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"Spiritual biography India"
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Gandhi
In his Autobiography, Gandhi wrote, \"What I want to achieve-what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years-is self-realization, to see God face to face. . . . All that I do by way of speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field, are directed to this same end.\" While hundreds of biographies and histories have been written about Gandhi (1869-1948), nearly all of them have focused on the political, social, or familial dimensions of his life. Very few, in recounting how Gandhi led his country to political freedom, have viewed his struggle primarily as a search for spiritual liberation.Shifting the focus to the understudied subject of Gandhi's spiritual life, Arvind Sharma retells the story of Gandhi's life through this lens. Illuminating unsuspected dimensions of Gandhi's inner world and uncovering their surprising connections with his outward actions, Sharma explores the eclectic religious atmosphere in which Gandhi was raised, his belief in reincarnation, his conviction that morality and religion are synonymous, his attitudes toward tyranny and freedom, and, perhaps most important, the mysterious source of his power to establish new norms of human conduct. This book enlarges our understanding of one of history's most profoundly influential figures, a man whose trust in the power of the soul helped liberate millions.
eBook
My family and other saints
In 1969, young Kirin Narayan’s older brother, Rahoul, announced that he was quitting school and leaving home to seek enlightenment with a guru. From boyhood, his restless creativity had continually surprised his family, but his departure shook up everyone— especially Kirin, who adored her high-spirited, charismatic brother.
eBook
Zorba the Buddha
Zorba the Buddha is the first comprehensive study of the life, teachings, and following of the controversial Indian guru known in his youth as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and in his later years as Osho (1931-1990). Most Americans today remember him only as the \"sex guru\" and the \"Rolls Royce guru,\" who built a hugely successful but scandal-ridden utopian community in central Oregon during the 1980s. Yet Osho was arguably the first truly global guru of the twentieth century, creating a large transnational movement that traced a complex global circuit from post-Independence India of the 1960s to Reagan's America of the 1980s and back to a developing new India in the 1990s. The Osho movement embodies some of the most important economic and spiritual currents of the past forty years, emerging and adapting within an increasingly interconnected and conflicted late-capitalist world order. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival research, Hugh Urban has created a rich and powerful narrative that is a must-read for anyone interested in religion and globalization.
eBook
In Amma's Healing Room
\"[I]t is extremely salubrious to see the ways Islam works in the lives of ordinary people who are not politicized in their religious lives... No other book on South Asia has material like this.\" -Ann Grodzins Gold
In Amma's Healing Room is a compelling study of the life and thought of a female Muslim spiritual healer in Hyderabad, South India. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger describes Amma's practice as a form of vernacular Islam arising in a particular locality, one in which the boundaries between Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity are fluid. In the \"healing room,\" Amma meets a diverse clientele that includes men and women, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian, of varied social backgrounds, who bring a wide range of physical, social, and psychological afflictions. Flueckiger collaborated closely with Amma and relates to her at different moments as daughter, disciple, and researcher. The result is a work of insight and compassion that challenges widely held views of religion and gender in India and reveals the creativity of a tradition often portrayed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as singular and monolithic.
eBook
Auroville
Recit autobiographique d'une quete philosophique et spirtuelle au coeur de l'IndeAuroville : au fil des ans, cette communaute du Sud de l'Inde, fondee en 1968 par Mirra Alfassa pour concretiser la pensee du philosophe indien Sri Aurobindo, a cristallise de nombeux cliches et nourri tous les fantasmes. Utopie idyllique, village de hippies, repere de doux dingues ou bulle coupee du monde : quelle etiquette peut-on bien coller sur ce drole d'Objet vivant non identife ? Et surtout, a quoi ressemble cette experience aujourd'hui, quarante ans apres les caravanes arrivees par la route de la Soie, pour quelqu'un ne longtemps apres l'epoque du flower power ?Il y a autant d'Aurovilles que d'Aurovilliens, si ce n'est plus ; mais l'auteur essaie ici de trouver sa propre definition, de relier son periple exterieur a son voyage interieur. Et dans cette quete initiatique, basee sur une experience personnelle et non sur l'analyse theorique, il recevra l'aide d'un personnage inattendu...Un journal intime, entre religion et meditationA PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR Julien Fortin, trente-deux ans, s'est installe a Auroville depuis plusieurs annees, apres avoir vu le jour en France, et vecu en Allemagne, au Sri Lanka et au Gabon. Il a parcouru la planete pour suivre de nombreux projets de developpement. Par ailleurs, il pratique l'escalade et la plongee partout ou c'est possible...EXTRAIT Le debut de l'histoire est une question de choix. Quand on cherche dans sa memoire le moment ou tout a commence, on peut toujours remonter d'un cran l'enchainement des evenements qui nous ont mene la ou l'on est, chercher la cause de chaque effet jusqu'a notre naissance, et meme avant : dans la rencontre de nos parents ou de nos grands-parents, et de leurs grands-parents avant eux. Aussi amusant soit-il, ce jeu ne mene a rien, et l'on se retrouve oblige de choisir, arbitrairement, un instant que l'on declare etre le debut de l'histoire . Plutot que de remonter mon arbre genealogique a l'infini, je decide, a la majorite absolue, que mon histoire aurovilienne commence dans un bar munichois.
eBook
Critical Characters in Search of an Author: Cornelia Sorabji and Virginia Woolf
This paper reminds its readers at the outset of that curious and irrepressible animal, the woolfenstein. Gertrude and Virginia might well have not liked each other, but those who have liked them, together and apart, “engender” of their lives, times and texts, “a monstrous intertext” based on the principle that texts (as well as authors of texts) are porous, inevitably “traversed by otherness” (Johnson 116). Critics and their subjects alike can be, are, woolfensteins, “digging up the bodies, sewing bodies into bodies, resituating women where they have been elided, erased” and “making themselves up of dead and living bodies” (DuPlessis 1989, 100).In The Lure of the Modern (2001), writing within the relatively recent but firmly established tradition of postcolonial scholarship that seeks to redress the perpetuation of cultural imparities inherent in Eurocentric juxtapositions of modernist writers across the imperialist, imperializing divide, Shumei Shih roundly criticizes the potent, pleasurable grotesquery of such imagery as affectively obfuscatory, colluding with and vindicating the language of “expansion” (Mao and Walkowitz 738) that prefaces and prefigures the replacement of a Stein with, for instance, a Shuhua. Before, beside, and behind monstrous bodies expansion sidles, arrives obliquely, becomes implicit, and, therefore, tacitly admissible into liberal intellectual reckonings, failing to evoke the barbarity of the physical acts that have historically constituted it, adulterated again with the poignancy of adventure, the excitement of breaking new ground (which is, of course, another would-be playful expansionist metaphor of violence and violation).Shih is referring specifically to Woolf 's 1938–39 epistolary encounter with Ling Shuhua, author of Ancient Melodies (1953), published by the Hogarth Press, and sometime lover of Woolf 's nephew Julian. Their admittedly productive relationship, Shih argues, reproduced the imbalance and inequality characteristic of the macrocosm it might be considered a metonym for. But as Patricia Laurence emphasizes in Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes (2003), the primary concern of the twenty-first-century geomodernist cannot still be whether Woolf 's correspondence with Shuhua was or was not carried out on entirely equal terms. Of course it was not.
Book Chapter
INTRODUCTION
THE ROLES OF WOMEN and sexuality within Tantric Buddhist communities are topics of fascination for many, despite the scarcity of reliable sources. Tibetan doctrinal, liturgical, and biographical works are pervaded by references to female celestial figures known asdakims(Tib.mkha’ ’gro ma), literally “female sky-goers,” but the lives, experiences, and perspectives of historical Buddhist women who attained religious mastery in India, across the Himalayas, and in Tibet remain by and large elusive. The vast majority of Tantric scriptures were written by men and represent meditation practices from the perspective of the male subject. The dearth of Tantric Buddhist texts
Book Chapter
The Dual Plot of Gandhi’s An Autobiography
The subtitle of Gandhi’s An Autobiography—“the Story of my experiments with Truth”—gives the reader a clue to why it is difficult to follow its plot. Written periodically during and after a prison term from 1921 to 1924, the narrative of Gandhi’s “experiments” appears episodic and disorganized, in part because it was composed as a series of newspaper columns to edify his followers.¹ Only Judith M. Brown, in her excellent Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, makes sense of the complex tensions in the development of Gandhi’s life and thought in a manner consistent with his own story. Yet even Brown
Book Chapter