| Swami
Rudrananda (Rudi) was born at the beginning of the Depression and
raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. along with his two brothers, under brutal
and impoverished conditions. Abandoned by his father, his mother
worked in burlesque to help support her family but Rudi had to quit
high school and go to work in order to make ends meet. At 18 he
enlisted in the Army and after being discharged attended night school,
got his diploma, and then went to North Carolina State College where
he received a degree in textile engineering. Soon after returning
to New York, he opened an Oriental Art shop in a small store on
7th Avenue next the famous jazz joint, the Village Vanguard. Within
several years it became one of the major Asian antique stores in
the United States.
Rudi
was aware of his spiritual potential as a young boy and spoke
of continual inspirational visions and experiences that guided
him onto his spiritual path. His earliest teachers, he said, were
Tibetan Buddhists. He also studied Gurdjieff work and Pak Subud
in his early 20's. The greater portion of his studies was spent
with Hindu masters: Sri Shankarcharya of Puri, Bhagwan Nityananda,
and Swami Muktananda, who, in 1966, recognized Rudi as a swami,
and gave him the name Rudrananda.
For
all his immersion in the Orient, Rudi was a product of Western
civilization and recognized the need to make esoteric Eastern
teachings accessible to the growing spiritual hunger that emerged
in America in the middle of the 20th Century. For over twenty
years he taught Kundalini Yoga to many hundreds of students in
America and abroad. In 1973, Swami Rudrananda departed from this
world during a small plane crash in the Catskills. Remarkably,
the other three occupants walked away with only minor injuries.
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