Another fertile breeding ground for sacred is Nature. There is something intrinsically awesome in mountain ranges like the Himalayas, and in great seas and oceans, that triggers the metaphysical in us, and turn our thoughts toward the non-manifest. Certainly, the love of the English for their landscape and their sensitivity to itis arguably one of the most mythic and sacred of their values. And in Scandinavia, the wellspring of the metaphysical is not only the landscape but also climate- hence the dark winters of Sweden reflected in the brooding film of Ingmar Bergman, with their epic struggles of good and evil. So also for us here in India, the word 'Akash' conveys much more than just 'sky'. To walk on a seashore in the evening, or to cross a dessert and arrive at a house built around a courtyard, is an extraordinary experience. At such a moment, subtle responses are set off in our minds, responses conditioned by thousands of generations of life on this planet. Perhaps they are the half-forgotten memories of a primordial landscape, of a paradise, lost.
In any event, these spaces, open to the sky, condition to our perceptions very powerfully, bringing a sense of the ineffable into our lives. Thus while the symbol of education in North America is the little red school house, in India it is the Guru sitting under the peepal tree. Not only is the image of Lord Buddha under the peepal tree more sensible than the idea of sitting in a stuffy room, it is also far more conducive to enlightenment.