A Culture Based on Inner Science
Right from ancient times, any number of visitors have visited India, and so did the great American writer and thinker Mark Twain. After his short visit, he said, “Anything that can ever be done either by man or God has been done in this land.”
Most Indians are not aware of the depth of mysticism and spiritual process that has happened and still continues to happen in India. This land has always been known as the spiritual capital of the world, simply because no other culture has looked at the inner sciences with as much depth and understanding as this culture has.
But in the last hundred years, because of a very upstart-ish attitude towards life, we have dropped many things. Because of political and other kinds of dominance, we have come to a kind of conclusion that if something comes from the West it becomes science; if it comes from the East it becomes superstition.
Many of the things that your grandmothers would have once told you are today being discovered in top scientific laboratories as “great” discoveries about human nature. Everything that they are saying after billion-dollar research studies, we have already said in our culture, because this is not a culture which has evolved out of compulsions of living. This is a culture which was evolved consciously by sages and saints —seeing how you should sit, how you should stand, and how you should eat. It was designed for what is best for human wellbeing, and there is immense scientific value in it.
Today, particularly in the last few years, a phenomenal amount of research has gone into water and the potential of water. One thing scientists are saying is that water has memory. Like a fluid memory bank, water remembers whatever it comes in touch with. For example, if I take a glass of water in my hand, look at it in a certain way and give it to you, well-being will come to you. If I look at it another way and give it to you, you will fall sick tonight.
In this culture, we have always known that water has memory. This is why in traditional homes, people keep a copper vessel which they wash every day, do a pooja for, and only then fill it with water to drink. What you call as teerth is just this. You may have seen how people struggle to get that one drop of teerth from the temple. Even if you are a billionaire, you are still dying for that one drop of water because you want to take in water which has the memory of the Divine.
Today, there are a lot of studies showing how a pregnant woman eats, what kind of people she is with, what she is exposed to has a huge impact on the next generation of people. But over the last few decades, fully pregnant women have been in trains, buses and bars. They are drinking and smoking. When asked, “Won’t this have an impact on the baby?” people would say, “No. We studied the blood parameters, nothing happened.” Now, after fifty years of that culture, there are a lot of studies saying that it is actually having an impact for many generations of people.
In India, we have always been conscious about this. There is a whole process from the moment a woman conceives until delivery, and later on for as long as the mother is breastfeeding the child - what she should and should not consume, what kind of people she should meet, where she should go or not go.
Science has done incredible things in the last hundred years, no question. The comfort and convenience that all of us are enjoying today is essentially because of the outcome of the scientific endeavor on the planet. At the same time, the limitation of science has been in trying to achieve everything through physical means - by measuring physical quantities, going by the physical laws.
If only scientists, who have pursued things so far into physical reality, pay a little attention to the most fundamental physicality, which is themselves, if they spend an equal amount of time turning inward rather than solely looking through a telescope or a microscope, I think something phenomenal could come out of it.
There is an inner strength in Indian culture that stems from a whole science and technology of inner wellbeing - right now the whole world is crying for it. They have outer technology with which they have done wonderful things on the outside, but they are struggling inside.
If we fall back on the knowledge bank that we have in this country, it could be the greatest asset — not only for this nation’s wellbeing but for the world’s wellbeing as well.
Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic and visionary, and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life; Views presented are personal.
