Lord Buddha in Crisis -The Buddha Bar (Part 5)

There’s an influx of self help gurus popping up left and right in the holy business of “god shopping”. The trend of consumerism and individualism in society has created a new path for marketing spirituality to be more sellable as a product with a renewable repeat cycle.

Two and a half millennia after the passing of Siddharta the Buddha, it isn’t surprising to find that his life story and enlightenment is used by people to sell things attached to the concept of Buddhism. Buddha branding is everywhere.

Consumerist spiritualism is now a new trend and capitalists exploit the notion of spirituality for materialistic benefits. You can get dharma in department stores, on bookshelves at your local bookstore, or even over the Internet. People today love high-speed things and spirituality has been “newly packaged” to match the fast-paced lifestyle. The new fad is to “sell” spirituality that is easy and digestible like instant noodles — “fast-food Enlightenment”.

Having had enough with the old paradigm of life-controlling and mind-manipulating institutionalized belief systems, many are wandering, trying to find their own way and own answers. Following the dictates of supply and demand, a new market has developed “products” which attempts to showcase answers to those people who have become disillusioned with the old dogmatic systems. Many of them seem to provide an easy way out of the voids many people feel they have within their lives. Most make a ridiculously massive amount of money with their own catalog of self authored spiritual books, while a select few attain glamorous spiritual superstardom. In this new domain of contemporary spiritual guidance, these masquerading “holy hookers” are taking outright advantage of people and creating circumstances that vary very little from the old paradigm; they simply polish it up using a different language, and give the illusion that it’s something else.

The actual fact of the matter is everyone loves fear. The ending of fear is your death, and most people don’t want that to happen. It is fear that makes you experience that you are living and project a future that you will be dead. To suppress the thought of death, we have invented all these new mental states, pseudo mind sciences, listening to highly evolved souls giving talks, spiritual self-help books, a myriad of therapies, transcedental states of existence, an obsession with consciousness and superconsciousness, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. You are fed with words you want to hear — joy, bliss, beauty, permanent happiness and what not. They are merely words with no meaning. You make up your own meaning and eat it up.

Language is great tool for solving problems, BUT ONLY after it has created the problems in the first place — and this becomes the sphere of operation for modern day “masters” and “gurus” peddling their ware in the open market.