He has written on the life, teachings and disciples of Ramana Maharshi, an Indian sage who lived and taught for more than fifty years at Arunachala, a sacred mountain in Tamil Nadu, India.
[4] In the early 1980s Godman started to visit Lakshmana Swamy, a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, in his ashram in Andhra Pradesh.
[6] When Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma moved to Tiruvannamalai in the late 1980s, Godman looked after and helped to develop their new property, which was located close to Sri Ramanasramam.
[8] In 1987 Godman conducted extensive interviews with Annamalai Swami, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi who worked at Sri Ramanasramam between 1928 and 1938.
The interviews were the primary source for his book, Living by the Words of Bhagavan, a biography that chronicled Annamalai Swami's relationship with Sri Ramana.
[9] Godman has contributed to a scholarly debate on the true identity of Larry Darrel, a character who appeared in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.
[citation needed] A year later he edited and published a collection of dialogues that had taken place between Annanalai Swami and visitors to his ashram in the 1980s.
[18] Between 2000 and 2002 Godman brought out The Power of the Presence, a three-volume anthology of mostly first-person accounts that chronicled the experiences that visitors had had with Ramana Maharshi between 1896 and 1950.