Stock market of purity

Ston­ing to death was a com­mon pun­ish­ment for so called break­ers of the purity sys­tem laws among ancient Jews, and is still prac­ticed under cer­tain reli­gious regimes. Let us remind our­selves once again what kind of world it cre­ates, and what kind of socio­cul­tural cli­mate purity needs to flour­ish and entan­gle all within its web.

While the Israelites were in the desert, a man was found gath­er­ing wood on the Sab­bath day. Those who found him gath­er­ing wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assem­bly, and they kept him in cus­tody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man must die. The whole assem­bly must stone him out­side the camp.” So the assem­bly took him out­side the camp and stoned him to death, as the Lord com­manded Moses.
– Bible, Num­bers 15:32–36

I’ve heard some­thing like the fol­low­ing at least a hun­dred times in my life:

Just chant Hare Krishna maha mantra purely and be happy!

Or seen peo­ple believ­ing in some­thing like this:

The ideal all devo­tees strive for is exclu­sive ded­i­ca­tion to sri guru. […] The purity of spir­i­tual advance­ment depends on the grace of sri guru. Only when he or she is pleased with the dis­ci­ple can the dis­ci­ple attain purity, and no one can please their guru by aban­don­ing or rel­a­tiviz­ing him or her — by not being chaste.
– Har­monist, July 2009

Why is God bound by purity to bestow hap­pi­ness unto us, lit­tle flock on a tiny planet Earth, a mere speckle within the end­less uni­verse? Sounds silly and paradoxical.

It very much reminds me of the psy­chol­ogy that pro­pels a mar­ket mech­a­nism, espe­cially stock mar­ket. Peo­ple reach deep into their pock­ets, grab some money to buy invest­ment shares, real estate, gov­ern­ment bonds, valu­ables like jew­elry, orig­i­nal art, rar­i­ties, and so forth. Util­is­ing money to pur­chase hap­pi­ness, com­fort­able liv­ing in this life and util­is­ing purity to bar­gain for some hap­pi­ness, God’s mercy or good prospects in future life — what’s the real dif­fer­ence between them? They both illus­trate a mar­ket approach to get what we need to “feel secure” and to be “saved from the blaz­ing ago­nies of mate­r­ial existence”.

Biz­zare rules of purity

The true trick with every mar­ket is that is not ruled by the abun­dant offer — no mat­ter what that can be — but only by means of acqui­si­tion, which in this case becomes purity. In tra­di­tional stock mar­kets money rules. Sim­i­larly in spir­i­tual mar­kets of this world purity rules. When purity becomes cur­rency, then noth­ing else mat­ters for cur­rency can “buy you any­thing”. You live not to spend it, buy things with it and then for­get about it, but the mar­ket entails: you need to be con­stantly liq­uid. Liq­uid­ity means being able to eas­ily con­vert all your assets into cur­rency, or in our case in purity. Gor­don Gekko, a ruth­less multi-millionaire char­ac­ter played by Michael Dou­glas in Oliver Stone’s mas­ter­piece movie ‘Wall Street’ would call that “You become a player.” A player in the stock mar­ket of purity.

Purity puts a pres­sure on you. You need purity. Des­per­ately. Purity gets you every­thing. There­fore you work hard every day to earn purity. How­ever, often­times that is not enough to play in demand­ing mar­ket games, so you need more income flow­ing in. What can help? Sell­ing some­thing, rather than pour­ing in penances and hard work alone? Or fill­ing up pock­ets with other valu­ables appre­ci­ated in the stock mar­ket of purity? Both are absolutely nec­es­sary. As Gor­don Gekko fur­ther said in the movie, one third of the wealth comes from hard work and two thirds from every­thing else: mainly from inher­i­tance, inter­est accu­mu­lated, stock and real estate speculation.

Let’s see inher­i­tance. In mar­kets of purity inher­i­tance is some­thing you get by belong­ing closely to some­one who was recog­nised as a great player and was con­sid­ered a wiz­ard of purity. Being in the line of some well known mar­ket guru, for exam­ple. Being born in a fam­ily of priests, imams or brah­mins is con­sid­ered to be very pro­pi­tious. Or being their good friend, or a dis­tant rel­a­tive. You scratch your back on your ancestor’s life of achieve­ments, the result­ing social sta­tus and use it as a win­ning bid to get more cur­rency and invest­ment options. Your true achieve­ments don’t really mat­ter because inher­i­tance puts you instantly for­ward. Sud­denly your voice mat­ters and you’re in the game.

Inter­est accu­mu­lated is every­thing you gain on assets prop­erly invested into purity mar­ket options. Spir­i­tual mar­kets of purity claim God, as a supreme trea­surer and a bean counter, care­fully cal­cu­lates all your deposits and adds on a proper inter­est that you can with­draw at a cer­tain time, or use to rein­vest. The choice is yours, but obvi­ously mar­ket indeed wants play­ers to accu­mu­late as much cur­rency as pos­si­ble because that’s the true goal. Liq­uid­ity. So you’ll prob­a­bly tighten up your waist belt and reinvest.

How­ever, even all that is not enough, as mar­ket has tremen­dously high expec­ta­tions from its play­ers. Often you ask your­self does this fran­tic game makes any sense, but you have lit­tle time to recon­sider and change your life, as you’re firmly bound to mar­ket rules by dif­fer­ent sets of fears for your very exis­tence. Can you find courage to chal­lenge them? But you don’t have enough time even to earn enough to stay in the game. Now when you’ve reaf­firmed your­self this is the only way to go, you’ll shout out one more loud ban­zai and continue.

What major promise keeps you in the game? An ora­cle that says you should never for­get that one per­cent of all play­ers pos­sess half the spir­i­tual wealth avail­able in those mar­kets, and only one per­cent of those one per­cent will even attain God’s mercy. You really want to be one of them. You indeed need to ven­ture into stock and real estate spec­u­la­tion.

What is that? It is fol­low­ing: you need care­fully observe the bids on the mar­ket and try to pre­dict where’s best to invest. Is there some­one or some­thing really pop­u­lar at the moment in spir­i­tual mar­kets of purity you should come close to? Invest in his or her shares? You need to mon­i­tor every­thing care­fully, for you never know who’s gonna appear next, with a more com­pre­hen­sive port­fo­lio, inher­i­tance cap­i­tal and thus more promis­ing future for invest­ment. Be care­ful, for invest­ing into stocks of ‘wrong saints’, ‘out-of-ordinary gurus’ or some sus­pi­cious reli­gious thoughts may cause ban­ish­ment from the cir­cle of your friends and men­tors. You surely don’t want that.

You should also re-evaluate your assets reg­u­larly. Do they yield enough purity? Should you get rid of some­thing? Per­haps that which is not pure enough, that doesn’t earn a high inter­est rates in purity mar­kets at the moment. That can be some real estate of your life, say, rela­tion­ships with oth­ers which the cul­ture of purity mar­kets call ‘impure and non-winning bid’ rela­tion­ships? Say, aban­don­ing school, fam­ily, young chil­dren, wife or a hus­band, friends? Or it can be your own indus­try, tal­ents, hob­bies, ideas and fruits of your knowl­edge and thought that is con­sid­ered impure and not wor­thy of God’s mercy?

Greed for purity is mighty. Those who give up just every­thing impure in peo­ple eyes are con­sid­ered sheiks in the purity stock mar­kets. They are “top play­ers”. We also call them renun­ci­ates. But how­ever you call them, every­one looks at them atten­tively, watch­ing how they bid in order to learn few tricks ‘from the best’. That’s why they, like Gor­don Gekko, have thou­sands of poor Bud Foxes who want des­per­ately to become like them and will do anything.

“Save us mas­ter, we are fallen. We want to become as pure as you are,” they pray in exhaus­tion. A whole new par­a­digm of spir­i­tu­al­ity arises, which rules this world by mock­ery and fear, and dri­ves it downhill.

Who can say, “I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and with­out sin”?
– Bible, Proverbs 20:9

In his book ‘Meet­ing Jesus Again for the First Time; The His­tor­i­cal Jesus & The Hearth of Con­tem­po­rary Faith’, post­mod­ern Chris­t­ian thinker and the­olo­gian Mar­cus Borg reflects on mat­ters of purity which are old as eons. He writes:

“The famous words of Paul also negate the world of purity and cul­tural bound­aries and express the same inclu­sive­ness: In Christ there is nei­ther Jew nor Gen­tile, slave nor free, male nor female. Paul is not here announc­ing an abstract ideal; rather this verse reflects the new social real­ity of the [Chris­t­ian] move­ment itself. In short, there is some­thing bound­ary shat­ter­ing about the imi­ta­tio dei that stood as the cen­ter of Jesus’ mes­sage and activ­ity: Be com­pas­sion­ate as God is com­pas­sion­ate. Whereas purity divides and excludes, com­pas­sion unites and includes. For Jesus, com­pas­sion had a rad­i­cal sociopolic­i­tal mean­ing. In his teach­ing and table fel­low­ship, and in the shape of his move­ment, the purity sys­tem was sub­verted and an alter­na­tive social vision affirmed. The pol­i­tics of purity was replaced by a pol­i­tics of compassion”.

And it came about when He went into the house of one of the lead­ers of the Phar­isees on the Sab­bath to eat bread, that they were watch­ing Him closely. And there, in front of Him was a cer­tain man suf­fer­ing from dropsy. And Jesus answered and spoke to the lawyers and Phar­isees, say­ing, “Is it law­ful to heal on the Sab­bath, or not?” But they kept silent. And He took hold of him, and healed him, and sent him away. And He said to them, “Which one of you shall have a son or an ox fall into a well, and will not imme­di­ately pull him out on a Sab­bath day ?“
– Bible, Luke 14:1–5

Com­pas­sion vs purity

Com­pare this act of Jesus with an act of Moses and Aaron, who sen­tenced a poor man to death for break­ing purity laws on a Sab­bath day, men­tioned at the very begin­ning of this essay? They stand oppo­site, star­tlingly dif­fer­ent. One is an act of com­pas­sion and cause­less love despite laws, yet other a cold-hearted exer­cise of purity laws that sel­dom make any sense at all. Can a sane per­son today really believe that God indeed demanded a poor man col­lect­ing wood (and thus break­ing some obscure social rule of purity) to be stoned to death? What a poor man should do to please God through Moses and Aaron? His purity mar­ket stock options were obvi­ously low, and he was not a friend or a rel­a­tive of any­one ‘impor­tant’. Then he was a good scape goat to show peo­ple, to scare them pro­foundly, what will hap­pen if they don’t obey laws of purity. How­ever, I won­der has God thun­dered his com­mand for the exe­cu­tion of a man from the sky above, so every­one could hear it, or it was Moses who claimed he was the one who heard it?

Can a thought­ful per­son really believe we need purity to get few drops of hap­pi­ness, or a step in ‘spir­i­tual advance­ment’? We find infi­nitely more mercy in scouts organ­i­sa­tions, or just one hos­pi­tal by prac­tic­ing doc­tors and nurses who save end­less lives than in hun­dreds of asy­lums of Moses-like gurus and teaches who ‘hear God’s voice’ and whose mercy ‘thou hast to yet deserve’. What is so ‘advanced’ and ‘wor­thy’ in the cli­mate of purity, which is always ruled by fear? What a hor­ri­fy­ing God demands all that? Do we really want rules that cre­ate such a sadis­tic, hope­less, heart­less world with its roots in bigotry?

With a fol­low­ing para­graph I want to con­clude: every­thing we do is bet­ter to do with love, no mat­ter how small, or how insignif­i­cant we think it is. We can­not mea­sure love. Lov­ing atti­tude is bet­ter than purity of any kind, no mat­ter how big the lat­ter one is. Love is a higher prin­ci­ple than purity. Purity is a seri­ous imped­i­ment and becomes a goal in itself, which is a sad truth in all spir­i­tual prac­tices today and of antiq­uity. Purity is dis­grace that denies our human­ity, denies life, denies com­pas­sion. It always needs some ‘impu­rity’ to jus­tify its sor­row­ful life, and thus it lives to find blem­ishes and spots in every­thing and every­one. It rules by fear, stops peo­ple to think and to feel out­side its bound­aries. It has noth­ing to do with spir­i­tual, or life affirm­ing. Quite the oppo­site — it’s life denying.

But if I said it just like that, with­out any elab­o­ra­tion, who’d believe me a word?

– Zvon­imir Tosic

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 21:46 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with ancient jews, guru, purity, stock market of purity, vaishnavism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.