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#4382 -
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Satori In The Eye Of Suburbia
In Zen, in Taoism and in the Gita, young urban Indians are
finding life
Smita Mitra
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?278426
It started six years ago. A small group of people in Mumbai, led
by Aspi Mistry, a practising Buddhist, decided to meet every
Saturday. There was no real agenda: the Dharma Rain Centre was
established to discuss in a lively manner all aspects of ethics,
spirituality and its practice, to study religious texts and to
meditate together. But of late, Aspi has noticed something
unusual. “If I mention our group at a social gathering, I am
immediately surrounded by people who want to give me their e-mail
IDs to be added to our mailing list,” he says. So what began
as a small group is now a collective with 300 members on its
roster. “I also see more people near the spirituality
section in bookstores, which is usually in a well-hidden
corner,” he laughs.
What is dramatically different about this new and intense
interest in all things spiritual in Indian metros is that there
is nothing ritualistic about it. Neither is it rooted in piety,
which sent earlier generations to temples and satsangs. The
newfound attraction to spirituality is more measured, based as it
is on an almost scholarly approach. Instead of waiting till
retirement to ask the age-old questions, city folks are starting
early, at the peak of their careers, eager to find answers that
help them in the here and now.
And the numbers are growing. Some 700 people have signed up for
the home study course on Bhagavad Gita, launched in July by the
Chinmaya Mission Foundation, which specialises in courses on
Vedanta and Sanskrit. “We have students from both genders,
all ages—from 18 to 80—and people from varied fields
like teachers, businessmen, builders, government employees,
corporate executives, research students, retired people and
housewives,” says Manisha Makhecha, the coordinator for the
mission’s home-study programmes. The fee: Rs 3,000 for a
15-month course delivered by e-mail. And the reasons people are
taking the course? Some say they “want to improve the
standards of personal life by applying this knowledge”, some
say they are on a spiritual quest. Some want to learn how to be
happy.
In Delhi, the Ahmisa Trust, which organises sanghas to discuss
Buddhist texts and practise meditation in several locations
across the city every alternate Thursday, started a new chapter
in Noida a month ago. The crowd is mixed, aged anywhere between
30 and 65. Anita Anand, who coordinates the Defence Colony
sangha, attributes the shift to spirituality to the pressures of
modern life, in which marriages and families are breaking down.
People are realising that material comforts may be fulfilled but
emotional needs are not. “Once the children leave the house,
and job responsibilities are routine, midlife crisis strikes.
People start to wonder what their life is worth,” says
Anita.
As Aspi puts it, most people usually turn to spirituality after
some trauma, a common enough occurrence in this age, asking two
versions of the same query—‘Why me?’, or the more
general ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’
Take Aditya Apte, an investment manager, who has never been the
“religious sort”. But after he turned 31, he began
seeking a “deeper meaning” to his life. So he decided
to enrol for a six-day course called ‘Journey of
Self-Discovery’, run by ISKCON monks. He was expecting to
find retired people as classmates and was pleasantly surprised to
find most of the 160 students were young professionals like him.
There were some MBA and engineering students too. Chaitanya Roop,
the monk who taught the class, came armed with PowerPoint
presentations on topics like ‘The Search for
Happiness’, ‘The Existence of God’,
‘Reincarnation’ and, of course, ‘Why Bad Things
Happen to Good People’. At the end of the six days, after
approximately nine hours of lectures and discussions, most of the
class had signed up for Round 2—an advanced course on the
Bhagavad Gita.
For Dr Rekha Kusum, a participant, the Gita is first and foremost
a “practical text”. “I didn’t want to wait
till I was retired to read the Gita. It is a blueprint for a
dynamic life and it certainly helps you function more efficiently
in these stressful times, in a more detached manner. It teaches
you not to take everything so personally,” she says. Nilesh
Neharia, 33, an options trader dealing with the ups and downs of
the stockmarket daily, similarly turned to the Gita to function
in equanimity while still giving his “100 per cent”.
Most of these new spiritualists are 30-50 years of age and have
rejected rituals as a way to connect to religion. It is this age
group that a new breed of professionals are eyeing for their
‘spirituality workshops’. Mayur Khabrai, 34, is one of
them. Till recently, he was a senior executive at an mnc with a
handsome salary. Now, he is training to be a life coach and is in
the process of “liquidating his assets” to start his
own institute for spirituality-based counselling and workshops.
His ‘Below the Bo-Tree Workshop’ is a weekend session
on Taoism using 16 verses from Chinese philosopher-mystic
Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Cost: Rs 1,500. Mayur has trained in
Zen Buddhist traditions with a Tibetan monk and has held six
successful workshops since he began in June this year, each with
20 participants. As more people jump on to the spiritual
bandwagon, his career move couldn’t have been better timed.
There has also been a renewed effort to crack the ‘science
behind spirituality’. Doctors in India and abroad have
undertaken studies to anlayse the parallels between
‘spiritual psychology’, taken from the Vedas,
Upanishads, Yoga-sutras, Bhagawad Gita, Buddhist and Sufi
traditions, and modern-day psychology. At the National Institute
of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, Dr
Mahendra P. Sharma, who heads the behavioural medicine unit, is
studying the effects of Buddhist mindfulness techniques on
patients with anxiety problems, depression and obsessive
compulsive disorders. He is also using them to alter addictive
habits like smoking. Mindfulness essentially involves training
the mind to focus on the present, approaching everything with
full awareness and accepting the current reality without
judgement or reactions. It is based on the acceptance of the
impermanent nature of all things and an attitude of ‘letting
go’ that allows individuals to spring back from negative
experiences a lot faster. Initial results are more than
encouraging, showing that patients practising mindfulness fare a
lot better than those undergoing conventional modes of therapy,
including those involving medication. Dr Sharma is also studying
the effects of mindfulness on subjects in high-stress situations
like soldiers on the front and adolescents appearing for their
board exams. In another corner of this Bangalore institute,
studies are on in the Advanced Centre f.or Yoga (Mental Health
& Neurosciences) to study the effects of yoga on depressive
patients. “In the 1980s, there was a lot of research on
transcendental meditation or TM. Now we are looking at training
people how to think about thinking— the process called
meta-cognition,” explains Dr Sharma. Since spiritual texts
are chiefly devoted to how the mind shapes our experiences, along
with themes of self-awareness and self-actualisation, their
impact on the field of human psychology has been considerable.
In fact, the term ‘spiritual quotient’ was coined in
2000 by psychologist Danah Zohar in her book SQ: Ultimate
Intelligence. It was rated a step above the other established
parameters of intelligence—IQ and EQ (emotional quotient).
According to Dr S.S. Nathawat, director and dean of Amity
Institute of Behavioural & Allied Sciences in Rajasthan, SQ
cannot be measured as easily as IQ, because everyone answers
questions according to an “idealised sense of self”.
Instead, SQ is measured by observing behaviour and revolves
around value-based qualities that are consistently displayed, say
altruism, compassion, gentleness, honesty and sincerity. In
short, traits that show a person is working towards personal
growth. People with higher SQ are not necessarily religious, but
show qualities that are extolled in spiritual texts.
One of the more practical applications of Indian spiritual
traditions in psychology has come from 40-year-old psychologist
Shilpa Dattar. After completing her PhD on Indian psychology from
Mysore University and completing a two-year home study course in
Advaita Vedanta from Chinmaya Mission, she has come up with a
series of psychometric tests based on the Vedic concepts. It may
not be too late before one of the spirituality workshops
incorporates these tests as part of its PowerPoint presentations.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?27842