nablusos wrote: > Reccomended reading for anyone who thinks Shantanand Saraswati > was just a cook: "The Man Who Wanted to Know God" > ISBN 0-517-88520-4 > That Shantanand was a cook at Jyotirmath is just a rumor. I supposed the idea behind it is that Shantanand used to cook food for Brahmanand Saraswati, implying that he was unfit to succeed Guru Dev because of that. It may be true that Shantanand cooked food at various times; when he was an editor at Geeta Press he may have cooked his own food - I don't know. However, when I interviewed Brahmacharya Satyanand in 1970, another direct desciple of Guru Dev, he made no mention of Shantanand being a yoga camp cook.
We have a very detailed corpus of interviews with Shantanand over the years conducted by F.C. Roles, who was a student of Shantanand - no mention of Shantanand being a cook. A full report: In his report, he wrote: "One evening, when we were all sitting on the sand on the banks of the Ganges, you can imagine how surprised I was to hear the following: "all our problems happen because we do not remember ourselves." The word 'self-remembering' resounded as if Ouspensky had said it." From that time on, up to and including 1993, this Advaita Vedanta teacher invited Roles and MacLaren for private discussions. It soon became clear that the Advaita Vedanta teaching and the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were closely related and complemented each other wonderfully. Since then, Roles and MacLaren have both used and passed on the material of these discussions, together with the teaching of the two others. Shantananda once summarised it thus: "The knowledge of the East will bloom in the fertile fields of the West." 'History of the Work' http://www.ouspensky.info/maclareneng.htm
