Tragedy of the Soul Food 2020
Shortage of the Soul Food and alarming suicide rates
“Despite progress, one person still dies every 40 seconds from suicide,” says WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 15–29 years, after road injury in USA. WHO has declared that mental diseases–stress, depression, addiction, psychosomatic problems–will be the greatest health hazard of the current century. WHO calls suicide as “a tragic social health problem” and states that there is no proven cure for it. What is more disappointing than these facts and figures is the following unforsightful approach of World’s leading organisation for a solution of this problem. According to WHO, The intervention that has the most imminent potential to bring down the number of suicides is restricting access to pesticides that are used for self-poisoning?
Is this all we can really do about it?
There are different departments of knowledge in different universities and many technological institutions, all to study and understand the subtle laws of material nature, and there are medical research laboratories to study the physiological condition of the material body, but there is no institution to study the constitutional position of the soul.
Famous UK Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill aptly puts it “The first duty of the university is to teach wisdom not trade; character not technicalities”.
This is the greatest drawback of materialistic civilization. Even the great scientists who have offered many wonderful scientific contributions have been unable to trace out the personal self, which is the cause of such wonderful discoveries. Despite a great amount of advancement in science and technology, which has brought about many luxuries and comforts, man is still not able to solve real problems of life owing to his meager scientific knowledge of his own inner soul. Although the dormant inclination for the soul search is there in every being, the authorities of the society are unfortunately not giving any education about it. Therefore people are becoming godless, and they are feeling baffled in obtaining the true joy and satisfaction of life.
According to the Great epic Mahabharata, the problems in society are because the man is limiting his sphere of activities just to fulfill the basic animalistic needs of eating, mating, sleeping and defending and forgetting needs of his own inner soul. Neither can man solve his problems by fulfilling these needs in a more sophisticated manner using advanced technology which may just give him a credit of being a sophisticated animal and nothing more. Renowned author Mr. Chaitanya Charan Das says in his article when science points to spirituality, “Why is it that we modern humans, the most “intelligent” among all species, are the only species whose members commit suicide in such alarmingly high numbers? Could it be that we are being tragically misled into abusing the human body for activities it is not designed for? Survey after survey has shown that spiritual practices protect people from self-destructive behavior and habits. Science has thus come up with a precious finding: spirituality is a sure solace for the self.”
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” ―Aristotle
The well documented research on, NDEs ,OBEs and Reincarnation studies by Dr Ian Stevenson scientifically corroborate the existence of the soul. According to vedic scriptures we are all constitutionally spirit souls. Bhagavad Gita says
“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.” (BG 2.13)
“As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.”(BG 2.22)
The external gross body and the subtle mind are simply the coverings of the spirit soul, just as this shirt and coat are coverings for your body. One should not simply take care of the shirt and coat and neglect the person who is covered by this shirt and coat, similarly one should not just satisfy the body and mind but neglect the soul. Just like nutritious food is essential to maintain proper physical health, similarly to maintain good emotional and spiritual health, one needs deep spiritual practices like Mantra Meditation and Bhakti yoga. Neglect of this food for the soul by the leaders of the society and people in general is the primary cause of the increasing troubles of the world of which diminishing mental health is just a small component. “Patrick Glynn of the George Washington University writes in his book God: The Evidence that surveys show that those who don’t attend spiritual prayer meetings are four times more prone to suicide than those who do so. Further, the giving up of such meetings has been found to be the best predictor of suicide, better even than unemployment.”
Before trying to understand the mysteries of the nature and world around, we need to give some attention to understand this soul-knowledge. Moreover if we act with such soul-knowledge we will be able to find true inner happiness and joy which we are so much hankering after and thereby bring some success in our pursuit of sanity in a chaos filled world.
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