A lineage from time immemorial

Born into a family of Vajpayee brahmins in the holy city of Mathura, Sri Swami Gangadhar Tirtha was the absolute embodiment of spiritual involution and an unconditional lover of solitude. All his life he refused to play the public role of a Guru and lived in such complete anonymity that his neighbouring hermits knew nothing of his realisation. No photograph has come down to us; the portraits are drawn from the subtle visions of the Yogis of the lineage.

He settled in Jagannathpuri, in Orissa, on the shore of the Indian Ocean, in a straw hut near the sacred lake of Chandan Talab, offered by his disciple Karaali Brahmachari. His hermitage contained only a mat, a blanket, a water pot and a wooden staff. He revealed that at that time there were only six people in the whole of India who held this science, all living in secret.

Observing with compassion the suffering of beings who tried to escape the ocean of Maya through vain efforts, he made a vow to find an aspirant with a pure heart. On the morning of Akshay Tritiya 1889, at three o'clock, he initiated the young Kalikishore with a penetrating gaze, then sent him back to live twenty years as a family man before consecrating him, in 1908, and ordering him to give Shaktipat. He continued to guide his disciple in his subtle body, long after leaving his physical form.

Born Kalikishore in the village of Mandrasar, Faridpur district, in what is now Bangladesh, he was consumed from childhood by the life of the spirit. Married at eighteen against his will, employed in a printing works in Calcutta, he ended up leaving everything to seek a realised master. Disappointed by the worldliness of the ashrams, he arrived dejected on the shores of the ocean at Jagannathpuri, where Karaali Brahmachari led him to the hidden sage of Chandan Talab.

Initiated on the morning of Akshay Tritiya 1889, he instantly felt tingling throughout his body, let out a great cry and entered total absorption for more than three hours. His Guru, having read in his mind the lie he had told about his family, sent him home: the fruits of destiny must be exhausted through experience. For nineteen years, six months and thirteen days, he lived as a ploughman and family man in Bengal, supported by his wife Sarojini Devi, keeping his initiation secret.

In 1908, the idol of Kali he was polishing lit up with a miraculous radiance: his Guru appeared to him and ordered him to transmit. In 1910, he received the saffron robes and his monastic name. In 1913, his hermitage built on the site of his mother's cremation became the Jnana Sadhan Math of Madaripur. Living on alms, coldly refusing the rich who came to buy grace and initiating sincere beggars on the spot, Baba trained the greatest pillars of the lineage. He entered Mahasamadhi on the day of Akshay Tritiya 1935, forty-six years to the day after his initiation, welcomed into heaven by his Guru.

A direct disciple of Swami Narayan Dev Tirtha, Sri Yogananda holds a singular place in our lineage: he refused to wear the saffron robes and to leave worldly life, choosing to remain a Grihastha, a householder, facing his karmic destiny in the midst of his fellow human beings. “There is nothing sacrosanct about these outer appearances,” Paramguruji reminds us.

Born in Junagarh, in Gujarat, detached from any glorification of his person, he spent long periods of retreat at Swargashram, one of the oldest hermitages of Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganga. It is said that he once crossed the river on foot, through a powerful surge of his Shakti; when questioned, he merely smiled.

It was there that in 1933 he met the lawyer from Ghaziabad who would become Swami Vishnu Tirtha, and conferred on him the direct transmission of grace. He deliberately let his renunciant disciple burn through his Karmas at an accelerated pace, and ordered him to write down his experiences and to study Sanskrit: Vishnu Tirtha's masterpieces were born of this.

Born in 1888 in Haryana, a brilliant student who became a respected lawyer in Ghaziabad, he had been visited in secondary school by an immeasurable light descending from the sky into his body, followed by trembling and tears he did not understand. Decades later, simply sitting by his stove plunged him into absorption for hours, the khichdi entirely burnt to charcoal: he understood that he needed a guide. He gave up the law, distributed his possessions and set off in search of a Sadguru.

Initiated in 1933 at Rishikesh by Sri Yogananda, he experienced Kriyas of almost unprecedented violence, to the point that his landlord thought him mad, while his inner mind remained perfectly calm. In 1934 he walked barefoot to Badrinath and Kedarnath, without money, living on alms. In 1948, on his Guru's orders, he settled at Dewas at the foot of the hill of the goddess Chamunda and founded the Narayan Kuti Sanyas Ashram; he took the vows of Dandi Sanyas at Varanasi from Swami Shankar Purushottam Tirtha, then founded Yoga Shree Peeth at Muni-ki-Reti, on the banks of the Ganga.

Author of Devatma Shakti, Adhyatma Vikas, Prana Tattva, Shaktipat (Kundalini Mahayoga) and many other treatises in Hindi and Sanskrit, he stripped Shaktipat of all superstition to present it as a self-evident spiritual science. Rising every day at three o'clock, he took eight to ten successive baths in the icy water of the Ganges. With legendary severity he trained his successor, Swami Shivom Tirtha, then entered Mahasamadhi on 1 October 1969 on the banks of his beloved river, where his body was immersed.

Born Om Prakash into a pious family of the Punjab, in what is now Pakistan, a graduate of Lahore and a senior official on the Nangal dam, he led a fulfilled life as a householder. The Partition of 1947 tore everything from him: his land, his possessions, his father who disappeared without trace, then his wife and his job. This torrent of calamities gave rise in him to an irreversible detachment, and he wandered the Himalayas in search of the Absolute.

In 1959, he walked through the gates of Narayan Kuti at Dewas and surrendered instantly at the feet of Swami Vishnu Tirtha. A former scholarly civil servant, he cleaned the toilets, washed the master's laundry, slept on the kitchen floor. Initiated into Brahmacharya on 19 January 1961, into Dandi Sanyas at Varanasi in May 1965, he was declared in December 1965 the sole successor of the lineage.

From the 1970s onwards, he travelled tirelessly and founded ashrams in Malaysia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, including the one at Pond Eddy, in New York State, initiating Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Parsis, Buddhists and Jains. His trilogy Churning of the Heart, Sadhan Path, The Second Dawn, A Guide to Shaktipat and Antim Rachna demystified Sadhan for thousands of seekers. He passed on the charge to his most advanced disciples, among them Swami Sahajananda Tirtha, and entered Mahasamadhi on 6 April 2008. To a disciple woken in Canada at the exact moment of his departure, he whispered: “See, my fleshly sheath has fallen. Simply carry on with your Sadhan.”

Born in 1923 in the district of Guntur, he grew up in the village of Munipalle, “the village of the sage”. His quest led him to the greatest: three years at Sri Aurobindo's ashram in Pondicherry, a week with Sri Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai, two years at Swami Sivananda's Divine Life Society in Rishikesh, from 1953.

Introduced to Swami Shivom Tirtha in the early 1970s, he received Shaktipat in 1972, at the same ceremony as his friend Swami Bhaskaranand Tirtha, then led at once the life of a family man and a silent Sadhan of rare intensity. In 1982, at the temple of Narayan Kuti, he received Sanyas and his name. Returning to Andhra Pradesh on his Guru's orders, he settled in Vijayawada and became the channel through which Shaktipat, until then transmitted in Hindi, Marathi and Bengali, reached Telugu-speaking seekers. He accumulated more than fifty years of retreat in the Himalayas.

The bond uniting him to his successor transcended time: in 1986, on a train to Delhi, he shared a thirty-hour journey with a fifteen-year-old named Sreenivasulu, whom he met again twenty-one years later in Hyderabad and initiated the next day at four in the morning. In January 2019, at ninety-seven, he conferred the Deekshadhikara on him: “Do not consider this a spiritual reward, but a responsibility and a karmic duty towards the Parampara.” Translator and commentator of the Guru Gita, he supervised the writing of the Secrets of Shaktipat. He has now made his transition and remains the invisible source of inspiration for the whole Parampara.

Born in the early 1970s in Andhra Pradesh, trained at the Sainik School of Korukonda, at the National Defence Academy in 1988 and then at the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun, he was commissioned as an infantry lieutenant in 1992 and served for more than thirty-two years, notably along the Himalayan borders and in Jammu and Kashmir. This life of absolute discretion was the most perfect of incubators.

At fifteen, on his way to a mountaineering course in the Himalayas, he shared a train compartment with an old monk in saffron robes, who gave him shelter for a night in Rishikesh, in the middle of the Kumbh Mela. Twenty-one years later, in November 2007, ruined, harassed by creditors and on the brink of the abyss, he recognised at a friend's house in Hyderabad the monk of his adolescence: Swami Sahajananda Tirtha initiated him the next day at four o'clock. For two years, no Kriya; then, at Navratri 2009, the floodgates of Shakti opened, and a merciless cleansing of his fears, his anger and his pride began, reaching even into the caves of Dewas and the heights of Vaishno Devi.

On his Guru's orders, he published in 2015 The Power Unknown to God, born of this question: “Does God have a particular alphabet?” The book, translated into more than twenty languages, is distributed free of charge. In January 2019, he received the Deekshadhikara and initiated more than two hundred people in the first year; raised to the rank of Param Guru, he has in turn passed on the authority to initiate to more than twenty disciples, among them Sadguru Hagi. Retired from the army in 2025, he oversees the Order of Shaktipat monks and Sadhaks from the south of India, and ceaselessly recalls the golden rule: sincere japa, quiet perseverance and unconditional surrender, Samarpan.

Gregory Hagi, of Greek descent, carries within him the song of the philosophers and mystics of ancient Greece. For more than thirty years he was a tireless seeker: physical Yoga, shamanism as far as the jungles of Peru with medicine men and women, the silence of the Australian deserts, mountaineering, exploration. Happiness remained transitory; he knew the essential was missing.

In early 2019, while searching online for information about Kundalini, he came across Paramguruji's page, and Paramguruji sent him his book. For a while he sat with his doubts: dependants, a job, stability. Then the answer imposed itself: everything will have to be given up anyway. In February 2019, he was part of the very first wave of Sadhaks initiated by Paramguruji. In 2020, on pilgrimage to Hyderabad, he bowed before Swami Sahajananda Tirtha, then aged ninety-eight, who blessed him and granted him the authority to initiate in turn.

From his haven in Melbourne, through the TS Online Shaktipat Ashram, he guides and initiates seekers on every continent, making sure that each Deeksha remains a heart-to-heart encounter. He maintains a strict discipline of absolute gratuity. In 2025 he offered the Parampara a collection of mystical poetry, Divine Song of Shakti. In July 2026, he travelled to Greater Geneva to celebrate Guru Purnima with the Sadhaks of Europe and to bless our ashram. It is through his channel that the Deeksha opened the way to the French-speaking world.

Born in Brussels in 1990, Jacques Vervier first knew the path of effort, in elite sport and then in the profession of conference interpreter, between the European institutions and the United Nations in Geneva. On an inner quest from the very beginning, somewhat set apart in spite of himself, he knows that if he is on this path, it is thanks to the Karmas accumulated over the course of previous lives.

After the loss of his parents, a first door opened by the hands of the woman who would become his wife, Reiki, and then a long search, he found the website of Sadguru Hagi and received Shaktipat Deeksha in November 2023. A pilgrimage to the Yog Shri Peeth ashram in Rishikesh, and then an early-morning call, made the seed his Guru had sown germinate. On 25 January 2025, the Deekshadhikara was conferred on him.

Today he transmits the Deeksha free of charge, without proselytising, in accordance with the will of Shakti, from the mountains near Geneva and online for the whole world. A bare plot of land in the countryside of Greater Geneva, blessed by Sadguru Hagi in July 2026, is our ashram.

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