Sri Madhava Ashish (1920-1997) – Ashishda to his friends and pupils – was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and christened Alexander Phipps. He went to Sherborne, a well-known English public school, and then studied aeronautical engineering at Chelsea College of Engineering in London.

When the Second World War broke out, he was posted to India as an aircraft engineer, repairing Spitfires at Dum-Dum, Calcutta. After the war ended, instead of going back to the UK, he decided to use his four months’ leave to travel in India. He went to see the great sage Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai; the experience proved utterly overwhelming and confirmed that he would make the inner quest the aim of his life.

His search led him to his Guru, Sri Krishna Prem. Twenty years of intense inner work ensued, under his guidance and that of Moti Rani, the charismatic daughter of Yashoda Ma. During this time ‘it slowly became clear that Sri Krishna Prem was no longer a seeker but one who had found’ (writes Sri Madhava Ashish in the Preface to Man, the Measure of All Things). With characteristic humility, though, both men would refer to themselves as ‘pupil-teachers’. After about twenty years, Sri Krishna Prem named him his successor.

During those years, ‘the rigid framework of orthodox Hindu discipline’ was widened to become a teaching that spoke directly to a later generation of seekers who responded to a ‘less mythological, more direct mode than the strictly religious approaches provided for’ (as Sri Madhava Ashish writes in the Foreword to Initiation Into Yoga).

While meditation is of course the core of the inner work, Sri Madhava Ashish (like Sri Krishna Prem) stressed the connections between mystical teachings from all traditions – the Upanishads, Vedanta, Buddhism, the Sufis, and esoteric Christianity. The iconoclastic twentieth-century teacher, George Gurdjieff, was revered, and many of his insights – such as ‘Self-remembering’, ‘Man is asleep’, ‘chief feature’, ‘negative emotion’, and ‘harmony between the three centres: physical, emotional and mental’ – became an integral aspect of inner work for all seekers. Psychological self-examination, especially in situations of stress while working closely with other pupils, was essential. A unique feature of the teaching was the use of dream analysis, applying many of Jung’s path-breaking concepts (such as archetypes, the Shadow, the animus and anima), but also using dream as ‘an open window’ to access deeper, non-physical levels of consciousness. For, in Ashishda’s words ‘dream can turn to vision, and vision can turn to understanding’.

Ashishda taught a path to self-knowledge that includes a meaningful and active outer life. From the 1980s onwards, seeing the poverty of the local people and the ecological degradation of the Himalayan foothills around the ashram, he began a pioneering environmental plan focusing on sustainable forestry and farming practices to counter the unrelenting pressure of increasing population. Together with Dr Michael Jackson and Dr Lalit Pande, he worked with the Almora-based not-for-profit NGO the Uttarakhand Seva Nidhi on many issues, especially environmental education in schools.

His essays now also dealt with subjects other than the strictly spiritual, sparked by his friendship with Raj and Romesh Thapar, the founders of the influential journal of public affairs, Seminar. Tackling subjects like the degeneration of the country’s moral and social ethos, and the decline of public institutions, this phase of his writing epitomized his belief in the interconnectedness of all of life – the ‘material correlates of mysticism’. Invited by the government of India’s prestigious Planning Commission to serve on several Sub-committees on Hill Development, he was awarded the Padma Shri in 1992 for his work.

His books include Man The Measure Of All Things (co-authored with Sri Krishna Prem), Man Son of Man, An Open Window: Dream As Everyman’s Guide to the Spirit, What Is Man?, and Relating to Reality.

He was a true exemplar of how the inner and outer are one: how to use the problems and friction of daily life as material for ‘work’, and thus (as a fellow pupil, Satish Pandey, writes in Guru By Your Bedside) transform ‘action’ into the ‘yoga of action’. His very presence, and his books and articles, help one understand that the spiritual and material worlds form an essential and awe-inspiring continuum.