I just got back from a jam-packed teaching and speaking tour of India, supported in part by the Speaking Tree. As a 56-year-old western spiritual teacher who originally came to Mother India in 1984 seeking for Enlightenment, I find myself in an interesting position when I return: now I come back to share with others what India so generously shared with me. But this trip began with an unexpected rude awakening.
When I arrived to give my first talk at the Shahani Centre for Management at Bandra National College in Mumbai, I noticed that the title had been changed from "Spiritual Self-Confidence" to "Self-Confidence." When I inquired as to why that was, my host explained that if they kept the word "spiritual" in the title, young people wouldn't come!
Over the last five years or so during my travels through modern India, I have come to appreciate in ever-new ways the enormous pressure, stress, and tension there is on young people. These are individuals who are committed to taking full advantage of India's dramatic leap into material abundance and a higher standard of living, along with a shift from traditional values to modern and postmodern ones.
What I found most troubling was a profound lack of autonomy, healthy curiosity, and independence in the way too many of India's educated young adults were thinking about the human experience. My message to them was very simple: Are you thinking your own thoughts? Or are you, like too many people these days, blindly and unconsciously seeing the world through the beliefs, convictions, and assertions of others?
Young modern Indians experience enormous pressure from their families and their culture to live up to very high expectations: to work hard at school, so they can get good grades, so they can get high-paying jobs, so they can get married, and have enough money to live well and afford a good education for their children. If they're lucky, they'll go to America, the land of milk and honey, and get even higher paying jobs. And while there's nothing wrong with all of the above, too often what tends to be missing are higher human values and even more importantly what has always been the greatest gift of India herself to the world: spiritual ideals.
As I spoke to bright young audiences in urban centers throughout North India, I found myself telling these young people that I had originally come to India seeking for Enlightenment because I couldn't find it at home in modern, wealthy America. I explained that her most lauded luminaries of the last 100 years, people who had influenced myself and countless others, people like Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, and Mahatma Gandhi, were all bold individuals who bucked the status quo in order to follow their own muse. They all courageously did what too few human beings are willing to do, think for themselves about the big and important questions in human life. Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of existence and what is the purpose of my existence? Without their brave and heroic spirit of independent inquiry and action, think of how much poorer we would all be.
Then once again I asked them: Are you thinking your own thoughts? Are you living your own lives?
What I call "spiritual self-confidence" comes from knowing the answer to these profound and fundamental existential questions. In order to become self-actualized human beings, ironically we have to, in our own ways, find the strength and integrity to mimic the greatest human beings who have come before us. In this case that means embracing enough independence of spirit to finally find our own authenticity and think our own thoughts. It's not an easy thing to do. But it's worth it. It's more than worth it.
My concern is that in the midst of the enormous benefits of modern India's great leap forward, she may be losing touch with her greatest gift to the world. That's why I was imploring her young people: Do you really want to think someone else's thoughts and live someone else's life? Or are you willing to make the heroic effort to live your own life?
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Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher and the best-selling author of Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening. To download a 38-page excerpt, click here.
Follow Andrew Z. Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AndrewZCohen
I now put a question mark by every spiritual leader/teacher today who still associates with him. And I'm not happy to do that because many of them are teachers I respect. Their endorsement as I say is a true mystery to me.
But "Rude Boy" guru has a new book to sell and perhaps a bit of an image makeover will help with the "cha-ching" of the cash register.
I say, question everything ... question yourSelf.
Thanks for the article.
"Our very own consciousness, our deepest self, becomes the instrument through which the original evolutionary impulse strives to express itself and to fulfil its insatiable desire to BECOME."
"The human vehicle becomes a vessel through which the whole universe is able to know itself."
"So the awakening of the spiritual impulse in the human heart and mind is the universe becoming conscious of itself through its own emerging creative process."
Faith, n. “Belief without evidence, in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.” Ambrose Bierce
Religion, n. ”A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable.” A. Bierce
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
-- Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science," New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” T. Paine