David Godman was born in 1953 in Stoke-on-Trent. His father was a schoolmaster and mother a physiotherapist who specialised in treating physically handicapped children. He was educated at local schools and in 1972 won a place at Oxford University. It was sometime in his second year there that he found himself getting more and more interested in Eastern spiritual traditions. Then, one day, he took home a copy of Arthur Osborne's 'The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in his Own Words'. Reading Ramana's words for the first time completely silenced him.

He says, "It wasn't that I had found a new set of ideas that I believed in. It was more of an experience in which I was pulled into a state of silence. In that silent space I knew directly and intuitively what Ramana's words were hinting and pointing at. Because this state itself was the answer to all my questions, and any other questions I might come up with, the interest in finding solutions anywhere else dropped away. I suppose I must have read the book in an afternoon, but by the time I put it down it had completely transformed the way I viewed myself and the world."

David Godman first visited the Tiruvannamalai ashram of Sri Ramana Maharshi in 1976. For eight years, between 1978 and 1985, he was the librarian and archivist of the ashram. In the early 1980s he also edited The Mountain Path, a journal published by Sri Ramanasramam.

In the mid-1980s he edited Be As You Are, an anthology of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s teachings which is now published by Penguin. This best selling book has been continuously in print since 1985. Translated and published in at least twelve foreign languages, it is the text through which most people outside India are introduced to Sri Ramana Maharshi’s teachings.

In the late 1970s he made many visits to Nisargadatta Maharaj, the renowned advaita teacher who lived in Mumbai and died in 1981. His lengthy online account of his experiences there has been widely appreciated and reposted.

In the early 1980s he started to visit Lakshmana Swamy, an enlightened disciple of Sri Ramana Maharshi, in his ashram in Andhra Pradesh. At the instigation of Lakshmana Swamy he wrote a book (No Mind – I am the Self) about the lives and teachings of Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma, the latter being Lakshmana Swamy’s own enlightened disciple. When Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma decided to move to Tiruvannamalai in the late 1980s, David Godman looked after and helped to develop their new property, which was located close to Sri Ramanasramam.

In 1987 David Godman interviewed Annamalai Swami, a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi who worked at Sri Ramanasramam between 1928 and 1938. The interviews were eventually published as Living by the Words of Bhagavan, a book which chronicled Annamalai Swami’s eventful and devotional relationship with Sri Ramana Maharshi,. In the late 1990s David Godman also edited Final Talks, a book of Annamalai Swami’s teaching dialogues.

In 1992 David Godman began to visit Papaji (Sri H. W. L. Poonja) a disciple of Sri Ramana Maharshi who had made many visits to Sri Ramanasramam in the 1940s, and who later became a teacher in his own right. In 1993 David Godman moved to Lucknow, the city where Papaji lived, and spent the next four years chronicling his life and teachings. In 1993 he edited Papaji Interviews, an anthology of interviews that various journalists and visitors had had with Papaji in the early 1990s. Later that year, in cooperation with Jim Lemkin, he brought out Call Off The Search, a documentary that focused on Papaji, his devotees and his teachings. An extensive filmed interview that Godman had with Papaji, entitled Summa Iru (Keep Quiet) was also brought out as a separate documentary that year.

In late 1992 Papaji asked Godman to be his official biographer. Over the next four years Godman did extensive research on Papaji’s life and the result was Nothing Ever Happened, a three volume 1,200-page biography. In 2007 David brought out a new volume of Papaji’s teaching dialogues entitled The Fire of Freedom.

When Papaji died in 1997 David Godman returned to Tiruvannamalai. Between 1999 and 2003 he was engaged in a project to record the lives and experiences of devotees of Sri Ramana Maharshi. These narratives were eventually published in a three-volume series entitled The Power of the Presence.