Swami Ramananda
During his earlier years in India, Swami Ramananda also spent time with Rabindrinath Tagore, a Noble Prize winner for literature. Tagore gave Ramananda a copy of his book Sadhana with the wish that it could be used as a textbook in America. Swami Ramananda taught from Tagore’s book for over 50 years, alongside the Vedic Upanishads. While Gandhi and Tagore were the teachers who influenced Swami Ramananda most, his first teacher of philosophy and spirituality was his grandmother, who was a full-blooded Mohawk. During his childhood, she told him of the legends, stories, and traditions of her people. He was deeply impressed and inspired by what he saw as great similarities between the Native American and Eastern religions. As a teacher later in life, Swami Ramananda realized that the principle of “Unity within Diversity” profoundly applies to spiritual wisdom and religious experience. Throughout his life, he maintained an avid interest in all religions, from the Roman Catholic—the tradition in which he was raised—to the Vedic of India. He encouraged his students to enjoy and celebrate the fascinating and far-reaching diversity of the world’s religions, and he dedicated his life to helping others discover their own unique spirituality through the pathway of direct experience. He always told his students: “Don’t be a follower! Find where your own truth is and live it!” Swami Ramananda was born with a bad vertebrae that never joined and consequently spent most of his childhood in bed. He was unable to walk until he was 18. He first began to crawl, then walk with crutches, then walk with a cane until he could walk unaided. Since that time, he has walked seven times across the continent of India and all over the United States. His physical confinement in childhood afforded him time to read, which he did avidly. At age 4, he completed reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Soon after, he began reading books on religion and philosophy. Swami Ramananda lived his life in constant wonder and learning. His students fondly remember his pocket-sized magnifying glass, which he carried everywhere, and which he would use to examine the subtle beauties in nature—whether a flower, stone, insect’s wings, or the veins in a leaf of a tree. His magnifying glass was a literal and symbolic message to his students that God is everywhere, in everything, and so beautiful to behold. He inspired those who knew him, through the very way he lived his life, to see God in the world and in oneself. He once said:
Swami Ramananda lived in recognition that every moment of life offers a creative opportunity to experience greater and greater co-creative possibility, greater and greater expression of Truth. His life was a continuous experiment in truth. He passed from his body in 2004. It is not known how old he was. |
“The legends and religious teachings of every continent seem to reach beyond recorded history to a time when the world was young, a time before all known languages came into being and before all known civilizations existed. Inscriptions and symbols recorded in the geological history of every continent speak to us of happenings and human events long forgotten.”
- Swami Ramananda, The Gospel of the Stone
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