INDIA MY MOTHER, YOGI MA FATHER Gaura Krishna

When going to India vias an organised travel agency or as a tourist, to see and to visit, you come back to your country with preconcevied ideas and judgements. India is not a country o be seen or visited, it is a country that has to be lived. Coming back from India within your head Taj Mahal and misery, it is as if you went for nothing, it is to have passed far from all, to have understood nothing because you have lived nothing.

To see India, one has to forget oneself, to forget one's familiar environment, one's daily life, one's habits, one's way of life, one's mental luggage. That obliges to an effort for forgetting one's ego, effort which will be proved a rebirth to oneself, a true discovery of oneself.

India is a country for discovering oneself, and not for discovenring new things that satisfy mental and material desires. For here is the difference : while West pushes man to have desires only for external things to be owned, desires which advertising strengthens by creating new needs far from his necessities, as far as to see only the outside and to forget himself internally, becoming party of every moral and material pollution, taking part in the massacre of his mother, nature. In India, man has, as goal, to find himself. This is the richness of India, the richest country on the earth : the interior richness of man.

Tne Indian man sees his Mother in nature and he respects her. He sees the other one as another himself and not as a concurrent, and he respects him. Indian hospitality is legendary. The wealth of India is in the hearts of its inhabitants.

In the Western world, the value of man is measured by his material wealth. People prostrate themselves to the rich. The beggar is chased away, spurned. In India, only interior value counts and sometimes the beggar is considered as a divine incarnation, even by the richest who comes and prostrates to his feet.

In Tiruvannamalai, in the south of India, there lives such a beggar. His name is YOGI RAMSURATKUMAR. He is a spiritual montain, a great sage. He does consider himself only as a poor beggar, but this man, who owns nothing, has everything : he has found himself. He is humility incarnate, and still he possesses an incredible culture. His conciousness is universal and still he is like a child. West will see in him only a destitute, yet he is a pearl on this earth. One could pass him by without seeing him, camera in hand to visit the temple where he lives close by; When one forgets oneself, one can also see him and it is not necessary to visit the temple anymore, for he his himself the temple and the Divinity who resides within. No more need for pictures for his presence will always be within you.

He his not one of those false gurus who goes West to get disciples. These gurus are nothing but tradespeople who profit from the credulity of inwardly "lost" westerners, in the same way some in France sell amulets to naive people. He, in no way does anything to be famous. No. Imagine a child, in all his simplicity, but a child who, in addition, knows everything and the depth of the heart of everyone and who gives everything he has or that is given to him. That is YOGI RAMSURATKUMAR.

One may go to India with the goal to create a nice album full of photographs in coming back. One may also go to India to find oneself. The Indian destitute is quite a lot richer than us. He has so much to teach us ! But we, egoists of our material wealth, we do not even have one eye or one thought for him who can give us everything and the only thing it will be possible for us to take with us at the time of death : Ourselves.