Photo: July 2008,
speaking at Christ School for Living, Philadelphia

About Sun Conscious Founder: Surya Green

Surya Green is a planetary citizen whose personal journey integrates West-East, material-
spiritual, and modern-ancient in a simple lifestyle based on oneness, naturalness, and greenness.

Born in Manhattan, Surya holds a B.A. degree in American Studies from New York’s Barnard
College of Columbia University (Regent’s Scholar). She earned her M.A. in Communication
from California's Stanford University, Department of Communication (National Honors Fellow).
She also attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York.

Memberships
Surya is a member of the Dutch Association of Journalists, the International Federation
of Journalists, and the Society of Authors (UK). She is an alumna of the Salzburg Global
Seminar. Her past memberships include: American Guild of Variety Artists, Actors’ Equity
USA, and the Foreign Press Association of the Netherlands.

Surya is also a pioneering member of the international movement -- centered around
personal transformation -- that sprang up decades back without any leadership, registration rolls,
or fees. Without having to join, spontaneously and automatically she became a member. During
a four-year period, Surya underwent, quite unexpectedly, a three-part deepening and widening
in her thinking and patterns of action.

1.The De-education
Finishing her M.A. studies, she accepted a temporary writing job at an internationally-renowned
animation and documentary film studio in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. At the time, Croatia
was a grey-faced, materially-deprived, slow-moving, and politically-repressed republic
of the former Yugoslavia. Forced by circumstances to de-hook from consumerism, she practiced
a lifestyle that was simpler, slower, and more reflective than she was accustomed to in California
or New York. She also arrived at new definitions of Success and the Good Life.

After completing her work stint at Zagreb Film, she stayed on longer in Europe. Eventually,
she found her writing home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Establishing herself as Benelux
correspondent for several international travel magazines, she became a member of the Foreign
Press Association of the Netherlands. In the progressively-minded Netherlands, her view of life
as a citizen in society underwent further refocusing and expansion of social awareness.

2. The Re-education
Surya entered the second part of her lifestyle transformation when she attended events held
in connection with the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm
in Sweden. At the world’s first international conference on the environment, she awakened
to the One Earth whole and the ecological-environmental crisis threatening that whole. Returned
to Amsterdam, she started to live a socially-responsible, Mother Earth-friendly lifestyle
encompassing balance and non-harm, natural and organic, in a pioneering form of what would
become the 21st century’s green lifestyle. Then the Government of India, Ministry of Tourism,
invited her to India as its guest.

3. The Be-coming (ever continuing)
Traveling to India on freelance journalistic assignment, little did she know that the land
of ancient solar heritage would jumpstart the third part of her total transformation.
Without warning, she underwent mystical experiences that were spiritually awakening
and dramatically life-transforming. She experienced, from within, that all is truly One under
the Sun. She became “Sun-conscious.” Having begun her Indian journey as Norma Green,
a worldly Western woman, she returned to Amsterdam as a serious seeker of higher wisdom.
She was reborn as “Surya,” Sanskrit for “the Sun, the Source.”

A difficult transition period followed, as Surya integrated her solarized vision
into her daily functioning. In the process of spiritualizing her work, she wrote farewell letters
to the travel magazines and resigned from the Foreign Press Association. Her new career
as a “journalist of the spiritual” began when a Dutch journal asked her to write about
her personal meeting in India with the spiritual leader, the Mother of Pondicherry. In line
with her new writing focus, Surya met and interviewed foremost spiritual leaders who gave
themselves generously to her tape recorder, camera, and notebook. Her articles
on transformational topics, including spiritual growth and natural lifestyle, as well as
her interviews with a broad range of social, cultural, and spiritual notables, began to appear
internationally.

As a pilgrim with journalistic shoulder bag, Surya gained knowledge of Eastern religions,
philosophies, and consciousness-raising systems by wending her way around the globe
to sacred sites and power spots, holy celebrations of all kinds, and diverse groups and
communities. During a six years’ residence in Asia, she studied the spiritual heritage of the East
through practice and experience that included: staying in monasteries with Buddhist monks
and nuns in Thailand for four months, meditating in full-time Vipassana silent retreat
in a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar for six and a half months, and practicing various streams
of the bhakti yoga of devotion in India for five years. Her training includes association with
leading spiritual teachers of both East and West, among them senior monks of the Ramakrishna
Order of India. She considers her studies in the school of Life to be ever-ongoing.

Sharing the third part of her transformational story first, Surya eventually wrote
The Call of the Sun, published in English and in German and Dutch translations.
(Comments from Readers)

In 2000, in Amsterdam, Surya inspired the establishment of the non-profit planetary service
foundation Sun Conscious. Along with five readers of her book’s Dutch edition,
Als de Zon spreekt, she set up Sun Conscious to promote the use of solar energy,
both physical and subtle, and to help people become Sun Conscious.

Surya divides her writing and residential time between the Netherlands and the USA.
On invitation, she gives talks and workshops and guides spiritual gatherings. She has spoken
on various aspects of personal transformation, Sun-power, and the spiritual heritage of India
to spiritual, religious, and cultural organizations in the Netherlands, UK, India, and the USA.
(Talks) She has given seminars and retreats on the Sun’s subtle energy. She consults on
healthy living, the spiritual growth process, and personal transformation as well as on
research and writing projects. She also loves to sing ancient Sanskrit Sun mantras
and play her tanpura.