The Mushrooming Of 'Spiritual Market'
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
19 June
2023
One night a
fisherman stole into the grounds of a rich man and cast his net into a lake
full of fish. The owner heard him and set his guards upon him. When he saw the
crowds searching for him everywhere with lighted torches, the fisherman hastily
smeared his body with ashes and sat under a tree, as is the custom with holy
men in India. The owner and his guards could find no poacher, though they
searched for a long time. All they found was a holy man covered with ashes
sitting under a tree absorbed in meditation. The next day, the word spread
everywhere that a great sage had designed to take up residence in the grounds
of the rich man. People gathered with flowers and fruits and food and even a
lot of money to pay obeisance to him for it's piously believed that gifts, when
made to a holy man, bring god's blessing upon the giver.
The
fisherman turned sage was astounded at his good fortune. " It's easier to
make a living on the faith of these people than by the toil of my hands,"
he said to himself. So, he continued to meditate and never went to work again.
All godmen,
Babas, swamis, gurus, preachers, 'holy' men and women thrive on the extreme
gullibility of their rank brainless followers. In India and elsewhere, Gurudom
is the easiest and most profitable profession that requires no initial
investment. The only requirement is the sustained stupidity and blind
religiosity of people.
We keep
producing all sorts of Babas; they engage in an ugly act of mass hypnosis; they
become close allies of leading political personalities; with lavish ‘ashrams’,
constant appearance on ‘devotional’ channels, and all sorts of ‘religious
discourses’ they look like ‘miracle makers’. And in a society with its
heightened inequality and absence of basic facilities for a dignified living,
there is a constant search for ‘miraculous’ solutions.
Education
as it exists cannot fight this pathology. In fact, formal degrees/diplomas have
no relation with emancipatory consciousness. You can find IIT/IIM ‘educated
class’ bowing down before sophisticated/ English-speaking Babas who also
perform the science of ‘inner engineering’. I'm talking about that glib talker
Jaggi, Jaggi Vasudeva who calls himself Sadguru! What is needed is true
awakening that enables one to distinguish truth from falsehood, spirituality
from magic.
Now the
most important question is: Why and how do college and university-educated
people prostrate before all these frauds? The late Christopher Hitchens spent a
few months in Calcutta researching Mother Teresa and her so-called miracles. He
was bemused to see that many educated Bengalis had blind faith in the gurus and
swamis of Ramakrishna Mission and ISKCON. While these swamis of Ramakrishna
Mission and ISKCON were not loud and loquacious jokers like Ramdev, Asaram,
Bageshwar, Jaya Kishori, Nirmal, to name but a few, they (swamis) were also
full of recondite spiritual balderdash, culled from Vedanta and other Eastern
belief systems. Hitchens had a neurologist friend, Dr Kenneth Stewart, who
spent a few sessions of spiritual discourses and talks delivered by one suave
Swami. He found that most of the 'educated' followers had some internal
turmoil. In fact, we all have. But an 'educated' brain has a far greater and
bigger sense of ego than that of a common man. It subconsciously likes to
indulge in all sorts of esoteric and intangible word-play like transcendence,
internal and external sublimation, self-realization and self-actualization,
beyond spiritual horizons, dualism-non-dualism and all that jazz. The egoistic
mind of 'educated' followers feels good to hear all these abstruse terms and
talks and they come home egotistically happy and satisfied. That's why, you
find a crowd of all elite people listening to Jaggi or Ravi Shankar's
inanities. The 'educated' swamis of ISKCON or Ramakrishna Mission know it very
well that their spiritual nonsense gives a kind of an ego message and a 'high'
to the well-heeled. It's a two-way process. The swamis feel good by hoodwinking
their followers and the followers also feel good to be spiritually swindled by
these frauds. At the end of the day, all parties are happy. At the same time,
it needs a mention that human mind is perpetually agitated and is in constant
need of some sort of an ' Anodyne Treatment.' These Babas and swamis
provide that much sought after anodyne with their sugary fiddlesticks which can
chloroform timid and terrified minds. In other words, swamis provide
psychological bolstering and a false protection to their slavish followers and
disciples.
Today,
spirituality has become a fashionable term. It's nothing but a euphemism for
religiosity. The difference lies in the degree/s of ' refinement.' If
religiosity is for crude and rustic people, spirituality is for the urbane and
sophisticated ones. In short, both have the same chemistry, but the labels are
different.
Since most
of us are ready to be deceived, the charade of urban spirituality and Gurudom
will go on. Humans are still evolving and according to Yuval Noah Harari, we
may take more than 50 thousand years for complete evolution. Until that
happens, we'll continue to wallow in such mind-benumbing and self-deceiving
acts of religious stupidity and spiritual piffle.
----
A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several
languages including Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/mushrooming-spiritual-market/d/130023