BHAGAVAN DAS

Born Kermit Michael Riggs in Laguna Beach, California on May 17, 1945, Bhagavan Das is a Western yogi who lived for more than six years in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.  The Buddhist community knows him by the name Anagorika Dharma Sara.  He is a singer and teacher.  He is perhaps best known for having guided spiritual teacher Ram Dass, at the time known as Dr. Richard Alpert, throughout India, eventually introducing him to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, who then became Ram Dass' guru. Bhagavan Das gained fame after being featured in Ram Dass' 1971 book Be Here Now, a bestselling classic.

Das is a bhakti yogi, a shakta tantra adept, and teacher of Nada Yoga, a sound-based yoga. He was the first Western initiate/devotee of the aforementioned Neem Karoli Baba, as well as the first American to meet Kalu Rinpoche of the Shangpa Kargyupas lineage. He has received Vajra Yogini initiation from His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje of the Karma Kagyu lineage and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the 11th Trungpa Tulku. During the six plus years he spent as a wandering ascetic he received numerous initiations and teachings from living saints and sages including A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Swami Chaitanya Prakashananda Tirtha, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Sri Anandamoyi Ma, and Tarthang Tulku of the Dudjom Rinpoche lineage.

In 1972 in California he married his pregnant girlfriend, Bhavani, who subsequently bore him a daughter, Soma, who was born in New York.  In 1976 in Berkeley, California, he met Usha, who eventually became his common-law wife and they had a son together, Mikyo, and then a daughter, Lalita.  Over the years he became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa.

Das travels widely throughout the world as a performer of traditional and non-traditional Indian bhajans and kirtans, which are devotional songs and chants, and is the author of an autobiography, It's Here Now (Are You?).

LIVING LOST

We don't know who we truly are until the very end, and some of us never know.

SWAMI VIDYATMANANDA

Born John Yale in 1913, Swami Vidyatmananda underwent initiation and training under Swami Prabhavananda at the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Following brahmacharya, which is the active period of education and discipline in Vedanta, he took sannyas, final vows, in 1964, and was ordained as a monk in the Ramakrishna order.

On a trip to India, Vidyatmananda visited the Belur Math in Howrah, the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Calcutta, and other pilgrimage sites throughout the subcontinent. He wrote about these experiences in travelogue articles for the journal Vedanta and the West.

Vidyatmananda went on to become an editor of Vedanta and the West, and edited Atman Alone Abides: Conversations with Swami Atulananda (1978).  He edited also What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda (1982), with an introduction by Christopher Isherwood.  His impressions of India he included in a book entitled, A Yankee and the Swamis: A Westerner's View of the Ramakrishna Order (2001).

His career continued as manager of the Centre Védantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France, where he served until his death in 2000.  He was 86 years old.  His autobiography is entitled The Making of a Devotee and can be found online.

The University of Texas at Austin, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, holds the Swami Vidyatmananda Collection, which comprises correspondence to Vidyatmananda between the years 1923 to 1986, as well as correspondence he gathered through his association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California and the Centre Védantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France. Three distinct groups of correspondence are present: letters between Christopher Isherwood and Swami Vidyatmananda (John Yale), 1950-1986; correspondence to Lady Sandwich (formerly Amiya Corbin) from Aldous Huxley, John Van Druten, Christopher Isherwood, Walter De la Mare, E. M. Forster, and Gerald Heard, 1944-1977; and letters to the French diplomat Martha Vanek from Jan Masaryk, René Fülöp-Miller, and Igor Stravinsky, 1923-1930.

NEVER NOTHING

There has never been nothing.  There is the manifested and there is the unmanifested.  Unmanifestation, however, is not nothing.

INTERCONNECTEDNESS

Ji ji muge in Buddhism is defined as the mutual interpenetration of all things and events.  To point out this interconnectedness, however, while all well and good, does not go far enough.  The implication of ji ji muge is that even the smallest and seemingly insignificant act in existence, affects all the rest of existence.  Think of it as an old clock where the slightest movement of even the tiniest wheel moves all the rest of the wheels.  To be aware of this is called mindfulness in Buddhism.

BRAHMAN IS NOT GOD

Author John B. Noss states that the early Upanishads generally refer to Brahman as a neuter something, "without motion or feeling, the impersonal matrix from which the universe has issued and to which it will in time return.  This It, this One Thing, is the substantial substratum of everything."

It is important to emphasized, however, that Brahman is not God, is not Pure Spirit, according to author Edward Rice.  Again, all words used in connection with Brahman are neuter--It not He.  Meantime, to call Brahman "the Ground of All Being," as Western Vedantists do, is to belittle the immensity of Brahman, says Rice.

The subjective or immanent aspect of Brahman is termed Atman.  The pair may be used as synonyms or otherwise appear together as Brahman-Atman.  Swami Prabhavananda states, meanwhile, that Brahman-Atman has nothing to do with everyday life, additional evidence of the way in which Brahman-Atman is not God.  It is worth noting that Hindus often use the word "God" in, for example, their writings, but this is for convenience only.  What they are referring to is Brahman.

LAMA ANAGARIKA GOVINDA

Born Ernst Lothar Hoffman, Lama Anagarika Govinda (May 17, 1898–January 14, 1985), was the founder of the order of the Arya Maitreya Mandala and a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.  The son of a German father and a Bolivian mother, he was born in Waldheim, Germany. His family, who owned silver mines in South America as well as a cigar factory, was quite well to do.

After spending two years in the German army during World War I, he contracted tuberculosis and was discharged. He briefly studied philosophy and archeology at Freiburg University and then, from 1920 until 1928, lived in an international art colony on Capri in Italy.  There he worked as an abstract painter and a poet, receiving some money from his family. He conducted archeological research in Naples and Cagliari and studied tumuli, that is, burial mounds, in the Mediterranean, including North Africa.  Still intending to earn a doctorate, he eventually abandoned the ambition when he became interested in Buddhism and meditation.

He then moved to Sri Lanka where he became a Buddhist monk of the Theravada tradition. Tibetan Buddhism, though, he was quite critical of from the start, considering it the home of demons. Indeed, in 1931 he went to a conference in Darjeeling to convert Tibetans to a more pure form of Buddhism. In nearby Sikkim, however, he met the Tibetan teacher Tomo Geshe Rimpoche (1866–1936) who completely turned around Govinda's views. From then on he embraced the Tibetan form of Buddhism.

After founding his order in 1933, he lived a secluded life for three decades at Crank's Ridge, outside Almora in northern India. From there he undertook travels through the remotest areas of Tibet, where he made a large numbers of paintings, drawings and photographs. He described these travels in his book The Way of the White Clouds.

Due to his German birth, Govinda was interned by the British army during World War II. In 1947 he married a Persian-speaking photographer Li Gotami (original name Ratti Petit).  In the 1960s he began travelling around the world to lecture on Buddhism, settling, in his twilight years, in the San Francisco Bay, where he was hosted for a time by Alan Watts. He died in Mill Valley, California.

MYSTIC ATTRACTION

In the beginning, he felt that it was the particulars of the mystics, such as what they said, how they looked, and who their followers were that drew him to them.  He now saw that it was the rest of it.