I went to a
bookshop recently. While I was browsing through the shelves, a book called out
to me. It was a small book. It was totally black. It was entitled “The BOOK of ANSWERS” by Carol Bolt, a
professional artist living in Seattle. It was a strange book. Each page had an
advice, a short message. That’s all. There were hundred of pages of such brief counsels. If you were looking for a novel-like book or a non-fiction replete with facts, then you will be sorely disappointed. There was no story to start with. No conclusion. Neither a beginning. Not even a content page.
Here’s what made it even weirder. At the back cover of the book was this “HOW TO USE” section which reads as follows:-
1)
Hold
the closed book in your hand, on your lap or on a table.
2)
Take
10 to 15 seconds to concentrate on your question. Questions should be phrased
closed-end, e.g. “Is the job I’m applying
for the right one?” or “Should I
travel this weekend?”
3)
While
visualizing or speaking your question (one question at a time), place one hand palm
down on the book’s front cover and stroke the edge of the pages, back to front.
4)
When
you sense the time is right, open the book and there will be your answer.
5) Repeat the process for as many
questions as you have.
Yes, I know what you are thinking. Drop that crap-alogy and run. Save your soul while you still can! Unfortunately, I held the little black book for longer than I should and was duly tempted. Alas, I gave in. I squirreled over to one corner of the bookshop and started to list down a few questions of my own; some open-ended and the rest closed-end. Here are the questions I listed:-
1)
Does
my son have a future?
2)
Will
I remarry?
3)
What
will my career be like in the future?
4)
What
would make me really happy?
5)
Am
I in the right religion?
6)
Does
my future look bright?
7)
Is
my wife right for me?
8)
What
is the meaning of life?
Out of
curiosity, I rubbed the edge of the pages, back to front, like stroking the top
of my bare-belly, and gingerly turned a page. To the first question “Does my son have a future?”, I got this
answer, “USE YOUR IMAGINATION”. I was
puzzled at first. Then I scratched my forehead and reflected. Mm…maybe it is all about imagination. With
imagination comes innovation, and with innovation comes invention. Ok, that
sounds satisfactory. My son would just
have to imagine out a future for himself. Let’s go for another spin or flip, I
mused.
I then
recalled my second cheeky question, “Will
I remarry?” Of course, I was just being playful and wanted to see what the
Book of Answers had to offer. Was it for
real? So, after the usual stroking, I turned another page and the pulp
oracle answered, “BET ON IT”. Ouch! That was weird. I was confounded,
speechless.
I quickly
dismissed it and went on to the third question without thinking, “What will my career be like in the future?”
The page that found me was, “DON’T FORGET
TO HAVE FUN”. Well, that’s interesting. For me, the book was telling me to stop
thinking about my career as work and start thinking about it as fun. Profound, I thought to myself. Then, I
progressed to the fourth question, “What
would make me really happy?”
A sense of
anticipation lingered in the air before I flipped and this was what my eyes set
on, “DON’T IGNORE THE OBVIOUS.”
Mmm…that’s deep, enlightening even. Is
the book trying to tell me that happiness is right before my very eyes? That
is, in the laughter of my daughter? In the kiss I had this morning with my
wife? In the times I enjoyed with my son jogging together? Wow, for a
moment, I thought the Book of Answers was really up to something. It was timely
and sagely. It knew me. It knew about life. It was like it “had been there” and “had done that”.
Then, as I
got my senses back, I let out a sustained chuckle. How silly. I guess out of the one reader who got most of the
answers spot-on from the Book of Answers, there are five or more who walked
away in disappointment or ridicule. The Book of Answers is just about as randomly
correct as tarot cards, Ouija board and fortune cookies. There is just no
logical explanation for its so-called tailored and timely advice except by a
stroke of pure chance. This reminds me of what the late physicist Richard
Feynman once said, “The first principle
is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Indeed, we
are easily fooled. As a human race, we are incurably and indissolubly gullible.
We believe anything and many things (me included). In the book, Why we believe what we believe by Dr
Andrew Newberg, the author summarizes the following reasons why we believe:-
1)
They
help us to organize the world in meaningful ways.
2)
They
give us our sense of ourselves.
3)
They
help us to take action in specific ways.
4)
They
allow us to accomplish our goals.
5)
They
help to regulate the emotional centers of the brain.
6)
They
allow us to socialize with others.
7)
They
guide us in our moral and educational pursuits.
8)
They
heal our bodies and minds.
So, it can be
seen from the above that our beliefs, whether they are scientifically verified
or not, help us to navigate this complex world. It gives us a sense of purpose
and meaning. It defines us in a way that helps us to define the world and make
sense of it. But sometimes, or at most times, our belief can be self-sabotaging.
It can suppress truth (reality) or ignore it. It can thwart common sense. It
can also ossify our position and make us resistant to purposeful changes.
Especially when beliefs become self-serving, we can be led by the nose by them
because as a Greek statesman/orator once said, “Nothing is easier than self-conceit. For what each man wishes, he also
believes to be true.” Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of religious
fanaticism.
I guess it is
easy to entice anyone with the gospel of health, wealth and all round goodness.
In fact, just yesterday, I was surfing Facebook
and I stumbled upon this post, which reads, “If you worship a small god, you are serving the wrong god,” said
Katherine Kaufman (sic – “Kuhlman”). When the Lord asked me to trust Him as my
sole provider, I told the Lord very bluntly, that I will not accept eating
porridge and salted fish everyday or wear lousy clothes. Because I am not
serving the king of beggars but the King of all kings on earth and the Lord of
all lords in heaven…”
For me, it is
difficult not to accept that a loving and all-powerful god wants me to be rich,
happy and healthy. It is almost heresy to expect anything less. But the reality
is far from my wishful thinking. I know this is hard to accept since everyone
of us wants to feel special, singled-out, and different from the rest. This is
only human nature, especially for the immoderately religious. Our
disappointments and disillusionments with the world inevitably draw us inward
to seek solace, hope and encouragement in our beliefs. But at times, the refuge
that we seek unfortunately ends up on the wrong side of the faith. We mistake
our needs and wants for God’s and we enlarge our own estate rather than His. This
is also where we use God as a ladder to scale up our hierarchy of wants. We therefore run the risk of telling God what we want instead of
allowing God’s will to unfold in our life and at His own time. This is also why
we are putty in the hands of miracle healers who claims to have supernatural powers.
Take Adam
Dreamhealer for example. He claimed that a large black bird once revealed to him
the secrets of the whole universe. Thereafter, he has the powers to heal. He
has many followers and patients who put their faith on him. If you can make
sense of it, his website reads, “Adam
uses energy healing in a unique way to merge the auras of all participants with
healing intentions. Then he uses holographic views to energetically affect
through intention those present.” Then we have Natasha Demkina who claims
that she has x-ray vision to diagnose diseases. This is what she has to say
about her preternatural abilities, “I was
at home with my mother and suddenly I had a vision. I could see inside my
mother’s body and I started telling her about the organs I could see. Now, I
have to switch from my regular vision to what I call medical vision. For a fraction
of a second, I see a colorful picture inside the person and then I start to
analyze it.” Move aside, Superman.
The gullibility
galore does not end here. There is the all-pervasive magnet therapy. Proponents
of this unusual and unverified therapy claim that placing magnets close to the
body can treat various ailments, even heal bones and improve blood flow. Mind
you, this is an industry that has more than $1 billion in sales of magnetic
bracelets, shoe insoles, neck braces and even pillows.
How about homeopathy? This is a very strange form of
alternative medicine. In the book Trick
or Treatment, the authors Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst describes it as
such, “A system for treating illness
based on the premise that like cures like. The homeopath treats symptoms by
administering minute or non-existent doses of a substance which in large
amounts produces the same symptoms in healthy individual. Homeopaths focus on
treating patients as individuals and claim to be able to treat virtually any
ailment, from colds to heart disease.”
I seriously
can’t imagine how a near complete dilution of a substance can cure an ailment
which a proper dosage of that same substance is responsible for causing. Yet,
people all over the world blindly put their money into such treatment even when
there is a mountain of evidence to disprove it. I think this doggerel from the
first Episcopal Bishop of Albany is most apt to put homeopathy in its place, “Stir the mixture well/Lest it prove
inferior/ Then put half a drop/Into Lake Superior/ Every other day/Take a drop
in water/You’ll be better soon/Or at least you oughter.”
Bloodletting
is another form of treatment that was popular in the eighteen century. It was
believed that cutting skin and severing blood vessels could cure many ailments.
Patients were literally made to bleed out in order to balance the four humors
in the body, that is, blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. George
Washington was suspected of being bled to death via bloodletting. Another
perverse treatment is trepanning. It was once used to treat many ailments in
particular migraine. No further details is required to describe this most
bizarre medical intervention except to say that it involves drilling into the human
skull in order to relieve pressure from the brain.
Many of us
may not be familiar with Dr John R Brinkley. He was a twentieth century medical
quack who believed that transplanting the gonads of billy goat into men would
reverse or at least halt the ageing process and improve the patient’s sexual
experiences. I can’t understand why many men would stand in line to offer their
family jewels to a fraudster to be replaced with those of goats! (and why
goat’s anyway and not lion’s?) I guess anything that promises youthful virility
to men of certain age is definitely a balls-grabber (pardon the pun).
And then,
there is Prince Charles. In the disgusting revelation of the so-called “Camillagate”
tapes, he talked of reincarnation as his mistress’s tampon! (Honestly, most
honestly, in my craziest moments of spousal affection and admiration, I didn’t
even come close to that thought) Of course, in the privacy of lovers’ chatters,
one can be expected to be flippant and liberal, almost nonsensical, about
things. That’s most understandable. It was therefore more likely a joke that
was made in very bad taste than an endorsement of a belief. But this was also
the same man who once encouraged people to talk to their plants. In a 1986
interview, he was caught saying: “I just
come and talk to the plants, really – very important to talk to them. They
respond.” I know many plant-lovers chat with their plants. They are more
like social monologues with oneself as I do it often when driving or in a
train. But for the future heir to the royal throne to go on air to say that the
plants respond when they are talked to may be stretching the science of botany
a tad too far.
Anyhow, there you have it. The crazy things that people believe and do. (Actually
I am tempted here to write more about how it is legal to engage in festive intercourse with
donkeys in a northern Columbian town of San Antero, but then I think that would
be an overkill). I guess we will always believe in such things as long as they hold out something for our benefit; even if they make the remotest of sense to us. Alas,
it is often the bait that hides the hook. But sometimes, I think that you don’t
even need a bait for some people. You just need to polish the hook to make it
glitter, throw your line into busy waters, and wait for the definite tug. They
will surely come. I call it the tug of fools.
Let me end with this thought from Sherlock Holmes. “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic,
and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all
the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which
might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of
other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the
skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his
brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his
work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect
order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can
distend to any extent. Depend upon it; there comes a time when for every
addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the
highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the
useful ones.” Time for some mental
spring cleaning? Cheerz.
POSTSCRIPT:-
I think I owe
it you my reader to finish what I first started. So, for the sake of
completeness, here is what the Book of Answers has to say about my remaining
questions (and I leave it to you to make sense of it):-
1)
Am
I in the right religion?
2)
Does
my future look bright?
3) Is my wife right for me?
4) What is the meaning of life?
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