Category: Spirituality

David Frawley: Yoga and Ayurveda

Self-Healing and Self-Realization

Lotus Press, 1999

Amazon.com

From the Back cover:

Yoga and Ayurveda together form a complete approach for optimal health, vitality, and higher awareness. Yoga & Ayurveda reveals to us the secret powers of the body, breath, senses, mind, and chakras. More importantly, it unfolds transformational methods to work on them through diet, herbs, asana, pranayama, and meditation. This is the first audiobook published in the West on these two extraordinary subjects and their interface. It has the power to change the lives of those who listen to and apply it.

About the Author:

Dr. David Frawley (or Pandit Vāmadeva Śāstrī वामदेव शास्त्री) is a Vedic teacher and educator who is the author of over forty books in several Vedic and Yogic fields published worldwide over the past thirty years. He is the founder and director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies (www.vedanet.com), which offers on-line courses and publications on Ayurveda, Yoga, Vedanta, mantra and meditation, and Vedic astrology. He is involved in important research into ancient Vedic texts and is a well known modern exponent of Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma. He has a rare D.Litt in Yoga and is a recipient of the prestigious Padma Bhushan award, one of India’s highest civilian awards for “distinguished service of a higher order.” His work is highly respected in traditional circles in India, as well as influential in the West, where he is involved in many Vedic and Yogic schools, ashrams and associations.

René Guénon: Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues

Éditions Véga, 2009 (1921)     Amazon.fr

English translation:

Sophia Perennis, 2004     Amazon.com

Book Description:

René Guénon’s first book, Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines, came (in the words of the eminent scholar S. H. Nasr) “like a sudden burst of lightning, an abrupt intrusion into the modern world of a body of knowledge and a perspective utterly alien to the prevalent climate and world view”. In this book Guénon establishes the criteria which formed the basis of his later works and set the tone for the Traditionalist School that came after him: the meaning of Tradition, the relationship between “religion”, “theology”, “metaphysics” etc. – all leading up to an exhaustive definition and comprehensive overview of Hinduism, which Guénon saw as the most ancient and most complete spiritual tradition on earth, embracing the most profound and explicit metaphysics. The West is now overrun with many brands of compromised Hinduism, whose “gurus” are considered charlatans by traditional Hindu authorities. For anyone drawn to the Hindu tradition, searching for a way to separate the wheat from the chaff and dedicated to gaining an understanding of the universe that is Hinduism in its own terms and not those imposed by modernist Western assumptions, this book is indispensable.
About the Author:
René Guénon (1886–1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization. René Guénon, of whom Jacob Needleman wrote in The Sword of Gnosis that “no other modern writer has so effectively communicated the absoluteness of truth”, is gradually being recognized by deeper thinkers as one of the few who have truly penetrated the seductive veil of the modern age. As an expositor of pure metaphysics and its application to the science of symbols, Guénon is without peer; and his extraordinarily prescient critique of the modern world is attracting more and more attention among cultural commentators. Little known in the English-speaking world till the recent appearance of his Collected Works in translation, Guénon has nevertheless long been recognized as a veritable criterion of truth by a vanguard of remarkable writers who evince that rare combination: intellectuality and spirituality. After a lonely childhood, often interrupted by ill health, Guénon navigated the seductive half-truths of occultism toward a deeper, unified vision offering a way out from the confusion and fragmentation of our time. Regarded by leading scholars as the first truly authentic interpreter of many Eastern doctrines in the West, Guénon never tired, in face of the seemingly inexorable process of dissolution in the twentieth century, of pointing to the transcendent unity of all religious faiths and the abiding Truth that contains them all.

JOB’s Comment:

The first and in my view the basic and perhaps even the most important text of the traditionalist “school”. Some corrections were, I think, included in the English translation, and it is possible that they are found also in this late French edition; other traditionalists rightly pointed out a few errors in Guénon’s interpretations.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the Bhagavad-Gita

A New Translation and Commentary, Chapters 1-6

Penguin, 1990 (1967)     Amazon.com

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the Bhagavad-GitaThe first six chapters of the Bhagavad-Gita with the original Sanskrit text, an introduction, and a commentary designed to restore the fundamental truths of the teachings delivered by the Lord Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield.

About the Author:

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, was born in India, around 1917. In around 1939 he became a disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, the spiritual leader of Jyotir Math, who inspired his own, later teachings. Since his first global tour in 1958, Maharishi’s techniques for human development have been taught worldwide.

JOB’s Comment:

See also my posts about Maharishi and Brahmananda Saraswati in the Spirituality category, in particular the first one, about this book.

Paul Brunton: The Quest

The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

Volume Two

Larson, 1986

Amazon.com

Back Cover:

“Because something deep down in the subconscious knows that the ego is destructible…a longing arises for that which is indestructible…This is the beginning of the quest…” – Paul Brunton

This second volum in The Notebooks of Paul Brunton gives timely, candid, immediately useful advice about the promises and pitfalls of spiritual seeking. Drawing creatively and in a thoroughly unique fashion upon philosophical insights of both East and West, Dr. Brunton shows clearly and simply how the daily experiences and difficulties of modern living can be successfully transformed into meaningful steps on the timeless search for self-knowledge.

The Quest is invaluable for reconciling the voices of authority and individuality in anyone who longs for absolute inner freedom and competent instruction. It presents in depth the first of the twenty-eight categories from Dr. Brunton’s personal notebooks surveyed in Perspectives.

“…a person of rare intelligence…thoroughly alive, and whole in the most significant, ‘holy’, sense of the word.”

Yoga Journal

JOB:s kommentar:

Ordet quest är mycket vanligt i engelskspråkig andlig, esoterisk och i vid mening teosofisk litteratur ända sedan 1800-talet. Jones är ett undantag, som utan tvekan beror på hans avvisande av inställningen av sökande. Intressant nog använder han uteslutande “seeking”. Frågan uppkommer om en eventuell betydelsemässig skillnad. På svenska har vi ingen motsvarighet, och är därmed begränsade till “sökande”. Kvisition?