Living Spiritually in a Modern World – (Finding harmony in chaos)

Namaste everyone. Welcome. Before speaking, I will chant Sanskrit invocations. They are offering of respects and gratitude to my spiritual teachers, to our lineage and to the Supreme Soul.

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

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

he krishna karuna sindho dina bandho jagat pate
gopesa gopika kanta radha kanta namo ‘stu te

aum namo bhagavate vasudevaya

Haribol.

So, I was asked to speak on—I have to find it, I made a few notes here: Finding Harmony in Chaos – living spiritually in a modern world.  I actually did it the other way because I think it fits better: Living Spiritually in a Modern World – (finding harmony in chaos.)

So just as a perspective, from the ancient spiritual traditions that have arisen out of India, the Vedic, or yogic traditions, they categorized, or spoke of, how, during this particular period of time, and for quite an extended time in which we live, they referred to this time as the Kali Yuga. This word yuga means, it’s quite an extended period of time. And it was categorized as an age of chaos, of quarrel, and confusion. Can anybody relate to that? I mean it’s just crazy how quickly everybody’s willing to fight and to quarrel over things. It’s like we can’t even deal with stuff and gracefully accept differences of opinion, or attitude, or how somebody wants to do things. This tendency, for almost immediate outbreak of quarreling tendency, is very strong.

So, I’d just like to make the point that while a lot of people may feel that the internet, and particularly social media, has really caused that, the answer is, no, it hasn’t caused it. What it does is amplify it. That tendency is there, and it’s rather unfortunate.

So, we live in a time where there are so many competing political ideas or beliefs, so many different social philosophies that compete with each other, different value systems and ideas of morality, or proper conduct or behaviour. And it’s just extraordinary how things over a short period of time can be reversed; how 30 years ago, 50 years ago, certain conducts were considered bad and undesirable, and now just the opposite, the conducts become glorified, and things to revel in, and opposition to that—a different set of values—becomes condemned by people. And it’s just like we’ve lost the ability to be tolerant and to live somewhat harmoniously even when there are differences.

So, with these different competing ideas, different people are suggesting different ways in which we can socially organize, or we can rearrange all of these external things to bring about more harmony, but mostly this is not the case. The idea that I can make so many social or environmental adjustments that will result in peacefulness and harmony is actually not proven and is, from a spiritual perspective, not very well founded at all.

So, during the last century there has been one very pervasive idea that has come to the forefront. And a very famous BBC documentarian, Adam Curtis, describes this as,

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

That’s a pretty indisputable fact, and it is becoming increasingly so, the focus on individual feelings and desires taking priority over other things. This idea is a new idea. In the thousands of years of human history, this was not the way people operated.

I mean, it really blew my mind: when I was a young guy, I left New Zealand when I was 18, going 19, and I ended up moving to India and living in ashram and monastery as a monk, and adopting that lifestyle, and then moving out to the Philippines, Southeast Asia, for about 35 years. And I’ve been really—spent most of my life living in older cultures, older cultures that are prevalent in Asia, probably Eastern Europe to a large degree, and Africa; and in these social environments, the idea of it all being about “me” is considered shocking. It was like… [mimes looking at someone in shock and dismay]

Because we live within societies, we desire and need relationships. But if I tend to make it all about “me,” it becomes very hard for people to live in a way that produces some peacefulness and some happiness.

The effect of this great experiment over the last 100 years to create a consumer society, a society that has never existed in history—and it’s kind of like we’re disconnected from that reality, because this is kind of all that we know. But if you are a student of history, you’ll see that this was not the case. And being immersed in a society where the individual is considered so important, more than anything else, and my need to consume things, to find, try and find happiness and fulfillment and status and all of these things is actually tremendously impactful upon people’s life, ideas of harmony, ideas of purpose.

Along with this period in time, we had this growth of the use of psychological manipulation, and especially now through technology, the use of psychological manipulation in order to capture markets. And it’s just like, “What!?” What is a market? A market is you and me. But there are people that look at us in a very impersonal way, simply as markets to exploit. And so, they endeavor to capture as much information about you as possible. Everything that you do on one of these devices, everything that you do on a smart TV, and now with the internet of things, every time you open the refrigerator door, somebody’s captured that information—what time of the day, how long the door was open—they even predict what you were probably going for, to try and look at patterns of consumption and habits.

So, we’ve been monitored all the time. Even when you enter a Google Search, and you put two words in, or three words, and then you erase one word and put another one—that is recorded, and it is analyzed by AI to show the way in which you think, the way in which you are directed, because that information gives them more of an ability to manipulate you, to try and sell you something, to further capture your attention, which is a marketable commodity. I mean, we use these things, and we haven’t really given people permission—we have without knowing it—that they just take all of this information about us.

There are massive profiles about us in the internet that are then manipulated and utilized and sold as a commodity—your thinking, your desires, your habits are sold as a commodity, and people exploit that to make money. And we’re just like oblivious. We’re living in, “Do-do do-do, do-do,” our own little fantasy world, like, “Oh yeah, we’re okay. No, I’m control of my life. I got my device. I know what I’m doing. It’s my social media.” No, you are enslaved. You are exploited to the max. And then you wonder why your life is so chaotic. Well, there’s a reason for that. The technology is designed to produce a result.

So, there is a guy by the name of Tristan Harris. He was a design ethicist for Google, and—or Microsoft, can’t remember, and he resigned from that because he was so shocked by really what’s going on behind the scenes. And in testimony to US Congress, he made the statement that the business model, the big tech business model is

“…to create a society that is addicted, outraged, polarized, performative…”

Do you know performative? [Mimes taking selfies and video] “Smile for the camera.” “It’s me.” “It’s me again, aaah!” “Here’s me being candid,” and that was the 30th time I took that picture, and I chose which one I wanted. This is being performative. We’re performing for the camera. We’re performing to try and project an image of what we are like and what our life is like that is utterly fake. It is utterly plastic.

So, their model is to create a society that is addicted to the phone in so many ways and to the social media and all of the products associated with it.

“…addicted, outraged…”

When they see that you are going—that you have strong feelings about things in a certain way, they will purposefully hit you with things that outrage you, so that you will just like [mimes typing angrily] They want you to blow it up, they want you to have a shitty reaction to something. It’s like this. So, they want you:

“outraged, polarized, performative and disinformed.” And he says, “That’s just the fundamentals of how it works.”

And we’re on the other side of this thing, and we’re oblivious. We don’t know that every time I pick this thing up, there is a massive array of computers behind this, that’s targeting me and digging into my mind and my emotions and how I react and how I respond and what I like and what I don’t like. There’s this massive amount of computing power that’s really after me and wants to build the most accurate possible profile where they can even predict how you are going to react to something. They know in advance.

It’s become so—there was one man in England who was part of a study, and he started suddenly getting ads for baby products, and he’s going like, “What’s going on?” And so, he had one daughter, and so he reached out to his daughter, and asked, “Are you pregnant?” And she goes, “No.” Then about a week and a half later, she goes, “Oh my gods, Dad, I’m pregnant.” And it’s kind of like whoa, how did they know that? Because they know that with pregnancy comes a change in hormonal functions in females, and the attraction to certain types of scent and the repulsion to certain types of scent, this is all documented. And so, you’ve got computers watching her, and seeing her change in behavior and what’s of interest to her, and predicting that she’s probably pregnant, and then targeting her dad who they’ve connected with someone that’s likely to buy stuff for the baby. Is that amazing or what?

And it’s not like this is a one-off example, this is what’s going on everywhere; and they want to become so advanced in their predictive capability that they can find out if somebody’s likely to be going out on a first date and judge that that person, a guy, may be feeling some insecurities based upon his previous behavior and relationships (if he had any) and start firing products at him that will help give him a sense of more worth and more being, and an attack of vulnerability to exploit it for money, and then take a commission when he goes off to buy that cool leather jacket to get ready for the date, that they will show that they drove that, and then they want a percentage from the seller. This is how they’re actually working. This is what’s going on behind the scenes.

So—but it’s not like they’ve created these things. As I mentioned earlier, we have entered a period of time that was predicted, where certain characteristics will become manifest: chaos, quarrel, and confusion. And so, in order to look for peace and balance and harmony, there are so many things that are fired at us, how—offering those kinds of opportunities, and as I said, it’s all about trying to rearrange things in my life and things around me. But unfortunately, most of these drivers are based upon a particular idea that is non-spiritual. It is material.

Materialism—which everybody goes, “Yeah, materialism is not good,” but you ask people, “What is materialism?” they think it’s, oh, being too interested in buying stuff and owning things. And well, yeah, those are symptoms of materialism. Materialism is founded on the idea that I am material, that this body which I am temporarily occupying and using is me. And so all of the different proposed arrangement of things, they are trying to rearrange things connected with my false identity as being the body.

Spirituality means I see as foundational in my life that I am a spiritual being. I am only in this body for a limited period of time. I am a transient. This body is not me.

In the philosophy of materialism (and most people don’t even know that it’s a philosophy, it’s just something that we do, it is “our life” as people say) there is the idea that the body is the self, and my pathway to happiness is to try and satisfy or fulfill all of the urges of the body and the urges of the mind. And if I do that, I will be fulfilled, I will be happy, I will be peaceful. So, the proposition is, through consumption of stuff, getting stuff and pulling it in close, I will become fulfilled and happy. But this is not the case. It breeds disappointment. It breeds dissatisfaction. And the more I chase these things, the more I stimulate my senses and my mind with the idea of consumption, fundamentally, the more unhappy I become.

I don’t know if you guys saw it, but a couple of weeks ago there was an article in the world news about a tribe in the Amazon. They lived like in the really, one of the far-flung areas of the Amazon. They didn’t have any contact with the rest of the world. And in his great benevolence, Elon Musk thought, “Let’s give them internet so that they’ll be able to reach out to the world if they have an emergency or something going on.” And a person hears that, and they go, “Wow, yeah, that’s a good idea. That’s kind, like really kind. He’s so kind.” He gave them Star Link and a whole bunch of associated terminals with it.

So, within a relatively short time, the chief of the tribe (and it’s a 2,000 strong tribe) began complaining that the result of having Internet available to everyone in the tribe, a lot of the young guys were already addicted to porn, and they were manifesting aggressive behavior towards the women because of their porn addiction. He said all—and because they are hunter gatherers, you got to go out every day to make it—and work, either planting or gathering or hunting to make it so you have food. And all those people were becoming now lazy. They’d rather hang out on the internet than going out taking care of their lives and their families. And then the other big problem for him was the introduction of social media and how it was causing divisiveness and fighting amongst members of the tribe.

So here we go, we’ve got a perfect control, as they say in scientific experiment, perfect: there’s no facilities for communicating, they’re living their own lives, they were quite modest people. For instance, men and women would not kiss in public before other members. It was considered, “No, you need to keep that one back in your hut. You don’t do that outside.” They lived very temperate lives, and there was a certain balance, and there was a certain level of happiness, or at least some peacefulness in this life. And now this has all become upended because of exposure to these different things.

We are deeply immersed in this type of experience, and because we have no “control” in our life, I mean nothing to measure against, we don’t see how deeply we are being affected, and we just wonder “Why am I feeling empty? Why am I feeling unhappy? Why am I feeling unfulfilled? Why is there a lack of satisfaction in my life?” Which then just leads me—I hear all the time, I’ve just got to hit it harder. I got to turn up the volume, a little squeeze of lemon and some Tabasco in it. Let’s spice it up. Let’s try something different. Let’s go for it, let’s amp it up, and this way, it’ll bring back the spice to things. And it’s just like, oh my gods! And we’re so blind, we don’t see how harmony and peacefulness becomes not just corroded but actually destroyed incrementally by this approach to things.

So, the common denominator in all of the different proposed activities on the material platform to find harmony and peace, they all—the common denominator is this misconception of the body as the self, the mind as being the self. And in this state, one is completely oblivious to our actual spiritual identity. We become disconnected from our own self. We become absorbed that which is not us. And it doesn’t matter how much you experience, you don’t become fulfilled, you don’t.

There’s a clip of Will Smith going around, and a couple of things blew my mind. One is what he was saying, and the other thing that blew my mind were all the comments and reaction to it. He was saying, “When you have everything you will reach this age and point in your life where you realize that you are not getting any happiness from things, even experiences related to the world don’t actually provide you happiness. Your relationships don’t provide you fulfilling happiness, that happiness comes from within. Happiness is not what you get from things, it’s what you need to be bringing to your life and bringing to things.” That is a profound realization. There is more truth to that than most people can comprehend unless you are deeply engaged in a spiritually directed life.

But the comments were like—they were so cheap and nasty and thoughtless, “It’s easy for you to say that! How about you give me some of your money?” And it’s just like, “What?!” We don’t even have the ability to listen to what somebody’s saying and consider their situation and think, “My God, is this, is this it? Is this where everything leads?” I just manifest envy: “Oh, you’re so cool and rich, why don’t you give me some of your money so I can be happy?” And it’s just like, are you, are you that dumb? Really? Are you that—can I use the F word, clueless, that you can make a comment like that? It’s just like—that’s sad, when we cannot even take advantage of people’s real-world experience.

So, there’s a revolutionary idea that’s proposed in one of these ancient yogic texts, known as the Bhagavad-gita, which is actually 5,000 years old. They make a statement:

“One who is not connected with the Supreme Soul can have neither transcendental intelligence nor a steady mind, without which there is no possibility of peace. And how can there be any happiness without peace?”

That’s like whoa! That’s like, that’s amazing. And I need to be actually quite sensitive and very honest with myself to contemplate upon that and look at my own life and people that I know around me, to see the truth in this. And it’s like, here is an offer, an offer of happiness and an offer of peace, something that we all desire. But am I so committed to the path I am on, am I so committed to the illusion that all I need is more experience, more opportunity to consume, to indulge, I need unlimited access to all of this, then I’ll be happy? This is an utter fantasy.

I’ve had the experience in my life, I at one time developed a process for doing semi-precious stone mosaics. I used to work with one of the biggest jewellers in the world, and he had two private jets and a $45 million yacht, in those days. Today that would be about $80 million yacht, US dollar, not New Zealand dollar. And I used to fly around the world with him.  I used to decorate palaces and stuff. I’d rock up to some kingdom and I’d have like $162 million worth of jewellery to show to queens, $18 million necklaces, and this kind of stuff. And I would create these just astonishing things for the very wealthy people, people that can spend $150, $200,000 in a weekend and it’s like it’s nothing.

And when you have access to this strata, you become amazed at how pervasive the use of drugs and alcohol are. The drugs are often prescribed by doctors. And you go, in Saudi Arabia go into a palace, and it’s meant to be, nobody’s meant to drink there, and the wife of the Sheik, who’s the secretary of the king, she’s drunk out of her mind at 10 o’clock in the morning. She’s having a nervous breakdown and falling apart at the seams. It’s just amazing how you can have supposedly everything and be so empty.

Just ask Kurt Cobain. You have all this popularity. I mean how many people that are highly supposedly successful, they’ve got everything that everybody desires, they end up committing suicide, withdrawing from society, major drug addiction problems, tremendous unhappiness. But we just look at in the movies and everything, and we have false ideas what these people’s lives are like. Then somebody goes to court—like the Johnny Depp thing, right? and how he’s behaving with his partner. Oh, my gods, it’s like animals, animal life. And it’s sort of like okay, well, I guess money doesn’t bring dignity, it doesn’t bring peacefulness. People can become incredibly degraded, even in those situations.

So, we’re talking here about what will actually deliver peacefulness, which is a foundation for real happiness.

So, there is another verse, four verses later in the Bhagavad Gita in that chapter, and it describes, you know how big rivers flow into the ocean? We don’t have many real big rivers here, not really. You want to see a big river, where it’s like a 100, 150 kilometers across the mouth of it, when it’s flowing out into the ocean, like in the Amazon, in the Ganga, the Brahmaputra. You go to these big rivers, it’s mind-blowing. And the amount of water that’s rushing out! You can be three or four kilometers offshore and put a bucket in the water, and the water’s still kind of fresh as opposed to being really salty. And the volume of water that’s rushing into the ocean from all of these big rivers is mindboggling. And this example is used. So, this is a formula of how to become peaceful:

“A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires—that enter like rivers into the ocean which has ever been filled but is always still—they alone can achieve peace, and not the person who strives to satisfy such desires.”

And this is just like, whoa, what a radical idea, that rather than responding to the ads, “Just do it,” just do what? Just go for it, just go for it, commit, just consume, whatever urge comes along, treat yourself, do yourself a favor, buy yourself a birthday present. Oh my God, these are such horrible ideas. They don’t contribute anything positive to our life. They make us more unhappy is the result of it. And rather than being a greedy and envious consumer—

Envious means, I envy what others have, which is what advertising is all about. It plays on this. There is a recognition in advertising that every single person is feeling emptiness, and what I need to do is present a product that they can connect with, because it’s in a certain genre, it has a certain appeal to what they’re doing already or whatever, the values that they have, I present a product, and the message is: this will fill up the emptiness—that’s what the offer is. And the psychological manipulation behind the choice of who’s going to appear in the ad, what they’re going to dress like, what their demeanor is going to be—this is all studied to appeal to a certain market group. And they basically sell the idea that because I’m consuming this product, I’m happy, my life is fulfilled, it’s wonderful. And I take that in and become manipulated by it.

And so, the idea of fulfilling endless desire is actually what our whole economic system, the consumer economic system is built on this idea. And if consumers reduce their consumption, all of the economists and the politicians freak out. And they look for ways (and they say this) “to restore consumer confidence,” to get people spending again, buying stuff, because that’s necessary to maintain the system. And so, everybody has simply become a slave, maintaining a system that actually doesn’t deliver to them peacefulness or happiness. It does the opposite. It’s like putting gasoline on the fire. I have a fire and I go, “Oh let me grab this bucket of gasoline. I’ll put the fire out,” and I throw it on, and it just like Booouuufff, it becomes hotter.

When I chase consumption with a desire to extinguish this emptiness inside, it doesn’t. Temporarily I get a blast, “Baam!” It’s just like, “Oh, yeah!” but then it wears off really quickly. And the result is it is actually increased the desire to consume. It has the opposite effect.

And so, the formula that’s been proposed here is, one must learn to tolerate the endless flow of desires. You need a higher purpose in your life. You need something that’s really worth living for, something that delivers the goods, and you need to follow that path. And in doing it, you will still be battered by endless desires, because this is how we’ve been conditioned, but it’s saying here, one must learn to “tolerate” this and not be disturbed by it. And in this way, living a life of more temperance, one will experience a calming of the heart, a calming of the mind. And when we begin to look at things that are more purposeful and meaningful, relationships, our activities, everything that we’re doing in our life will become more spiritually oriented and fulfilling.

You know this—you’ve heard of the Dunedin study?  I mean New Zealand’s really famous for the Dunedin study. It’s just extraordinary. I think it was 1500 people they got as little kids and began following them in their life. And as part–they were doing psychological, medical, all kinds of examinations on these people. And they had such cooperation that even now, after decades, people come back at the appointed time to be interviewed, to be medically checked, to be psychologically evaluated, to see how they’re doing in their life. It has produced the single most amazing body of information.

And one of the things that they’ve found is that when they examine certain activities that people engage in, like the tendency towards addictive behavior and consumption habits and all these kinds of things, they said that there was a single predictor for the highest success life. And that single predictor was the capacity for delayed gratification, when people could put off this tendency to “Now!” “I got to get it now! I got to taste it, I got to experiment, I got to experience it, I got to do it now.” But people that had the ability to go well, “It’s not time for it. This is not the right thing. I need to be focused on this,” people that had this quality of temperance where they could delay gratification, these people were more focused on better outcomes in their life and prepared to accept levels of austerity to tolerate urges in order to acquire something more valuable later.

And this is just the opposite to what governments, to what the internet, social media want you to do. They want you consuming constantly. Every time there’s an urge, go for it. That’s what they want.

The spiritually perfect person was described as an atmarama. This means somebody who is completely self-satisfied. They are so complete, because of their spiritual realization of their identity and the engagement in a spiritually oriented life, that they felt there was no need for anything. They did things but they weren’t driven by an emptiness and a need. They were self-satisfied. That person is the worst possible person in a consumer society. That person wrecks everything; and yet that’s what produces the highest happiness and the best outcomes.

So, if we want to find peace amongst the chaos—I mean hopefully, if you contemplate on and consider, and even do some of your own study, you will find that what I am saying is actually completely true. It’s not a belief system. It’s not—it’s a reality. The thing that will make it so that we can cultivate a greater experience of and reconnect with our actual spiritual identity, who I am as a person, not as a material body and a mind, who I am as a spiritual being, and live a life that is more connected and in harmony with my spiritual being, the greater happiness I will experience, the greater peacefulness I will experience.

There is nothing that you can do that is more helpful in having—growing in that vision and experience, than the process of meditation, of mantra meditation. We are encouraged by the ancient great saintly teachers, great sages, to actually build a personal meditation habit, to build a personal practice. They have a word, it’s sadhana. Sadhana means my daily spiritual practice or cultivation. The word sadhana means, the means to an end, that this activity will take me to the place that I wish to go. And by engaging in a personal meditation practice, what is now—

—It’s described that everybody’s walking around like with their head in the fog. We’re utterly confused and bewildered. We’re just responding to all this stimulation and impetus, to do this and to do that, but it’s not giving us what we want, and we’re so out of it we don’t recognize that. Instead of going, “Oh I’m doing this, and it’s not producing what I thought. Maybe I need to do something different,” the general tendency is, “I just need to turn up the volume. Let’s hit it harder.” Right? If I’m a party animal, and it’s not producing the happiness I want, then I should party harder. That’s the philosophy, the material philosophy, and it’s so dumb. It shows just, we’re bewitched. We’ve lost our intelligence. We can’t see things clearly, because everybody else around us is doing the same stuff.

I urge and encourage you to develop a personal meditation habit. It will genuinely dissipate, gradually, the fog. There will come from it a clarity and an actual experience of this awakening of my actual spiritual identity, who I truly am.

The process is like spiritual nutrition. I spend all my waking time trying to nourish the desires of the mind and the body, and I am completely abandoned, myself, the spiritual being within who is—I can, just as a—we can use the terminology, it’s not like this, but it’s like we’re withering away, we are so empty, we are so lacking in spiritual experience. And if I take in spiritual nutrition, I grow stronger, and my experience of the process is that it actually delivers amazing experience of happiness and fulfillment.

So, I have a website Acharya das.com, and we got one of the tabs in there on kirtan and meditation, and we teach different types of meditation. We’ve got some really simple guided meditations where you can just, every day, put one on and just, some of it is just so easy and simple. If you want to just stretch out and put it on, and just follow one of the guided meditations even for 20 minutes a day I promise you, your life will become transformed. It will become transformed.

So that’s it, folks.

Ben: You want to finish with a chant?

ACD: Cool. What? Aah, we’re going there big time, Ben.

We’ll do questions, we’ll do questions after, during the meal, but…so if you have them don’t forget it.

So, somebody requested me to do a certain chant.  So, I have to do it otherwise I don’t get any meal, not that I really need a meal.

I’ll just say one more thing, spiritual growth, self-realization, God realization, you don’t have to be special to experience this. It’s not for some special person. What we are talking about is uncovering your actual spiritual nature that is already there. This process is not about acquiring something. It’s about uncovering what is already there, the most intimate, the deepest part of who you are. And this process we’re engaged in is not—you don’t need any special ability or talent or anything. It’s just really simple. By engaging in such a simple and profound process, powerful process, it gradually removes all of the covering, the fog, and your actual real and eternal spiritual nature begins to manifest.

Sound like a good deal? It’s for everyone. This is meditation for dummies.  I’m a complete idiot. Oh my God, I’m just like the number one space cadet. When I left New Zealand, I was just like all over the place, it’s like a drugged-out hippie, just absolutely spaced out. Anything that I’ve shared with you today hasn’t come from me. It is my great fortune to have the wonderful and holy association of wonderful spiritual teachers. And so, it’s just like, okay, you just do it, and it happens. Okay, that’s it folks.

Haribol. So, I’ll chant the Mahamantra.