How Thoreau’s Walden Pond Mixed with the Ganges and Yoga Came to America with Swami Vivekananda

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For VIDEO go to: Introductory Video

How the ancient Yoga of God-Realization came to America

One early morning during the winter of 1846-47, Henry David Thoreau looked out the window of his small cabin on Walden Pond. He saw over a hundred men with horses and saws cutting the ice of Walden Pond into blocks. From there, the ice was taken to the railroad that ran across the western edge of the pond, conveyed to Boston harbor, packed into a clipper ship, and transported over 16,000 miles to Calcutta, India, where it quickly sold to grateful members of the East India Company. 

Thoreau imagined that ice would eventually melt and run down into the Ganges River, and he was referring to this when he wrote, “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred waters of the Ganges.” 

Thoreau envisioned not just a mingling of waters but of cultures as well, that of a young America just before the Civil War and the ancient Indian religious culture of the Vedas; after all, he was reading the Bhagavad Gita daily. What he did not foresee is that nearly fifty years later, those now-mingled waters of Walden Pond and the Ganges would return (symbolically) when Swami Vivekananda traveled to America to take part in the Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago as part of the Worlds Fair in 1893. Representatives of nearly every religion in the world had gathered together in the same room for the first time in history, and his now-famous talks marked the first presentation of the ancient Yoga of God-Realization in America.

This story explores these mingling waters, the Yoga brought to America by Swami Vivekananda, and its roots in Vedic India. In the process, we will examine differences between the Yoga Vivekananda taught and what is generally called Yoga today.

This enhanced ebook offers a video introduction with over 200 photographs and many photo galleries. Over 150 pop-ups fill the ebook with additional material, quotations, and background information, as well as a rich glossary of terms. 

Peter Malakoff has a BA in Religious Studies, trained in Vedic Studies, obtained a degree in Ayurveda from Kalidas Sanskrit University in 2008, and subsequently took an extended sojourn in the ancient land and culture of India, living in the Kullu Valley of the Himalayas and the religious town of Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu. He is presently residing in Mexico.

website: www.petermalakoff.com

email: petermalakoff@gmail.com