The purpose of this research is to examine the evidence for the authority of the spiritual message as delivered to the Western world by the charismatic religious leader Swami Vishnudevananda. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which Vishnudevananda was positioned to travel from India to provide spiritual teaching to Europeans and Americans, and then to discuss the content and structure of principal declarations made by Vishnudevananda, who appears to have cited Swami Sivananda, his teacher, as at least one of his spiritual authorities.
The spiritual leader Sivananda, also called Sivanandaji Maharaj and Sri Gurudev in publications published by the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers, appears to have been a charismatic leader in India who enjoyed the loyalty and devotion of his followers from the 1950s onward. In significant part, the religious teachings promulgated by Sivananda were predicated of the physical and spiritual practice of yoga. Swami Vishnudevananda became one of Sivananda's principal disciples, as well as the main evangelist for Sivananda's teachings in the Western world. But Vishnudevananda was not always a religious leader. His upbringing appears to have followed that of many young men of good family in India, and he became an army engineer. His life and work did change, however, after attending what would today be called a spiritual workshop conducted by Sivananda, whose teaching techniques and sayings seemed "simple and straightforward. Each word came from his heart. There was no kind of religious hypocrisy, no sitting on a tiger skin with ashes smeared all over his body. He had an extraordinary spiritual glow" (Sinananda 7). At a second meeting, Sivananda essentially humbled himself by bowing before the younger Vishnudevananda, entirely nonplussing him: "My whole body began to shake violently. With all my heart, with all my life and love, I learned how to bow without any type of reservation. . ...