Failed Spiritual Paths

At first I was going to list some of the people who I knew that died in the "I am" movement from extreme actions. But then I realized it was more important to just say that, "People who are in extreme need of psychological help often perish when they turn to religion." The reason for this is that without enough common sense no one survives many of these "spiritual paths"

Though many people I have known over the years have died "or gone crazy" from various extreme things that they did. Nothing caused more problems that I know of than extreme diets. So even people who were perfectly normal and actually had common sense before they entered some extreme diet often lost it completely doing some fool diet.

The 40 day water fast:

There are very few people of any age that can stay very balanced while doing a 40 day water fast. I know people who did this once a year and I wouldn't consider any of them completely sane now.

The Fruitarian:

Most people who did this eventually died if they kept doing it. The main problem appears to be hypoglycemia or diabetes caused by too much fructose sugar.

The Breathairian:

In this diet one simply breathes and doesn't drink or eat. Most people recover from this when they start suffering and start eating and drinking water again because reality wins out.

Various types of diets or diet pills:

Unless people use common sense especially around diet pills many many problems both physical and psychological can arise.


Though there can be other spiritual problems caused by things like too much sex or psychological problems caused by someone who is oversexed trying to become celibate and instead just becoming an aberrant predator instead, I think the worst problems tend to come from people with common sense losing their common sense by strange diets and getting really psychologically strange.

So, people with various kinds of post traumatic Stress disorder caused by war, rape, drug abuse or violence or verbal violence of all kinds should not be ready to retreat into strange diets or fasts because this will only take their post traumatic stress disorder and create serious and possibly permanent mental or physical disorders or both.

So, spiritual paths need to be approached with common sense and if possible wisdom. Otherwise people often just wind up nuts or dead in the process.

note: This is not to say that there may be people who are capable of being Breathairians. It's just that they may be 1 in a million or even 1 in a billion. There are always exceptions to every rule. However, just make sure you aren't one of the fatalities whose good effort fails because you just aren't ready or evolved enough yet.