Look on the Bright Side
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. –Oscar Wilde, quoted in Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples
Tag: Christopher Isherwood
The One Thing That Is Important
Christopher Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980. I’ve been imagining coming up with a class in which we’d explore Chris Isherwood, Ram Dass, and especially The Gospel of Sri…
“Concentration Is Consecration”
Yulia and I are meeting weekly to discuss Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. I found the following insightfulg passages from Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood’s translation. 1.2 Yoga is the control of thought-waves in the mind. 1.13 …
With Unswerving Steadfastness
Swami Prabhavananda, The Eternal Companion: Brahmananda—His Life and Teachings A while back, through reading the spiritual works of Christopher Isherwood, I became acquainted with his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, who was a devotee of Brahmananda,…
Plunging into the Work
Conversations with Christopher Isherwood Edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman University of Mississippi Press, 2001 One summer a few years ago I went on a binge of some of Christopher Isherwood’s books, particularly…
Now
1. Thoughts of the past and future spoil your time. –Dipa Ma, in Amy Schmidt, Dipa Ma: The Life and Teachings of a Buddhist Master 2. If I had to use one single word to…
“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 …
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…
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…