He goes by the name Swami. He is Myonk and his brother Yash’s teacher. He arrives downstairs. We was here to see if we could help him connect with some American patrons. “It’s not the best time to be looking for investors.” We talk at length. He is erudite and professorial. He is a real person. I am amused by the chance encounter. It’s not everyday you hand a swami a business card. He alludes to “one world” and “from the source,” which I innocently take as a good sign as that was to be the name of this blog.
He talks about India districts in terms of chakras: Kerala at the base, Tamil Nadu the belly, Varanasi throat, Rishikesh the third eye. He believes that “global karma” is playing out but that the planet is on the verge of change, that the days of Western gross materialism will end. India society is resistant to authority and regulation, and Indians live on a plain that is not only material. In other words, trashing your neighborhood and country doesn’t pull with Indians. I push pack. He resists our questions about balancing individual liberty and the global need to protect the environment. He obviously is critical of the West but his prescription don’t provide me with much comfort.
A week later we meet at his place, not far from where we are staying.
He is a talented artist seeking to set up a creative arts and tantric yoga center. As a Kundalini Yogi, I discover, he believes that the mindful use of the senses provide a path to liberation. He advocates for passion, something “society beats out of you and discourages as eccentric and self-involved.” To illustrate the difference between East and West, he tells a story of how a cow was run over on a German highway and made headlines and how, in India, a bus crashed over a Himalayas cliff to avoid hitting a bovine, killing thirty-five people. Indeed, this is planet India.
We are living in a crude period in the evolution of the universe, a perpetual cycle from ameba ignorance to human liberation and enlightenment, he says. We’re at the tail end of the Dwapara Yuga, on the cusp of entering a more enlightened period. The world is getting small, he says. However you arrive at it, his diagnosis is sensible. How many of the world’s six billion will make it through the eye of the needle is much less certain.
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