The Influence of Stories

The teachings of Pashupatinath

Lineage authority of Trilok Akhada, a 17000 year old school of Nath Yoga.

Written by Om Karanjkar

Pashupatinath : “Children are taught to be OK with others making decisions for them. Right from schooling to ordering food at a restaurant.
No stories they hear have regular people. All of them are hyped up to grand levels. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales have ‘the world is a scary place’ kind of messages. Then come all the warrior stories like Shivaji’s to glamorise and hype up everything, so much that a regular life becomes worthless. History is confused with myth, and expectations go beyond possible reality.”

The idea behind telling stories to children is to teach them about the world. But if you really look at the stories that are told, they’re either mindless or downright disturbing. Nursery rhymes aren’t just silly strings of rhyming words put together. Humpty Dumpty falls off a wall and dies. Jack and Jill go falling down the hill and get injured. Ring a Ring o’ Roses is said to be about the Black Death, a plague that killed millions. What exactly are children supposed to learn from these rhymes?

Once they’ve grown beyond nursery, they have ultra-glorified historical heroes who never do a single thing wrong, ever. They defeat countless ‘evil’ enemies, conquer huge regions, are ridiculously rich, and basically not realistic. Look at Shivaji. His legacy is used and misused in so many ways that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. And yet people who grew up listening to these stories will swear by them.

Pashupatinath: “The simple checklist of life is this: health, wealth, relationships, longevity, and love. But the general media projects conflict as awesomeness. The bhramastra here is this: get isolated and fight everyone, and you’re awesome. Everyone’s life is a struggle because struggle has been glamorised.”

People get their knowledge about life through sources of fiction. It’s really bad when the facts in these stories are accepted as the truth. But it’s even worse when the philosophy is absorbed.

The way struggle has been glamorised isn’t new. While Indian myths have characters like Rama who was exiled for thirteen years and made it look like the right thing to do, modern stories have gone much further.

Look at Batman. He’s basically a modern day god. The hype is almost funny, in a sad way. Not just him, look at almost any other fictional heroic character. All of them have tragic histories. Almost every famous comic book hero is an orphan. The point here is that people make the correlation between suffering and success. That trauma is the only motivation you need, and being a 'hero' is the highest kind of success in life. This kind of thinking is dangerously wrong.

Pashupatinath: “Do not encourage stupid stories. Even the story of being in a cool yoga class is a stupid story. Reject its power over you. Serial killers and ‘psychos’ are also on a story power-trip. They just follow the story on the ‘evil’ side.

If any information has been funded to reach you, chances are that it’s not something you want to hear. Information that reaches you without sponsors – it might be worth listening to. It is usually devoid of an agenda.”

People on a story power trip can do a lot of things. Hypnotise someone to believe they can break bricks and they might just do it.

But this is a story. It’s not reality. And when the story fails, when the trance ends, they’ll have painful bruises for the rest of the month.

Story power trips end with bad consequences, and then people look for another story to get over them. Don’t get into this loop.

It’s no secret that marketing something enough will sell it. Spend enough money to spread the word and people will buy it, even if they don’t need what you’re selling. It’s how marketing works. This works not just for selling things, but also to spread ideas and propaganda. It’s how dictators control people. Forget politics, even religious groups use paid marketing now. And that should tell you something.

Try a week of Pashupatinath’s excellent online yoga coaching for free, visit www.trilokakhada.in