It is perfectly legitimate for people to seek stress relief of course, and we all need to cultivate some inner space to better allow us to deal with the ongoing pressure of daily living. But will palliatives that allow us to simply cope with our family, financial or professional problems satisfy us? Or, do we want deeper answers to existential and philosophical questions about the nature of life itself that include these matters but go beyond them? This distinction matters. If we ask big questions, we get big answers that empower us in more meaningful ways.

I came to this conclusion early on. I remember that in my late teens and early 20’s as my attention was beginning to be drawn to philosophical matters, I was advised by many to postpone this interest – “You are too young for this!” I was told, and it was suggested that my time would be better spent attending to “practical matters” such as my educational life and career. I always found that response puzzling and felt that philosophical inquiry should tell us how to live and what could be more practical than that?! Even so, while I found my philosophical pursuits very inspiring and fascinating and read many books and met many people, any sense of unshakeable conviction in the answers that these provided eluded me for years. It is only direct experience that can convince any of us and for me, meditation in the context of inquiry, became the doorway to faith and conviction.

Meditation can open the portals to deeper dimensions of the self – a self that far transcends our more routine day-to-day problems. Knowing this self gives us spiritual self-confidence, a very particular type of confidence that doesn’t come from what we are good at, how much skill or money we have, or even the state of our relationships with other people. This confidence may empower all these aspects of life, but is not derived from any of them. Meditation allows us direct access to that dimension of self that is free from all problems and can create a foundation of fearlessness for our lives. And there is endless, infinite depth to this dimension. Over the years, apart from daily meditation practice, I have also done several long retreats ranging in durations up to 4 months. I wrote a blog a couple of years ago describing my experience after one such 10-day retreat. It is a beautiful practice and one that I feel passionately can transform our culture when understood in a big context. That is why I am going to join thousands of others in a 24-hour Meditation Marathon on Dec 8, 2012. Join me for what promises to be a powerful day!

In a way I could say my heart never left the land, though there has inevitably been a distance. I like to imagine my relationship to India as a kind of passionately engaged detachment derived from the insider/outsider status that long absence bestows upon one. Of course that is not probably the whole objective truth and in any case the sheer diversity of lived experience in India ensures that anyone can project their own ideas on to her. But the bottom line is that I am deeply excited by the prospect of no longer merely being a visitor to a land that is at once so familiar and in the midst of rapid change.

There is an emotional frequency to every culture and to minds produced by that culture – and at the risk of over generalizing I can say there is flexibility, circularity and an almost preconscious sense of connectedness to a greater whole in the Indian sensibility. I have often found access to that in my love for Indian music – there have been many times in which I would escape to a world of suggested emotion in the music, entire interior landscapes evoked by a single turn of phrase or a note – to get away from the hyper modern, linearized rationality of professional US life. These are simplistic ways of looking at things of course, but there is truth to them and do provide a contrasting study in different modes of being in the East and West. There is much to unpack in this statement but in any case I do not doubt that conscious recognition of these differences provides for creative ways forward for all of us. This certainly fuels my excitement about this move. More on that in my next blog!

But for now – to come back to the theme of returning home: it is almost a truism is that our real home is to be found in the self. And indeed that is true – we never leave the deepest part of our own self despite all the apparent travel. But what does India of the soul represent in physical form if not that very deepest part of self? And despite all the obvious caveats that well-meaning people give, and my own recognition that I don’t fully know what it is that I am getting into and what to expect – I still remain convinced that the inner and outer merge in India like in no other place. So homeward bound it is!

In the midst of all this, there is also another impulse that exists in all of us- the desire to see further, to know something true, to dig deeper for greater meaning and to break the norm to reach for higher ground. This impulse is present to a greater or lesser degree in any given individual, and its relative strength in each of us is probably one of the stronger determinants of our character and personality. This impulse, which can be termed “awakened interest”, can be strengthened through giving it attention and responding to the information we receive as a result. Something interests us – whether spirituality or physics or gymnastics – and we start giving it more attention, this gives us inspiration to do something or learn more, that in turn generates more interest and so it goes…

I remember as a boy being very curious about the night sky. I was obsessed with the US and Soviet space programs of the early 1970’s, and used to collect coins about the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft that the Burmah Shell petrol bunks handed out every time my father filled up his vehicle. That in turn led to an interest in physics and astronomy which in turn led to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series which certainly partly fueled my own interest in spirituality. It is awakened interest that leads us to ask big questions about life. The point is that in a country like India where there is so much flux and change – young people, or people of any age for that matter, simply cannot afford to take tradition at face value. We all need to look deeper for meaningful answers for how to live a 21st century life and there is no reason to wait for anything propitious to occur to start this journey!

I met Andrew over 19 years ago and had already been seeking spiritually for almost a decade by that time. What I found compelling in that initial encounter was Andrew’s passion for life, and his deep transmission of the compelling, mysterious, liberating and purpose-awakening connection between spiritual freedom and engaged activity.

My own journey had started in India many years prior to that encounter with Andrew almost two decades ago as a doctoral candidate in Massachusetts. When I had set out seeking spiritually as a college student in India, I was drawn to the mystical traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism and found myself on a path that emphasized transcendence of worldly concerns as the solution to the existential questions that were fueling my nascent quest. Now I had come face to face with a spiritual master who proclaimed that the measure of our inner freedom can only be gauged by the quality of our outer response to life. That forced a renewed reckoning with my basic assumptions about the nature of reality and what an awakened life would look like.

As my studies with Andrew progressed, my sense of the context within which these existential questions are asked began to expand. The teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment proclaims and embraces all of cosmic evolution as the context within which we can each discover purpose and meaning for our lives. This seemed abstract to me at first, but as my contemplation has deepened, I have come to recognize that this is profound indeed! When we embrace evolution itself as the context for our inquiry all manner of matters come into view – the nature of human cultural evolution, our shared values, how these values are affected by the nation or culture that we come from, our very human relationships, what potential the future holds, and most important of all – the relationship of spiritual enlightenment to all these issues.

In this blog I hope to to unpack all these matters and especially relate them to Indian history, the dramatic social changes that are sweeping the country at present, my own experience as an Indian who has straddled multiple cultures while having been on this journey for almost 30 years, and the shared future that we can create together. I invite responses, comments, thoughts and suggestions and hope that together we can make this a dynamic community of shared inquiry.