India

 

 

India is not just geography or history. It is not only a nation, a country, a mere piece of land. It is something more: it is a metaphor, poetry, something invisible but very tangible. It is vibrating with certain energy fields which no other country can claim.

 

For almost ten thousand years, thousands of people have reached to the ultimate explosion of consciousness. Their vibration is still alive, their impact is in the very air; you just need a certain perceptivity, a certain capacity to receive the invisible that surrounds this strange land.

 

It is strange because it has renounced everything for a single search, the search for the truth. It has not produced great philosophers — you will be surprised to know it — no Plato, no Aristotle, no Thomas Aquinas, no Kant, no Hegel, no Bradley, no Bertrand Russell. The whole history of India has not produced a single philosopher — and they have been searching for truth.

 

Certainly their search was very different from the search that has been done in other countries. In other countries people were thinking about truth; in India, people were not thinking about truth — because how can you think about truth? Either you know it, or you don’t; thinking is impossible, philosophy is impossible.

 

It is absolutely an absurd and futile exercise. It is just like a blind man thinking about light — what can he think? He may be a great genius, may be a great logician — it is not going to help. Neither logic is needed nor genius is needed; what is needed is eyes to see.

 

Light can be seen but cannot be thought. Truth can be seen, but cannot be thought; hence we don’t have a parallel word in India for ‘philosophy’. The search for truth we call darshan, and darshan means seeing.

 

Philosophy means thinking, and thinking is circular — about and about, it never reaches to the point of experiencing.

 

India is the only land in the whole world, strangely, which has devoted all its talents in a concentrated effort to see the truth and to be the truth.

 

You cannot find a great scientist in the whole history of India. It is not that there were not talented people, it is not that there were not geniuses. Mathematics was founded in India, but it did not produce Albert Einstein. The whole country, in a miraculous way, was not interested in any objective research. To know the other has not been the goal here, but to know oneself.

 

For ten thousand years millions of people persistently making a single effort, sacrificing everything for it — science, technological development, riches — accepting poverty, sickness, disease, death, but not dropping the search at any cost… it has created a certain noosphere, a certain ocean of vibrations around you.

 

If you come here with a little bit of a meditative mind, you will come in contact with it. If you come here just as a tourist, you will miss it. You will see the ruins, the palaces, the Taj Mahal, the temples, Khajuraho, the Himalayas, but you will not see India — you will have passed through India without meeting it. It was everywhere, but you were not sensitive, you were not receptive. You will have come here to see something which is not truly India but only its skeleton — not its soul. And you will have photographs of its skeleton and you will make albums of its skeleton, and you will think that you have been to India and you know India, and you are simply deceiving yourself.

 

There is a spiritual part. Your cameras cannot photograph it; your training, your education cannot capture it.

 

You can go to any country, and you are perfectly capable of meeting the people, the country, its history, its past — in Germany, in Italy, in France, in England. But you cannot do the same as far as India is concerned. If you try to categorize it with other countries, you have already missed the point, because those countries don’t have that spiritual aura. They have not produced a Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira, a Neminatha, an Adinatha. They have not produced a Kabir, a Farid, a Dadu. They have produced scientists, they have produced poets, they have produced great artists, they have produced painters, they have produced all kinds of talented people. But the mystic is India’s monopoly; at least up to now it has been so.

 

And the mystic is a totally different kind of human being. He’s not simply a genius, he is not simply a great painter or a great poet — he is a vehicle of the divine, a provocation, an invitation for the divine. He opens the doors for the divine to come in. And for thousands of years, millions of people have opened the doors for the divine to fill the atmosphere of this country. To me, that atmosphere is the real India.

 

-Osho, "The Osho Upanishad, #21, Q1"