Invisible Forces that Shape Our Lives

Aum Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya

Haribol.

So, the topic I was asked to speak on, about Invisible Forces That Shape Our Lives. So, from a scientific perspective we know that such things exist. For instance, laws of gravity: we’re not even aware that it’s affecting us all the time. Even when we drop something or something gets knocked off a table and falls on the ground, we don’t even think about what are the forces that are acting on these different objects. But our entire life is—our bodies are being deeply influenced by so many natural and invisible forces.

One of the big problems with the world today and the way people are living is that we’ve become very disconnected from actual life. Everybody’s become very absorbed in these things [indicates phone], in YouTube, in the movies, whatever. It’s like we actually don’t really live our life deeply connected to the actual world around us, where we’ve been pushed more and more to live in the world of the mind, as if that is some profound reality, when it’s actually, a lot of it is just mental concoction and doesn’t really help us very much.

One of these forces—and I’m just going to touch on a couple, but there’s one particular category that I was going to focus on a little bit this evening, one that we’re sort of like quite unaware of, often, is time, the big picture of time. Like usually we, if we’ve got an appointment, or we’re going to meet somebody, somebody’s going to go to a movie, or they’re going to some event there, suddenly we have a—or it’s time for work, or it’s time to get off work, “Is it time to go home yet?”, lunchtime, we sort of like, we become a little bit aware of it.

But because of the way that we live we are very disconnected from one great reality of time: time is eating us day by day. Your experience of life in this particular body has a trajectory. It goes up, it plateaus, it goes down quite rapidly, and ends where? With the event called death. And yet nobody wants to focus on that reality, that the only place it’s all going is to that eventual outcome. And if we actually lived more conscious, we were more aware of that reality, it would really alter, probably, a lot of the ways that we deal with each other, relationships, the things that we come to value, and how we process stuff.

And so, time is one form of like an invisible force that actually shapes our life in terms of its effect, but it’s like we live our whole life unconscious of it, not very aware.

And you know, a big killer has been electricity. I—because I lived most of my life in the, what’s called the third world, underdeveloped economies, there were big parts of my life where I lived in places where there’s no electricity, and you can’t believe how different the experience is, to be able to see a sunrise every morning and to watch a sun, the sun go down; and then the influence or the effect of not having all of this kind of distraction. And it’s sort of like, the way people relate to each other and what goes on is really, really different.

So that point is made in an ancient text called the Bhagavat Purana. There’s one verse that states:

“Both by rising and by setting, the sun decreases the duration of life of everyone, except one who utilizes the time by discussing topics of the all-good Supreme Soul.”

So the fundamental point there is that time is a material force. It relates to the material world. It doesn’t touch us in terms of our very being. The spiritual being, the soul itself, is not touched by time. The living being is eternal. See, the paradigm that the ancient spiritual texts, known as the Vedas, the yogic texts, the foundation of what they’re putting forward was this understanding that each of us is an eternal spiritual being. In Sanskrit this is called atma, or self, the jiva atma. The body is temporary. The world that we are residing in is temporary, is constantly changing, but I am an eternal spiritual being.

And when I lose the plot, when my whole, all my efforts, and my mind, and my endeavours are only absorbed in that which is temporary and passing, I miss this great opportunity to actually explore and discover my real spiritual nature, and to reconnect with that which is purely transcendental. That’s the opportunity that becomes lost.

And so these invisible forces that I’m going to be mentioning here, including time, have that effect, or have that influence.

Another form of invisible influence is actually the law of karma. This word karma, it means, literally, it means action. Most people, particularly in the Western World, when they hear of karma they think of the reaction, but actually the word karma means action. And for each action there is a result, or a fruit. That fruit, in Sanskrit this is karma phalam, the fruit of your action, good or bad, and it really rules our life, whether we accept it or not. In the Biblical teaching, “As you sow, so you shall reap.” And in many cases it’s, as you sow, so you shall weep, because you cannot escape the harm that you cause others. You cannot escape it. Neither can you escape the good that you do others.

And it is because of these laws of karma you will see people are born in different situations. You know, average person thinks, a baby, when a baby shows up, “Oh, it’s so cute, and it’s so pure, and it’s so innocent.” No, it’s not. That little dude has shown up with massive amounts of baggage that you can’t even see, and that baggage will be unpacked bit by bit during your life. So you don’t choose, in the normal sense of the word, who your parents are, but actually the family that you are born in, the economic circumstance you were born into, your capacity for intellectual gaining of knowledge and learning, your artistic abilities, what the body looks like in terms of being very attractive, all the way through to very unattractive, the whole spectrum is all predetermined by karma, and we cannot escape.

But the point in talking about karma is to understand that every time we make a decision and act on that decision there will be a result. Every time you engage in something, some activity, there will be a result that will accrue from it, and it is this, laws of karma that bind the living entity to the material world and determine the nature of a birth that a person will take.

And so, our interest is in, and I’m just going to broadly use this term, in spiritual liberation. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is, in the embodied state the pure spiritual being has utterly lost the plot, and one of the big ways we’ve lost the plot is we identify this body that we’re currently residing in to be us. And so I say, “I’m male,” “I am female,” “I’m a Kiwi,” “…an Aussie,” “I’m from Asia,” “I’m…” whatever, “I’m tall,” “I’m short,” “I’m fat,” “I’m thin,” “I’m a kid,” “I’m middle-aged,” “I’m old.” All of these labels that we are adopting as being us are actually not us. These are labels attached to this body.

When the living being is caught up in this material consciousness, we desire happiness, but all of our experience doesn’t provide us with the happiness that we desire—doesn’t matter how much money you have, how much opportunity you have, everybody has that same experience. We fear death, because by nature we are eternal, but when I identify the body as the self—and it’s just like, oh, it’s so unbalanced. We know that everybody dies. Nobody continues living in that body. It—everybody’s body comes to an end. Yet when somebody close to us has that experience that we call death, when they leave—

Actually the spiritual being never dies, cannot die. You cannot die. You are eternal. What dies is the body. The body dies when you leave, when you get up and—usually you are forced through sickness or old age or some accident, the body can no longer be a suitable vehicle to occupy, then the living being leaves, and what’s remains behind is dead. And it’s shocking to us, absolutely shocking. But it’s kind of like, why should it be shocking, when this is the only outcome that can happen in life, this is the only thing that you can guarantee on? Nothing else in life is for sure. This one thing is for sure. But we feel uncomfortable with the idea of death because by nature we are eternal.

We have a great capacity to love and to be loved. More than probably anything else, everybody is driven by this. It is because that is part of the nature of the soul itself, in a pure spiritual state, to exist in the experience of being loved and loving. That is a spiritual condition. But we try to fulfill that spiritual need in this world, and it’s always like— “Oh, I was so excited. I thought this was it. I thought I was really in love, but it’s kind of crapped out, didn’t turn out so well.” Right or not? And we don’t get it. We don’t get it.

So, the great spiritual teachers are really encouraging everybody to begin to walk on a pathway that leads to their spiritual liberation, to come to know your actual spiritual identity, to experience what it means to be spiritual, and to engage in—to become immersed in an ocean of loving exchanges. This is what we are meant for. We are not meant to be hanging out in these bodies. The body is not for the benefit of the soul, the spiritual being, it’s for your entanglement, your entrapment.

And so, because they had that understanding—and I’ll just make the point that different spiritual teachers may present different perspectives or views of what spiritual liberation is. We’re not going to get into that at the moment. But the idea that the most desirable situation is for me to reconnect with my eternal spiritual nature and to live a spiritual existence, to be immersed in that which is actually spiritual. Therefore, when I am caught up, and I’m being influenced by many things and constantly thinking from a material perspective and engaging in material activity, the effect of that is I become bound to this world and bound to the material body. So, the laws of karma are for that, the process of time plays a role in that. And if we actually understood these things, and if we were more appreciative. I mean if we actually—

Well, I’ve mentioned to some people before, I used to run a lot of programs in Paremoremo, in a maximum security prison, and one of the things I try to instil in these guys is an understanding, you can cannot escape the laws of karma. Everything that you do you will pay for, in this lifetime or going forward. You cannot escape. But the big problem is when you are pulled by different forces, and you engage in speech and action, that is harmful. It harms you, and it harms others, and it binds you to this, what’s called this cycle of birth and death.

Are we okay with this? Yeah?

So there’s actually one more thing. I’ll just mention it just very, very briefly, before I get to what I’m going to talk about. There is another powerful energy that permeates the material world, and it’s called maya. Maya in Sanskrit means illusion, that there is this invisible energy that influences everybody. And so they describe how—

You know, when we’re having a conversation here, and I say we’re all eternal spiritual beings, most people kind of nod their head. They sort of get it, and they sort of accept it, at least the idea, but as soon as we stop talking about it, what happens? Again you’re just sucked into that realm of identifying the body as the self. It’s sort of like deep. We’re deeply conditioned by these ideas. And in the Vedic text they talk about a particular form of invisible but powerful energy that is facilitating that, that is making that happen.

We’re just touching on a whole bunch of actually really important stuff, but just try to appreciate, even if we’re not deeply discussing it, that these things exist.

So, the main thing that I wanted to talk about today was this really powerful energetic force that permeates the material creation, and they refer to it as the gunas. This word guna literally means quality, and they talk about there are three qualities. So they refer to it as, in Sanskrit, as tri guna.

So, what are these three qualities that are spoken about? You’ve heard the saying, “Oh, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”? Yeah or not? And fundamentally what does it mean? I woke up, and I’m in a crappy mood. Right? I’m in a bad mood. And when I think about it, it’s pretty amazing, that just the act of sleeping, and then I wake up, and sometimes I can feel as light as a feather, and I’m all bright-eyed and ready to go, other times I can wake up, and it’s just like, it’s just, you feel horrible, and you behave horribly to everybody. It’s like you warn people, “Be careful. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” or something like that.

This—there is this reality that even a person that has a very nice demeanour sometimes can suddenly just change, and they can snap at someone, usually, the kids, or their husband, or their wife. Everybody’s a little bit more careful around their friends, but people that we’re more familiar with, we feel we have a license to behave badly. And somebody can be just normally on a, really, they’re on an even keel, and then suddenly you interrupt them,  “Excuse me can I…” and, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” What! There’s something going on in their life. But you can see these sudden shifts, and one of them is the manifestation of anger, where a person can suddenly be overwhelmed by some influence where they just manifest anger, and they speak horribly, hurtfully, and they behave in a way that’s threatening and not very pleasant to be around. And it’s sort of like…

So, the ancient yogis, they were really into perceiving the nature of human behaviour and human response. They studied it very, very deeply, to understand. Their concern was, when I behave badly, in particular, and I say things or act in a way that’s hurtful, I implicate myself. I now have to accept, at some point in my life, the result of that. The pain or hurt I cause somebody else will be visited upon me. And at that moment when I lost the plot, and I became overwhelmed with some other urge or desire, made a bad choice or engaged in a bad action, that binds me, that ties me to the world. It makes it so I am moving away from what’s in my real interest as an eternal spiritual being.

So we are capable of quite drastic and sudden change, and it’s sort of like, well, what’s that all about? Before I just talk about that a little bit, they have another saying, old proverb, “One man’s food is another man’s poison.” You heard that one? And it’s sort of like, what does that mean? One person can be drawn to something and think it’s intensely desirable, another person is repulsed by the same thing and experiences it as being undesirable and really bad. And it’s sort of like, why does that situation exist? Why? Why? What’s with that? What’s driving that? What’s the causation? What’s causing that?

I’ll give you another little story. I was, about 25 years ago I think it was, 20 something years, I was in India, and they had implemented this new thing. Most travel was done on the railways, and the railways were really far out. I mean, they were pretty amazing. But getting a ticket on a train was like—it was like hell. You go down to the ticket office (and nothing was online in those days), and there’s just like so many people lined up there. And you have to know which train you want, and which window, and then you need to line up at, and there are just like hundreds of people in there, and it’s all sweaty, and it’s like a freak out. So they thought they’d do something cool and open up a special facility for tourists. As long as you lived outside, you’re a tourist, then you could go to the tourist office, and there was an air conditioner, and they had got things computerized, and it was kind of like meant to be a really good experience.

This time I was in Delhi, and I’d gone into the thing to buy something, and the computers had gone down. So, there was just like one computer working, and there was a room, it was about maybe three times this size, and it was full of people, all these tourists, all lining up for the ticket. And so the line went along, and it was like this big snaking line around the room, and one desk where one guy was sitting behind trying to do the tickets. And they had this one crappy little air con that was whiiirrr—and there was no cold air coming out, and yet everything was closed. And so you’re just sweating, and the place has just like such bad stale air, and you’re just standing going, “Oh my God! This is torture. This is torture!” And you’re waiting and waiting. You don’t have another choice.

So there was a situation—and it took about maybe 4 and a half hours to get a ticket. So we’re not talking about 30 minutes, and I’m all upset. We’re talking like 4 and a half hours to get a ticket. And so this—there were all these different people, and one guy—you can’t be in there that long and not want to use the bathroom—so some guy had asked the person behind him, “I need to use the bathroom. Can you save my space?” And the guy said, “Yes.”

So he goes off, and of course, he’s going to go a long way to find the bathroom, and getting in there is no easy feat either. So by the time he came back the guy that was saving his place, the guy behind him, had become changed by a friend, he went off to get something to eat, and his friend or relative was the one in line. So the guy came back, and tried to get in front of him, and this guy got all angry and erupted,”You can’t, you can’t push in. You can’t just push in.” The guy goes, “No, no, I was here. The guy was saving my line.” “What guy!? There’s like—” And next minute this big fight erupted, like shouting match, and guys pushing each other.

And then you watched it as it rippled along the line where everybody was, that other people started fighting with each other and complaining about stuff and started calling out and complaining. And you could see it moving along the room, and everybody got caught up in this horrible situation of all the shouting and fighting and bustling and pushing each other.

There was a little Muslim man from Malaysia who was there with a three or four friends, also in line, and he was watching, and he was observing. It was like dominoes, when you got dominoes all lined up, and you touch one, and dddrrr, ddddrrr, it’s all going. So he was seeing this, and he turned to his friends, and he said, “Satan is amongst us.” And that’s an interesting observation. He’s basically saying, in his understanding, that there is some outside and bad energy or force that is beginning to influence people, and so the behaviour that you’re seeing is because of this influence.

The yogis would see it in a slightly different way. They would see the same thing, but rather than referring to it as Satan, they would refer to it in relation to these, what I’m going to be talking about, the three modes of material nature; that the material energy operates under three influences. One is called sattva guna, which means the mode of goodness. One is called the mode of passion, raja guna, and the third one is called tama guna, or the mode of ignorance.

People are unaware that these influence or forces are there and actually affecting us. We become susceptible to these influences by the way in which we are living, the nature of the food that we are attracted to, the nature of our association, the way we are living our life, even the way in which we sleep, our sleep habits. There are all kinds of things that influence us in in this way.

So, I’m just going to read a verse from the Bhagavad-gita speaking—it says

“The material nature consists of three modes, of goodness, passion and ignorance. When the eternal living entity comes in contact with nature, O mighty-armed Arjuna, he becomes conditioned by these modes.”                          [Bhagavad-gītā 14.5]

So, these modes of nature, we will see that a person, even in their life, can become affected by these things throughout the day, or from day to day, or from week to week, or at different points in their life.

When we talk of the mode of goodness, we’re speaking about this energy that influences people, where they become very drawn to peacefulness. They like—they don’t like noisy rowdy situations. They don’t like arguments and people in conflict with each other.  They like peacefulness. They’re generally very drawn to nature and calmness. And even the type of music they like, maybe more like classical music or very ethereal sort of sounds and everything. And when a person becomes very influenced by this energy, they tend to live that kind of life.

The mode of passion influences people in the following ways: It causes people to intensely desire things. It spurs creativeness. It spurs people to seek excellence. So, just think of an athlete, like an Olympic level athlete: most people don’t even understand the amount of sacrifice that you have to make to be an amazing athlete. We’re talking about a lifetime, years and years of dedication and endeavour, massive austerity. Your friends, when they go out to party and stuff, you don’t go with them, because you’re getting up in the morning to go to the gym or to the pool or to engage in—and so they make massive sacrifices to excel, and they’re driven by this real internal—there’s this massive drive to seek excellence. And it can be as an artist, it could be as a business person, it could be as a musician, it could be anybody that has that level of dedication and driven towards creativity, is driven by the, what’s called the mode of passion.

The mode of ignorance, this influence pulls people into depression, laziness, just lie around and sleep all the time, to have no ambition, to be drawn towards intoxication of different forms, whether it’s drinking or drug taking or anything. This energetic influence of the mode of ignorance drags a person in that kind of direction.

Most people, when they speak the language that they speak, “Oh, I’m all fired up today. I’m ready to rock,” or “I’m completely out of it. I can’t even get my ass out of bed.” They would say things like that, without seeing the fact that actually you can be influenced by any of these states, by how you’re choosing to live and how you are going to interact with the world.

The overarching thing that was important was the fact that these invisible energetic forces really grip the mind and the body, and they drive desire of different types, and attraction to different forms of activity. And most people feel that they’re just helpless, that, I’m this today, “I’m lazy today,” “I’m fired up today,” “Oh, I’m feeling like going for a bush walk today, or get out in nature.” People identify with those states without understanding that we actually need to become the driver of the bus.

Spiritual life means that I am going to make a conscious decision, a conscious choice: I want this kind of outcome in my life, and therefore I need to engage in activity that produces that outcome. One of the most important things for us to be able to accept is that, at any time in our life, wherever we are and what’s happening to us is the result of our own choices and our own actions.

Somebody may say, “Well, I didn’t choose to be in an abusive relationship.” Well yeah, you may not have desired an abusive relationship, but you made a choice to get involved with that person without doing your homework and really knowing what they were like. You chose to turn a blind eye to little red flags that you saw. And so, to understand that we are constantly making decisions and making choices in our life, and the need for us to be able to make really good choices in life will determine the quality of the life that we will have, and how that life will end, how—whether it’s going to be wonderful, or just blaah, or whether it’s going to be terrible. We can actually determine that by making really, really good choices.

And so—you know this topic, talking about these invisible but powerful forces, a lot of people when they hear, it’s like, “What!?” It’s like, “Whoa, my head’s exploding. I can barely get my head around it.” But the reason that the spiritual teachers tried to talk to people, or engage with them on the subject, even in a very simple way, is to try and make everybody understand, yes, you do have choices, you can determine what is going to happen to you going forward, what will be your life experience, and how that life will end, what will be the condition that you are in, whether it will be a wonderful experience or a fearful and terrible experience. You have a choice. You can determine that.

Being aware that we are influenced is really important, because then I don’t instantly go, “Uh, I’m bummed today. I’m angry at the world today.” No, you’re not, you’re an eternal spiritual being. Your mind has been influenced by the mode of passion or ignorance, and you are caught up in a certain type of thinking, but that’s not actually you, that you are different than what you were experiencing. You are not your desires. You are not your mind. You are not your state of consciousness. You are an eternal spiritual being, and you may be having a very bad experience, but you don’t have to stay there, and you can get out of that, by engagement in spiritual activity that’s completely transformative.

That’s fundamentally the message which I hope is clear for people, because it is important to understand. So, I won’t go on very much longer. I will just give you a little glimpse into some of the texts or verses in the Bhagavat-gita that speak about the subject. In one text it says:

“O sinless one, the mode of goodness, being purer than the others, is illuminating, and it frees one from all sinful reactions. Those situated in that mode become conditioned by a sense of happiness and knowledge.”             [Bhagavad-gītā 14.6]

Next verse:

“The mode of passion is born of unlimited desires and longings, O son of Kuntī, and because of this the embodied living entity is bound to material fruitive actions.” [Bhagavad-gītā 14.7]

So “fruitive actions” means when I desire and then engage in activity to try and drag some reward, some desirable thing out of it.

“O son of Bharata, know that the mode of darkness, born of ignorance, is the delusion of all embodied living entities and the results of this mode are madness, indolence and sleep, which bind the conditioned soul.” [Bhagavad-gītā 14.8]

So what that means, just think, everybody starts out the same way. You get a whole bunch of 2-year-old children, and many of them are going to be similar in a lot of ways; but 25 years 30 years later you could have someone that’s become a very successful business person, or a top athlete, or an artist or something; and another person that is just interested in real peaceful living and has got a place up on the hill somewhere or something; and somebody else that is drug addicted and addled and living a life that is just shockingly sad. And it’s like, wow! such different outcomes from the time that maybe as children, two-year-olds or three-years-old, you couldn’t tell them apart by those thing. They were all just kids. They were playing, they had certain feelings for each other and stuff. They hadn’t learned to be really nasty to each other yet, hopefully. So that’s what these things are addressing.

There is this bigger picture that we’re completely unaware of—and it’s okay, you don’t be need to be intensely aware of these things—but to understand and appreciate that you actually have a massive capacity to control your life and to determine what is going to be your experience and what is going to be the outcome, and that is your choice and your responsibility. Our problem is when we get sucked into certain ways of living and thinking we don’t think, “Could I be doing something else? Could I be making different choices?” We just feel drawn and compelled to constantly react to whatever’s going on in our mind and nature of our desires. We don’t have agency. We’re not taking charge of our life. And this message, that each of you not only can but should be taking charge of your life, you need to be the hands on the steering wheel, you need to be the one driving the bus and determining where your life is going.

And of course, a very important part of that is, not only to cultivate some spiritual understanding, like through this yoga wisdom, to cultivate, but to engage in the process of meditation. Meditation is not a mental activity. It’s not an activity of the mind. It is the process by which the living being, along with their body and their mind, they immerse themself in that which is spiritual. This process of chanting these transcendental sounds is like us immersing ourself in an ocean, a spiritual ocean, an ocean of transcendent. And the power of these spiritual sounds, the mantras, is that they burn off the fog.

You know when there’s a lot of heavy fog, and you look out the window, you can’t see anything, but as the sun comes up, and the heat of the sun increases, then gradually the fog begins to dissipate.  Oh, I can see the hills again, I can see the tree is out there, but it’s still hazy. But then as the sun continues to beat down, that fog becomes completely burned off, and I see everything with clarity.

So the process of meditation is a process by which the fog of material life, of all the confusion, the misidentifying with the body, being caught up in the mind and constantly just being dragged by the mind and whatever’s going on up there, I feel—I identify with it, and I feel I have to follow it. No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You can step back. You can take a time out. You can engage in activity that brings real change and puts you in the driver’s seat and empowers you to make really good choices in life and produce wonderful spiritual outcomes.

Okay, was that too far out? Or no? Hopefully. It’s very challenging to talk about some of these things. We’re just scratching the surface. There’s a lot of deep technical understanding in the way the these modes of nature play out, the way they influence the living beings. But hopefully I’ve given you a basic appreciation of these realities. And I want you to please—the takeaway, you don’t have to accept things the way they are. You can live a wonderful life and have a wonderful death. That sounds like a weird thing to say, but it has actually deep meaning. You can experience pure spiritual love, you can experience great happiness, but it will be when you begin to reconnect with your actual spiritual self, not just caught up in the external body and the mind, and just being—living your whole life dictated to by the body and the mind and the desires, whatever’s going on upstairs in the mind.

Okay, so we will—I’ll chant the Mahamantra also. And do consider and contemplate that what we are doing is we are immersing ourself in a wonderful ocean of transcendental sound. And you don’t have to think any thing, you don’t have to focus any way, just let it go and immerse yourself in the spiritual sound, in the experience.