Swami Venkatesananda

Swami Venkatesananda's Australian talks on yoga were first given in 1968 at the homes of friends, or at various churches and synagogues. After 1969 he visited Western Australia every year, so that the notion of creating a yoga centre where he could stay while delivering these talks became an obvious decision for all those hopeful of a longer stay each year.

Eventually the Beacon Yoga Centre, in the Western seaport town of Fremantle, became somewhat of an ashram, with a permanent staff of yoga teachers, all eager to sit at the feet of a yogi named Swami Venkatesananda. And it's no doubt thanks to all the people who lived and worked at Beacon Yoga Centre that we have this legacy of audio recordings to pass on.

Unfortunately, we have few Australian recordings made during the sixties and seventies that have survived, or if they have, we don't have them (send them if you do).

Fortunately, we do have many of the analog recordings made in 1980 and 1981 as well as his final year of lecturing, 1982. Those who are observant may detect some change in his yogic vision in the later years; certainly a change had come over him; many had commented on how there was something different about him, and we all knew that he wouldn't be with us much longer. Foremost, he clearly seemed emancipated from any debt his gift of scholarship had bestowed upon him. A decade earlier, yes, ten years earlier, he had proclaimed to all of us that his final task on earth was to finish his own translation of the great but little known scripture known as the Yoga Vasistha. With it completed, he still managed keep on for one more year, and give in this final months of his life, a fourteen hour series of talks centered around the Yoga Vasistha.

So, here we will post the talks taken from his final three years, as well as his final lecture series on the Yoga Vasistha, delivered over several months in the winter and spring of 1982, which provide an opportunity for students, scholars, and most importantly, yogis, to probe this final chapter of recordings of the yogi, who, because he was empty was filled, as those who were nearby could attest, with the ever constant luminosity of a liberated sage.