Aug 28, 2017

Swami Prakashanand Saraswati

Swami Prakashanand Saraswati
Swami Prakashanand Saraswati
Swami Prakashanand Saraswati or Swamiji (Hindi: स्वामी प्रकाशानंद सरस्वती) (born 1929) is a convicted felon and child molester, spiritual leader, social reformer and award-winning author from Ayodhya, India who founded Radha Madhav Dham in the United States.

He is a Rasik Saint in the tradition of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. In 2011, a jury found Swami Prakashanand Saraswati guilty on 20 counts of indecency with a child. He is still a fugitive and appeared on the Fox TV show America's Most Wanted.

Swami Prakashanand Saraswati was born in a respectable brahmin family in 1929 in Ayodhya, India. His early life was fraught with intense religious feelings, and as a youth he became a reclusive mystic so that he might find God.[10] He completed his studies and at age of 21, renounced the world and took the order of sanyas. In 1952, he was offered to become the Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath but he declined, because, according to Swami Prakshanand Saraswati, he "was drawn towards the love of Radha Krishna".

He spent the next 20 years as a wandering ascetic in the Himalayas and in the forests of central India, ending in Braj. Following the strict discipline of sannyas, he first lived in the Himalayas (Joshimath, Badrinath, Rishikesh, Haridwar, etc.), forests of Amarkantak, near the Narbada River, Allahabad and Kashi for about four years. Later, he went to Vrindaban and then to Barsana where he spent over 18 years in the deep woodlands of Braj. In 1975, he emerged from his solitary life he began his mission of teaching the path of raganuga bhakti. He founded the International Society of Divine Love in India in 1975. The society was established in New Zealand in 1978. Later on he travelled to America and founded an ashram for his devotees and disciples. By 1981 Swami Prakashanand Saraswati, who had begun to be thought of as a distinguished sage and a saint, conceived of creating a global mission, establishing religious centres in India, England, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prakashanand_Saraswati

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