The Gospel of the Stone

Swami Ramananda reveals in The Gospel of the Stone a treasury of ancient traditions and teachings as well as a glimpse of Earth’s earlier epochs—the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds—whose histories illuminate meaningful insights for the Fifth World, upon whose threshold we all now stand. The Gospel of the Stone is a touching and vibrantly realistic story of the migration of a Native American people, led by the wise elder Shumavi. The Native American way of life—daily chores, cooking, rites, teachings, and rituals—are richly and vividly depicted.

Swami Ramananda founded the Sadhana Society in California in 1968. Among his teachers are Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindrinath Tagore, Swami Yogananda, Krishnamurti and Swami Prabhavanada, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. While in India, he studied and traveled with Mahatma Gandhi. During a walk across India with Ghandi in 1939, Swami Ramananda took his vows as a Swami. He was present at Gandhi’s assassination and shortly thereafter returned to the US. During his earlier years in India, Swami Ramananda also spent time with Rabindrinath Tagore, a Noble Prize winner for literature. Tagore gave Ramananda a copy of his book Sadhana with the wish that it could be used as a textbook in America. Swami Ramananda taught from Tagore’s book for over 50 years, alongside the Vedic Upanishads. While Gandhi and Tagore were the teachers who influenced Swami Ramananda most, his first teacher of philosophy and spirituality was his grandmother, who was a full-blooded Mohawk. During his childhood, she told him of the legends, stories, and traditions of her people. He was deeply impressed and inspired by what he saw as great similarities between the Native American and Eastern religions. As a teacher later in life, Swami Ramananda realized that the principle of “Unity within Diversity” profoundly applies to spiritual wisdom and religious experience. Throughout his life, he maintained an avid interest in all religions, from the Roman Catholic—the tradition in which he was raised—to the Vedic of India. He encouraged his students to enjoy and celebrate the fascinating and far-reaching diversity of the world’s religions, and he dedicated his life to helping others discover their own unique spirituality through the pathway of direct experience. He always told his students: “Don’t be a follower! Find where your own truth is and live it!” Swami Ramananda was born with a bad vertebrae that never joined and consequently spent most of his childhood in bed. He was unable to walk until he was 18. He first began to crawl, then walk with crutches, then walk with a cane until he could walk unaided. Since that time, he has walked seven times across the continent of India and all over the United States. His physical confinement in childhood afforded him time to read, which he did avidly. At age 4, he completed reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Soon after, he began reading books on religion and philosophy. Swami Ramananda lived his life in constant wonder and learning. His students fondly remember his pocket-sized magnifying glass, which he carried everywhere, and which he would use to examine the subtle beauties in nature—whether a flower, stone, insect’s wings, or the veins in a leaf of a tree. His magnifying glass was a literal and symbolic message to his students that God is everywhere, in everything, and so beautiful to behold. He inspired those who knew him, through the very way he lived his life, to see God in the world and in oneself. He once said: “Human beings are co-creators. This is our whole purpose for being. We are the co-creators we are continually expanding creation. “There is nothing out there in the universe that we’re not part of. The human bag of bones has no limitations. If the physical side of us is filled with possibilities, think of the possibilities in that Mysterious Something within each one of us.” Swami Ramananda lived in recognition that every moment of life offers a creative opportunity to experience greater and greater co-creative possibility, greater and greater expression of Truth. His life was a continuous experiment in truth. He passed from his body in 2004. It is not known how old he was.