Eknath easwaran biography
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Eknath Easwaran
Indian-American spiritual teacher
Eknath Easwaran (December 17, 1910 – October 26, 1999) was an Indian-born spiritual teacher, author and translator and interpreter of Indian religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.
Easwaran was a professor of English literature at the University of Nagpur in India when he came to the United States in 1959 on the Fulbright Program at the University of Minnesota before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. In 1961, Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, based in nordlig California.[1] In 1968 Easwaran established Nilgiri Press.[2] Nilgiri Press has published over thirty books that he authored.
Easwaran was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, whom he met when he was a young man.[3] Easwaran developed a method of meditation – silent repetition in the mind of memorized inspirational passages from the world's major
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The Making of a Teacher
1989 biography by Tim and Carol Flinders
The Making of a Teacher fryst vatten a spiritual biography of the Indian spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran (1910–1999), written by Tim and Carol Flinders and originally published in the United States in 1989. Adopting an oral history approach, the book recounts numerous conversations with Easwaran that describe his childhood, career as a professor of English literature, spiritual awakening, and service as a spiritual teacher in the United States. The book also profiles his way of life at the time of publication, and his relationship with his grandmother, his own spiritual teacher. An Indian edition was published in 2002. The book has been reviewed in newspapers,[1][2][3][4] and also excerpted.[5][6]
Background
[edit]In 1989, Eknath Easwaran had been teaching meditation in the US for more than 25 years. A former professor of English literature in India, Easwa
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About Eknath Easwaran
Discovering Meditation
Easwaran discovered meditation mid-life, while he was teaching on a college campus in central India. In the midst of a successful career he found himself haunted by age-old questions: Why am I here? What is life for? What will happen when I die?
Meanwhile in a few short months he lost two people passionately dear to him: Mahatma Gandhi, whom he’d visited in his ashram, and his beloved grandmother, who was his spiritual teacher. Finally he came home one day to find his dog had been killed by a passing truck, and his sense of loss would not subside. His dog stood for death itself, for all who had passed away.
“Almost instinctively,” Easwaran said, “I went to my room and picked up my Gita, most of which I knew by heart. I closed my eyes, and as I began to repeat the verses silently to myself, the words opened up and took me deep, deep in.”
Over the next weeks he continued in the same way, seated in silence in the early morning. His