Living with Reality

Book excerpt: "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