Religious experience

Pilgrimage and festivals as group experience; the role of the guru; ashrams; meditation; and yoga.

If liberation is realisation (Shankara's Advaita), meditation is the characteristic experience; if it is nearness to a personal God (Ramanuja), devotion is. The schools disagree about what a religious life feels like.

Transmission person to person: a living teacher gives one student one worked-out reading, applied to their life, which no text can do alone.

A community of study, meditation and seva — community work — usually formed around a guru.

A path to moksha — jnana, bhakti or karma yoga — and also the disciplines associated with the Yoga darshana and Patanjali. Not an exercise class.

That it is not possible or necessary. It then names ISKCON, a modern missionary-type organization, and the Arya Samaj, which worked to restore Vedic religion.

Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Narayan and Sri Ramakrishna — for developments in Hinduism and its relations with other religions.

The traditional roles of women in worship and the home; the changing status of women in modern India and the diaspora; and female deities in scripture and festivals as role models, plus female gurus.

Because the guide itself names the changing status of women in modern India and in the diaspora, so the balance is currently moving.