His tour clearly affirmed that Guruji’s reputation had spread far and wide; his message was being heard by an ever-broadening audience. Back at Devipuram, however, he still sometimes wondered aloud why his efforts never really seemed to, in his own words, “catch fire” with anything even remotely approaching the colossal popularity of India’s mass gurus such as Sri Ravi Shankar or Mata Amritanandamayi. It was not that he sought fame or adulation; if anything, he instinctively avoided both at every turn.
But what he wanted very much was for his message to rise sufficiently high above the cacophony to be heard by all who were ready to receive it.
Yet it remained fundamentally impossible to picture Guruji at the helm of any sort of mass spiritual juggernaut. He was too down-to-earth; too straightforward and unpretentious. As scholar Hugh Urban wrote (of another pair of spiritual leaders in a different scholarly context), Guruji and Amma were most likely too genuine, too authentic to find success on such a vast domestic and international scale.
Unlike the neo-Tantric sex-gurus and gurus of the rich like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh [Osho], [they] are remarkably low-key and seem relatively uninterested in the mega-guru, mass-profit business. Indeed, despite their odd hybridity of religious styles, they appear quite resistant to the commodification and consumerism that is so rampant in American-style Tantra.
Guruji was also profoundly uninterested in gaining or exercising any charismatic power over others. “If you are given some power and you exercise that power to control people, then you get stuck at that level and will likely be unable to help others,” he explained. “But if you use your power to empower others, then you elevate both yourself and others.”
Moreover, Guruji offered no miracles or instant solutions, no quick-fixes or easy answers. Even the streamlined and simplified Sri Vidya rituals and meditations he developed and taught could take years to fully understand and master. “Sure, we may question why one should go through all this trouble if shorter methods are available,” Guruji agreed. “And I do think the shorter methods work, too, but each method has its own reward in proportion to the effort invested.”
In addition, his philosophical writings dug uncommonly deep, challenging and surprising readers rather than providing straightforward inspiration and comfortable platitudes. And when Guruji spoke of the connections between science and spirituality, he did so with the complexity and authority of an experienced nuclear physicist—his learned scientific references were never the lightweight “quantum-everything” that has become the bland stock-in-trade of so much New Age spiritual literature. It took a lot of time and effort to digest and follow.
Finally, of course, his liberal teachings on nudity and sexuality in Tantric tradition—despite their historic authenticity—landed him in a rather sparsely inhabited spiritual middle ground: he was sufficiently frank to scare off many socially conservative Indian worshipers, yet too resolutely authentic, practical and non-sensational to excite the imaginations of many Western neo-Tantrics seeking X-rated “sacred sexuality” in the Mystic East.
Yet while Guruji’s teachings spread comparatively slowly, their influence steadily deepened and entrenched itself over the decades, carried by the countless devotees with whom he has shared. “While Amritananda is nowhere near as famous as Rajneesh [Osho],” Gupta observed, “he is the Guru of Chaitanyananda [Haran Aiya], founder of the Rajarajeshwari Peetam in Rochester, NY, America’s fastest-growing Sri Vidya community, [and his] other disciples have founded Sri Vidya Peetams in other countries as well
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