Swami Vishnudevananda The purpose of this resear

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 straightf

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of the knowledge which he had before he went to sleep remains the same; it does not increase at all. No enlightenment comes. But when a man goes into samadhi, if he goes into it a fool, he comes out a sage. What makes the difference? From one state a man comes out the very same man that went in, and from the other state the man comes out enlightened: a sage, a profit, a saint--his whole character changed, his life changed, illumined (Vivekananda 612-13). That kind of change is reported by Vishnudevananda in his initial relationship with Sri Gurudev. Subsequent study of Hatha Yoga led to Vishnudevananda's becoming a professor at Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Forest Academy in India. The Academy became a magnet for Hatha Yoga study for people all over the world. Vishnudevananda reports becoming ego involved as a professor and affecting a great beard and mane of hair to complete his image--an image shot down by Sivananda, whom Vishnudevananda refers to as Master. Later, Vishnudevananda engaged in a series of often solitary meditative pilgrimages throughout India. By the early 1950s, Master was sending Vishnudevananda throughout India to give yoga demonstrations. It was in 1957 that the decision was made to expand these demonstrations to t

Category: Philosophy - S