Karma Cola- Femina - Indiatimes

Everyone’s getting high on spirituality, even as the West looks towards the East for its fix of nirvana. By Priya Nair

Keanu Reeves and Richard Gere are Buddhists. Sting, Meg Ryan, Betty Buckley, director Andre Gregory and John Frieda are all captivated by Gurumayi, who carries on the message spread by Swami Muktananda in the `60s and the `70s. Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell can be found in Rajasthan rejuvenating, recharging and reviving their spirit. Donna Karen and Demi Moore are great fans of Deepak Chopra.

The Chill Pill
It’s all about being blissed-out, keeping the soul in balance and making changes.

India is hot! It’s almost like the `60s and the `70s, but there aren’t any dropouts or hippies coming. Now we have jet-setting, trendsetters from the world of fashion, entertainment and high society, there are also lawyers, doctors, teachers and even housewives and police officers making the journey. Terms like `chakras’, `kundalini’ meditation, `moksh’, `atma,’ `astanga’ or `hatha’ yoga, trip off their lips.

Not all come to renounce the world, but to bring the wisdom of the East into their lives and make it better - inside out.

In the flower-power days, it was trendy to seek the mystical connection (Get a load of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Woodstock or with the Beatles). But con artists and frauds abounded and a few faithfuls may have become disillusioned. But the West has since wisened up, having now learnt to separate the wheat from the chaff. It isn’t about getting stoned and discovering God through grass, anymore.

Whether we’re talking holistic medicine, yoga, sex, alternate therapies, beauty products, philosophy or food — they all reflect the profound influence and impact the East has on the West. And the East is biting back, big time, satisfying the Western world’s spiritual itch.

The Indian experience is a new high. Some discover Ayurveda to treat diseases, some turn to Yoga for inner strength and good health. Many others are simply following the latest trend. Often, they learn meditation at a local centre or an ashram set up in their country, fast becoming fascinated with Indian spiritualism as a form of automatic transition. That’s when they make their first trip to India. And keep coming back for more.

The New Age Tourists
It’s no longer the Taj Mahal, India now boasts of meditation tourists. And the welcome drink is a heady, but reinvigorating cocktail of soul searching — witnessing first hand the struggle of a Third World country and an exposure to techniques and methods of self-realisation that are life-changing.

Sure, things have changed, even drastically. New age gurus use cell phones, have websites dedicated to them and ashrams now have email addresses. Spirituality is online and available at the click of a mouse. Indian ashrams too have become more Westernised, or would `globalised’ be the politically correct term?

Redefining Spiritualism, Osho style
The West thought they had seen it all — Mahesh Yogi, Sathya Sai Baba, Srila Prabhupada of ISKCON and loads of others who had preached the wisdom of the East. And then came Osho who borrowed a little from them and some from Western philosophers, spoke a lot of common sense, threw in some smart self-promotion tactics, preached his perception of reality in a large lecture theatre and for good measure, named it the Buddha Hall.

Osho redefined the definition of the Indian guru. He believed that for the hyperactive modern Western mind to reach anything close to inner peace, traditional techniques were not enough. So he created some of his own.

Today, at the Osho International Meditation Resort, also known as the Osho Commune International, spirituality is serious business. It is what still brings the foreigners in droves. They go back armed with the mystic rose or `kundalini’ meditation, dancing meditation or `nadabrahma’.

His popularity reached far and wide. A guru unencumbered by tradition, an Enlightened Master who could quote Heidegger and Sartre, and who furthermore believed in technology, capitalism and sex. Osho was
a brilliant lecturer.

An article by Francis Fitzgerald (Pulitzer prize winner) in `The New Yorker’ has a quote by the Dalai Lama, “Osho is an enlightened master who is working with all possibilities to help humanity overcome a difficult phase in developing consciousness.” Need we say more?

Tradition Revisited Worldwide