About India

India is not a geography or history. It is not only a nation, not a country or mere piece of land. It is something more: it is a metaphor, poetry; something invisible but very tangible. It is vibrating with certain energy fields which no other country can claim.

For almost ten thousands years, thousands of people have reached to the ultimate explosion of consciousness. Their vibration is still alive, their impact is in the very air; you just need certain perceptivity, a certain capacity to receive the invisible that surrounds this strange land.

It is strange because it has renounced everything for a single search, the search for the truth. It has not produced great philosophers - Bertrand Russell, Aristotle, Bernard Shaw or Plato.

Certainly their search was very different from the search that has been done in other countries. In other countries peoples were thinking about truth; in India people were not thinning about truth-because how can you think about truth? You know it, or you don’t; thinking is impossible, philosophy is impossible. It is absolutely an absurd and futile exercise. It is just like a blind man thinking about light-what can he think? He may be great genius, may be a great logician-it is not going to help. Neither logic is needed nor genius is needed, what is needed is eyes to see.

Light can be seen but cannot be thought. Truth can be seen, but cannot be thought; hence we don’t have a parallel word in India for ‘Philosophy’. The search we call "Darshana" and means seeing.

Philosophy means thinking and thinking is circular-about and about. It reaches to the point of experiencing. India is the only land in the whole world, strangely, which has devoted all its talents in a concentrated effort to see the truth and to be the truth.

If you come here with a little bit of meditative mind, you will come in contact with it. If you come here just as a Tourist, you will miss it. You will see the ruins, the palaces, the Taj Mahal, the temples, Khajuraho, the Himalayas, but you will not see India-you will have passed through India without meeting it. It was everywhere, but you were not sensitive, you were not receptive. You will have come here to see something which is not truly India only its skeleton-not its soul. And you will have photographs of its skeleton and you will make album of its skeleton, and you will think that you have been to India and you know India, and you are simply deceiving yourself.

There is a spiritual part in this country. Your camera cannot Photograph it; your training, your education cannot capture it. You can go to any country, and you are perfectly capable of meeting, the country, its history, its past-in Germany, in Italy, In France, in England, but you cannot do the same as far as Indian is concerned. If you try to categorize it with other countries, you have already missed the point, because those countries don’t have that spiritual aura. They have not Produced Buddha, Mahavira or Shankarcharya. They have not produced Kabir, Buddha. They have produced scientist, they have produced great artists, painters and all kinds of talented peoples. But the mystic is India’s monopoly; at least up to now it has been so.

And the mystic is totally different kind of Human beings. He’s not simply genius, he is not a great talented person-he is a vehicle of this divine, a provocation, and an invitation for the divine. He opens the doors for the divine to come in. And for thousand of years, millions of people have opened the doors for the divine to fill the atmosphere of this country.

To me, the atmosphere is the real India. But to know it, you will have to be in a certain state of mind. Because you are meditating, trying to be silent, you are allowing the real India to come in contact with you. Yes, you are right; the way you can find the truth in this poor country you cannot find anywhere else. It is utterly poor, yet spiritually it has reached a rich heritage that if you can open your eyes and see that heritage you will be surprised.

Perhaps this is the only country which has been deeply concerned with the evolution of consciousness and nothing else. Every other country has been concerned with thousands of other things. But this country has been one-pointed, a single goal; how human consciousness can be evolve to a point where it meets the divine; how to bring the human and the divine closer.

And it is not a question of a day or a month or a year, but thousands of years. Naturally, it has created a tremendous energy field around the country. It has all, over the place; you just have to be ready to experience it.

It is not coincidental that whenever anybody is thirsty for truth, suddenly he has become interested in India; suddenly he has started moving towards East. And it is not only today, it is as sold as there are Records that Pythagoras, twenty-five centuries ago, came to India in search of Truth. Jesus Christ came to India.

It is only in India has the art of dying been explored, just as the art of living has been explored; they are both part of on single process.

And down the centuries, seekers have been coming to this land from all over the world. The country is poor; the country has nothing to offer. But to those who are sensitive it is the richest place on the earth. But the richness is of the inner.

You are right. Just be more open, more relaxed more in a state of let-go and this poor country can give you the greatest treasure that is possible for human beings.