Aspen Tree Yoga

Richard Alpert wrote this book after his transcendental voyage to India where he met his guru, Maharaj-ji, who gave him his mystic name, Baba Ram Das. This illustrative book was transformational for seekers of consciousness during and after the Hippie Movement.

This is a book of free-verse poetry that reveals Whitman's nature as an American transcendentalist mystic. He writes of Hindu ideas of the Self and asserts the interconnectedness of humans and nature, placing large emphasis on sonic quality and spacing of words.  

Calasso writes a lengthy fictional novel about Hindu gods and deities that references influential religious texts. He uses the myths as story plots and interweaves philosophical meditations to unravel ka, or what, underlies the creative force of consciousness that created existence. The stories are a web of confusion that try to arrive at clarity.

This text appears within the large Mahabharata - an epic that tells the history of ancient India. The Gita is the most well-known story from the lengthy epic.  The battle that the main character Arjuna faces is a metaphor to illuminate the different paths of yoga. The most revered path in the text is that of devotion, or Bhakti yoga.  

These sutras systematized yoga as a vehicle to achieve seedless contemplation. The sutras are philosophical musings that were precise and compact. They were intended to be memorized and passed along verbally. Because of the abstract nature of the sutras, many interpretations have been offered to readers. Patanjali organized and summarized concepts from the vedas and established an eight-limbed ladder to achieve unfettered union with the Self.