All cultures have mystical traditions and tradition-bearers called mystics are highly venerated for what they said and did in their unusual lives.

What is praised most is their supposed mystical power that emanates from their ability to live in spiritual mist and think in imaginative haze. An unmistakable sign of such a power is their being gifted to work miracles. Human capacity to be fascinated by the unusual is unlimited but ability to employ reason and decipher the hidden meanings of the usual seems certainly limited. Hence the imagined mystical mumbo jumbo is paid more attention than actual mystical life which is always difficult to follow or emulate. A genuine mystic is defined by two things; his actual way of living, his practice, and his relationship with ordinary folks, the people. He/she chooses simple living if not austere that on the one hand marks his bond with the mass of people and on the other their totally non-possessive attitude towards material things.

Choice of simplicity in concrete life instantly connects them with the people who invariably are forced to live a simple life in a class society regulated by inequality thought to be a natural phenomenon. It may be a natural phenomenon but it’s not human one in a humanised world.

What compels mystics to tread such a trying path is their desire to see things from the people’s perspective. Why such a compelling concern with the people? It’s because ordinary people form the bulk of humanity who work hard and make life enjoyable but are denied joys of life. By denying material comforts of life the mystics create a deep sense of solidarity with the people who live deprived of fruits of their work in longstanding inequitable social, political and economic structures. Exploiters and oppressors, in their view, do not and do not reflect divine grace while the suffering ones certainly do. That’s perhaps why Jesus Christ says: “And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”. The prophet knew that a rich man was rich because he appropriated what the poor man produced.

Prophet Muhammad [PBUH] says: “Poverty is my pride”. In Christian mystic tradition it was larger than life saint Francis of Assisi who made submission to the Lord thus: “Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty; permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it has no other patrimony than begging”.

In the subcontinent it was prince Gautama Siddhartha who gave up life of riches and pleasures and adopted a simple life of a roving sage. In Punjab’s tradition it was Baba Farid and Baba Guru Nanak who showed the way. The former lived life of a poor man and opened the doors of his monastery to all and the latter rejecting the privileges caste and class identified with the lowly.

All of this unequivocally shows two things; simple life shall save us on this planet and poverty is not indignity. The both need a bit of elaboration. Notion and practice of simple life bequeathed to us by these great minds is crucially significant. Simple life implies less consumption. Less consumption means less exploitation of natural and human resources which in turn means slowing the process of environmental degradation.

Mystic view of simple life stands in marked contrast to the worldview created by capitalist society which hinges on maximum consumption. Ironically, the mystic view seems far more rational than the one touted by capitalism. What scientists came to uphold in the 20th century was known to the mystic ages ago; our world was finite and so were its resources. Earlier religious and secular concept of infinite word was poorly conceived, to say the least. Mystic insight encapsulates core of human wisdom; is infinite consumption possible in a finite world? The answer is big no. But the entire capitalist concept of individual and social being is consumption based. One’s individual and social worth is proportionate to their consumption. The more you consume the worthier you are. So consumption is the measure of man. Since majority of the people in a class society can’t touch higher level of consumption they are less worthy. Thus they are socially and culturally forced to earn more in order to consume more. In the effort they further add to their perceived unworthiness by doing dehumanised work. Can your fifty pairs of shoes make you know the steps of life’s dance better? Coming to the second point, less consumption in the capitalist society is akin to poverty and poverty is considered indignity. The prevalent notion of poverty tries to blatantly negate the highly insightful sages’ experience of poverty born out of their practice.

Prophets, mystics and revolutionaries lived poor and died poor. And the poverty was a choice, not a compulsion for them. It was they, not worthies in the capitalist scale, who transformed society and humanised it pulling millions and millions out of cycle of sufferings. So when it comes to human joy and happiness, the mystics and sages are uber-rational despite all their esoteric and exotic practices wrapped in mystery. The capitalist advocates of apparent rationality on the other hand appear as peddlers of dangerous opiate of irrationality touted as consumption-laced way of life. Equating poverty or simplicity or less consumption with indignity would be tantamount to insulting the wise and the sagacious i.e. the best of the best we ever had. In a nutshell, simple life - consuming less - means saving the planet, the only abode we have along with other countless creatures as of now. The notion of poverty as indignity is a typical capitalist phenomenon aimed at producing and selling more and more to satiate the insatiate greed for profit. Dignity in poverty on the contrary means sharing the scarce resources we have at our disposal as species.

Even if we are determined to self-destruct, do we have the right to destroy what we share with millions and millions of other forms of life on the planet? We ought to commit suicide least in a manner that spares the life of other creatures on this planet. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2022