O my mind, let us go home –

Why do you roam?

The earth, that foreign land

And wear its alien garb?

These senses, these elements

Are strangers; none is your own …

Why do you forget yourself

Falling in love with strangers?

O my mind, why do you

Forget your own?

Kamarpukur village

Under the hurried exterior of modern India there is still a yearning for the eternal that has been the core of its existence for thousands of years. The sages of India accepted the reality of God as absolute fact, developing customs and rituals to enable ordinary men and women to attain the ‘superconscious’ in a natural way in the course of their daily lives. Of all the people of India, perhaps few are as intensely passionate as those of Bengal. Here, volatile emotions entwined with intense religious fervour create a special strain of ecstatic devotion that lies dormant, coiled under the soil, awaiting an exuberant release, sparked by a birth, a death, an event or an awakening. For centuries, Bengal has been the cradle of poets and revolutionaries, iconoclasts and free thinkers – and the fervent legions of God. Like the celebrated Bauls, or Sri Chaitanya, hailed as a reincarnation of Lord Krishna, dancing in spiritual rapture down dusty rural lanes, sparking off an incendiary wave of spiritual fervour from the Himalayas to the southern Cape, in the fifteenth century.

The spiritual culture of India has been resilient. The land has been inhabited for more than four thousand years by people whose heroes have not been kings, generals or politicians, but the solitary spirits who lived in caves, on the banks of rivers, on the summits of glaciers, meditating on the nature of existence, right behaviour or on virtue. Searching for the spark of the divine deep within their souls that tells man from beast, that is the dharma of humanity, the core of man’s existence.

The culture of India was not a series of realities verified in laboratories that manipulated matter, but rare blooms of intuition proven in the delicate flowers of the mind, with roots in the invisible reaches of the spirit. India watched while Egypt, Greece and Persia flared like meteors across the skies in the cycles of civilization ….

Waves of conquerors came down into her fertile lap through the Himalayan passes – Sycthians, Parthians, Greeks, Huns, Mongols and Mughals. Yet when the last Mughal Emperor left the Red Fort in Delhi, after three centuries of political domination, the people of India remained committed to Sanatan Dharma – the eternal way of the ancient sages. Like a willow bending to the wind, the mind of India endured.

But, by the mid-nineteenth century, the start of the modern age, a storm of the spirit, brewing for centuries in Europe, began to spread its shadow over the world’s ancient cultures. European scepticism and rationalist dogma, born out of the philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment and of Reason, analysed and divided, controlled and dominated, and removed the spirit from its sheath of matter. Religion in Europe had been intolerant and self-righteous. It had resulted in wars, it had been manipulated for political ends and bigoted priests stood in the way of further investigations into the secrets of nature. Religion must be separated from the State. The new European values that made quantum leaps in the domination of the environment for the comfort of man, rejected as myth and superstition anything too subtle to be grasped by the inflexible instruments of logical and rational thought.

India seemed the most vulnerable of all traditional societies to this new practicality, for how could a culture rooted in the spirit for four thousand years survive hurricanes of cold, hard facts that crushed truths too subtle for its grasp?

Western body-consciousness accepted as real only that which could be investigated through the five senses. The European mind turned outwards. Worldly enjoyment became the goal of life on earth. And as the West impacted on India, she lost her way to both enjoyment and liberation.

And indeed in Calcutta, the turbulent capital of a passionate land, young men reeled under the first intoxicating blizzard of European ideas, rumbling like juggernauts through the landscapes of the mind. Young men, who might have in an earlier age, turned their genius to the study and practice of their orthodox religions, began to believe that the European mind that augmented the individual, that had the power of impact on matter, the likes of which humanity had not witnessed before, was the way of the future.

Vying with their British masters, young Bengali intellectuals heaped scorn on their ancestors: India was backward, mired in superstition. India was asleep. The future was in the realm of matter, in the manipulation of matter and in the enquiry into matter. The new gods were Science and Standard of Living.

Science laughed at the gods. The gods, it appeared, must be banished. This was progress and India must awaken to the brave new world and keep in step with the rest of humanity. This was a judgement that reverberated across and down the century!

But unknown to the world, eighty-six miles northwest of Calcutta, in the Hooghly district, in the mud and thatch hamlet of Kamarpukur – dotted with little shrines, revelling in a healthy joyousness, in an environment not yet degraded by the onslaught of industrialization and malaria, around religious festivals and performances of sacred plays, crafts and harvests – the spiritual soul of India was preparing its response.

From out of this humble village hut came one of the greatest explorers of the inner realms that the world has known. A man who charted, with scientific precision in the laboratory of his own soul, each one of the ancient sadhanas – the paths which sages of yore had devised in their single-minded quest for God.

He traced each path to its goal and carefully mapped each obstacle, every cliff and chasm, each river and path, and every bend along the way. Then, when his search was complete, he shared with all those who would listen, the knowledge he had gained, and revealed to them the hidden purpose behind every ritual and myth in the Hindu tradition, and those in Islam and Christianity, in a manner that even the sceptic could accept.

For he did not quote from scriptures, or fall back on the mute authority of tradition, or retreat into the safety of dogma. He spoke from his own experience.