Human Needs and Quackery

-

Whenever a human need arises a human often tends to seeks help from other humans. Thus when a human has a health problem he seeks a doctor that can help him. The trouble is that this world is made up opposites -  good and bad, truth and lies etc. For every genuine practitioner out there, there are also quacks willing to lie about their abilities or to exploit the need of a fellow human to satisfy their greed rather than any sincere desire to help. Unlucky persons can get trapped by such exploiters or agents of the devil and instead of getting real help end up loosing their health or money or both. It requires utmost wisdom to protect oneself from falling into the wrong hands.

Such quackery and greed does not exist merely in the field of medicine but also in every other sphere of human need. What may be said though that more acute the human need, the more extensive  the exploitation. Unfortunately, spiritual quackery has also been widespread in human societies from ancient times. Such quacks range from traditional  witch doctors to modern cult gurus. A number of organizations too have been built up that dish out spurious spiritual knowledge with an eye on your pocket. At times these organizations are built up on the foundations of the teachings a saintly spiritual master. However since such organizations are more concerned about their incomes and influence rather that truth, it is not surprising that they embellish the original spiritual teaching with falsehoods and deplorable practices, all in the name of the holy revered saint and Almighty God.

It is not difficult  to pick out the frauds. See if they are in to accumulating wealth. They usually do it in a so called charitable foundation but keep full control in their hands for every possible luxury they may need. A truly charitable foundation/trust/society is not controlled by a family or a couple of persons close to the founder but by personalities from public chosen by well laid out criteria. Another check is to see if a cult is focusing and pandering primarily to the rich with a few poor thrown in for ad value. What is true of such fraudulent cults is also true of political ones in democracies of the world as well as billionaire ones and similar tests apply there too.

With modern science, communications and media such spurious organizations are exposed more quickly now than in ancient times. The result is that many modern humans have distanced themselves from such organizations and some even shun all spiritual knowledge as crap. That is unfortunate because just as there are genuine and quack doctors, there are also genuine spiritual masters. There have been persons like Gandhi, Kabir, Jesus, Buddha and numerous others who are not so well known but have been sincere seekers, practitioners and teachers. One of my favorites is the author Paul Brunton who pursued spiritual knowledge and documented his findings in numerous notes and books.

These latter saintly beings did not go about amassing wealth but rather even gave up what little or immense wealth of their own they had. Buddha gave up a kingdom. The words of such spiritual masters deserve respect and can be used by other humans capable of independent study to acquire spiritual knowledge in order to acquire immense peace and happiness that such knowledge can add to their lives, besides helping a human to evolve to wiser states of being. Care is required in selecting ancient scriptures for study though. The craftiness of the wicked has resulted in undesirable insertions and editing in order to lead the student away from genuine knowledge and into their laps.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Birds to Telepathy

-
Image
  Sparrow by  Laitche T he house that I live in presently was built in stages  beginning in 1991 during  vacations and sabbaticals in my career. By 1995, the ground floor of the house was more or less complete except for some finishing that continued later. In the center of the roof of the living room was a hole meant for a center light. To hide the protruding wires a small round plastic sheet covered it with another circular hole in the center of it for the light. A similar one existed in the front porch of the house. I lived in the house through most of 1995 with frequent visits of three or four days to Delhi. At this time a pair of house sparrows occupied the porch roof cavity and made it their home. There were no complaints about that since it was not intended to fix a light there in a hurry. Sparrows are cute little birds anyway and I often leave seeds out for them in the garden. Sometime later the female of the pair moved into the living roo...
Read more

The Palash Tree - Magic of Medicinal Herbs and Flowers and Back Pain

-
Image
The Palash Tree Flower B efore modern medicines became prevalent, humans treated many ailments with flowers, leaves, roots and barks of plants and trees. Ayurveda,  an ancient Indian medicinal science, makes use of many herbs and plant materials without substantial extraction of active ingredients as modern medicine does. The idea is that additional compounds in a medicinal or edible plant is an organic whole and a part of life that supports other life.  The complimentary compounds appear to play a useful balancing role whereas individually extracted and isolated compounds can be harmful. A modern example in wide use as food is sugar, a pure chemical isolated from the juice of sugar cane. Indeed there is no food or herb that does not contain a compound or two that could be from mildly to extremely dangerous if isolated and consumed but is beneficial as a group with other compounds. That is the reason why alcohol distilled from a natural fermented fruit juice and ...
Read more

You are what you eat, and drink

-
Image
C onsume an ounce of whiskey and you will notice the change in mood and behavior immediately. However, it is not just whiskey everything we drink, even the quality of water, or anything we eat has some subtle or significant influence on our behavior. Consumed over a period, not just the weekend binge, the type of food we consume literally shapes our personality prompting ancient thinkers like Hippocrates to remark, “You are what you eat”. Some question this by saying that it is our experiences and habits that shape our personality but the two are linked because it is our habits that shape our tastes and food choices. In another post in this blog it was  mentioned that a human personality is shaped by memory and experiences and one might ask which of the two is more significant - food or experiences?. My understanding is that humans gravitate towards the foods and actions that agree with their inner inclinations and personality and so in the end both causes are two sides of th...
Read more