In 2009, Newsweek magazine ran an composition on religious trends in America. The caption read WE ARE ALL HINDUS NOW. The pen, religion editor Lisa Miller, did n't mean that millions of Americans were doing pujas rather of going to church, or hanging Ganeshas from their necks rather of crosses.
Her opening judgment explained “ Recent bean data show that conceptually, at least, we're sluggishly getting more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we suppose about God, our characters, each other, and eternity. ” Specifically, checks showed that Americans had come far more accepting of other persuasions and other approaches to church than they were in the history. The new station reminded Miller of the Rig Veda passage, ekam sat vipraha bahudha vadanti, which Americans generally restate as “ Truth is one; the wise call it by numerous names. ”
The composition appeared as I was completing work on my book, American Veda From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Contemplation, How Indian Church Changed the West. I was pleased that a major news magazine vindicated what I had proved in the book. In fact, Hindu Dharma has entered American culture more deeply than Newsweek realizes, and in the six times since that composition appeared, the substantiation is indeed stronger. Philosophically, America has decreasingly come a nation of Vedantists — and, in terms of spiritual practice, a nation of yogis. According to studies, the American world- view has changed in these ways lesser mindfulness of the concinnity that underlies the multifariousness of ordinary experience; acceptance of our own godly nature, as in tat tvam asi; lower concern with religious dogma and further interest in spiritual experience.
These trends are complex and multifaceted. But exposure to India’s spiritual treasures has played a major, and presumably the most important part. The transmission of Vedic wisdom from India to America has been going on for over 200 times, through a variety of means. Large figures of people have studied with exponents, spent time in lamaseries and read the Gita, the Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras. But numerous others have absorbed Vedic ideas and practices laterally, throughnon-Indian sources, because the core perceptivity of Vedanta and the principles and practices of Yoga have impacted psychology, drug, the trades, literature, drugs, neurobiology, theology and other areas of life. Because the training are universal, they've been embraced by those with temporal and scientific outlooks as well as spiritual campaigners.
The primary means of dispersion has been the long line of swamis, exponents and yogacharyas who came to the West, beginning with Swami Vivekananda in 1893. utmost people in India know about his stimulating presence at the World’s Parliament of persuasions in Chicago. But his impact was solidified in the following times, when he gathered scholars, wrote classic textbooks, gave hundreds of speeches( numerous transcribed into books) and established a tutoring association, the Vedanta Society, that continues to serve Americans to this day.
Other preceptors followed, including swamis from the Ramakrishna Mission who tutored Vedanta to thousands of Americans, including some of our most prominent thinkers. In 1920, Paramahansa Yogananda arrived and snappily came what the Los Angeles Times called “ the first megastar practitioner of the 20th century. ” He was the first emissary from India to make his home and transnational headquarters in America. His tone- consummation Fellowship continues to thrive, and his bio, Autobiography of a Yogi, has inspired and informed millions since its publication in 1952.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a cortege of exponents burst on the scene, attracting substantially youthful campaigners. Represent a variety of lineages and emphasizing different aspects of dharmic training, they included Swamis Satchidananda, Vishnudevananda, Muktananda and Rama, plus Srila Prabhupada, Bhagwan Sree Rajneesh( aka Osho), B.K.S. Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois and the most notorious of all, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. His Transcendental Meditation attracted enormous media content and scientific exploration, moving contemplation from the circumferences of society into the mainstream by themid-1970s. nearly all of the prominent exponents have since passed on, but they continue to change lives because of their successors and the associations that carry on their work.
In addition, certain masters who noway came to the West — Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo and Neem Karoli Baba, to name just three — have nonetheless had a big impact, thanks to individualities who propagated their training in America. And exponents continue to come to America, of course; the most popular moment being Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Mata Amritanandamayi( Amma).
The spread of Vedanta and Yoga also passed through prominent Westerners who acclimated the ideas and practices to their own fields of moxie and transmitted them to others, occasionally touching millions of minds and hearts. The disseminators include some of America’s topmost public thinkers, beginning in the 19th century with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who absorbed Vedic textbooks long before Swami Vivekananda’s appearance. They were followed by Madame Blavatsky( the author of Theosophy) and others who started indispensable spiritual movements. In themid-20th Century, their species included Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith. Other intellectualists followed suit, from Alan Watts in the 60s and 70s to Ken Wilber moment.
Scientists from Nikola Tesla to Erwin Schrodinger to Robert Oppenheimer to Fritjof Capra also propagated Vedic ideas, and psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Richard Alpert( who came Ram Dass) fostered an East- West integration in the study of the mind and knowledge. Physicians similar as Dean Ornish did the same in drug, helping to legitimize contemplation and other yogic practices in the field of healthcare.
Significantly, the transmission also came through artists. They include famed muses like Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg; novelists Herman Hesse, Somerset Maugham and especially J.D. Salinger; and, in an extraordinary way, musicians. The great sitar master Ravi Shankar was the main catalyst; beginning in 1956 he entered the worlds of classical music, jazz and eventually gemstone, when George Harrison of the Beatles studied with him. That association led directly to the Beatles — also the most notorious celebrities in the world — taking up Transcendental Meditation and spending months at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s vihara in Rishikesh. This was a vital moment in the transmission of Vedic wisdom to the West, leading directly to the mainstream acceptance of contemplation and hatha yoga.
