Asian Religions in America

The category of Asian religions in America is incredibly broad. In 2023, the Pew Research Center published the results of the largest national survey of its kind on religion among Asian Americans. It included Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shintoism.[22] While comprehensive, the Pew survey excludes Sikhism, Jainism, and Indigenous Asian religious strands. Given my own research specialization, in this entry I focus solely on Buddhism and Hinduism in America. One way scholars have approached the diversity of Asian religions in America is to distinguish between Asian heritage Buddhist- and Hindu-American communities and non-Asian communities of converts or those who have adopted Buddhist and Hindu religious practices. One early typology in scholarship on American Buddhism was the “two Buddhisms” model that differentiates between immigrant/heritage Asian American Buddhist communities and Buddhist communities of converts made up predominantly by white, middle-class Americans. The two Buddhisms model characterizes Asian American Buddhist communities as concerned with ritual, merit-making activities, community, and cultural preservation, and it characterizes American convert communities as focused on individual meditation practice and Buddhist philosophy.

The two Buddhism model has been rightly problematized.[23] One crucial critique is that this model erases the contributions of Asian Americans who first brought Buddhism to the USA, preserving their Asian traditions under conditions of racial violence and religious discrimination. Another critique is that the two Buddhisms model equates “American” Buddhism with white converts from the 1960s and 1970s counterculture.[24] Scott A. Mitchell shows the great degree to which Asian American Shin Buddhists, who make up nearly two thirds of Buddhists in America, shaped and supported white American Buddhist popularizers from the Beat and Countercultural generations.[25] The intermingling of heritage and non-heritage Buddhist groups is demonstrated by a 2004 interview by Shin Buddhist minister Taitetsu Unno at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies; in this interview, Unno speaks about the impact upon him of meeting Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki and about how his own community includes non-heritage American Buddhists. Unno also shares that Buddhist meditation and the Shin Buddhist practice of nembutsu—taking refuge in Amida Buddha chant—share the same goal of transforming the “small-minded self” in order to connect with the deeper currents of life.[26] Yet, Shin Buddhism has typically been excluded in the non-heritage embrace of Buddhist and Hindu spiritual practices.

Scholarship on Hinduism in America identifies differences and tensions between South Asian American Hindus and non-heritage American Hindus. Jeffrey D. Long, for instance, notes that “adopters of Hinduism”—particularly white Hindus or white spiritual seekers who selectively borrow Hindu practice—are in a contentious position due to British Colonial and racist violence inflicted on South Asian Hindus.[27] Concerns about colonialism, racism, cultural appropriation, and the erasure of Hindu and Buddhist heritage communities shape these adopter communities’ orientations toward social justice, decolonial, and nationalist discourses. Today, demographic and generational shifts further complicate the divisions between heritage and non-heritage Buddhist- and Hindu-American communities.[28]

At the same time, non-heritage Buddhist and Hindu Americans—historically composed of white Americans, though it is increasingly becoming more racially diverse—who have adopted, articulated, and appropriated practices and experiences from and across Buddhism and Hinduism represent a significant historical presence in the United States. In some cases, these non-heritage Hindu and Buddhist Americans have been taught and empowered to teach by more traditional Asian teachers, and, thereby, they are included in the lineages of their teachers. I name this lineage of non-Asian teachers the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage.[29]

Zen popularizer D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966) played a key role in what is known as the “Zen Boom” of the 1950s. Suzuki presented an ahistoric view of Zen rooted in satori, which he explained as a direct experience of reality free from the dualistic ego mind’s assertion of subject-object distinctions. Like Vivekananda’s monism in Advaita Vedanta, Suzuki suggests that the nondual essence and experience of Zen was an answer to problems arising in a technologically developed but spiritually empty West.[30] Beat generation writers like Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Alan Ginsberg were drawn to Zen as a means to critique mainstream America.[31] Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) presents a selective version of Zen that emphasizes spontaneous, ecstatic experience. Straddling the Beats and the hippies, Alan Watts (1915–1973) popularized Zen and Taoism, and he championed the spiritual potential of psychedelics in books such as Psychotherapy East & West (1961). The psychedelic movement, in fact, was a major gateway for white Americans to explore Buddhist and Hindu philosophy and practices.[32] Taking inspiration from Ram Dass, many Americans turned to meditation and yoga to stabilize realizations experienced through psychedelics. The 1960s and 1970s counterculture embrace of Buddhism and Hinduism was inseparable from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which included a loose configuration of the anti-war movement, Black Power, women’s rights, and the gay liberation movement, all set in opposition to a coalition of conservative movements and the Christian Right. In 1965, the Asian Exclusion Act lifted the series of racist laws passed between 1875–1924 that prevented immigration from Asia. This legal change enabled Hindu and Buddhist teachers from Asia to come to the US, where they found an enthusiastic white American audience. 

Overall, the 1960s and 1970s Counterculture Period was marked by a Romantic affirmative Orientalism that idealized enlightenment, meditation, and Asian gurus. Primed by figures such as Vivekananda, Huxley, Suzuki, and Watts, white Americans embraced a new wave of Buddhist and Hindu gurus who typically taught that enlightenment was the realization of a nondual reality accessible through meditation and yoga as well as devotion to gurus. At the heart of this embrace were American students’ own profound transcendent experiences produced through practices taught by or direct transmissions from these guru teachers: “cosmic consciousness,” the experience of a unitary consciousness pervading all phenomena; kundalini awakening, an activation of energy that was believed to be coiled around the base of the spine in Hindu yogic traditions; kensho, a Zen Buddhist term that denotes a sudden glimpse into the nature of ultimate reality; and the realization of no-self, a Theravada Buddhist term that signaled the conditioned nature of self. Students’ spiritual idealism was often wed to visions of social reform. Many believed that only enlightenment could bring about real cultural transformation or an “enlightened society.” In other words, they believed transcendent experiences would automatically lead to the transformation of the self and the world. In the subsections that follow, I focus on how this Experiential/Idealized current was expressed in American Buddhism, American Hinduism, and Transpersonal Psychology.

American Buddhism: From Beginner’s Mind to Crazy Wisdom 

During this 1960s and 1970s Counterculture Period, white Americans were drawn to Buddhist groups rooted in Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan lineages, which all emphasized meditation practices and attaining enlightenment.[33] Some of these groups were started by charismatic teachers from Asia; others were founded by white Americans returning from training with monastic and lay teachers in Asia. Soto Zen teacher Shunryū Suzuki came to the USA in 1959 and founded the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) and Tassajara, the first Soto Zen training monastery in America. Soto Zen teaches the “gradual awakening,” an approach to awakening requiring steady effort expressed in all activities and not just in formal meditation. In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice (1970), Suzuki describes nondualism and enlightenment as a state of wholeness in which your “mind pervades your whole body.”[34] Zazen meditation, he explains, is a “simple practice,” and, once it was realized, enlightenment was “nothing special.”[35]

Despite Suzuki’s and SFZC’s influence on American Zen, it was Rinzai Zen’s more dramatic approach to awakening that dominated the counterculture. Rinzai Zen teaches “sudden awakening,” an immediate experience of nondual reality linked to a dramatic breakthrough experience and through intense meditative practice. The now-disgraced Japanese Rinzai Zen teacher Eido Shimano (1932–2018) emphasized intensive zazen meditation and koan practices (insight-granting paradoxes) to bring about an experience of kensho, the initial glimpse of awakening. Shimano moved to New York in 1964, and he took over the Zen Studies Society (ZSS) before founding Dai Bosatsu monastery in the Catskills. He was known for his intense teaching style that included yelling and using the meditation stick (keisaku) to strike students. Shimano articulated enlightenment as a nondual state beyond any conventional morality of good and bad. He evoked the “Wild Zen” archetype of the iconoclastic Zen monk who has transcended dualistic norms and uses unconventional methods to wake up his students.[36]

Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–1987) was the founder of the Vajradhatu/Shambhala community and eventually Naropa University; his teachings merged tantric Buddhist Vajrayana doctrine and practice with the human potential movement and counterculture hedonism.[37] As part of his teachings, Trungpa often turned up intoxicated to deliver teachings, openly slept with many of his female students, and alternated wild partying with traditionally disciplined Vajrayana practice. Students idolized him as an enlightened master and saw his controversial behavior as “crazy wisdom”—a term coined by Trungpa himself as a play on the Vajrayana Buddhist lineages of “holy madmen,” those realized yogis who spontaneously express their awakened nondual state through transgressive behavior.[38] Trungpa emphasized guru devotion and warned that students would go to Vajra Hell, a particularly gruesome hell realm in the Buddhist cosmology, if they rejected or even criticized their Vajrayana teachers, especially him. Trungpa focused on the creation of “the enlightened society” based upon a mythic kingdom called Shambhala, asserting that a new society aligned with Shambhala could be established by following his teachings, sometimes called Shambhala teachings and sometimes called “the path of the warrior.”

American Buddhism did not only draw from Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions. On May 19, 1975, the American lay teachers Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Jacqueline Schwartz, who had each trained in Asia with Theravada monastic and lay teachers, themselves part of the modernization of Buddhism in Asia, cofounded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), which aimed to “provide a secluded retreat environment for the practice of meditation in the Theravada Buddhism tradition.”[39] The four co-founders extended and accelerated the process of Buddhist modernism. As Kornfield explained, “We wanted to offer the powerful practices of insight meditation, as many of our teachers did, as simply as possible without the complications of rituals, robes, chanting and the whole religious tradition.”[40] They are key figures, as is the organization they founded, in the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage. 

IMS hosted retreats with the Burmese lineage of the Theravada teacher Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982), which simplifies vipassana meditation practices as acts of anti-colonial resistance.[41] Mahasi established meditations centers in Burma and across Asia before beginning to teach in the West. During intensive retreats, Mahasi taught a vipassana technique called “noting.” It was possible via this noting practice to attain the four stages of awakening—Sotāpanna (Stream-enterer), Sakadāgāmi (Once-returner), Anāgāmi (Non-returner), and Arahant (Fully awakened)—that culminated in awakening, i.e. Nibbana (Nirvana, in Sanskrit), as set out in the Visuddhiamagga, an influential fifth-century Buddhist text. IMS teachers did not emphasize the attainment of Nibbana in the same way as Mahasi, being concerned that these practices would lead to excessive striving by American students. They also departed from Mahasi by creating a team-teaching structure and inviting teachers from different Burmese and Thai Theravada lineages to teach. IMS reproduced Mahasi’s intense vipassana retreats where retreatants would maintain complete silence and do sitting and walking meditation for ten hours each day. 

American Hinduism: Cosmic Consciousness, Shaktipat, and Neo-Tantra 

Scholars of Hinduism in America note that the second wave of Hindu gurus, those who started communities in the 1960s and 1970s, taught modernized forms of Hinduism, which were then even further innovated upon in response to the American cultural context.[42] It is important to note that this period is marked by charismatic Asian guru teachers with international brands. In this period, as Lola Williamson discusses in her study of “Hindu-inspired meditation movements”—namely the Self-Realization Fellowship, Siddha Yoga, and Transcendental Meditation—members of these communities reported having profound transcendent experiences with their gurus.[43] Working within an affirmative Orientalist framework, these teacher gurus presented monistic metaphysics and drew on science to legitimate religious practices. Considered to be enlightened by their followers, they taught a range of transformative practices, including mantra meditation, Hatha yoga, kundalini yoga, chanting, and neo-tantric sexual practices. 

The Transcendental Meditation Movement (TM) was founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918–2008), an Indian guru from the Advaita Vedanta lineage who first came to the U.S. in 1959, eventually attracting a number of famous followers, including The Beatles. Simplifying Advaita Vedanta monism for an American audience, Maharishi claimed that the ultimate nature of self and reality—what he called “Cosmic Consciousness”—could be attained by chanting a simple mantra.[44] TM students describe transcendent experiences practicing this meditation. Mark, for example, shares, “During that process I was able to transcend completely. Immediately my mind became silent, and I had the experience of pure awareness.”[45] While Maharishi initially taught TM meditation as a Hindu religious practice, he later framed it as a universal scientific technique that people from any or no religious background could benefit from engaging. 

Siddha Yoga was founded by Swami Muktananda (1908–1982), who first came to America in the 1970s. Central to Siddha Yoga’s doctrine and practice is the “grace of the guru” and an initiation process or a dramatic initiatory experience in which spiritual energy called shakti, also called kundalini, descends, after being awakened, from the guru to disciples in what is called shaktipat, literally meaning “the descent of energy.” Kashmir Shaivism, a ninth to thirteenth-century monistic tantric tradition of Hinduism, depicts kundalini as a serpent coiled in the subtle body at the bottom of the spine. When activated, kundalini rises up the spine, sequentially activating different chakras, energy wheels or centers associated with various spiritual powers, until kundalini reaches the highest chakra and the practitioner attains moksha or liberation. Traditionally in South Asia, shaktipat is transmitted after many years of training in a close guru-disciple relationship. In events called “intensives,” Muktananda innovatively conferred shaktipat transmission on a mass scale.[46] In shaktipat experiences, shakti-kundalini dramatically manifests in physical movements, visions, sounds, and ecstatic states called kriyas. As Kathie, one of Muktananda’s devotees, describes it, “It was as though a sonic boom had occurred just above my head … a level of my being was open that I never knew existed. It was absolutely incredible. Tremendous love, tremendous ecstasy.”[47] 

Indian guru Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh (1931–1990), later known as Osho, claimed to have experienced cosmic consciousness at age seven and to have reached full enlightenment at age twenty-one. Rajneesh-Osho’s eclectic teachings drew on Asian metaphysics, Western Esotericism, and Western Depth Psychology. He celebrated sex and wealth as a legitimate part of spirituality, which aligns with many traditions of tantra in Asia. Hugh Urban identifies Osho as a major proponent of “neo-Tantra” and a key figure transmitting Tantra to the West.[48] Osho taught “dynamic” meditative techniques that included screaming, crying, and dancing, and he encouraged group sex and promiscuity as methods to liberate students from the restrictive conditioning of repressive modern society.[49] 

Esalen, The Human Potential Movement, and Transpersonal Psychology

During the 1960s and 1970s Counterculture Period, many Americans joined Buddhist and Hindu groups; others started their own communities that drew heavily from Buddhist and Hindu thought and practice. At the forefront of this trend is the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962. 

After a mystical experience in a comparative religion class at Stanford University, Murphy spent time at the Aurobindo Ashram in India. Aurobindo (1872–1950) was an Indian guru who taught Integral Yoga, his innovative spiritual path that combined Hindu monism with evolutionary theory. Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator was “the Mother,” or Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), a French-born teacher and artist of Sephardic Jewish and Egyptian ancestry. She took over running Aurobindo’s ashram, and she established Auroville, a spiritual community near the ashram.[50] Michael Murphy, influenced by Aurobindo’s evolutionary spirituality, posited there was a spiritual force that had evolved inanimate matter into consciousness and that would ultimately sacralize human nature. He envisioned Esalen as an Aurobindo-inspired intellectual-spiritual ashram in California where the best of the East and the best of the West could meet.[51] Esalen offered and continues to offer psychological and spiritual workshops that include yoga, holotropic breathwork, encounter groups, psychodrama, Gestalt therapy, holistic health, and ecstatic dance. The author Alan Watts was a resident scholar at Esalen.[52] 

Esalen is home to the Human Potential Movement that blended humanistic psychology with Asian mystical cosmologies and practices in order to map out the full potential of human development. In its early days, Esalen hosted workshops by humanistic psychologists Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, both influenced by Buddhist and Hindu ideas.[53] Maslow posited that the highest stage of human development was “self-actualization” and that “self-actualizers” have access to “peak experiences” including unitive consciousness experiences as described in Asian mysticism.[54] In 1967, Sutich launched the field of Transpersonal Psychology, which aimed to broaden the scope of traditional psychology by exploring states beyond the ego and integrating Eastern mysticism with Western Psychology. Inspired by Huxley and Watts, Sutich described Transpersonal Psychology as the cultivation of higher states of consciousness like self-transcendence, mystical experiences, and unitive consciousness.[55] Transpersonal Psychology and its offshoots borrowed heavily from the detailed cartographies of consciousness and arrays of meditative practices in Buddhism and Hinduism. 

Enlightenment Blues: The Shattering of Spiritual Idealism 

Starting in the 1980s, American idealism around spiritual enlightenment and enlightened teachers was shaken by allegations of sexual misconduct and power abuse across Buddhist, Hindu, and Asian-inspired communities, leading to a profound unease and discontent, the so-called “Enlightenment Blues.”[56] Three significant crises occurred in 1983. Richard Baker, the sole dharma heir of D.T. Suzuki was forced to resign as Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center as a result of his multiple affairs with female students and accusations of inappropriate financial excesses.[57] Taizan Maezumi (1935–1995), who founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles, entered treatment for alcoholism and apologized for multiple affairs with female students.[58] Muktananda faced multiple allegations of having sex with his students, many of whom were teenagers.[59] In 1988, it was revealed that Osel Tendzin, the American successor of Chogyam Trungpa, had been having unprotected sex with male students despite knowing at the time that he was HIV positive. Tendzin later died from an AIDS-related illness, as did one of his students.[60] In 1994, the Hindu yoga guru Amrit Desai, founder of the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, acknowledged that he “had inappropriate sexual contact with three women disciples” and then resigned from his position as spiritual director.[61]

Later, American students of the Buddhist, Hindu, and Asian-inspired teachers who were implicated in abuses published reflections that wrestled with the fact that these teachers had been able to transmit powerful mystical experiences but still acted in deeply unethical ways.[62] Many of these students revealed that they had profound enlightenment experiences—dropping the egoic self and experiencing pure consciousness—but yet they still struggled with persisting unresolved emotional experiences. Across these students’ reflections emerged the view that it was possible for a teacher to be spiritually realized and, at the same time, be ethically flawed or psychologically unconscious of their own toxic behavior. In other words, transcendent experiences like nondual awareness or shaktipat transmission did not automatically lead to individual transformation or the ethical perfection of an experiencer’s personality.

The Insight Buddhism teacher Jack Kornfield took a leading role in the response to sexual misconduct in American Buddhist communities by co-developing a Teacher Code of Ethics for IMS and for Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.[63] This code expanded the third precept against sexual misconduct to condemn teachers “using their teaching role to exploit their authority and position in order to assume a sexual relationship with their student.”[64] According to the Teacher Code of Ethics, if romantic feelings arose between a teacher and student, they must end their teaching relationship and wait three months before acting on their feelings.[65] In his pointedly titled book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (2001), Kornfield shares his own challenges integrating meditative attainments with his householder life: 

Although I arrived back from the monastery clear, spacious, and high, in short order I discovered through my relationship, in the communal household where I lived, and in my graduate work, that my meditation had helped me very little with my human relationships. I was still emotionally immature, acting out the same painful patterns of blame and fear, acceptance and rejection that I had before my Buddhist training.[66] 

Kornfield concludes that whatever meditative heights one reaches, there is always a return to the personal self.                             

Many agreed with Kornfield that a state of perfect enduring enlightenment in which the human ego was completely transcended was not possible and suggested that self-transcendence and self-development were two distinct processes. Asian enlightenment traditions needed to be placed in dialogue with Western Psychology. Psychologist and Insight practitioner Jack Engler claimed that Americans needed to develop a healthy ego before embarking on intensive Buddhist meditation to deconstruct the self.[67] Transpersonal psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist John Welwood coined the influential term “the spiritual bypass” to identify the ways in which spiritual practices not only failed to resolve psychodynamic issues but could be used to circumvent them.[68] Rob Preece, a Jungian analyst and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, stresses the importance of bringing Jungian concepts of the shadow and individuation into dialogue with Buddhism. The shadow is a Jungian term referring to the part of the personality that is composed of repressed, socially unacceptable, or shameful tendencies that are unconscious and often projected onto other people in harmful ways. Individuation is the name for the process of becoming conscious of, differentiating, and then re-integrating unconscious parts of the psyche into a balanced whole.[69] 

Taken together, the powerful personal experiences of the first generations of American students and the guru abuses rampant during this time led to the development of new approaches within Buddhist, Hindu, and Asian-inspired spiritualities that emphasized integration and embodiment rather than bliss and transcendence.[70] Teachers such as Kornfield, Engler, and Welwood emphasized the need to integrate Asian mystical practices with Western psychology. They used the term integrate as a way to signify the urgent need for western practitioners to bridge radically different experiences of subjectivity: emotional self-development and mystical self-transcendence. This is the most common use of the term integrate in the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage, and it is distinct from the Jungian model of integration typically referred to as individuation, although some teachers such as Preece turn to Jungian models in order to articulate the importance of self-development as well as self-transcendence. This use of the term integration is also distinct from the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo, a specific approach to spirituality that influenced the founders of Esalen, and which is a major influence on Ken Wilber’s integral spirituality, which I discuss below. 

Spiritual approaches emerging in the wake of the so-called “Enlightenment Blues” de-centered the prior focus on dramatic transcendent and ecstatic experiences, and, rather, they emphasized the importance of integrating meditative experiences with the personal self in the context of daily life in the world. These approaches typically draw on psychodynamic discourse in order to address the shadow and the spiritual bypass. All these approaches stress the need to integrate the ontological ground of the human and the individual human self—that ontological ground being the nondual absolute—but some approaches place more focus on the human whole while others emphasize the ontological ground. These approaches all stress that they are attempting to develop a more embodied rather than transcendent approach to enlightenment. 

On one side of these innovations are approaches to awakening that place the human person at their center. In my research on the American Insight movement, I delineate between two strands: East Coast Vipassana, associated with IMS in Massachusetts, and West Coast Vipassana, associated with Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.[71] At the heart of West Coast Vipassana is Kornfield’s notion of an “embodied enlightenment” that integrates profound awakening experiences with the insights of psychotherapy and, simultaneously, addresses the challenges of everyday life. Alongside teaching foundational Buddhist meditative practices, Spirit Rock incorporates psychological training into their teacher training programs and has developed specialized relational and family-oriented programing.[72] Another distinctive characteristic of West Coast Vipassana is that it takes a gentler approach to meditation practice than the more rigorous intense retreat style of Mahasi Sayadaw. Kornfield genders the Sayadaw’s practice model as masculine, describing it with terms and phrases like “a battle mode of practice.”[73] West Coast Vipassana, Kornfield advances, is part of a wider Western femininization of Asian Buddhism that represents “a more profound movement to develop the dharma as a practice of relationship with the body, the community, the earth, and to stress interdependence and healing rather than conquering and abandoning.” [74]

On the other side of these innovations are Asian-inspired teachers and groups that stress integrating the personal self and propose an impersonal ontology without a personal deity, but who emphasize the ontological ground of the human. One example is Judith Blackstone, a teacher who incorporates psychological knowledge and nondual metaphysics.[75] Trained as a clinical psychotherapist, Blackstone was a student of the Hindu guru Sai Baba and also practiced Tibetan and Zen Buddhism for over forty years. Blackstone draws on nonduality teachings from the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen, Kashmir Shaivism, and Advaita Vedanta traditions, but she presents her own teachings, which she names the Realization Process, as based in her own experiences.[76] Blackstone describes the Realization Process as “a series of practices for uncovering in ourselves a very subtle unbroken undivided dimension of consciousness … a dimension of oneness of wholeness and of nonduality.”[77] Her distinct approach is based on discriminating between a cognitive realization of nonduality, where there is a conceptual recognition of nondual states occurring primarily in the realm of perception, and an embodied realization of nonduality, where the body is fully experienced as nondual luminosity.[78] Blackstone teaches that psychological fixations obscuring nonduality are not just conceptual, as they are generally mapped out in Asian nondual models, but include unconscious psychosomatic “holding patterns” in the body that arise in response to painful relational experiences and childhood traumas. Blackstone believes that traditional Asian nondual systems do not fully address these particular obstacles because these traditions did not have modern knowledge and perspectives about psychological development and trauma. Blackstone’s Realization Process integrates spiritual realization with psychological and relational healing as well as embodiment. 

The transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber—in a model he calls the “psychology perennis” or “the spectrum of consciousness,” which he first presented in 1975—was one of the first Americans to integrate Asian mysticism and Western Psychology.[79] Wilber developed a comprehensive integral model that integrates Asian religious maps of awakening with Western psychological models about the developmental individual and cultural structures aligned with a wider evolutionary framework.[80] Drawing on models such as Spiral Dynamics, a developmental map of societal values and human cultural consciousness based on psychologist Clare Graves’s research on adult development, Wilber’s integral approach distinguishes between “Stages” and “States” of consciousness. Wilber’s Stages of Consciousness refer to how western developmental structural theory has mapped out cultural developmental stages of consciousness that sequentially emerge along an evolutionary path from the most primitive “mythic ethnocentric” to the most advanced “kosmocentric.” States of Consciousness refers to ways that premodern contemplative traditions like Buddhism produced detailed cartographies of consciousness, ranging from the conventional “waking-gross” state to liberative nondual awareness. States of Consciousness, Wilber contends, are always interpreted through the cultural stage of development in which they are experienced, and the general aim of his integral approach is to align higher States of Consciousness with higher Stages of Consciousness.[81] Wilber’s system provides meditative practices to access these different aspects of consciousness.

Wilber distinguishes between “waking up,” i.e., spiritual or mystical awakening, and “growing up,” i.e., psychological maturity, and he emphasizes the importance of doing shadow work as part of integral development.[82] Wilber is critical of many approaches to integrative or psychologized spirituality, seeing them flattening the “natural hierarchy” of the individual and cultural development as expressed in his integral model. He coined the term “Boomeritis Buddhism” to critique spiritual approaches that reduce awakening to egalitarian and pluralistic development stages.[83] Some teachers from Buddhist and Hindu communities adopted Wilber’s model and offer forms of integral Buddhism, integral yoga, and evolutionary spirituality.[84] Wilber’s approach, while firmly in the Psychological/Integrative current, has also been influential in what I call the Technological current, but he is in tension with the Decolonial current because he places social justice, Indigenous, and Earth-based spirituality-oriented currents on lower levels of his hierarchal ladder of cultural evolution. I will say more about these other currents below.            

New Currents: The Technological and Decolonial Currents

A number of sociocultural, generational, and demographic shifts occurred after the boomer generation encountered Asian enlightenment lineages in therapeutic and in the countercultural contexts of the 1960s and 1970s. One major shift comes from the impact of the digital age and the influences of new technologies, especially the rising preeminence of podcasts. Another shift is the mainstreaming of meditation and yoga practices through the legitimating frameworks of science and the facilitations of late capitalism.[85] Demographic shifts as well as technological ones also have a significant impact. The white middle-class boomer audience has become much more diverse. Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC),  Gen X, and millennial practitioners bring new influences and perspectives to encounters with modern Hinduism and Buddhism.[86] Two new currents in the development of spiritual approaches and subcultures are the Technological current and a Decolonial current. These currents are continuations of streams also present in the earlier modernization of Buddhism and Hinduism: The Technological current arises through scientific dialogues and the Decolonial current is a continuation of prior social reform concerns.[87] With advances in technology and social media and the emergence of new generations, however, these currents take distinct forms from the previous currents in the American Spiritual Enlightenment Lineage. While distinct thematically and in demography, both currents simultaneously counter and continue Psychologized/Integrative approaches that arose from the Enlightenment Blues.                

Hindu-inspired communities and nondual subcultures have widely participated in dialogues around science, technology, and spirituality. In large part due to the Buddhist modernist framing of the Buddha as an early empiricist and depictions of Buddhism as a scientific religion, Buddhism has been at the center of the Technological current.[88] There are a number of dimensions to the Buddhism-science-technological dialogue, including, importantly, the secularization of mindfulness practices through which leading advocates like Jon Kabat-Zinn claim that the transformative power of mindfulness can be harnessed on a large scale across medicine, education, and business.[89] By considering Gen X teacher Daniel Ingram and the millennial teachers Vince Fakhoury Horn and Daniel Thorson, I focus on the ways Buddhist meditation practices and models of awakening are adopted today in tech-driven communities—a broad signifier referring to a network of tech developers, entrepreneurs, organizational consultants, scientists, systems thinkers, engineers, and coaches. 

Daniel Ingram talks about having three selves. “Daniel One” refers to the many spontaneous transcendent experiences he had as a child and teenager and during what he calls his period as a “meditative athlete.” “Daniel Two,” rather, refers to his training in science and work as an emergency medical doctor. And “Daniel Three” combines the selves of Daniel One and Daniel Two in order to explore spiritual practices and experiences in a clinical context.[90] As Daniel Two, Ingram, along with Kenneth Folk, developed an online meditation subculture called Pragmatic Dharma, also called Hardcore Dharma. Folk introduced Ingram to Bill Hamilton, a contemporary of Kornfield and Goldstein who critiques the Insight Movement for becoming over psychologized, abandoning the soteriological goal of enlightenment, and, thereby, abandoning the approach of Mahasi Sayadaw, a teacher who talked openly about the possibility of attaining the four stages of enlightenment. Following Hamilton, Pragmatic Dharma explicitly rejects psychologized Buddhism, affirms enlightenment as an obtainable goal, and offers a transparent goal-orientated approach to the Theravada Buddhist stages of enlightenment.[91] In his 2008 book Mastering the CoreTeachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Approach to Dharma, Ingram details his own meditation experiences and also claims to have reached arhatship, the fourth stage of enlightenment as detailed in the Path of Purification.[92]                                          

In 2008, Ingram and Horn started the Dharma Overground (DhO) website as a platform for meditators to share meditative practices, attainments, and challenges.[93] While the dominant strand on DhO is Theravada Buddhism, Ingram also names Advaita Vedanta, Zen, Vajrayana, Ceremonial Magick, and New Age as influences, and, alongside Theravada knowledge and insight practice, he offers detailed experiential accounts of “energy stuff,” “psychic/magic phenomena,” “chakra openings,” and lucid dreams.[94] Pragmatic Dharma presents itself as an alternative to psychologized dharma, but Ingram rejects “perfectionist models” of awakening and agrees with DhO that awakening does not transform the psychological shadow, the unconscious disavowed parts of the personality that can be expressed in harmful ways.[95] Ingram’s claims to have realized arhatship make him a controversial figure for Theravadin and Insight Meditation practitioners.[96] In spite of this, Ingram is influential in the science and Buddhism network, especially through his leadership in The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC), an international collective founded in 2020 to engage in “[p]ioneering research and advocacy for the responsible integration of meditation, psychedelics, and emergent practices among clinicians, academia and practitioners worldwide.”[97]

The Buddhist teacher Vince Fakhoury Horn and Emily Horn, his co-teacher and wife, have brought Buddhism into the tech world through Buddhist Geeks, which started in 2007 as a podcast and expanded into an online Buddhist media company offering conferences and including practice communities.[98] One of the initial questions that drove Buddhist Geeks was “How can we serve the convergence of the time-tested practices and models of Buddhism with rapidly evolving technology and a global culture?” Buddhist Geek conferences in 2011, 2012, and 2013 brought together key figures involved in recent dialogues about Buddhism, science, and technology. In addition to promoting technologies that enhance meditation, such as apps like Buddhify, Horn has formed innovative, tech-inspired interactive forms of meditation practices, such as “Multiplayer Meditation.” Buddhist Geeks takes an “unbundling” approach to Buddhism, breaking down what it sees as Buddhism’s core components, rebundling them into new configurations and offering a modular practice of concentration, awareness, heartfulness, inquiry, awareness, and embodiment.[99] Demonstrating the pluralism that characterizes most of the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage, Vince and Emily Horn recognize “many Dharmas,” naming six of their main influences to be “Mindful Dharma, Pragmatic Dharma, Psychedelic Dharma, EcoDharma, & Integral Dharma.”[100]

Increasingly popular in Buddhist and Buddhist-derived circles, a main practice in the Buddhist Geeks network is jhāna, meaning “concentration meditation.”[101] In addition to podcasts on jhāna practices and jhāna meditative states, the Buddhist Geeks team facilitate the Jhāna Community that provides high-quality teachings to small groups of committed practitioners.[102] Vince Horn explains that they started the community to teach jhāna practices in a non-dogmatic but ethical and safe way as a specific alternative, for example, to the mass scaling of jhāna practice by the meditation startup company Jhourney.[103] Launched in 2022, Jhourney claims that through “results-oriented teaching methods” jhāna states traditionally requiring “thousands of hours of practice” to reach can be experienced in “under 40 hours.”[104] Jhourney’s promise of “[b]liss on demand” is affirmed by testimonials provided by people identifying as Google software engineers, AI playmakers, and tech entrepreneurs. Horn suggests that the lack of trained teachers and proper guidance at Jhourney is dangerous. He also charges Jhourney’s co-founders with cultural appropriation due to their lack of lineage connection with recognized jhāna teachers and their commodification of jhāna practice.[105] Horn’s points echo serious concerns raised about the secular mindfulness movement.[106] Neuroscientist and clinician Willoughby Britton has been at the forefront of responding to one of these concerns: psychological and physical harms caused by contemplative practice. In response to these concerns, in 2008 Britton founded Cheetah House, an organization that seeks to “provide evidence-based information and support to individuals who have experienced negative effects from meditation.”[107]

Another important figure in tech meditation culture and the Technological current is former Buddhist Geeks facilitator Daniel Thorson, whose podcast Emerge: Making Senseof What’s Next has become a platform for what is often referred to as the Liminal Web, a digital network of thinkers, podcasts, and organizations that propose the development of new cultural values and organizational forms to meet the so-called meta-crisis of late-capitalism and postmodernity.[108] Liminal Web participants talk about “sensemaking,” meaning the creation of new meanings by drawing on multidisciplinary perspectives, and they identify as metamodernists. In terms of demography and values, the Liminal Web subculture overlaps significantly with the integral movement, having a majority white demographic that is critical of social justice.[109] Many participants stress the need to ground culture change in spiritual practices like meditation and mindfulness, relational work such as circling practice, post-Jungian soulmaking, shadow work, trauma therapy, and psychedelic medicine.[110] Many teachers and practitioners draw heavily on Buddhism, such as John Vervaeke, a university professor who explores dialogues between cognitive science and Buddhism.[111] Daniel Thorson trained at the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE), started by Soryu Forall, who trained in Rinzai Zen in Japan and he also works with Shinzen Young, another key teacher in the dialogue between science and Buddhism. The mission of MAPLE is “to create a cultural renaissance of wisdom institutions.”[112] MAPLE offers “modern monastic training to develop a collective that can resolve the crises of the digital age.”[113] A current focus of MAPLE is responding to the challenge of AI. Its website states, “The most important task for our age is to design a trustworthy religion that teaches wisdom and compassion for the age of AI.” 

As noted in the introduction, Spring Washam and Lama Rod Owens’ Spirit Underground expresses a distinct current in the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage. Participants in the Decolonial current extend John Welwood’s notion of the spiritual—namely, how spiritual practice can be used to avoid developmental issues—to include what they call the socio-cultural bypass; they explore the ways that spiritual practice can be used to ignore oppressive social and political conditions.[114] Decolonial current teachers understand the self to be composed of social, cultural and historic forces as well as psychological ones, all of which must be acknowledged and worked through during spiritual practice. This Decolonial current replaces the goal of individual enlightenment with collective liberation. Practitioners have recovered practices from Hinduism and Buddhism that have been neglected in the modernization process, such as honoring ancestors and ritual, and have turned to Asian and non-Asian Indigenous practices like shamanic healing and plant medicine. Just as the Technological current extends and amplifies a Scientific current that marks the modernization of Asian religion, so too the Decolonial current extends and amplifies a Social Justice current in Modernity; due to limitations of space, the Scientific and Social Justice currents are not included in this entry.

Shifts proposed by the Decolonial current are driven by BIPOC practitioners: South Asian Americans lead the decolonize yoga movement, and Black American Buddhists craft new forms of practice, community, and understandings of liberation.[115] These teachers and communities additionally draw from a range of Indigenous practices and worldviews, decolonial critiques, abolitionist work, intersectional feminism, and healing justice. I will explore this current through considering its expression by teachers and communities in the American Buddhist, yoga, and nondual meditation worlds.

Insight teacher Spring Washam is at the forefront of bringing psychedelic plant medicine into American Buddhism.[116] She turned to plant medicine after reaching, due to trauma, an impasse with meditation. After a profound transformative experience with ayahuasca, a potent psychedelic brew traditional to the Amazon basin of South America, Washam lived and trained with a shaman from the Shipibo people in Peru; she now runs plant medicine retreats interwoven with the Buddhist teachings and practices that she teaches at her center, Lotus Vine Journeys.[117] Washam considers plant medicine to be particularly powerful for healing trauma, and she contrasts her deeply relational approach to the earlier predominantly white psychedelic movement of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, which was neither relational nor collective in its orientations.[118] 

Soto Zen Buddhist teacher Zenju Earthly Manuel integrates social justice and spiritual awakening through teaching what she calls Embodied Awakening.[119] Drawing on the Buddhist doctrine of “two truths,” Manuel suggests that it is only through the relative realm of the body—a physical and social entity marked by differences like race and gender—that the absolute can be experienced: “Our identities cannot be ignored for the sake of spiritual transcendence. We are not capable of being “unembodied” selves.”[120] She troubles disembodied forms of awakening that bypass relative particularities such as racial identity, and she teaches, rather, the inseparability of the absolute and relative in a way that honors embodied difference. Manuel calls on Buddhists to recognize the collective dimensions of teachings such as dukkha (suffering) and nibbana (liberation) in order to counter the distinct individualism rampant in white Buddhism.[121]

Manuel draws on her own experiences in Indigenous African, Caribbean, and Native American shamanic practices to offer what she calls a “Zen of the earth.”[122] In a deeply personal account, she shares that she has been guided by the ancestors and describes the many Zen visions and transmissions that have deepened her relationship with spirit worlds.[123] She writes that “There is an invisible experience rarely talked about in Zen communities. I experienced Zen practice as a shamanistic journey of the spirit, and I have found this to be true for so many other practitioners.[124] As part of her innovative Zen practice, Manuel offers detailed reflections about ancestor offerings, sacred ritual, ceremony, and communing with unseen spirits. While recognizing that Zen is not commonly understood as a shamanic practice, Manuel sees her approach to be recovering Indigenous forms of Asian Buddhism ignored through or not recognized by the modernist framing of Buddhism as a scientific religion, making explicit that these are recoveries rather than novel Buddhist innovations.[125] She draws on Buddhist Studies scholarship to discuss the ways magic and divination have always been part of Asian Buddhism, and she quotes from sutta scriptures that portray the Buddha as a seer who has paranormal powers.[126] As well as presenting an image of the Buddha as shaman, Manuel posits a type of perennial Indigeneity behind all religions. In her words, “there are underlying esoteric, mystical, or shamanic histories to all spiritualities and religions.”[127] In Manuel’s articulations, connecting with “the bones of Zen” restores one’s connection to the earth and enables experiences of “the oneness of embodiment and boundlessness.”[128]     

The Decolonial current’s concerns for social justice continue to shape Modern Yoga and its communities today. Susanna Barkataki, a Los Angeles-based yoga teacher, plays a leading role in the Decolonize Yoga movement.[129] In 2019, Barkataki created the Honor (Don’t Appropriate) Yoga Summit, and she published a book titled Embrace Yoga’s Roots the following year.[130] She critiques whiteness and neo-colonialism in mainstream yoga, pointing out that mainstream platforms, such as YogaJournal, erase BIPOC yogis by presenting white women as the face of yoga.[131] Barkataki’s own approach for yoga teaching and practice is centered around four principles that interweave social justice commitments with Hindu yogic principles: “Separation—Discover how cultural appropriation, trauma and racism drove yoga traditions underground, Reflection—Understand how power, culture, equity, and diversity influence modern yoga, teaching, branding and product development, Reconnection—Get tools and resources to bring an authentic 8-limbed yoga deeper into your life, home, studio, work and organization, Liberation—Integrate a more ethical and honorable practice in your life supporting continual personal growth by following the ancient teachings.”[132] These principles translate into a trauma-informed yoga that includes Hatha Yoga postures (asanas) but also Buddhist meditation practices.[133] Barkataki’s teachings selectively draw on popular classic Hindu texts, social justice discourse, and also include Indigenous land and Hindu yoga lineage acknowledgements. Barkataki presents yoga as an expression of premodern Vedic “ancient wisdom” but also as part of the Healing Justice movement, which was formally launched in 2006 by the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, a Black Southern queer working-class activist network.[134]

While Barkataki is a leading voice in the social justice Decolonizing Yoga movement, she has been accused of being colonialist herself for not centering South Asian Hindu yoga lineage holders at the 2019 conference, and she has been criticized for participating in Hinduphobia.[135] Barkataki responded to these accusations and critiques by affirming her commitment to social justice over any commitment tradition. In her words, “Yes, we need to honor the roots of the practice, but that doesn’t mean that yoga needs to be so tied to tradition that it can’t be used to uplift those with non-Hindu identities. We must critique tradition where it furthers oppression.”[136] This exchange points to an important difference between the social justice-derived Decolonial current within Modern Yoga and Postcolonial and Hindu Nationalist movements and perspective such as those represented in the Take Back Yoga campaign launched by the American Hindu Foundation in 2008.[137] Hindu nationalists attempt to return control of yoga to what is sees as its original Vedic Brahminical context, whereas the social justice-derived Decolonial current critiques colonialism, whiteness, and traditional Hindu Brahmanical patriarchy as supremacist systems.[138]

The Decolonial current is well represented in the de-institutionalized nondual community made up of those who teach and practice nonduality outside of Buddhist and Hindu lineages through the SAND organization—SAND being a shortened form of the words science and nonduality. The teachings offered by SAND include “From Surviving to Thriving: Decolonial Healing and Liberation” and “ALTAER: Ancestral Bone Mapping & Healing,” and the organization is a major influence for bringing trauma work into the nondual community and its network. In 2009, Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo started SAND as an annual conference in California that aimed to explore relationships between science and nonduality. SAND now hosts year-round virtual events in order to make the dialogue accessible for a wider international audience. SAND’s mission statement has a broad definition of the religious and philosophical concept of nonduality. Alongside emphasizing Asian nondual lineages including “Hindu Advaita-Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Buddhist Shentong, Madhyamaka or Zen, and Taoism,” the organization asserts that “Many indigenous and shamanistic teachings are also nondual in essence.”[139]

Thomas Hübl, a frequent SAND participant, is an Austrian teacher who describes himself as a “contemporary mystic.” Before deciding to leave medical school and devote himself fully to meditation, Hübl describes being influenced by Advaita Vedanta mystic Ramana Maharshi, the integral yogi Sri Aurobindo, and transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber. A profound encounter with an unnamed spiritual teacher led to Hübl to develop the Collective Trauma Integration Process for “working with individual, ancestral, and collective trauma.”[140] As he said at one SAND event, “Trauma work is absolutely necessary for our spiritual path.” [141] Hübl’s work on ancestral and intergenerational trauma places him in the Decolonial current, but his background influences illustrate the crossovers with Psychological/Integrative and Technological currents. 

The currents in the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage display thematic confluences that include (1) recognition that meditative practices and experiences do not heal psychological wounds so other forms of therapy are necessary; (2) the necessity of including trauma work as part of spiritual practice from trauma-informed meditation to working directly with intergenerational and collective trauma;[142] (3) a positive revival of psychedelics and plant medicine so that these substances are used alongside and in conjunctions with Buddhist and Hindu meditative practices;[143] (4) embracing spiritual entrepreneurship, branding, and active digital presence; and, finally, (5) linking transformative and transcendent practices and experiences with wider social, cultural, and political reform, even revolution.

This entry offers a brief historic and thematic overview of what I call the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage, which begins in Asia during British Colonial conditions and stretches into contemporary attempts to draw on meditative, therapeutic, and Indigenous practices for healing the trauma of colonialism, as articulated in the currents above. A wide shift occurring across the American Spiritual Enlightenment lineage is the result of teachers and practitioners changing their focus from the cultivation of transcendent experiences to cultivating transformative embodiment. Earlier popularizers of Asian religions in America—Vivekananda, Suzuki, Huxley, and Watts, for instance—elevated transcendent mystical experiences, where the goal is disidentification from the personal ego self, in order to realize a pure awareness as the true Self. Later teachers—for instance, Kornfield, Washam, Horn, and Barkataki—emphasize that the importance of embodiment where the different layers of the personal self—the psychological, the social, collective, and ancestral—are factors in the process of spiritual transformation.[144] 

This dramatic shift from focusing on transcendence to embodiment resonates with Jeffrey J. Kripal’s tantric transmission thesis that the American appropriation of Asian religions has moved from a strong preference for world-renouncing traditions like Advaita Vedanta to preferring world-embracing traditions like Tantra.[145] At the same time, embodiment in this context does not completely replace transcendent experience; the two are in a dynamic and contextually shifting relationship. There is increasing awareness that a both-and approach is needed: A turn to the body and the Earth when too much transcendence leads to dissociation and an opening to the multiple dimensions of self and cosmos when identification with the personal and social self becomes too restrictive.

[1] Ram Dass, Be Here Now (Lama Foundation, 1971; Hanuman Foundation, 1978). This edition does not contain page numbers. For a reflection on the impact of Be Here Now, see Doug Toft, “‘Be Here Now’—A Look Back,” Integral Yoga Magazine, https://integralyogamagazine.org/be-here-now-a-look-back/
[2] Dass, Be Here Now.
[3] The version of Be Here Now from 1971, the version utilized in this entry, has no page numbers.
[4] Be Here Now Network: A Network of Mindfulness and Spirituality Podcasts, https://beherenownetwork.com/.
[5] “Heart Wisdom with Jack Kornfield—Ep. 294—The Secret of Love and Attachment: Wise Relationships, Vulnerability, and the Joy of Nirvana,” Be Here Now Network, 33 min. and 25 sec., https://beherenownetwork.com/heart-wisdom-with-jack-kornfield-ep-294-the-secret-of-love-and-attachment-wise-relationships-vulnerability-and-the-joy-of-nirvana/.
[6] “David Nichtern—CMS Podcast—Ep. 40—Entrepreneurship, Technology & Spiritual Practice w/Justin Evans,” Be Here Now Network, 1 hr., 5 min., and 46 sec., https://beherenownetwork.com/david-nichtern-csm-podcast-ep-40-entrepreneurship-technology-spiritual-practice-w-justin-evans/.
[7] “The Spirit Underground with Spring Washam and Lama Rod Owens—Ep. 1—Modern Abolition & The Spiritual Path,” Be Here Now Network, 1 hr., 2 min., and 20 sec., https://beherenownetwork.com/the-spirit-underground-with-spring-washam-and-lama-rod-owens-ep-1-modern-abolition-the-spiritual-path/.
[8] Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Penguin Books, 1985). For an extension to Hinduism and Buddhism of Said’s Islam-focused analysis of Orientalism, see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East (Routledge, 1999).
[9] See David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008). Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Elizabeth de Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism (Continuum, 2004). Mark Singelton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010). Richard S. Weiss, The Emergence of Modern Hinduism: Religions on the Margins of Colonialism (University of California Press, 2019).
[10] J.J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (Routledge, 1997), 16–34.
[11] For an example of affirmative Orientalism in Buddhism, see Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[12] For a Western esoteric version of the perennialist philosophy, see Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (The Aryan Theosophical Press, 1925 [1888]). Also known as Madam Blavatsky, she co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott. Both were important figures in the modernization of Hinduism and Buddhist. See Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Indiana University Press, 1996).
[13] Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880 (Columbia University Press, 1984).
[14] Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and also Jane Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism; Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010).
[15] Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (Oxford University Press, 1993).
[16] Carl Jackson, Oriental Religions and American Thought (Greenwood Press, 1981), 57–8.
[17] Richard Hughes Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions (Indiana University Press, 1995).
[18] For a discussion of what has been called the “First Wave” of Hindu Gurus in America such as Vivekananda, see Thomas Forsthoefel and Cynthia Ann Hughes, eds., Gurus in America (State University of New York Press, 2005) and Anya P. Foxen, Biography of a Yogi (Oxford University Press, 2017).
[19] Jeffrey D. Long, Hinduism in America: A Convergence of Worlds (Bloomsbury Press, 2020).
[20] Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (Harper & Brothers, 1954).
[21] Long, Hinduism in America, 124.
[22] Besheer Mohamed, Chip Rotolo, Nick Zanetti, and Bill Webster, “In Their Own Words: Cultural Connections to Religion Among Asian Americans,” Pew Research Center, October 11, 2023.
[23] For details of the “two Buddhisms” and related typologies, see Ann Gleig, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019), 34–47.
[24] See, for example, Funie Hsu, “We’ve Been Here All Along,” Buddhadharma (Winter 2016): 24–31.
[25] Scott A. Mitchell, The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2023).
[26] Taitetsu Unno, “The Working of Boundless Compassion,” Insight Journal, Fall 2004. Also available via Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website: https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/the-working-of-boundless-compassion/.
[27] Long, Hinduism in America, 171–78.
[28] For a discussion of Asian American heritage and non-heritage Buddhists, see Chenxing Han, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic Books, 2021).
[29] For other accounts of branches within this lineage, see Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and The Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago, 2007); Philip Goldberg, American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (Three Rivers Press, 2010); and Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Traditions (Yale University Press, 2007), 330–93.
[30] D. T. Suzuki, Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Eastern Buddhist Society, 1934).
[31] Carol Tonkinson, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (The Berkely Publishing Group, 1995). “Beat Buddhism,” segment in “ Enlightened America?,” New American History podcast, 1 hr., 2 min., and 49 sec., https://backstory.newamericanhistory.org/episodes/enlightened-america/
[32] Douglas Osto, Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America (Columbia University Press, 2016).
[33] As numerous scholars have noted, meditation only became a common practice in Buddhism as a result of colonialism and modernity. See, for example, Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight.
[34] Shunryū Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice (Weatherhill, 1970), 41.
[35] Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, 47.
[36] In 2010, Shimano was finally forced to resign as Abbot of Zen Studies Societies after decades of allegations of sexual abuse from multiple female students. See Mark Oppenheimer, “The Zen Predator of the Lower East Side,” The Atlantic, December 18, 2014.
[37] For an excellent biography of Trungpa, see Alex Gardner, “The Eleventh Trungpa, Chogyam Trungpa,” The Treasury of Lives, https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Eleventh-Trungpa-Chogyam-Trungpa/11231.
[38] David DiValerio, The Holy Madmen of Tibet (Oxford University Press, 2015).
[39] For a longer history of IMS, see Wendy Cadge, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America (Oxford University Press, 2004).
[40] Kornfield is quoted in Gil Fronsdal, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the American Insight Community,” in The Faces of Buddhism in America, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka (University of California Press, 1998), 167.
[41] See Braun, The Birth of Insight.
[42] Forsthoefel and Humes, eds. Gurus in America and Long, Hinduism in America, 121–44.
[43] Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion (New York University Press, 2010), 161–85.
[44] Cynthia Ann Humes, “Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: Beyond the TM Technique,” in Gurus in America, ed. Forsthoefel and Humes, 55–79.
[45] Williamson, Transcendent in America, 161.
[46]
[47] “Muktananda: The Guru’s Touch” clip from 1976 documentary The Guru’s Touch, posted Jan. 6, 2013, YouTube, 14 min. and 59 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhkjJi4lXHE.
[48] Hugh B. Urban, “Osho, From Sex Guru to Guru of the Rich,” in Gurus in America, ed. Forsthoefel and Humes, 169–92.
[49] A number of adults have shared that they were sexually abused in the community as children and identify the sexually promiscuous culture as a factor enabling abuse. See, Maroesja Perizonius and Alice McShane, eds., Children of the Cult (Dartmouth Films, 2024), https://www.dartmouthfilms.com/childrenofthecult.
[50] Ann Gleig and Charles Flores, “Remembering Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: The Forgotten Lineage of Integral Yoga,” in Gurus of Modern Yoga, ed. Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (Oxford University Press, 2013), 38–59.
[51] Jeffrey Kripal reads Esalen as a uniquely American mystical tradition suspended between the ontological revelations of Asian mysticism and the democratic, scientific, and pluralistic of modernity. Kripal, Esalen and the Religion of No Religion, 87.
[52] Michael Murphy, “Michael Murphy on Esalen and the mystical expats,” Philosophy for Life, December 4, 2019.
[53] The term “Human Potential Movement” was derived from the term “human potentialities” in Aldous Huxley’s book The Perennial Philosophy, first published in 1945. Huxley was a major influence on Esalen.
[54] Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (Penguin Compass, 1970).
[55] Neville Drury, The Human Potential Movement (Element Books, 1989), 37–9.
[56] Andre van der Braek, Enlightenment Blues: My Years With an American Guru (Monkfish Books, 2003).
[57] Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at the San Francisco Zen Center (Catapult, 2002).
[58] Katy Butler, “Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America,” Common Boundary, May/June 1990.         
[59] William Rodarmor, “The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda,” CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1983): 104–11. See also Lis Harris, “O Guru, Guru, Guru,” The New Yorker, November 14, 1994.
[60] Butler, “Encountering the Shadow.” In 2018, Shambhala faced a further crisis after Buddhist Project Sunshine, a survivor-centered initiative, revealed a pattern of intergenerational abuse in the community. Chogyam’s son and Shambhala’s then spiritual leader Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche was forced to resign after facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse. See Andy Newman, “The ‘King’ of Shambhala is Undone by Abuse Report,” The New York Times, July 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/nyregion/shambhala-sexual-misconduct.html.
[61] Anne Cushman and Lizette Montgomery, “Yogi Desai Resigns from Kripalu,” Yoga Journal, February 1995, 40.
[62] See Stephen Butterfield, The Double Mirror: A Skeptical Journey Into Buddhist Tantra, (North Atlantic Books, 1994); Andre van der Braek, Enlightenment Blues: My Years With An American Guru (Monkfish Books, 2003); Natalie Goldberg, The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth (HarperOne, 2005); and Robert Forman, Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be (Changemakers Books, 2011).
[63] For example, Jack Kornfield, “Sex Lives of the Guru,” Yoga Magazine 63 (July/August 1985): 27.
[64] Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (Bantam Books, 1993), 341.
[65] A copy of the original Code of Ethics can be found in Alan Senauke ed. Safe Harbor: Guidelines, Processes, and Resources for Ethics and Right Conduct in Buddhist Communities (Buddhist Peace Fellowship, 1998).
[66] Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path (Bantam, 2001).
[67] Wes Nisker, “Interview with Jack Engler: You Must Be Someone Before You Can Be Nobody,” Inquiring Mind Volume 5, no. 1 (Summer 1988). Online version available here: https://inquiringmind.com/article/0501_1_engler-interview/.   
[68] John Welwood, Toward A Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and Personal and Spiritual Transformation (Shambhala, 2002).
[69] Rob Preece, The Wisdom of Imperfection: The Challenge of Individuation in Buddhist Life (Snow Lion Publication, 2006). Also, Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path (Park Street Press, 2023, originally published 2003).
[70] Allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct in American Buddhism and American Hinduism/yoga communities have continued. For updated considerations see Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Listening for and to Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Misconduct in Buddhism,” Religion 55 (2025): 783–80; Matthew Remski, Surviving Modern Yoga: Cult Dynamics, Charismatic Leaders, and What Survivors Can Teach Us (North Atlantic Books, 2024).

[71] Ann Gleig, “Wedding the Personal and Impersonal in West Coast Vipassana: A Dialogical Encounter Between Buddhism and Psychology,” Journal of Global Buddhism 13 (2012): 129–46.
[72] For more details on this relational/integrative approach to Buddhist practice, see Gleig, American Dharma, 113–26.
[73] Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are (Shambhala Publications, 2011), 252.
[74] Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma, 197. An example of a domesticated approach in the American Hindu network was developed, in response to Amrit Deasi’s sexual abuse crisis, at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. See Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (Bantam Books, 1999).
[75] Another example is A.H. Almaas’s Diamond Approach. For a discussion of both Almaas and Blackstone in this context, see Ann Gleig, “Embodying Nonduality: Depth Psychology in American Mysticism,” in Depth Psychology and Mysticism, ed. Thomas Cattoi and David Ordoriso (Palgrave and MacMillan, 2018).
[76] “An Innovative Path for Embodied Personal and Relational Healing and Nondual Spiritual Awakening,”
The Realization Process, website, https://realizationprocess.org/.
[77] “Embodying Nondual Awakening with Judith Blackstone,” Buddhist Geeks Podcast, March 11, 2024, 42 min. and 2 sec., https://www.buddhistgeeks.org/p/embodying-nondual-awakening-with-c21.
[78] Judith Blackstone, The Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic Process (State University of New York Press, 2007), 4.
[79] Ken Wilber, “Psychologia Perennis: The Spectrum of Consciousness,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 7, no. 2 (1975): 105–32.
[80] Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion and Spirituality in the Modern and Postmodern World (Shambhala Publications, 2007).
[81] Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 88–98.
[82] Ken Wilber, “Wake Up, Grow Up: Enlightenment in the 21st Century,” Integral Life, January 20, 2017, https://integrallife.com/wake-grow-edge-unknown-human-being/ and Ken Wilber and Corey De Vos, “Integrating Shadow” Integral Life, July 16, 2020, https://integrallife.com/integrating-shadow/.
[83] Wilber, Integral Spirituality.
[84] Examples include the Integral Zen of Diane Hamiton, Integral Yoga by Sally Kempton, and the Evolutionary Spirituality of Andrew Cohen.
[85] See Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014).
[86] For more on generational shifts in American Buddhism, see Gleig, American Dharma, 209–48. For more on racial demographic shifts, see Ann Gleig, “Undoing Whiteness in American Buddhist Modernism,” in Buddhism and Whiteness, ed. George Yancy and Emily McRae (Lexington Books, 2019).
[87] For a history of the dialogue between Buddhism and Science see, for example, Donald S. Lopez, Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (University of Chicago Press, 2008). For more on how science and social reform concerns shaped modern forms of Buddhism and Hinduism see footnote 8.
[88] Science and Nonduality (SAND), website, https://scienceandnonduality.com/.
[89] David McMahan and Erik Braun, eds., Meditation, Buddhism, and Science (Oxford University Press, 2017). Jeff Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Medicine and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Gleig, American Dharma, 50–83.
[90] See the podcast interview of Daniel Ingram: “33: Awakening and the Search for Meaning with Dr. Daniel Ingram,” Mind that Ego podcast, December 14, 2023, 1 hr., 29 min., and 2 sec., https://www.mindthatego.com/awakening-and-meaning-daniel-ingram/.
[91] For a longer discussion of Pragmatic Dharma, see Gleig, American Dharma, 129–35.
[92] Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Approach to Dharma, (Aeon Books, 2008). A free copy of a revised edition published in 2018 by Aeon Books is available on Ingram’s website, Integrated Daniel.
[93] The Dharma Overground, website, https://www.dharmaoverground.org/.
[94] “A Compilation of Daniel’s Posts On Dharma Overground,” Daniel’s Posts Compilation, website, https://danielpostscompilation.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html.
[95] See interview, “33: Awakening and the Search for Meaning with Dr. Daniel Ingram,” Mind the Ego podcast.
[96] Bhikkhu Analayo, “Meditation Maps, Attainment Claims, and the Adversities of Mindfulness.” Mindfulness 11 (2020): 2102–12.
[97] The Emergent Phenomenological Research Consortium (EPRC)’s website is https://theeprc.org/. See “Emergent Phenomena with Daniel Ingram,” Black Beryl, July 3, 2025, https://blackberyl.buzzsprout.com/2044347/episodes/17441051-emergent-phenomena-with-daniel-m-ingram.
[98] For a history of Buddhist Geeks, see Gleig, American Dharma, 176–208.
[99] “What is the Buddhist Geeks Approach?,” Buddhist Geeks Guide website, last updated 2021, https://guide.buddhistgeeks.org/.
[100] “What is the Buddhist Geeks Approach?.”
[101] See Gleig, American Dharma, 126–29.
[102] The Jhana Community website, https://www.jhana.community/.
[103] “Jhāna Drama with Vince F. Horne,” Buddhist Geeks website, published June 10, 2024, https://www.buddhistgeeks.org/p/jhana-drama-with-vince-f-horn-305.
[104] Jhourney website, https://www.jhourney.io/. For media coverage, see Naina Bajekal, “My Week at the Buzzy Meditation Retreat That Promises Bliss on Demand,” Time, August 7, 2024, https://time.com/7007856/jhourney-meditation-jhanas-retreat-bliss/.
[105] “Jhāna Drama with Vince F. Horne.”
[106] For a summary of concerns around secular mindfulness, see Gleig, American Dharma, 56–62.
[107] Cheetah House website, https://www.cheetahhouse.org/. Also, see “When Meditation Causes Harm: A Discussion with Willoughby Britton & Jared Lindhal,” Black Beryl, August 3, 2025, https://blackberyl.buzzsprout.com/2044347/episodes/17497011-when-meditation-causes-harm-with-willoughby-britton-jared-lindahl.
[108] Daniel Thorson, Emerge: Making Sense of What’s Next podcast https://www.whatisemerging.com/emergepodcast. Joe Lightfoot, “The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets,” Joe Lightfoot website, published November 18, 2021, https://www.joelightfoot.org/post/the-liminal-web-mapping-an-emergent-subculture-of-sensemakers-meta-theorists-systems-poets.
[109] See Thorson’s critique of social justice and “Tech Bro” Buddhism in the Substack by Daniel Thorson, “The Upper Middle Path and Tech Bro Buddhism,” The Intimate Mirror Substack, March 11, 2025, https://intimatemirror.substack.com/p/the-upper-middle-path-and-tech-bro.
[110] Gregg Henriques, “What is Metamodern Spirituality?” Psychology Today, October 17, 2022, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/202210/what-is-metamodern-spirituality.
[111] For an example of Vervaeke’s approach to Buddhism, see “Ep. 13: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing,” Meaning Crisis podcast, 55 min. and 2 sec., https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-13-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-buddhism-and-parasitic-processing/.
[112] See Daniel Thorson’s podcast episode “Harmonizing to Emerge with John Vervaeke,” Emerge: Making Sense of What is Next podcast, October 12, 2021, 38 min. and 45 sec., https://www.whatisemerging.com/emergepodcast.
[113] Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth website, https://www.monasticacademy.org/.
[114] Sebene Selassie and Brian Lesange, “A Conversation about Cultural Spiritual Bypassing,” Insight Journal, 2019. Available online at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website, https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/a-conversation-about-cultural-spiritual-bypassing/.
[115] Rima Vesely-Flad, Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (New York University Press, 2022).
[116] Spring Washam, “Buddhist Practice, Plant Medicine, and Healing: An Interview with Spring Washam,” Insight Journal, 2022. Available online at the Barre Center for Budhist Studies website, https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/buddhist-practice-plant-medicine-and-healing/.
[117] Spring Washam presents what she calls Plant Meditation Retreats through her website, https://www.springwasham.com/plant-medicine-retreats/.
[118] “The Spirit Underground with Spring Washam and Lama Rod Owens–Episode 11 Liberation with Plant Medicines,” Be Here Now Network, 1 hr., 1 min., and 34 sec., https://beherenownetwork.com/the-spirit-underground-with-spring-washam-and-lama-rod-owens-ep-11-liberation-practice-with-plant-medicines/.
[119] For an academic analysis of Manuel, see Ann Gleig, “Undoing Whiteness in American Buddhist Modernism.”
[120] Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality and Gender (Wisdom Publications, 2015), 41.
[121] Manuel, The Way of Tenderness, 81–8.
[122] Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen: Revealing the Ancestral Spirit and Mystical Heart of a Sacred Tradition (Shambhala Publications, 2022).
[123] Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, 6.
[124] Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, 5 and 71.
[125] Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, 7. Sam van Schaik, Buddhist Magic, Divination, Healing, and Enchantment Through the Ages (Shambhala, 2020).
[126] Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, 58–61.
[127] Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, 6.
[128] Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, 6.
[129] See Sussanna Barkataki website, https://www.susannabarkataki.com/.
[130] Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga’s Roots (Ignite Yoga and Wellness Institute, 2020).
[131] Susanna Barkataki, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Yoga Journal: Roots, Reverence, Representation, Reparations,” Susanna Barkataki website, published Dec 9, 2019, https://www.susannabarkataki.com/post/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-being-yoga-journal-roots-reverence-representation-and-reparations
[132] Back cover of Barkataki, Embrace Yoga’s Roots.
[133] In addition to her focus on yoga, Barkataki has taught the Five Mindfulness Trainings of Thich Nhat Hanh and was a participant in the Community Dharma Leaders Training program at Spirit Rock.
[134] Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective website, https://kindredsouthernhjcollective.org/.
[135] The Tattvabindu Collective, “How a Popular Decolonizing Yoga Summit Became a Colonizing One,” Brown Girl Magazine, March 28, 2019, https://browngirlmagazine.com/how-a-popular-decolonizing-yoga-summit-became-a-colonizing-one/.
[136] Susanna Barkataki, “The Moment I Almost Gave Up on My Mission—and How Yoga Got Me Through,” Susanna Barkataki website, published April 26, 2023, https://www.susannabarkataki.com/post/the-moment-i-almost-gave-up-on-my-mission-and-how-yoga-got-me-through.
[137] “The Hindu Roots of Yoga and the Take Back Yoga Campaign,” American Hindu Foundation website, https://www.hinduamerican.org/projects/hindu-roots-of-yoga.
[138] For an exploration of the postcolonial and decolonial distinction in contemporary yoga, see Sheena Sood, “Towards a Critical Embodiment of Decolonizing Yoga,” Race and Yoga 5, no. 1 (2020): https://escholarship.org/content/qt9bx1x7wc/qt9bx1x7wc_noSplash_cdaff79064c98218016f1acd05df21c6.pdf. Also, “The Trauma of Caste: Healing from Dharmic Traditions of Casteism with Thenmozhi Soundararajan,” Kripalu 2024 Amplify Series, “The Roots of Yoga” session,  livestream from May 8, 2024, published on YouTube May 22, 2024, 1 hr., 5 min., and 24 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt_jbXuyWRk.
[139] “Nonduality,” Science and Nonduality website, https://scienceandnonduality.com/nonduality/.
[140] “About,” Thomas Hübl website, https://thomashuebl.com/about/.
[141] Thomas Hübl, “Healing Trauma and Spiritual Growth: Thomas Hübl, Peter Levine and Zaya Benazzo,” Sounds of SAND, October 4, 2022, https://we.scienceandnonduality.com/podcasts/sounds-of-sand/episodes/2147800917. See also Thomas Hübl’s website, especially “Healing the Traumas That Shape Society,” https://thomashuebl.com/healing-the-traumas-that-shape-society/ and “A Meditation to Connect to the Heart,” https://thomashuebl.com/a-meditation-to-connect-to-the-heart/.
[142] An example of the spiritual practice from trauma-informed meditation is David A Treleavan and Willoughby Britton, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018). An example of working directly with intergenerational and collective trauma is Thomas Hübl, https://thomashuebl.com/.
[143] For a consideration of different types of approaches to plant medicine within technological and decolonial approaches see Colin H. Simmonds, “Intersections with Indigeneity in Psychedelic Buddhism,”
Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School website, published October 22, 2024, https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2024/10/intersections-indigeneity-psychedelic-buddhism.
[144] For a more detailed discussion of the shift from the modern focus on experience to the postmodern/metamodern focus on embodiment see Gleig, “Embodying Enlightenment.”
[145] Kripal, Esalen and the Religion of No Religion.

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