Papers by Mauro De Matteis
Indian spiritual autobiographies pivot on the idea of spiritual enlightenment: by transcending th... more Indian spiritual autobiographies pivot on the idea of spiritual enlightenment: by transcending the ego, the self puts an end to the cycle of reincarnation. On the one hand these works reflect an individual experience, and on the other hand they mirror the society and culture that forms its background. In this paper I examine two “enlightened” autobiographies, Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) and Osho Rajneesh’s Glimpses of a Golden Childhood (1984), from the viewpoints of ideational content and rhetoric, in order to show the difference between Yogananda’s sacred outlook, which G.K. Shandya interprets from a post-colonial vantage point, and Osho’s secular spiritual perspective, which has a cross-cultural character and includes key aspects of the Western worldview. In the field of spiritual life writing no less than in general, the movement from the cultural moment of 1946 to 1984 reflects the modernization of the Indian tradition and consists in a change of empha...
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Papers by Mauro De Matteis