The Spiritual Teacher

1. The twenty-first century has been dubbed the "age of inter-spirituality". The Bengali monk, Swami Vivekananda, was the man who brought yoga to the U.S. and inspired some of the greatest minds of the 20th century...such as J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, Nikola Tesla, and Sarah Bernhardt.  He is perhaps best known for his inspiring speech which began: "Sisters and Brothers of America" through which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893. More about Swami Vivekananda can be found at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami_Vivekananda
   
   

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   Finding peace would be a lifelong battle for J.D. Salinger (top left in above quartet), author of the 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger wrote to another monk at the New York City center about his own daily struggle, citing a text of the eighth-century Indian mystic Shankara as a cautionary tale: "In the forest-tract of sense pleasures there prowls a huge tiger called the mind. Let good people who have a longing for Liberation never go there." Salinger wrote: "I suspect that nothing is truer than that, and yet I allow myself to be mauled by that old tiger almost every wakeful minute of my life."