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 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism