A friend recently told me her yoga teacher ended class by saying, “Bhakti means self-love.” I winced. No, it doesn’t. In an age when everything spiritual gets flattened into self-care, we’ve managed to turn one of India’s most radical, world-changing ideas into an Instagram caption. Bhakti—love offered to Krishna, the

Back in 1970, at age twenty, I left the Sorbonne University in Paris where I had been studying literature and began studying the Bhagavad Gita at the Krishna temple in London. It was also the year George’s single, “My Sweet Lord,” became the most successful solo release by any of

Two Bestsellers with Unhappily-Ever-After Endings As if life weren’t dramatic enough, I’ve been reading novels that predict humanity may not recover from its abuse of the natural world. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake imagines a near-future wasteland created by genetic experiments gone wrong. In an interview, Atwood explained the book’s

One person’s struggle with cable news and the search for deeper meaning. Most mornings I make the same mistake: I turn on cable news. I know. Bad idea. Five stories about how the world is going to hell, then, a moment later, a cheerful anchor tells me the markets are

Friends, I don’t know about you, but I’m not an enlightened yogi, and I don’t think any of the people I’ve met in Bhagavad Gita classes are either. None of them can shoot fire from their eyes, make an apple manifest from thin air, or float. What they can do

In the 1970s, during one of my first visits to India, I found myself standing on the edge of the world. Or so it seemed. It was late one night, and I was walking on Juhu beach, on the outskirts of Bombay, gazing up. This was at a time when