Spiritual India -by Manu Bahuguna



A country where the Buddha attained Nirvana – where people practiced Christianity even before Europe took to it – where Sufis and the Mystics walked on lonely trails for days on end, and where as recently as 1995, thousands of Ganesha idols suddenly started drinking milk! People still debate if they really did – some believe, others do not. In India, you always have a choice. In 1929, Sass Bruner, a well-known painter from Hungary, realized that she did not want to paint still life any more, that she did not want to do anything with the world around her. She had a vision and an inner voice told her that she needed to travel, to meet her guru. With her 16-year old daughter Elizabeth in tow, she set course for India, leaving everything behind. The mother and daughter duo traveled through hostile countries and inhospitable terrain, and a few months later found themselves in RabindraNath Tagore’s Ashram at Shantiniketan. This was long before Osho and other modern gurus became fashionable in the west. The life and times of Sass and Elizabeth Bruner sum up the essence of India. They travelled to all kinds of places, met a sundry of people and never went back to their motherland. The same quest for realizing oneself draws millions to India even today. No other place under the sun amalgamates such a variety of religions as India does. Every bit of her land, rivers and mountains, forests and glades, towns and cities, along with its people, is steeped in mythology, mystery and mystique. You could go to the hills, the deserts, the seas, or talk to the man on the streets, and you will discover that spiritualism in India is a way of life with no parallel in the world. Any one who wants to realize his Shangri-La, his very own God, will find that the search ends and the journey begins afresh here - in the hustle and bustle of an Indian metropolis, in the vastness of the Himalayas, or the quietness of its desert. The energy and power of spiritual India can even be experienced by the uninitiated. The quest for discovering One’s Own God ends and the journey towards the realization of the self begins, with a visit to timeless spiritual India. This country will always remain the place where the confluence of science and spiritualism actually takes place; where you stop questioning and start experiencing the inner truth.