I was in Turkey just two weeks ago. You’ve heard of Konya? Outside in the garden so many broken pieces, you know. Huge faces, half faces, all kinds of things. Old temples, all broken and made foundation stone.
So we were just walking through, and there in the garden, I found about four and a half feet, or more about four feet nine inches kind of Linga. Properly created Linga. An ellipsoid stone. Wow!
Four thousand seven hundred years ago, there was a full-fledged temple with almost five feet tall lingam, which was in worship.
And, when we looked at the history and things like that, they said this is almost four thousand seven hundred years old. Four thousand seven hundred years ago, there was a full-fledged temple with almost five feet tall lingam, which was in worship. And it was consecrated that long ago. Still alive! Cracked a little bit, so got disturbed. And I was just demonstrating for the few – three, four people who are with me – every point in the Linga is different, you know. Different points in the Linga are differently done. Beautifully done piece. I mean whoever worked on it they knew what they were doing. Not rudimentary job, very subtle work. Still alive – four thousand seven hundred years – thrown out in the garden, not worshipped – still alive. Because of a little bit of cracks that have happened, some disturbance has happened to the whole thing. But still there.
I just demonstrated. I felt this, and then because they had to see we put the Rudraksha and showed them, how at different places how the Linga behaves differently. So, this work has been done in the past plenty. But when very, you know, when my way or no way attitude came, these things were all raised to the ground in many ways. Otherwise whole of Europe was full of temples like these, consecrated spaces like this.
These eastern temples were never built as places of prayer. You are just supposed to go there, sit there for some time and come.
These eastern temples were never built as places of prayer. Even today in India, nobody ever leads a prayer in a temple. You are not supposed to pray or worship, but you are just supposed to sit there and come. The idea was people will go and sit there and benefit. This is how a temple was created. No priest, no prayer. There is a maintenance person, who is now calling himself a priest. Certain families were appointed to maintain the sanctity of the place, to keep it going in a certain way. You are just supposed to go there, sit there for some time and come.
In South India this tradition is still alive. In North it’s been disturbed because the, the brunt of invasions North India took, South India left, the Deccan plateau was generally left untouched by the outside invaders. So you were just supposed to sit there. Nobody leads a prayer, nobody teaches you a prayer, nobody says you must do this or that. You just sit there and imbibe this. Because these are all consecrated spaces. They created many. All these things were raised to ground. Only few that are left are generally in India and some other Southeast Asian countries. Otherwise whole of Arabia and Europe were full of consecrated spaces.
