In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores practicing Indian spirituality as a foreigner and shares the importance of approaching Indian traditions with humility, awareness, and respect for their deeper context.

The first thing that you should always remember when you are dealing with anything that has to do with India is that, no matter how long you have been there and no matter how much you have been exposed to, you are only going to be exposed to a very small amount of what the totality of the reality is over there. I say this as a person who went there 50 years ago and has spent a total of half of the past 50 years there. I am not even sure that there is anybody who has been exposed to everything that is the reality there.

Especially when you are coming from the outside, you need to realize that you are going to experience only a small window of what the reality of that particular experience is. It is very important not to assume that what you are experiencing, however valid and meaningful it may be, represents what is happening to everyone else within the larger context of Indian spirituality.

Always approach everything that you are exposing yourself to with a great degree of humility. You do not have the full context, and therefore you should not assume things or try to project ahead. It is especially important to understand that the structure of personality in the East and in the West is very different, not only in India but also in East Asia.

Generally speaking, in the West and among people who are more westernized, there is an idea that you can only be psychologically healthy if you are highly individuated and separate from everyone else, including your family.

Whereas in India and other parts of the world, there is a deeper understanding that, unless you are a renunciate, it is not healthy to separate yourself too much from everyone who is part of your family. This includes your immediate family, your blood family, and your extended family.

So when you are interacting with people, even people who may be spiritually advanced, you have to be very careful not to project your own expectations or your own way of understanding personality structure onto them.

This is important because it will not be useful for you, and you may misunderstand what is being presented to you if you do not appreciate how different the way things are organized in India can be from your own way as a non-Indian.

It is also very good to remember that the word for tradition is *parampara*. It means not only going beyond, but going beyond from generation to generation.

Many forms of knowledge have been transmitted within families or within communities. That knowledge has therefore become deeply connected with its context. You have to understand that context as much as possible, while also recognizing that there are certain things about that context that you may never fully understand.

Before you try to take hold of something and hold onto it tightly, it is important to remember that this tendency has become common in the modern world because we have turned many things into commodities.

Spirituality is not something that can be commodified. It is a reality that goes beyond the physical manifestation of everything we usually think of as physical. That is the whole point of the spirit, to go beyond.