Baba Sawan Singh

Baba Sawan Singh is the fountainhead of spirituality in our century who made Surat Shabd Yoga (Shabd Yoga or the Science of the Soul), which had been accessible to the few, available to humanity at large. He was the spiritual mentor of Sant Kirpal Singh. He predicted a great spiritual awakening.

Born in a farming family of Punjab, India, he trained as a civil engineer, and was able to blend the traditional with the new.

Although he was deeply interested in matters spiritual from boy-hood onwards and kept up a continuous search for a genuine and perfect spiritual teacher, he entered government service as a young man.

After studying at the Thompson Civil Engineering College at Roorkee (a small city north of Delhi), he became a military engineer. In this capacity, he served for twenty-eight years, finally retiring in 1911. During all of his early manhood, he searched with great diligence for a true Master of the spiritual path and made visits to many holy men who he thought might know the essence of truth. But none of them gave him what he needed: a sense of total conviction that his mind and character required before he could commit himself.

For a long time he associated with a holy man named Baba Kahan, who usually remained in a state of absorption in trance, developed as a result of fourteen years of persistent spiritual meditation. Hoping that Baba Kahan would show him the right path, Sawan Singh asked him for initiation. He answered, “No, your Guide is somebody else.” The young officer then asked him who his Master was to be so that he should go to meet him. Baba Kahan replied, as have so many other holy men when placed in similar situations, “When the time comes, he will himself find you.”

Finally, in 1894, when he was thirty-six years old, he had the good fortune to encounter Baba Jaimal Singh who was visiting the Murree hills in the northwest Punjab. By that time, three years after settling by the Beas river, Baba Jaimal Singh had become well known; esteemed throughout the northwestern India for his saintliness, for the spiritual radiance and power that continuously emanated from him, and for the unshakable conviction which his teachings and inner guidance inspired in his students.

One day, shortly after Baba Jaimal Singh’s arrival in the Murree hills, he passed Sawan Singh, who paid him no attention whatever, mistaking him for some Sikh litigant bound for the commissioner’s court. But on seeing him, Baba Jaimal Singh is said to have remarked to Bibi Rukko, one of his students, “That is the man we have come to initiate.” Bibi Rukko replied, “How may that be when he does not even notice you?” In reply the Master said, “On the fourth day he will come to us.” And so it happened that on the fourth day the young officer, Sawan Singh, having heard that the holy man was giving a discourse, went to hear him.

He was profoundly impressed and within a few days was initiated, as Baba Jaimal Singh had foretold. From the time of his initiation until the time of Baba Jaimal Singh’s departure from this world in December 1903, Baba Jaimal Singh trained his chosen disciple to succeed him in the work of guiding souls to their origin in Truth.

And from that time until his death in 1948, just before he reached the age of ninety, Baba Sawan Singh served a growing multitude of pupils in the way of Shabd Yoga. During his period as the Master, Baba Sawan Singh initiated about 125,000 persons, the largest number ever initiated into the secrets of the Word by any known Saint.