For The Reason Of Our Sanity

A rational idea of spirituality can heal the split personality syndrome afflicting humanity. Reason is a country India has always belonged to.

- Purushottam Agrawal

In July 2019, a ‘spiritual’ guru made the outlandish claim of having ordered the “sun to rise 40 minutes late” so he could do his flag-hoisting before sunrise. Of course, according to him, the sun followed the command obediently. Earlier, in another video uploaded in 2016, he can be seen in conversation with a US businessman, a self-appointed guardian-angel of Sanatan Dharma. Both the worthies are discussing a proposal of assuring (of course, for a hefty fee) billionaires like Bill Gates a rebirth with similar fortune rather than as a pauper in Africa. They propose to use the ‘jeevatama GPS’ for this purpose. Instructively enough, in both the videos, the discussion is neither sarcastic nor metaphorical, but as plainly matter of fact as it can be. The enthusiastically clapping admirers and followers of these worthies are not “uneducated” folk, but English-speaking professionals trained in skills like management and technology. They must have learnt in their schooldays that sunrise and sunset are caused by earth’s revolution around the sun. Some of them must have also taken pride in the fact that Hindus realised the heliocentric nature of the universe long before the Europeans did.

While deliriously clapping for their guru, however, they chose to forget that even a nanosecond’s break in the earth’s perpetual rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun will cause cosmic disorder—‘Mahapralaya’. Surely, jeevatama GPS belongs to the era of IT revolution, but the idea of assuring rebirth in similar wealth is obviously inspired by the sale of indulgences (assurance of a nice place in heavens in return of huge donations) by the Roman Catholic Church in medieval Europe.