Sublime

A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka.

His first book, Thought Force, was published in 1901.

I especially enjoyed the work of Sir John Woodroffe (1865–1936), a.k.a. “Arthur Avalon,” who—while prominently serving as Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in British India—spent his private hours explaining, defending and ultimately practicing in the then widely reviled Hindu religious schools of Shaiva and Shakta Tantrism.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in her landmark masterwork, The Secret Doctrine

Five people (Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, H. Olcott, and A. P. Sinnett) wrote most of what we know to date of the etheric web, auras, magnetism, chakras, spiritualism, psychic perception, and reincarnation. These people took the ancient wisdom of the Hindus and translated them into a language Westerners could understand.

The master of the academy, William Weatherald, had a major impact on the boy, implanting in him a love of literature and the essentials of mathematics and other practical sciences and fostering more than a little of the gentle religiosity of Quakerism.

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

Then, in 1906, Hunt’s enterprise came to an end when he was arrested after rumors broke out how he held the Igorots’ wages he had earlier promised them and that two of the tribesmen in his group who had died were left unburied.