"In February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay
with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the
most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days
in the wilderness. "
With these words, Philip Goldberg begins his monumental work,
"American Veda," a fascinating look at India's 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 actually began more than two hundred
years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge
as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics from 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 India's "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 India's sages
permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have
redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americans--and
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."
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