India of the Heart

Extract

‘I let the crystals resolve into their mother liquid’

Wittgenstein

India had been exercising more and more of an attraction on me for some years, and I did occasionally wonder why this was so. Then I came across a saying of André Malraux to the effect that there is a secret India in the heart of each one of us. I began to realise why I was in India: I was exploring my own heart, yet, like Jung in regard to Africa, I needed the India without to bring out the contours of the India within. And this is in fact how my experience of India has gradually evolved: the outer world that now swam into my ken has helped to disclose new potentialities within myself.

At the same time I am also a child and representative of the European culture in which I was brought up, so the potentialities that India was opening up in me could also be those of my culture as a whole. And this is the spirit in which I offer these reflections from India: immediately they represent one person’s experience of getting in touch with new possibilities, ideas and directions, but, in so far as others who share my heritage can recognise themselves in what I say, they can serve as pointers to the way in which we might together help our Western society as a whole to direct itself anew.