An experience of the ultimate truth

Michael Graham was a devotee of Siddha Yoga for 28 years. As a seeker of truth, he studied under India’s most respected gurus until he came to a startling conclusion. He turned his back on his past, acknowledged Jesus Christ as his Saviour and Lord, and found the peace that he had been searching for all his life.

‘Everything I had done, the thousands of hours of meditation, cognitions, realisations, spiritual experiences, had all added up to a big fat zero! It was as though I’d been trying to draw water from an empty well. All my endeavours had led nowhere.’

Michael Graham describes his life as ‘uncommon’. He has met and lived with some of the most influential spiritual masters and gurus in both the East and West. Among the most extraordinary was Swami Muktananda who later became known in the US as the Guru’s Guru.

At the age of 22 Michael was the first Australian to set foot in Swami Muktananda’s Indian ashram in 1969. He was attracted to the Eastern quest by the promise of a life free of suffering, personal transformation and an experience of the ‘highest truth’. He spent the next three decades immersed in the charismatic worlds of Hinduism and the human potential branch of ‘New Age’ style spirituality. He ran ashrams and went on to become a successful mind power teacher in his own right, combining the insights he had found in both Hindu and Human Potential thought. ‘I was hooked and in for the long haul,’ he recalls in his detailed autobiography From Guru to God.

‘I lived to see the movement of Siddha Yoga expand to around a quarter of a million devotees with centres in forty six countries.’ Yet after all his years associated with Siddha Yoga, Michael says ‘there was still no one and nothing in whom I could really place my faith. There were many grand spiritual experiences, well-developed and compelling spiritual thought systems and some clever techniques; in the meantime I was satisfied with a quest for truth.’ Michael’s thirst for authentic spirituality was finally slaked in a dramatic and powerful encounter with Jesus Christ.

In 1996 Michael was on retreat when he was amazed to see a vision of Jesus appear before him. ‘There was an openness and love coming from Christ to me of cosmic proportions, and an invitation and welcome; as if to say “Give me your life and breath and I will take care of you”. The encounter was unmistakable; the message, precise, personal and clear and altogether real. How was I to respond to this? ...Jesus Christ had been worthy of great respect but he was a figure peripheral to my focus.’

Michael carried the memory of this experience for a year before he acted on it. Then came the realisation that all he had worked for was worth nothing. While in the US he began to listen to Christian preachers on the radio. His understanding of the Christian faith grew. First he noticed the similarity with what he had believed for so long. Then, crucially, the radical differences became more significant.

‘So, remembering the vision of Christ and his invitation to me; having also been reduced to zero, and therefore having nothing to lose, and now, being acquainted with the essentials of the historical Christian faith, I started to get excited about the prospect of accepting Jesus’ invitation.’

Michael wanted to make his decision a memorable event. ‘By chance I saw a billboard promoting Billy Graham coming to town. I’d heard of him; the biggest evangelist of the twentieth century.’ When Billy Graham invited people down to make a decision, Michael was one of the first to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. ‘I made that decision – definitely, cleanly, clearly – no turning back. Done,’ he recalls.

‘From that moment to this, I was never quite the same again. From that day forth all the substantive changes of heart and mind that I had reached for during a twenty-eight year quest in the Eastern tradition were being given to me by Grace as a silently given gift of the Holy Spirit.

‘God’s sacrifice on our behalf is called Grace. Grace is a free gift, and all gifts cost someone something. There was never a greater cost paid in all creation than the cost to God the Father and to God the Son as that hour, as Christ, the one who was without sin, died for the sins of the world and was mocked as He did so. Some still mock today.’ Michael describes his feeling as like ‘coming to rest’.

‘It was not as though I had now found something to believe in, a sort of “How nice for me”. It seemed that for all these years I had been a dead man walking. Now I had come alive. The seeker had died. Now I was established in a peace whose footing lay below experiences and feeling. It was an end, and a new beginning, of Grace alone, and not of my own making.

‘Circumstances that led me to Christ, and the decision itself, were driven by inspiration and the drawing of God. I would never have thought to have done it myself. The credit therefore, goes to Him.’

Michael’s life changed. He had found the ultimate truth – ‘every truth finally leads to Christ. In Him the crown is found, the picture complete, and the full means of salvation given.’ Is the ultimate truth something you seek? Why not ask the person who gave you this paper what following Jesus Christ means to them? Jesus’ invitation is for you too.