Ramakrishna and Christ, The Supermystics: New Interpretations

by Paul Hourihan

Overview

In this award-winning exploration of the lives and teachings of Ramakrishna and Christ, Paul Hourihan guides us through Ramakrishna's extraordinary struggle along the various paths that led him to God-realization, and opens our minds to new interpretations of Christ's life.

Hourihan was raised in a traditional Catholic family in Boston. While inspired by Christ's teachings, the rigid dogma of the Church proved to be an obstacle. It contributed to his gnawing dissatisfaction in living in a world fraught with suffering, loneliness, and injustice.

Hourihan, in his search for meaning, joined Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and other writers of his time who were enthralled by the profound answers found in the teachings of the ancient Vedantic scriptures of India. These teachings were dramatically brought to life in the United States by Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna's chief disciple. His main message: Awaken to your true divine nature within, which may be experienced directly through the practice of the yogas of meditation, knowledge, work and devotion. Each of these writers found teachers amongst the learned, revered monks of the Ramakrishna Order of India who had been sent to this country.

Through studying Ramakrishna and Vedanta, Hourihan not only found his spiritual home, but discovered the deeper meaning and significance of Christ's life and teachings. With his knowledge and experiential background, Hourihan was able to write a compelling biography for Westerners that introduces Ramakrishna's life and its unheralded influence on our own time.

"A finely crafted book that brings sensitivity and psychological finesse to the interpretation of two towering figures in the history of spirituality. In understanding Ramakrishna, we may come to better understand Jesus of Nazareth, and vice versa. This book exemplifies comparative religion at its best."
- Dr. Georg Feuerstein, author of "The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga"

Product Details

BN ID:	2940150337558
Publisher:	Vedantic Shores Press
Publication date:	12/22/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Paul Hourihan, an award-winning author and teacher, was a long-time student of Vedanta and the great mystical traditions of the world. His own commitment to the spiritual path began with a life-transforming experience in his early thirties and continued for the remaining 45 years of his life. While living in New York and Boston in his thirties and forties, he made a personal in-depth study of the major spiritual traditions and in particular studied India�s Vedanta teachings with some of the well-known swamis of the Ramakrishna Order.

With an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a PhD in American literature from Boston University, he commenced his teaching career in southern Ontario, Canada. Gradually he was led to teach courses on the great illumined teachers such as Buddha, Christ, and Ramakrishna. He was able to combine his two great passions�literature and mysticism�in many of the courses he taught over a period of 15 years. Some of these courses were the basis for several of his books on such literary mystics as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and William Blake.

It wasn't until the last part of his life that he started to write his dozen compelling works. With his deep knowledge and his own experiential background, Dr. Hourihan is a fitting interpreter and biographer of Ramakrishna, India�s foremost mystic for many centuries.

Paul Hourihan passed away peacefully in 2001 in northern California where he lived with his wife Anna, who continues to carry on publishing his spiritual works.