American Veda

by Goldberg, Philip

• ISBN13: 9780385521345
• ISBN10: 0385521340
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-02
• Publisher: Crown Archetype

Summary

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 Indiars"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 Indiars"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 likekarmaandmantraare part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of Indiars"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 Vedashows 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."

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Namaste, America!	p. 7
What India has given us and why it matters
The Voice of an Old Intelligence	p. 26
ôHindooö texts enchant Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman
New Thought in Old Wineskins	p. 47
Eddy, Blavatsky, and the New Thoughters metabolize Vedanta
The Handsome Monk in the Orange Robe	p. 67
Swami Vivekananda conquers the Parliament and creates the Vedanta Society
The Public Intellectuals	p. 87
Swamis tutor smart guys, and they tutor us
The Yogi of the Autobiography	p. 109
Paramahansa Yogananda becomes the voice of India
Blowin' in The Wind	p. 130
Beatniks, hippies, and consciousness expanders trip toward the East
Maha Mass Media	p. 151
The Fab Four find Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and meditation goes mainstream
The Baby Boomers' Babas	p. 176
Muktananda, Bhaktivedanta, and other gurus storm the seventies
The Yoga Bearers	p. 197
Satchidananda, Iyengar, and other Yogacharyas take Americans to the mat
Sex, Lies, and Idiosyncrasies	p. 210
The guru wave casts a shadow
Made in The U.S.A.	p. 219
Ram Dass, Deepak, and other American acharyas take the wheel
Not Just Academic	p. 236
Practitioner-pandits penetrate the Ivory Tower
Guru Americana	p. 247
Om-grown gurus gather disciples
Art-Omatic Transmissions	p. 262
Musicians and writers channel India
The Soul of Science, The Science of Soul	p. 282
The cosmic Shiva dances into the lab
Into The Mystic	p. 309
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an ashram
The Once and Future Religion	p. 327
America the spiritual evolves
Notes	p. 349
Index	p. 387
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