I love diving deep into great literature. I love receiving spiritual wisdom through the written word. Not very often do I get to do both with the same book. Then again, I’m not Dean Sluyter, whose mind is a divining rod for messages that most of us fail to discern. He did it for movies in Cinema Nirvana, and now he’s done it for selected works in the Western literary canon. In The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics, he sees enlightenment wherever he looks. It’s a perfect topic for a long-time meditation teacher, pop culture aficionado, and former English instructor at a top East Coast prep school, and he approaches the task with expertise, engaging prose, and a joyful relish.

You will no doubt be familiar with at least some of the authors in The Dharma Bum’s Guide. As Sluyter puts it, he explores “the books that we read, or were supposed to read, in high school or college.” And you will not be surprised to find luminaries like William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson in a “spiritual” book, although you will be surprised by much of what Sluyter finds in their works. What’s especially Sluyteresque is the not-so-obvious choices. Just as he uncovered nuggets of illumination in movies like The Godfather and Jaws, he digs them out of classics like Moby Dick, Macbeth, Waiting for Godot, and the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass.

Really? Well, yes, because as Sluyter suggests, if the infinite is really infinite, it must be everywhere, even in the seemingly dark places, and even in authors who might not have admitted to having a spiritual bone in their bodies. He uses Douglass’s story, for example, to explore the nature of dukkha and moksha, suffering and liberation, whether physical or spiritual. Moby Dick turns out to contain not only gory scenes of whale hunting but sublime glimpses of the transcendent. There are lessons on conscious dying in one of John Donne’s love poems. Who knew?

Like all successful classroom teachers, Sluyter specializes in making his material both clear and entertaining. As he says in his introduction, “If it’s not fun, what’s the point?” So, along with the heavier tomes, he takes a jaunt through The Cat in the Hat, finds awakening messages in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, draws lines of connection from rap and Zen to Chaucer and Toni Morrison, and nominates alternative national anthems from Mr. Rogers and Aretha Franklin. Literature was never this much fun, or this enriching for the soul.

The beating heart of The Dharma Bum’s Guide is the revelation that all those books on the English 101 syllabus can be Dharma gates, portals to awakening. Sluyter’s enthusiasm is contagious as he shows how to read Hemingway as haiku, or derive mindfulness lessons from Virginia Woolf, or see the parallels between Huck Finn’s journey and the Buddha’s, or find the solution to Gatsby’s problems in St. Paul’s teachings on love. And he finds hints to meditation — with an emphasis on naturalness and effortlessness — everywhere: Whitman’s “I loaf and invite my soul.” Dickinson’s “Not knowing when the dawn will come / I open every door.” Keats’s “Still, still,” Huck and Jim literally going with the flow as the river carries their raft downstream.

Digging deep in that way takes a certain kind of creativity and boldness. Those Sluyter has, along with a sparkling writing style of his own. You’ll be entertained; you’ll be elevated; you’ll be enlightened—more enlightened than you were before, at least—and if you learn from the author’s method, you’ll never again view great works of art in quite the same way.

Phil Goldberg

Philip Goldberg has been studying the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. An Interfaith Minister, public speaker, and workshop leader, his numerous books include Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru, and his latest, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. He blogs on Elephant Journal and Spirituality & Health, cohosts the popular Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com.

www.philipgoldberg.com

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Dean Sluyter offers a skilled meditation guide in Natural Meditation

Dean Sluyter is in the grand tradition of authors who interpret traditional enlightenment teachings and apply them to modern Western life. In his latest book, Natural Meditation, he certainly accomplishes that task with a rare combination of insight, clarity, wit, and pragmatic common sense.

Can you learn to meditate effectively from a book? That’s an open question. But if any book can do the job of a skilled meditation guide, it’s this one. Sluyter knows as much about clear, concise, captivating prose as he does about the nuances of meditation. That rare combination makes Natural Meditation as enjoyable as it is useful.

We’ve come a long way from the days when meditating marked you as weird. Now, physicians recommend it, and no one blinks if you’re late for dinner because you were meditating. But misconceptions remain. One is that all meditation practices are the same. Another is that it’s difficult; as in, “I tried to meditate, but it’s so hard” and, “I’m not good at it.” Sluyter is here to tell you it was hard because you tried, and there’s no such thing as being good at it. The key words in his title are “natural” and “effortless.”

Meditation, he asserts, can be as natural and effortless as a leaf floating to the ground. The mind wants to settle down. Sluyter shows you how to allow it.

Fear Less: Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, and Addiction

Read our review of Dean Sluyter’s book Fear Less: Living beyond Fear, Anxiety, and Addiction. 

Phil Goldberg

Philip Goldberg has been studying the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. An Interfaith Minister, public speaker, and workshop leader, his numerous books include Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru, and his latest, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. He blogs on Elephant Journal and Spirituality & Health, cohosts the popular Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com.

www.philipgoldberg.com

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Yogananda himself, of course, played a principal role in that history. After making a 12-acre site atop Mount Washington the international headquarters of his Self-Realization Fellowship, he became “the 20th century’s first superstar guru,” to quote the LA Times. Over the years, Yogananda’s visible footprint was placed on other choice properties in the region, notably the magnificent Lake Shrine on Sunset in Pacific Palisades and the cliff top retreat in Encinitas, where he wrote his iconic memoir, Autobiography of a Yogi.

More than two decades before Yogananda made L.A. his home, Swami Vivekananda ushered in the 20th century in this part of the world. During his three-month visit commencing in December of 1899, lecture halls were filled with crowds eager to hear the triumphant star of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions speak on subjects like “The Science of Yoga.” In 1923, one of his devotees, Swami Paramananda, founded Ananda Ashrama, a still-functioning sanctuary in the hills of La Crescenta. A few years later, the triple-domed temple of the Vedanta Society rose up in Hollywood. There, in the 40s and 50s, a trio of celebrated authors, Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, were schooled in Vedanta philosophy and Yogic practices by the erudite Swami Prabhavananda, who presided over the temple from 1929 until his death in 1976 at the age of 82. The essays, novels and nonfiction books (e.g., Huxley’s seminal The Perennial Philosophy) produced by those literary lions educated millions about India’s spiritual treasures. Prabhavananda and Isherwood teamed up on elegant translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras (titled How to Know God) that were the best-read versions of those classics for years. The Hollywood center remains a custodian of Vivekananda’s vision of adapting the ancient dharma to the modern West.

The other Hollywood—the star-making industry, as opposed to the geographical entity—has also played a major role in beaming Yoga and Indian philosophy to the masses. As early as the 1930s, celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo would motor up to Ojai in their roadsters to listen to the pathless pathfinder, Jiddu Krishnamurti. It was in Ojai that the iconoclastic Krishnamurti had the spiritual breakthrough that led him to reject the messiah-like role for which he’d been groomed by the Theosophists who brought him to the West as a teenager. For nearly six decades, his spring lecture series drew thousands of Angelenos to Ojai annually.

Hollywood star power also taught folks in the hinterlands about Hatha Yoga. Celebs like Mae West and Greta Garbo were linked to the practice early on, and in the 1950s gossip columnists reported that icons such as Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Monroe were into it. Marilyn was said to do asanas “to improve her legs,” proving that Yoga as physical fitness did not begin in the Madonna era. One of the teachers of celebrities and thousands of others was Indra Devi, the so-called First Lady of Yoga, whose landmark book, Forever Young, Forever Healthy, coupled with numerous public appearances, helped bring the teachings to the masses. Born in Eastern Europe, she was a student of the legendary Hatha revivalist Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. Only an exceptional woman could have broken through India’s male-only Yoga club back then, and Indra Devi remained exceptional until her death in 2002 at the age of 102.

Among the region’s other mid-century Hatha teachers was Bishnu Charan Ghosh, Yogananda’s younger brother. One of his students was Bikram Choudhury, who went on to build a worldwide empire with his trademark high-temperature Yoga. Another innovator in L.A. at the time was Richard Hittleman. A devotee of the non-dualist saint Ramana Maharshi, Hittleman penned enormously popular books and pioneered the use of video. His daily TV show, “Yoga for Health,” debuted in L.A. in 1961 and was syndicated nationally for years.

In 1953, Judith Tyberg, a direct disciple of Sri Aurobindo, one of the spiritual giants of modern India, founded the East-West Cultural Center near the intersection of Beverly and Vermont. The center moved several times before settling into its present location in Culver City in 1985. A native San Diegan who studied Sanskrit in Benares, Dr. Tyberg introduced Angelenos to Sri Aurobindo’s work and hosted visiting teachers who went on to have a huge impact on modern Yoga. Among them was Swami Vishnudevananda, who was sent to America in 1957 by his guru, Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh. Ganga White, one of many seekers who found their way to East-West in the sixties, trained with Vishnudevananda and later opened the Sivananda Center for Yoga on Sunset and Western during the apex of flower power. The Hare Krishna devotees added to the colorful atmosphere of the era, giving locals their first glimpse of traditional Hindu Bhakti and their first earful of Sanskrit chanting, a precursor to today’s kirtan scene. They would soon establish an L.A. temple (now in Culver City) and, in 1977, start their annual Festival of Chariots in Venice.

In the seventies, White disconnected from the Sivananda lineage and turned The Center for Yoga into a prototype of today’s independent studio. It offered an eclectic menu of classes and hosted a parade of luminaries, from Swami Satchidananda to Allen Ginsberg to the first teachers trained by the influential Hatha masters B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois (Iyengar himself lectured there in 1976, as did Pattabhi Jois in 1985). The center caught on quickly, forcing a move to a larger location on Larchmont Boulevard, which is now owned by YogaWorks. White went on to found the White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, and Swami Vishnudevananda’s lineage was reestablished as the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center, which is now located in Marina Del Rey.

The watershed moment in the West’s embrace of India’s spiritual heritage came when the Beatles met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, studied his Transcendental Meditation (TM) and, in early 1968, famously retreated to the banks of the Ganges River. Overnight, words like mantra, guru, and ashram entered the collective vocabulary, and it became acceptable, even fashionable, to start the day in silent meditation. The locus of that phenomenon was London, but the sparks were lit years earlier in L.A. when clean-cut citizens of Ozzie and Harriet’s America were drawn to the Maharishi. When college students looking for ways to expand their awareness without dangerous drugs turned to TM, the Students International Meditation Society (SIMS) was created at UCLA. By 1966, SIMS had branches at several major campuses, and after the Beatles’ media explosion its office on Gayley Avenue became the administrative engine of a massive movement. One of the UCLA meditators, Keith Wallace, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the physiology of TM, and his findings, published in 1970, would jumpstart a research juggernaut that moved meditation into the mainstream.

The chain reaction that led directly to the Beatles began with an L.A. record producer named Richard Bock. The head of World Pacific Records, Bock started promoting the music of Ravi Shankar soon after the great sitarist’s first visit to the West in 1956. He produced some of Shankar’s early albums and connected him to L.A. based jazz artists like flutist Paul Horn, who became one of the first American TM teachers and later recorded the seminal “Inside the Taj Mahal” album. Bock also introduced Shankar to John Coltrane, who infused his music with Indian sounds and themes, and to Alice Coltrane, who went on to become a Swami with an ashram of her own in the Malibu hills. It was also through Bock that David Crosby, then a member of the Byrds, first heard Shankar’s music. Crosby shared his discovery with George Harrison in 1965, at a Benedict Canyon party. The rest is musical and spiritual history. While studying sitar with Shankar in India, the quiet Beatle’s spiritual longing found direction, and his path led to the historic Beatles-in-India moment.

Once the floodgates were opened, L.A. continued to be the principal conduit for the East-to-West transmission. Yogi Bhajan, who first appeared at the East-West Cultural Center in 1969, started teaching his distinctive Kundalini Yoga on Melrose Ave, down the road from the Bodhi Tree, which in 1970 established itself as the prototype for spiritual bookstores everywhere. Also starting up in a Melrose storefront (circa 1972) was the American guru who was born Franklin Jones, became Bubba Free John and, after more name changes, passed away as Adi Da Samraj.

Virtually every teacher whose impact reverberated nationally made important inroads in Los Angeles. Swami Muktananda, for instance, introduced his Siddha Yoga to Angelenos during his three world tours, beginning in 1970. On his first visit, he was accompanied by Ram Dass, who was then in the early stages of his indispensible life as the spiritual teacher formerly known as Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert. Mutkananda spent six months in L.A. on his third tour, holding public events in a huge tent in Santa Monica, where the Loews Hotel now stands. His successor, Swami Chidvilasananda (Gurumayi), also came to Los Angeles a number of times in the eighties and nineties. And, as local Yogis know, B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, the progenitors of the asana-based practice now virtually synonymous with the word Yoga, established a powerful L.A. presence. The transmission continued through the turn of the century, as new teachers—Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Mata Amritanandamayi, Sri Karunamayi, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, and others—have found some of their most welcoming audiences in L.A.

Somehow, a city known for glitz and glamour also acquired a strong ethos of inner development. In what other city could Bhakti Fest, Yoga Month or Yoga therapy have been incubated? Where else could professor Christopher Chapple create a Yoga Studies program at the Jesuit-run Loyola Marymount University? Los Angeles has probably produced more Yoga teachers per capita than anywhere else in the country, and must surely lead the nation in the number of asanas performed and mantras intoned per day. By all indications, the Benares of America will continue to beam Yoga in all its forms as skillfully as it beams movies and TV shows.

Phil Goldberg

Philip Goldberg has been studying the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. An Interfaith Minister, public speaker, and workshop leader, his numerous books include Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru, and his latest, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. He blogs on Elephant Journal and Spirituality & Health, cohosts the popular Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com.

www.philipgoldberg.com

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The most conscientiously spiritual of the Beatles, Harrison learned from a number of well-known gurus, living and dead: Swami Vishnudevananda, whom he met when the Beatles were filming Help! in the Bahamas; Paramahansa Yogananda and Swami Vivekananda, whose books he read while studying sitar with Ravi Shankar in India; A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, whose Krishna Consciousness movement Harrison supported as enthusiastically as he chanted the familiar Hare Krishna Mahamantra; and most famously, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, from whom he and the Fab Four learned Transcendental Meditation in 1967 after George’s then-wife, Pattie Boyd, told him about it. That meeting of celebrity and guru triggered a media frenzy that put words like mantra, guru and ashram into the vocabulary and ushered meditation—and, as a byproduct, the full repertoire of yogic practices—into the mainstream.

Once he found value in India’s spiritual heritage, Harrison promoted the message with the same passion he brought to his guitar. When Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein died, George’s funky explanation of reincarnation was heard around the world: “There’s no such thing as death anyway. I mean, it’s death on a physical level, but life goes on everywhere, and you just keep going up really.” When the Beatles departed for their famous sojourn in India, George told the press why: “For every human, it is a quest to find the answer as to ‘Why are we here? Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?’ That, to me, became the only important thing in my life. Everything else is secondary.” When he discovered Krishna bhakti (the devotional form of Yoga), Harrison funded the London Hare Krishna temple and the printing of one of Swami Bhaktivedanta’s books, for which he penned a foreword. Prefiguring today’s kirtan explosion by decades, he also produced and performed on an album of chants called “Radha-Krishna Temple” that reached a global audience.

Harrison became as Hindu as a Westerner is likely to be without taking swami vows, and his urge to express what he’d discovered in the tradition is palpable in some of his lyrics. Listen to “Within You Without You” on the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and you’ll hear lines like “Try to realize it’s all within yourself” and “When you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there.” I think of the song as the first rock ‘n’ roll Upanishad and those lines as rock mahavakyas (great utterances). But it is in his post-Beatles solo career that George the guru steps onto center stage. On “My Sweet Lord,” the first number one single by an ex-Beatle, he voices the yearning of a God seeker: “I really want to see you,” he cries, “I really want to know you … I really want to be with you …” As he intones variations on “my sweet Lord,” the chorus sings “Hallelujah,” then “Hare Krishna,” then a traditional verse invoking Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (called Maheswara). Harrison said he wanted to show that Christian and Hindu sounds of praise “are quite the same thing.”

On “Give Me Love,” from the album Living in the Material World, he again gives voice to the primal spiritual yearning: “Give me love / Give me peace on earth / Give me light / Give me life / Keep me free from birth.” “Beware of Darkness” warns of the dangers of worldly attachment, counseling us to beware of “falling swingers” and “thoughts that linger.” On “Awaiting on You All” he tells us: “chant the names of the Lord and you’ll be free.” He advises us to learn “The Art of Dying,” a classic metaphor for transcending bodily identity, and he states the case for reincarnation: “There’ll come a time when most of us return here / Brought back by our desire to be / A perfect entity.”

Phil Goldberg

Philip Goldberg has been studying the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. An Interfaith Minister, public speaker, and workshop leader, his numerous books include Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru, and his latest, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. He blogs on Elephant Journal and Spirituality & Health, cohosts the popular Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com.

www.philipgoldberg.com

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J.D. Salinger

The obituaries and tributes to J.D. Salinger, the seminal novelist who died in January at the age of 91, have tended to ignore one important feature of his life and work: for many readers, especially young seekers of truth in the sixties and seventies, he was a kind of guru figure. I was one of many who turned to his work for not only esthetic pleasure and insight into modern existential dilemmas, but also for spiritual lessons. Like the Somerset Maugham of The Razor’s Edge and Herman Hesse (Siddhartha and others), Salinger’s fiction made explicit references to Eastern spirituality. And, because he was American, contemporary and wildly popular, he had a much bigger influence than the other authors in introducing readers to yogic teachings.

A determined seeker and a practitioner of the spiritual arts, Salinger studied Zen after his traumatic service in World War II, and segued to the Vedanta stream of Hinduism in the early fifties after publishing The Catcher in the Rye, that masterpiece of youthful yearning for higher meaning. He was a regular at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where the great mythologist Joseph Campbell also absorbed seminal lessons early in his career.

“Teddy,” the last short story in the famous collection Nine Stories, introduced thousands of Salinger’s readers to reincarnation, nonattachment, and other concepts that the author was imbibing from Swami Nikhilananda at the Vedanta Center. In that tale, the ten-year-old title character says the only reason he was incarnated again was because, in his previous life, “I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating.” (According to his daughter Margaret’s memoir, Salinger himself was relieved to find out that married life could be a legitimate pathway when he read Paramahansa Yogananda’s classic Autobiography of a Yogi.) The story ends, famously, with Teddy calmly, even cheerfully, walking to an accidental death that he’s foreseen – clearly Salinger’s attempt to depict his understanding of an enlightened soul’s attitude toward death, based upon the Vedantic comparison of discarding a body to the shedding of a garment.

Eastern mysticism – and to some extent the Western variety – becomes more explicit and more sophisticated with each subsequent Salinger work, beginning with Franny and Zooey. The sibling stories about two siblings, originally published in the New Yorker and then together in the 1961 book, introduce Salinger’s immortal Glass family and foreshadow the journey that thousands of baby boomers would soon embark on: a smart, precariously sensitive college student sinks into an existential crisis, tries to unlock the secrets of an esoteric text, and climbs out of her dark night of the soul with the help of Eastern wisdom delivered by a representative of a guru lineage. In this case, the “ashram” is the Manhattan apartment where Franny grew up, and the spiritual guide is her older brother Zooey, who imparts the teachings of the next oldest sibling, Buddy, who in turn is the chief “disciple” of their late brother Seymour, the family sadguru. Along the way, readers learn about karma, Atman, chakras and various yogic imperatives, such as acting without attachment to the outcome and seeing everything, even the remedial chicken soup of a fussbudget mother, as consecrated.

Franny and Zooey was followed in 1963 by Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, two stories that round out Salinger’s portrait of Swami Seymour – the author’s attempt to portray an enlightened being negotiating life in the modern world – and his sibling disciples. The Glass offspring don’t run off to ashrams in India, as many of their fans did in the 60s and 70s; they are karma yogis, trying their damndest to live authentic spiritual lives while performing their dharmic duties with dignity. They may be precocious kids, ridiculously sensitive adolescents and bizarrely eccentric adults, but they speak in modern vernacular and struggle with the same neurotic concerns as anyone who’s ever wondered what it’s all about or why the world is filled with phonies and sleepwalkers. Salinger’s answers, delivered mainly through Seymour, are invariably lifted from Vedanta or a sister school of perennial wisdom.

Salinger completed his Glass chronicle with a prequel in the form of a letter from camp by the seven-year-old Seymour. Published in the New Yorker in 1965, the story with the weird title (“Hapworth 16, 1924”) was the last work the author made public during his long famous seclusion. It contains repeated references to past lives, which the character calls his “appearances,” instructions for a yogic breathing technique, allusions to tantric sexual practices, and an homage to Swami Vivekananda, founder of the Vedanta Society, whom Seymour calls “one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century.”

I have learned that a surprising number of serious spiritual practitioners found early inspiration and direction from Salinger’s post-Catcher work. And it still has the power to illuminate. A few years ago, I was asked to contribute to You’ve Got to Read This Book, a collection of essays about books that changed people’s lives. I wrote about Franny and Zooey’s impact on me as a young seeker. When the book came out, I received a thank you e-mail from a woman whose eighteen-year-old daughter had been wallowing in a Franny-like spiritual funk. My essay led her to Franny and Zooey, which showed her daughter that she was not crazy and not alone.

A Los Angeles-based spiritual counselor and interfaith minister, Philip Goldberg is the author or coauthor of eighteen books, including Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path. His new book, American Veda, will be published by Doubleday in October: philipgoldberg.com.

By Philip Goldberg

Phil Goldberg

Philip Goldberg has been studying the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. An Interfaith Minister, public speaker, and workshop leader, his numerous books include Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru, and his latest, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. He blogs on Elephant Journal and Spirituality & Health, cohosts the popular Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com.

www.philipgoldberg.com

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Woodstock

Truth Is One; The Wise Call It By Many Names: A Collective Search For Meaning

OF ALL THE ICONIC IMAGES THE MEDIA trotted out to remind us of Woodstock on the fortieth anniversary of that seminal event (August 15 – 18, 1969), the one that best captures what endured from the Sixties was orange-robed Swami Satchidananda addressing the multitude. It wasn’t displayed nearly as often as the writhing bodies, impassioned performers and muddy encampments but that tableau, captured in black-and-white before the music started and before the rains came, stands as a potent symbol of the meeting of East and West that has transformed American culture. While most of the values that Woodstock was said to embody faded away as the baby boomers grew up, the embrace of Eastern spirituality has only grown stronger, changing the way we understand and practice religion, the way we take care of our minds and bodies, and the way we contemplate our place in the cosmos. Think of it this way: it wasn’t long before even the hippest of hippies stopped living communally, sharing food with strangers and dancing naked in the mud. But, forty years on, more people than ever meditate, chant mantras, read the sacred books of the East, and, participate in the six-billiondollar-a-year Yoga industry.

The East-to-West transmission didn’t start at Woodstock by any means. It began more than a century earlier, when translations of Hindu texts found their way to New England and the bookshelves of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It got a big boost in 1893, when Swami Vivekananda came to Chicago to address the Parliament of the World’s Religions and stayed to establish the now-venerable Vedanta Society. Later, in the 1920s, Paramahansa Yogananda toured the country, visited Calvin Coolidge in the White House, and settled in Los Angeles, where he penned the hugely influential Autobiography of a Yogi. Assorted yogis and swamis came and went over the years, and then, in 1968, the Beatles’ went on the most consequential spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness. Their sojourn at the ashram of Transcendental Meditation founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (with Mia Farrow, Donovan and other young celebs) touched off a campus craze and a media frenzy.

Swami Satchidananda’s opening invocation at Woodstock, witnessed by nearly half a million youngsters and seen in part in the Oscar-winning documentary about the mud-and-acid-soaked weekend, accelerated public awareness of India’s heritage of inner exploration. The founder of the Integral Yoga Institute and the most popular guru among counterculture New Yorkers at the time, Swami Satchidananda was helicoptered to Woodstock from Manhattan by organizers who thought that a wise elder might start things off on a serene note. With his long gray beard and flowing hair, the swami was right out of central casting, and his message played to the generation’s sense of importance. “America is helping everybody in the material field,” he said, “but the time has come for America to help the whole world with spirituality also.” He exhorted everyone present to take responsibility for the success of the festival. Responsibility was not a very popular word in hippie circles, but coming from someone seen as an advocate of peace and freedom – the inner variety – the message was taken seriously, and any misgivings the kids might have had were dissolved in the Sanskrit chant that the swami led before blessing the crowd and departing. To this day, many believe that his good vibes averted what could have become a catastrophe as the festival grew far bigger than initially anticipated.

That may or may not be so. But it is certainly true that his presence, along with Ravi Shankar’s electrifying performance, reinforced the idea that downtrodden, oppressed and misunderstood India had something of genuine value to offer the West. The essence of what we imported from the Hindu tradition is the philosophy known as Vedanta and the repertoire of practices known as Yoga. Together they constitute a rich spiritual system. But the knowledge was presented in such a rational, pragmatic way over the years that it was embraced by a wide spectrum of Americans – not just seekers of the transcendent, but scientists and secularists who saw Indian philosophy as a science of consciousness, and medical practitioners who saw yogic techniques as holistic healing modalities. Over time, the imports changed medicine and psychotherapy and radically expanded the way we think about consciousness.

During the 1970s, India’s message of higher awareness and mindbody-spirit integration was increasingly mainstreamed, until now, of course, Yoga studios are as easy to find (or sometimes easier to find) as Starbucks and meditation is prescribed by physicians for stress reduction. Only a year after Woodstock, the first experiment on Transcendental Meditation was published in a prestigious scientific journal. There are now thousands of studies on various meditative disciplines, and thousands more under the heading of Yoga. Dr. Dean Ornish, to cite a well-known example, derived his world-famous preventive medical program, which has been shown to reverse heart disease, from the protocols of Swami Satchidananda, whom he met when he was a medical student.

Of greatest significance, however, is the transformative impact that Indian teachings have had on American spirituality. The influence can be seen in the burgeoning popularity of contemplative Christianity and Jewish mysticism, which experts agree would not have occurred without the catalyst of yogic practices starting in the sixties. And anyone who relates to the term “spiritual but not religious” can thank the parade of gurus and Yoga masters beginning with Vivekananda who made that designation possible. The notion that one can have a deep and fulfilling spiritual life without accepting the complete belief system of any particular religion was understood only to a few eccentrics and mystics before access to the East became widespread. Now, “spiritual but not religious” is the category of choice for sixteen to thirty-nine percent of Americans, depending on the source of the data, and many more count themselves both spiritual and religious – a group that includes thousands, if not millions, who returned to their ancestral religions after their minds were opened by Vedantic ideas. Indeed, the fact that we distinguish between religion and spirituality at all – and that I don’t have to explain the difference – is a direct result of seekers having access to yogic practices that can be used by anyone regardless of religious orientation. The fact that there are many legitimate pathways to the sacred, an idea first expressed in the Rig Veda as ekam sat vipraha bahudha vadanti (“Truth is one, the wise call it by many names,” or, colloquially, “One Truth, many paths”) is more accepted than ever before in our increasingly pluralistic society.

In the past forty years in particular, what we have gained from our contact with India is far more significant than spicy dishes for our palates and cheap customer service operators for our corporations. In his classic eleven-volume text, The Story of Civilization, historian Will Durant expressed the hope that India would “teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, pacifying love for all living things.” That turned out to be prescient. The image of Swami Satchidananda at Woodstock will always be a symbol of the moment when a battery of unconventional baby boomers turned Eastward – and inward – in such large numbers that the process became irreversible.

Philip Goldberg is the author of Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path and other books. His history of Indian spiritual teachings in America will be published by Doubleday next year:PhilipGoldberg.com.

By Philip Goldberg

Phil Goldberg

Philip Goldberg has been studying the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. An Interfaith Minister, public speaker, and workshop leader, his numerous books include Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru, and his latest, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. He blogs on Elephant Journal and Spirituality & Health, cohosts the popular Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com.

www.philipgoldberg.com

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