Journey of the Soul – A Meditative Path to Purpose

Aum namo bhagavate vasudevaya.

Haribol.

So, can I ask you a question? How many people are here specifically because of the topic? So, shall I talk about something else?

It’s always a little challenging when you come to a new place, while it’s possible, and not too difficult on a one-to-one or small groups to quickly ascertain where everybody is at in their life and on their journey of life, it’s not very easy in a large room. And my job is to try to present something that is actually absolutely incredible and extraordinary, but to do it in a way that people can relate to and it inspires people in their spiritual journey. And of course, I don’t have the power to do that. I am dependent on a higher power for that purpose.

So, what do we mean? I’m always handed these quite interesting topics, so—at least I find them interesting—what do we mean, the journey of the soul? Of course, we need to break that one down. So, one of those words, soul, what is a soul? I’m not expecting anybody to answer, don’t worry, but I’m seriously hoping you’re contemplating and considering what that could mean.

One of the big problems that many people in the Western world face is that there is no crystal-clear conception of the soul, for most. For instance, most people would say, if they were asked to address the subject, they would often begin by, “I have a soul.” And if anybody ever says that to me, then my question is, “Well, if you have a soul, who exactly are you, and what is this thing you are calling a soul?” And that is a profound question that begins to address the subject in a deeper and more personal sort of way.

The Vedic understanding was that you don’t have a soul. Is that spinning people out? You are the soul. You don’t have one. You are the soul. You are the eternal spiritual being residing within that temporary body. You will have a certain amount of time allotted to you to reside within that body, but ultimately you will have to leave. But we have spent perhaps all of our life intimately identifying this outer covering as being me, who I am.

If my body is male or female, then I say I am male or female. If my body is young, I say, “I am young.” If my body is middle-aged, I say, “I’m middle-aged.” If you are one of us old dudes, people say, “Yeah, I am old.” And the most foundational understanding that was presented in the Vedas and in yogic teaching was, though, no, that is an illusion. That is absolutely false. That body that you’re residing in and everything connected to it is temporary. It is destined for death. It doesn’t go anywhere else; but you move on.

And then, of course, that opens the question like, oh my gods, if that is true, then I’m spending almost my entire life focusing on these temporary labels attached to the body, and in the end, it’s all for nothing. The body is destined for the grave or the crematorium. Is that where all my hopes and aspirations should be going?

Okay, we’ll take a little check on the pulse here. Is this okay, talking so seriously? Or? I’m really lousy at the light, fluffy stuff. I’m sorry. I have no patience for it. And if this wasn’t what you came for, please excuse me, but I’m not about to change course.

In Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, they don’t have a word like soul. They have one word that’s most commonly used, and it is called atma. This word atma literally translates to “the self.” The self. The body was not accepted as the self. The resident within was the self.

So then what is this—what is a way of considering the topic, the journey of the soul? What would that be? What could that be about? And it is the journey of self discovery, or self-realization. There is nothing more important that you can be doing with your life than coming to discover who you actually are, apart from all the labels attached to this body and to the body itself. There is nothing more important; and it is this journey that will make it so you can find profound purpose for your life.

I mean, if we consider the reality, it’s just like, it’s actually really mind-blowing. You show up in this tiny little body with nothing—actually that’s not true. You bring with you into this particular life a monumental amount of baggage. It’s called karmic fruit. You bring it into this life, and you unpack those bags throughout your life, and taste sweet or bitter karmic fruits from previous choices, previous actions.

But that aside, you show up in this tiny little body with nothing, and you leave with nothing. And yet we spend almost our entire life trying to create that which is permanent, a home, relationships, objects that we become attached to or attracted to. We spend our entire life working on all this stuff, and blind to the reality that we will be forced to leave it all behind. If we really actually were more mindful of that reality, many people would live differently. You would make different types of choices. You would value different types of things, perhaps.

But we adopt this dream, this illusion that we will find permanence in a world which is impermanent, that we will find a home, that we will create a little kingdom with ourself at the centre, the central enjoying agent, and we work incredibly hard to try and achieve that. Yet, just in relation to our own family, our fathers, our mothers, our uncles, our aunties, our grandfathers, grandmothers, all those who came before us, they all departed; and we somehow think our life is going to be different? It’s either a little arrogant or a little stupid, intoxicated, perhaps.

Oh boy, he’s one of those guys. [Laughs]

In the quest for understanding—I think everybody more or less generally adopts and accepts the idea that materialism is not a good thing, and it’d be good to be more spiritual in your life, more or less. Right? But then you ask people, what do those words mean? What is materialism? And what is spirituality? So, I don’t want to take too long on these particular subjects, so I’ll just tell you.

The foundation of materialism is not the hunger for material things. The foundation for materialism is the idea that I am material (How about that?), and when I say I am material, the idea that the body is me and that the mind is me. See, we’re introducing a whole different paradigm.

I’ve done a lot of work in prisons, and one of the things I try to help these people understand—and they get exposed to counselling and psychiatric counselling and evaluation, but it doesn’t often bring very much change, and I tell them it’s because the people that you’re dealing with are actually operating a two-dimensional paradigm. The two components of that paradigm is the mind and the body, whereas we’re dealing with what I would refer to as a three-dimensional paradigm: you have an eternal spiritual being who is temporarily inhabiting a physical body and utilizing a subtle body comprised primarily of the mind.

Spirituality is founded upon the cultivation of the understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being, having a temporary material experience, and it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. We become utterly disconnected from our true spiritual identity.

My dilemma is I’m looking at the clock, and I’m going, “Oh my gods, there’s so much to share, but our time is so short.”

Spirituality begins—the foundation of spirituality is understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being. I’ll just give you one little example for those who are maybe a little bit science-oriented. If I ask the question, “Do you exist?” the answer is “Yes.” Of course, it’s self-evident. Or it should be, unless you’re so philosophically inclined that you’ve convinced yourself you don’t exist, but then who is you that’s convincing yourself that you don’t exist? If you didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be there convincing your—okay, so let’s not go into that realm. There’s people that go into that realm, and it is a futile waste of time. It’s simply speculative. Yes, I know I exist. I’m conscious, I feel pain, I feel happiness.

Did you exist seven years ago? What would that be? 18, right, 2018. Okay, good, somebody much better at math than me. 2018—were you experiencing things in 2018? Yeah, how about in year 2000, did you exist? Yeah. Do you know that within seven years every single atomic particle in your body is replaced? So the body that you have on now is not the same body that you had on seven years ago. It’s actually been replaced, everything, everything. Some it’s on a cellular level; with nerve cells and brain matter, it’s on an atomic level. All the matter is completely gone and there’s a whole new bunch of chemicals and elements and atoms there making up the body.

Anybody that was even slightly intelligent would then conclude, “Well, if I existed seven years ago but this body I have on now didn’t, it’s not possible for me to be the body, because if that body was me, my identity would have changed, I would have taken on another identity.” We don’t take on new identities, we just change. The body changes.

When we speak of the spiritual being, to ask the question, who am I in reality? Who am I? One of my teachers did an awesome job of condensing Vedic teaching into some very simple principles. If I want to know the reality of something, I must know its essence, its position, and its function. When I know these things, then I understand it.

When I apply that principle to the question of the soul (I’m going to use the term spirit soul, the spiritual being), what is my essence? My essence is that I am spiritual. I am not of this world. This world is made of material elements that are constantly changing. My identity, the perceiver, doesn’t change. Even as the body grows old, and you have different experiences, you are still the same person. I am in essence spirit. And this is like a crash course.

The second thing, in relation to where do I fit in relation to all other beings in this world, well, the first thing that you’ve got to really understand, you’re not God. You’re not the centre of everything. This is a kind of consciousness that we bring into this particular lifetime. You just observe little children: they’re completely self-absorbed. It’s all about me. Right or not? I have enough of them of my own, they’ve grown up to be wonderful people, but we all have been through that phase. But the big question which I’m not going to answer here, if I’m not actually the centre of everything, even though I’m aspiring to be, what is my position, where do I fit in the big picture?

The third thing, what is my natural function? And to answer that, if the spiritual being is stripped of all material covering and material consciousness, in its pure state, what is the natural activity of the spirit soul, what is the natural activity?

It is difficult to reach those conclusions without some help, without some higher authority and direction.

But I would just like to, for a moment, revisit the position question, and the aspect that I want to just address is how we see everything. I see everything in relation to me. I use the language, “my husband,” “my wife,” “my children,” “my parents,” “my relatives,” “my friends,” “my countrymen,” “my humanity.” I see everything in relation to me. And this is highly problematic. This becomes foundational for great unhappiness.

And yet we have these experiences, when we show kindness to someone, anyone, how do you feel? Do you not feel uplifted? If you see a little child who’s lost or fallen over, and no parents around, oh my God, better go and help the little dude up, “No, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s… are you with your mommy or your daddy? Let’s look for them.” Just taking some time to help someone. You see an older person, or anybody trip and fall, and they’re carrying something and drop it, you have a natural inclination to want to help them up. You don’t revel in their pain, in fact you feel pain in their pain, don’t you? Even something simple like, you know, you’re at the supermarket, and you’re going out to your car, and somebody’s got their arms full of stuff, and there may be a kid, and they’re just trying to wrestle to get the boot of the car open, and you just, “Let me help you,” and just open it. Don’t you instantly feel something really good?

That is because this is part of your actual spiritual nature. Your spiritual nature, your deep spiritual nature, is not to be a user and an exploiter and to seek to take advantage; your deeper spiritual nature is to show kindness, to act in an affectionate and a kind way.

However, in life we run into all kinds of experiences that makes us mistrust people. But our tendency is to do this. And we see it when humans have such difficulty—oh my God, I’m going to upset somebody here—when people have such difficulty in relationships that we have to take it inter-species. People feel a lot more comfortable with a dog or a cat showing love and showing affection than they do with another human being. I find that incredibly unfortunate. But once again it’s got something to do with this inner nature and desire.

There are certain characteristics of the soul—you know, in life everybody is searching for happiness, are we not? Anybody looking for a bummer? Or are we trying to avoid it? And we’re not just trying to avoid it, we’re actually looking for happiness, correct? Why? What’s wrong with being on a bummer? Why do we seek happiness? I will tell you, this is not a desire of the body or of the mind, this desire arises from the spirit soul itself. The spirit soul is, in its natural state, existing in a condition of limitless happiness. That is its natural state.

And because that’s deeply embedded so we seek to fulfill that urge, but we have a crippled understanding. We’re just looking at this body that we have on and thinking that’s me, and so I try to find happiness through the agency of the body and the mind. And even when I find things that are thrilling and exciting and happy, they always have the same characteristic—that happiness does not perfectly fulfill me, and it doesn’t last. It has a beginning, and it has an end. And so I look again, and I look again. And we don’t understand that this is actually a spiritual need. It is not a material need.

The other thing I will tell you is one of the great needs that we have is to love and to be loved, and this need is also a spiritual need that arises from the spirit soul itself. It’s tied into our true spiritual being and existence. But once again, being overly absorbed in the body that we have as being the self, I seek to find the love that I need through material, what I will describe as material, personalities. And even if I have a wonderful relationship, I still hold this feeling that there is something more ideal. So we are drawn to love stories, we are drawn to romantic comedies and things, just that ideal of something more wonderful exists.

One of the chief manifestations that we see in materialism and material consciousness is, as I said, this tendency towards self-centeredness. There was a brilliant BBC documentarian, Adam Curtis, and he had done a four-part series for the BBC quite a few years ago, called The Century of the Self, and it explored over the previous century the massive transformation that has taken place in human society in terms of the concept of self.

For thousands of years human beings did not buy into this intensely self-centred existence—the idea of duty and of responsibility—the idea of just living for myself was considered absolutely shocking, that a person that displayed this quality is like, whoa! somebody that you really avoid. But we’re almost—we’ve lost touch with our roots, our human roots, the way societies have developed and lived.

He stated in, this guy, Adam Curtis, in describing the docu that he put together, it examines

“…the rise of an idea that has come to dominate society. It is the belief that the satisfaction of individual feelings and desires is our highest priority.”

I don’t know where you all sit with that. The problem is it has become so normalized that we may even have some difficulty relating to the idea that this is a new idea that’s been introduced to society, that the satisfaction of individual feelings and desires is our highest priority.

There is—and to show you, just show you just one example of how problematic this is—there’s an environmentalist, his name is Gus Speth. He’s an American environmental lawyer. He was at one time the administrator of the United Nations Development Program. He was a Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, somebody that sort of like probably knows a little bit (right?) about these subjects. So he has stated,

“I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that 30 years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy. And to deal with these, we need a cultural and spiritual transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

So that’s just a little peek into one thing, which is primarily environmental related, climate change, and you know, all these other things. And the leading cause, he has ascertained after many decades of study: selfishness, greed and apathy. The world has become so self-focused that it’s actually become ingrained.

And social media, these little things here, [indicating his phone] are so, so destructive that people haven’t yet begun to actually comprehend. Like people actually think that I’m exercising my free will in scrolling. Look, [miming scrolling] doing all this stuff, that I’m making the decisions, I’m making the choices, I’m utilizing my free will and my independence. And what people don’t understand is this “you,” this puny little individual with a technological device—and many of the things on here are so-called free, but they’re not free, they’re given to you to extract more than a pound of flesh—that on the other side of this device you have such a monumental array of computing power that is highly trained on addiction and addictive behaviour, and is designed to exploit you to the max and to change the way that you are thinking, the way that you are seeing the world, the way you are seeing yourself. And it’s like a tidal wave that humanity has been hit by it, and people haven’t had the opportunity to actually get up and shake it off and go, what do we do now?

So, there was a guy by the name of Tristan Harris. He was hired by Google to be a design ethicist, meaning he’s made to evaluate how ethical Google’s products are. He resigned [laughter] because they wouldn’t take him seriously when he found that many of their products were actually quite destructive. And in giving a testimony before US Congress, he described that

“the business model of big tech is, [and this is in his words,] to create a society that is addicted, outraged, polarized, performative, and disinformed. And that’s just the fundamentals of how it works,” he says.

It’s designed for this purpose. All the stuff that you use on your phone is designed to exploit you. Of course, it’s gonna do something that kind of you think is helpful. That’s the hook. It’s the bait on the hook, but it’s designed to exploit you.

And of course, this absorption in—I mean, I just really detest this word “selfie,” and usually mention that 15 years ago, if you wanted to take a photo, you had a camera, you didn’t have a phone that took pictures. And if you were somewhere, and you had a camera, and you wanted to get a picture of yourself, you would usually have to ask somebody else to do it for you, because you couldn’t see yourself in the camera.

And so I’d pass it to you. “Could you take a picture of me, please?” Everybody’s usually, “Yeah, okay,” you know, and so you do your pose and click. Then I take it back. And then I give it to the next person, “Could you take a picture of me, please? Maybe two, can you take two? One this side and one this side?” “Okay.” And, “Oh, could you take a picture of me, please?” 15 years ago, if somebody did that, you would think that that person has got problems. Right? This is, “We should leave! We don’t know where this one’s going!” But this is the norm.

One of the things that was described by Tristan Harris was training people to be performative. You take—you put your phone up—and everybody holds the phone up because they think it makes them look better. I’ve just been telling you, you’re not the body. So why the hell are you calling it a selfie? That’s not even the self. And then you’re going to take like—you’ve got it on rapid fire. Brrrr, brrrr, brrrr. And then you’re going to sort through about 10,000 pictures before you select the one that you apply the filter to and blast out to the universe, like “I’m so interesting! The whole universe wants to know about me.”

What the hell is this? Everybody’s living their lives online, showing all kinds of stuff, what you eat—have you heard the saying, “The phone eats first”? Have you heard that? Okay. That’s already been around for about six years. The phone eats first. Like everybody orders, like, “Oh, what’d you get? What’d you get?” “Oh, oh, okay.” And then somebody goes to, “No, no, no, wait, wait, wait.The phone eats first,” [mimes taking photos]  and then blast it out to your friends. It’s kind of like, oh my gods, what an existence!

And what everybody is learning is to be increasingly more self-focused. And alongside the phenomena is a rise in mental health issues, in loneliness, in severe depression, suicidation, and even suicide that’s growing at a pace that’s absolutely mind-blowing. I mean before, people had all these wars, they had famines and pestilence, and you didn’t have the rate of depression and suicide that you do now. And everybody’s got it so easy. It’s kind of like, whoa, what’s that about?

So there’s a problem with the self-centredness. The more that you think about yourself, or what you think of as yourself, the more miserable you are. That is just a fundamental reality. There is a renowned clinical psychologist—I was watching him speaking on the subject, and he said,

“One of the words that clumps with negative emotion is self-consciousness [meaning an unhealthy focus on what we consider the self] which means that self-consciousness is so tightly associated with suffering that they are not conceptually distinguishable, which means literally the more you think about yourself, the more miserable you are.”

Do we want to embrace that or no? We need to embrace that. If we want to become happy, we can’t go down pathways that produce misfortune.

How are we doing in here for the temperature? Is it okay or is it too much or? Everything good? Okay.

So I just saw another article yesterday about kids who get smartphones before 13 years of age face skyrocketing suicide risk. So they did a study of two million people, or a combination of studies. They distilled them, and they specifically, as part of it, did a study of 100,000 people aged between 18 and 24, looking at how they were doing in relation to when they first got their first smartphone and started using it.

“Those who got smartphones before age 13 showed much higher rates of suicidal thoughts, aggression, and emotional struggles. Girls were especially affected with 48% of those who got phones at age five or six reporting suicidal thoughts later in life compared to 28% of girls who got their first phones at age 13.”

Okay, we’re going to move on now.

My proposal is that being self-centred and self-focused, especially when you don’t have a clear conception of self, when you misidentify the body as self—I mean, oh my God, what an ocean of suffering that is. When you think that your loveableness, your being worthy, your being acceptable is tied to how your body looks, you are in a world of hurt. That is monumental ignorance.

You know, in the Dharmic traditions, they have a fundamental equation: ignorance equals pain and suffering. Broadly, if I am feeling pain and suffering in my life, I am accepting something that is actually untrue as being true. I am ignorant of something. I’m embracing ignorance, and it’s producing a result.

So I’m going to put it to you that self-centredness is actually unnatural, meaning it is not actually part of your spiritual being, that this is a corruption of the mind and of consciousness and ways of looking at the world, yourself and others. The natural condition is more tied to what we talked about earlier, the desire to show love, or kindness at least, how that has a wonderfully uplifting effect, wonderfully uplifting.

This is something that people should do if you have children. You should at least sometimes engage your children in charitable activity, doing kindness for others, to cultivate in them, awaken the experience, because it will affect and influence their life.

So going way back to the beginning, this fundamental statement in relation to the essence, position and function, in relation to the question “Who am I?” You are not the centre of the universe. When you embrace that, it is like you’re trying to play God or something. It’s all about me. It’s not about my contribution to this world, my sense of duty or responsibility towards family and society and to people that I want to be able to love. If it is focused upon taking rather than giving, I promise you unhappiness. I’m not causing it, I’m just telling you that’s what happens.

And yet, we can’t break these patterns because we live in a society, in a world, where these messages are just constantly hammered and reinforced. Everybody’s telling you where you will find happiness, where you will find fulfillment, where you will find value, where you will find worth. And it’s lies. It’s lies. But we’ve become so weakened that we can’t even—we see it, and we hear some of these things, and we go, “Yeah, I need to change the way I’m functioning.” And then 10 minutes later you go out the door and get in the car, and it’s all back to the way it was. Maybe in a week or two you think, “Yeah, maybe I should try to do something.”

So our proposal is the great and heroic journey in life, is the quest for self-realization and God-realization; that is actually the purpose of human life. Everything else is the side stuff. This is the main reason for our existence. And it’s only when you connect with that endeavour do you start experiencing an increase in happiness and a sense of purpose in life. You stand the chance of actually amazing spiritual discovery.

But the need to be engaged in this way—in the Bhagavad-gita it speaks about the dual nature of the embodied being, and it’s referenced as a higher self and a lower self. The higher self is you, the eternal spiritual being, and the lower self is considered the baseness of the body and the material mind and material consciousness, which is the focus upon me at the centre of things and seeking to grab and get and exploit and to take so that I may become happy. And we are encouraged to curb the lower nature but to cultivate the higher nature, and this is what is the actual journey, what we may reference as the journey of the soul. And its reference is a meditative journey. (Is that what they said?) A Meditative Path to Purpose.

The great saintly teachers, regardless of their tradition, regardless of the religious or spiritual paths that they embraced, the genuine saintly people, they manifest a life of constant immersion in spiritual thought, in reflection, a life of constant prayer, if you wish, a life of constant communion with a higher transcendent reality. And so the journey! We are advised in our tradition that we should follow the footsteps of the great saints, to discover what was their journey and to walk in their footsteps, to face the trials, to be guided by truth and light, to seek to be constantly absorbed in a higher transcendent reality, or truth, or God, whatever term you want to reference, but I think we all understand what I’m speaking of.

One of the great tools in this endeavour, we are told, is to embrace a personal practice of meditation. I would just like to state, and this is going to probably, some people will have a hard time with this, meditation is not an activity of the mind. Meditation means to become immersed in transcendence, to become immersed in that which is spiritual or transcendental; just like on a really hot day, and you’ve been doing some yard work or something, and you’re all hot and sweaty, and you’re near the beach, and you walk out into the ocean and immerse yourself in the balmy and refreshing waters, and it’s transformative, it’s enlivening.

We should think of meditation as the same type of activity, where we bathe in this ocean of spiritual sound. We give up, just let it go for a while, and immerse your mind and your heart in the ocean of transcendental sound. It will have a profound and transformative effect. It will purify the heart and the mind.

Some of those studies that I read out, some of those things—and it’s just like, you suddenly get slapped with, oh my God! the effect of some of the things we’re embracing as societies is so dangerous and so harmful. But we’re so intoxicated, for instance by the technology and by the dopamine hits, which—they’ve all studied, they’ve just, they have studied in ways that you cannot even comprehend how to find, what are all the individual trigger points that trigger dopamine responses, that create dopamine responses, that are tied into addictive behaviours that make it so we can’t put the phone down. We can’t break loose, we freak out. It’s like such an important thing. So, we become overwhelmed, we become deeply conditioned by things, and we’re not even aware that it’s going on.

But if you develop a personal practice of meditation, where you take even 10 minutes a day and absorb yourself in spiritual sound, one of the effects it will have will be to bring clarity, just like the early morning bright sun will burn off the fog. It will actually burn off the fog of illusion and distortion and make it so that we can begin to break free, to see with clarity. We will begin to perceive the reality of my spiritual identity. We will begin to look at the world and others differently than we are currently.

So, it’s essential. You can’t do it with just your mind. Of course, it’s wonderful to, and we should cultivate understanding, from hearing spiritual discourses and considering, contemplating this truth in my life. It’s essential, we need to do that. But the thing that will bring the internal change and bring the clarity and actual vision of reality will be from the meditation process.

So we’ll chant a little bit, and then if you have any questions… Was that too long? I can keep going, I can go at hours for this. This stuff is so awesome, and to be able to internalize and have that transformation in your life is so, so important.

Change the pick out.  I’m going to use—Okay, that’s the big one. I’ll use the Maha Mantra, the Hare Krishna Mantra, and I’ll ask you to just let it go for a little while. It’s all going to be there when you’re done. Just open your mind, your heart, and listen to these sounds and bathe in them.