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Re: ARTICLE : The Mother on India's Spiritual Atmosphere
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To: Srinivasa Chakravarthy <srini@monod.neusc.bcm.tmc.edu>
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Subject: Re: ARTICLE : The Mother on India's Spiritual Atmosphere
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From: Saumen Sengupta <sengupta@sunyit.edu>
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Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 05:36:06 GMT
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In-Reply-To: <ghenE0Kor6.n4z@netcom.com>
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Newsgroups: soc.religion.hindu, soc.culture.indian, soc.culture.indian.kerala, soc.culture.indian.karnataka, soc.culture.indian.marathi, soc.culture.indian.gujarati, soc.culture.indian.delhi, soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir, soc.culture.tamil, soc.culture.bengali
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Organization: SUNY Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome
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References: <ghenE0Kor6.n4z@netcom.com>
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May You have a wonderful day!
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On Fri, 8 Nov 1996, Srinivasa Chakravarthy wrote:
: India is known to be a land of spirituality. The country had
: produced great kings, poets, philosophers etc but the sage and the
: saint have always won the highest respect. India is praised as a
: Punyabhumi and a Karmabhumi so much so that the Bhagavata says: "one
: who would achieve rapid spiritual progress would choose to be born in
: the Bharavarsha." Surely there must something special in the very
: atmosphere of the country. Here are a few lines from the Mother of
: Sri Aurobindo Ashram on this point:
I wonder how long we would continue this kind of self-hypnotism to keep
ourselves bound to feudal state of being. Look at the spiritual India
today and tell me in what ways has she demonstrated its spiritual presence
above and beyond the rest of the world. Look around and tell me how many
countries today sport the distinction of excelling India in corruption
and violence. Reading the mails here I was shocked to realize that we
can hardly find more than one honest prime minsiter in our glorious
history. You got to be kidding. Is that what spiritualism endows?
>From our childhood we have been brainwahsed in accepting such falsehood.
If Vedas and Upanishads were great, hey, we did not produce them. Stop
kidding. It might be our remote ancestors who produced them but the
identity stops there. We are no way related to them either in ideals or in
spirit. Take any one percent of the randomly sampled adults from the
Indian cultural mosaic and ask them if they could recite and relate a
single stanza from Rg Veda or any of our Upanishads. And yet, ask them to
defend their political and religious outlook it would invariably be
circumscribed in terms of well known commodities: The Vedas, the Gita,
the Upanishads, the Hinduism, the Aurobinda, the Mother, the great
Sanatandharma, etc. We hesitate not in killing each other to defend our
religious sentiments even though on our walls we sport slogans like
"Satyameba jayate" with pictures of Gandhiji, Swami Vivekananda, etc.
Is this spiritual India? Wake up and see how we really are, not what
the propaganda proclaims. If anything, by now we have succeeded in
terminating Indian spiritual heritage totally. Today our spirital heritage
is nothing but a disgrace championed by people like Chandraswami, Uma
Bharati.
:
: "There are places that are favorable for occult
: experiences. Benares is one of these places, the atmosphere there is
: filled with the vibrations of occult forces, and if one has the
: slightest capacity, it spontaneously develops there,in the same way
: that a spiritual aspiration develops very strongly as soon as
: one lands in India.
Seeing India as is, where millions have treaded innumerable thirthasthans
like Varanasi since the dawn of our being, one could easily arrive at
the conclusion that either we don't have even a drop of "capacity" that
the Mother talks about for garnering occult forces or, worse still, these
are all bogus. The real spiritual India is not in Benaras but in her
villages, in her slums, on her roads where living is eked out with those
whose lives are beyond the dictates of the Vedas and the Upanishads,
beyond the tranquility of the plush Auroville tucked away in the lush
majesty of Pondicherry.
: These are Graces. Graces, because it is
: the destiny of the country, it has been so throughout its history,
: and because India has always been turned much more towards the heights
: and the inner depths than towards the outer world. Now, it is in the
: process of losing all that and wallowing in the mud, but that is
: another story..."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
: The Mother
: From "Mother's Agenda" Vol I
No, that is not another story, but the only story that matters now.
That India is wallowing in mud is the cruel fact. That her educated elite
is brainwahsed to stoop so low, to indulge in daydreaming of their
supposed "greatness", in their "great destiny" while the country is going
down the drain is a fact. And you know what is in the root of all these?
The root of all these is our dependency on the Mothers, on the Aurobindas,
on the Sai-Babas, on the systems, on the ideologies, on the ideals, on
our value systems, our cultures, our traditions -- all in all on our
dependency on authorities. If the latter says we are great we must be.
We never enquire, never question, never explore but acquiesce if some one
tells us we have a great destiny.
To be spiritual, you have to be free. Occult is not for those who cannot
exist without depending on some authority.
Warmest regards
Saumen (sengupta@sunyit.edu)
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