Be Here Now: American Sadhana and the Search for the Real
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 mantra throughout the day met your future wife at a…
Category: India
Don’t Get Rattled by Samsara
So many of my brilliant former students— Their families from Gujarat, Bijar, Delhi, Kerala, West Bengal— Would pity me Or express incredulity That I, their erstwhile quasi-prof, Hang on the words Of Sri Anandamayi Ma…
“Renounce and Enjoy”
Mohandas Gandhi used the Bhagavad Gita as his go-to source for dealing with life’s daily problems and issues. A short book of 700 verses, the Gita grounded and inspired Gandhi throughout his life. Like other …
Aiming for the Supreme Goal in Life
Dear Perry I am sending out the following to a few of my friends, Bengali-Americans, who haven’t heard of Sri Anandamayi Ma. I think they’ll be open to her. I’m grateful we read her before…
After Reading a 2002 Book by Arundhati Roy
What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain. But it is a terrible, terrible thing. To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try…
Gita/Gandhi
Not agitated By grief nor hankering after pleasure, They livs free from lust and fear and anger. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, They are not elated by good fortune Nor depressed by bad. Such…
The Good News of Giving and Receiving Books, 6.26.2017
Ten years ago, because of a Social Justice theology class, I got to know Melissa Banerjee, a Bengali-American. It made sense to me to give her a hardback edition of the The Gospel of Sri…
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…