In a quiet village on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), the capital of Kerala State, India, a baby was born to Krishnan and his wife Retnamma. He was named Mohankumar, or Mohan.
The beautiful boy was always interested in meditation and worship of divine forms. His earliest remarkable encounter was when he was 7 years old, and met with the famous reclusive Avadhootha (which means close to the divine), Poonthara Swami, who took him under his wing. Experiences continued.
When he was 16, on Shivaratri night, the practice was to sing bhajans for 24 hours at Keleeshwaram Siva Temple. The young Mohan was to give a talk during a 5 minute break, but everyone was so absorbed that it lasted for more than one hour of talking and chanting mantras. Walking home afterward in the darkness of the night, the boy had to pass through a paddy field. He looked up at the sky, and the moon was in a narrow crescent shape. As he looked, an enormous glow of light fell from the moon and he fell unconscious. That was his first divine experience. After this, there was always an inner urge for purity and to know the divine. From this day, the ardent seeker started wearing only white clothes.
The quest to know the truth about purity and the reality inside and outside started then. Like the moon had been, all of nature became his teacher from then on. He found that seeing the duality between outside and inside is the cause of all sorrow, and to remove this sorrow became his life’s mission. He dedicated his full life for this cause. Education was concentrated upon to bring out this mission of subjective and objective ideas (the genesis of his Education for Total Consciousness concept) and to realize the creation of everything in the universe. The second thing he did was to see all women as the embodiment of the 'Moolaprakrithi' or the Divine Mother itself. So he began to be a priest in a devi temple during his college studies. This acquaintance paved his way to see the Divine Mother in all the female creation.
Many experiences came to him during this time as he pursued his mission through meditation and tapas. One time, he received the darshan of the great Sage Agastya, who led him deep into the jungles of Neyyar Dam. On another Shivaratri night in a cave at Maruthvamalai hill, he again lost body consciousness and the very deity who was in his mind while chanting the mantra, appeared before him in the same shape as he had envisioned. From this higher dimension the name ‘Isa’ was bestowed on him.
‘Isa’ is the only name which is used in all religious traditions to indicate the supreme all-pervading truth, a befitting name for the young yogi who would one day bring together all different communities under a single vision through the Global Energy Parliament.
Years of intense sadhana gifted Isa with different yogic powers. To the yogi who had attained cosmic consciousness, the five elements come under his control. All elements are produced by vibratory variations in electrons and protons.
The variations in turn are regulated by prana, subtle life force finer than atomic energies intelligently charged with the five distinctive sensory substances. But he always says that these are not the goal of sadhana and tapas, they are merely things that come along the way.
It was after these experiences that Isa left everything behind and began his journey throughout India (the renunciate’s foot journey called ‘Parivirajaka’). The Parivirajaka crossed mountains and hills, leaving behind parents and dear ones, visiting temples and meditating in caves, where numerous divine experiences awaited him. At the Kudunchikkal hills in Karnataka, the place of the Sage Mrugunda, the sound of ‘Om’ was throbbing in the air. Swami meditated there in a huge, dark cave.
Drinking water was only obtained by walking a long distance and scaling a cliff like a spider every day and getting one precious pot from the top. His food was the juice of a ‘theratty’ plant that he squeezed.