiva samadhi, and they built a big circular temple around it. When we first arrived in the larger temple complex, it was a bizarre scene. There were a lot of working elephants, which was very exotic to me, with large mounds of elephants droppings and pools of elephant urine to step around. There were devotees doing interesting and unusual worship. A lot of the worship involved doing pradakshina, prayer while moving in a circlular fashion around the center point of the temple. A circular lane, 15 feet wide or more, encircles the central jiva samadhi. Some people were doing rapid walking pradakshina, while other people were doing slow walking pradakshina. Some people were layed out fully on the floor, rolling in their pradakshina. Some people were walking for a while, then laying down and rolling. Obviously pradakshina is a big mechanism here. In their pradakshina, it didn’t matter what they encountered, they just kept going, literally rolling through the elephant urine and dung! ‘Gosh, what is going on here!? When is my flight back to America?’ This scene was just a few weeks into my first trip to India. Only men are allowed to go down and get into the area to see the actual jiva samadhi, the granit box where his body is sitting. There was a strict diksha that men have to wear lungis to go there. I didn’t even know what a lungi was, and I certainly didn’t have one. I was wearing gym shorts and a tank top!.

So, the women and me sat in the larger temple watching the pradakshina, while Sai Kalehswara and the other men went into the inner chamber, to see the stone box, the grave, the jiva samadhi there. I sat to meditate and really enjoyed the divine vibrations. These energy channels taught by Swami are really miraculous. Anyone who has practiced them experiences amazing energies. I was still PurIfYIng the fIve elements and quickly started to feel a little drowsy and heavy. It was nice. I was forgetting how strange everything looked around me. Suddenly, I felt a beam of energy like a lighthouse come and hit me. I heard a voice in my head asking me, “Who are you?” Then it went away! It was like a consciousness was circling, witnessing, interacting, in a cycle as the light turns around a lighthouse. Every time it came around, it gave something to me. I started waiting for it to come back around, and every time, it felt a little deeper. It was like receiving a blessing in a time cycle, shaktipat... shaktipat... shaktipat... .

I didn’t know at the time what a jiva samadhi was. Swami didn’t say much, just that we were going to see a temple, and this temple had a saint’s body in the middle. When he came out, he was smiling and very happy, “Oh, how’s your meditation?”

“Wow, what is this, Swami? I’m feeling like something’s watching me.”

“It’s okay, we’ll talk later.”

The mystery is that the body is being accessed by the soul of the saint, even though the soul has gone on to another life. Swami would eventually teach a lot about the mechanisms of different types of saints’ samadhis. He taught about jiva samadhis, yoga samadhis, jala samadhis, and maha samadhis, and how they were benefitting the world. So, a jiva samadhi gives incredible blessings to the planet. There’s a time cycle for their energy blessings. Jiva samadhis usually take three hundred years to start really giving out the high divine vibrations. Jiva Samadhi’s energy is powerful and sustained for another 600 years, then the energy starts to diminish. So, jiva samadhi is one way that a soul through a body can be blessing the planet for more than a thousand years.