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."
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Review
American Veda is an illuminating, gracefully written and remarkably thorough account of India's spectacular impact on Western religion and spirituality.
- Deepak Chopra
American Veda shows us how we got to where we are. It chronicles a revolution in consciousness and describes India's lasting influence on our culture, from gurus, meditation, and yoga to sitar music and aromatic curries. Savor it.
- Michael Bernard Beckwith, author of Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul's Potential
This book demonstrates the far reach of Indian thought into the American psyche and sense of spiritual self. A well written, superbly researched book, it should be read by all the 15 million Americans practicing meditation and yoga!
- Christopher Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology, Loyola Marymount University
Wonderfully comprehensive, positive, tremendously insightful, and illuminating. For anyone interested in the deep influence of yoga philosophy in American culture, I highly recommended this masterful book.
- John Friend, Founder of Anusara Yoga
Immensely smart, wise and brilliantly written. This book should be required reading for everyone interested in ecumenical spirituality which is the one hope for the survival of the human race, and India's great gift to us in our crisis.
- Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope: The Guide to Social Activism and The Sun at Midnight
In this important and engaging book, Philip Goldberg chronicles the long neglected history of Hinduism's encounter with the US. He astutely examines how Hinduism has been constructed and consumed within the larger American spiritual landscape. A must read for those interested in Hinduism and its transmission.
- Varun Soni, Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California
American Veda documents an important cultural change and is an impressive book: informed and informative, well researched and readable.
- Roger Walsh MD, Ph.D., University of California Medical School, author of Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices
Intriguing reading, fascinating profiles and great storytelling of Yoga luminaries adapting the teachings to fit modern American life. This book inspires us to continue to deepen in our body, mind, and spiritual journey.
- Lilias Folan, PBS Host and author Lilias! Yoga Gets Better with Age
Goldberg weaves a tale as only a true storyteller can, drawing the reader into this Vedic web that has no weaver, providing us with a fresh view of how Vedic strands have woven their way into the daily fabric of every American. He masterfully unfolds this ancient play of spiritual unfolding that is just now beginning to emerge into early adolescence in America.
- Richard Miller, PhD, author of Yoga Nidra: A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing, co-founder of the International Association of Yoga Therapy and the founding president of the Integrative Restoration Institute.
A breathtaking trek across time, American Veda shows us something extraordinary, surprising, and precious about where we come from, who we are at this moment, and what we may yet become.
- Chip Hartranft, author of The Yoga-Sutra Of Patañjali a new translation with commentary
In a delightful, compelling way, American Veda shows how India's ancient wisdom has permeated our lives, including many of the self-improvement teachings that have benefited millions. I loved reading this book.
- Marci Shimoff, NY Times bestselling author, Happy for No Reason and Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul
"Nothing short of remarkable. Within the pages of this fairly short volume, Goldberg manages to cover every major figure, movement, and idea that originated in India's spiritual terrain and arrived on our shores to forever alter the landscape of our thought and culture....Writing with empathy and discernment, he covers highly controversial issues regarding the impact of the transmission of Indian spiritual culture in a way that inspires deeper understanding. American Veda is an insightful guide to the fascinating history of a phenomenon that will be seen in the future as one of the watershed moments of American history."
- Rita D. Sherma, Ph.D., Executive Director, School of Philosophy & Religious Studies, Taksha University
"American Veda is a bright light on the historical path to enlightenment in America. Philip Goldberg is an acharya of words and research. Highly recommended."
- Larry Payne Ph.D., coauthor, Yoga for Dummies, Yoga Rx and The Business of Teaching Yoga
We imagine the United States as a Christian island far from the exotic teachings of India. We imagine wrong. As Phil Goldberg's masterful American Veda shows we have been under the sway of Hindu spiritual thought for centuries. If you want to understand American spirituality today, and get a glimpse into its future, read this book.
- Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Recovery, the Sacred Art
This book, American Veda is a landmark! Easy to read it shines a light of understanding on the American Vedic Hindu path which started with the transference of knowledge from India, and equally important by its acceptance by the Americans of western orientation. It is a path on which now, the immigrant Vedic Hindu community and its progeny are grafting on to and traveling along with many in the mainstream community, resulting in, we hope increased understanding. The integrated approach of this book helps fill in the gaps of this historical journey, especially for those of us who see ourselves as fellow travelers working to bridge the east-west divide.
- Anju Bhargava, Management Consultant and Founder of Hindu American Seva Charities
About the Author
PHILIP GOLDBERG is the author or coauthor of a number of books, including Roadsigns: On the Spiritual Path and The Intuitive Edge. Based in Los Angeles, he is an ordained interfaith minister, a public speaker and seminar leader, and cohost of the Spirit Matters podcast. He blogs regularly on religion for the Huffington Post.
American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation How Indian Spirituality Changed the West
Philip Goldberg
3.92
461 ratings58 reviews
====
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.”
398 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
This edition
Format
398 pages, Hardcover
Published
November 2, 2010 by Crown Archetype
=====
=====
Moshe
84 reviews
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November 9, 2013
Amazing, awesome book! The kind that made me extra eager for my nighttime reading fix! We met Phil the author at Bhaktifest. He was the MC for a session there about the Beatles influence on bringing Eastern spirituality to the West - with a very cool 4 piece band of yogi rockers doing the Beatles songs. Anyway, we got autographed copy from him there.
Took me a long time to get through the book. It has great depth and no wasted words. It is as thorough and well-researched as it is enlightening and captivating. I loved it. Folded down about a million pages to refer back to particular points. I gained a lot of perspective on the oneness movement. And he has a superb writing style; what a way with words!
A few keepers...
The three classic paths of enlightenment in the Bhagavad Gita: Jnana, karma, and Bhakti. Intellect, action, devotion.
Three kinds of Vedic transmitters: pandits, acharyas, and gurus. Scholars, scholars who also address personal concerns of students, and those with higher spiritual attainment aka divine incarnations (sometimes) whose mere presence or darshan has spiritual impact.
Fowler's six stages of faith.
Gotta get to know Phil!
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Phil
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August 27, 2013
"American Veda" is an extremely well-researched and well-written exploration of how India's ancient spiritual wisdom seeped into the cultural bloodstream of America. The vast majority of the information in this book was brand-new to me. It was fascinating to learn how Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later Henry David Thoreau and other nineteenth-century writers and poets, were responsible for disseminating the wisdom of the East to the unawakened masses in the West. Then came Swami Vivekananda's momentous trip to the U.S. in 1893, which was also the birth year of Paramahansa Yogananda, who came to America in 1920 and undoubtedly had the greatest impact of all the saints, sages and swamis who visited these shores. A must read for anyone who is on a spiritual path, or wants to start one.
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Kb
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September 24, 2014
This was a fantastic insight into the history of yoga in the west. I also love how Goldberg gets into some of the more practical teachings of indian philosophies in his course the great yogic transmission.
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Melissa
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April 5, 2022
This book filled me with wonder and curiosity. I feel like I just completed a semester course in the subject. While it is often lacking critical analysis, the sheer depth of the research is commendable and for those who have knowledge of Vedanta and some of its practices, the implications are great. I love that I now have a library of new books to read from the book's timeless references.
spiritual-book-club yoga
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Justin Douglas
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August 28, 2012
Very thorough. Too thorough. So much so, in fact, that I didn't finish this veritable encyclopedia of the transcontinental transmission of Vedantic truth. The author gets too caught up in trying to present everything relevant to the subject that after a while it just becomes tedious--and the published edition is a heavily abridged version of the first draft!
Mostly, I was interested in his main idea that America has been receptive to and influenced by Indian thought and spirituality for much longer, and to a much more profound extent, than we typically think. And I wanted to see through what thinkers and artists those ideas reached the American public. The author certainly delivers, but I think that I would have been much happier with a flowchart.
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Marie Kelleher
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February 25, 2013
A decent starting point, and I enjoyed the chapters on Vivekananda and Yogananda) but the central argument sort of breaks down, and the second half of the book devolves into a guru-per-3-pages format, to the point where it seemed more like a narrative catalog than a monograph. That said, I left the book wanting to read more to fill in the gaps (for example, the ambivalent relationship between yoga and modernity, or cultural commodification) and that's never a bad thing.
other-nonfiction popular-history
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Kathleen
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January 20, 2012
Like a college survey course titled The Influence of Indian Spirituality on American Culture. I found it very readable, and gave me huge lists of people and topics to probe into further. I strongly recommend the spiritually curious to read this book.
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Bean
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February 5, 2022
tldr: this book reads as an endless Wikipedia-esque iteration of various names and dates. If you want an expansive, insightful view on comparative religion and comparative philosophy, nothing I've found so far can hold a candle to Alan Watts' work. Go there instead.
Serves as a reference for a lot of philosophical and/or spiritual personalities that had influence in the United States since the late 1800s. To be honest, it just reads exactly if I was perusing the Wikipedia page autobiographies for all these people. I would have had the same experience just spending a day Wikipedia-ing all these various teachers, gurus, swamis, and philosophers.
I wouldn't describe the book as bad, and the author's prose is engaging enough. It just lacked in any interesting argument or perspective. It was just a book rattling off endless fun facts and life stories of various people, names and dates, names and dates. Again, if I need a reference, Wikipedia or its high-class cousin, Encyclopedia Britannica, will do just fine. I was hoping for an incisive analysis of the change of American attitudes and philosophy, but quite frankly it didn't offer anything terribly interesting, just more names and dates of people who came to America to teach Vedanta/Vedic philosophy.
One thing I really didn't enjoy was that the author seemed too personally enamored of these characters to allow his book to be appropriately critical of the many abuses that some teachers and gurus inflicted. He takes a really weak, non-committal stance on even the grossest characters that any person firmly grounded in reality should easily be able to denounce. For example, Osho (Bagwan Sri Rajneesh) gets a shrug and pass on his exploitation, diamond-encrusted watches, FLEET of Rolls Royces, and the nonconsenual drugging of members of his ranch, because, well, it's fine because others got so much spiritual benefit, I guess. Another guru who had multiple credible accusations of raping underage girls is treated very lightly by Goldberg in a sort of mealy-mouthed he-said-she-said brushing off of the allegations as just one of many potential truths. Anyway, his spiritual teachings enlightened others, so you know, maybe it's all just water under the bridge? Please. How spineless. Not to mention the lovely, classic victim-blaming when he bemoans that excesses and abuses may have happened when previously isolated sannyasis were now suddenly exposed to the libertine west with its American girls wearing "short skirts"...
I also found his treatment of the Vedic philosophy's influence on Western science and medicine totally lacking. I think perhaps there has been a great influence, but Goldberg doesn't offer anything for me to sink my teeth into. He just talks about how the founder of TM tried to enlist scientists to help study meditation, which had mixed results in terms of anything scientifically credible. He talks about how there happens to be a statue of Shiva outside CERN. (Cool...what does that show...?) And then he just talks about Deepak Chopra, not dwelling on the uncomfortable fact that Chopra is one of the many who misuse physics that they never specialized in order to push their spiritual ideology as a science in and of itself. Goldberg mentions very briefly that most scientists think this appropriation of quantum physics is poppycock, before scurrying away and basically saying, well, SOME other people think its credible, so... The only interesting part was about Bohm, but it was cut too short.
tldr: this book reads as an endless Wikipedia-esque iteration of various names and dates. If you want an expansive, insightful view on comparative religion and comparative philosophy, nothing I've found so far can hold a candle to Alan Watts' work. Go there instead.
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Mark
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October 6, 2017
Om Satyam Shivam Sundaram
by Mark Chmiel
If you’ve ever …
put your faith in a guru
traveled to India and were blown away and never took a single drug
recited a mantram throughout the day
memorized part of chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita
had a mid-Seventies practice of TM
acknowledged 1970 seed planted from radio frequent blessing of My Sweet Lord
engaged in a conversations where such words as Atman, samadhi, and sattva were common
quoted often one of your Gujarati-American students who told her classmates, “I look at you and see God”
went off-script after having read Be Here Now
smiled with a Namaste and palms together several hundred times
underwent 190+ hours for Yoga Teacher Training
learned how to play the sitar
intuited that the Katha Upanishad had a special message for you
wished you spoke Gujarati, Hindi or Bengali like your parents
challenged yourself by attempting ekāgratā while driving the car
heard one of your pre-med students say that her life dream was really singing and dancing in classical Indian style
gave friends Library of America edition of Whitman’s Poetry and Prose
felt goosebumps even at the 57th listening to Krishna Das’s Ma Durga
said at least ten times, various social situations: “I’m spiritual, not religious”
asked a seventy-year-old Catholic nun to tell your circle about the several weeks she spent in training with ninety-something Mr. Iyengar in India
cited skillfully Maharajji, Yogananda, and Ramakrishna
enjoyed Isherwood’s candor in his book, My Guru and His Disciple
chanted with cheerfulness Hare Kṛṣṇa while walking down Michigan Avenue, a stunningly sunny Saturday morn
facilitated a nine-month reading group of the Bhagavad Gita, with Eknath Easwaran’s three-volume commentary optional
spent long retreats at California ashram
meditated while seated before classic b/w photo of Sri Anandamayi Ma
wondered if N. Finkelstein’s immersion in half of the Collected Works of M. K. Gandhi affected the scholar in ways he himself wasn’t aware of
filled a notebook with the Holy Name
learned to appreciate Jesus through Prabhavananda
fused three of your students into the fictional character Tanya Chatterjee
understood the links of Thoreau to Gandhi, and Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.
saw activism at its collective best as karma yoga
noticed how one of your students resembles the young Vivekananda
responded to the question at La Dolce Via, “What do you want your life to be about?” with Om Satyam Shivam Sundaram
…you may enjoy Philip Goldberg’s American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West.
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Julian Lynn
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October 30, 2019
Panoramic in Scope with Narrative Irregularities: "American Veda" is a singularly ambitious and panoramic report and, in some cases, review of the many ways in which Indian spirituality has impacted and informed American culture and cultural precepts over the past two-hundred-plus years.
Readers new to this field of inquiry may initially be overwhelmed by the vast number of names, events, organizations and statistical information presented in this seemingly comprehensive book. Readers who have a good command of US social and intellectual history and/or a strong bent toward serious spiritual inquiry may find Goldberg's work very helpful. And, to the author's credit, copious endnotes provide serious readers with additional material and leads to supplement the chapters' many narrative threads.
Because this work is being used as a teaching tool, two aspects of Goldberg's work caused this reviewer concern. First is the issue of the author's voice. Goldberg seems to be entrenched in hippie-era slang circa 1970. As a point of fact, the verbal phrase "turn on" instead of "introduce" peppers the book's pages—to the extent that this reader almost started tracking the instances of its appearance. What can I say? "Bummer drag, man." Also, in an attempt to contextualize certain events, the author sometimes makes sweeping and sensationally-worded statements about US history. These passages would benefit from a more careful rewording.
The second and more serious concern, regarding Goldberg's book, has to do with the nuanced "details" of events and cause-effect relationships and how they are reported. The author, perhaps because of the sheer scope of material covered, has in several instances become mildly confused. For example, Goldberg reports that the meeting between the XIV Dalai Lama and a delegation of Jewish Rabbis, "Chronicled by Rodger Kamenetz in the best seller "The Jew in the Lotus," [that] the purpose of the trip was to learn why so many Jews were drawn to the East." In contrast, Kamenetz himself writes, "In 1989, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts, the Dalai Lama turned for the first time to the Jewish people for help. 'Tell me your secret,' he said, 'the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile.'" Readers, using this text as a teaching tool, need to be aware that the narrative contains such irregularities.
Read the book; enjoy it. I am hopeful that—with a more careful and, perhaps, scholarly peer review, as well as a much closer editing— "American Veda" might become a trusted resource for serious students of Indian spirituality in the West for years to come.
=====
American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West Hardcover – 2 November 2010
by Philip Goldberg (Author)
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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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Philip Goldberg
Philip Goldberg grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles like the Dodgers before him. A professional writer for 45 years, he is author or coauthor of numerous books, all but one nonfiction. He is also a skilled public speaker, meditation teacher, and ordained Interfaith Minister. He leads tours to India and cohosts the popular podcast Spirit Matters. His 2010 book, American Veda, which chronicles the impact of India's spiritual teachings on the West, was named one of the top 10 Religion books of the year by Huffington Post and Library Journal. That was followed in 2018 by a biography: The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru. Website: www.philipgoldberg.com. His current book, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times is the #1 New Release in 3 Amazon categories.
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4.7 out of 5 stars
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.”
398 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
This edition
Format
398 pages, Hardcover
Published
November 2, 2010 by Crown Archetype
=====
A map of the amazing, expansive, and eclectic impact of the Indian Vedic tradition in America.
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/view/28097/american-veda
Philip Goldberg is the author of nineteen books, including Roadsigns: On the Spiritual Path. Based in Los Angeles, he is an ordained interfaith minister, a public speaker and seminar leader, and the founder of Spiritual Wellness and Healing Associates. He is director of outreach for SpiritualCitizens.net and blogs regularly on religion for the Huffington Post.
In this bellwether book, Goldberg maps the spiritual clout of Hinduism in the West. Whereas Americans have not been enchanted with the many gods and goddesses or the rituals and complex mythology of Hinduism, they have been attracted to Vedanta philosophy and the meditation and yoga practices that go along with it. In this religion, experience takes precedence over belief or dogma.
Among the first to discover the riches of Vedanta (the teachings of the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita) were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists. They along with later pre-eminent spiritual teachers such as Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and Joseph Campbell were sympathetic to the Hindu understanding of the Oneness which undergirds all the world's religions. Hinduism spawned a perennial philosophy which turned out to be very appealing to Madame Blvatsky, Mary Baker Eddy, Rudolf Steiner. and their followers. In our times, it is evident in the thinking of New Thought communities.
Indian spirituality morphed into guru-centered groups after Swami Vivekananda spoke at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Swami Yogananda also opened many doors for Hindus with his Self-Realization Fellowship. But the most wide-ranging impact of teachers from abroad came in the 1960s and 1970 with Swami Muktananda, Sri Chinmoy, the Maharishi, and many others. Vedanta and yoga spoke to the yearnings for peace of mind and personal transformation of the countercultural Baby Boomers.
Goldberg salutes the positive influences of the Vedic tradition with its emphasis on the mind-body relationship, the direct experience of the Divine, the honored place of mystery, and the unity-in-diversity perspective. He also covers the shadow side of guru-disciple relationships with a chapter titled "Sex, Lies, and Idiosyncracies."
With great elan, Goldberg maps the musicians and writers who popularized the many creative channels of Vedic transmission. Here you will find material on movies, kirtan, verse, and novels. He accentuates the Vedic legacy and its contributions to the rapprochement between science and spirituality along with the burgeoning interest in mysticism.
In sum, Vedanta-Yoga is making a significant contribution to American life, as illustrated by all the seekers searching for the oneness of spirituality, the $6-billion-a-year yoga industry serving 16 million practitioners, and the widespread cultural interest in meditation as a healing tool for mind, body, work and relationships.
=====
Moshe
84 reviews
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November 9, 2013
Amazing, awesome book! The kind that made me extra eager for my nighttime reading fix! We met Phil the author at Bhaktifest. He was the MC for a session there about the Beatles influence on bringing Eastern spirituality to the West - with a very cool 4 piece band of yogi rockers doing the Beatles songs. Anyway, we got autographed copy from him there.
Took me a long time to get through the book. It has great depth and no wasted words. It is as thorough and well-researched as it is enlightening and captivating. I loved it. Folded down about a million pages to refer back to particular points. I gained a lot of perspective on the oneness movement. And he has a superb writing style; what a way with words!
A few keepers...
The three classic paths of enlightenment in the Bhagavad Gita: Jnana, karma, and Bhakti. Intellect, action, devotion.
Three kinds of Vedic transmitters: pandits, acharyas, and gurus. Scholars, scholars who also address personal concerns of students, and those with higher spiritual attainment aka divine incarnations (sometimes) whose mere presence or darshan has spiritual impact.
Fowler's six stages of faith.
Gotta get to know Phil!
6 likes
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Comment
Phil
Author 8 books14 followers
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August 27, 2013
"American Veda" is an extremely well-researched and well-written exploration of how India's ancient spiritual wisdom seeped into the cultural bloodstream of America. The vast majority of the information in this book was brand-new to me. It was fascinating to learn how Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later Henry David Thoreau and other nineteenth-century writers and poets, were responsible for disseminating the wisdom of the East to the unawakened masses in the West. Then came Swami Vivekananda's momentous trip to the U.S. in 1893, which was also the birth year of Paramahansa Yogananda, who came to America in 1920 and undoubtedly had the greatest impact of all the saints, sages and swamis who visited these shores. A must read for anyone who is on a spiritual path, or wants to start one.
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Kb
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September 24, 2014
This was a fantastic insight into the history of yoga in the west. I also love how Goldberg gets into some of the more practical teachings of indian philosophies in his course the great yogic transmission.
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Melissa
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April 5, 2022
This book filled me with wonder and curiosity. I feel like I just completed a semester course in the subject. While it is often lacking critical analysis, the sheer depth of the research is commendable and for those who have knowledge of Vedanta and some of its practices, the implications are great. I love that I now have a library of new books to read from the book's timeless references.
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Justin Douglas
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August 28, 2012
Very thorough. Too thorough. So much so, in fact, that I didn't finish this veritable encyclopedia of the transcontinental transmission of Vedantic truth. The author gets too caught up in trying to present everything relevant to the subject that after a while it just becomes tedious--and the published edition is a heavily abridged version of the first draft!
Mostly, I was interested in his main idea that America has been receptive to and influenced by Indian thought and spirituality for much longer, and to a much more profound extent, than we typically think. And I wanted to see through what thinkers and artists those ideas reached the American public. The author certainly delivers, but I think that I would have been much happier with a flowchart.
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Marie Kelleher
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February 25, 2013
A decent starting point, and I enjoyed the chapters on Vivekananda and Yogananda) but the central argument sort of breaks down, and the second half of the book devolves into a guru-per-3-pages format, to the point where it seemed more like a narrative catalog than a monograph. That said, I left the book wanting to read more to fill in the gaps (for example, the ambivalent relationship between yoga and modernity, or cultural commodification) and that's never a bad thing.
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Kathleen
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January 20, 2012
Like a college survey course titled The Influence of Indian Spirituality on American Culture. I found it very readable, and gave me huge lists of people and topics to probe into further. I strongly recommend the spiritually curious to read this book.
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Bean
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February 5, 2022
tldr: this book reads as an endless Wikipedia-esque iteration of various names and dates. If you want an expansive, insightful view on comparative religion and comparative philosophy, nothing I've found so far can hold a candle to Alan Watts' work. Go there instead.
Serves as a reference for a lot of philosophical and/or spiritual personalities that had influence in the United States since the late 1800s. To be honest, it just reads exactly if I was perusing the Wikipedia page autobiographies for all these people. I would have had the same experience just spending a day Wikipedia-ing all these various teachers, gurus, swamis, and philosophers.
I wouldn't describe the book as bad, and the author's prose is engaging enough. It just lacked in any interesting argument or perspective. It was just a book rattling off endless fun facts and life stories of various people, names and dates, names and dates. Again, if I need a reference, Wikipedia or its high-class cousin, Encyclopedia Britannica, will do just fine. I was hoping for an incisive analysis of the change of American attitudes and philosophy, but quite frankly it didn't offer anything terribly interesting, just more names and dates of people who came to America to teach Vedanta/Vedic philosophy.
One thing I really didn't enjoy was that the author seemed too personally enamored of these characters to allow his book to be appropriately critical of the many abuses that some teachers and gurus inflicted. He takes a really weak, non-committal stance on even the grossest characters that any person firmly grounded in reality should easily be able to denounce. For example, Osho (Bagwan Sri Rajneesh) gets a shrug and pass on his exploitation, diamond-encrusted watches, FLEET of Rolls Royces, and the nonconsenual drugging of members of his ranch, because, well, it's fine because others got so much spiritual benefit, I guess. Another guru who had multiple credible accusations of raping underage girls is treated very lightly by Goldberg in a sort of mealy-mouthed he-said-she-said brushing off of the allegations as just one of many potential truths. Anyway, his spiritual teachings enlightened others, so you know, maybe it's all just water under the bridge? Please. How spineless. Not to mention the lovely, classic victim-blaming when he bemoans that excesses and abuses may have happened when previously isolated sannyasis were now suddenly exposed to the libertine west with its American girls wearing "short skirts"...
I also found his treatment of the Vedic philosophy's influence on Western science and medicine totally lacking. I think perhaps there has been a great influence, but Goldberg doesn't offer anything for me to sink my teeth into. He just talks about how the founder of TM tried to enlist scientists to help study meditation, which had mixed results in terms of anything scientifically credible. He talks about how there happens to be a statue of Shiva outside CERN. (Cool...what does that show...?) And then he just talks about Deepak Chopra, not dwelling on the uncomfortable fact that Chopra is one of the many who misuse physics that they never specialized in order to push their spiritual ideology as a science in and of itself. Goldberg mentions very briefly that most scientists think this appropriation of quantum physics is poppycock, before scurrying away and basically saying, well, SOME other people think its credible, so... The only interesting part was about Bohm, but it was cut too short.
tldr: this book reads as an endless Wikipedia-esque iteration of various names and dates. If you want an expansive, insightful view on comparative religion and comparative philosophy, nothing I've found so far can hold a candle to Alan Watts' work. Go there instead.
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Mark
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October 6, 2017
Om Satyam Shivam Sundaram
by Mark Chmiel
If you’ve ever …
put your faith in a guru
traveled to India and were blown away and never took a single drug
recited a mantram throughout the day
memorized part of chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita
had a mid-Seventies practice of TM
acknowledged 1970 seed planted from radio frequent blessing of My Sweet Lord
engaged in a conversations where such words as Atman, samadhi, and sattva were common
quoted often one of your Gujarati-American students who told her classmates, “I look at you and see God”
went off-script after having read Be Here Now
smiled with a Namaste and palms together several hundred times
underwent 190+ hours for Yoga Teacher Training
learned how to play the sitar
intuited that the Katha Upanishad had a special message for you
wished you spoke Gujarati, Hindi or Bengali like your parents
challenged yourself by attempting ekāgratā while driving the car
heard one of your pre-med students say that her life dream was really singing and dancing in classical Indian style
gave friends Library of America edition of Whitman’s Poetry and Prose
felt goosebumps even at the 57th listening to Krishna Das’s Ma Durga
said at least ten times, various social situations: “I’m spiritual, not religious”
asked a seventy-year-old Catholic nun to tell your circle about the several weeks she spent in training with ninety-something Mr. Iyengar in India
cited skillfully Maharajji, Yogananda, and Ramakrishna
enjoyed Isherwood’s candor in his book, My Guru and His Disciple
chanted with cheerfulness Hare Kṛṣṇa while walking down Michigan Avenue, a stunningly sunny Saturday morn
facilitated a nine-month reading group of the Bhagavad Gita, with Eknath Easwaran’s three-volume commentary optional
spent long retreats at California ashram
meditated while seated before classic b/w photo of Sri Anandamayi Ma
wondered if N. Finkelstein’s immersion in half of the Collected Works of M. K. Gandhi affected the scholar in ways he himself wasn’t aware of
filled a notebook with the Holy Name
learned to appreciate Jesus through Prabhavananda
fused three of your students into the fictional character Tanya Chatterjee
understood the links of Thoreau to Gandhi, and Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.
saw activism at its collective best as karma yoga
noticed how one of your students resembles the young Vivekananda
responded to the question at La Dolce Via, “What do you want your life to be about?” with Om Satyam Shivam Sundaram
…you may enjoy Philip Goldberg’s American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West.
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Julian Lynn
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October 30, 2019
Panoramic in Scope with Narrative Irregularities: "American Veda" is a singularly ambitious and panoramic report and, in some cases, review of the many ways in which Indian spirituality has impacted and informed American culture and cultural precepts over the past two-hundred-plus years.
Readers new to this field of inquiry may initially be overwhelmed by the vast number of names, events, organizations and statistical information presented in this seemingly comprehensive book. Readers who have a good command of US social and intellectual history and/or a strong bent toward serious spiritual inquiry may find Goldberg's work very helpful. And, to the author's credit, copious endnotes provide serious readers with additional material and leads to supplement the chapters' many narrative threads.
Because this work is being used as a teaching tool, two aspects of Goldberg's work caused this reviewer concern. First is the issue of the author's voice. Goldberg seems to be entrenched in hippie-era slang circa 1970. As a point of fact, the verbal phrase "turn on" instead of "introduce" peppers the book's pages—to the extent that this reader almost started tracking the instances of its appearance. What can I say? "Bummer drag, man." Also, in an attempt to contextualize certain events, the author sometimes makes sweeping and sensationally-worded statements about US history. These passages would benefit from a more careful rewording.
The second and more serious concern, regarding Goldberg's book, has to do with the nuanced "details" of events and cause-effect relationships and how they are reported. The author, perhaps because of the sheer scope of material covered, has in several instances become mildly confused. For example, Goldberg reports that the meeting between the XIV Dalai Lama and a delegation of Jewish Rabbis, "Chronicled by Rodger Kamenetz in the best seller "The Jew in the Lotus," [that] the purpose of the trip was to learn why so many Jews were drawn to the East." In contrast, Kamenetz himself writes, "In 1989, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts, the Dalai Lama turned for the first time to the Jewish people for help. 'Tell me your secret,' he said, 'the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile.'" Readers, using this text as a teaching tool, need to be aware that the narrative contains such irregularities.
Read the book; enjoy it. I am hopeful that—with a more careful and, perhaps, scholarly peer review, as well as a much closer editing— "American Veda" might become a trusted resource for serious students of Indian spirituality in the West for years to come.
=====
American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West Hardcover – 2 November 2010
by Philip Goldberg (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars 168 ratings
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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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Philip Goldberg
Philip Goldberg grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles like the Dodgers before him. A professional writer for 45 years, he is author or coauthor of numerous books, all but one nonfiction. He is also a skilled public speaker, meditation teacher, and ordained Interfaith Minister. He leads tours to India and cohosts the popular podcast Spirit Matters. His 2010 book, American Veda, which chronicles the impact of India's spiritual teachings on the West, was named one of the top 10 Religion books of the year by Huffington Post and Library Journal. That was followed in 2018 by a biography: The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru. Website: www.philipgoldberg.com. His current book, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times is the #1 New Release in 3 Amazon categories.
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J. F. Grant
4.0 out of 5 stars Hmmm, it was alright but becomes repetitive
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 11 February 2021
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This book was great for the first third and then becomes a litany, page after page, of one person who has effected/been affected by vedic teaching after another. A chapter on scientists, musicians, artists, Indian gurus and western gurus, a page about this person then another about that person. Most of the short biographies you get time and time again are pretty much the same (someone read the I Ching, Vedas, etc and then got involved in their day to day and then started an institute in California somewhere and then you're on to the next person) and if you're like me you'll start skipping by the end. I will say that it's a good start for the very basics, what words mean etc but if you're interested in the actual spiritual stuff, this book may not be the best. It ends up being a catalogue of those who have been involved in western Hinduism, not actually about the beliefs or practices themselves.
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4.0 out of 5 stars American Veda - an apt title
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 12 September 2020
Verified Purchase
A lot of people would know that the Vedas are from India - a work that emerged over a few thousand years to which lot of Saints and Mendicants would have contributed.
What makes this book interesting is the way the author shows how Emerson was deeply influenced by these books and how it influenced him as a Minister of the Unitarian Church! Thoreau imbibed these teachings from his teacher and his books on Civil Disobedience went on to influence Gandhi who was one of the main Architects of India’s Freedom Movement.
Gandhi’s thoughts went on to influence Nelson Mandela and Civil Rights Movement’s Martin Luther King!
The book shows how the Vedic thought process evolves and continues to influence Mankind.
One person found this helpful
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V Govindan
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent work
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 30 December 2017
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A painstaking work incorporating all aspects of development of Vedantic thougt in America. A must read for all Western aspirants. God Bless.
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Jorma Rusanen
4.0 out of 5 stars Nice small book.
Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on 14 March 2016
Verified Purchase
Nice small book. Interesting stories told about those Indian yogis who happened to go to USA, maybe true, maybe fiction.
One person found this helpful
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J. F. Grant
4.0 out of 5 stars Hmmm, it was alright but becomes repetitive
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 11 February 2021
Verified Purchase
This book was great for the first third and then becomes a litany, page after page, of one person who has effected/been affected by vedic teaching after another. A chapter on scientists, musicians, artists, Indian gurus and western gurus, a page about this person then another about that person. Most of the short biographies you get time and time again are pretty much the same (someone read the I Ching, Vedas, etc and then got involved in their day to day and then started an institute in California somewhere and then you're on to the next person) and if you're like me you'll start skipping by the end. I will say that it's a good start for the very basics, what words mean etc but if you're interested in the actual spiritual stuff, this book may not be the best. It ends up being a catalogue of those who have been involved in western Hinduism, not actually about the beliefs or practices themselves.
Report abuse
Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars American Veda - an apt title
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 12 September 2020
Verified Purchase
A lot of people would know that the Vedas are from India - a work that emerged over a few thousand years to which lot of Saints and Mendicants would have contributed.
What makes this book interesting is the way the author shows how Emerson was deeply influenced by these books and how it influenced him as a Minister of the Unitarian Church! Thoreau imbibed these teachings from his teacher and his books on Civil Disobedience went on to influence Gandhi who was one of the main Architects of India’s Freedom Movement.
Gandhi’s thoughts went on to influence Nelson Mandela and Civil Rights Movement’s Martin Luther King!
The book shows how the Vedic thought process evolves and continues to influence Mankind.
One person found this helpful
Report abuse
V Govindan
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent work
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 30 December 2017
Verified Purchase
A painstaking work incorporating all aspects of development of Vedantic thougt in America. A must read for all Western aspirants. God Bless.
Report abuse
Jorma Rusanen
4.0 out of 5 stars Nice small book.
Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on 14 March 2016
Verified Purchase
Nice small book. Interesting stories told about those Indian yogis who happened to go to USA, maybe true, maybe fiction.
One person found this helpful
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