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 integration.

Integrating East and West
In early last century, we would have seen the conflict of science and spirituality as one between West and East. The Western cultures ignored the spiritual and the Eastern cultures ignored the material--the domain of science. The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote:

East is East, and West is West
And the twain shall never meet.

And this was true then. West was already a scientific culture, but the Easterners stubbornly held on to their spiritual cultures and it seemed they would never budge. Of course, many people still believe that this is so. Alas! The East is now also rapidly giving way to a materialist culture.
From: Amit Goswami

Eastern spirituality fundamentally professes oneness of consciousness and spirituality was a way of life for Easterners. But in the Western old science, consciousness is assumed to be brain-based, to be individual by nature, and to be conditioned (via biological and socio-cultural evolution) to operate on the survival of the fittest kind of competitive individual mode.

But rapid change is under way. A brain-based consciousness conflicts in a major unsolvable manner with quantum physics. So science is undergoing a paradigm shift. In this new paradigm, the Eastern model of oneness of consciousness is found to be the right way to think about consciousness. Thus this paradigm is paving the way for an integration of science and spirituality, of modern West and the old East.

There is another subtle conflict between the Eastern and the Western approach to life. Easterners, by and large, consider spirituality as the goal of their lives. It is believed that the individual “soul” (a deeper level of conscious identity beyond the ego of one life) reincarnates many times. Only when the soul learns the secret of its spiritual being of oneness...