Superstition: When the Goddess of Fear Becomes an Agent of Redemption

 **15 June 2003**

Nothing perhaps comes without its set of disadvantages and advantages.

Pros and cons being just relative hypotheses, for as far as the ultimate abstractness, the absolute impracticality is concerned, everything is just a thing, a process just a process, or there aren't even that.

Everything or nothing at all.

Well, as per our tiny, puny bit of utilities, everything serves us with its advantages and disadvantages.

Then how can superstition, with its fabled mammoth draw of agony, ignorance, ill effects, be deprived of its little set of advantages?

Superstition, like any relative phenomenon, serves us in some ways as well.

There are some chronic cases, as we know them to exist.

Such are the cases which logic can't snare in its resolving, explanatory tentacles.

They lie unsnared.

The case of chronic addiction, someone following an immoral path, some in-laws torturing their helpless daughter-in-law, etc., which medicine, logic, social bindings can't remove off the track of its unwanted rails.

Superstition, as we know, can strike terror even more so in wrong hearts, for they have always this subconscious intimation of the wrong acting as the backstage drapery behind the drama of their life.

It can be ruffled easily, provided we use such gusts of wind as superstition.

First lead them—the wrongdoers—into believing in the magical, supernatural powers of some black magician, faith healer or any type of godman, and then get them reprimanded for their doings.

Get them prescribed with some hocus-pocus rituals with stern prohibitions regarding the pathways of life.

I have seen a chronic drinking case put into positive gear in such a manner as this.

The faith healer gave such a marvellous performance that the drunkard fell into believing in his miraculous powers.

He then gave him a powder which would, for weeks to come, put him on a vomiting spree at the merest recollection of the taste of alcohol.

Still playing his cards well, he wrote some numbers on paper, asked the fellow to put his finger on one, gave him the sternest warnings to choose as per the force of all his whole being, asked several times, as if it was a question of life and death, to change his option.

(For the involuntary chance proceedings of his pen scribbling something on paper, a particular finger falling over one of the figures—this, he said, was driven by the will of God, providence, the affected karmic score of the person with the finger, etc., etc.)

And looking at the choice with some horror, he scribbled something on the paper, which roughly translated as:

"Still driven by the tamasic elements. You have chosen a fatal number, the number five."

I know, for the welfare of the poor fellow, he would have said the same thing for any number.

"If you follow the same urge as has been followed thus far, you will die within the next eleven and a half months.

"Drink wine—that will be the end of you within that time.

"And in making this ill-fated prognostication known to you through this open chance given by me, God wants to warn you.

"It is your good deeds of some birth that you stand a chance of your redemption.

"Quit drinking, otherwise the evil stars will follow you to your doom.

"Put the slip as an affidavit of your mortality.

"Get it encased behind a glass frame and put it on a wall to be made known to all.

"Violate the sacred injunction and see the consequences."

Every part of his whole being began to shine with some mysterious power, and the drunkard, already decimated of his confidence due to decades of drinking, humiliations, poor eating habits, began shivering.

And to help the wretch onto the road to recovery, he prescribed Ayurvedic medicines, brain stimulants and sedatives, in fact.

All this resulted in a happy ending.

Salute to the goddess of superstition.