A travel guide that explores over 500 places of spiritual interest for the modern traveller
Series: Westerners in India. The following article is an excerpt from Ashrams of India. Cuban-American writer Mercedes de Acosta (1893 – 1968) travelled to Arunachala to meet Ramana Maharshi in 1938 after reading Paul Brunton’s book A Search in Secret India, and stayed for three days. This visit made a tremendous impact on her. She later wrote in her 1960 autobiography Here Lies the Heart that these were the three most significant days of her life…
Series: Westerners in India. The following article is an excerpt from Ashrams of India. The Razor’s Edge It is thought that sometime in the late 1920s, a young traveller from America bumped into Swami Ramdas one night at the Meenakshi Temple in Madura, the two of them had previously met three years earlier in the …
Letter from India. By David Shaftel July 22 2010. 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 tourists stuck in …
In 1911, Frank Humphreys, a policeman stationed in India, became the first westerner to discover Sri Ramana Maharshi. He wrote articles about him which were first published in The International Psychic Gazette in 1913. Sri Ramana only became relatively well known in and out of India after the publication of two books in 1934 and 1935 by Paul Brunton, who had first visited him in January 1931. Some of the foreign visitors included …
Peer Wertin (Swami Ramanagiri) (his original name was Per Alexander Wertin) was a natural born Western mystic, a member of the Swedish Royal Family, who renounced an inheritance to become a holy man in India and attained Moksha (liberation) under Ramana Maharshi. In his youth he came across Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga and found he …
The following article is an excerpt from Enlightenment Magazine. Though Sri Mataji Anandamayi Ma was not, strictly speaking, my guru, she certainly played a major role, to say the least, in my life and my sadhana [spiritual practice]. In fact, she still does today. Her memory is alive deep within my heart and there are …
