Aghora

The Aghora trilogy have been embraced world-wide for their frankness in broaching subjects generally avoided and their facility for making the 'unseen' real. We enter the world of Vimalananda who teaches by story and living example.

Book 2 of the trilogy explores the kundalini, the force of forces. Tantra, mantra, the sacred fire, chakras and consciousness. Written in the personable form of Vimalananda's storytelling and recounting of life's episodes we are able to truly enter the invisible realms.

"More than four decades have passed since I met the Aghori Vimalananda, and it has been thirty-three years since I last heard him speak. Happily for me he permitted me to write down many of his musings so that I would have them to remind me of the wisdom that he embodied. And, thanks to his compassion for others, he instructed me to publish some of this material after he was gone, which I did in the three Aghora books, books that I continue to regularly read and that continue to offer me thought-provoking guidance at any step along my own path.An aghori is someone who plunges so deep into dark­ness that he emerges into light. Aghora is a spiritual path that because of its extreme heterodoxy has been¿ough I cannot myself claim to be an aghori, the example that he thus set has inspired my own sophomoric attempts to transmute into equanimity all that is both gratifying and grotesque in life, focusing on the subtle world while living in mundane reality, for Vimalananda always emphasized the importance of living with reality." Dr. Robert E. Svoboda Illustrated by Satya Moses

Aghora, described in this volume as super-tantra , is a Path of Devotion to the Great Mother Goddess Kundalini, here manifesting with the Name and Image of the Goddess Tara. This way is one of extraordinary extremes and intensities, even for tantra, and its aim is nothing less than to destroy the human limitations of the practioner, so that he or she becomes a super-human in fact, a kind of deity.

Vol. copublished by Sadhana Publications, Floresville, Tx.

A grand scale space opera about family, sacrifice, and survival told within an immense universe, both in scope and originality.

"Aghor Medicine moves seamlessly between an ethnography of religion and medical anthropology. The stories of suffering and renunciation, of collective experience that turn Indian hierarchy and discrimination upside down are quite marvelous. The writing is clear and direct and the interpretations balanced and scrupulously documented. Barrett has written one of the best accounts on local traditions "modernizing" in ways that combine indigenous significance with globally crucial changes that react against health and social inequalities."—Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University "Ronald Barrett's fine account of aghor medicine reveals essential characteristics of India's popular culture, and, since an ashram in California has an important role in the story, of American popular culture as well."—Charles Leslie, author of Death Row Letters (forthcoming)