There’s a street-evangelist who hangs out in the CBD of Melbourne, with a little PA system and a stand-full of brochures to guide you towards eternal salvation in Christ. We must be a particulary heathen bunch in Melbourne, because in all the years I have been passing him, I have never once seen anybody take him up on the offer.
What I have noticed, especially in the last few months is that the evangelist dude sounds like he is experiencing an altered state of consciousness as he recites various passages from the bible at the disinterested passers-by.
He has started singing the bible verses, in a way that reminds me of the Krishna folk with their drums and their mantras wending their way down the street. It’s not a pretty sight…his eyes are glazed and his body twitches and he looks like any other junkie on the street, except he doesn’t hassle you for spare change.
Is he just so totally bored with the stuff he is spouting (especially as no-one actually listens to him), or has he managed to find some sort of Nirvanic ecstasy in the really tedious passages…he only reads the boring ones I’ve noticed.
Is this an as-yet undiscovered getting off yer’ tits source to be capitalised upon?
It’d make going to your dealer an interesting exercise…d’ya wanna coupla grams of weed, or a coupla kilos of St James today?
Actually, he could be entering a meditative or trance state. The “boring” passages he’s reciting could be the equivalent of a mantra, used to take him out of his body and the temporal world and into a state where he is one with the universe or one with God, depending on your take on religion. He might consider it blasphemy, but I can see it as a sort of Christian variant on intense Zen Buddhist style meditation.
Forget the idea of packaging it, selling it, and making a million bucks off it, be it Australian or US dollars. It takes time, practice, and a certain mindset to be able to pull it off. The guy may not even be consciously aware he’s doing it.
I think he may be using religion to escape the worlds problems, and his own. I know several people that ended up that way, I had a relative that use religion for an escape,she ended up in a mental hospital for it. Every whisper of the wind told her jesus was coming soon.
Religion becomes a substitute for medication for them.