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From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation How Indian Spirituality Changed the West
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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Author: Philip Goldberg
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
ISBN: 9780307719614
Format: .pdf.ibooks.epub.mobi.djvu.fb2
Release:
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The Autobiography of Maurice Baker
“For the life of a diplomat is often a variation of routine boredom and exhilarating crises.”Maurice Baker is an academic and one of Singapore's pioneer diplomats. Growing up in colonial–governed Malaya and Singapore, his profound love for great literature works inspired him to obtain an honors in English from King's college, London in 1948 despite the cruelties faced during and after the Second World War. Baker's humble beginnings and political consciousness earned him the friendship and respect of many diplomats during his missions to India in 1967, Malaysia in 1969, Philippines in 1977 and back to Malaysia in 1980 before retiring from his career as a diplomat in 1988. Between his diplomatic missions, Baker returned to Singapore in 1972 to head the Department of English at the University of Singapore for five years.
This is Baker's story of how he came to be The Accidental Diplomat. With occasional poems and a sense of humor, he candidly recounts the colourful romances of his life to his enriching encounters of diplomatic relations. His portrayals of admiration for great leaders and men paint a vivid picture of the qualities that guided his beliefs, proving that he was by no means an “Accidental Diplomat” in the eyes of others.
Sample Chapter(s)
Foreword (55 KB)
Introduction (79 KB)
Chapter 1: Cameron Highlands, Malaya: March 1942–August 1945 (256 KB)
Chapter 6: Ambassador to the Republic of the Philippines: June 1977–August 1980 (20 MB)
Contents:
Foreword by S R Nathan
Message by S Dhanabalan
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I:
Cameron Highlands, Malaya
University College, Leicester and King's College, University of London
Return to Singapore
Part II:
High Commissioner to India
High Commissioner to Malaysia and Return to Academia
Ambassador to the Republic of the Philippines
Return to Malaysia
Retirement in Singapore
Readership: General public.
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Author: Maurice Baker; Edmund Baker
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 9789814618335
Format: .pdf.ibooks.epub.mobi.djvu.fb2
Release: July 2014
301 pages
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With a combination of essay-length and short entries written by a team of leading religious experts, the two-volume Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodoxy offers the most comprehensive guide to the cultural and intellectual world of Eastern Orthodox Christianity available in English today.
An outstanding reference work providing the first English language multi-volume account of the key historical, liturgical, doctrinal features of Eastern Orthodoxy, including the Non-Chalcedonian churches
Explores of the major traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy in detail, including the Armenian, Byzantine, Coptic, Ethiopic, Slavic, Romanian, Syriac churches
Uniquely comprehensive, it is edited by one of the leading scholars in the field and provides authoritative but accessible articles by a range of top international academics and Orthodox figures
Spans the period from Late Antiquity to the present, encompassing subjects including history, theology, liturgy, monasticism, sacramentology, canon law, philosophy, folk culture, architecture, archaeology, martyrology, hagiography, all alongside a large and generously detailed prosopography
Structured alphabetically and topically cross-indexed, with entries ranging from 100 to 6,000 words
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Author: John Anthony McGuckin
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9781444392548
Format: .pdf.ibooks.epub.mobi.djvu.fb2
Release: November 2010
872 pages
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