A travel guide that explores over 500 places of spiritual interest for the modern traveller
Series: Westerners in India. The following is an expanded and more compressive article that is sourced from Ashrams of India Volume 2. In 1911, Frank Humphreys, a policeman stationed in India, became the first Westerner to discover Sri Ramana. He wrote articles about him which were first published in The International Psychic Gazette in 1913. Sri Ramana only became relatively …
Series: Westerners in India. The following is an expanded and more compressive article that is sourced from Ashrams of India Volume 2. In 1911, Frank Humphreys, a policeman stationed in India, became the first Westerner to discover Sri Ramana. He wrote articles about him which were first published in The International Psychic Gazette in 1913. Sri Ramana only became relatively …
Series: Westerners in India. Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s (1926 – 2011) early Western devotees and visitors to the ashram from the 1930s onwards… From The Hagiographer and the Avatar (2021) by Antonio Rigopoulos “Foreign interest in the guru of Puttaparthi grew rapidly, especially during the period 1965-1975. Through their testimony and books, a few select Westerners, primarily from …
Series: Westerners in India. Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s (1926 – 2011) early Western devotees and visitors to the ashram from the 1930s onwards… From The Hagiographer and the Avatar (2021) by Antonio Rigopoulos “Foreign interest in the guru of Puttaparthi grew rapidly, especially during the period 1965-1975. Through their testimony and books, a few select Westerners, primarily from …
For many, the journey East – as depicted in new BBC drama ‘The Serpent’ – ended in disillusionment and worse. By Mick Brown 3 January 2021. In 1961, the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, along with his partner Peter Orlovsky, set off for India in search of enlightenment. Travelling to Paris, then Tangier, Israel, and Kenya, …
A Tribute to Jyotipriya (Dr Judith M. Tyberg) May16, 1902 – October 3, 1980. Text by Mandakini, Photo layout and design by Anie Nunnally. “By heaven’s illuminings one perceives her to be a bearer of the Truth.” Rig Veda, 111.61.6 Hymn to Usha ONCE Jyotipriya asked the great Sanskrit pandit Kapali Sastri if she could …
Polish writer Wanda Dynowska (Uma Devi) (Tenzin Chordon) (1888 – 1971) lived in India from 1935 until her death in Mysore in 1971, often visited the ashram. Wanda Dynowska came to India in 1935 on a soul-searching mission. Born to Catholic parents of Polish nobility in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1888, Wanda was drawn to the Bhagavad …
Maurice Frydman (Maurycy Frydman or Maurycy Frydman-Mor in Polish) (1894 – 1976), aka Swami Bharatananda was a Polish Jew who subsequently converted to Hinduism. he was an engineer and humanitarian who spent the later part of his life in India. He lived on the ashram of Mahatma Gandhi and took an active part in India’s …
Sita Sharan is the owner and founder of Surya Incense Company, LLC. Sita Sharan lived in Montreal until 1970, when she heard two Ram Dass recordings on the radio. After listening to Ram Dass’ experiences in India with Neem Karoli Baba, gurus and yogis, she went to India a few months later. Sita met Neem …
The Spectator: 20 February 2021: Why is the smoky, febrile art of Marcelle Hanselaar so little known? by Laura Gascoigne. Her work is in the collections of the Ashmolean and Metropolitan Museum, New York, yet her powerful paintings and etchings remain under the radar. I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed …
Suzanne Marie Olsson is an American author best known for investigating the bloodline and alleged tomb of Jesus in India. She wrote ‘Jesus in Kashmir, The Lost Tomb’ , research of the RozaBal in Srinagar, Kashmir alleged to contain the remains of Jesus, a claim first made widely known in the book titled ‘Book of Balauhar and Budasaf, the Ikmaj-ud-Din’, authored by …
Article by Michael Highburger published in SARANAGATI SRI RAMANASRAMAM Magazine. Dear Devotees, In this issue, we begin a new biography of a devotee who spent more than two years in Bhagavan’s presence up until his Mahanirvana in Thelma Rappold took copious notes throughout her stay at Ramanasramam in the late 1940s and compiled them into …
2018 Interview and editing: Ginta Gaivenyte Photos: Sarune Cepulyte and Ginta Gaivenyte I bought a new airplane ticket and when the day came, I sent my belongings back to the monastery and prepared to take a leave the next day. But that night as I set about to pack my small bag, something prevented me from doing …
From the New York Times, A letter from India by David Shaftel. Books about Westerners seeking enlightenment in India seem to be everywhere these days, including in India itself. In Mumbai, Elizabeth Gilbert’s juggernaut of a memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love,” is prominently displayed in street corner bookstalls and hotel bookstores. Bootlegged copies are hawked to …
For the New York Times by Alisha Haridasani Gupta. Akash Kapur and Auralice Graft are married now, but they first met in 1975 when they were just toddlers, racing around on wooden scooters, in a hut in utopia. Well, kind of. They were living in an “aspiring utopia,” as Kapur describes it in his new …
Afterthoughts, by James George, August 1, 2016. Looking back, I see my five years in India as the high-point of my diplomatic life, and my most memorable time in India as the four days in January of 1971 before Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s official visit to India. […] When the prime minister met the saint, …
I had never read anything about Ramana Maharshi, I had not read much of anything at all. I had hardly ever heard the name. I was not a seeker. I was five years old and I came because my parents decided it was what they wanted to do and at five one doesn’t have a …
By Roger Gabriel, April 20 2017. The word ashram comes from the Sanskrit word, Srama, which means “religious exertion.” However, in more recent times the term “ashram” is used to describe any facility used by a spiritual community. They can vary in size from a small hermitage housing just a few people to multiple building complexes …
Simonetta travelled in India during the 1960s and 1970s, where she established a colony for the care of lepers as well as a craft training program. Duchess Simonetta Colonna di Cesaro was born in Rome in 1922. Descended from Russian aristocracy, the daughter of intellectual & politically inclined Giovanni Duke of Cesaro,’ she grew up in a sophisticated environment, and …
A boarding and day-school for boys and girls, the Rajghat School taught from kindergarten to high school and college levels. Rajghat was one of the two schools of the Rishi Valley Trust, founded by Annie Besant and handed over to Krishnamurti so he could implement his ideas. It was an experimental community where students and …
