Nayikas Quest

Extract from a talk that Sashi / Raghu / Jyotsna gave recently.

"In the last 200 years or so what we have been pushed into not experiencing ourselves through our own eyes but through the eyes of Eurocentric constructs of the world, therefore our view of ourselves lacks dignity and respect. We end up overlaying a natural growth experience and traditional ways of growing up with interpretations and injunctions that actually prevents you from experiencing ourselves fully. Our ways get into conflict with the structure and underlying assumptions of man that govern the ‘modern educational systems’. We therefore get caught with all kinds of blocks. The open design of living and imbibing a whole way of looking at self and the world has all of a sudden become a liability! The lived grammar is subtle, and possibly not understood in its depth by the parental generation. The explanations and criticisms are grounded in a very different world-view and idea of self. So the object that you see that is supposed to trigger something reflective becomes an object for discussion and the discourse is framed in Eurocentric frames! Art that draws one inward from gross to subtle gets enmeshed in confusion! Freud comes in the way and calls the Lingam a sexual object and lo and behold, all Indian Gods can be critiqued as representations of sexual repression. The grammar of Yoga is replaced with the discourse of sexuality, of freedom and feminity. The young aspirant is faced with the very difficult task of honoring profound inner stirrings while being bombarded with an explanation fraught with guilt and shame. Indian Art is now forced to answer the western criticism and problematic of eroticism, and not follow its own path of movement from the outer to the inner."