Nietzsche, you and I both are highly critical of Western culture, history and ideology. I am however not critical of Western people. I separate people from concepts. In fact, as ironic as this may sound to you, most of my friends are Western. I enjoy the company of Western people more than I enjoy the company of Indian people. In my experience, finding good Indians really has been like finding a diamond among a sea of sand. Most Indians I have met have been highly materialsitic, greedy and debauched and generally not nice people. I spend 6 months in India studying at an Indian institute, and I was appaled at the behaviour of my Indian peers. Most of the Indian women smoked(even in the West most Western women do not smoke) Most of the Indian men spoke in highly explicit and vulgar language and were rude to the extreme. I faced so many problems by Indians gossiping about me and spreading rumours for little to no reason. In fact I was not the only one, but it was a common practice amongst my Indian peers to gossip about one another and spread malicious gossip. Even back here in the UK, the Indian people I met were not very nice. My experiences growing up with the Indian community were plagued with incidents.
On the contrary, my experiences with Western people were largely positive. I made friends with them much more easily. They were accomodating of me and treated me like I was one of them. I got the same opportunities as they did in social circles. I could open discuss with them and represent my own culture. I have very fond memories of many Western Caucasian people in my life. My teachers, my school friends, my best friends and my current friends who have all been very embracing of me.
I am not going to generalize of course and say that all Western people are nice and friendly and all Indian people are nasty and rude. I separate people from culture. The way current Indian culture is leads to people being rather nasty and rude(urinating, spitting and excreting in the streets, teasing women on the roads, hassaling foreigners, being rude in general) and the way current Western culture is leads to people being more tolerant, acceptant of differences and living more civically. For example here when we get off the bus we say thank you to the bus driver. In India, you have to get off a moving bus!
Suffice it to say I have met more spiritual people in the West than I have in India. I once joined my local Hindu student community at my uni in hope to find spiritual Indians, and what I got instead was the opposite: highly materialistic Hindus that loved going out in huge groups to various towns for nights of debauchary and visited the temples occasionally to worship idols. I never went back.
Do not take me wrong that I am criticising Indians and Hindus, because I am not. I am criticising culture. As it is culture that humanizes us and a citizen of any country is only as good as their culture is. The British succeeded in destroying the entire fabric of Hindu society 300 years ago, and they supplanted it with a new generation of Indians that rejected their own culture, history and traditions and glorified Western culture. Even today Indians are in high praise of Western culture and capitalism.
Meanwhile, in the West the opposite happened, a section of Western society embraced Hindu culture and this lead to many counter-cultural movements and the ushering in of new-thought. In the West, you find more people critical of capitalism than you do in India, where capitalism is rampant. This is also why you find more progressive and spiritual people in the West. This has definitely been my experience.
So what does this all mean? It means that India is no longer the centre of the world and nor is it the centre of spirituality. Even Hindus gurus are moving into the West, because they often find that it is in the West that they find more sincere seekers. Therefore we must accept the fact of today that Hinduism is no longer just the property of India, but it has become the property of the new globalized world. In the new globalized world there is no particular centre anymore. The idea of nation-states will become defunct this century. The world is now becoming more like the ancient Vedic ideal: a global family.
We must abandon all kinds of nationalistic philosophies and think more globally. Currently, the globalized world that we are living in is largely a Westernized world, but it need not be Westernized. It can also be Indianized. This is why I predict that in the future a clash of civilisations will take place: India vs the West; Dharmic vs Abrahamic. Hindus need to push for a Vedic world in rational public spheres. They need to take over the academic world and once again become the teachers for the world. Similarly, spiritual people from other traditions like gnosticism and the new-age need to also push for a Vedic world, realising that Hinduism is their common denominator. Rather than seeing themselves as separate parallel traditions, they need to realise they are actually part of the same Vedic heritage.
The Vedic religion is said to be eternal and therefore it is not the particular religion of any locale or period. It may well have developed in India, but it is not limited to India. It is the religion of all of humanity.
