Right from ancient times, many number of people
have visited India, including the great American writer and thinker Mark Twain.
After his short visit, he said, “Anything that can ever be done either by man
or God has been done in this land.” I think that is the best compliment that
this nation has ever received.
Most people are not aware of the depth of
mysticism and spiritual process that has happened and still continues to happen
in India. This land has always been known as the spiritual capital of the world,
simply because no other culture has looked at the inner sciences with as much
depth and understanding as this culture has. In this culture, liberation or
mukti has been the highest goal – even God has been considered just a stepping
stone towards that.
In terms of bringing the spiritual process into
practical life, a few yogis managed to quietly change the landscape. Agastya
Muni was the most effective. The Indian people are still enjoying the benefit
of what he did. He touched every human habitation and made sure the spiritual
process became a living culture – not just a teaching, not just a philosophy,
but a way of life. The whole society was structured such that the moment you
were born in India, your life was not about your business, your wife, your
husband or your family – your life was only about mukti.
In this context, many kinds of powerful devices
were created. There is a whole science of temple building, where a temple can
become an enormous field of energy, a sea of energy. You must see some temples
in India. You don’t have to believe in any gods. If you are a little sensitive,
you can just sit there, and it will activate you from within.
If you come and sit in such temples, they will
shake you enormously from within because they were consecrated in very powerful
ways. There were temples where no rituals or prayers were performed; there was
always total silence. Infact in some temples, Prayers and offerings were
prohibited . Their main purpose is to make people evolve in their consciousness
by doing Sadhana. People from all the cultures of the
world were allowed to come and sit there. Just sitting silently for a few
minutes there was enough to make even those unaware of meditation experience a
state of deep meditativeness. They have been created like that.
The building of temples became such a huge
process in South India that many temples were built, massive ones. Even if you
just look at the physical architecture of the temples, the brilliance behind it
is unbelievable. Temples were always built such that the temple would be grand
and huge, but the people who built it were not living in palaces. They lived in
little huts and it did not matter to them because they knew that the temple
would be a tool for human wellbeing and liberation. Everything else was not
important. This is the way the whole culture was created.
Unfortunately, the spiritual culture we see in
India today has in many ways been broken by invasions, and distorted by long
spells of extreme poverty. Much has been dislocated, but the basic ethos and
backbone of the spiritual process is still not broken, and it cannot be broken.
It is time that we have ideas to reestablish this in its full glory once again
through our Yoga club, but it cannot be done the same way as it was in the past.
Today people are much more logical, and much more science-oriented.
With the way education is impacting people, a
spiritual process will not mean anything to people unless it is offered as a
science. The science of yoga does not demand any kind of trust in a philosophy
or a person. No belief is needed, no faith is needed – and it works. This is
one system that has been practiced for thousands of years, and in terms of
physical health, mental health and spiritual wellbeing of a person, it works.
In this sense, in many ways, the future of the world is in yoga.
Soon we have planned to offer a simple yogic
process that anybody can teach to anybody without any risk. The goal is that
every human being, irrespective of his caste, creed, religion, gender, or whatever
else, must have at least one drop of spiritual process in him. Do not
underestimate a drop. A drop is an ocean by itself.
When we say ‘spiritual process,’ it is not
about gods, not about pooja, not about any such thing. It means that something
beyond your physicality has become a living reality for you. A nonreligious,
scientific spiritual process is the need of the hour. It is the need of the
century, the need of the millennium, the need of eternity.
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