| The soul does not love. It is love itself. It does not exist. It is existence itself. It does not know. It is knowledge itself. — How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali |
Christopher Isherwood
1904 - 1986
Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist. The son of landed gentry, he was born in the ancestral seat of his family, Wybersley Hall, High Lane, near Stockport in the northwest of England. His army officer father was killed in the First World War.
At school he met W. H. Auden, who became his lifelong friend. He later studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he met Stephen Spender, who was at Oxford University with Auden.
Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to males, he moved to Berlin, the capital of the young Weimar Republic, drawn by its deserved reputation for sexual freedom.
He worked as a private tutor while writing the novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains and a series of short stories collected under the title Goodbye to Berlin. These provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera and for the subsequent Broadway musical Cabaret and film of the same name.
In September 1931 the poet William Plomer introduced him to E.M. Forster; they became close and Forster served as a mentor to the young writer.
Swami Prabhavananda, Guru to Chistopher Isherwood
Auden and Isherwood emigrated to the United States in 1939. Isherwood settled in California, where he embraced Hinduism. Together with Swami Prabhavananda he produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and his Disciples, novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with themes and characters of Vedanta, karma, reincarnation and the Upanishadic quest.
Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood
Swami Prabhavananda, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood in Los Angeles, c. 1940
Arriving in Hollywood in 1939, he first met Gerald Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at Trabuco Canyon that was eventually gifted to the Vedanta Society. Through Heard, who was the first to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers that included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Chris Wood, John Yale and J. Krishnamurti.
- excerpted from Wikipedia, 2006