Early Life
David Godman was born in 1953 in Stoke-on-Trent. His father was a schoolmaster and mother a physiotherapist who specialised in treating physically handicapped children. He was educated at local schools and in 1972 won a place at Oxford University. It was sometime in his second year there that he found himself getting more and more interested in Eastern spiritual traditions. Then, one day, he took home a copy of Arthur Osborne's 'The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in his Own Words'. Reading Ramana's words for the first time completely silenced him.
He says, "It wasn't that I had found a new set of ideas that I believed in. It was more of an experience in which I was pulled into a state of silence. In that silent space I knew directly and intuitively what Ramana's words were hinting and pointing at. Because this state itself was the answer to all my questions, and any other questions I might come up with, the interest in finding solutions anywhere else dropped away. I suppose I must have read the book in an afternoon, but by the time I put it down it had completely transformed the way I viewed myself and the world."
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