THIS HOUSE IS ON FIRE: THE LIFE OF SHRI DHYANYOGI, by Shri Anandi Ma Pathak

This House Is on Fire focuses on the struggles of Kashinath Mishra, a boy from a remote village in India's Bihar state, as he grapples with life's biggest questions. Seeing a funeral at age seven, Kashinath faints and is thereafter unable to play, study, eat, or sleep. Instead, two questions occupy his thoughts to the exclusion of all else: Who am I, and What is death? The only relief he can find is in spending time with the local holy men, so he runs away from home to become a sadhu.

And this is where the real story begins. The boy is renamed Madhusudandas as a Ramanandi monk, and travels the entirety of India for thirty years around the turn of the century, often starving, cold, exhausted, and despondent. But the fire inside him to answer these questions pushes him onward. He experiments with virtually every meditation teacher in the country as well as with hatha yoga, chanting, fasting, and a wide variety of other techniques. But even after years of practice, he finds himself one night alone in a temple crying his eyes out because he can't concentrate well--surely a situation that most of us meditators can relate to! Fortunately, for this young sadhu, Swami Vivekananda appears to him in a vision and blesses him, saying, "Don't worry, it will be alright."

After that, Madhusudandas' practice begins to flower as he wanders from place to place in the ancient way of the sadhu. Many years later, as he is chanting the Tulsidas Ramayana in his cave on Mount Abu, a dreadlocked nagababa appears, and offers him shaktipat initiation. Madhusudandas eagerly agrees and instantly receives the answers to the questions that have plagued him his entire life. Stunned by the power of the shaktipat initiation, the newly enlightened man, now called "Dhyanyogi," vows to spare other earnest seekers the long, arduous, and precarious path he had to tread.

The rest of this fascinating book covers the years of Shri Dhyanyogi's mission to bring shaktipat initiation to householders in India, and eventually America. Filled with hundreds of personal stories from disciples as well as photos covering almost a century of this remarkable yogi's life, This House Is on Fire stands out from an entire bookcase of saints' biographies as the one most likely to fire up your own can-do spirit.

- VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

SHAKTI: HIDDEN TREASURE OF POWER, by Shri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandasji

REVIEW COMING SOON

RAJA YOGA, by Swami Vivekananda

When Swami Vivekananda sailed around the world to attend the first World Congress of Religions in Chicago in 1893, he ignited a flame of interest in Hinduism that has only grown stronger in the century since then. Finding an eager audience in America, he set about writing books that would introduce Westerners to some of the basic concepts of Hindu spirituality, meditation first and foremost among them. In his classic work Raja Yoga, Swamiji offers what is still one of the clearest, cleanest, and most direct expressions of what meditation is, how to do it, and what benefits it brings to practitioners. Using Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (see next page) as the basis of his text, he creates what is essentially an inspired series of commentaries that take readers to the core of Indian thought and spiritual practice. Vivekananda's passion was to strip away the centuries of misinterpretation and misunderstanding from what are some of the most basic and powerful concepts of spirituality the world's spiritual traditions have ever produced, and in Raja Yoga he succeeds magnificently. While some of the Victorian language can feel dated at time, the diamond of clarity that is the hallmark of the great Swami still shines for us today. - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED