B&W B&W: Words/No Words

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Thanks for you kind comment.

This photo was taken in Varanasi, few days after a Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj (Allahabâd). After Kumbh Mela, many pilgrims and Sadhus came to Varanasi. We spend a week in Varanasi and (like you about my photo) I had mixed feelings about this spiritual place. Except foreign tourists, most people come there for spiritual reasons: some family with dying persons who wanted to be burned there as they beleive that doing so they will finish the reincarnation cycle, others to bath in the Ganga river and visit Holy temples and all of them to participate to the evening ceremony. But, like every place where pligrims and tourists are going, there is much mercantilism.

And about these Naga Sadhus (naked sadhus) most of them seem to stay under their tent, covering their bodies with ashes, meditating and smoking cannabis, except to bath in the Ganga. But few of them (like the one on the photo) stay in the middle of the crowd, giving blessings and asking money for doing so. The one one the photo asked "dollars" to my fiancée... An Indian living there told us that some of these naked sadhus are not realy holy men, being there only for begging money from tourists and pilgrims...

Very strange place...
A friend of mine spent several stays in ashrams in India. She was a doctor in classical medicine but had specialized in various alternatives - Indian and Chinese (TCM). She introduced me to this ancient culture of the Indian scriptures. For the last fifteen years I've been reading the texts of the "eternal wisdom" (philosophia perennis) and I'm really fascinated with the depth of these texts, both the scientific and the spiritual ones. The Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and Puranas have had a great impact on western philosophers and scientists of the 19th and 20th century (Goethe, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Thoreau, Huxley, Einstein to name but a few).
As to the Sadhus and Gurus who take money there is a clear agreement: an enlightened person would never accept money for his services (even the Dalai Lama is very outspoken about this).
 
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A friend of mine spent several stays in ashrams in India. She was a doctor in classical medicine but had specialized in various alternatives - Indian and Chinese (TCM). She introduced me to this ancient culture of the Indian scriptures. For the last fifteen years I've been reading the texts of the "eternal wisdom" (philosophia perennis) and I'm really fascinated with the depth of these texts, both the scientific and the spiritual ones. The Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and Puranas have had a great impact on western philosophers and scientists of the 19th and 20th century (Goethe, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Thoreau, Huxley, Einstein to name but a few).
As to the Sadhus and Gurus who take money there is a clear agreement: an enlightened person would never accept money for his services (even the Dalai Lama is very outspoken about this).
30 years ago, I was introduced to Transcendental Méditation (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) and developped interest for The Bhagavad Gita an Upanishads. After several months of steady practice, I quitted Transcendetal Méditation as it did not work for me, and so my interest for Indian philisophy... Now I am more attracted by buddhism, not as a religion but as philisophy and meditation technics. So I am sometime reading translations of sutras relating the teaching of the Buddha.

The path to enlightment is long and hard :)...
 
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