How Thoreau's Walden Pond Mixed with the Ganges and Yoga Came to America with Swami Vivekananda

Introduction
“All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy”
– Henry David Thoreau
One early morning, a little more than a hundred and fifty years ago, during
the coldest days of a New England winter, Henry David Thoreau looked out
the window of his small cabin on Walden Pond and saw men cutting the ice
into blocks. That ice was hauled by horse to a railroad that ran across the
western edge of Walden Pond, packed into a boxcar and then taken to
Boston, where it was loaded onto a clipper ship that sailed to Calcutta, India,
arriving about four months later.
Thoreau knew that ice, once in India, would eventually melt and run down
into the Ganges. He imagined those two bodies of water mingling together
and discovered an analogy: the mingled waters of Walden Pond and the
Ganges, corresponded to his American-Christian-Unitarian religious culture
mixing with the ancient worldview of the Vedas. He experienced this
confluence of waters every day when he bathed his intellect in the Bhagavad-
Gita, one of the two books he brought with him on his retreat in the woods.
What he did not know was that nearly fifty years later, in 1893, Swami
Vivekananda would arrive at the Chicago World’s Fair and the World
Parliament of Religions, bringing with him (symbolically), the waters of the
Ganges: the ancient sacred culture of the Vedas, and the Yoga of God-
Realization . . . Thoreau’s Walden waters had mixed with the Ganges and
returned, bringing Yoga to America, although what Vivekananda carried with
him has little resemblance with what we call Yoga today.
After receiving an extraordinarily positive reception at the World Parliament
of Religions, Vivekananda went on to travel all over America like a Johnny
Appleseed of the Vedas, giving talks and lectures in many cities, sowing the
seeds of the ancient philosophy of Vedanta in one of the youngest countries
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