The Role of India in the Spiritual Future of the World
From: Amit Goswami
I started writing this article on Oct 10, 2005. According to the Hindu Calendar this is a very auspicious day of pooja offering to the Goddess Durga, the divine mother. It reminded me of the spiritual culture that was India, a spiritual culture in which I myself grew up. But now India is undergoing deep changes in its socio-cultural fabric. Materialism is coming to India in a major way along with the highly touted economic growth. Can Indian spirituality survive this materialist affront let alone guide the rest of the world in its spiritual future?
My wife, Uma, and I for many years have taken groups of Westerners to spiritual journeys in India. And we have noticed changes, very serious changes in Indian spirituality during this period. When we started, there were many places of India where we could take our group to get a glimpse of what it means to live in a spiritual culture. The biggest change that we have seen in these years is that now there may be only two or three major places left in the entire sub-continent where such a glimpse is available. In most places, temples and ashrams notwithstanding, spirituality has been commercialized, quite unable to thwart the onslaught of tourism and vices of material affluence and global economics. From this perspective, the spiritual future of India, like that of the rest of the world, does not look very bright.
At first sight, it may also seem that we should blame everything on capitalism–American style, globalization and all that. But I submit this would be a short-sighted conclusion. I submit all that is taking place in India and in the West right now is a part of an evolutionary movement of consciousness–East-West