Biography
Nitya was born Jayachandran Panicker, in the matriarchal compound of Vakayar, near Konni, Kerala, South India, as the first son to Vamakshi Amma and her husband, the poet Raghavan Panicker.
As a youth, Nitya left home and wandered India for eight years as a mendicant, meeting and studying with Sufi, Jain and Buddhist teachers, as well as and Hindu masters such as and Nityananda. After attaining his master's degree in social psychology at Bombay University, he continued his spiritual search in earnest. Among other posts, he served as director of the Indian Foundation for Psychic Research in New Delhi in the mid-1960s, charged with investigating the claims of yogis and fakirs.
In 1951, he had accepted Nataraja Guru as his spiritual preceptor and after Nataraja Guru died in 1973, he became the Guru of the Narayana Gurukula. Throughout his life he has been instrumental in sustaining Narayana Guru's legacy as the emancipator of women and eradicator of caste distinctions, as well as interpreting his unsurpassed mystical vision for the modern seeker of truth. He traveled throughout the world as a teacher, with a special flair for the meaning of the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, and continued to welcome seekers of truth to his retreat at the Fernhill Gurukula, near Ooty, until his death in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Nitya Chaitanya Yati
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