In "American Veda," Philip Goldberg traces the remarkable and largely untold story of how Indian spiritual ideas—meditation, yoga, karma, chakras, the unity of consciousness, the divinity of the self—moved from the exotic margins of Western awareness to become so thoroughly integrated into mainstream American culture that most people no longer recognize them as imports. Goldberg, a journalist and interfaith minister who has studied Vedantic philosophy for decades, documents a cultural transmission that began with the Transcendentalists in the nineteenth century, accelerated through the counterculture of the 1960s, and has now penetrated so deeply into American life that concepts originally articulated in Sanskrit are used casually in yoga studios, therapy offices, corporate boardrooms, and everyday conversation.

The book matters for IMHU's community because it provides historical context for understanding how and why contemporary Western culture has become so receptive to ideas about consciousness, spiritual practice, and mind-body connection that would have been dismissed as mystical nonsense just decades ago. The integration of Indian spiritual concepts into Western culture didn't happen accidentally. It happened through the efforts of specific teachers, the openness of specific cultural moments, and the resonance of Vedantic ideas with questions that Western philosophy and psychology couldn't adequately answer. Understanding this history helps explain both the opportunities and the challenges facing anyone working to integrate spiritual perspectives into mental health care. The ground has been prepared by a century and a half of cultural transmission—but that transmission has also created misunderstandings, dilutions, and appropriations that need to be navigated with care.

Goldberg begins with the figures most Americans would never associate with Indian philosophy: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Yet the Transcendentalists were among the first Westerners to seriously engage with Hindu and Buddhist texts, and their encounter with Vedantic ideas profoundly shaped their thinking. Emerson's concept of the "Over-Soul," Thoreau's experiment in contemplative simplicity at Walden Pond, Whitman's ecstatic celebration of the divine in all things—each reflects a direct engagement with ideas from the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and other Indian scriptures that were becoming available in English translation for the first time.

What Goldberg demonstrates is that this wasn't a superficial intellectual fashion. The Transcendentalists found in Indian philosophy answers to questions that Western thought had struggled with for centuries: How can the individual self be related to the infinite? How can direct spiritual experience bypass the need for institutional religious authority? How can the divine be found within nature and within oneself rather than exclusively in scripture and doctrine? These questions resonated so powerfully because they addressed genuine gaps in the Western intellectual and spiritual tradition—gaps that Enlightenment rationalism had widened by stripping the sacred from nature and confining religion to the domain of belief rather than experience. The Transcendentalists planted seeds that would take a century to fully germinate, but the ideas they introduced—that consciousness is primary, that spiritual experience is available to everyone, that the self is deeper than the personality—would eventually reshape American culture in ways they couldn't have imagined.

Goldberg devotes substantial attention to the specific Indian teachers who brought meditation and yoga to the West, from Swami Vivekananda's electrifying appearance at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions through Paramahansa Yogananda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Muktananda, and many others. Each teacher adapted Indian spiritual practices for Western audiences in different ways, and each encounter between East and West produced its own unique synthesis. Vivekananda presented Vedanta as a rational philosophy compatible with science. Yogananda offered personal practices of meditation and energy work. Maharishi packaged Transcendental Meditation as a secular technique with measurable physiological benefits. Each approach opened a different doorway for Western seekers.

What's remarkable about this history is how consistently these teachers identified the same deficiency in Western culture: the absence of practical methods for directly experiencing the spiritual dimensions of consciousness. Western religion offered belief, doctrine, and moral instruction, but it had largely lost the contemplative practices that produce direct mystical experience. Western science offered empirical knowledge of the external world but had no methods for investigating the internal world of consciousness. Indian teachers arrived with thousands of years of refined contemplative technology—detailed maps of consciousness, specific practices for exploring different states, and sophisticated philosophical frameworks for interpreting what one discovers—and found a culture that was desperately hungry for exactly what they had to offer. The massive Western adoption of meditation and yoga that followed wasn't cultural tourism. It was a genuine response to a genuine need that Western institutions had failed to meet.

The 1960s and 1970s represented a watershed moment in the transmission of Indian spiritual ideas to the West. The Beatles' publicized relationship with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ram Dass's transformation from Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert to devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, the explosion of yoga centers and meditation retreats across America—these developments moved Indian spiritual practice from academic curiosity to lived experience for millions of Westerners. What had been the province of scholars and eccentrics became a mass cultural movement, and the ideas that had seemed exotic in Emerson's time began to feel intuitively right to a generation questioning every assumption their culture had handed them.

Goldberg traces how these initially countercultural ideas gradually penetrated mainstream institutions. Meditation entered hospitals through Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Yoga entered fitness culture and then corporate wellness programs. Concepts like karma, dharma, and mindfulness entered everyday language. Research on meditation's benefits began appearing in major medical and psychological journals. What had been dismissed as hippie mysticism was validated by peer-reviewed science and adopted by institutions that would have laughed at it a generation earlier. This mainstreaming has been enormously beneficial in many ways—millions of people now have access to contemplative practices that genuinely improve their lives—but it has also involved significant dilution and decontextualization. The yoga practiced in most American studios bears little resemblance to the comprehensive spiritual discipline described in the Yoga Sutras, and the mindfulness taught in corporate settings often strips away the ethical and philosophical framework that gives meditation its full transformative power.

Goldberg examines the growing body of scientific research on meditation and yoga—research that has been instrumental in legitimizing these practices within mainstream medicine and psychology. Studies documenting meditation's effects on stress, blood pressure, immune function, pain management, emotional regulation, and brain structure have provided the evidence base that institutions require before endorsing any practice. The science has been enormously helpful in making contemplative practices available to people who would never have encountered them through spiritual channels.

But Goldberg also raises an important concern: the scientific validation of meditation has come at the cost of reducing it to its measurable physiological effects while ignoring the deeper dimensions that make it a spiritual practice. When meditation is framed primarily as a stress-reduction technique—a kind of mental hygiene, like brushing your teeth for your brain—the transformative potential that the Indian traditions describe is largely lost. The Vedantic understanding of meditation isn't primarily about reducing cortisol or thickening the prefrontal cortex. It's about awakening to the fundamental nature of consciousness, dissolving the illusion of a separate self, and realizing one's identity with the infinite ground of being. These aims can't be measured by an fMRI, and the tendency to value only what can be measured risks producing a version of meditation that captures the physiological benefits while missing the spiritual point entirely. For IMHU, this tension between scientific validation and spiritual depth is directly relevant. The organization needs the credibility that science provides, but it can't afford to let the reductive tendencies of scientific methodology define the boundaries of what spiritual practice is or what it's for.

Goldberg concludes by reflecting on what remains incomplete in the Western absorption of Indian spiritual wisdom. Despite the massive adoption of yoga and meditation, most Westerners engage with these practices in ways that remain superficial relative to their source traditions. The philosophical frameworks that give the practices their full meaning—the understanding of consciousness as primary, the recognition that the individual self and the universal Self are ultimately identical, the sophisticated maps of states and stages of spiritual development—are rarely transmitted alongside the techniques. The result is a culture that practices meditation without meditating, that does yoga without understanding yoga, that uses Sanskrit terms without grasping the worldview from which they emerged.

For IMHU, Goldberg's history illuminates both the opportunity and the challenge of the current moment. The opportunity is that Western culture has been primed, over a century and a half of gradual exposure, to take spiritual experience and contemplative practice seriously in ways that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. Millions of people already meditate, practice yoga, and use conceptual frameworks derived from Indian philosophy to understand their inner lives. The challenge is to deepen this engagement—to move beyond the commodified, decontextualized versions of these practices that dominate popular culture toward a genuine integration of contemplative wisdom and clinical practice that honors the depth of the source traditions while adapting their insights for contemporary needs. American Veda's most important message may be that the West hasn't just borrowed techniques from India. It has been gradually absorbing a fundamentally different understanding of consciousness, selfhood, and reality—an understanding that is still being integrated and that has the potential to transform not just individual practice but the entire framework within which we understand mental health and human flourishing.