Category: India

Spiritual Passage to India

Love everyone, feed everyone, and remember God. Neem Karoli Baba I recently gave Ram Dass’s Be Here Now to Laura,  an exceptional Maryville University  graduate  and psychology major. Previously,  I had mentioned to her that…

I Beseech You, Orianne Aymard

Peace and harmony appear so closely woven in every cell of her being that the spirits of darkness would search in vain for a loophole. –Melita Maschmann, Encountering Bliss: My Journey through India with Ānandamayī Mā  …

On the Street Meditation

The swami told me to make japam while I walked and to give everybody I met on a street a mental blessing. You weren’t to think of yourself with a feeling of superiority, as a…

A Little Perspective

You can plan for five hundred years, but you don’t know what will happen in the next moment. –Neem Karoli Baba, quoted in Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of…

Saluting the Ātman

Dear Sunil, Thought I’d share one of my recent reading binges with you. I read a book late spring called American Veda, about how Indian thought has influenced the USA (from Thoreau and Emerson through the…

A Disciple and His Guru

Dear Max, I never read Christopher Isherwood until this summer.  What drew me to him was not his  fictional  output but his spiritual journey.  My Guru and His Disciple is his engaging memoir of several…

Om Satyam Shivam Sundaram

If you’ve ever … put your faith in a guru traveled to India and were blown away and never took a single drug recited a mantram throughout the day memorized part of  chapter 2 of…

Summer Reading, 2009

I recently found this in an old file…   CHINA Annping Chin, The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics David Hinton, Selected Poems of Wang Wei D.C. Lau, trans. Mencius Andrew Plaks, trans.,…

Devi

What did people see in [Sri Anandamayi] Ma that so captivated their hearts? They found a combination of the sweetness of maternal affection and the profound depths of a mystical knower of God. In this…