India: A Potential Spiritual Superpower

INDIA: A POTENTIAL SPIRITUAL SUPERPOWER India’s potential to be a spiritual superpower is based on its ancient traditions of tolerance, plurality, and mutual acceptance embodied by its Swamis and Sufis. I have always maintained that India is a potential spiritual superpower. Why is this so? This is traceable to India’s long spiritual traditions. Since ancient times, India has been engaged in spiritual activities. India has also been a land of pluralistic and multi-religious societies. Indian Swamis and Sufis followed the principle of inclusiveness. The pluralistic and inclusive nature of Indian society is not by accident. It is directly due to the Indian way of thinking. India believes in pluralism. A major school of religious thought in India is based on what can be called Monism. Monism means that the Divine Reality, One, is manifested differently and is present in every particle of the universe. According to this religious philosophy, everything in the cosmos is a part of a manifestation of the Divine. Adherents of this way of thinking believe that every human being, indeed every creature, is a particle of the Divine. This concept accords equal position and respect to everyone, regardless of religion, ethnicity, caste or class. This way of thinking is a major component of the culture of tolerance in India. It resonates with something that the wellknown Indian thinker and reformer Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) declared at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s