Philip Goldberg
Author of American Veda
I was a student in the mid-1960s when I first heard about something called The Bhagavad Gita. I had taken my first tentative steps on the spiritual path that would come to define my life, and I had I come across several references to the Gita, but Henry David Thoreau’s reverence for it made me sit up and take notice. In his classic essay, Walden, about his year of solitude at Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.” Elsewhere in the book, he praises the Gita’s “sanity and sublimity,” and says “the reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer, or rarer region of thought.”
If the great Thoreau had such high praise for an ancient text from India, I had to read it. Believe it or not, it wasn’t easy to find a copy in New York City then. But I finally tracked down the translation by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, and devoured it in one sitting. My life was never the same. Four decades later, when I was researching my book, American Veda, I interviewed many people who also credit the Gita with kick starting their passion for Vedanta, Yoga, and other aspects of the Hindu dharma.
I’m sure that one day historians will recognize the transmission of Sanatana Dharma to the West as one of the most significant developments in history—as important, if not more important, than the flow of technology and industry from the West to India. It has transformed American spirituality.
The process began more than 200 years ago, when the first translation of the Gita, along with other Vedic texts and respectful commentaries by European scholars, arrived in the libraries of leading thinkers. The most important was Ralph Waldo Emerson. As the country’s leading home-grown philosopher, Emerson has been called America’s Plato. I think of him as America’s Shankaracharya. Inspired and informed by Hindu and Buddhist texts, he composed essays and poetry that captured the non-dual essence of Vedanta in lucid American prose. It was his copy of the Gita that his protégée, Thoreau, read each morning on Walden Pond.
Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, the founders of the New Thought movement drew directly from Vedic texts (and from Emerson). Ever since, anyone involved with Theosophy, Christian Science, the Unity Church, or Religious Science has been impacted by Sanatana Dharma whether they know it or not. I often surprise Unity audiences by quoting their founder, Charles Fillmore, who wrote, in 1889, that “the evolution of the spirit has created a demand for a religion of broader scope, and we turn to the lore of India, for lack of a better system nearer home.”
Most of those early adopters got their inspiration from books, but some were present when the transmission accelerated thanks to the triumphant appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the World’s Parliament of Religions, in 1893. The enthusiastic reception Vivekananda received in Chicago, and at his subsequent lectures, marked the beginning of a new era. It gathered steam in the early years of the 20th century, as swamis of the Ramakrishna lineage educated American seekers in the Vedanta Societies founded by Vivekananda.
Other gurus, swamis and yoga masters came and went as the century progressed, attracting a small number of followers. One, Paramahansa Yogananda, arrived in 1920 and stayed for the next 32 years of his life. His Self-Realization Fellowship became a major force, and his seminal memoir, Autobiography of a Yogi, turned millions of seekers toward India—and continues to do so today.
The next major breakthrough came in 1967 and 1968, when the Beatles met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, took up his Transcendental Meditation, and spent time at his ashram in Rishikesh, all under the relentless gaze of the world’s media. This tidal wave triggered scientific interest, leading to hundreds of subsequent studies and the mainstreaming of meditation as a medical intervention, a mental health therapy, and a spiritual practice.
It also opened the floodgates to a parade of gurus who attracted sizeable followings in the 1970s and onward. Swamis Vishnudevananda (Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers), Satchidananda (Integral Yoga Institute), A. C. Bhaktivedanta (Hare Krishna), Muktananda (Siddha Yoga), Rama (Himalayan Institute); hatha yoga innovators like K. Patthabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar; and iconoclastic teachers such as Sri Chinmoy, Rajneesh (aka Osho), Amrit Desai, and Jiddu Krishnamurti brought out different aspects of the dharmic repertoire. That march of masters continues today with gurus such as Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma), Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.
But it wasn’t just the teachers from India who disseminated dharmic wisdom; a vital role was also played by Westerners. Some were trained as meditation or hatha yoga teachers by their gurus, or were trained to perform bhajan and kirtan. Many absorbed the teachings and assimilated them into their own areas of expertise, and some of them were prominent enough to introduce Sanatana Dharma to millions of people—sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly, sometimes granting proper respect to the source and sometimes appropriating teachings as if they had thought them up themselves. They ranks include prominent intellectuals like Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell, Ken Wilber, and Alan Watts; psychologists like Abraham Maslow, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), and Stanislav Grof; physicians and medical researchers like Dean Ornish, Mehmet Oz, and of course Deepak Chopra, who crossed over from doctor to public philosopher. The transmitters also included poets (Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Alan Ginsberg); novelists (Herman Hesse, Somerset Maugham, J. D. Salinger); and musicians, the most important of whom was George Harrison, who studied sitar with the great Ravi Shankar and introduced his fellow Beatles and millions of Baby Boomers to the Hindu Dharma.
Through all these streams and tributaries, the Vedic nectar found its way into American homes. The result is a new paradigm in the way Americans view themselves, understand religion, and practice spirituality. The inner experience of one’s own divine nature through methods of one’s own choosing has replaced belief and identification with a religious tradition as the main driver of spirituality. Pluralism has overtaken exclusivism: most people now realize there are many pathways to the divine, and no religious tradition is the “one true way.” These trends point to an evolutionary shift in consciousness toward the fundamental principles of Sanatana Dharma (even among people who never heard the term). It suggests that the great historian Arnold Toynbee was correct when he wrote, in 1969, that “a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race.”
Philip Goldberg
Author of American Veda
Philip Goldberg is a spiritual counselor, meditation teacher and ordained Interfaith Minister. The author or coauthor of 19 books, he lectures and leads workshops throughout the country. He lives in Los Angeles, where he founded Spiritual Wellness and Healing Associates (SWAHA).