Is there a more "spiritual" culture than India? It is the home of Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, ashrams, asceticism, yoga, meditation, mantra, chakras, kundalini, world as illusion, karma, transcendence, reincarnation, nirvana, and a crowd of many other "spiritual" beliefs and practices. The Buddha hails from there. India is the home of the inward turn: Turn inward and find truth and transcendence within.
Have you looked at the external, social conditions of India lately? I mean besides the news about the commonality of women being gang-raped. Azadindia.org helps paint the picture of what life is like in a culture that practices the inward turn-a deeply introverted, escapist, life-denying, (anti)spirituality.
Over the past several decades many Westerners have succumbed to the seduction of the Eastern inward turn. Meditation, yoga, renouncing meat and other material goods, chanting mantras, counting beads, balancing chakras, invoking karma, asserting reincarnation, exploring past lives, and aspiring to nirvana are common among Western New Agers and Hindu wannabes with last names like Smith, Johnson, Williams, and Jones.
Could there be a connection between following the Eastern inward turn and the decline of social conditions in Western cultures? If nothing else they're symbiotic. The Eastern inward turn feeds the social decline and provides a fictional escape for those in it. This in spite of unsubstantiated claims that those who practice the inward turn play an essential "spiritual" role in society, that of simply being. Their escape into being, into now, supports the decline.
It is past time for an about face toward a spirit-focused, life-affirming, empirically-based, Western-rooted spirituality.
Note: I said nothing about a revival of religion. We're way past that.
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