Online Zoom Forum: Ramana Maharshi: The Spiritual Vision and Influence of his Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 10 December 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Dr Sara Trevelyan:
Bio: Be As You Are….what a wonderful invitation. I am delighted and honoured to have been invited to chair this evening panel discussion about Ramana Maharshi. I have visited Ramana Maharshi’s ashram when I have been in India – it is a place which has touched me deeply. His living presence lives on both in the ashram as well as in the caves on Mount Arunachala. His teaching encourages profound simplicity – for me this has been an invitation to drop into a deeper ground of being beneath the surface roles of my life. I keep his picture on my desk top – he radiates pure love and reminds me that this divine essence dwells in the hearts of us all.
I am a therapist, an interfaith minister, a mother and grandmother….I am involved in communities here in Edinburgh as well as at Findhorn. I believe in coming together in these challenging times to build circles where we can support each other and grow in our capacity celebrate our uniqueness, strengthen our resilience and deepen our connections with all of life.
Speakers:
Michael James:
Title: Infinite peace is our real nature, so to experience it we must subside back into our being.
Description: Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi taught us that what we actually are is pure being-awareness (sat-cit), which, being infinite, eternal and immutable, is perfect peace (santi) and happiness (ananda). However, at present we do not experience ourself as such because we have seemingly risen as ego, thereby limiting ourself as if we were a person consisting of a body, life, mind, intellect and will, which are finite, transitory and constantly changing, and therefore the very antithesis of peace and happiness. In order to experience ourself as perfect peace and happiness, therefore, we must subside back into our being, as pure being, and the means to do so is self-investigation and self-surrender.
Bio: Michael James spent more than eight years studying the teachings of Bhagavan Ramana under the clear guidance of Sadhu Om, one of his foremost poet-disciples, while assisting him in translating Bhagavan's Tamil writings into English. Since the passing of Sadhu Om in 1985, Michael has continued to improve his understanding of literary Tamil and thereby to refine the translations they did together. He has also written a couple of books and hundreds of articles discussing and explaining Bhagavan's teachings, and he regularly gives talks and answers questions via Zoom.
Dr Isaac Portilla:
Title: The Unique Mystical Experiences of Ramana Maharshi: Explaining the Power of an Extraordinary Indian Sage.
Description: Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi is one of the most iconic sages of twentieth-century India—his transformative presence, impressive detachment, and straightforward spiritual instructions changed the lives of many, and continues inspiring spiritual seekers and practitioners in the East and West. Even so, Ramana’s varied mystical experiences remain little understood today. Besides Self-realization—the uninterrupted experience of the Absolute, the Infinite, Brahman—what are the mystical experiences that explain the power of this extraordinary sage?
Bio: Isaac Portilla PhD, FRAS, is an academic, philosopher, and theologian. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of St Andrews (Scotland). His academic work, initially developed at the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics (St Andrews), focuses on the encounter of spiritual traditions (including interreligious dialogue), mystical consciousness, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. Isaac is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) and a member of various academic organizations, among others, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the European Academy of Religion (EuARe), and the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies.
Isaac's projects cover four areas: academic studies; philosophical-existential inquiry; contemplative studies/practices; exploration of integral life. His most recent works are Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India: Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, the Hari-Hara Mystery, and the Hindu-Christian Encounter (Routledge, 2025) and the academic article, "Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness" (Harvard Theological Review, 2022). Isaac is author of the book, What Christ Said: Revisiting the Countercultural Sayings of Christ Jesus (Wipf and Stock, 2022); in it, he presents the possibility of a provocative Christian path based on truth and freedom. He has also authored various books on spiritual practices, a verses book, and a philosophical work, partly autobiographical, The Possibilities of Spiritual Experience: An Autobiographical and Philosophical Exploration (Mirlo, 2017), where he proposes a path for the modernization of spirituality—the adoption of an original methodology to understand mystical experience—arguing that "the science of Enlightenment [spirituality] never reached the Enlightenment Age."
Isaac has given talks in a variety of environments, from international conferences and universities to yoga studios. He has lived in three continents and travelled extensively, exploring a great variety of cultural environments and visiting places of spiritual relevance in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. He speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Prof Thomas A. Forsthoefel:
Title: On the Testimony of Holy Ones: The Importance and Value of Ramana’s Life and Teaching.
Description: This talk will consider Ramana Maharshi as a potent resource for cross-cultural dialogue and interfaith solidarity. I will first briefly discuss testimony as a valid knowledge producing mechanism in Indian thought and then will apply that discussion to Ramana’s life and teaching. In short, his life and teaching become an eloquent witness to nondualist truth, whose thread in Indian philosophy traces back to the Upanishads and gradually becomes institutionalized in the Advaita school of Vedanta, especially under Shankara (8th CE). However, Ramana distanced himself from institutional Advaita quietly insisting that his teaching expressed his own direct experience and realization. That experience and the inquiry Ramana taught as a method to realize it liberates Advaita from its local contexts. Ramana’s life and teaching thus bears witness to the promise of an immediate experience of the divine, uninflected by cultural forms and thus available to all, regardless of country or culture. As such, it becomes a rich resource for thinkers, practitioners, and those cherishing interfaith solidarity.
Bio: Thomas Forsthoefel is Professor of Religious Studies at Mercyhurst University. He has written, edited or co-edited four books, Knowing Beyond Knowledge, Soulsong, Gurus in America, and The Dalai Lama: Essential Writings. His work in Indian philosophy and religion has been published in numerous academic journals including Philosophy East and West and Journal of Ecumenical Studies. He earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Prof Trey Conner:
Title: Listening for the Sound of the Whistle in the Maternal Inheritance.
Description: Scholars and devotees alike create an image of Tamil sage Ramana Maharshi as a modern era jnani (a yogi of knowledge) who is Socratic in tone and epic in reputation as an instantly awakened being without even a trace of devotion or practice. How, then, to take up a plausible practice that seems to consist of an awakening almost quantum in nature: sudden and discrete, the-awakening-of Ramana-particle? If our practice takes the form of listening we will hear much music. Ramana’s algorithm, “Nan Yar? ”, or, “Who am I?” asks us to take our attention and point it towards the songs that were sung by Mother Maharshi in the young Maharshi’s household, where the tropes and practices of Advaita Vedanta - a first millenium BCE Vedic discourse bent toward the perception of non duality or “Oneness” - even now are singing. This talk situates the high metaphysics of Vedanta monism within the kitchen songs of Maharshi’s youth. Through grateful recourse to recent scholarship on the songs of Avudai Akkal translated by Kanchana Natarajan, this talk also reflects on healing experiences and invites us to sing without a singer. That is, it is the very existence of the I that becomes rhetorically illuminated through the practice of singing “ Nan Yar?”.
Bio: Trey Conner (Associate Professor, University of South Florida St. Petersburg) forms community partnerships that empower youth and provide service learning opportunities for USF students, facilitates a welcoming classroom space for students to learn rituals of writing ranging from contemplative practices to distributed authorship, and writes about the function of chanting, song, and rhythm in diverse rhetorical and poetic traditions, including scholarly articles on Carnatic music, Advaita Vedanta, open source culture, and digital pedagogy. His ongoing collaboration with Richard Doyle (Edwin Erle Sparks Professor, Pennsylvania State University) has most recently yielded Shut Up and Chant: Recipes for the Attention Insurgency, which will be published by University of Nebraska Press in 2026. Trey remains always already engaged in a nourishing process of "infinite rehearsal" of collaboration with friends, family, students, and colleagues, and is currently at work on Everything Worth Doing Now.
Dr Nick Boeving:
Bio: Dr Nick Boeving is a Stanford-trained addiction scientist who writes at the intersection of science and spirituality. Currently on faculty at Alef Trust and Liverpool John Moores University, he teaches in the graduate MSc program in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology and is an active member of APA Divisions 32 (The Society for Humanistic Psychology) and 50 (The Society of Addiction Psychology), as well as the Positive Psychology Special Interest Group.
After a transformative encounter with plant medicines led him to explore their potential to treat addictions of all kinds, he has since redirected his research to pushing past the limiting binaries of traditional recovery models developing new treatment protocols for substance use disorder that include the place of psychedelic medicines.
Trained at Rice in the psychology of religion, Dr. Boeving earned his PhD. in psychology under the direction of the legendary pioneer in the scientific study of human consciousness, Dr. Stanley Krippner. Additionally, he completed a two year postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford School of Medicine – where he is currently a collaborating scientist –working directly with the world’s leading expert on the psychology of forgiveness, Dr. Fred Luskin. Currently, he serves as an editor for the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
Booking: By Paypal.
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
If you are having a difficulty paying by Paypal, then you can pay by bank transfer instead.
NB: you must also email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so we can send you the Zoom sign-in details.
Here are the bank transfer details:
Account Name: Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace
Bank: Bank of Scotland
Bank Address: Edinburgh Royal Mile Branch
Account Number: 06131159
Sort Code: 802000
Some international transfers also ask for an IBAN number:
The IBAN number:
GB70 BOFS 8020 0006 1311 59
BIC:
BOFSGB21168