Sublime

Devipuram—“The Goddess’s Abode”—the temple complex that Guruji had spent more than three decades building up from almost nothing in the rural wilds of eastern India.

Five people (Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, H. Olcott, and A. P. Sinnett) wrote most of what we know to date of the etheric web, auras, magnetism, chakras, spiritualism, psychic perception, and reincarnation. These people took the ancient wisdom of the Hindus and translated them into a language Westerners could understand.

Swāmī Muktānanda (“Bābā”) probably did more than anyone else in the 20th century to make the teachings of Śaiva Tantra known in the West,

Cliff arrived at Devipuram toting a small, pyramidal Sri Meru he had ordered by mail from Devipuram five years earlier.16 One day he brought the Meru to Guruji for his blessing. Handing it back afterward, Guruji told him, “This is for your healing.”

Sri Meru is a three-dimensional projection of a Sri Chakra, used in Sri Vidya worship, that figures heavily in Guruji’s life and work. See also “Introduction: The World of Sri Vidya” in The Goddess and the Guru, Volume II.

Hawaiians' authenticity as an autochthonous people was and is often tied to their relationship to land and ocean.

associated with a specific religious tradition, the religion of Śiva-Śakti, also known as Shaivism, the dominant religion of India throughout the medieval period.

I especially enjoyed the work of Sir John Woodroffe (1865–1936), a.k.a. “Arthur Avalon,” who—while prominently serving as Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in British India—spent his private hours explaining, defending and ultimately practicing in the then widely reviled Hindu religious schools of Shaiva and Shakta Tantrism.