Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan (2) in Concert 1972
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Ustad Zakir Hussain Tabla duet
Ustad Zakir Hussain Tabla duet
This is an old concert recording of Usthad Zakhir Hussain & Usthad Fazal Quereshi tabla duet,held in Malaysia in late 1980s.
Ustad Zakir Hussain Playing a Teentaal Rela at Shrutinandan
Ustad Zakir Hussain Playing a Teentaal Rela at Shrutinandan
Source :-https://www.facebook.com/HindustaniCl...
Ustad Zakir Hussain Playing a Teentaal Rela at Shrutinandan
Ustad Zakir Hussain Playing a Teentaal Rela at Shrutinandan
Source :-https://www.facebook.com/HindustaniCl...
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan (3) In Concert 1972
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan (3) In Concert 1972
Raga Sindhi Bhairavi ( 26.16 )
Ravi Shankar - Sitar
Ali Akbar Khan - Sarod
Alla Rakha - Tablas
In concert recorded at the Philarmonic Hall, New York, october 1972
" We dedicate this album to our beloved Guru Baba Ustad Allauddin Khan "
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan in concert 1972
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan in concert 1972
Three Ragas:
01 - Raga - Hem Gihag
02 - Raga - Manj Khamaj
03 - Raga - Sindhi Bhairavi
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan in concert 1972
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan in concert 1972
Three Ragas:
01 - Raga - Hem Gihag
02 - Raga - Manj Khamaj
03 - Raga - Sindhi Bhairavi
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Swami Satchidananda, 87; Yoga Master and Guru Preached and Practiced a Life of Spiritual Unity
Swami Satchidananda, 87; Yoga Master and Guru Preached and Practiced a Life of Spiritual Unity
By ELAINE WOO
AUG. 25, 2002
Swami Satchidananda, the yoga master and guru whose message of spiritual unity brought solace to the Woodstock generation and attracted followers from Hollywood to Virginia, died Monday in India. He was 87.
The swami lived in Yogaville, Va., a 1,000-acre community he founded by the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville in 1979.
He was in his native South India to address a peace conference when he died suddenly from a thoracic aneurysm, a Yogaville representative said.
Brought to America in 1966 by psychedelic artist Peter Max, the swami was part of a wave of Hindu teachers in the 1960s and ‘70s who found among U.S. youth a curiosity about Eastern mysticism, music and meditation. He became known as the “Woodstock guru” after he opened that epochal music festival in 1969 by declaring music “the celestial sound that controls the whole universe.”
He gradually shifted his base of operations from Sri Lanka to the U.S. and opened branches of his Integral Yoga Institute around the world.
Carole King a Disciple
Among his disciples are singer-composer Carole King, who donated 600 acres to his Virginia ashram; jazz pianist Alice Coltrane; and actresses Diane Ladd, Laura Dern and Sally Kirkland. Another adherent is Dr. Dean Ornish, the best-selling author, who said the teachings of the swami inspired his research and program for reversing heart disease through diet and relaxation.
The swami was a tall, lean man in a billowing white beard and saffron robes. Followers often remarked on his penetrating, otherworldly gaze. “When you looked in his eyes,” Max recalled recently of his first meeting with the guru 36 years ago, “nobody was home except an ocean of love.”
The swami loved to fly planes and helicopters and had satellite television installed in his modern house at the ashram. He was fascinated by cameras and would usually be seen carrying the latest models, presents from admirers.
His followers regarded him as a fount of practical wisdom.
Actress Lindsay Crouse recalled a meditation with the swami during which a woman confessed how aggrieved she was by her lack of success. “She said, ‘I’ve really been trying to do good work, make independent films, not commercial, but I just can’t get anywhere with it,’ ” Crouse recalled.
“Well,” the swami replied, “people obviously don’t want that--do something else!”
“He was very down to earth,” Crouse said. “He gave very simple advice, [so simple] it would make you feel sort of silly after a while.”
Born in Chettipalayam in South India in 1914, he was the son of wealthy landowners. As a young man, he worked in his uncle’s auto import business and learned welding. He also worked briefly in India’s film industry as a cameraman and producer.
He married and had children. But when his wife of five years died, he began, at age 28, his spiritual journey. He took the vows of a renunciate and traded his given name of Ramaswamy for Satchidananda, said to mean “existence, knowledge, bliss.”
He studied with some of India’s greatest sages, adopting Swami Sivananda as his guru in 1949. Four years later, he left for Sri Lanka, where he opened a branch of Sivananda’s organization, the Divine Life Society. He remained for several years, opening an orphanage and medical clinic, and joining a movement to welcome untouchables to Hindu temples.
In 1966, Conrad Rooks, a filmmaker, invited Max to Paris to help him with a project, a movie about “the meaning of life.” When Max arrived, he was greeted by Rooks, Ravi Shankar and Swami Satchidananda.
“I didn’t know what a swami was,” Max said. But he was instantly mesmerized by the Indian man with golden eyes. “I just told him, ‘Swami, America needs you desperately to come there.’ All the hippies were running around, experimenting, trying to become sort of enlightened.”
Under a visa identifying him as “Minister of Divine Words,” the swami came for a two-day visit, but wound up staying for the rest of his life. He became a popular yoga teacher in New York City. Within a year, his supporters had bought him a $1-million center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Finding an Inner Peace
His integral yoga teaches Hatha yoga and other methods, as well as meditation, chanting and cleansing practices.
“He was a major figure who helped bring yoga to the West,” said Nora Isaacs, managing editor of the Berkeley-based Yoga Journal. “His underlying message was that every person has peace within them, but it’s all covered up. By doing these practices, you uncover that.”
He reached a massive audience in 1969, in a cow pasture in New York state. Max, his sponsor, knew Michael Lang, one of the organizers of the Woodstock festival, and proposed that the swami open the event.
Sitting on a stage that would be shared by such countercultural icons as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, the swami challenged the throngs to use “the sacred art of music” to bring peace to the globe.
He attracted a celebrity following that included Mia Farrow, George Harrison and Rascals vocalist Felix Cavaliere. Some of his students became yoga teachers, such as King and Kirk- land, who has taught Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan and Robert DeNiro.
“He was very, very playful, which is why so many celebrities enjoyed being with him,” said Nirmala Heriza, a longtime devotee who now directs the Integral Yoga Center of Los Angeles, as well as a rehabilitation program for heart patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that is based on the swami’s precepts.
Kirkland nearly became a monk after meeting the swami in 1969. She remembered that when she asked him if she should quit show business, he said, “No, no, no, no, no. Your destiny is to be a public person.... Just consider yourself a plainclothes swami.”
“If you met him today, you would feel you were in the presence of a 12-year-old,” Kirkland said. “He had such innocence and joy, and a hysterical sense of humor.”
At the dedication of a $2-million, lotus-shaped temple at the Virginia ashram in 1986, he flew in a helicopter over the site, leaning out to pour holy water over the structure. The festivities included a parade featuring a flame-tossing juggler, monks, priests and rabbis. Leading the procession was a baby elephant named Bubbles.
The lotus shrine is the focal point of the ashram. It features a column of light ascending from a central altar that divides into 12 rays. The rays represent the world’s religions, while the central light symbolizes universal wisdom.
The message, the swami once said, was “not to make one religion out of 12" but to illuminate the central truths at their core. His slogan was “Truth Is One, Paths Are Many.”
“Read the Bible, read the Koran, read the Torah, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita,” the ecumenical guru said. “They all say: ‘Refine yourself. Get out of these definitions.’ It’s the definitions that divide us.”
An estimated 1,500 mourners attended his funeral Thursday in Yogaville. He will be entombed in a sarcophagus beneath a statue of his likeness.
Link: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-25-me-swami25-story.html
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Swami Satchidananda, Woodstock's Guru, Dies at 87
Swami Satchidananda, Woodstock's Guru, Dies at 87
By Douglas Martin
Aug. 21, 2002
Swami Satchidananda, the guru with the gigantic cottony beard who opened the Woodstock festival by calling music ''the celestial sound that controls the whole universe,'' died on Monday in Madras in South India. He was 87.
He lived in Yogaville, Va., a community he founded, and was in India attending a peace conference.
The swami, who used a title given to Hindu monks, arrived on the crest of a wave of fascination with India in the 1960's, as sitar music, meditation and incense became standard features of college dormitory life. With a gift for irony, a mischievous sense of humor and a disarming way of ending his sentences with a slight ''hum,'' he gave lectures that were part of the fun.
Peter Max, the artist of psychedelia, invited him to the United States in 1966, and his disciples included celebrities like the singer-composer Carole King, the jazz musician Paul Winter and the actors Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern.
Among the many Indian gurus then appearing in America, he was regarded as more tolerant of the often heavily medicated flower children. He attributed their frustrations to failed institutions and offered his teachings as a way to escape drugs.
''They are all searching for the necklace that's around their necks,'' he said of the Woodstock generation. ''Eventually they'll look in the mirror and see it.''
Over time, his influence deepened, as he established ashrams, or places of worship, and yoga training across the United States, including his Light of Truth Universal Shrine (Lotus) on 750 acres on the James River in Virginia. Corporations asked him to counsel employees, and medical centers sought his advice on nutrition.
Dr. Dean Ornish, the scientist and author who showed that cardiovascular disease can be reversed through diet, exercise and relaxation, became a vegetarian and started meditating on the basis of the swami's advice. ''I felt better,'' he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998. ''I felt peaceful.''
Ramaswamy, as his given name was then, was born in Chettipalayamm to a family of wealthy landowners on Dec. 22, 1914, a time seen as having propitious astrological energy because Jupiter was aligned with Uranus under the sign of Capricorn.
According to the reference book ''Religious Leaders of America,'' he worked in his family's automobile import business as a young man, learning the welding trade.
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He married and had two sons; one, C. R. Nanjappan, who lives in South India, survives him, along with six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
His wife died five years after they married, and he became more deeply interested in spirituality. He left his sons with his mother and set off on a spiritual quest that took him to mountaintops and deep into jungles and forests. He wandered from one guru to the next, finally finding the one he wanted to follow in Swami Sivananda, a yoga master who wrote 200 books.
On July 10, 1949, on the banks of the Ganges River, he was initiated into the holy order of Sannyasa by Swami Sivananda and given the monastic name Swami Satchidananda. It is said to mean ''existence-knowledge-bliss absolute.''
In 1951, Swami Sivananda asked him to tour India organizing branches of his Divine Life Society and teaching yoga. He was then sent to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, to do the same thing. His outreach was social as well as spiritual: he opened an orphanage and a medical dispensary.
In 1965, Conrad Rooks, a filmmaker, met Swami Satchidananda while filming his autobiographical movie ''Chappaqua.'' The next year Mr. Rooks and Mr. Max, who was working on the film with him, invited the swami for a two-day visit to New York. His visa identified him as ''Minister of Divine Words,'' and he soon attracted hundreds of followers who persuaded him to lengthen his stay.
He broke from Divine Life, and on Oct. 7, 1966, founded his first Integral Yoga Institute in New York. Integral Yoga is his blend of a variety of forms of yoga, including physical exercises, that together are designed to lead to mental tranquillity.
Word circulated on the nascent spiritual grapevine about the swami's gifts, including an account that he had cured a disciple's kidney ailment by blessing a glass of water. Seven months before Woodstock, he presided over a sold-out evening at Carnegie Hall.
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At the music festival, he sat on a white bedspread surrounded by microphones. He shared the stage with Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
''The whole world is watching you,'' he said to the crowd. ''The entire world is going to know what the American youth can do for humanity. America is helping everybody in the material field, but the time has come for America to help the whole world spiritually also.''
In 1972, he founded Yogaville-West in Seigler Springs, Calif. Yogaville-East was begun in Pomfret, Conn. For almost 10 years, it was the United States headquarters for Integral Yoga.
In 1979, he acquired 600 acres of woodlands in Buckingham County, Va., financing the purchase by selling a piece of land in Falls Village, Conn., that Carole King had given him. He later added 150 more acres.
The centerpiece of the town is a shrine with 10 altars for different religions -- Hindu, Shinto, Tao, Buddhist, Islam, Sikh, Native American and African, plus two for other unnamed religions. Tubes of neon light rise from each altar; a larger central altar has its own, larger tube of light.
The shrine highlights a belief the swami shares with modern Hinduism, that all religions ultimately lead to God. At the dedication ceremony in 1986, there were two Bengal tigers, a juggler and a baby elephant named Bubbles.
Swami Satchidananda led the audience in chanting ''Om-shanti,'' or peace.
We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports, and suggestions toarchive_feedback@nytimes.com.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 20, 2002, Section C, Page 17 of the National edition with the headline: Swami Satchidananda, Woodstock's Guru, Dies at 87.
Monday, August 19, 2019
Yama, Kalighat painting
Yama, Kalighat painting
Swami Vivekananda Quotes:
Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.
Joseph Campbell – The Story of Indra from the Brahmavar Upanishad – The ...
Joseph Campbell – The Story of Indra from the Brahmavar Upanishad
Religious ecstasy is a type of altered state of consciousness
My thoughts lately about the goal of religion in daily living is to provide a code of morality and ethics to conduct our lives' duties to work, maintain a household, relate to the world around us and relationships with other people.
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