From soldier to seeker
Born to a Punjabi Brahmin family in 1910. As a young man he was a Krishna devotee — a bhakta in the classical Hindu sense, longing for direct vision of his chosen form of God. He served in the British Indian Army during the Second World War. The encounter that redirected his life came through a wandering sadhu who, when Poonja described his decades of devotional searching, told him there was one man left in India who could give him what he wanted. The man was Ramana Maharshi.
The recognition
Poonja arrived at Tiruvannamalai in 1944. By his own account, the recognition was not gradual: in Ramana's silent presence, the search ended. He continued visiting through the late 1940s. After Ramana's death in 1950 he returned to ordinary life as a manager in a mining concern in southern India, holding the recognition privately for several decades. The wider transmission only began in the 1980s, when Westerners began to find him, and intensified after he settled in Lucknow in 1990.
His instruction and his caution
Papaji's teaching was sparse — variants of Ramana's self-enquiry and the single instruction keep quiet. He was equally famous for warning against premature claims of awakening. Many of those who later taught in his name did so with his blessing; others, he said publicly, had mistaken a deep glimpse for the final recognition. The caution is part of his lineage.
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