What the biggest spiritual and existential challenge facing India’s next generation?

Q: What the biggest spiritual and existential challenge facing India’s next generation?

A: In my opinion, the biggest existential challenge facing India’s young people today is to think for themselves about who they really are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. In the amazing economic and technological upsurge of modern India, where there is so much promise, millions of young people all seem to be getting on the same train. They appear to be moving in lock-step, striving to get good jobs, so that they can get married, have children, and be able to send their children to good schools, so that they can get a good education, so that they can get good jobs, and get married, and have children, and so on. There’s a lot of drive and ambition, but for most, perhaps not a lot of deeper introspection or consideration of the fundamental philosophical and metaphysical questions about who we really are and why we’re here. That being said, one could make a similar statement about young people all over the world these days. But in India, what makes this all stand out that much more is the way everybody seems to be blindly conforming to their culture’s expectations without any sense that there could be another way. One feels in many of the young people, a sense of inevitability, almost like there really is no other way and there are no other options available. Ironically, the perennial wisdom of India’s great mystical traditions, does not seem to speak to most of young people. Their eyes are on the material world and the promise of a better life -- if they’re lucky -- in the West. So really, I think that the great existential challenge for India’s young people is, in the end, no different than it is for all human beings who are in the process of transcending a traditional worldview and entering into modernism. In that transition, we find freedom and independence. But all too often, we simultaneously lose touch with our own souls.

In order to rediscover our true selves, all of us, sooner rather than later, need to make that pilgrimage back to what Mother India represented — our own deepest Self.

Om Namah Shivay. 

source : FB