Faith, Belief and Worship...

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Over the recent years, India has witnessed an overflow of god-men, spiritual gurus and ‘swamis’ who seem to have captured the imagination of the masses. Their followers are not restricted to particular strata of the population, but span across varied professions and social classes.

One often fails to understand what makes such god-men so successful and their followers so faithful to them. Even though pure logic and scientific arguments clearly prove their tactics to be nothing more than tricks to deceive innocent (and not so innocent) followers, these god-men continue to increase their disciples not just in India but even from abroad.

But what is it that makes these ‘babas’ so much in demand ? I’ll try to explain here, how I comprehend the logic behind it all.

Every human life, from birth till death, follows a somewhat similar path. If one remembers high school mathematics, it is very similar to a ‘sine curve’. It’s a curve which changes it’s co-ordinates at regular intervals, consisting of crests and troughs.



The above is a basic and symmetrical sine curve. But every human life differs in the variations of each crest and trough he or she goes through during life. The positive and negative phases, though uneven in time and magnitude, always follow one another just as a ‘sine wave’ does. Which means, periods of happiness lead to not too happy ones, and bad phases are destined to end in good ones.

Now, suppose a person is rather happy and content with his life. Let us mark him to be at point ‘A’. But as soon he passes point ‘B’, things seem to start getting not so good. As he passes point ‘C’ on the baseline, things start going from bad to worse.




That is the phase usually when every person gets panicky and wants relief. The point marked as the red star in the ‘life-curve’ above is the time when such a person, feeling hopeless with his life, runs for some spiritual help, expecting it to turn things around magically.

At this point, he may be advised about the amazing qualities of a ‘guru’ or ‘baba’ by a relative/friend/neighbor or anyone for that matter.

This is when he actually develops faith in the aforesaid person to lift him out of his mess. He becomes a sincere disciple of the ‘guru’, expecting for things to change for good.

Sooner, rather than later, his ‘life-curve’ passes point ‘D’ and turns back upwards towards the positive side. He realizes things to be getting better and attributes this change in ‘fortune’ to his ‘guru’. As the curve passes point ‘E’ and gets still higher to the positive side, his faith now turns to belief for his ‘guru’. Now he is a die-hard devotee. By the time his ‘life-curve’ reaches the next peak at point ‘F’, he has already started worshipping at the god-man’s feet.

The above is just a basic example. A person may have a larger ‘crest’, thereby solidifying his belief for his ‘master’. Or he may have a prolonged ‘trough’, which he attributes to not being sincere in his devotion, and waits patiently for the ‘master’ to bless him.

Recently, I heard about a lady who recalled about how her husband fell ill while on a trip, having a fit and frothing at the mouth. And how she quickly dropped in some of the ‘sacred ash’ into her husband’s mouth which a god-man had given her. And how her husband recovered magically.

I have personally heard countless tales of businessmen running for the blessings of a ‘guru’ after bearing business losses and thereby becoming die-hard devotees for life.

Then there are sick people, who, after going through loads of medication, still don’t find a cure and start feeling better once they experience the ‘miraculous’ treatment of a god-man. Which may be anything ranging from ‘sacred-ash’, ‘magic-water’, or a ‘healing-touch’ to even a wave of a hand.

It is not that once a person having cleared a depression in life will not experience another. But the new found faith, leading to a belief makes his confident that he worshipping his ‘guru’ would once again lift him from the bad phase into the good one.

Thus, one will never find a dearth of blind devotees to every other ‘swami’ or ‘baba’ who look up to them for their miracles to rescue them from physical, mental or economical bad phases in life.

Almost every other spiritual leader, god-man or ‘swami’ has been found involved in some sort of mess or the other. Be it amassing wealth, conversion of black money into white, scandals, illegal land acquisition to even murders. But such cases have not affected the number of devotees to such frauds. The followers refuse to accept even obvious proofs of their ‘master’s’ crimes. In fact, they just cannot take anything that questions their 'guru'.

The bottom line is that people are scared to accept logical explanations of their troubles. They would rather depend on some supernatural cure that has no certainty but is based on positive faith and belief. And the above statement is probably the only thing which such fraud god-men know and take advantage of.

(Picture source: Google Images)