India is essentially a land of religion. Religion has always been the supreme concern of the people of this country. Without hankering in the least after material possessions or temporal pleasures they have ever remained absorbed in their search for God on self-realization. The pleasures derived from material objects are transitory, they can never yield abiding joy but the joy derived from contact with God or resulting from self-realization is permanent, this joy can never pall of breed discontent. Hence, the Indians have paid rather scant attention to physical science and concentrated their minds on the science of religion. India seeks to develop human values through spiritual discipline, to effect a qualitative change of moral character. Religion is the glorious asset of India. That religion is the best religion which enables an individual to have a direct perception or direct realization of everything through personal experience since a religions the primeval and the everlasting Hindu religion. The everlasting Hindu religion is timeless and dates from the very beginning of time; it is the product of the Infinite and nonhuman agency; it is not the creation of a particular individual. The incarnation of God or apostles nurture it by incarnating themselves in response the needs of the age. So says the Lord in the Srimad Bhagvad Gita—
He means to say, ''Oh! Bharat, whenever religious values decline and
unrighteousness gains the upper hand, I incarnate myself, that
is assume a bodily shape. To protect the virtuous and destroy
the vicious and to install religion I incarnate myself from age
to age''. Whenever the human society loses the sense of right
and wrong and goes astray God Himself takes His birth in this
mundane plane, arrests the flow of unrighteousness and
rehabilitates religion, the saints preach religion in order to
make it suitable for the contemporary society and to bring about
a total change in the course of the society. As a consequence,
the direction of the human society as a whole undergoes a
change. Being moved to pity at the woes and afflictions of the
living beings of this Earth, God Himself descends from His
celestial abode and incarnates Himself on the Earth.
A right-minded and conscientious spiritual guide is necessary to
manifest the creeds and ways propagated by the incarnations of
God among individual human beings. Those who have been born as
human beings by passing through the different stages of
evolution from worms and insects. Animals and birds and have
elevated themselves to gods from human beings to the principal
God from a god and from God to the Infinite Brahma or attained
total absorption into the absolute deserve to be called
right-minded spiritual guides. The living beings are specially
benefited by a true spiritual guide. A bonafide(?) spiritual guide
awakens the spiritual enlightenment of ordinary mortals and
indicates the right path to them. He sprinkles their despondent
souls with ripples of peace. Being guided directly by a
right-minded spiritual mentor they attain self-consciousness and
gain salvation. They are released from the continuous cycle of
birth and rebirth and are not ground in the rack of mundane
existence and subjected to hellish torture.
Many ideal preceptors were born in different places of India in
different ages. One of these noble spiritual guides is Srimat
Swami Nigamananda Paramahansadev