I Have Ghosted the Ghost of Spirituality!
First things first; to prove spirituality is a ghost.
I Googled to find the meaning of apparition: “a ghost or ghost like image of a person”. Given below are the meanings of apparition from other sources.
Cambridge dictionary: “the spirit of a dead person appearing in a form that can be seen”; Webster’s Dictionary (not Merriam Webster) Third College Edition: “anything that appears unexpectedly or in an extraordinary way; ...thought to be a ghost”; Merriam Webster: “a ghostly figure; an unusual or unexpected sight”.
What I got from the above collection of meanings is that a ghost is not a material thing. And, if it is not a material thing, its meaning is as slimy as the ghost in the original Ghostbusters.
In current lingo, if one has been ghosted, it means she has become a ghost to others who were previously in her circle; she has been thrown out of the circle. The still in-people won’t respond.
This has happened to me among my friends from both the remote and immediate past. It could be, at least among some of them, because I told them that I have ghosted the supreme ghost, God, or His/Her/Its earthly (or, is it “earthy?”) apparition.
All said, before I dive into the substance of this write-up, apparition is a ghost and a ghost is an apparition (I have checked). God is an apparition and an apparition can be, for those who are inclined to seeing ghosts where there are none, God!
This act of mine is different from the mundane ghosting. Spirituality is obviously not a material thing. Even being non-material it is still distinctly different between different people and peoples. What is spiritual to one group would be tagged nonsense by others. It can, at best, be an apparition and could easily be attributed to one’s mental state. Call that a ghost, a synonym of apparition.
It is this non-mundane ghost that I have ghosted from my life. Should God appear before me during one of my evening walks, I would merely step aside and keep walking.
No. Check that. I would walk through that ghost. Naseeruddin Shah walks through, as a ghost, material things in the 1990s movie Chamatkar. I would do the reverse−as a material object, I would walk through the non-material ghost that is God, something spiritual.
Gotcha! I hear you go, thumping your chest and all. If I tried going through the sculpted stones (and not non-material stuff) in Hindu temples, I would be gushing blood. You are missing a crucial point.
If I looked in the direction opposite to Mecca while praying, Allah will smite me. If a Jew cooked food on the Sabbath (Saturday or Sunday when God rests!), Yahweh will rain brimstones and fire on me. It is said in the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) that when Moses led Israelites out of Egypt, God is a Heaven to earth pillar of cloud in the day, and a similar cloud of fire by night, offering shade and light respectively. And, so on. Just check history to see who tortured whom during the Spanish Inquisition, and likewise who went to war against whom during the Crusades.
It is you, if you are a Hindu, who claims that God resides in the stone idol in temples (almost always made by man) offering no proof; you are not−and, none of your religious cohorts are−Bhakt Prahlad to make true his claim, God appears in a pillar as a man-animal (Nara-Simha). I am not so egotistic as to claim that none exists above, below or beyond me. As an aside, this isn’t that what Lord Krishna claims in a slightly modified version that everything inhered in him, did he not?
As of yet, no one who claims to be a spiritualist has explained why they needed the God prop in their life. And, I believe even the spiritual masters are not up to the task. Courtesy the women folks in my household, I am subjected to a four to five hour session of spiritual brain washing every morning; check that something spiritual cannot wash the material brain. Rather, it is mind washing they expose me to. The spiritual teachers contort themselves into pretzels, not in teaching spirituality, but in not stepping on the toes of the other teachers.
There is a benefit in being mind washed. You can’t consume too many pretzels before your stomach rebels. In the spiritual mind washing, it is not the mind but the brain that rebels.
It is my brain aided and abetted by my mind, not me per se, who ghosted spirituality as a true ghost.
Raghuram Ekambaram