My friend of nearly three decades, a disciple of Swami Rama, and a guru in his own right, told me about going to the American embassy in New Delhi for a visa to travel to the United States. Having heard about the idiosyncrasies of visa officers, and not knowing how another man claiming to be a teacher of yoga and meditation would be handed his “visa karma”, my friend stood in line waiting for fate to play its game.

Called by an officer and asked why he wanted to travel to the US, my friend told me that he must have spoken for about 15 minutes, and that it seemed his guru, Swami Rama, was the one who was doing the talking through him. With tears in his eyes

There has always been a pervasive but undocumented feeling that Indian philosophy, as manifest in Vedanta on the intellectual plain and yoga on the physical plain, has very significantly influenced the West in general and America in particular. That feeling now finds a meticulously constructed scholastic endorsement in the form of an important new book.

Author Philip Goldberg’s ‘American Veda – From Emerson to the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West’ (Harmony Books, 398 pages, $26) [available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk] offers a comprehensive account of the inroads made by Indian philosophy since the early 19th century.

‘The combination of Vedanta and Yoga was …