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, 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 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."
