By Lola Williamson
Yoga, karma, meditation, guru—these phrases, as soon as imprecise, are actually part of the yankee lexicon. Combining Hinduism with Western suggestions and values, a brand new hybrid kind of faith has constructed within the usa over the last century. In Transcendent in the USA, Lola Williamson strains the heritage of varied Hindu-inspired routine in the US, and argues that jointly they represent a discrete class of spiritual perform, a different and identifiable kind of new religion.Williamson offers an summary of the emergence of those activities via reading exchanges among Indian Hindus and American intellectuals resembling Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and illuminates how Protestant traditions of internal adventure prepared the ground for Hindu-style hobbies’ popularity within the West.Williamson makes a speciality of 3 movements—Self-Realization Fellowship, Transcendental Meditation, and Siddha Yoga—as consultant of the bigger of phenomenon of Hindu-inspired meditation events. She offers a window into the ideals and practices of fans of those routine via delivering concrete examples from their phrases and stories that make clear their international view, way of life, and courting with their specialists. Drawing on scholarly study, various interviews, and a long time of non-public adventure with Hindu-style practices, Williamson makes a resounding case that Hindu-inspired meditation events are targeted from either immigrant Hinduism and other kinds of Asian-influenced or “New Age” teams.
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Sample text
In 1920 Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in Boston and spoke to the International Congress of Religious Liberals. Within the same year he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship. For the next several years he lectured on the East Coast and in 1924 traveled throughout the United States, lecturing to audiences of thousands. After a lull from the 1930s to the 1950s, Americans again became intrigued by Hindu ideas following the 1965 reversal of the Immigration Act of 1924. ” Remembered for phrases such as “flower power,” “summer of love,” and “power to the people,” the hippies also staged establishment-defying events—campus protests, peace rallies, demonstrating at the Democratic National Convention, and outdoor concerts with the smell of marijuana wafting through the air.
Drawing on mystics from both the West and the East, Theosophy explores pantheism, monism (the view that all existence is one), transmigration, the merging of the individual soul with the cosmic soul (called Universal Over-Soul in Theosophy, as it was in Transcendentalism), and experiential contact with levels beyond the mundane through meditation, intuition, and revelation. Like Neo-Hinduism, Theosophy turns to the Upanishads and the Bhavagad-Gita for inspiration. The Theosophical Society stresses the comparative study of religion and the idea of a “universal brotherhood” that accepts anyone without distinctions of race, caste, sex, or creed.
Drawing on Enlightenment ideas, Deists believed that reason and scientific knowledge could and should inform religion. The ideas of Deism began in pre-Revolutionary America and expanded throughout the eighteenth century. ”19 Deists were influenced not only by French liberalism and British rationalism but also by translations of texts and descriptions of travelers that were arriving from China and India. ”20 22 | Bac kg rou n d Acculturation Acculturation is often understood as one culture adapting to a more dominant culture, but it can also be defined as the mutual exchange between two cultures and the resulting adjustments that each makes.