Before Yogananda, knowledge in the United States of the Indian scriptures known collectively as the Vedanta (which literally means “end of the Veda”) had been slowly growing in intellectual circles for about 80 years, but they were still unknown to the vast majority of Americans.

The first translation into English of the Bhagavad Gita, which contains the teaching given by Lord Krishna to the warrior Arjuna, was made in 1785. One American who eagerly devoured the Gita and other Indian texts was philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). The Transcendentalist philosophy for which Emerson became famous was saturated by the distilled wisdom of spiritual India. His 1841 essay “The Over-Soul” contains the following passage:

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul (“The Over-Soul.