You cannot have a spiritual culture

No culture is spiritual. Indian, Western, Martian, no culture is spiritual. Spirituality has nothing to do with culture. All culture is just a social phenomenon.

You cannot have a special land that enables the coming of the spiritual mind. You cannot have a spiritual culture where it is easier to be spiritual. But for sure, you can have a mind that is attentive to its own falseness. That you can have! Not something definitive or particular, like a culture. Not something positive and affirmative. But, rather something reductive and destructive.

“You know nothing can lead me to God, let me just find out what keeps me away from God.” That kind of an approach.

Instead, we have cultures that claim to lead you to God. And that’s what all God-men do. They say, “I’ll take you to God.” You cannot be taken to Truth or God, you only need to find out what keeps you away. What makes you think that you are away. That kind of thing can be there. That rigor, you can even equate it to the intellectual rigor, so it is not really intellectual. That rigor, even if it is found, even if it has been found in India, has been found only intermittently and that too very privileged and very tiny pockets.

You know the people from whom this…from whom the holiest…why even call them holy? Let’s call them “Intelligent Scriptures”. From whom these books came, they were an extremely tiny minority and most of them were not socially absorbed. We cannot even call them a part of society or a part of India. The fellow is living on the top of the hill. He has nothing to do with the country, nothing to do with society. Would you call them belonging to a certain nation? He doesn’t even know whether nation exists, or has been conquered, or an earthquake has wiped out the entire population. He is so absorbed in his own meditation. So, he hardly has a nationality.

And those numbers, they were extremely small, very-very small. The common masses were doing what they were doing. They had nothing to do with all this. In fact, even in India today, you see, all kinds of spiritual myths are popular. But if you go to somebody and you ask him to name even one Upanishad, one out of a hundred people can do it. There are more than 200 Upanishads but when you do the general survey on the streets of India and ask them to tell the name of even one of the Upanishads. I might be over-estimating in saying one by hundred.

Acharya Prashant regularly writes at literature.acharyaprashant.org and to closely connect with his teachings watch his YouTube videos at Official YouTube Channel or fill this form.

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