The great mystics go through life without fuss and frenzy as if they had all the time in the world, and their lives seem so much richer than ours that we have to stop and wonder why.

ﾗ Eknath Easwaran

In 1959, Eknath Easwaran, a young Indian scholar and teacher of Victorian literature, received a Fulbright Exchange Scholarship giving him an opportunity to study and teach in the United States. That travel involved two ocean liners. The first one was an aging ship that had been in service before the First World War. Though the ship was completely without luxuries, Easwaran enjoyed the passengers "from empire builders to scholars from the Far East."

As they traveled across the Arabian Sea, monsoon storms struck, tossing the ship like a small toy boat. He recalled how frightening it was as he clung with the other passengers to the ship's rails. "A storm is a great equalizer. All distinctions of class and color were swept away," he said.