Almost ten years before my meeting with Sathya Sai Baba, I began to practice yoga and meditation. Even as a child, I had all sorts of mystical experiences, such as astral travel in the subtle body and memories of past lives. For a long time, it seemed quite natural for me to come home from school, lie down on the sofa and in my astral body go for a walk in the neighboring park. With age, it became clear that such experiences do not happen to everyone.
I was very lucky with the social circle that has been around me since childhood. Among my parents' acquaintances were people who were seriously interested in esotericism, meditation, and yoga. It must be remembered that these were Soviet times during which yoga and meditation were banned.
At that time, it was not possible to go to India – there was no free sale of books on the topic of spiritual practices. Despite all the difficulties, there were enthusiasts in Russia engaged in practicing meditation and yoga underground. Now, it sounds very strange, but such was the reality of Russia in the mid-twentieth century.
Quite a few people practiced yoga in Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Kyiv, and other cities, and it was a very interesting and difficult time. Now we have many opportunities to find necessary information instantly, but at that time, there was no such option.
Russian yogis of the Soviet era drew information about meditation practices either from the few books they managed to bring from abroad or from internal mystical experience. They very quickly developed many supernatural abilities in themselves and entered deep meditative states to quench their spiritual thirst by immersing themselves in the inner space of the spirit first of all.
The era of underground Soviet yoga was both strange and tragic, but its raw strength was revealed in how people learned to trust their intuition and their feelings, foregoing their attention to logic and common sense. Some of the first Russian devotees of Sathya Sai Baba came from the Russian underground yoga environment.