Words have their charm; words can be alluring. No wonder most of the great leaders had their way with words. One of the best occupations you can have with words is of a preacher. People have created empires through their words in this profession. We want solutions, and on top of that we want easy solutions. If the solution can come through just words, there’s nothing better than that.
This is what a preacher gives you or at least a hope of it. Preacher gives you words, words that carry hidden promise of solutions to the problem we call life.
But can words actually give you solutions or are they not as effective as they appear when you hear or read them. Have it ever happened to you that you heard an advice and felt that this is the solution to all your problems and issues but as the time passed, the advice fell short or not even that much. It happens a lot, to a lot of people. This is the reason that we are not that eager to hear advice we only bear them somehow. The biggest problem with advice is that it is boring.
Why? That’s because you already know all of it. So, most of the time it is flat and boring. Skilled preachers know this; they know straight forward advice is not good for people and for business. This is where the game of logic and belief come into play. Misery is a fact and can be proven logically, but we are not meant to be miserable is a belief that gives reassurance. Preachers play between these two all the time.
The line
They masterfully give you a hint of logic and then sprinkle lot of belief over it to the point that you forget the distinction between the two. But skillful preaching is not a scam; it gives us something that we crave a lot. It gives us entertainment. Books about philosophies are for that purpose specifically. They give you a good time, plus you feel more knowledgeable than before as a bonus.
Words as medicine
But they can’t give you what they promised you. They can’t give you a SOLUTION to your life. Sometimes you may feel that now you have the secret you were looking for, this is it, but soon you will find that secret was only that, a secret not a solution.
You are not going to have a solution ever; no preacher can give it to you, but the problem is not with the solution or the preacher. The real reason you are not going to have a solution ever is because the problem is an unsolvable one. Either you can accept it, or you can add suffering of search to your list of miseries.
It’s something like this; you can never have true peace but in knowing this you can save yourself the distress that comes from searching for peace.
This sounds like a sound logic, but it doesn’t work as much as I want it to. This search is not something we can give up just by knowing that it’s fruitless, although one can manage it to a point. Revelations don’t hold as much value and power as we think they do. Revelations only have one true effect, which is shock. Shock does not have a long life; no one can stay in shock forever.
Shock of revelations
Even people who look like they are in shock from a long time are bound to revert back to the normal if given enough time, actually they are already in process. But most shocks are not even that, most shocks start wearing off after just a few minutes, even the strongest ones.
You know how people talk about meaninglessness and absurdity of life, when they are in funerals, but life starts looking really meaningful afterwards once they get back to the world.
It’s really weird that death is one of the most common things in this world and yet it manages to shock us every single time, anyway, shocks are not something on which you can carry your whole life.
People who came out as a different person from an experience are not integrally different. We all are different to each other; this does not make us different to the integral laws of our design.
Intelligent preaching has different uses to us. It may sound wrong but good preaching never aim for the change in you, it aims for relaxing you. It aims just to unwind you for the time being. Good preaching is like a drug, it’s providing an addiction. It unwinds you, it solves your knots and leaves you to get wind up again, so you will soon come back again for more preaching and the cycle continues.
The game of preaching.
The art of dissecting the existence is the real tool of an intelligent preaching. We have pressure points in our psyche. These points are also pleasure points if we can release this pressure by any means. The intelligent preaching deals with these pressure points specifically. One cannot give the ultimate solution to our real problem, the most one can do is a post-mortem of what is, in doing so the stress and pressure gets released.
I may be talking about some truth related to the universe and you may feel that you are not tense about your job or some other thing anymore, two completely unrelated things and yet they feel so related to each other. You can put God, existence or something else into the mix instead of universe, the key here is the skillful dissection.
The reason behind this is that whenever you dissect a fact or a situation and go deeper and deeper, you will end up with the absurdity. If miseries are meaningful, they become necessary. You are bound to stay miserable then, in the name of important and meaningful miseries, but a good dissection or postmortem of what is, makes any misery look absurd, small and meaningless.
To tell you
An intelligent preacher will not tell you that you have to put lot of efforts and calculate all your moves precisely in the service of god to reach the heaven or salvation, but he may tell you something like how ridiculously huge universe is and how miniscule you are or how insignificant is what you are or what you do in the greater picture, like if you didn’t exist, it wouldn’t even have mattered.
It’s not just the matter of knowing, a good philosophical preacher knows how to show it to you and how to make you see this through words and through stories.
A clever preacher knows that when you feel truly insignificant, so does your issues, you stop caring about your issues; at least you won’t care about them as much as you did before, for a little while.
The preacher knows that it is not a permanent solution; soon you will again feel that your issues are important and serious, they hold real significance and then you will come back for more preaching, for more revelations.
A dull preaching can be boring, but a sharp and clever preaching can be a drug, a drug for which people return again and again.
A thin line
But it’s a risky affair. People may get even more depressed and sad if they actually get to realize that they are meaningless and others can even object that they are not, that they have meaning if not to anyone else then to themselves at least.
I always wonder when a person give advises to another person, that how stupid this actually is. Do they know this another person; do they even understand where he is coming from? What is their life story? What are they feeling?
Even if someone says yes, they know this another person, I will have to say NO they just don’t. How many people know you the way you are? People know about you but how many people actually know you? Allow me to tell you what you already know, not even a single one. We don’t understand others no matter how much we pretend that we do, we only know the parts of them like they know the parts of us.
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Here’s some advice.
Everyone has different designs, way of thinking and situations from us. At most and at best we can only be relative to someone else, nothing more than that. I am not saying advises never work; it’s just that the idea behind it doesn’t make any sense to me. Your experience is not someone else’s experience, and it will never be.
The only thing one can do is to stay indifferent to someone’s personal issues and descript the reality as it is, only thing someone can do is to tell someone not what they know but what they see and of course I am not talking about your physical eyesight here. There are truths that are true personally and there are truths that are just true.
There is no medicine to life, no formulas and no specific solutions; there is only this existence that changes without asking you. You are not the driver of your life no matter how much you want or feel to be, you are just a passenger of it. This is the truth that’s just true, and what you are going to do with this knowledge is your personal truth.
The difference here is the difference between telling someone how they should be and telling someone how the things are. How they should be is not up to you and weirdly enough it’s not up to them either.
I never liked people who constantly give advice to others and yet I have loved some good preachers. We love to give advice and sometimes we feel obliged to give them.
It will be fine.
When someone is crying in front of you, you feel compelled to console them and tell them that it will be alright, you don’t know that it can even be worse from there, but we have to tell them something positive.
We all do preach in our lives knowingly or unknowingly on so many different occasions.
Do you know, what is the most difficult thing to do in any kind of relation? It’s to accept the other person as they are. Even your mother doesn’t love you the way you are, she can only love what she sees as a fitting child anything else she only somehow adjusts with.
They say mother’s love is an unconditional one but if given the chance every mother will change her child according to what she feels the perfect fit, and this is true for every other relation, whenever you will go against someone’s expectations you will find that they never cared about you much, they mostly, just loved their expectations from you. The naked you as you will be cherished nowhere.
Preaching, as we do.
The need of preaching arises from this basic functioning of human brain. Preaching is not something that you hear in churches and temples or over some online discourse, it’s everywhere. It’s in your workplace, it’s in your house, it’s in movies, it’s in books and it’s in every relationship because the need of ours to change others according to what’s best in our view is always present and is everywhere. Preaching is an integral part of our lives.
It wouldn’t have been a problem if our perception of the world wasn’t so different from each other. So, the situation end’s up with just a clash of different and sometimes even opposite expectations. So, if we are bound to be a preacher sometimes if not always than the least, we can do is try to be a good one.
Words have their charm, but that charm depends upon the listener as much as it depends on the speaker, it’s always better to just explain what is and just stops there.
Something we can’t help
I said it is better, I didn’t say this is what you should do, because what you should do is not for me to decide, it doesn’t matter what I think is right for you, I don’t know you even if I did.
You should not write they said, you are wasting your time, we have seen this world more than you and we have more experience than you. The thing is, they are not wrong maybe I am just wasting my time and they do have more experience of this world, but what they don’t know is that I couldn’t have done otherwise, I had to write.
They didn’t know this; they couldn’t know this. It could be a good thing if we all can learn how to be a good preacher because in different areas of our lives, over different occasions, we all are PREACHERS.
