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Artwork for Insight Myanmar
Insight Myanmar · Today · 3 hr 20 min

Stranger Things

Episode #638: Leslie Hover has inherited an extensive archive documenting the life of her father, Robert Hover, an American aerospace engineer who became an early Western teacher of Burmese vipassanā meditation. His journey took him from California’s aerospace industry to Sayagyi U Ba Khin’s International Meditation Centre in Rangoon in 1961, and later to teaching retreats across several continents. Leslie remembers a father whose scientific curiosity shaped both his approach to Buddhist practice and his willingness to investigate experiences beyond conventional explanations. Robert helped establish the Vipassana Newsletter in 1974, connecting a growing international community of meditators. His teaching career changed dramatically in 1977 after a dispute involving an alleged psychic communication from the deceased U Ba Khin. Mother Sayama withdrew institutional support, and Robert continued independently. Leslie possesses recordings and correspondence documenting the aftermath, but the original letter remains missing. “That is one thing that I would really like to know,” she says of its contents. Her father also developed Internal Moving Healing, a method based on concentrated attention to bodily sensations and the removal of what he termed “faint matter.” Leslie learned an early version at seven and continues to attribute extraordinary personal healing experiences to the technique. She also recounts her father’s investigations into psychic phenomena, extraterrestrial spacecraft, and underground civilizations, drawing upon his unpublished writings and her own spiritual experiences. These claims remain distinct from the documented history of his meditation teaching. Leslie regards Robert as her greatest teacher, even though she never attended one of his formal retreats. Her account preserves both her devotion to his memory and the difficulty of establishing the full historical record. Among the cassettes, newsletters, manuscripts, and carefully ordered correspondence, she continues searching for the missing document that might explain why one of U Ba Khin’s early Western teachers was pushed outside the institution he had served.

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Episode #638: Leslie Hover has inherited an extensive archive documenting the life of her father, Robert Hover, an American aerospace engineer who became an early Western teacher of Burmese vipassanā meditation. His journey took him from California’s aerospace industry to Sayagyi U Ba Khin’s International Meditation Centre in Rangoon in 1961, and later to teaching retreats across several continents. Leslie remembers a father whose scientific curiosity shaped both his approach to Buddhist practice and his willingness to investigate experiences beyond conventional explanations.

Robert helped establish the Vipassana Newsletter in 1974, connecting a growing international community of meditators. His teaching career changed dramatically in 1977 after a dispute involving an alleged psychic communication from the deceased U Ba Khin. Mother Sayama withdrew institutional support, and Robert continued independently. Leslie possesses recordings and correspondence documenting the aftermath, but the original letter remains missing. “That is one thing that I would really like to know,” she says of its contents.

Her father also developed Internal Moving Healing, a method based on concentrated attention to bodily sensations and the removal of what he termed “faint matter.” Leslie learned an early version at seven and continues to attribute extraordinary personal healing experiences to the technique. She also recounts her father’s investigations into psychic phenomena, extraterrestrial spacecraft, and underground civilizations, drawing upon his unpublished writings and her own spiritual experiences. These claims remain distinct from the documented history of his meditation teaching.

Leslie regards Robert as her greatest teacher, even though she never attended one of his formal retreats. Her account preserves both her devotion to his memory and the difficulty of establishing the full historical record. Among the cassettes, newsletters, manuscripts, and carefully ordered correspondence, she continues searching for the missing document that might explain why one of U Ba Khin’s early Western teachers was pushed outside the institution he had served.

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