2025 in Review – How did we do Spiritually? – Part 2

I offer my respects to my spiritual teachers, our lineage, and to the Supreme Soul.

aum ajnana timirandhasya jnananjana salakaya
caksur unmilitam yena tasmai sri gurave namah

bhaja sri krishna caitanya prabhu nityananda
sri advaita gadadhara srivasadi gaura bhakta vrnda

he krishna karuna sindhu dina bandhu jagat pate
gopesa gopika kanta radha kanta namo ‘stu te

aum namo bhagavate vasudevaya

Haribol.

Better check what I’m meant to be talking about, how can we do better this year or something like that.

Knowingly or unknowingly we have goals, and we have ideas of purpose. Choosing a spiritual path fundamentally means gaining some clarity as to my goal, my goal in life generally, and more specifically, let’s just take it down to a month at a time, or a year at a time. What do I see as being my goal?

And can I just offer the appreciation that the spiritual journey, it doesn’t mean that you’re automatically a very spiritual person. We may be very troubled. We may be very conflicted and confused. We may have loads of unwanted baggage and desires. That doesn’t determine, or has no—it doesn’t define our embarking upon a spiritual journey. Developing and cultivating some clarity around what is really important is the beginning of actually undertaking a conscious spiritual journey.

A person can begin unconsciously. Just, you know, sometimes these guys, they do all of these far-out things in some of the festivals and stuff. And people are coming to the festivals because of the SDR, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, right? Well, a lot of people do. A lot of people are there for a spiritual trip, but they want plenty of that as well. And they may just wander past and hear kirtan for the first time and go like, “What the hell? This is awesome,” or, if something pulls them in. And so even without any real conscious endeavour, a person can be drawn towards the spiritual path.

And even hearing just once these spiritual sounds guarantees that at some point, that individual will attain the highest fruit, the goals of self-realization and God-realization. How long that’s going to take, that’s another story. But they’re well on their way just by what seems to be a chance encounter.

I have a—Well “a”, I don’t have just one, I have numerous and massive flaws and deficiencies. One of them is, because the amount of information that is given to us by our spiritual teachers and by the Vedas, it’s so vast and it’s so amazing, I feel great joy in contemplating upon, meditating upon, and sharing this wisdom, but sometimes that makes me a little bit complicated for people. I think many people may have that experience, when we start getting into things a little bit, it’s like, whoa, whoa, what’s this all about? Don’t be distracted by that kind of thing.

Spiritual life is very simple and very easy. The principal things that we are sharing that are absolutely foundational for spiritual life, the first one is the cultivation of this understanding that I am not the physical body, nor am I the mind that in many cases is controlling me. That’s not me. These are external coverings, that I am the person deep within. I am that person who experiences loneliness, who longs and yearns for happiness and for love, to be free from pain and trouble. The person that is longing for that is me, the eternal spiritual being.

If you can cultivate this appreciation that I am an eternal spiritual being, everything becomes possible for you in terms of spiritual understanding and experience. This is foundational. And it’s so important that the cultivation of this appreciation will begin to transform not only your view of yourself, but how you look at others and therefore how you deal with them. And it will transform your view of the world. You will become a better person. You will automatically experience compassion, a growing compassion and concern for others. You will be drawn towards kindness, kindness to everyone, even one’s reputed enemy. You will also gradually become fearless.

This foundational appreciation is the basis upon which all spiritual growth takes place. Without it, there is no understanding of anything spiritual. That may seem a little harsh or direct, but it is just fundamentally true. And so, we encourage people to try and cultivate that understanding. It’s also—

I’ve attempted to be helpful to my spiritual teachers and to people in general by producing a bunch of videos on these different—on talks related to this. And you will see, if you check some of those out, that this foundational appreciation of not being the gross physical body or the subtle body, that you are an eternal spiritual being, is the key to becoming happy and the key to living a successful life. We cannot state how important it is.

Many people, we live in the illusion—when we speak about our life, we speak about the experience in between the birth of the body and the death of the body, and we call that period of time “our life”, and that is actually not true. That is not your life. It doesn’t define you at all. It often has nothing to do with you. The living being has become overwhelmed by the body and the mind and the desires and looking in so many futile ways for fulfillment and purpose and happiness and love. This period in between the birth of the body and the death of the body—

And can I just add, it doesn’t go anywhere else, this thing that people call their life, it’s kind of like, my God, if you really think this is life, how depressing, because it just comes to this crashing end. You’re flying along at 35,000 feet, celebrating your trip to wherever, and suddenly the plane loses power, and then you start gliding like a brick. You know how a brick glides?

A pilot told me that. I used to have a business partner. He was a big-time jeweller. He had private jets and stuff, and I was cruising around with him one time and got to sit up in the jump seat in the cabin. It’s really a trip on a powerful jet to be in the cabin and watch going down the runway and ccchhhock, suddenly just taking off, landing also. And I asked the guy, “How well can this glide if you lose power?” He goes, “Can glide like a brick.” I went, “Oh, that doesn’t sound like much fun.” But that’s what happens.

I had the opportunity to talk very briefly with a young woman yesterday who has stage four cancer, and she’s extremely distraught, because the outlook is you’re in the plane at 35,000 feet and it just lost power, and now it’s just shaking as it descends rapidly, and it will simply just hit whatever it encounters. And I told her in that brief time that I had, “Something you must cultivate is the reality that you cannot die. You don’t die. You can’t die. You don’t die. You are eternal. Your body’s going to die. When you leave it, that’s going to fall down dead big time, immediately start rotting, but you don’t die; and the cultivation of this appreciation that I am an eternal being and my time, the time allotted to me to reside in this body is coming to an end.”

And she is actually blessed to have notice of the impending departure. It’s far more sad for people that have no notice. They get a stroke, or a heart attack, or they have a crash in the car, or some violent accident, or something terrible, and suddenly just that’s it. It’s just like all over. There is a certain benefit to having some notice.

And so we should all firmly embrace, the body is destined for the grave or the crematorium. It doesn’t go anywhere else. That’s the way it’s always been. It’s the way it always will be. And if I’m aware of that, it’s kind of like, okay, well, what should I be doing while I have this body and what I’m calling my life? What should I be doing? How can I live a life that has some extraordinary meaning and purpose?

And of course, our understanding is the human form of life is meant for the purpose of self-realization and God-realization. This is what distinguishes human beings from lower life forms. Lower life forms, animals, plants, they have—it’s the same spiritual being. It’s not different than the spiritual being in a human body. It’s the same. But they’ve got this body that they’re so overwhelmed by. There is no concept of the spiritual self. And they are just driven by desire and all of these animalistic responses to things, to eat, to sleep, to mate, and to defend what they consider theirs.

The human form of life grants us the opportunity to question, who am I really? Who am I? Why am I here? What is this all about? What should I be doing? This is what distinguishes real human life and makes your life noble and wonderful and extraordinary.

And so, this foundation of the cultivation of the reality that I am an eternal spiritual being, having a temporary and often unpleasant material experience, that can change everything for you in the most wonderful way, can completely change things. So cultivate this appreciation. This is the path to happiness.

If you want to disregard that and cling to the idea that the body is the self and fulfilling the desires of the body and mind is going to be where I find perfection and happiness, I’m sorry, that is the ticket to great unhappiness. I don’t mean that in any critical way, or a bummer. I’m saying this because my personal desire is that you all become very happy, that you become free from fear, anxieties, all of this kind of stuff. So that’s number one.

Second thing is, there is no more effective, efficient, and powerful means to have spiritual realization than through the process of the chanting of transcendental sound. This morning I heard Radha dasi talking about it and just making the point, material sound vibration is one-dimensional. If I use the two syllables man go and I keep saying it, mango, mango, mango. I don’t get to see a mango. I don’t get to taste a mango. I might remember what it was like, but nothing shows up. I don’t experience anything. It is because they are simply syllables. They are empty syllables that don’t contain anything.

Spiritual sound vibration is different. Spiritual sound vibration, number one, I’m going to say something that might freak people out. It is personal. It’s not just impersonal sound vibration. There is a whole spiritual reality contained within spiritual sound vibration, a whole spiritual world. The Supreme Soul resides within the spiritual sound vibration. And so it’s sometimes referred to as like spiritual nutrition; because the living being trapped in the body, we crave experience, we crave to fill up an emptiness, we look at the menu and we go, “Ooh, I think I’ll have some of that.” And I get it, and I’m thinking before it comes, “Ooh, this is going to be awesome.”

But I mean, if— and this is a dumb example, but I’m going to use it anyway: If I had somebody sitting beside me and I ordered an amazing, I don’t know, dessert or some ice cream sundae that just had all the whatever. And I’m sitting there looking at it and going, “Wow, this is going to be amazing.” And then I take a spoonful of it, and I start moving it towards my mouth, and then I veer off and I put it in somebody else’s mouth. They go, “Oh, wow, that’s far out.” I’m going, “Oooh, I didn’t feel anything.” And I try it again. And I try it again.

And it’s kind of like, this analogy, not very good analogy, is the reality of trying to find happiness simply by stimulating the body and the mind. You can have extraordinarily titillating experience, but it doesn’t last and it doesn’t fulfill, and it often leaves you more empty and desiring more intently something to fill up the space. Because we are spiritual beings, it is only going to be that which is purely spiritual that will satisfy us.

And the beginning, exposure to real spiritual experience, is in hearing and also repeating these spiritual sounds. They are not just empty syllables. They change you. They will purify the heart and the mind. They will transform you. They will bring clarity to your life. Simply by engaging in this process, even if you don’t do anything else, and you don’t know anything else, simply by doing this, I promise you that if you faithfully and regularly engage in this form of meditation, you will begin to experience a shift in how you see the world, how you see others. You will be able to deal with relationships, with difficulties that you face that are a normal part of life. You will find more clarity simply by engaging in this process.

And as I said before, in truth, actual meditation is not a mental activity. The mind is material energy. And the mind and mental activity, like quietening the mind and stuff, what people often think of as meditation, those kind of things are actually pre-meditation. In the yoga system this was called pratyahara, the withdrawal of the mind and the senses from worldly stimulation, trying to find quietness, and dharana, bringing the mind into a singular focus, so it’s not jumping all over the place, so you can begin this inward journey. But those activities are not meditation. They were considered pre-meditation. We don’t have to do that. You don’t have to go anywhere near that one.

If you engage with spiritual sound, the fruit of the highest forms of self-realization and God-realization you can experience in this lifetime. That’s not an empty promise. That is a guarantee. And so the adoption—meditation means to become immersed in that which is transcendental or that which is spiritual. And so when we engage in the process of hearing and chanting, and you just let go of everything, don’t worry about the mind. It may still continue to try and think about stuff. Don’t worry. Just take shelter. Like walking out into a warm, balmy ocean and just letting go. Fall back into the ocean. Allow the spiritual sound to penetrate through the ears into the core of your heart and just let go. Just experience the presence and the effect that we experience from chanting.

If you want to grow spiritually, it is best to try and adopt a regular meditation habit. Doesn’t matter if it’s five minutes, if it’s 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a time thing, but to have made some form of commitment that every day at this time, I’m maybe going to put on a kirtan track and just sit, listen to it, maybe chant along with it for 5, 10, 15 minutes.

Or I may have got some of these beads, japa beads, and I want to try and do this every day. But it’s like, oh my God, look how many beads are on there. And this is like a baby round. It’s a half a round. My other beads that I don’t usually bring out of my house, it’s got like 108. It’s bigger. And you’re looking at it. It’s going like, oh, this is a serious commitment. Hey, relax. You want to just do five? Okay, that’s five. Okay, let’s chant the mantra five times with clarity and intention. Let’s just come to a peaceful place, take a few deep breaths and chant and listen. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. Oh, that wasn’t too hard. Let’s try another one. I mean, even if you’re going to do five, it’s fine. Just do that. But do it every day because the commitment to the process really begins to change.

You now become increasingly the driver of the bus. It’s not like “Who’s driving this thing?!” which happens to us all the time. We don’t realize we’ve surrendered to the mind, to emotions, to desires. And next minute I’m off doing this, and I’m going like, “Oh my God, how did I get into this situation? And I’m here already, might as well go for it.”  And then I wake up the next morning and go, “Oh, that was a crappy decision.”:  It’s ‘cause I’m not driving the bus. I’m the passenger.

And the activity of committing to every day to engage even a little bit in this process will change your life. Okay, this is point number two.

Point number three, and let’s keep it—you don’t have to become connected to this if you don’t want. It’s fine. Do these other two things. They’re absolutely essential.

A third reality is we are eternal spiritual beings. We have a source. We have an eternal connection with a higher, transcendent, divine reality that I am often referencing as the Supreme Soul. We have in one ancient text, the Brahma Samhita, it describes that the jiva, the living being, is bound by an eternal connection of kinship to the Supreme Soul for all eternity. We have a soulmate. It’s not another person in this world.

There’s this beautiful description in some of the Upanisads and in the Bhagavat Purana that there is actually a manifestation of God residing within the heart of all living beings. And it gives this description to try and help people connect or relate with the understanding. And it describes that there are two birds sitting in a tree. So the tree means the material body. And the two birds are you, the eternal spiritual being, and the other one is a manifestation of that divine personality, the Supreme Soul. In Sanskrit, this is called Param Atma. Param means supreme, the Supreme Soul.

And it describes that one of these birds is just standing in the tree, waiting for the other bird to turn and recognize its eternal friend. But this other bird has lost the plot and is simply hopping from branch to branch, busily trying to enjoy all of the fruits of the tree, and yet all the time feeling morose. And it describes, when that bird, the one that is preoccupied and trying to enjoy the fruits of the tree, turns and recognizes their eternal friend, there is an awakening of great and ecstatic, transcendental love and ecstatic happiness.

You have a connection to some higher, transcendent reality, whether you like it or not. And it is because of that that you feel lonely. You pine for meaningful connection. You pine for perfect love. It is because of this. If you want to recognize that, it is extraordinarily helpful to you on your spiritual journey. If you don’t want, it’s cool. Don’t worry, don’t panic. Cultivate the understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being, and engage in the process of mantra meditation, and I guarantee you success.

With the cultivation of understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being, it brings a different kind of perspective to your engagement with other people in this world. Have you heard of the Serenity Prayer? Some people? It’s often associated, they use it a lot in drug and alcohol rehab programs. Not saying that if you know it, you’ve had a problem. Who cares anyway? I’ve done a lot of work in these areas, and it’s really far out that people embrace this. And I’m raising it in the context of that young woman that I spoke with yesterday who was confronted with stage four cancer that is absolutely terminal. The Serenity Prayer goes like this: “Grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change.”

You’ll find that much of your unhappiness in life comes from the inability to accept those things which you cannot change. Like the idea of being given a death notice from a medical diagnosis, for instance. The idea of getting really upset. “Why did that person, why did they speak to me like that? Why did they say that? Why did they do that to me?” Who gives a shit? Really? What can you do about it? That’s somebody else. That’s their trip. That’s what they’re going through. Why do you let it affect you?

Oh, because I’ve always just surrendered to my mind. Something comes in and it excites me or agitates me or makes me sad, and I begin to embrace that. Oh, bad move. Bad move. If somebody wants to be an, (am I allowed to swear again?) an asshole. That’s their choice. Why do you want to change them? Who cares what they think of you, or what they have to say? That’s not going to actually affect your life. But we make it affect our life. We get so entangled with it. We become obsessed with trying to change that which we cannot. You can’t change anybody else. What you can change is whether I’m going to let that affect me or not, and how I will let it affect me or not. That’s liberating to learn that you’re not the body and whatever goes on in your mind, you don’t have to be embracing, you don’t have to be identifying with. The way somebody speaks to you and deals with you, that doesn’t have to define your day. That’s their problem. That’s their trip.

“Grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change.” What most people don’t understand is that serenity comes from the cultivation of the knowledge and the increasing awareness that I am an eternal spiritual being. I have temporarily—I’m residing within this body for a limited period of time and I will move on. This body and the experiences with it is not the whole world. There is so much more. But for me to become untouched—you’ve heard of the saying, “Living in the world, but not being of the world”?

They use the example in Vedic teachings and all the dharmic traditions, Buddhism, of the lotus. Usually lotuses grow in disgusting places, like really stinky ponds that are filled with filth and dirt. Yet they will rise out of the water, and you’ve got this long stem and then this thing opens. And my God, if you’ve ever seen a real big lotus, it’s so beautiful and it’s fragrant, not in a—it’s heady and intoxicating, it’s subtle. This beautiful fragrance. And it’s like, you know what? That’s not connected to all the crap and the water and the mud and the filth underneath. This has risen above it.

And so spiritual life will empower you to be able to gradually come to live your life, the time allotted to you in this body, in this world, but not to be overwhelmed by it, to become transcendental, to rise above it, to live another type of existence.

The second line of this prayer, first one, “Grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change. Grant me the courage to change those things that I can.” And this is the hard one. I want to get all upset at the way somebody spoke to me or what they did to me. “Can you believe it they told me—?” And I’m wigging out and all angry or whatever over this. And it’s kind of like, well, why don’t you just step back and stop letting that affect you? “Well, that’s easy for you to say.” It actually takes courage to begin a practice of stepping away and consciously making the choices about what is going to affect me and what is not. I need courage to sometimes change what has been my life for so long, decades. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s lifetimes.

“Grant me the courage to change that which I can and grant me the wisdom to know the difference.” If you take this simple prayer that is profoundly spiritual, and cultivating this foundational understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being, and beginning to consciously make decisions about my life, what’s going to affect me, what’s not, what I’m going to now focus on as being important, what I’m going to let slide. This constitutes a spiritual life, a spiritual journey.

The practices that you engage in, this is called, in Sanskrit, sadhana. This word sadhana means the process by which one attains a goal. If you want to change your life, if you want to have a different experience, you are going to have to do something about it. We’re already doing stuff. We’re meditating on all kinds of things. People spend hours on these ridiculous devices. Now they’ve come along with AI. There is nothing intelligent about AI. It is not a person. It has no intelligence. It has no life. It is programmed to simulate language, to simulate intelligence, but it is a simulation. But it’s just making it that so more and more people become absorbed in meditating upon things that cannot provide you happiness and will guarantee your unhappiness. A hard truth.

You want to make your life better this year? Simple things. Cultivate an appreciation you’re an eternal spiritual being. And from time to time, consider what that means and how it applies to different situations and relationships and connections. Okay, how would—you run into something, and it’s knocking you off balance or making you highly emotional. Just step back, close your eyes, take a breath and ask the question, “How would a transcendentalist deal with this? What would they do? How do I need to start thinking about this?” This is a practical application of this spiritual knowledge, atma jnana, knowledge of the self.

Every day, commit to a period of time, and I don’t care how long it is, a period of time of regular meditation, absorption in spiritual sound.

I’m going to use an unpleasant example. That’s me, I’m the unpleasant example person. Dog turd. A fresh, steamy dog turd. Nice or not? No, it’s, come on, it’s really gross. You don’t want to step on that and then step, get into your car. That smell is going to be in the car for a few weeks, no matter how much you clean it. It’s not something wonderful, desirable, clean, in any way, shape, or form. But it’s sitting out there on the grass because someone didn’t pick it up. And so it’s kind of like, what’s going to happen? Well, over time, it will dry out. And over time, because of the rays, the purifying rays of the sun, it will become transformed into something that is not dirty. It will become purified of its contamination and things, through UV rays. Eventually it becomes like white. There’s no smell. And it breaks down and that’s it. It’s gone. It’s the power of the sun to purify.

I am not suggesting we are dog turds. Please don’t think I am. Absolutely not. But in a similar manner, by placing ourselves in the presence of the all-purifying, transcendental sounds, your heart and mind will become purified and transformed. It is guaranteed. It will definitely happen. And that commitment to that process of embracing the meditation upon the spiritual sound and of trying to apply in your life the understanding and sometimes the meditation upon the fact that I am an eternal spiritual being, this will completely change your life. The regular practice is called sadhana. It is a means that guarantees a result.

And so that’s about all I got for you for now. That is, yeah, just one second, I’ll just encourage you to take on a spiritual practice and try to cultivate even the most simple and basic understanding of what that is. It’s profoundly powerful and transformative.

Yep?

Audience member: [Indistinct]

Acharya das: My daily sadhana? Ooh. That’s a secret. No, it’s not. When I wake up, the first thing I try to think is the highest object of my love, the Supreme Soul. And I say at least once one of these transcendental sounds, Krishna. Then I get up and brush my teeth, wash my face, and I usually go and sit in an area where I don’t have my phone. It’s turned off. It’s nowhere near me. I might check it before I go in case something urgent happened that I needed to pay attention to. Then I go and find a, my own space. My wife, my daughter who lives with me, we have the same practices, and this part of things we don’t do together. We have our own private little space, a little room or wherever it is that we’re going to go. And then I become absorbed in trying to affectionately and thoughtfully recite these mantras. I usually do it for about maybe an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half, which is—I’m not saying you need to do that, but that’s what I do because this is what sustains me. This is my spiritual nutrition. It is this practice that I know is pleasing to my spiritual teacher and to Krishna. And so I do this.

Then I hit the bathroom, shower, get ready, do a little bit of work. We engage in a form of…We have a little sacred space in the house where we maintain an altar upon which there are transcendental forms and the form of my spiritual teachers in our lineage also. And we usually prepare some flowers and an offering of fruit or some simple meal. And I make an offering of that.

Then I go to work. And I’m engaged in quite a few different projects involving trying to help people in different places. And at nighttime, it’s almost like the reverse of that. So that’s sort of like—

This is not essential to know, but it’s very helpful and it’s the basis of things. We suffer from a profound problem. The profound problem that makes it so that we don’t experience a pure spiritual life is our tendency to be self-centred. I see everything in relation to me. I make decisions, I contemplate on things, I relate to all relationships with me at the centre. I reference my partner, my husband, my wife, my children, my parents, my cousins, my friends, my countrymen. My language demonstrates how deeply I am absorbed in the idea of myself being the centre of everything. I see everything in relation to me. This is the essence and the epitome of the material condition.

The spiritual condition is just opposite. I don’t see myself at the centre of anything. I see myself as an insignificant, eternal servant of the Lord and all the Lord’s children. And my thinking should be, “How can I act in a way that is pleasing, that is in line with a higher transcendent truth?”

I’ll give you a little example of how you know this is true. This may sound a little bit startling to some people. When you show kindness to someone, how do you feel? It could be just a little child that’s fallen over or got lost and is all freaking out. “No, it’s okay. It’s okay. Come, come. You want to find your mommy and daddy? Let’s look for them.” I mean, it can be something simple. Walking through the parking lot in a supermarket, you’ve got some woman with a kid in tow, and she’s got all her groceries, and she’s trying to get the door open and to load the car. And you just say, “Let me get that for you.” And you walk over and just help unlock it, and they turn to you, and they feel touched, and they say, “Wow, thank you so much.” And you walk away. And how do you feel? You feel like really good.

And when you engage in extreme acts of kindness, where you are truly selfless—you know, you’re driving down the road, and there’s somebody stuck on the side of the road, and they’ve got a problem, and you immediately think, “Maybe somebody else will attend to them. They’ve probably got a phone. They’ll be okay.” And you can make a choice of pulling over and say, “Do you need a hand? Can I be of some help?” Or you can choose just to keep driving. And when you do it, when you engage in acts of kindness, you feel wonderful. You feel something inside that touches you deeply. And the reason you feel that is because that act is completely in line with your spiritual identity, not as being the centre of everything, but in selflessly giving and loving.

The material condition is the opposite. I see everything in relation to me. People here probably may have experienced or they know someone who’s experienced profound depression. And if I ask somebody that’s experienced that, or you know somebody that’s experienced that, in a depressed, deeply depressed state, who is in there with you? And the answer is, no one. It’s just me, and I’m in a deep, dark hole. This tendency towards being preoccupied with false notions of the self and seeing myself at the centre of things is the material condition.

Sometimes people want to take to spiritual life and they bring that tendency with them. You can’t get rid of it easily. It’s going to be a process. It’s going to take time. As long as there is that idea of it’s all about me, I’m seeing everything in relation to me, I should know I am not in a very spiritual state. Spiritual practice means trying to apply these principles that we learn. And the cultivation of the giving, the serving, the loving heart is an important part of it. The idea of taking, and it’s about me, is the opposite and can never bring you happiness, not lasting and fulfilling happiness.

Anybody else got a question? I need to check. Ooo, we’re over time, aren’t we? It’s only lunchtime. People might get hangry at me. Yeah? I’ll do one more. And just letting you know, I think, I wasn’t going to be here this afternoon. But a change of plan looks like I’ll be here. So if you want to hang out a little bit where we did yesterday, I think around the same time, I think that will be on.

Yeah?

Audience member: I have a question around grief. So, we talk about having, you talk or there’s talk about having this detachment from the body when someone dies and recognizing that that’s not them dying, that’s the body dying. But as humans, we still have this attachment of no longer, the grief of no longer having that shared experience with that person or this shared lifetime with that person. And I guess I’m just wondering how we can maybe find some comfort or offer comfort to people that are experiencing that or frustration around that and anger about feeling like something’s been taken away.

Acharya das: You will find the answer in the Serenity Prayer. “Grant me the serenity to accept that which I cannot change. Grant me the courage to change that which I can.” And that means working on our own acceptance, to be always an eternal well-wisher of those that we are close to, to have a remembrance  oftimes.

The sadness and grief are not the same from a spiritual perspective, although the word is often mixed the way people use it, particularly psychologists and stuff. Grief is where you cannot accept something has happened, and you’re constantly pining for it to not be that way. That is like really unhealthy. And for you to begin a process of really considering, and praying and asking for that serenity to accept that which I cannot change, it doesn’t mean that you’re not recognizing it would have been nice to continue to have a nice relationship for a much longer period of time. Of course it would be nice. And of course, their not being present before you is sad. But don’t get into focusing on trying to undo things. Learning to accept that I have no power to change this.

And I need to make sure I don’t fall into that trap of constantly wishing it wasn’t that way and longing for it not to be that way, because that begins to affect myself and my current relationships and decisions I’m making, and how I’m interacting with others and the world, which canset me back, from a spiritual perspective. So this Serenity Prayer, it doesn’t come from the Vedas or anything. The principles do. This is eternal spiritual truth and learning to—I promise you, in your life, all the stuff that you go through, write this down. Keep it somewhere. And when you find yourself in turmoil or anxiety or grave sadness, go to it and look at it and think, how does that apply in this situation? And I promise it will apply to whatever it is that you’re experiencing in life.

And with the understanding we have of what that serenity is, where it is coming from, is in the cultivation of the knowledge of my eternal being, and the eternal being of all others. That changes things.

Is that okay? I can see that has already somewhat lifted the burden. Your sadness of your heart is dissipated.

You know, in Bhagavad-gita, in speaking about this knowledge of the soul, the spiritual being, the spirit soul, it is described as being so powerful, it can protect one from the gravest forms of fear. That has deep meaning, and it’s true. It’s not about a superficial acceptance. It’s actually thinking of it in relation to my current situation and what I’m going through, or somebody else. And this, sharing this with others will really reinforce the experience for yourself. When you feel somebody else’s pain in some way, and you can share with them something that will lift them a little even out of that pain, it has this amazing—you’ve done something extraordinarily kind.

Our concern is for the suffering of all living beings and how to relieve that, and when we can do that by sharing that which is spiritual, then you will have this experience.

Okay, I’m going to chant a little bit. And if you want to do some more, we can do it later. And also, if you see me walking around and stuff, I really don’t like being involved with other people’s lives. I don’t want to be an intruder in anybody’s life. But if you want to ask me something, please feel free. Okay, I’m normally quite actually shy. I don’t like intruding. I speak fearlessly here because it is my attempt to repay my spiritual teachers for the great gifts that they have given me. And so the way which I can begin to repay that debt is by sharing what I’ve been given. So when I’m sharing like that, I’m quite fearless, but normally I can be a little bit on the shy side. But don’t worry. If you give me the opportunity to somehow serve you, to help you, then you are doing me a great kindness.

So, we don’t have to make a big deal of it, but once again, when we engage in kirtan, it’s good to make a commitment to just let it all go. Bathe in the transcendental sounds