Title: sannyasi

Gender: Male

Age: 68

Location: Incarnation Monastery, 1369 La Loma Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94708

An ashram, according to India's spiritual traditions, is a temporary dwelling place and a temporal phase in human life, when you sit for a while at the feet of a guru, a teacher, before moving back into the ashram of marriage and human society; finally your ashram is an out-of-the-way place, or it is a placeless, timeless presence anywhere.

I learned about ashrams and gurus from the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1953). I was fourteen when I read the book. Since I had received very little religious education, my discovery of the Ultimate was first through music, then through nature (my own body and the cosmos), and finally through Yoga. I started trying to meditate.

In September of 1958, while I was  a sophomore at Occidental College, I received initiation into Kriya Yoga from Yogananda’s disciples Bhaktananda and Mokshananda. I wanted to join them at his ashram on Mount Washington in Los Angeles, but Mokshananda told me to finish college. In 1960, after an experience of timeless grace in meditation, I became a Catholic. Mokshananda mailed me a magazine article about a hermitage in Big Sur, which I entered in 1962.

In 1967 I professed monastic celibacy and was sent to Italy. In 1978 I traveled to India and Nepal. The following year I met Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) in Rome. From 1984 until 2004, I made retreats at his ashram almost every year. I kept diaries and turned the first part of them into a book, Ashram Diary: In India With Bede Griffiths, due out in spring 2009 from O Books, London.

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