Dana Sawyer | |
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Born | Jonesport, Maine, United States | July 4, 1951
Occupation | Professor of Religion |
Known for | Author of Aldous Huxley: A Biography, author of the authorized biography Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper: Living The World's Religions |
Spouse | Stephani Briggs |
Children | (from previous marriage) Sophie Sawyer and Emma Sawyer |
Dana Sawyer is professor emeritus of religious studies and world religions at the Maine College of Art & Design and an adjunct professor in Asian Religions at the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine. [1] He is the author of numerous published papers and books, including Aldous Huxley: A Biography, [2] which Laura Huxley described as, "Out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked."
Huston Smith, Wisdomkeeper, Sawyer's authorized biography of world religion scholar Huston Smith, was published in 2014. [3] [4] [5]
Huxley and Smith were close friends and were leading advocates of the perennial philosophy, which describes an underlying reality to material existence. Huxley's 1945 book, The Perennial Philosophy , argues that the concept is revealed in the mystical branches of all the world's religions. Sawyer's updated account of the perennial philosophy, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded will be published in July, 2024. [6]
Dana Sawyer was born in Jonesport, Maine in 1951 to Waide and Joanne Sawyer, and after the age of nine grew up with a younger sister, Cynthia, and brother, Paul, in the nearby village of Milbridge, where his father was a wholesale lobster buyer.
He has been involved in fund-raising activities for the Siddhartha School Project in Stok, Ladakh, north India, for more than ten years. [7] This project has resulted in the construction of an elementary/ middle/high school for underprivileged Buddhist children that has been visited twice by the Dalai Lama, who holds it as a model for blending traditional and Western educational ideals. Much of his work for this project has involved translating at lectures for (and teaching with) the school's founder, Khen Rinpoche Lobzang Tsetan, who is the abbot of the Panchen Lama's monastery near Mysore, India. [8] [9]
Sawyer's interest in the phenomenon of Neo-Hindu and Buddhist groups in America led him to become a popular lecturer on topics of interest to these groups. He has taught at the Kripalu Center (Lenox, Massachusetts), the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (Barre, Massachusetts), the Vedanta Society of Southern California (Hollywood, California), the Esalen Institute [10] in Big Sur, California, and other such venues. This work has also brought him into contact with several important figures in this field, including Stanislav Grof, Andrew Harvey, Huston Smith, Laura Huxley, Stephen Cope, Jeffery Kripal, and Alex Grey.
Sawyer has been to India eighteen times, most recently while leading the study abroad program in India for the Maine College of Art & Design in 2019, and has traveled extensively throughout the subcontinent: Nepal, Pakistan, Sikkim, Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Related to academic work Sawyer has lectured at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Banaras Hindu University, the University of Riga, Latvia, the Huntington Library, and at colleges and conferences throughout the United States (interview footage of Sawyer from the Riga conference was featured in a British documentary, "Brand New World," on the dangers of consumer culture). In August, 2005, Sawyer was a participant in the by-invitation-only conference on "Government, Education, and Religion" at the Oxford Roundtable, Lincoln College, Oxford University. He is a member of two academic societies: the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP) and the International Aldous Huxley Society, centered at the University of Munster in Germany.
Ph.D. candidate, University of Iowa, School of Religion, Iowa City, Iowa (comprehensive examinations, May 1988). Major: History of Asian Religions with a primary focus on religion in modern India. Dissertation unfinished, though much of it has been published.
M.A., University of Iowa, School of Religion, History of Asian Religions, 1993.
Oxford University, Oxford, England. Accepted by the Oriental faculty to study for the Department of Philosophy, with Richard Gombrich as advisor. Attended during the Michelmas term, 1980.
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Graduate courses in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy (with Bimal Motilal), Fall 1978.
M.A., University of Hawaiʻi, Department of Asian Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1978. Major: The Religions of India.
B.A., Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, Connecticut 1973. Major: World Literature. Minor: philosophy.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
The Doors of Perception is an autobiographical book written by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it elaborates on his psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, ranging from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision", and reflects on their philosophical and psychological implications. In 1956, he published Heaven and Hell, another essay which elaborates these reflections further. The two works have since often been published together as one book; the title of both comes from William Blake's 1793 book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
The perennial philosophy, also referred to as perennialism and perennial wisdom, is a perspective in philosophy and spirituality that views religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown.
Vedanta, also known as Uttara Mīmāṃsā, is one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy. The word "Vedanta" means "conclusion of the Vedas", and encompasses the ideas that emerged from, or were aligned with, the speculations and enumerations contained in the Upanishads, with a focus on knowledge and liberation. Vedanta developed into many schools, all of which base their ideas on the authority of a common group of texts called the Prasthānatrayī, translated as "the three sources": the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita.
Swami Prabhavananda was an Indian philosopher, monk of the Ramakrishna Order, and religious teacher. He moved to America in 1923 to take up the role of assistant minister in the San Francisco Vedanta Society. In 1928 he was the minister of a small group in Portland, OR, but in 1930 he founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The Swami spent the rest of his life there, writing and collaborating with some of the most distinguished authors and intellectuals of the time, including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Gerald Heard.
Huston Cummings Smith was a scholar of religious studies in the United States, He authored at least thirteen books on world's religions and philosophy, and his book about comparative religion, The World's Religions sold over three million copies as of 2017.
Traditionalism posits the existence of a perennial wisdom or perennial philosophy, primordial and universal truths which form the source for, and are shared by, all the major world religions.
The Perennial Philosophy is a comparative study of mysticism by the British writer and novelist Aldous Huxley. Its title derives from the theological tradition of perennial philosophy.
Vedanta Societies refer to organizations, groups, or societies formed for the study, practice, and propagation of Vedanta, the culmination of Vedas. More specifically, they "comprise the American arm of the Indian Ramakrishna movement", and refer to branches of the Ramakrishna Order located outside India.
Vedanta Press is the publishing wing of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded in 1930 by Swami Prabhavananda. It publishes a number of important books in Indian philosophy and the Vedanta tradition, both original works and translations of Sanskrit scriptures. Vedanta Press published collaborations, original articles, and books by leading intellectuals of the 1940s to the present, including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Fredrick Manchester, among others.
Johannes Bronkhorst is a Dutch Orientalist and Indologist, specializing in Buddhist studies and early Buddhism. He is emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne.
Neo-Advaita, also called the Satsang-movement is a new religious movement, emphasizing the direct recognition of the non-existence of the "I" or "ego," without the need of preparatory practice. Its teachings are derived from, but not authorised by, the teachings of the 20th century sage Ramana Maharshi, as interpreted and popularized by H. W. L. Poonja and several of his western students.
Rami M. Shapiro, commonly called "Rabbi Rami", is an American Reform rabbi, author, teacher, and speaker on the subjects liberal Judaism and contemporary spirituality.
The Religions of Man began as a class taught by Huston Smith at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1955, the producers at KECT, the local NET affiliate, were looking for original content for the newly launched national network. Upon asking the local university what the most popular class was, they were told it was Huston Smith's class. That series was the first TV show to offer college credit.
Huxley on Huxley is a 2009 documentary directed by Mary Ann Braubach, narrated by Peter Coyote and includes interviews with Laura Huxley, drummer John Densmore, spiritual leader Ram Dass, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, artist Don Bachardy, philosopher Huston Smith and actor Nick Nolte, star of the adaptation of Aldous Huxley's 1955 novel The Genius and the Goddess. The film features archival footage of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Mike Wallace, and Igor Stravinsky, and photographs from Laura and Aldous Huxley’s personal collection, as well as other historical archives.
The monastery was originally developed in 1942 during WWII by Gerald Heard, a disciple of Swami Prabhavananda of the Vedanta Society of Southern California an American branch of the Ramakrishna Order of India. Established as Trabuco College, it was originally meant to be a religious, non-sectarian, co-ed monastery, unaffiliated with any particular religious organization. Aldous Huxley, a close friend of Heard, spent 6 weeks there working on his book The Perennial Philosophy.
The following bibliography of Aldous Huxley provides a chronological list of the published works of English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously.
Bhagavad Gita - The Song of God is the title of the Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood's translation of the Bhagavad Gītā, an important Hindu scripture. It was first published in 1944 with an Introduction by Aldous Huxley. This translation is unusual in that it is a collaboration between a world-renowned English language author and an adept in Vedanta Philosophy and Hindu scripture. With this translation, "...the very purpose of life in Hindu terms becomes luminously clear.”. The 2023 edition includes the standardized verse markings that were left out from the original, published in 1944.