Authors starting with C

- Sri Chinmoy (August 27, 1931 - October 11, 2007) -

Ancestry: Shakpura Village, Chittagong District, East Bengal, British India (now Bangladesh)

Chinmoy Kumar Ghose was an Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. in 1964. His teachings emphasize love for God, daily meditation on the heart, service to the world, and religious tolerance (a view that "all faiths" are essentially divine).

In 2007, Sri Chinmoy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Ghose was the youngest of seven children, born in Shakpura village in the Chittagong District of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) He lost his father to illness in 1943, and his mother a few months later. In 1944, the 12-year-old Ghose joined his brothers and sisters at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, French India, where elder brothers Hriday and Chitta had already established a presence. There he spent the next twenty years in spiritual practice, including meditation, study in Bengali and English literature, and work in the ashram’s cottage industries. Ghose claimed that within only a few months of arriving at the ashram he had achieved the spiritual state of God-realisation.

In his teens and twenties he was a sprinter and decathlete. According to Ghose, in 1955 he became secretary to Sri Aurobindo's most senior disciple Nolini Kanta Gupta. However, the accuracy of this particular claim is not supported by the ashram's Archives and Research Library. Ghose translated many of Gupta's articles from Bengali to English. He also published articles of his own about India’s spiritual leaders, and continued filling notebooks with poems, songs, and reflections on ashram life.

In 1964, with the help of American sponsors, he emigrated to New York City with the intention of teaching.

It took Chinmoy three years to obtain a Green Card. One requirement was that he provide a reference from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram concerning his suitability as a teacher. Chinmoy states that it was not possible for him to obtain a reference. In 1967 the problem was overcome when one of Chinmoy's disciples introduced him to her brother who was an assistant in the New York Immigration Office. Chinmoy's new contact not only waived the reference requirement but also gave Chinmoy's application special help and attention. In the summer of 1967 Chinmoy finally received his Green Card.

Between 1968 and 1970, he gave talks at Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Brandeis, Dartmouth, and The New School for Social Research.

While in America in the 1970s, Sri Chinmoy attracted followers such as musicians Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin, though both eventually turned away from him. In 2000, Santana discussed Sri Chinmoy as being "vindictive" towards the end of their relationship. Other musicians who were spiritually inspired by Chinmoy are Narada Michael Walden, Roberta Flack and Boris Grebenshikov. Sri Chinmoy also had the Olympic athlete Carl Lewis as a student. Frederick Lenz (Atmananda) became a follower around 1972, but he left and became a guru on his own around 1981. In 1976, Chinmoy released a meditative album on Folkways Records entitled Music for Meditation.

Chinmoy continued to travel, lecture, give concerts and arrange lifting events, until his death from a heart attack while at his home in Jamaica, Queens, New York on October 11, 2007.