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Philip Goldberg - American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

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A fascinating look at Indias remarkable impact on Western culture, this eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the mind-body methods of Yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape.
What exploded in the 1960s, following the Beatles trip to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, actually began more than two hundred years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledgeas well as tangy spices and colorful fabricsfrom Asia. The first translations of Hindu texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed Indias science of consciousness and wove it into the fabric of their lives. Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them. The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms. Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of Indias sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americansand continue to do so every day.
Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.

Philip Goldberg: author's other books


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Copyright 2010 by Philip Goldberg All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 1
Copyright 2010 by Philip Goldberg All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 2

Copyright 2010 by Philip Goldberg

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldberg, Philip, 1944
American Veda: from Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and meditation: how Indian spirituality changed the West / Philip Goldberg.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. HinduismUnited StatesHistory. 2. United StatesReligion. 3. VedantaHistory.
4. YogaHistory. I. Title.
BL1168.U532G66 2010
294.50973dc22 2010011040

eISBN: 978-0-307-71961-4

v3.1_r1

To the venerable rishis, sadgurus, and acharyas,
a thousand pranams

Passage to India

Lo, soul, seest thou not Gods purpose from the first?
The earth to be spannd, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be crossd, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing,
You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,
You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,
You, not for trade or transportation only,
But in Gods name, and for thy sake O soul.

Walt Whitman, Passage to India

Picture 3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My gratitude begins with Trace Murphy, director of religious publishing at Doubleday, who saw the need for a book such as this one and made sure it got written. Profound thanks to my agent, Lynn Franklin, who brought Trace and me together, and whose support, guidance, and friendship have long sustained me. Thanks as well to Gary Jansen, whose astute hands-on editing was invaluable in shaping the book.

A deep bow of gratitude to Huston Smith, whose foreword graces these pages. That he took the time to write it at age ninety-one, with other priorities on his plate, is a testament to the importance he attributes to the subject matter. My added gratitude to Jon and Anna Monday for serving as liaisons to Huston, and for their feedback on sections of the manuscript.

Since I conducted more than three hundred interviews and engaged in countless informal conversations, I cant thank by name all those who generously shared their insights and expertise. I am grateful to every one of them, and especially to certain well-known individuals who are in demand by the media and nevertheless took the time to speak with me.

A number of people offered valuable assistance in a variety of ways, from transcribing interviews to supplying information to vetting passages of the book to extending profound moral support. For those contributions and others, I am thankful to the following: Jeffrey Ainis, Prem Anjali, Bill Barnard, John Roger Barrie, Raveen Battee, Swami Brahmavidyananda, Robert Brown, Sara Chadwick, Christine Chagnon, Christopher Chappie, Srinivas Chari, Ken Chawkin, Mawiyah Clayborne, Rameshwar Das, Dave DeLuca, my in-laws Betty and Richard Deutsch, Navin Doshi, Bill and Leslie Elkus, Tom Feldman, James Finley, Jack and Roberta Forem, Robert Forman, Elliot Friedland, Robert Gordon, Carlos Grasso, Robert Green, Michael Gressett, Linda Groff, Heidi Hall, Craig Hamilton, Andrew Harvey, Alan Hodder, Kristin Imboden, Jerry Jarvis, Kurt Johnson, Doug Kruschke, Ramdas Lamb, Lauren Landress, Jeffery Long, Jean MacPhail, Sanjay Manchanda, Franz Metcalf, Venkatesan Natarajan, Duncan Newton-Gaines, Jyotish and Devi Novack, Kikanza Nuri, Carter Phipps, John Raatz, Anita Rehker, Gus Reininger, Dana Sawyer, Sara Schrefflers, Michael Schwartz, Rita Sherma, Bahman Shirazi, Dean Sluyter, Stuart Sovatsky, David St. John, Tony Stern, Jim Strohecker, Murthy Subramaniya, Jeremy Tarcher, Mary Ellen Trahan, Jeff Utter, Sirah Vettese, Pravrajika Vrajaprana, Lisa Walford, Andrew Wenger, Melissa West, Sharon Whittle, Lola Williamson, and Connie Zweig.

While this might seem odd, I want to thank the creators of Google and everyone responsible for the miracle of the Internet. In an earlier era, writing this book would have taken at least twice as long, certain details might never have been uncovered, and I might have developed asthma from wallowing in the dusty stacks of a university library, searching for information that is now obtainable in a matter of seconds.

Finally, a deep bow to the dear ones whose encouragement and support over the years has meant more to me than they can possibly imagine: my brother Bob and everyone in my extended family and my wifes family, with special thanks to Aliya Rafei and Ryan Rafei for letting me play with them. Above all, deepest gratitude to my wife, Lori Deutsch, my own private devi (look it up), who never wavered in her support, even when it was obvious that this book would consume far more time and resources than anticipated. Without her healing presence, I cant imagine getting through this massive project with mind and body intact.

CONTENTS

What India has given us and why it matters

Hindoo texts enchant Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman

Eddy, Blavatsky, and the New Thoughters metabolize Vedanta

Swami Vivekananda conquers the Parliament and creates the Vedanta Society

Swamis tutor smart guys, and they tutor us

Paramahansa Yogananda becomes the voice of India

Beatniks, hippies, and consciousness expanders trip toward the East

The Fab Four find Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and meditation goes mainstream

Muktananda, Bhaktivedanta, and other gurus storm the seventies

Satchidananda, Iyengar, and other Yogacharyas take
Americans to the mat

The guru wave casts a shadow

Ram Dass, Deepak, and other American acharyas
take the wheel

Practitioner-pandits penetrate the Ivory Tower

Om-grown gurus gather disciples

Musicians and writers channel India

The cosmic Shiva dances into the lab

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an ashram

America the spiritual evolves
FOREWORD

In the Indo-European languageso named because Sanskrit in India and Greek in Europe both derive from itv and w were interchangeable. Hence in India the word Vedanta and in Europe wit (and by extension wisdom) are branches of a single linguistic tree.

This common origin, however, is only the framework; the important question is what those two vessels (Vedanta, on the one hand, and the wisdom literature of Socrates, Plato, and their lesser lights, on the other) contained.

Here I will wax personal. As a professor of philosophy and religion, I had been well acquainted with the Wests wisdom literature, but I was totally unprepared for the shock of discovering that Vedanta proposes different paths of life tailored to human temperamentsjnana for intellectuals, bhakti for those who are emotional, karma for industrious individuals who like to work, and raja for contemplative people who profit from meditating. A verse in the Bible admonishes us to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart [

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