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, the officer told my good friend that the US needed the help of teachers like him and, surprising my friend, who expected nothing more than a six-week, one time visa, the officer later handed him a 10-year, multiple-entry visa.
My friend and I taught in a Krishnamurti school in India about 30 years ago, and over the past three years he has graced my home with his presence as he travels through the US and Canada talking to and walking his students and small groups of Americans and Canadians through the simple as well as the esoteric aspects of Hindu meditation techniques, about the nature of the cosmos, the need to relate well to friends and family, and about reducing the daily stress and burdens of modern living. In his still rather quaint Indian English, and with his soft, engaging smile, he manages to soothe those who come seeking answers that are as old as life and as new as now: Why are we here? Where do we go from here? What is life all about?
My friend was very much on my mind as I recently read Philip Goldberg’s new book, American Veda [available at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk], in which, with a grand sweep, Goldberg traces the two-century long American fascination with Hindu spirituality, yoga, philosophy, music and meditation. From the bard of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was smitten by the Bhagavad Gita and wrote in his journal in 1831, “It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us”, to the LSD-experimenting Harvard iconoclast, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), who was led by an American friend to Neem Karoli Baba in the hills of north India and rid of his doubt and his LSD, Americans have discovered spirituality, karma, reincarnation and cremation through Hinduism – so much so that Lisa Miller wrote an essay in Newsweek with the title: “We are all Hindus now”.
