Philip Goldberg was the speaker for the Arjun Kumar Sharma Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Vedanta Society of Kansas City and the AUM Foundation on October 26th this year. Goldberg and Swami Chetanananda spoke together on “India’s Impact on America’s Spiritual Landscape.” The Vedanta Society was pleased to welcome Goldberg back to Kansas City after his 2012 appearance to promote his insightful book, American Veda.
Goldberg’s newest literary achievement is The Life of Yogananda, an expanded biography of Paramahamsa Yogananda, who is perhaps most famous for his bestselling book Autobiography of a Yogi. His autobiography, familiarly known as the AY, was first published in 1946, and it has sold more than four million copies. Many people who were exploring new spiritual horizons in the 60s and 70s may recall the AY as a book that was passed from friend to friend.
Paramahamsa Yogananda, 1893-1952, came to America in 1920, He arrived about thirty years after Swami Vivekanada, the founder of the Vedanta Society, who first spoke at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Yogananda founded the Self-Realization Fellowship, which has a meditation center in Kansas City.
After college, Goldberg explored Eastern philosophy, first through Western intellectuals such as Watts and Huxley, and then through the texts of Buddhism and Hinduism. Continuing his study of sacred texts, he read the Christian Testament from the vantage point of Vedanta, and gained a new respect for Jesus as a master teacher. During the 1970s he participated in the Transcendental Meditation movement. He told the Vedanta Society of Kansas City:
“In recent years I’ve been quite heartened by the deepening and broadening of the interfaith movement. The addition of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and other smaller traditions has not only started to reflect the spiritual diversity of America, it has also opened interfaith gatherings to the esoteric element of religion—the transformative practices and internal experiences of adherents.
This is significant because it is in the esoteric realms that true religious unity is to be found—as opposed to the irreconcilable differences found in the exoteric domain of doctrine, truth claims, competing histories, and the like. This bodes well for interreligious harmony and the spirit of inclusivity, and it offers living proof of the Perennialist tenet that every path, if taken deeply enough, leads to similar, if not identical, experiences of the Divine.”
by Diane Marshall