Roping Outsiders InAuthor(s): Kathinka FrøystadSource: Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 14, No. 4 (May2011), pp. 77-98Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/nr.2011.14.4.77 .Accessed: 06/04/2011 04:16

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Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 14, Issue 4, pages 77–98, ISSN 1092-6690 (print), 1541-8480 (electronic). © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/nr.2011.14.4.77

Roping Outsiders In

Invoking Science in Contemporary Spiritual Movements in India

Kathinka Frøystad

Abstract: This article examines the pursuit of scientific legitimacy in spiritual movements that target the urban middle class in India. Based on fieldwork in a non-congregational ashram in Haridwar and six spiritual movements in Delhi that teach meditation of some kind—including Art of Living, Golden Age Foundation and Healing Rhythms—this article makes two points. First, participants articulate spiritual appeals to science in highly different ways, each of which merits analytical attention. Second, spiritual appeals to science are primarily directed at outsiders rather than long-term members. To explain why this is so, this article develops an analytical framework that takes into account religious uncertainty, differing degrees of religious involvement, and the narrative context of spiritual transmission.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1914–2008), founder of the Tran-scendental Meditation movement, had just spoken to a group of followers about meditation and the subtle changes it brings,

when suddenly he lifted up a voluminous blue book—a letter-sized, 700-page compilation of research documenting the measurable effects of the meditation technique he had introduced so successfully to the Western world. Waving it in the air for all to see, Maharishi remarked, “All these papers, just to convince ourselves?!”1 This incident occurred in Stockholm around 1983 and was recounted during a meditation retreat in Sweden in which I participated more than twenty-five years

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later. The teller had been present in Stockholm, and his anecdote made everyone around our table grin. Initially my own grinning reaction was mixed with puzzlement. After all, Maharishi had done more than any of his contemporaries to encourage scientists to research the medita-tion practices he prescribed. Moreover, parts of the research in the blue book had been conducted in an environment Maharishi himself had founded to document how his meditation technique and the Vedic principles that underpinned it dovetailed with modern science. Had he begun to question his own efforts? Not at all. As the introduction of the book hinted—and as Scott Lowe in his article in this issue of Nova Religio argues more explicitly—scientific validation was intended mainly for public outreach. For Maharishi and his circle of experienced medita-tors appeals to scientific authority were secondary, if not insignificant, compared to the inner certainty acquired through personal experience, something Maharishi conveyed with such humor that the anecdote was still recounted and received with smiling recognition more than twenty-five years later.

In this article I examine contemporary appeals to science in Maharishi’s birth country of India, arguing that differentiated rhetoric of the kind he employed has become widespread in the many New Age and guru movements that target the urban middle class, and that these movements invoke science in many different ways that are directed to-ward outsiders and beginners. To make the latter point, I break with the common tendency among my fellow anthropologists to analyze reli-gious appeals to scientific authority in terms of mimesis, the imitation and re-presentation of others’ ideas. Michael Taussig has developed this notion further to emphasize how imitation is used in the attempt to reverse power relations.2 While this perspective has yielded a number of interesting studies,3 it has the unfortunate side effects of conflating the many different ways in which spiritual movements may appeal to science, and of foregrounding the asymmetrical power relations be-tween the “mimer” and the “mimed” at the expense of contextual rela-tions that may be of equal relevance.

In a recent publication I shifted the lens to a mode of analysis that theorizes some of the ways science is invoked in spiritual contexts in India.4 In this essay I combine that lens with a narrative perspective to help explain why scientific rhetoric is reserved mainly for public out-reach, and why it enhances the understanding of which kinds of scien-tific rhetoric work for certain kinds of audiences. I argue the following: (1) suggestions that Western technological inventions or scientific dis-coveries had Hindu forerunners are intended primarily for non-Indian, non-Hindu audiences; (2) references to scientific experiments, termino-logical loans, doctoral titles, and analogies serve mainly to attract out-siders, while pulling those on its periphery closer; and (3) scientific rhetoric is rare among seasoned practitioners beyond educational

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contexts. I begin by reformulating in more analytical terms the insight conveyed in Maharishi’s quip.

HALF-BELIEF, RELIGIOUS INCORPORATION, AND THE NARRATIVE CONTEXT

My reformulation combines three perspectives or fields of inquiry usually treated separately. All have existed long enough to represent little new in themselves, but their combination may form the foundation for a novel analytical platform from which we may reconsider the increasingly common pursuit of scientific authority in spiritual missionization.

The first concerns the nature of religious convictions. In terms of reliance upon scientific authority in a field that should constitute a domain of truth-seeking in its own right, we are no longer dealing with traditional, self-evident cosmologies and religious principles. Take, for instance, the way Napoleon A. Chagnon outlined the myths and cosmos of the Yanomamö Indians in the Amazon nearly thirty years ago: “The Yanomamö conceive of the cosmos as comprising at least four parallel layers, each lying horizontally and separated by a vague but relatively small space.”5 Chagnon presents these conceptions as firm and shared by all. My colleague Bruce Kapferer states that in Sinhalese sorcery in Sri Lanka, “[t]he demon-deities, especially the bandaras, like Suniyam, are regarded as having once been human beings or the children of a divine-human union,”6 a statement in which the passive verb tense re-inforces the impression of a firm and shared religious conviction. The Yanomamö and Sinhalese may well have had firm belief in these cos-mologies and related rituals, but firm convictions of this kind are less common than anthropological classics suggest. Humanity’s increasing exposure to competing cosmological worldviews, scientific textbooks, and contrary experience invites a more hesitant response to religious beliefs. One approach to this phenomenon is Dan Sperber’s distinction between different kinds of beliefs, including half-understood ideas and principles one endorses because people one trusts claim them to be true.7 Another is that taken by Colin Campbell, who employs Peter McKellar’s “half-belief” concept to describe modern superstition of the kind that even its practitioners find it difficult to defend.8 A third ap-proach is to take inspiration from what Donald Tuzin calls “Mannoni’s paradox,” whereby one partly believes and partly does not, but certainly would like for something to be true.9 Whichever concept we choose, it is time to take spiritual uncertainty seriously when discussing spiritual invocations of science.

The second field of inquiry, which helps clarify the first, pertains to degrees of religious involvement. Many studies of new religious move-ments proceed as if these movements involve only two kinds of actors: leaders, teachers or ritual experts on the one hand, and followers,

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participants or listeners on the other.10 A more graded model would emerge if we were to take inspiration from other fields. Within ethnicity studies, for instance, Don Handelman developed a useful distinction between ethnic categories, networks, associations and communities.11 Loosely applied to religious settings, a religious category would refer to people who identify themselves in terms of a religious faith, but without neces-sarily being active practitioners; a religious network to people who inter-act with one another because they follow the same practice; a religious association to a denser network of active members of a religious organi-zation; and a religious community to people of the same religion who inhabit their own territory, such as a monastery. A model of this kind could be seen as constituting concentric circles, with the founder, orga-nization or teacher in the middle. One could also add a process-ori-ented lens of the kind Maya Warrier developed regarding a female guru known as Mata (Mata Amritanandamayi) or “the hugging saint.”12 Opening with how Mata’s first embrace made many people surrender and cry like children, Warrier describes how some proceeded to be-come devotees or even renouncers, gradually developing a deeper sense of meaning and experiencing profound self-transformation as their spiritual learning and practices progressed. According to this per-spective a spiritual belief is not something one either has (in full or half) or lacks, but something one gradually acquires over time—and may lose again. Applied to the concentricity model, this entails firm believers moving close to the center, and half-believers and those who want to believe being somewhere on the periphery with the potential for moving inward. Keeping such a model in mind would help us un-derstand how, when, and for whom scientific rhetoric is applied in spir-itual contexts, a reality of which Maharishi was so conscious that he was able to joke about it.

The third field of inquiry, which deepens the former two, is the nar-rative perspective that Michael Carrithers advocates in Why Humans Have Cultures.13 His book aims to explain cultural diversity, but for the argument I develop here I am primarily interested in his reflections on religious transmission. He discusses an incident that unfolded during his fieldwork among Digambar Jains in the Indian city of Kolhapur. Once, when sitting in the office of an agricultural supplier, he was sud-denly given a lecture on Jainism.

Did I know about Jainism? Not much. He told me that the essence of Jainism is ahimsa. This is non-violence, and Gandhi was really a Jain. Did I know what ahimsa means? I did not. Ahimsa is the essence of all religions, he said. We must do no harm, we must help all beings. Did I eat meat? I used to, but no longer. Good, he said, that is ahimsa.14

The teaching continued until the dealer had to leave. Shortly after-wards a shabby-looking man, possibly a farmer, stepped forward:

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Did I speak Marathi? A little. This, he said, is a story my grandfather told me. This is very important. Write this down, he said, pointing to my notebook. There was a great man . . . who lived right here, and one time that man went out to the bulls. While [doing something unknown to me]15 to the bulls one of them stood on his hand. What did he do? He did nothing! He waited and waited, and finally the bull’s owner came and saw what was happening! The owner struck the bull to make it move, and the great man told him to stop, that the bull did not understand! That is dharma [true religion], he said, that is genuine jainadharma [Jainism]!16

At one level this incident reflects a disagreement about whether Jainism should be presented in an abstract, paradigmatic manner, as in the first man’s lecture, or in terms of specific stories, as in the second man’s approach. Despite the frequent use of stories in religious transmis-sion in India,17 abstract generalizations reach back to 500 b.c.e. when religious aspirants competed in presenting the teachings of Buddha and Mahavira (founder of Jainism) to neophytes. Since then abstract gener-alizations have been greatly augmented by modern education, but ac-cording to Carrithers generalizations are still primarily reserved for non-believers and neophytes. Scientific rhetoric being a nineteenth- and twentieth-century form of abstract generalization, Carrithers’ point holds equal relevance for spiritual invocations of science: they represent a generalizing mode of religious transmission directed primarily at non-believers and beginners. At another level this incident points to the im-portance of being as attentive to the context of telling and the relation between teller and audience as to what is being told. Rather than treat-ing religious stories or myths as intellectual abstractions condensed in frozen texts (as with Franz Boas or James Frazer) or complex structures of thought (as in French structuralism and cognitive anthropology), Carrithers insists that stories and myths must be understood in terms of their use, in the primacy of what he terms a “mutualist” perspective over a “mentalist” one. It was crucial, for instance, that the agricultural sup-plier constantly interrupted his account of Jainism with questions that confirmed his listeners’ ignorance, and thereby his own authority, and that the second man linked his story to the locality and to his family. In this way the setting and frame influence the meaning and vice versa, thereby reinforcing the significance of being attentive to the ways and contexts in which scientific invocations are made.

NEw AGE, GURU mOVEmENTS, AND SCIENCE IN INDIA

Before I apply the framework of religious uncertainty, degrees of involvement, and narrative contexts to my own ethnographic observa-tions in India, I offer a brief introduction to the movements, beliefs and practices I refer to as an Indian version of the New Age movement. At

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first sight it may seem a misnomer to apply the New Age label to spiri-tual movements in India, since it is used primarily to signify a Western movement influenced by Hindu, Buddhist and Native American beliefs and practices. But as Paul Heelas pointed out as early as the mid-1990s, New Age thought has also developed in India, especially among the urban middle class.18 In Western contexts, the term New Age is usually applied to activities spanning meditation and astrology to Reiki healing and tarot card reading, beliefs in reincarnation, the meaningfulness of all events, bodily flows of energy that may be enhanced by various tech-niques and, not least, the coming of a global spiritual enlightenment that will form the beginning of a new era. So, too, in India, though one should note a few differences: Indian New Age includes more guru movements, less Native American influence, and a more frequent use of “New Age” as a self-referent. All the same, Indian New Age move-ments follow their Western counterparts in considering themselves “spiritual” rather than “religious,” a distinction that reflects their non-dualist conceptions of God more than it rejects any established order.19 Given the long history of non-dualism in Hinduism, I treat spirituality as a subcategory of religion rather than as its converse.

During my fieldwork from 2003 to 2005, a number of movements and activities populated the urban spiritual landscape in India. At the Times Foundation (later renamed the Oneness Center) in New Delhi, one could opt for acupuncture, acupressure, various types of medita-tion and breathing techniques, Lakshmi worship, and even ballroom dancing. Organizers included established religious organizations, new guru movements, secular offshoots, and one-person associations, of Indian origin and foreign, showing continuity with established forms of Hinduism, as well as representing recent transformations and imports.

I spent eight months doing fieldwork in six different movements active in New Delhi. I also spent some months at the rather unconven-tional Jyoti Ashram in the ancient Hindu pilgrimage town, Haridwar, which unlike other ashrams (spiritual centers) was non-congregational and allowed residents to concentrate on the spiritual practice of their own choice.20 Thus, rather than studying a singular movement in depth, which is what most of my South Asianist colleagues do,21 I prioritized empirical breadth, believing that the patterns that emerge across move-ments are equally worthy of analytical attention as those that emerge within a movement.

It has been noted that attempts to construe religions as scientific are common in virtually all societies where science has replaced religion as the prime domain for truth-seeking,22 and India is a case in point. Since its introduction to India during the early nineteenth century, modern science has come to play a dual role as an instrument of empire, and symbol of progress and universal reason.23 During the 1990s and 2000s, when India participated in cutting-edge research, elected the missile

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scientist Abdul Kalam as President (2002–2007), and became a global hub for information technology outsourcing and medical tourism, the status of science—imagined as hard-core natural sciences conducted by people in lab coats—rose as never before. Combined with a growing spread of education, the balance between religion and science began to shift. In terms of analysis the altered relation between religion and science may be described in the vocabulary of French sociologist Louis Dumont, who argues that logical systems are usually either juxtaposed or hierarchically ranked. In the first case, they explain different phe-nomena, whether in complementary or contradicting ways. In the sec-ond case, one logical system is subordinate to the other, which he illustrates graphically with a small square (system “y”) encompassed by a larger square (system “x”). In these cases complementarity and con-tradiction are manifest only at an inferior level while there is complete unity at a superior level.24 Using Dumont’s model, one can discern three rough historical phases in the relation between science and reli-gion in India: 1) science was encompassed by religion, as in Medieval Europe; 2) a juxtaposition emerged in which people gave each domain equal weight by compartmentalizing or contextualizing their think-ing;25 and 3) religion was increasingly encompassed by science and re-quired its support. Nevertheless, we still find evidence for the two former power equations, just as we find ample evidence for remarkably early spiritual appeals to scientific authority, which remind us of the pitfalls of historical periodization once we descend from a bird’s eye view to ethnographic particulars.

Indian appeals to scientific authority have been manifest since at least the late nineteenth century. At this time Hindu Revivalists began to con-strue Hinduism as an ancient science by promoting the Vedas as scien-tific, or arguing that chemistry, airplanes, and so forth originally were invented in India, but had been forgotten in the present chaotic era of Kaliyug.26 Scientific experiments on spiritual practices akin to those en-couraged by Maharishi date back to the 1920s,27 and when Western New Age influences began to flood into the country in the 1990s, Western ways to invoke scientific authority merely added to a century-old practice.

I will now shift to a synchronic view and examine some of the forms of scientific rhetoric I encountered during my fieldwork, paying close attention to the contexts in which they appeared.

ROPING OUTSIDERS IN

India as the Source of Science and Technology

Marking my point of departure following the model of concentric circles, I begin with invocations of science primarily intended for foreign-ers, non-Hindus, and the secularized middle class. More specifically I

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open with a booklet I was given by an octogenarian resident at Jyoti Ashram in 2005. Uncle Khanna, as I respectfully addressed the elderly man, identified himself as a member of Arya Samaj, a late-nineteenth-century Hindu reform movement that rejected image worship and caste. Uncle Khanna had spent all of his working life in the Ministry of Defense, and his years as a retiree reading newspapers and spiritual magazines, watching television, and learning one self-development technique after another, including Reiki healing, pranic healing, hypno-meditation as taught by the Mind Control Institute in Mumbai, dowsing, and the Silva method. “Here, you must read this,” he said one evening, and handed me a colorful booklet titled India: “Truth Alone Triumphs.” I found no trace of a publisher, date, or author, from which I gathered that it was an amateur publication that circulated in certain middle-class networks. True enough, Uncle Khanna had gotten it from his nephew. Back in my room I began to read.

The booklet was in English and opened with basic statistics about India, after which it informed the reader about India’s world-class rec-ognition in information technology, bio-technology, and space research, as well as the country’s large pool of scientists and engineers. Subsequent pages addressed India’s world standing in the production of cars and other kinds of technology, and the large contingent of Indian employ-ees in prestigious American organizations such as NASA, Microsoft and Intel. The middle section contained Hindus-discovered-it-first argu-ments that were more specific and numerous than any I had ever en-countered.28 For instance it claimed that the world’s first university was established in Takshila (now in Pakistan) in 700 b.c.e. and that students from all over the world had gone there to study; the art of navigation was invented in the Sindh river over 6,000 years ago; and Bhaskaracharya II described gravity some 400 years before Sir Isaac Newton. Proceeding to India’s achievements in medical sciences, the booklet stated that the existence of microorganisms and chromosomes, including the possibil-ity of test-tube babies, was mentioned in the Mahabharata (5500 b.c.e.); cell division was described in the Bhagavad Gita; and the possibility of artificial limbs was detailed in the Rig Veda. In terms of physical science, the booklet maintained that the velocity of light was described in the Rig Veda; space travel to other solar systems in the Bhagavad Gita; black holes in the Vishvaruchi section of the same scripture; and so on. The message seemed to be that there is hardly a Western scientific discovery or technological invention without an Indian forerunner.

When I asked Uncle Khanna about the booklet’s origin, he re-sponded matter-of-factly that it had been produced by the Government of India. Given its design and lack of government credentials and refer-ences, he was probably mistaken, however, he was on track if what he had in mind was the book’s target group of people with scant knowl-edge of India and Hinduism. When I googled the book’s title several

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years later, I discovered that it had an astonishingly wide circulation. At least three PowerPoint versions floated around on the Internet, one of which was virtually identical to Uncle Khanna’s booklet except for a final slide stating, “Authored by a proud Indian.” Another had been expanded by a London-based South Indian computer wizard and for-warded to a number of web forums. A third version, which replaced several details on India’s ancient science with a more neutral section on Hinduism, had been prepared by India’s ambassador to Chile from 2005 to 2008 to introduce India to some of the groups she addressed there. In other words, this was a presentation of Hindu scientific excel-lence that targeted primarily foreigners, Indians abroad, and the partly secularized urban middle class. Evidently Uncle Khanna found the booklet suitable for me as well, a sympathetic non-Indian whose knowl-edge of Hinduism was derived primarily through books and fieldwork. As with Carrithers’ case, my educated middle-class acquaintance found it appropriate to resort to generalized abstractions—here in the form of scientific rhetoric—to persuade me of his religion’s superiority. After I returned the booklet to Uncle Khanna, it remained on his bookshelf. He did not pass it on to other ashram residents, all of whom were Indian Hindus, though they followed different spiritual practices. Perhaps he was waiting for the next foreigner to turn up.

Appeals to Science: Art of Living Foundation

Movement-specific appeals to science were not only directed at com-plete outsiders, but also at novices. Introductory talks and beginners’ courses were typical occasions in which science was invoked, in several different ways. During a basic Art of Living course I attended in New Delhi, for instance, participants received a brochure summarizing re-search that documented the beneficial effects of the spiritual tech-niques taught in the course, including enhancement of the quality of life through stress-reduction techniques based on yogic breathing exer-cises (pranayama).29 The Art of Living Foundation founder, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (b. 1956), is a former disciple of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although I never heard Maharishi’s name mentioned in the Art of Living activities in which I participated, I noted a clear continuity in its emphasis on scientific documentation.

The brochure, entitled “Science of Breath,” aimed to convince read-ers of the benefits of Sudharshan Kriya, the Art of Living introductory series of breathing techniques. The author was Dr. Vinod Kochupillai, a professor of oncology at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi. Besides stating that Sudharshan Kriya changes the alpha, beta and theta activity in the brain, the brochure held that it reduces the level of blood cortisol, increases the number of antioxidant enzymes, and has a positive influence on the heart,

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immune system, vision, nervousness, depression and tobacco-cessation. The text took great care to distinguish between significant and non-significant results, and between published and unpublished work. But the sobriety of the text was contradicted by colorful graphs and figures. Graph legends were printed in such tiny and unclear letters that they were unreadable, and the legends of EEG pictures were so saturated with medical jargon they made the illustrations incomprehensible to the general reader.30 Consequently the colorful illustrations had little ex-planatory value beyond producing a visual impression of being scientific. This gave the brochure an obvious “magical underside,” an expression I borrow from Jean Langford’s analysis of how some modern ayurvedic practitioners imitate the scientific image of Western biomedicine.31

Having distributed the brochure, the course leader summarized its findings and added a few other positive effects of Sudharshan Kriya, such as its reduction of serum lactate in the muscles. During breaks the next day there was much small-talk about how our breathing exercise homework had induced relaxation and made headaches subside. It was almost as if the participants had begun to interpret their bodily sensa-tions according to the research summarized in the brochure, as if their experiences were being molded by scientific rhetoric.

To my knowledge, the emphasis on science was nowhere as strong in Art of Living as in the introductory lectures and beginners’ courses. I have no fieldwork observations from the advanced courses, but I met quite a few seasoned Art of Living practitioners in courses organized by other spiritual movements.32 One of them, a man in his mid-fifties, whom Sri Sri Ravi Shankar personally had asked to become an Art of Living instructor, made no mention of science whatsoever when he told me about his involvement with the movement. He emphasized the peace of mind he obtained through the breathing and meditation tech-niques the movement prescribed, as well as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s ex-traordinary compassion, love and wisdom, although he maintained that the guru never disclosed the latter in front of an audience in order to keep his teaching “light.”33 Again, as in the case of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, we see the contours of a diversified spiritual rhetoric: lightness, science and anti-stress for beginners, and more complex spiritual prin-ciples for advanced followers.

Scientific Terminological Loans: Healing Rhythms

Spiritual appeals to science to attract outsiders and pull newcomers closer could take radically different forms. In a one-day workshop ar-ranged by a movement named Healing Rhythms, science was invoked by means of terminological loan. As in Western spirituality, I had already encountered numerous words such as “science,” “quantum,” “alpha,” and of course “energy” in spiritual talks, advertisements, books

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and brochures, such as in the announcements for “quantum yoga” and “alpha meditation.” But the terminological loan in Healing Rhythms took this trend a step further by incorporating mathematical operators. Part of the reason such operators were used was found in the back-ground of the instructor, a cardiologist named Dr. Neelam Verma, who in addition to biomedical treatment also put strong emphasis on activat-ing her patients’ mental resources to get well. To this end she had com-posed a program combining simple yogic exercises, light meditation, breathing techniques (pranayama), and hand postures (mudras) with computer-mediated color therapy, sacred symmetrical figures (yantras), music, a “cosmic dance,” and recital of selected verses from the Bhagavad Gita—a program she and her newly established movement had begun to offer to the public to prevent stress-related diseases.34 The workshop I attended had been announced as a “lifestyle retreat” and took place in an air-conditioned and technologically saturated conference room in the basement of a posh hotel. Around twenty-five people had turned up, most of whom were upper-middle class, including some business-men whom Verma hoped to attract as investors for a “lifestyle farm” she planned to build.

When Verma explained the spiritual principle behind these activities she applied mathematical operators. She informed us that a human being has not only a physical body, but also a subtle body and a casual body. Each of these is nurtured by energy from different sources: the physical body from food and air (E1 + E2), the subtle body from our emotional, mental and intellectual well-being (E3 + E4), and the causal body from our psychological attitude (E5). Every now and then, she turned to a whiteboard to jot down the symbols for these energy sources. Having done that, she continued that none of these bodies would have come to life without the cosmic consciousness, which she represented as E0. She indicated the relative strength of these sources by writing E5 < E4 < E3 < E2 < E1 < E0 at the bottom, concluding that it was crucial to link up with the cosmic consciousness since it was the most powerful energy source of them all.

Several features of Verma’s explanation stood out. One was her idio-syncratic interpretation of the Hindu theory of bodies.35 Another was her conflation of religious idioms with medical and psychological ones.36 A third was her treatment of energy sources as readily measur-able and comparable. But for now I want to emphasize her use of math-ematical operators, which suggests the extent to which terminological loans from modern science can be applied in middle-class spiritual transmission in India. Combined with the many other ways science was referenced during this workshop, not least in Verma’s profession and doctoral title, the spiritual teaching gave a profound impression of being scientific. Looking around, I saw a woman taking notes almost as frantically as I was, while other participants nodded seriously. Whether

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Verma’s scientific rhetoric paid off in the long run is another question. Six years down the line I have heard little more about the movement, though it recently changed its name to Cosmic Rhythms and launched a new website.

Doctoral Titles

The use of doctoral titles can serve as a way to invoke scientific au-thority in its own right. As in the West, doctoral titles frequently crop up in Indian spiritual books, but spiritual seekers occasionally take it fur-ther by ascribing doctoral titles to their instructors. During a basic course in Acem meditation37 in New Delhi, for instance, I frequently heard participants refer to the Norwegian instructor as doctor sahab (Sir doctor), although the instructor himself corrected it whenever he could. As a rule, those with a legitimate doctoral title who taught spiri-tuality or self-development techniques actively used their titles. It hardly mattered whether the title indicated a medical background, Ph.D., or honorary doctorate, whether it derived from a renowned or dubious institution, or whether it was relevant to the teaching or not.

Analytically speaking, doctoral titles enhance what Aristotle termed ethos—an appeal to the moral character, intelligence and social standing of the speaker—and they are often seen as a guarantee for such traits. According to Pierre Bourdieu, a doctoral title represents “educational capital,” a concept that emanates from his analysis of social positioning according to economic, cultural and other forms of “capital.” In Bourdieu’s terminology, educational capital is an institutionalized form of cultural capital, generated by official documentation of a certain level of knowledge and reasoning.38 When people flag their educational capital by adding academic titles to their names, people with less edu-cational capital often find it more difficult to question them, even if the topic in question is unrelated to the degree.39 An illustration of how such title-related inhibitions could enhance spiritual persuasion emerged during the Monday meetings of the Golden Age Foundation in Delhi, and with the ethnographic vignette that follows I move on to instances in which invocations of science also influenced seekers past the beginners’ stage.

Golden Age Foundation (also known as the Oneness Movement and Foundation for World Awakening) is a spiritual movement headquar-tered near Chennai in South India. Unlike most contemporary move-ments, it is spearheaded by a couple known as Kalki Bhagawan (b. 1949) and Amma, who are claimed to be divine incarnations.40 The move-ment seeks to bring about a stage of enlightenment, a golden age, by 2012.41 Its main activities occur in South India—including the giving of diksha (initiation) and the construction of an enormous golden temple—but it also has an active congregation in Delhi. While most of the

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Delhi meetings were devotional, there were also weekly “spiritual coun-seling” meetings. Arranged every Monday and announced in the Times of India to attract new members, these meetings were chaired by Dr. N. V. K. Chakravarty. Virtually every week he welcomed a new participant or two. After briefly introducing the movement and the powers of Kalki and Amma, he would volunteer that he was a professor “in one of the natural sciences” and that his work included the supervision of doctoral students. Everyone who turned up was handed a visiting card, profes-sional on one side and spiritual on the other. Even the spiritual side presented him as “Dr. N. V. K. Chakravarty, M.SC. (Tech), Ph.D.,” indi-cating how his educational capital spilled over to his status as a spiritual convener. The participants, in turn, addressed him as “Dr. Chakravarty.”

One regular participant was a middle-aged man, whom I here call Ramamurthy. Initially I assumed he was one of Kalki Bhagawan’s staunchest believers. Not only did he attend most of the meetings in Delhi, he also prostrated himself more deeply than the others during the introductory and concluding aratis conducted in front of the giant photograph of the two leaders. But one day, when Chakravarty failed to turn up, Ramamurthy told me that his spiritual effort was more con-nected to his longing for a tangible spiritual experience. When I asked him to clarify what he meant, he said that when he had entered the Golden Age Foundation eight years earlier, he had joined an organized pilgrimage to its headquarters to receive diksha, which he explained as being a cosmic brain surgery that facilitates enlightenment. But while the other pilgrims claimed to experience fantastic explosions of colors, sounds and emotions during the initiation, Ramamurthy felt nothing. Since then he had not been granted a single experience of Kalki Bhagawan’s power, no matter how hard he tried. Neither was he hap-pier, nor had any of his wishes been fulfilled. Nonetheless he did not doubt Kalki’s power. He had full trust in the miracle testimonies that circulated among members,42 and he expressed particular confidence in the leader of the Delhi group: “Dr. Chakravarty is a great scientist, and when he has had such experiences, they have to be true.” Trapped in half-belief, Ramamurthy’s awe for Chakravarty’s scientific back-ground and title was a major reason he remained in the movement. Though it did not pull him closer in terms of faith, it certainly moti-vated him to intensify his worship in the hope that his half-belief would be transformed into deep confidence.

Scientific Analogies

Spiritual seekers further along the spiritual path typically were less impressed by appeals to science. Having considerable faith in their re-ligious worldview and practices, this category of seekers might well have appreciated the legitimacy that science could give, but they were past

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the stage where such legitimacy strengthened their convictions. In some cases, appeals to scientific authority could even be counter-productive, especially if they took forms that came across as banal.

One such instance involved Nalini, a 36-year old woman I met at a weekend retreat arranged by the American Ananda Sangha movement, which established an Indian branch in 2003 to bring the meditation techniques of its master, Paramhansa Yogananda (1893–1952), back to India.43 As it turned out, Nalini was in the midst of a spiritual reorientation after having left the Chinmaya Mission’s spiritual center in Rishikesh, where she had lived for a year. Though she had appreciated the Vedantic teaching of this Mumbai-based international movement, she had never-theless grown disgruntled. Her main criticism was that the movement was too intellectual (“lectures upon lectures upon lectures; no experi-ence of God”) and that some of the male yogis had developed improper relations with female neophytes. She had grown increasingly weary of the way spiritual principles were explained constantly in terms of sci-ence, as when the movement kept medical skeletons in the lecture hall to demonstrate the frailty of the body and the way it imprisoned the soul. Similar invocations of science abounded in Rishikesh, she lamented, one of the “worst” cases being a yogi nicknamed Yogi Protoplasm, who carried a small microscope in the pocket of his orange robe. When ex-plaining his teachings to strangers he often pulled the microscope out, put a gooey substance on its glass plate, and asked them to look. When hearing their arre wahs (or wows in English), he would explain that, just as microbes exist, though we cannot see them with the naked eye, there is a divine reality beyond what we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our intellect. To Nalini such appeals to science were simplistic and helped push her away.

Both the skeleton and the microscope served as heuristic devices to illuminate the similarity between living organisms and Hindu spiritual principles such as transmigration. As such they also exemplified the use of analogies to invoke scientific authority. Analogies have long roots in religious transmission in India. When traversing India as a wandering monk, Swiss-born American anthropologist Agehananda Bharati (Leopold Fischer, 1923–1991) noted that lay Hindus were far more eas-ily persuaded by commonsense analogies than by well-reasoned argu-ments unsupported by a simile.44 The analogy he encountered most often was the Vedantic example of how darkness can make people mis-take a rope for a snake, illustrating the way maya (ignorance, illusion) can cause people to mistake the tangible world for the reality of Brahman, the eternal divinity.45

While the rope/snake analogy is still in common use, contemporary spiritual analogies are increasingly drawn from technology and science, including medical and biological sciences, as in the instances recounted by Nalini. We know from communication studies that analogies may be

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highly effective in expanding and shaping cognition, often completely beyond notice,46 but they do not always work. Nalini already had ac-cepted transmigration and the dangers of maya, and since neither the medical skeleton nor the microscope expanded her understanding, all she gained from them was deep irritation.

Devotional Bliss at Jyoti Ashram

Moving further into the concentric model, one usually encounters more spiritual practice and reciprocal exchange than teaching. I end this ethnographic section by describing an evening I spent with two men who lived in the same ashram as Uncle Khanna, and who were acknowledged as two of its most spiritually advanced residents. Thirty-nine-year-old Roshan was preparing for monkhood in Yogananda’s Yogoda Satsanga Society ashram in Bihar by secluding himself to medi-tate. Ashok, in his late forties, shared Roshan’s regard for Yogananda, but identified more strongly with Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, 1931–1990), the controversial guru who gained a wide international following after amalgamating Eastern religion with Western psychoanal-ysis and sexual freedom. Ashok had read many of his books and held him in deep regard. Most of all, however, Ashok was inspired by Ramana Maharishi (1879–1950), the South Indian mystic whose teachings re-volved around self-inquiry, non-dualism and silence. In the Joyti Ashram, Ashok was renowned for having meditated for so many years that his remembrance of God had become permanent and his aggya chakra (third eye) open. His stated aim to dissolve his self was paralleled by a diet so restrictive that his clothes hung looser around his body each time I visited the ashram.47

Roshan and Ashok described each other as spiritual soul mates, and one evening I visited Ashok along with Roshan’s cousin Rakesh, a talk-ative lawyer with great admiration for these two men but with no aspira-tion to follow in their footsteps. While Roshan was meditating in his room, Rakesh asked Ashok a number of questions about his spiritual search, which Ashok answered patiently. After a half-hour, Roshan ap-peared, calm and serene from meditation, and our conversation slowed. After a while it felt as if there was nothing more to say. At this point Roshan was asked to get his harmonium and when he returned he began to sing a chant his master Yogananda used to sing. While he sang, a tear slowly trickled from his left eye, ran along his cheek and dripped down on his shirt. Ashok closed his eyes and listened, and so did Rakesh and I. When the last tone had faded none of us felt like speaking for a while. Ultimately Roshan explained quietly that Yogananda had com-posed chants in such a way that one was elevated by singing them.

Slowly we returned to a conversational mode, and to my surprise Ashok and Roshan began to exchange stories. Roshan opened with a

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tale he had heard recently from another Yogananda follower: A man had just arrived in heaven and was being shown its bustling depart-ments. In the prayer department people were so busy answering prayer calls they hardly had time to look at him. But in the department of gratitude the workers had nothing to do. They hardly received any thanks nowadays, Roshan said and fell quiet.48 The ending left Ashok on the verge of tears. “Oh, oh, oh,” he moaned, as if he had lost a close friend. Once he composed himself, he reciprocated with a series of stories about the guru-disciple relationship, including the following story about Guru Nanak (1469–1539), who founded Sikhism in the fourteenth century: Nanak had spent many years with his guru. One day the guru told him, “Now you have become enlightened; I have nothing more to teach you.” Nanak cried and cried, not wanting to let go of his beloved guru. When the guru repeated that he had nothing more to teach him, Nanak responded, “Even so, your words are like nectar to me.”49 Such is the ideal guru-disciple relationship, Ashok concluded. Even though you have become one with your guru, you still thirst for more. On this note our conversation ended. Roshan sang a closing chant and we all went off to bed.

Apart from the singing, silent pauses, and emotion, this spontaneous gathering was notable for its complete lack of references to science, whether in the form of summarized experiments, doctoral titles, termi-nological loans, scientific analogies, or other modes. In this context no scientific legitimacy was required; the spiritual worldview that the three men shared was self-contained as a truth domain—their faith was abso-lute and required no outside support. This represents a striking differ-ence from the teachings of their inspirational sources, Osho and Yogananda, who frequently invoked scientific authority in their writ-ings.50 It also contrasted with Ashok’s worldly life project of construct-ing a perpetual motion machine, an unfinished model of which occupied much of his room and which he referred to as “my research.” His work had just been boosted by a drawing he had encountered in a scripture commentary that caused him to conclude that such machines must have existed once in India. While this brings me full circle back to the Hindus-discovered-it-first argument, the point I want to make here is that Ashok’s peculiar research never spilled over to his spiritual con-versations. For him, religion had come to re-encompass science.

Finally, I want to note the marked preference for concrete stories over generalizations in this gathering, which confirms Carrithers’ argu-ment about the reservation of generalizations for educational purposes. Concrete stories certainly recurred in courses, workshops and retreats, but rather than standing alone as they did in Ashok’s room, they were always used to underpin a general point. Evidently spiritual rhetoric in the core of a spiritual tradition is marked not only by absence of scien-tific rhetoric, but also by an entirely different mode of expression.

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CONCLUSION

Multi-site fieldwork may be of great help in identifying broad trends and patterns that cut across particular movements on which ethno-graphic scholars usually concentrate. In this article I have employed fieldwork among six spiritual movements and a residential spiritual cen-ter to make two points.

First, scientific rhetoric has become enormously widespread in Indian guru movements and New Age activities targeting the urban middle class, and it comes in numerous forms. The modes of spiritual appeals to science examined in this article include claims that groundbreaking scientific discoveries or inventions had Hindu forerunners, scientific experiments, terminological loans, doctoral titles, and scientific analo-gies. The case material in this article is not exhaustive. I also encoun-tered narrative entanglement (which I discuss elsewhere)51 and scientific functionalism (which I have yet to discuss), and remain open to the ex-istence of additional appeals to scientific authority that escaped my at-tention. In terms of theory, this heterogeneity has made me advocate an analytical approach that looks beyond the mimetic effect of scientific rhetoric to enable a closer analysis of each form of scientific rhetoric in its own right.

Second, my observations support the thesis that spiritual claims to scientific legitimacy are intended primarily for public outreach. By juxtaposing some of the instances in which science was invoked in the movements and venues I studied, I have shown that scientific rhetoric was restricted largely to contexts in which a guru or instructor aimed to attract new followers or impart spiritual knowledge to beginners. My multi-site method made me attend more meetings for neophytes than for advanced followers, but I believe I spent sufficient time among ex-perienced spiritual practitioners, collected enough spiritual life stories, and consulted adequate spiritual literature to state my conclusion with confidence.

I have also sketched an analytical framework that holds the potential to enhance understanding of why appeals to scientific authority are re-served largely for public outreach. This framework foregrounds the way religious faith is marked increasingly by uncertainty; how faith in any given movement is better envisioned as a matter of degree than as a leader-follower dichotomy; and that, at least in India, appeals to scientific authority constitute an abstract, paradigmatic mode of speech that is out of place in non-didactic spiritual contexts. Regardless of the explanatory potential of this particular framework, further reflection on how, why and when religious proponents appeal to science is likely to remain a crucial agenda for research in coming years, especially the study of movements striving for expansion in societies characterized by wide religious free-dom and heterogeneity, where this phenomenon is particularly salient.

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The fieldwork on which this article is based was funded by a post-doctoral grant from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Oslo. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the Norwegian Anthropological Association in Bergen (2005); the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, (2005); and the Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego (2006). I am grateful to the participants in all of these meetings, as well as to Marit Melhuus, Arne Kalland, James R. Lewis, Benjamin E. Zeller, and the three Nova Religio referees for constructive comments.

ENDNOTES

1 Per Harald Wibe, personal communication, late July 2009. Wibe insists that Maharishi’s quotation must end with a question mark followed by an exclama-tion mark. The book in question was David W. Orme-Johnson and John T. Farrow, eds., Scientific Research on the Transcendental Meditation Program: Collected Papers (Weggis, Switzerland: Maharishi European Research University Press, 1976), which since has been supplemented by four additional volumes. 2 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).3 See James Holston, “Alternative Modernities: Statecraft and Religious Imagination in the Valley of the Dawn,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 3 (1999): 605–31; Jean M. Langford, “Medical Mimesis: Healing Signs of a Cosmopolitan ‘Quack,’” American Ethnologist 26, no. 1 (1999): 24–46; Joseph Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).4 Kathinka Frøystad, “From Analogies to Narrative Entanglement: Invoking Scientific Authority in Indian New Age Spirituality,” in Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science, ed. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010).5 Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 90. 6 Bruce Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 32. 7 Dan Sperber, “Apparently Irrational Beliefs,” in On Anthropological Knowledge: Three Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 35–63.8 Colin Campbell, “Half-Belief and the Paradox of Ritual Instrumental Activism: A Theory of Modern Superstition,” British Journal of Sociology 47, no. 1 (1996): 151–66; Peter McKellar, A Textbook of Human Psychology (London: Cohen & West, 1952).9 Donald Tuzin, “Croyances paradoxales: Mannoni, Kwamwi et la recontre des deux esprits,” Revue Incidence 1, no. 2 (2006): 71–86; Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien, mais quand même,” in Clefs pour l’imaginaire: ou, l’Autre scène (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 9–33. 10 There are certainly exceptions, including Maya Warrier, Eileen Barker and other fieldworking scholars, but the strong emphasis on religious leaders and

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their texts nevertheless frequently lumps followers of different degrees of commitment into a single “follower” category.11 Don Handelman, “The Organization of Ethnicity,” Ethnic Groups 1 (1977): 187–200; see also Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropo-logical Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2003).12 Maya Warrier, Hindu Selves in a Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission (London: Routledge, 2005).13 Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).14 Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures, 95.15 Removing dung from beneath the bulls, Carrithers later learned from a version of the story in a book about a nineteenth-century Jain ascetic named Siddhasagar.16 Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures, 96.17 See Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1989).18 Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 113. 19 For a contrasting view on the religion/spirituality distinction, see Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 5–6.20 Jyoti Ashram is a pseudonym, and so are all the personal names in this article, except in the case of those who spearheaded the movements I discuss. 21 See, for example, Warrier, Hindu Selves in a Modern World; Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels; Smriti Srinivas, In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008); Mark Juergensmeyer, Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Charles Brooks, The Hare Krishnas in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Sarah Strauss, Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts across Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 22 Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies or Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2001); Mikael Rothstein, “Science and Religion in the New Religions,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, ed. James R. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 99–118.23 See David L. Gosling, Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (London: Routledge, 2007); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination in Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).24 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 241–42.25 Milton Singer, “The Indian Joint Family in Modern Industry,” in Structure and Change in Indian Society, ed. Milton Singer and Bernard S. Cohn (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1968), 423–52; Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (London: Pall Mall Press, 1972); and A. K. Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 23, no. 1 (1989): 41–58.

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26 Prakash, Another Reason; Gyan Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India,” Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 153–78; Gosling, Science and the Indian Tradition; Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003).27 Alter, Yoga in Modern India, 72–108.28 These include arguments discussed in Prakash, Another Reason; Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India”; Gosling, Science and the Indian Tradition; Nandy, Alternative Sciences; Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward; as well as examples presented by Shri Dattatreya Bapu Rao (D. B. Thengadi) in 1983 and published online as “Modernisation Without Westernisation” at <http://www. hindubooks.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid= 1593>, accessed 17 August 2010.29 See “The Official Website of His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar,” at <http://www.srisri.org/service-organizations>, accessed 17 August 2010. 30 The version of the “Science of Breath” brochure used in this course is not available on the Internet, but a comparable version is available as “The Science of Breath” at <http://www.artoflivingdwarka.org/research.html>, accessed 17 August 2010.31 Jean M. Langford, Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 155. 32 It was common to attend courses and workshops organized by a guru or spiritual teacher other than one’s own, even if one claimed full commitment to one’s guru.33 For additional aspects of lightness, see Kathinka Frøystad, “For the Love of Simplicity,” in The Guru: Re-theorising Spiritual Leadership in India, ed. Aya Ikegame and Jacob Copeman (forthcoming).34 See also Anjana Rajan, “Cardiology for the Heart . . . And Soul,” The Hindu, 23 December 2002.35 A more conventional explanation, rooted in Advaita Vedanta, holds that the physical body (sthul sharir) refers to the material body and outer appearances; the subtle body (sukshm sharir) to the inner qualities consisting of the intellect, mind, senses, action capacities and vital breaths; and the causal body (karan sharir) to the desires that cause life (jiva) to take birth again and again. See Barbara A. Holdrege, “Body Connections: Hindu Discourses of the Body and the Study of Religion,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 2, no. 3 (1998): 347. A related understanding of the body and human nature is also found in the Theosophical movement.36 See Alter, Yoga in Modern India, 105–06, for a more thorough discussion of such conflations.37 Founded in Norway in 1966, Acem is a non-religious offshoot of Transcendental Meditation. It is embedded in a psychological framework rather than in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s simplification of Vedanta. Further details may be found at the movement’s web page at <http://www.acem.com>, accessed 17 August 2010.38 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood

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Press, 1986), 241–58. For a more elaborate discussion, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” concept covers a broad range of non-material resources, including knowledge, manners, taste and preferences. It is primarily knowledge that is institutionalized as cultural capital, but not only, as Steven Shapin demonstrates so well in A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 39 Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 248.40 As the name suggests, Kalki Bhagawan is believed to be an incarnation of Kalki, who in Hindu tradition is the expected tenth incarnation of Vishnu. See John L. Brockington, The Sacred Thread: A Short History of Hinduism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 66–69; and Makarand Paranjape, “God Incarnate or Mere Godman?” Life Positive (July 1997), available at <http://www.lifepositive.com/spirit/spirit-centers/god.asp>. 41 See Sri Bhagavan, “New Age—Envisioning the Golden Age,” Life Positive 10, no. 3 (2006), at <http://www.lifepositive.com/Spirit/Sri_Bhagwan_Kalki/Envisioning_the_Golden_Age32006.asp>; and “Year 2012: Kalki Bhagavan about the Significance of the Year 2012,” <http://www.experiencefestival.com/ a/Year_2012/id/1683>, accessed 13 November 2010. To my knowledge no academic work has been published on the Golden Age Foundation. 42 Some of the miracle testimonies may be found in Members of the Golden Age Movement, ed., Miracles of Kalki: Life Transforming Experiences (Chennai, India: Kosmic Publishing House, 2004). 43 I use Ananda Sangha’s spelling of Paramhansa, which differs from the Self-Realization Fellowship spelling in which an “a” was added (Paramahansa) after Yogananda left his body. For further details on Ananda Sangha, see “What is Ananda Sangha?” at <http://www.anandaindia.org/sangha/>, accessed 17 August 2010; and Kathinka Frøystad, “The Return Path: Anthropology of a Western Yogi,” in Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Globalization and Religious Intersubjectivity, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 279–304. 44 Agehananda Bharati, The Ochre Robe: An Autobiography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962), 212–13. 45 “Maya” holds at least two distinct meanings in Hindu thought: 1) the way in which divine power becomes manifest in worldly phenomena, which was the original meaning found in the Vedas and the Shvetashvatara Upanishad; and 2) the way in which the physical world masks divine power, an interpretation that emerged in the non-dualist traditions of Vedanta and Tantra, and was elaborated further by ninth-century philosopher Adi Shankara. See Julius Lipner, Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1994), 256; and Brockington, The Sacred Thread, 52–53, 108. Like Bharati, I was typically exposed to the second meaning, which a Joyti Ashram resident, writing under a pseudonym, concretized as: “Not sky, this is God. Not earth, this is God. In fact, anything & everything that we see is nothing but God.” See Vava-Vani, Not Snake, This Is A Rope (New Delhi: Trust Vava Vani, 1996), 33. 46 Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov, eds., The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001),

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epecially chapters 1 and 15; Gustav Thaiss, “The Conceptualization of Social Chance through Metaphor,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 13, no. 1–2 (1978): 1–13; Anne Salmond, “Theoretical Landscapes: On a Cross-Cultural Conception of Knowledge,” in Semantic Anthropology, ed. David Parkin (London: ASA/Academic, 1982), 65–88; and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).47 In addition to maintaining a strict sattvik vegetarian diet, which upper-caste Hindus see as conducive to spiritual progress, he was equally inspired by Western diets emphasizing the nutritional and environmental value of raw over boiled and fried food. For more on sattvik food, see Marvin Davis, “A Philosophy of Hindu Rank from Rural West Bengal,” Journal of Asian Studies 36, no. 1 (1976): 5–24; and McKim Marriott, “Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology,” in India through Hindu Categories, ed. McKim Marriott (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990), 1–39.48 The bureaucratic organization of heaven in this story suggests a recent Western, and possibly Christian origin, though I have also encountered an Islamic version.49 Former versions of this story are likely to have had different leading characters, since the Sikh tradition views Guru Nanak as having been a supreme guru from birth with no need for an external spiritual teacher. 50 For instance, Osho’s books include Yoga: The Science of the Soul, vols. 1–3 (Rajneeshpuram, Oreg.: Rajneeshpuram Rajneesh Foundation, 1984); while Yogananda’s books include The Science of Religion (Boston: Sat-Sanga, 1925). Books with similar titles appeared after their passing, including Osho, Science of God Realization (New Delhi: New Age Books, 2002); and Paramahansa Yogananda, The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita: An Introduction to India’s Universal Science of God-Realization (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 2007). Osho also drew heavily on psychology and psychoanalysis in his teachings. 51 Frøystad: “From Analogies to Narrative Entanglement.”

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