For many years I was enthralled with the spiritual glamour of India. The need to go there became a strong one, and in the end I surrendered to it. I learnt what the grasshopping tourist never learns; saw what the professional observer rarely sees; for both tourist and journalist usually lack the aspiration, the patience, and the preparations required to search for and discover what is really the best in any Oriental country.
I found much in that country that was of great interest and greater value, but I did not find the fulfilment of my Quest. That did not come to me until I was back again in the other hemisphere. Indeed, the Cosmic Vision, which revealed the Presence of Infinite Intelligence throughout life, throughout the universe and throughout history, which explained so many of the Higher Laws to me, came incongruously enough while I was sitting in a hotel room in Chicago. With this humbling insight, the need to go to India disappeared. And I then saw that it was really an ancient complex--a kind of auto-suggestion--inherited from my own far, reincarnatory past. Indeed, I found out that if I had remained loyal to the inward direction I had originally travelled, I need never have gone to India at all, nor to those other Asiatic countries where I sought for Truth. What I needed could be very well found within myself. But, I had accepted the suggestions out of my past as well as out of the lips and writings of other persons. And so I deviated from the inward way. The shortcut, which the journeys to Asia offered, turned out to be a long way, for I wandered over other men's roads, and, in the end, had to return, as we all have, to my own road. Indeed, there was nowhere else to go, and my Quest ended there.
The other ways were not without their usefulness and helpfulness, of course, but they lost that value the moment they were turned into substitutes for the interior way, which is unique and without a second because each one of us is unique. Each gets his own special experience of life, makes his own special set of contacts with other persons, and meets his own particular destiny. In his reactions to and dealings with all this, he is really reacting to and dealing with himself. He is showing quarrelsomeness, or trying to conquer it; he is losing himself in the day's activity, or saving himself from it in a half-hour retreat. He is letting negative thoughts or feelings stay in his heart, or trying to drive them out of it. He is practising a larger relationship and a kindlier attitude toward those he encounters in his day-to-day business, or he is failing to recognize why they--and not others who are quite different--have been put into his path by the Infinite Intelligence. His environment is really a testing-place and a disciplinary school.
And so I come back to the statement that going to India, or going to any other place, in quest of spiritual enlightenment is not so important as going inside one's self, and discovering Who one is. Moreover, if some have gone to India to look for an incarnate Master, others have gone to Palestine to look for a disincarnate one. There they lingered at the holy places, the sacred monuments, the historic ground where Jesus walked and talked. But, the attempts of both kinds of seekers bear real fruit only as and when they lead to the Seeking Within, for the indwelling Master, in the one case, or the indwelling Christ in the other. Yet, this final search the seeker could have begun anyway without leaving home. Indeed, Ramana Maharshi himself once said aloud: "Had I known how easy it was, I would never have gone away from home."
-- Notebooks Category 1: Overview of the Quest > Chapter 5 : Self-Development > # 285
