The Art of Spiritual Life

It is a memoir in which I invite you to come along with me as I share my life experiences with two world-renowned saints. These saints carried me on journeys to other lands, other times, and other worlds by their guidance regarding the eternal wisdom of ancient India. What I received from them became the subject of my art and my life. The goal of this memoir is to share my experiences of their divine presence and their message of devotional consciousness. My sharing is but a drop of the causeless mercy they bestowed upon their thousands of students and the world.

My true spiritual journey began when I came to know Srila Bhaktivedanta Svami Maharaja, renowned all over the world as "Srila Prabhupada." He is famous as an exalted self-realized guru, and many know him as a most loving teacher, a spiritual father, and as their best friend. I had the blessed opportunity of knowing him in all these ways. Although he was also my guide in transcendental art, he was first and foremost my guide on the path of bhakti-yoga, or devotional love.

The paintings crafted under his guidance by me and the other artists were not artistic fantasies. They were our attempts to render tangible images of his translations and commentaries of the sacred Vedic scriptures. By his power, the paintings themselves became tools for teaching the science of bhakti.

I first began working on this book in 1987, while living at the International Society for Krishna Consciousness asrama in Miami Beach, Florida. This work seemed to be a natural extension of what I had been doing daily in relation to his teachings; that is, sharing his spoken and written words.