I found myself walking down a mountain path, through a narrow staircase curved out of rock. There were trees and mountains and hardly any human. I was a woman with shaven head and maroon cloth. My feet were bare and strong.
In one such session, the pain was increasing and so were the layers of current, consuming my physical body and dematerializing it in every step till the whole body was not felt. As I was present there just being a mass of energy I could feel no physicalness and so no pain. But I knew my physical body of course still existed and so did the pain. But to my surprise when I returned to my physical plane, there was no pain. Since it was gone, it could mean that we can easily remove any physical discomforts or diseases just by entering the energy body and adjusting the energy flow there. Probably thats what self-healing meant.
I was like an electric transmitter. I hoped no one touches me at this point, or I might just faint and this energy might break lose killing me or harming me and harming the individual who touches me as well. Because I was electrified. I felt I was radiating white light from my bigger energy body, with tremendous force. As the whizzing of the energies happened, I felt I could simply get uprooted from the ground. I started concentrating on my root chakra while this energy dance went on. I started to say in my mind, "Mother please hold me. Even though I do not know what is to be done, you know the best for me. Hold me."
I realized I could not feel the sense of my physical body anymore. At that point from below my chest came out a flame of light from that emptiness, yellow but not harshly blazing. It was a steady yellow light, calm and gentle. I could very well recognize this light was me. And I wondered, does that mean everyone has a light or rather IS a light in another dimension? As soon as I thought that, several other similar lights emerged out from other people sitting in the meditation chamber. I realized that even if my sense of body comes back soon, this light in that dimension is going to remain and play with other lights, interact and dance while I in my physical body continue my physical life.
To understand India it is important to understand its soul. This is a country with a strong spiritual core. When Krishna guides Arjun encouraging him in battle, he still discourages him in violence. Now this itself is a controversy that a mind which is not trained in this school of thinking cannot penetrate. This kind of controversy is in the lengths and breaths of India. To understand India, one has to train. This is a course outline for a design institute which could prepare its students with that stronger base.
When the designers themselves grow without much understanding of India within the discipline, that fight continues leading to the fight of ideal within the country. In an institute like NID, which puts so much emphasis on understanding the surrounding, whose very root was set to empower India through the understanding of India as documented in the India Report by Charles Eames, one still feels that missing links and history. When I visited other newer institutes, this missing factor was even larger to the extent that it distorted the very purpose of "design".
Ancient culture in India was flooded with poetry, music and dance. Art was vibrant in the lives of the people and technology was no substitute for the rasas of Indian art forms. In ancient times, vidya or knowledge was not only academic knowledge, but vidyas of yoga, music and dance, which enabled one to live like a yogi within the family life.
Different cultures over the period of time have developed different ways of "problem-solving". If you look at it that way then design and culture seem to follow similar routes. What is it then that the culture has to contribute to design? What is it we have missed out on? Is culture only about orthodox practices? Or can we rather add so much to "design" if we only understood its contribution.
