Finding Meaning and Purpose with Regular Meditation

Aum namo bhagavate vasudevaya.

Finding meaning and purpose: is the topic of interest, or you just came along to check it out?

Last Sunday, I was mentioning in Melbourne that when they began to really develop advertising, commercial advertising, in the late 50s, a little bit before, but around more or less that time, they had come to recognize that there was one main principle that they were going to leverage off, and it was the recognition that everybody actually feels some emptiness inside. And they chose to try and then exploit that reality by offering people products or experiences or service with the attached idea—it is often very subtle, but the idea that this is going to fill up the empty space. And that’s why you see, like (when was that, the 70s?) Coca-Cola, their little slogan was, “Coke is it.” It’s like, Coke is what? “It.” You know, “it,” that thing that you’re all looking for. The offer that this is the thing that will fill up the space.

One of the experiences of life (and I take it, it is this way for everyone), we try to consider, “What’s it all about?” Like, “What am I doing here? What’s this for? Where am I going to find that thing that seems to be somehow missing?” There’s lots of different ways to think about that, but more or less that’s sort of like the underlying idea.

I was a little bit weird when I was a kid. I grew up in New Zealand. I don’t sound like it, but I did. And I was a little bit freaked out about, “What is it all for?” I was thinking, you know what, you finish your school, then you get a job, you have an occupation, and then, what, you find somebody that you feel that you can live with and have children, and then just grow old and die. And I was only, I was still in primary school, and I’m going like, “My God, what’s this?” I was completely freaked. I didn’t want to end up like my mum and dad. Not that there was anything wrong with them, but just the general sense of trying to fill that hole, and going about things, trying to make some sense of it, trying to find happiness.

Everybody is driven by the desire for happiness. We probably don’t know anybody that’s perfectly happy, but we’re looking. We believe it’s possible. There’s actually a reason for that. We have a great desire to love and to be loved. And we look around, we build relationships and often become a little bit disappointed. Right? I mean, gods, over half of marriages end in divorce. So, it’s sort of like, you know, now what?

And how I identify myself creates the foundation for where I will look for happiness, where I will look for purpose. The most extraordinary discovery that one can have by engaging in any of the yoga processes and meditation will be a discovery that’s actually quite shocking. This garment called the body is not me. I am an eternal spiritual being residing within the body, but I have so utterly lost the plot, I see the body as being who I am.

And of course, it’s particularly disturbing when people get a little bit older and grumpier. They kind of like, “Grrr, rrrr, rrr.” They don’t care so much anymore. They just feel kind of a little bit scared and somewhat lonely and looking back, and what was this all for. When the body is younger, then we become so preoccupied with what it looks like, and I unfortunately develop this notion that my lovableness, my attractiveness is going to be determined by what this body looks like, and that’s just a formula for pain and much unhappiness.

When we completely lose the plot, when we become utterly absorbed in this false conception of who I am, when I am actually really disconnected from my deeper and real spiritual identity, the process of meditation, while it will deliver benefits like feeling more calmness, feeling an increase in some happiness, while it will make it so that I can navigate life better, those are all actual side benefits. The real benefit is to come to discover your spiritual identity, who you truly are, who you truly are, apart from that body and apart from that mind.

Life, as we call it, which means actually just the period of time, people call the period of time between your birth and your inevitable death, they call this life. But our understanding is that it is not life, that is just a period of time when I showed up in this particular body and when I will leave this body and I will move on. And what we do with this period of time and how we understand our actual identity will determine how successful our life was and how happy we will become.

It’s so unfortunate that in the world, in general, there is so little understanding of what it means to be spiritual, what spiritual means. A lot of people think it has to do with—I don’t know, walking on the beach, hanging out in the bush, all kinds of ideas. But the big problem lies in the lack of understanding and appreciation of who I truly am.

I don’t like using the word “soul” as a standalone word, and the primary reason I don’t like using it is because people have a lot of confused ideas about this word, like, if you ask people, “Do you accept the idea of a soul or some spiritual existence?” And most people will say, “Yeah.” It doesn’t have anything to do with religion or anything, just most people sort of feel that there is some sort of higher spiritual reality, and they accept this idea of some sort of continuing existence.

But if you ask people, “Can you tell me about the soul?” the vast majority of people will say, if they accept it, “I have a soul.” And my question would then be, “If you have a soul, who exactly are you? And what is this soul that you have?” And when I ask that question, people just like flip out. It’s like, you know, “Never thought of that! I never thought of that!” That’s kind of like, what? How do I deal with this? And I would tell someone, “You know what? You don’t have a soul. You don’t have a soul. You are the soul.” That’s a massive difference. That’s a massive difference.

The ancient teaching that we find in the Vedas, and I’m thinking specifically now of the Bhagavad-gita, it talks about change, that the living being accepts a body. First, a little baby’s body, then a child’s body, then teenage years, then becoming an adult, then the body becomes middle-aged. Finally, you turn into an old dude like me. And then finally, you have to leave, vacate the premises. And there’s no other outcome. This is the passage for everyone. It doesn’t end any other way. And the extraordinary thing is, most people don’t know very much about this process. We just take a whole bunch of things for granted.

Within five years, maximum seven, every single, every single atomic particle and molecule in your body is replaced. So the body that you’re sitting here in now is not the same body that you had on five to seven years ago. And when people actually try to get their head around that, that’s kind of quite mind-blowing. And it’s like through your lifetimes, you will change that body multiple times. But you remain the constant identity, the person who is experiencing, “Oh, I had a little child’s body, I had a young person’s body, I had a teenage body, I had a mature body. My body became aged. Now it’s much more aged.” I am that constant being that’s experiencing all of this different change. But in spite of trying to understand that, there is still little awareness of our true inner spiritual identity.

A big problem arises when we become lost in the idea that the body is me, when I take on the body to be my actual identity; then I will seek to find purpose, I will seek to find happiness, fulfillment in the body. And our experience is what? You can flog this thing. You can whip it into a frenzy of different types of experience. And it doesn’t matter how far out the occasion was or the experience was, when you go home after it, you’re there all alone, and you feel it hasn’t fulfilled me. Right? It doesn’t fulfill me.

My desire for happiness is great. My desire for eternal happiness is even greater. They used to end all of the kids’ stories, a long time ago, well, not that long ago, “and they lived happily ever after.” Right? That is the desire. We desire permanence. We desire the idea of some safe and secure place where we can experience fulfillment and happiness. That’s the desire. That desire is not a material desire; that is a spiritual desire. It arises from the living being.

In Sanskrit, the terminology for what people in the West would call soul is atma, and atma literally means the self. It’s not a vague idea like soul. It literally means the self, who you really are. The desire for happiness arises from the spirit soul itself. It is actually a spiritual need. But when we direct that only at the body, we can stuff things in every orifice of the body and rub things all over it and stimulate the body in so many ways, but we are always left to different degrees feeling empty that didn’t quite do it.

And then I think, “Wow, we need to turn up the volume. Maybe a bit of Tabasco and a squeeze of lemon or something. We’ve got to spice it up so—we’ve got to go for it.” But it doesn’t matter how intense you try to make the experience, and you can make these experiences incredibly intense, it still passes and leaves us feeling unfulfilled. And that is because we desire—and I’ll try to put it simply—spiritual nutrition. And yet all I’m doing is feeding the body and feeding the mind. I’m not feeding the spiritual being within. And this has a tremendous impact.

You know, we live in an extraordinary time. The time of the so-called smartphones, right? And these things are engineered in the most extraordinary way. Most people think that when I start looking at stuff on my phone, it’s just me and my phone. I don’t see that behind this phone, there is a monumental amount, massive amount of computing power, and it’s watching everything I do, every single stroke and move, every app I open and close, every search I make. Everything I do is being tracked. And all the stuff that I’m interacting with is designed for a single purpose: to hold you, to hold you engaged in with whatever you’re doing.

And so for this reason, they study the psychology of addiction. They study how addiction occurs. They study addictive personalities. And they design everything around addiction, because different apps are competing with each other. If you’re not on their platform, their app, they know you’re on somebody else’s. And you are a commodity that they want to get and hold, because you can be exploited. We can take all of your information, everything, the way you’re reacting, your searches, everything you’re doing, and we can market that to someone who will attempt to exploit that information and somehow get money from you, selling you things, offering you opportunities, whatever, and so everything is designed just to capture you there.

But one of the things that’s really, for me, really disturbing is when they came to learn about dopamines and the whole dopamine rush. You know, gaming is really super, super engaged in this understanding and this form of exploitation, that every time—and it starts out even with simple stuff, like you get a like: “Ooh!” You make a post, and someone looks at how many people have looked at their post. Everything is designed to give you that little stimulation, which—you know, they do it with kids, they put kids on a device, and they do an MRI, and all of the parts of the brain that respond to cocaine when you snort it, are activated when you play games, when you start using the screens, when you are scrolling and looking and looking and looking and looking and looking and looking and—non-stop. And you end up with what they call dopamine fatigue, where you are just hammered so much that you can’t put it down, because when you put it down, then you feel really crappy. You feel really, really disturbed.

It used to be much more simple. People would come home from work, they walk in, they look around, they turn on the TV, and before they do anything there, they probably walk over to the fridge and open the door and just stand there looking in the fridge, and maybe reach for something and then go sit down in front of the TV and just space out. Now everybody, what are you doing? I just got home. [Miming being on the phone.] It’s like, what? Your life’s not that interesting. You don’t have to take a photo of all the food that you eat and let everybody know what you’re doing. You’re not that interesting. But we feel like we have to do this.

And if we were removed from our phone, we feel like, I feel so—I get angry. I’m sad, I’m empty and I’m angry. And I got to do something. I’m agitated. I can’t just sit quietly. I’m agitated. You know, this new phenomenon that young people, teenagers and early 20s, they’re finding that there’s just this growing number of people that can’t even watch a movie just because it’s too long. And everybody’s used to—while they’re watching the movie, they’re playing games and stuff and (you know what I mean?) and maybe texting someone. And if you take it away, and just let people watch a movie, they can’t do it. It’s like our attention span has been stolen. We don’t understand.

The upside to all of this is my hope that it will become increasingly apparent that we don’t have much going on in our life, that it’s pretty empty, which may drive people to try and consider, is there some higher purpose than just this thing and all the stuff I’m doing on it, and my so-called relationships. Is there more to life? So, my proposal is that there is a lot more. There is a great deal more.

The process of meditation: usually when someone engages in actual meditation—well, let’s stop for a sec. What is meditation? A lot of people associate meditation with a mental activity. Right? I’m going to try and still my mind and just think positive things and good vibes and whatever.

Audience member: Meditation is like ageless body, thoughtless mind.

Acharya das: Again?

Audience member: Ageless body, thoughtless mind.

Acharya das: Thoughtless mind. Yes and no.

Audience member: And most of the time people are busy in like making other people happy or to like to impress other people.

Acharya das: Yeah.

Audience member: That is the most of the people.

Acharya das: Absolutely true.

Audience member: And I feel that happiness and contentment are the two sides of the same coin.

Acharya das: That is true.

But what I would like to share is that meditation is not actually a mental activity. Meditation means to become immersed in that which is transcendental or that which is spiritual. And I will use the example, you know, especially when it’s cold, you go to somewhere where it’s tropical, up the Gold Coast or further, and the Sunshine Coast. And—does it get very warm up there in the water? Not really. Okay, let’s go to Bali or Fiji or somewhere, right? Balmy waters. And you walk out into the water, and it just feels so nice. And you touch the water standing waist deep. Then you just let go and immerse yourself in a warm, balmy ocean.

Meditation means to actually let everything go and become immersed in that which is fully spiritual, that which is transcendental. When a person engages in the process of meditation, there will be some initial effects where the mind and the heart becomes gradually, I’ll use the word purified.

We have been so conditioned to see the world, to see others, and to see ourselves in a particular way, and that is to look at what I will broadly call the material energy or the material world. But we are eternal spiritual beings, and we don’t know very much about who we truly are. The process of meditation will make it so that a person gradually, they awaken this discovery of who I truly am as a spiritual person, a spiritual being, and I gradually come to reconnect with my deeper inner spiritual nature.

I mentioned earlier that we have a desire to love and to be loved. That desire actually also arises from the spirit soul. It arises from you, the person, deep within. It is a spiritual need. It is a spiritual desire. And the process of meditation makes it so our natural desire to love and to be loved becomes manifest and experienced.

When you look at people in this world, everybody pretty much suffers from a common problem. The common problem is I see myself at the centre of everything. I use language like “My parents; my brothers and sisters; my husband or my wife or my partner; my children; my friends.” I see everything in relation to me. Right? This is called self-centred. We usually only think of this word in relation to kind of unpleasant people that are incredibly selfish. We call them self-centred. But actually, in life, almost everybody sees themselves at the centre. I see myself as like at the centre of the universe. It’s all about me, and it’s all in relation to me.

And I begin to cultivate ideas of how I should seek to fulfill my own desires, my own wishes. And I develop a mentality of wanting to take. Even when a person becomes really aggressive at taking and becomes successful at taking, they don’t become happier. They don’t become more fulfilled.

Back in, I think it was 1972, there was a whole new philosophy that invaded the Western world. There were two books that became highly popular, like super bestsellers. One was called Looking Out for Number One. Number one is? Myself! And the other one that came out a little bit before it and was a massive hit was called Winning Through Intimidation. It’s like, stop being so nice. Go out there and take what you want. Take what you need. That was the mentality. And that culture has become pervasive. And now it’s kind of massaged and dressed up in different ways with all kinds of ideas and philosophies. But fundamentally, that’s what happens.

Yet in life, people actually experience something else. When I show kindness, what happens? When I do something kind or selfless for someone, how do I feel?

Audience member: Good

Acharya das: Yeah, you actually feel good. On the weekend, we had a retreat out in the hills there, and I was relaying a story. I saw this video. A guy who’s kind of like, a so-called influencer, and he does all these feel-good stories, wanting people to… He’s hoping that it will affect people in a positive way.

So, there was this guy, this bum, stretched out on a bench in an American city, and it was cold. I mean, like seriously cold. Everybody’s wrapped up, and he’s got some cardboard over him and everything, and he’s doing it rough on the street. And the guy that’s doing the video, he walks past and he sees the guy is still asleep, or not watching. He takes out $100 and slips it into his backpack, but half of it’s sticking out. And then they’ve got a hidden camera videoing guy. And when he wakes up, and he’s kind of stretching and looking around and he sees it, and it’s just like shocking to him. And he pulls it out and he unfolds it and he’s just like, he’s overjoyed. It’s just like, wow!

And so he gets his stuff together, ([coughs]excuse me) and he goes down the street just a little bit to a department store, and he buys himself a sleeping bag and a pillow. I mean, things you need, and a few food and some items. Then he comes back to his bench to sit down with his new stuff. And this is going to make his life like way better, having a sleeping bag and stuff. So, the guy that planted the money, he’s now coming back, and he’s pacing out back and forward and he’s like talking on the phone and he’s, “But what can I do about it?” And he’s just like going through this whole trip of some major disaster in his life. And then, he hangs up, and he’s just like almost ready to break down.

And the guy’s looking at him and he goes, “What’s wrong?” The guy told him, there’s some major thing going on with his family, and it’s just like he needs to get to this place really quickly. I don’t know, it was a hospital or something. I don’t remember. But he says, he doesn’t have a car, and he doesn’t have any money. And the guy’s looking at him and kind of like—and then he goes, “Can you watch my stuff for just a minute? Yeah, just a minute? I’ll be right back.” And he picks up the bag of all the stuff he bought, and he goes back to the department store, and he returns it and comes back with the money, and he offers it to the guy so he can go and be with his family and everything and some tragedy that he’s dealing with.

And it just like, it just like, it’s mind-blowing. A lot of people, when they see this kind of thing, they almost feel like crying, they’re so touched by what’s happened. So, the guy let him know that he was actually doing a video, and he’s so moved by how kind this person is, and I think they gave him $500 or something, as a gratitude and thanked him very much.

But the response that we have when we see kindness shown to someone, when we see— when we ourselves do something, like a kid lost in a mall and crying, and “No, no, it’s okay. Are you looking for your mummy? Let’s, let’s, come on, I’ll help you, I’ll find them.” Or some lady, I use examples, some lady trying to get to a car with all her groceries and she’s got a kid or two, and she’s trying to open the boot of the car. You can just step over, “Let me get that for you,” and just open it. I mean, just even a simple thing where you engage in some kindness, where you give something of yourself, and the experience is like, you know that you’ve done something really good, even if it’s simple. You feel it.

And the question is, why do we feel that way? Because that action, that activity is in line with the spiritual nature of the person within. It is an action very much aligned with our deeper spiritual nature. Our deeper spiritual nature is not to grab and take. Our deeper spiritual nature is to give and to be kind, to serve and to love.

I remember quite a few years ago the Dalai Lama had written some book on happiness, and he said the two things someone needs to do to be happy it is to serve and to love, then a person feels some innate happiness.

So, this process that I’m speaking of, the process of meditation is the process by which we can more deeply discover our eternal spiritual nature and to align ourself outwardly more with our spiritual nature and to learn to live a life with a different, perhaps, set of values. The process of meditation makes this possible. The process of meditation makes it so we can uncover our true spiritual identity and begin to experience what it means to live a more spiritual life.

To be spiritual doesn’t mean you have to go off to the mountains, go live in a cave or join an ashram. Making those external changes may be a little helpful, but may be not. A person can be in robes and be reputed to be a great spiritual person, and just be totally getting off on everybody being so nice to them and giving them money and praising them. That could be what they’re seeking to do. You can have an external appearance that’s not connected at all with really what’s going on inside.

Spiritual realization, or self-realization, is not for special people. Sometimes people think you need to be special, or you need to undergo tremendous hardship and everything, and perhaps you can attain something of great value self-realization, God realization. The reality is that self-realization and God realization is for everyone. You don’t have to be special. You already have what’s needed. It is a question of uncovering what is there, how to remove the false concepts that we have of who we are and what will make us happy and what our life should be for.

When a person grows in their spiritual understanding of their own identity, it alters how they see themselves. It also alters how they see others. You begin to look at others differently, in a wonderful way.

Something that’s really a bummer about this thing [holds phone] and the internet is the proliferation of pornography. The idea of the dopamine hit is big time there. But one of the massive (for me) one of the massive disasters with the vast proliferation is everybody is being taught to look at another person as a thing to exploit and to use. They look at them as a thing, an object of my gratification, an object I can try to exploit. That conditioning then affects anybody that’s really engaged in this—and the majority of people in the world are, at least in the more developed countries, and I don’t mean super developed. And the effect that it’s having it just hardens people’s hearts and really reinforces this idea that it’s all about me and my desires. But that idea of me is not the spiritual me, it’s the body and mind, and the desires that arise from the body and mind, which are actually in conflict with the true me, with the spiritual being who is most overjoyed to give, to love, to serve, who cultivates enormous respect for all living beings.

In the Bhagavad-gita there is a verse that says, the great sage sees with equal vision a, what was called a brahman, (these are like priestly class, very learned people) a cow, an elephant, a dog, and what was called a dog eater, which was considered the lowest of people, who lived very rough and ate dogs and animals like this, they were considered to be living a very unfortunate life. And it says a person of spiritual intelligence sees all of them equally.

They—an awakening of spiritual understanding means I can see beyond the body that you are occupying and recognize that you are an eternal, wonderful, spiritual being residing within that body, and I can feel compassion and care. When I have that vision, I can’t inflict pain or suffering or abuse on another. My interest is their well-being, to try and do the greatest good for another. So, this is what happens. And when I look upon this world, I don’t see it any longer as a place to simply exploit.

It’s just like, oh my God, what’s happened? It’s crazy town. I mean, people actually think that all we need to do is have more sustainable energy, and everything will be okay. It’s like, No! That’s hardly going to do anything. The problem is this ridiculous consumption habits, because we’ve been utterly brainwashed. We’ve had a hundred years of an extraordinary development of understanding of psychology and the utilization of psychology to exploit people, to make them endlessly consume, to try and always fill up that emptiness with something more. Everything has become disposable. Even you and I are simply markets to be exploited—and we think the problem is fossil fuel? It’s like, come on. It’s way deeper than that. We have lost the plot.

We have become so utterly conditioned and controlled by all this messaging that we think we need all this crap. We think that we need validation, we need—we’ll find our worth and everything in all this stuff that will actually not do anything for us and wreck where we’re living and pull our societies apart. We have rates of depression and mental illnesses and suicidation that just like, it’s unparalleled in the history of human beings on this planet. It’s unparalleled. And it’s all tied to the choices that we’re making, the things that we’re doing.

We are convinced that the choices that we make are going to somehow deliver happiness and fulfillment. Yet, the reality of what everybody’s going through is completely opposite. We’re thinking one thing and the reality is another thing.

There was an American environmental scientist. I should have had it ready. Sorry. And he said, “I thought that the main problems were climate change, fossil fuels.” And he said, “I thought that maybe three decades of good science would solve the problem.” And—he used to be the head of one of the United Nations agencies to do with climate and everything. And he said, “but then I have come to realize the problem is not these things. The problem is a spiritual ailment that has taken over all of the people.” And he said, “I don’t have a solution for that. It’s not an engineering problem. I don’t know what the solution is to what’s a spiritual ailment that is really, really infecting the world.”

When a person has any form of actual spiritual awakening, the way that they will look at the world, the way they will look at others will be changed. And it will be based upon the way that they are actually seeing themselves, understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being temporarily residing within this body. If I think that just chasing stuff to poke into my body and its different orifices is going to fulfill me, I am sorely mistaken. If I am an eternal spiritual being, then what is my actual purpose? What is it that I should be doing to bring meaning to my existence?

The process of meditation will actually do that. It will actually bring about this transformation. The most efficient and effective way to engage in meditation is through the use of spiritual sound, of transcendental sound. This sound that comes from a spiritual dimension. And when we engage with it, just like I was talking about bathing in tropical waters, when we let ourself go and just bathe our mind, our body, ourself, our spiritual being in this ocean of transcendence, it will have a purifying effect. It will be like on those mornings when there’s fog (You get fog out here? You do? Okay.) when there’s like heavy fog and you look out the window and you can’t see the car, you can’t see the tree in the front yard. It’s just really heavy fog. But when the sun comes up, the power of the sun is that it begins to dissipate, the rays of the sun dissipate the fog. And the fog begins to clear, it begins to lift. Gradually, it all becomes very clear.

And so that is what happens when a person engages in this form of spiritual meditation on transcendental sound or spiritual sound. It begins to burn off the fog of ignorance, all the heavy conditioning, begins to change our hearts. We begin to actually more deeply consider, “What should I be doing with my life to make it of more value. How can I become more caring in my relationships with others? How can I make my life better?”

Something I share with everyone: wherever you find yourself in life and the experience that you’re having, it is the result of choices that you have made and actions that you are taking. And there’s a little formula that runs through all the Dharmic traditions, that ignorance equals pain and suffering. If in your life you are feeling pain, you are feeling some suffering, it will be because you are being affected by ignorance. You are accepting something that is untrue as being true, and it is making it so you have these profoundly sad experiences, you experience the emptiness, the pain. But we don’t have to stay there. We can make the change.

So, I’m going to lead you in a little what’s called kirtan. Kirtan is the process of group meditation, where you will have a person that leads the kirtan. They will sing some of these mantras, these spiritual sounds. And when the person leading, when they chant, then the other people simply allow the sound to enter their ears, enter their heart, and then when it is their turn, they respond by also chanting. It doesn’t matter what your voice sounds like, that’s irrelevant. And then we begin a process of back and forward, the leader chanting and then people responding.

If you want, you can close your eyes, and doing that, sometimes people feel a little bit more comfortable so that they’re not worried about how they look or if anybody’s looking. And it, for some people, gives them more license to feel free to chant.

So, I’m going to sing a—maybe I’ll sing two different mantras. The first one is Haribol, Nitai Gaur, Nitai Gaur, Haribol. And then I might also chant what’s called the Maha Mantra or the Hare Krishna Mantra that many different people also use.