76 Travel to India? 1 of 4

So many on the spiritual path are curious about India.  Many have considered going but it can seem like a daunting task.  Where to begin?  Where to go?  This is the first of a 4 part series on traveling to India.  I have traveled to India 14 times for around 12 weeks per trip.  In these podcasts I give you my sense of India, perspective and a place to start.  In the last of this series I give  you practical travel tips.  The book that best conveys my experience in India is "A search for a secret India" by Paul Brunton.  And of course, there is the old classic, "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Yogananda.  I would read them in that order.

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. I trust you're doing well today. So many people on the spiritual path are interested in India and possibly going to India. So I'm going to take a moment and tell you about some of my experiences in India, describe India to you so you'll get a taste and you can decide from there if you should like to visit sometime. I remember somebody asking an Indian man when I lived in Austin what India was like and he said, India is everything. I think that's the best description I've ever heard of India because it really is everything. Everything that you've heard is true. Every single thing, the good, the bad, the indifferent. I'm going to focus more on the spiritual side of things, but we'll touch a little on the other sides of things as well. Today, I've been to India 13 times for an average of about 12 weeks per stay. So I've had some time to settle, look around, absorb and benefit by my trips to India. As a psychotherapist and somebody who's deeply interested in spirituality, India is very powerful for me. If you're a brain surgeon, you want to go to where the best brain surgeons are. If you're interested in Awakening, you want to go to where the best and deepest spiritual gurus are that can show you Awakening. And there are many of these powerful gurus in India. Everything that you've read is true. However, everything else you've heard is true too. So you have to look and find these gurus. It takes a great deal of effort and focus to become that deeply clear. And they're not everywhere. There are a lot of people that are more halfway there or three quarters of the way there. So you can be distracted in many different ways. It's best to go to the very purest and deepest of these gurus. However, there are so many in India. Once you look around, that's where I've benefited by going so many times and for such a length of time each time so that I could find these people. But I'm going to try to speed it along for you and tell you what I've found so you can build upon that and find what you're looking for. Often when I go to India, I come across a European or people from different parts of the world because there are millions of visitors in India. And they'll say, Oh, you're from the United States. I know what that's like. I was in New York City for a weekend. And then of course, I have to explain, you know, Mississippi is a lot different than New York City or Alabama or California or Texas. The United States is a big place. And every place is quite, quite different. So you have to see the whole country before you can have an accurate perception of the United States as a whole. Although going to New York for a weekend is a start. Well, India is the same way. India is one third the size of the United States. It's made of 28 states. So it's kind of like Europe. All these individual countries, the states in India are like individual countries in a way. Each state has its own language. Some of the states, there are very few people that even understand the languages of the states around them. It's like learning French or German or Czechoslovakian. They're completely different languages. So they have some unifying languages. Hindi is mostly used in the north of India, although it's used all over India. Down south, say in Tamil Nadu, which is the name of a state, they don't even want to speak Hindi. They will speak English. I would say the biggest unifying language in India in general is English because it's a practical language. You can use it all over the world. And as tourists come from all over the world, for better or for worse, most of them know some English. And so that allows everybody to communicate as a common language. And depending on the state you're in, they will also be speaking the local language. So they might speak in general English, maybe Hindi. But if you're in Tamil Nadu, for instance, they'll speak Tamil. Or if you're in Kerala, they'll speak Malayalam. Every state having its different language. And then there are a number of different territories as well. But that's another story. Anyway, India is very large, very diverse. If you were looking for the best brain surgeons, say in the United States, say you heard they were in Boston, and there will be all sorts of things going on in Boston, lots of things. And you would have to search and find out where is this practice of brain surgeons that I've heard about? Where is it? And you might get in a taxi cab, and they might not know. But hopefully you've got an address and you would wind around and you would find the place, the clinic. And oftentimes it might just be a medium sized building in the midst of a giant city. You have to look for those brain surgeons. And where they are, it might be moderately impressive, but maybe not. Maybe it's just an old building. Have you ever gone someplace to the world headquarters of someplace that you were interested in? And once you got there, it was not as big as you'd built it up in your head. Well, when you're looking for gurus, it's a bit like that. You have to look, you have to know where they are. You have to ask people how to get there. And they might, some of the most powerful ones might not be in big surroundings. You might have to go to a cave, or you might have to go to an old guest house or an old ashram. Because there's so many things going on in India and being a guru is just one little tiny thing amongst so many other things. India, for instance, if you go to Bangalore, that's a big high-tech center. If you go to Mumbai, used to be called Bombay, that is a financial center. Chennai is a giant city. Pondicherry was a French protectorate. It's kind of like a blend between India and Paris. And people mostly speak French there rather than English. They'll speak English too, but French is spoken a lot. So, India has a wide variety and you have to know what you're looking for. So, you take your time. India is everything. So, you will find what you're looking for. If you're concerned with poverty, you can find lots of poverty. If you're concerned with high-tech, you can find high-tech. If you're concerned with business, lots of business. Pharmaceutical companies, they make the world's pharmaceuticals in India. There's all sorts of things. If you want rural areas, there are lots of rural areas. Big cities, there are big cities. Whatever you're looking for, you'll find it. So, you have to be very clear. Why are you going to India? The first time, you might simply want to go as a tourist. I don't know. You might just go all over India. What's the north like? The north, as far as spirituality, that's where the Buddhists, when they came from Tibet, they came to mostly North India and the Dalai Lama is in Dharamsala, up north in the Himalayas. So, the north is quite different. Mountainous, way up north is mountainous and can get cool and cold and snow. Down south, South India, where I like to go a lot, can be very, very hot if you go in the summertime. So, that's another thing. You should look and see what time of year is best to go to the area that you're interested in. But, if you first went as a tourist, you might go a little here and a little there and see all the architecture and the various temples and the different spiritual perspectives and you might go to different ashrams and you can often stay at these ashrams for very little money. Often, it's just a donation. They feed you and give you a place to stay for usually a limited amount of time, but you can get a taste of what they're doing and their spirituality. India has been interested in spirituality for thousands of years. So, they've gone very, very deep and they've become very, very clear on what they're doing. Head and shoulders above the west, in my experience. So, if you're interested in spirituality, India is definitely a good place to go. In fact, I've been all over the world and I have not personally found any place that compares to India as far as the depth of the spirituality when you find it. Because again, you can go to other places in India and they don't have a much clue about this depth. They're more caught up in the worldly pursuits. Maybe they're computer scientists or financiers or other things. And they are very interested in the west and western thinking rather than deep awakening. Many Indians will tell me that I know far more about their country's spirituality than they do. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard that because it's like when I lived in Memphis. I lived there probably for 13 years and a friend came to visit and I took them to see Elvis Presley's house. Now, I just wasn't that interested but I was right there in Memphis and people come from all over the world to see Elvis Presley's house. Well, I went just to take my friend. In the end, it turned out to be quite an impressive tour. I was so glad that I went. I only went one time that time but it really was worthwhile. So, there I was living in Memphis without much expertise in where Elvis Presley lived. Whereas people from around the world were much more in tune with that than I was. Same can happen in India. Living in India but not as deeply aware of what's going on in their own country. I remember one time, it's a long story, but I ended up going to a cardiologist. Everything turned out fine by the way. But this guy was a specialist and I had to go through a lot of different tests and I did. It turned out fine but I had been previously initiated and had for years been deepening, deepening, deepening in this process of giving powerful spiritual energy by touching somebody with my hands on their head. My guru gave me that power. In my podcast about gurus, I go through that more. But nonetheless, you could feel it. The power came from my guru through my hands and I put my hands on the cardiologist's head. I told him because they're interested. They're in India. They've heard of these things but maybe never have experienced them. I put my hands on his head and it blew his mind, I suppose in more ways than one. But he goes, oh, I could really feel that. Oh, what happened? And it maybe in a way changed his life. He started then looking and pursuing spirituality on a deeper level because it was something he could feel. It could change his life right then. Well, India is like that. And now here I was a I came from Austin, Texas to learn with my guru. He was a cardiologist in Chennai maybe two hours away and he'd never heard of it. So India's like that. It's a needle in a haystack perhaps, the spirituality. But it's there. If you want to read an account that's the closest to my experience when I have been in India, I would read Paul Brunton's book called In Search of a Secret India. You can order it online or maybe get it in your library. Very powerful book. He was a newspaper reporter and he wanted to figure out is it all these stories I've heard about India, are they true? Is there something to them? And he was very doubtful. You know, I don't really think there is, but there might be. I've heard some things. And he was curious. So he went to India and he started looking for spirituality and he wanted a deep, real spirituality. So he went all over the place. And the book is really about his experiences, who we met, what they said, what his experience was when he was with them. Did they turn out to be charlatans? Some did. Did they turn out to be real? Many were. Were they real in different ways? Absolutely. It's a very powerful book. I would read it. Well, let's get back to India. I was in Austin, Texas and I had been on this spiritual pursuit for a very long time. I had come across gurus who were visiting the United States, who their energies were so strong that you literally couldn't get up off the floor in their presence. Or another one whose ashes started pouring out of his hands. He would appear to you and then tell you what happened while he appeared to you. And there's no way either. He, you know, people don't appear to other people, right? And in addition, tell you what happened while they were appearing to you. That doesn't happen, but it did. I was in the presence of another guru and my heart just exploded. So something was going on. I went to so many of these different things. Somebody wrote a book. I became, and they made me a character in the book. So they were having a book signing. I saw a flyer at the bookstore. They invited me to the book signing. And on this flyer, it said they would, you could go and pay some money and somebody would touch you on your head and you would have a deep awakening experience. I didn't believe it, of course, but it was in Austin. I went, they touched me on the head. Next day, boom, I just melted into love and everything turned into love. And it just was incredibly radiant and it would not stop for days and days and days. It never stopped. So two weeks later, they were training people to be able to do this in India. How does this thing happen? This process, I mean, it's impossible from a Western point of view, yet I was experiencing it as well as were so many other people that attended that event. So four of us from Austin hopped on a plane and we went to India for a three week to learn this process, you might call it. And then we could bring it back to Austin or where we lived and we could do this to others. We could touch them on the head. That's what happened with the cardiologist later, years later. It's much deeper than I'm making it. I don't want to glamorize it too much. It had its pluses and minuses. And my guru is my good friend. And he told me to just move on in my own life, go through my own awakening. He just sort of showed me awakening through this process, through his energy. And now my incarnation learns awakening on its own. And that's been happening. But I got a preview through this thing that went on for 10, 12, 13 years. So that's what got me to India. I went through the ashram, very, very powerful. By the way, I started to say I've been all over the world, but I have never been to a place as powerful as India, except to my surprise in a bit of a different way, but very similar Bhutan. Bhutan is so powerful, but it's not as accessible as India. And it's quite different. And I'm not sure you would get the same teaching because you can't really stay in Bhutan very long, but it is everything you've heard about it. That's true. Thailand is a wonderful place, much easier to live in Thailand. The food is very good. The people are happy. It's a scenic, wonderful place. In my estimation, not as powerful as either India or Bhutan. The problem with India though, is it's kind of a rough place to be for a long period of time. 12 weeks is a good stretch. And it's like riding in a car without a shock absorber. You can go all over the place, see lots of great things, but you're kind of beat up along the way. What do I mean by that? Well, it can be very hot. It can be very dusty and dirty, hard on your lungs. They burn trash outside a lot of times, even plastic bags. So that's in the air. So when you're there for a long stretch, you're breathing that stuff for a long period of time. And even if it's okay on any given day, after 12 weeks of that, it's hard on your body. If you want to go someplace, maybe the bus will show up. Maybe it won't. But the thing about India is it doesn't run by Western standards, yet everything works out. And that's the strange thing about it. For instance, let's say you were going to meet somebody at noon for lunch in another town. You say, we'll meet at this restaurant. You go to get on the bus. They won't let you get on that bus. They put you on another bus. Instead, you end up in a different town. You're dejected, you're confused, and you're angry that nothing is working out. It's frustrating. You're walking down the street. And at noon, you bump into your friend randomly in the wrong town. So that's how India works. You can't figure it out. And if you have any buttons inside of you that need to be healed, and that's what we've talked about in the prior podcast, right? If you have stuff that life can bring forward, in India, it comes forward fast, because you're in a very high vibration in general. This is a country that's been working with deep spirituality. As I mentioned, for thousands of years. So there's as dirty as it is on the outside, it's clean on the inside. So the consciousness is very clean. And because it's so clean, it is like shining a pure light on your consciousness. And anything that is not clean comes to the forefront. It comes flying out of you. So most things that we've repressed are not buried pockets of happiness, they're repressed pockets of pain. So that pain comes flying out. And that also makes India very difficult. People who go as a couple, it brings out their issues very quickly, either to resolve or for them to break up often. It speeds you along. One day in India, we have often joked that one day in India is like six months in our home country, as far as spiritual growth. So much can happen in a day, you would not believe it. One time I was in India for six months, and people would ask me, hey, just a greeting, you know, how's it going? And back then, I just thought you said, how it really was going. So it was embarrassing, because about five or six days of the week, I felt like it was the worst day of my life. And then so much would melt in those five or six days that by the time I got to the seventh day, there would be a clearing and it would feel like I was the most awakened, happy, ecstatic, joyful person on the planet. As all that light shine through my body, and I took it in, guess what, it would go one layer out and find the next layer of junk that had been submerged. So I would go through another six weeks, six days of misery, and that would burn off. And then much so much light, and then another six day that went on for about six months, excruciating, but ecstatic at the same time. It's hard to describe India, it will clean you out. Is it expensive to go to India? Well, from the United States, I don't think I've spent any more than $1,400 for a plane ticket. And so of course, that will vary wherever you are in the world. Generally, they settle around $1,200, something like that, between $1,200 and $1,400. Generally, from the United States, it takes me about 25 hours to get to India on an airplane. I generally fly through Europe, and there's a stop there for some hours, and then you continue on to India. The time change for me is, let's say, on an average 11 hours. And airline pilots say that it takes about one day for every hour of time change for your body to acclimate. Some people can do it very quickly. Some people just come for a weekend. I've seen that. And I'm just utterly amazed and awestruck by those people, because for me, I'm out of it for about two weeks. I mean, it's upside down, and I am falling asleep after lunch, and I want to go to bed before dinner. It takes a while. And for me, it's a bit of a painful transition. And then I have it when I come back too. So it's difficult. Now, once you get to India, and you go to some of the places that I'll tell you about, and this podcast will get kind of long, so I'm going to make a second and maybe third podcast on this subject. So I'll get into more in the next podcast. But where I like to go might cost, my meals might, maybe that would cost $5 for meals for the day, drinks and meals like coffee or chai and whatever. A room in a guest house would be about $10 a night. Transportation might cost me another $2 a day. So might cost you about $20 a day to live in India. Double that if it's in a big city. And these are just rough figures. But it's not that expensive. You know, I could go and live there for a month, and that's $600. So as long as you go to the expense to get there, you could stay there for next to nothing. So many gurus, you don't pay to see gurus, you can make a donation if you'd like. Mostly they don't ask for a donation. I mean, they need to live, so you want to give them a donation. But there's no entrance fee, so to speak. Most ashrams, those are free to live in. Again, they have to maintain the ashram, so they do accept donations. But it's unlike the West, they're not generally chasing you for your money all over the place. They're just there to serve and to help you awaken. And they truly have your best interests at heart. If you know English, as I've referenced before, you'll do just fine. Even if you don't, people are so friendly and kind in India. It's one of the kindest place in the world, and I know there are many, I've been to many countries that they are very nice. But compared to some places, India is so nice. So they will help you, they will bend over backwards. They are there to serve you. That's in their culture. And to give you an example, sometimes for various reasons, I could be on a, renting a scooter and trying to get somewhere, and a road is blocked off. But I really need to go down that road, and there'll be a policeman there, or a couple or a few, and no, no, you can't go down this road. And I explain, I really need to go down this road. And they'll look at you and they'll go, okay. They'll open up the guardrail and let you through. So nothing is really fixed in India. They're more guided by compassion than rules. Though in general, they'll be following the rules, but there's always the room to ask, really, I really need this. Could, and for this reason, could I do this? And oftentimes they'll look at you, their intuition is strong. And if you're telling them the truth, they'll say, okay. And they'll help you. So India is very supportive. Okay. What about India and poverty? Sometimes people say, oh, I wouldn't want to go to India because there's so much poverty. I couldn't take it. And that's true. There is poverty. On one of my early visits to India, I was staying in a nice hotel and I was just thinking to myself, oh, I have a nice hotel. I'm so lucky. What about these poor Indians? I see occasionally, I see some sleeping on the side of the dirt road. And I was walking down a dirt road and I saw a couple cows sleeping on the side of the road and a couple of Indians sleeping next to those cows, a little family, husband, wife, child. And I thought to myself, oh, those poor Indians, I'm so sad for them. I have this wonderful place and they don't. And as I walked by, I saw their faces, they were sound asleep on the dirt and their faces were radiant and they had big smiles on their faces, radiant smiles. And in that instant, I got it. I was looking at them from a Western perspective. In the West, we're so miserable on the inside that we need three cars to be happy. We need our neighbor's house and our house and everything we can grab. We needed to protect ourselves and be happy because we are so miserable. And if everything isn't perfect, if our bed isn't perfect, if we don't have the latest edition of this or that and the best car, we are miserable because we are miserable. So we try to get stuff to cover it up. In India, often there's a culture of inner happiness. They have festivals maybe every, almost it seems like every week. It's not probably that often, but they're all centered around inner awakening, opening. It's just in the atmosphere. You can, some places you can go in the whole village. You hear mantras 24 hours a day, all over the place. You can go to fire ceremonies and all sorts of things, almost 24 hours a day. You just drop in. There's one going here. There's one going there. You just sit down and you're blessed by the energy that's generated by them. It's in the air. It's humming with inner joy and happiness. Now I don't want to exaggerate it, but it's there. So if you feel really good on the inside, how big a house do you have to have to be happy? Not very big because you're already happy. You don't need anything to be happy. How big, how many cars do you need to be happy? None. You're already happy. So in India, they're used to a bare minimum. They're already happy. So they don't attend to the outer world very much. Now that's concerning for Westerners. We like the outer world to be spic and span. When I go to the ashram that I go to now in Tiruvannamalai, they serve food. You sit on the ground and there's a banana leaf and they put, they feed maybe 500 people at a time. And they just come by with big buckets and they slop food on there. It's amazing food, but it's on a banana leaf and you eat with your hands. Most of India, you eat with your hands. So no utensils, no washing is very efficient. Environmental, because it's banana leaves. You can feed them to the cows or just put them outside and they compost naturally. Many of the bowls are made of pressed leaves. So you can feed large populations good food very inexpensively. One thing I like to do is feed holy men, sponsor dinners for holy men. And I have just come into a friend, oh, maybe five or 10 years ago, who is himself a sadhu, somebody who has renounced the world. And he just lives in a cave or on the side of the mountain as do thousands of these holy men. And maybe we'll talk about this in another podcast, but point being I can feed a holy man for about 25 cents to 50 cents a meal. And it's a nice meal. I can feed hundreds of people for next to nothing. It's very efficient there because you're not paying for utensils and plates and washers and people to wash the plates. And you don't have all that. You just, it's very direct. Here's the food, period. They cut out all the middlemen. India is like that. It's so efficient. Now it's true. Nothing seems to run on time or work right. So in that way, it's not efficient. But when people do things like workmen or people feeding other people, it's so efficient. They can fix almost anything with two turns of the wrist using some tool you've never seen in your life that they made from a broken shoe and a nail. You know, it's amazing. So that's India. India is full of animate and inanimate objects that radiate the divine. They just saturate you in the divine. Another question that people wonder about is, am I safe in India? Yes, you're very safe. The people are kind and really I've never come across any safety issues as far as crime. If anything, my experience would be it's more of a petty crime, which is very rare. And for me personally, I was at an ashram. I left a good sum of money in my suitcase and somebody took it. I was with hundreds of other people in the ashram. And there were also times when all of us would leave the ashram. So the workers at the ashram also had access to my suitcase who ended up taking the money. I have no idea, but I did lose the money. So be mindful, just be aware of this culture. It's a poor culture. And if somebody in the ashram, a worker took the money, the money that you might have could be five times what they would earn in a year. So it's very tempting. They know you as a Westerner probably have money. So somebody out there may want to search your suitcase. When you go to a guest house, generally they give you a lock and they don't want, the owners don't want your stuff to be stolen. That's not good for them, but there's usually another place on the door for you to supply your own padlock and put it on. So you have your own key that gives you an extra level of security. So I would buy an extra lock. You can buy them in India. They're very inexpensive or bring one with you. And that will give you extra peace of mind. If you have a private room at an ashram, they usually have that place for your own lock to put in addition to the lock that they give you. So you can take care of yourself. What I would say is in general, just be mindful of your surroundings. It's generally far safer than the city or country you come from. So if I were to put it in a different way, if you want to get safe, go to India and you can relax. You'll see what I mean when you get there. You don't have to have big concerns about safety. It will be safer than where you are now, most likely, but be aware if you're a female, be aware of the culture. It's different than where you come from, generally speaking. So you wear a shawl. You don't expose a lot of flesh. You don't wear revealing clothes. They don't wear revealing clothes. So you don't want to stand out and you don't want to look permissive. If I was a female, I would probably travel with somebody if I wanted to feel really safe, because a female traveling alone might invite unwanted attention. And you don't want that. It's like if you were traveling in Italy, for instance, you might want to be traveling with somebody, or you might get a lot of male attention that you don't want. And it could be in varying levels of attention. I have no idea. Generally, you'll probably be fine, but you'd want to be careful. Also in India, I've walked down a lot of dark streets alone. I'm a male. Never any problem. It's always fine. Occasionally, people run into a problem and it could be a fistfight, but I don't think that's too likely. It's less likely there than it would be where I'm from. Way less likely. I'm just saying, you just take your common sense and you're going to be safer in my estimation in India than where you are now. Don't go down any dark streets in the middle of the night. Um, know where you're going. If you're walking with somebody, that's even extra safety. But again, I don't want to, I'm just addressing the question because you might have it in your mind, but almost by addressing it, I make it an issue and it's not an issue. Generally speaking, there's always the exception, but I find it very safe, extremely safe. Watch the monkeys though. They're really cute, but they can grab your stuff and run up a tree. That's who you got to watch out for. Watch the monkeys. You know, I'm feeling because this, I could talk for hours on India and this podcast is going kind of long that I'm just going to say goodbye and I'm going to pick it up next week. I wish you a good week. Uh, and I look forward to talking to you again next week. We'll pick up from here. Take care.