Connecting Their Selves: The Discourse of Karma, Calling, and Surrendering among Western Spiritual Practitioners in India

The wonder of darshan: Going beyond the local and the national

“…At the same time, some of my interlocutors were especially critical of the rituals of temple visiting and idol worship. Such narratives are constitutive of a 'spiritual but not religious' ethos, which I have examined elsewhere (Ganguly, 2018). 2.…”

“…and I got lost in her eyes. (quoted in Ganguly, 2018Ganguly, : 1035 I felt myself being caught up in the frisson. Jerry's intensity while narrating his first darshan of the Mother was contagious in the classical Durkheimian sense, and his ebullience had the quality that may very well have been in Durkheim's (1995) mind when he wrote about consciousnesses being open to one another during a gathering around the sacred.…”

The Mother’s children: The making of memory and intimacy at the Gurus’Samadhi

“…As I have written elsewhere (Ganguly 2018), my interlocutors would frequently take recourse to narratives of having a ‘ karmic ’ that is, past life, ‘connection’ with their gurus and India. Interpreting the inexplicable but undeniable sense of belonging that they felt immediately upon meeting the Mother, or upon arriving in India generally or the Ashram specifically, as the unfolding of their previous lives’ ties in this life, they recrafted their biographies through a different line of descent—the religious genealogy of belonging to their guru and India across lifetimes or since time immemorial.…”

“…Narratives of being visited by gurus in dreams are frequent in religious storyscapes (Visvanathan 1998) and they signal the inclusion or at least initiation into a religious genealogy. Dream visitations are a powerful sign of ‘being called’ by the guru which, in turn, is a sign of being recognised by the guru; such recognition is timeless and eternal (Ganguly 2018). Frank’s narrative is particularly powerful in that the Mother chooses to visit him on the day of her mahasamadhi.…”

“…Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy’ (Boym 2001: xiii). Going by Boym’s understanding, my Western interlocutors’ feelings of finding home in India can be seen to be propelled by a nostalgia for a lost spiritual past (Ganguly 2018). Theirs comes close to what Boym calls ‘reflective nostalgia’, the kind of longing that looks back at the past but attempts to resuscitate it with an openness to new future possibilities 23 .…”