I first became aware of the Bhagavat Gita in the mid-1960s. I was a college student taking my first tentative steps onto my spiritual path, reading all I could about the Eastern traditions instead of my assigned textbooks. It was all second-hand at first. It seemed that every writer and scholar I admired – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, J.D. Salinger – wrote with great admiration of the Gita. Thoreau apparently read it every day of his famous retreat on Walden Pond: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita … in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.”