From the initial meetings with Sai Baba and Upasni Maharaj in 1915, Merwan started a grim habit which was to last the entire seven years of his coming down to normal consciousness. Every day Merwan would regularly strike his forehead on the stone floor of his room for hours. Some days in the afternoon, between one and five o'clock, he would go to the Golibar area of Poona or to the isolated Pataleshwar Cave Temple. At the Tower of Silence, sitting under a tree, he would continue this gruesome ritual — knocking his forehead on a rock or against a stone wall. He was not merely tapping his head on the stone surface but pounding and pounding his brow upon it with full force — always inflicting a bloody wound.
After knocking his head hour after hour against stone, Merwan would collapse. He would then wipe the blood off his face, clean himself and tie a large kerchief or hand towel around his forehead to serve as a bandage and a makeshift turban, thus concealing the wound from his family when he returned home.
The local neighbors, and his relatives in particular, thought that by tying a kerchief around his head, Merwan was complying with some new fashion trend. Little did they know the real reason for wearing the kerchief. Only Merwan's closest friends knew how he spent his mornings and afternoons, but they did not reveal this to Merwan's family, though they themselves did not understand his strange behavior.
While in Lahore with the Alfred Theatrical Company, Merwan had also pursued this painful self-inflicted practice. He would manage the company and its performances until late in the night. During the day, when the rest of the group was sleeping, he would rise early and quietly slip away to a deserted place, where he would bang his forehead against a flagstone for hours.
To come down from the highest spiritual state of God-consciousness — "I Am God" — to the normal human consciousness — "I am a man" — entails unimaginable suffering. This striking of his forehead was somehow a comfort to Merwan during the extreme anguish of his descent from the God state to normal or worldly consciousness.
Merwan himself later described these days of seeming agony:
This constant hammering of my head was the only thing that gave me some relief during my real suffering of coming down — which I have repeatedly said is indescribable.