Dr. Georg Feuerstein (born 1947) is a German-Canadian Indologist specializing on Yoga. Feuerstein has authored over 30 books on mysticism, Yoga, Tantra, and Hinduism. He has translated, among other traditional texts, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita.

Feuerstein was born in Germany. He moved to England to do his postgraduate research at Durham University and subsequently lived for 23 years in the United States. Today, he is a resident of Canada and lives in Saskatchewan.

Ken Wilber has called him both "probably Gebser's foremost American interpreter" as well as "...a scholar-practitioner of the first magnitude, an extremely important and valuable voice for the perennial philosophy, and arguably the foremost authority on Yoga today."^{[citation needed]}

Historian of religions Mircea Eliade called Feuerstein's 'The Philosophy of Classical Yoga', "one of the most profound and original contributions to the understanding of classical yoga".^{[citation needed]}

Jean Gebser (August 20, 1905 – May 14, 1973) was a philosopher, a linguist, and a poet, who described the structures of human consciousness.

Born Hans Gebser in Posen in Imperial Germany (now Poland), he left Germany in 1929, living for a time in Italy and then in France. He then moved to Spain, mastered the Spanish language in a few months and entered the Spanish Civil Service where he rose to become a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Education.

When the Spanish Civil War began, he moved to Paris. He lived in Paris for a while but saw the unavoidability of German invasion. He fled to Switzerland in 1939, escaping only hours before the frontier was closed. He spent the rest of his life near Bern, where he did most of his writing.

Late in life, Gebser travelled widely in India, the Far East, and the Americas, and wrote half a dozen more books. He was also a published poet.

Gebser died in Wabern bei Bern on May 14, 1973 "with a soft and knowing smile."

His personal letters and publications are held at the Gebser Archives at the University of Oklahoma History of Science Collections, Norman, Oklahoma, Bizzel Libraries.

Indra Devi (Latvian: Eiženija Pētersone (Indra Devi); May 12, 1899 - April 25, 2002) was an early disciple of Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, and herself became a renowned yoga teacher. Born in Riga, she also acted in some Hindi films.

Born in Riga to Vasili Peterson, a Swedish bank director and Alejandra Labunskaia, a Russian noblewoman, Eugenie attended drama school in Moscow as a girl and escaped to Berlin with her mother as Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. In Berlin, she became an actress and dancer.

Devi's fascination with India began at 15, when she read a book by poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and a yoga instruction book by Yogi Ramacharaka. In 1927, she sailed for India and adopted a stage name that would sound Hindu (using "dev", the Hindi root for "god") and acted in Indian films. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, a commercial attache to the Czechoslovak consulate in Bombay.

The famous Yoga guru Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya accepted her as a student, only after the Maharaja of Mysore spoke on her behalf and in 1938 she became the first foreign woman among dedicated yogis. She met every challenge Krishnamacharya set out for her and was so successful that the guru asked her to work as a yoga teacher, when he learned that her husband was to be transferred to China and she would leave India.

Lanza del Vasto, (Giuseppe Giovanni Luigi Enrico Lanza di Trabia), (September 29, 1901 – January 5, 1981) was a philosopher, poet, artist, catholic and nonviolent activist.

He was born in San Vito dei Normanni, Italy and died in Elche de la Sierra, Spain.

A western disciple of Mohandas K. Gandhi, he worked for inter-religious dialogue, spiritual renewal, ecological activism and nonviolence.

In December 1936, Lanza went to India, joining the movement for Indian independence led by Gandhi. He knew of Gandhi through a book by Romain Rolland. He spent six months with the Mahatma, then in June 1937, went to the source of the Ganges river in the Himalayas, a famous pilgrimage site. There he saw a vision who told him "Go back and found!"

He left then India and went back to Europe. In 1938, he went to Palestine, then in the midst of civil war, to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, "between two lines of tanks".

He came back to Paris at the time when the Second World War started. He wrote some poetry books and in 1943 he published the story of his trip to India, Return to the Source, which became a huge success.

Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert on April 6, 1931) is an American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the seminal 1971 book Be Here Now. He is known for his personal and professional associations with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s, for his travels to India and his relationship with the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, and for founding the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. He continues to teach via his website.

Alpert was born to a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, George Alpert, was a lawyer in Boston, president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, one of the founders of Brandeis University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as well as a major fundraiser for Jewish causes. While Richard did have a bar mitzvah, he was "disappointed by its essential hollowness". He considered himself an atheist and did not profess any religion during his early life, describing himself as “inured to religion. I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics.”