Teaching meditation in the land of its birth I M BACK, after nearly four weeks of grueling but highly successful

lecture tour i n Sri Lanka and India. The hectic trip brought my wife and me to Colombo in Sri Lanka, and Madras (now Chennai), Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta (now Kolkotta), Poona (now Pune), Bomba y (now Mumbai) and New Delhi in India where I conducted workshops for the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) chapters there. Remote viewing, self-healing through visualization and telepathy are topics comp letely outside an executive s field of work and competence. But these mental exerc ises that I made them perform were very well received and highly successful.They were an extraordinary group of management people. In Pune, for example, almost all participants successfully performed telepathy t o their great surprise, the highest percentage of success I ever achieved. In re mote viewing, over 90 percent of participants in each chapter succeeded in proje cting their sense of awareness to a distant place and described accurately what they had never seen before.The percentage of success in the self-healing through visualization exercise was difficult to determine because laboratory analysis w as required to find out some illnesses. But those suffering from physical pain l ike headaches and back pains, were relieved of their problem. FascinatingI have always been fascinated by India because of its antiquity, myst icism and many stories of paranormal events. I ve heard that in India, there are p eople who can make things appear out of nowhere, walk on fire or have their skin s pierced by sharp knives without getting hurt. People can stay alive without an y food or any liquid for months, and heal all sorts of illness at an instance. I thought I would have a chance to witness these things, but I saw nothing of th e sort. Mystic people with extraordinary powers are not found in the cities but in far places or remote villages hundreds of kilometers away. They shun the dazz le and noise of city living and prefer the quiet calm of country life. Instead, what I found was a very modern, progressive and dynamic country with a robust economy. It is a far cry from what I had been told it would be.Before I w ent to India I was told that in some parts people were so poor and hungry that s ome literally died on the streets. Nothing could be farther from the truth.In fact I ve seen more poor people on the streets of Metro Manila than even in Calcutta. I ve seen places here that are dirt ier and more crowded. There s nothing like being in the place itself to change one s false impression about a country. ModernizingBut it is true that in India, traces of an agricultural life can be s een side by side with modernity. I saw late-model cars running in the metropolis alongside cows and pedal-powered rickshaws.If one is not careful, one can easil y step on some cow dung especially near Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim temples that are visible everywhere like fast foods are in Manila. Just to show how modernization had eclipsed the ancient religious culture of Ind ia, in Bangalore we had to pass inside a big department store building to reach the big statue of Shiva in a temple behind it.There is no direct passage to the temple except through that department store! It is like entering a 21st-century building and exiting into a Jurassic Age edifice. Although I saw almost none of the mystical and paranormal side of India, the tri p had its own rewards. My wife had a grand time exploring the famous pearls in H

yderabad, the cheap but quality jewelry in Bangalore, and the magnificent silk a nd carpet products in Jaipur. Cheap books Me? I enjoyed visiting the bookstores with their unbelievably low prices. I coul dn t resist loading my luggage with a lot of them. I don t know why the Philippines can t have cheap books and cheap medicines like India. Like most Asian countries, India is fast losing its battle to preserve its tradi tional cultural heritage against the onslaughts of modernization. I asked our li censed tour guide, for example, what he thought of Ayurveda, the traditional her bal healing modality of India. He said, Well, it also works, but British medicine works faster. Here s another example. I felt awkward teaching Indian executives how to meditate and reach the alpha level of their brain waves, because where did meditation com e from? India! It was like selling ice to Eskimos. But these modern business executives have, generally speaking, lost touch with t heir glorious ancient past, like wealthy Filipinos who have become so at home wi th western concepts and practices they get surprised when introduced to somethin g their ancestors practised for thousand of years.