Friday, February 17, 2012

A SPIRITUAL VACUUM.

India has always been the land of mystics’ sages and spiritituality for the Western world from time immemorial and famous Icons like John Lennon, (the Beatles) and others have imbibed this spiritual wisdom from time to time. The late 1960’s and early 1970’s was a time when this spiritual hysteria climaxed in tandem with the hippie moment. The Vietnam war, with its sense of crisis, the moral urgency and concern with personal salvation gave a further impetus to the movement.

Bhagwan Rajneesh (Osho) armed with a Masters degree, was a keen student of Freud and spotted a real opportunity to exploit this spiritual hysteria. America, was always fascinated by spiritually inclined theorists, especially those with saffron robes, long hair, beards and foreign accents. The timing was perfect, communism had failed, and people were disillusioned with the war, the Kinsey reports, wife swapping and frigidity were worrisome issues. Intellectuals, critics, skeptics all fell prey to the new spiritual revival, where the prophet now called Osho promised salvation through “Free Love”. As a religious crusader of sexual freedom he used the mantle previously worm by Freud, Jung and other intellectuals and cloaked it with mysticism to give it added allure in the land of opportunity and everyone arose in a wave to embrace this new spiritual revival.

This created a mini-exodus, come summer time hordes of American & European spiritual tourists made a bee line to India, visiting its, monuments, solemn institutions holy Ganges, Himalayas , and ashrams where some grown varieties of hedonistic Guru’s and swami’s promised instant nirvana. Hordes of westerners with weary cartoon character T shirts, sugar candy colored shoes (like those worn by Goofy) with porky desk job thighs sticking out of shiny iridescent “day glow” color shorts & with fanny packs each more ridiculously clad than the next, dressed up as if they were in some sort of a pageant descended on this holy land. Is this the dress code for under-developed countries or holy shrines?

They spilled onto the crowded streets teeming with the locals in the sweltering heat, inhaling the incomparable smell of incense, joss sticks, warm skin, and meat cooking in coconut oil, tea, honey and frangipani, Dust, lust, hair oil mingling with the sprayed on perfume giving a heady odor like the breath of life.

How do you expect them to understand spiritual, abstract matters like Nirvana, Kundalini, Tantra, Vedas, Moksha, Yoga – when they are still trying to understand ski-boats, salad shooters, trail bikes, Palmcorders, I-pods, Jacuzzi’s, streaming music, video, and the now introduced cell phones, Tablets and Internet.

Disillusioned many of them will return to USA – where as Millerapa stated everything is sterilized and wrapped in cellophane. Away from the heat dust, stale smoke and street smells in their anti-septic roads, public places where the only odor is “halitosis” the genuine smell of spiritual decomposition, because the soul of America is rotten.

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