Ramakrishna and Christ, The Supermystics: New Interpretations

Paul Hourihan, an award-winning author and teacher, was a long-time student of Vedanta and the great mystical traditions of the world. His own commitment to the spiritual path began with a life-transforming experience in his early thirties and continued for the remaining 45 years of his life. While living in New York and Boston in his thirties and forties, he made a personal in-depth study of the major spiritual traditions and in particular studied India’s Vedanta teachings with some of the well-known swamis of the Ramakrishna Order.

With an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a PhD in American literature from Boston University, he commenced his teaching career in southern Ontario, Canada. Gradually he was led to teach courses on the great illumined teachers such as Buddha, Christ, and Ramakrishna. He was able to combine his two great passions—literature and mysticism—in many of the courses he taught over a period of 15 years. Some of these courses were the basis for several of his books on such literary mystics as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and William Blake.

It wasn't until the last part of his life that he started to write his dozen compelling works. With his deep knowledge and his own experiential background, Dr. Hourihan is a fitting interpreter and biographer of Ramakrishna, India’s foremost mystic for many centuries.

Paul Hourihan passed away peacefully in 2001 in northern California where he lived with his wife Anna, who continues to carry on publishing his spiritual works.