Meditation for Inner Peace and Balance

Peace and balance: What does peace even mean? I mean, we have some notion, some idea, but what is it actually, what is that experience? In one of the really famous ancient yogic texts, the Bhagavad-gita, it states in one verse, the question is asked, “How can there be happiness without peace?” And that’s a pretty profound idea. Everybody is seeking happiness. Or no? Are you happy to be on a bummer? I don’t know. Everybody is seeking happiness. We desire it. But it is an uncommon experience. And when we have moments of happiness, it tends to be somewhat fleeting and not as fulfilling as we would like it to be, those experiences. We feel them to be a little bit lacking somehow or other. So, we’re going to unpack these two terms, peace, and more specifically inner peace, and what it means to have balance in one’s life.

Many times people sort of like, they want to find some sort of technique or an activity or something that they can engage in that will perhaps make it so that their life—which kind of alternates quite often between boring and sort of some emptiness, to being overly busy and preoccupied, which is often just an activity to fill up the emptiness. Then we go home and we’re all alone. It’s just me and that emptiness in my heart. So people look for some sort of—something to add to their life to help them through what is often a reasonable amount of chaos, and if not chaos, just like a lot of noise and activity and a lack of real deeper meaning and a sense of purpose.

But what we’re going to deal with tonight is, it’s not really about trying to add something to the mess that’s already there to make it more tolerable. It’s kind of like what will—why do we have these problems in the first place? Why do we feel a lack of fulfillment? Why do we feel a certain amount of emptiness? Why is there a lot of chaos in my life? And rather than trying to cover it up with so-called peace, there is a need to find a way to remove it, to remove the serious distraction, to remove the emptiness, to remove those things instead of trying to cover them up.

We live in pretty extraordinary times. Speaking as an older person, I’ve been trying to make my way through life for 74 years now, and I’m quite saddened by the state the world is in and what it is that people are dealing with. Everybody is familiar with the reality that, particularly in the last 15 years, there’s just been this exponential growth of mental health issues. It’s just like so common. It’s like almost everybody is talking about their mental health. And it was like, 50 years ago people didn’t talk about that—not very often, unless somebody is really having some major crisis. Most people had some ability to stay on course even when confronted with enormous difficulty.

I mean, we got it so easy now. Most of my life, I’ve lived in the third world, in seriously underdeveloped countries, where people, they don’t have time for mental health issues. They’re so busily engaged in trying to put food on the table and to try and help get the kids through school and taking care of all kinds of things that are basic necessities. And many people in those situations are often way better off. They’re kind of, although it’s all relative, they tend to be more happy and feel a sense of more purpose and meaning than many people in the developed countries who are really struggling in so many ways.

We have an epidemic of serious depression where people become almost immobilized; and it’s so sad, and it’s so unfortunate. And then you have the figures on suicide and suicidation. It’s just like, what’s going on? I saw an article just a couple of days ago. Open AI released some data that on chatGPT in any given week there’s going to be a million, 1.2 million people discussing suicide. In their words, there are “conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” 1.2 million a week. And it’s sort of like, whoa, this is nothing short of a crisis. And people don’t seem to know what it is that’s really driving it. And of course, it escapes most people that perhaps we’ve chosen a bad course. Perhaps we’ve adopted philosophies and ideologies of life that are not delivering on the promise.

Are you guys okay with me talking very directly? I’m not the fluff guy. I’m sorry. I don’t do the rainbows and butterflies.

It’s a really devastatingly serious problem. And people don’t really understand what it is, how have we come to this place? It hasn’t just kind of happened. It didn’t just suddenly show up. It is the fruit of perhaps 100 years of heading in a really bad direction. For the past hundred years, there’s been this grand social experiment where people that have our attention are trying to convert us to be greedy and mindless consumers. And we’ve been deeply influenced. We don’t even comprehend, we don’t even understand how things have happened.

Well, there’s a clear pathway. The way people lived 100 years ago was so much different. For instance, when people purchase something, it was, for the majority of people, it wasn’t about fulfilling desires. It was, I need a new pair of shoes. These ones almost got a hole in the bottom of them. And when I go out to buy something, one of the primary things that I’m going to look for is durability. Fashion wasn’t a big thing. There was a trend… but this was part of what was developed in the 30s, this idea that a person should be, their character should be manifest in how they dress. How I dress, my choice in clothing, how I decorate the body is really important. It gives me a sense of identity, and clothing should represent the aspiration of who I want to be seen as. So we had a whole different environment, the way people were functioning.

In around 1922, might have been 1921, 22, one of the directors of Lehman Brothers (which was the biggest bank at the time in the U.S.), his name was Paul Mazur. He wrote an article in one of the leading newspapers in New York, and he put forward a revolutionary idea. And the idea was, and these are his words:

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

 And this was a formula to how to build a gangbusters economy. And the idea was that if we could stop all of the cycles of boom and bust, and we could have a highly productive economy, the wealth that would be experienced by everyone would make them happy. That’s what the economists thought. That was the driver. That was the idea.

And you had renowned economists, probably the biggest economist in the world, Lord Keynes, and he actively, actively promoted the idea that the two great driving forces that will make it so economies can really develop quickly, in people you must develop envy and greed, that these are the powerhouses of economies. And at that time you had a whole—the development of psychology had become a big thing. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Eddie Bernays, unknown to most people in the world, actually had more—a bigger hand in shaping the world as we know it today than almost anyone else. He utilized his uncle’s, Sigmund Freud, he utilized his research on how to influence people en masse, on a large scale, how to get them to think certain ways, how to get them to behave in certain ways. And he developed all of the early approaches to advertising.

Is this of interest? You want a really crappy example? His first client was the tobacco companies. And the tobacco companies had a big problem, because in those days, back in the 20s, women didn’t smoke cigarettes. It was just weird and wasn’t done. And so the tobacco companies are going like, God, we’re missing out on half the population. How are we going to break this model? How are we going to get more people using our product? So they engaged Eddie Bernays, and he said, “I will take the job on, but I need a budget for two psychologists and for a little bit of data.” And they agreed.

So what he did, this was the time of women’s suffrage, when it was so bizarre, women didn’t vote and didn’t have property rights and things. And so the women who were leading the charge here, most of them were socialites, and they were very strongly committed to bringing about change. So Eddie Bernays went and approached the suffragettes, as they were called, and appealed to them and said, “What you need to do is really catch attention and really make a statement.” And it was a St. Patrick’s Day parade. There were going to be a contingent of women with banners appealing for women’s suffrage. And he told them, “I want each of you to bring a cigarette hidden in your clothing and a lighter or matches.” And he said, “On my command, I want all of you to pull out the cigarette, and light it up, and just boldly walk there in the parade, puffing away on the cigarettes.” It’s a “stick it to the guys” moment. And so the women went, “Yeah! We’re all in.”

So then Eddie Bernays got all of the press pool together and he told them, “Stick with me, there is something monumental going to happen.” He said, “During the parade, you will see this contingent of women who are going to be lighting up torches of freedom.” It’s just like, what? This is brilliant. This is absolutely brilliant. And so when the women at Eddie’s signal pulled out the cigarettes and lit them up and marched down the street smoking, all of the photographers were taking pictures, and in every single major newspaper in the Western world, they had the picture of the women walking down the street en masse and the caption all read, “Women lighting up torches of freedom.” The rest is history.

But this is how influential people that ran advertising were, and they honed the craft of manipulation. The most fundamental principle in advertising is the recognition that everyone feels emptiness within, and all advertising is basically to a specific target audience showing someone a product, a service, an experience, and tying it to the idea, if you get this, it will fill up the emptiness. And we don’t even recognize what’s going on. We don’t recognize how we’re being manipulated.

Algorithms are fundamentally based on that principle also, whether it’s through shock factor or attraction or whatever, it is to feed people things to keep them engaged with the promise that this is what you need, this is what’s going to fulfill you. And it becomes so addictive that when you put the phone down, or if you walked out of the house without the phone and suddenly realized it, you almost go into panic: I’ve got to get the phone! We don’t understand how much of our life has been surrendered to the control of people that are heavily manipulating us on an ongoing basis.

Another phenomena that (one second, I just got a—I’m getting bombarded with texts here, sorry. Airplane mode will do it.) Another—somebody that dealt with the subject matter in a really brilliant four-part documentary called The Century of the Self was a gentleman by the name of Adam Curtis. He’s a documentarian and he did this amazing series, quite a long time ago, where they examined the hundred years up to more or less current time, that saw a massive transformation of society. And he described that—his documentary addressed “the rise of an idea that has come to dominate our society. It is the belief that satisfaction of individual feelings and desires is our highest priority.”

And of course, we should understand that the more self-focused we become, the more unhappy we will be. That’s just a fundamentally true paradigm. The more I make it all about me, the less I am engaged in healthy relationships that are focused on giving and sharing, and healthy communities where my role is to contribute to something larger, to accept responsibility and to offer help, compassion, service, love. The more I can do that, the more happy I will be, the more peaceful I will be. The more I am living in just in my head where it’s all about me, the more unhappy you will become.

This might be a radical idea for some people, but it’s sort of like if anybody has experienced really deep depression, the question is who’s in there with you? No one. It’s just you, in an ocean of pain and disconnect from everything. The tendency towards being overly self-centred and making life all about me leads to unhappiness. So, all this messaging that we’ve received, that it should be just about us, that we should not really think about things, that we should become highly emotional, and if I have a desire for something, I should seek to fulfill it immediately or as quickly as I can, these are the kinds of ideas that have gripped society and are fundamentally responsible for much of the pain and unhappiness that people are experiencing.

Then you’ve got another problem. You’ve got all these promises that if you just have a nose job, you get some implants, you get the right kind of body, ripped body, that you get the right kind of clothing or whatever, that your life is going to be amazing. And all the stuff that you’ve been encouraged to buy—I mean, it’s just amazing. I watched Amazon go from being a small niche bookseller to this mega business just worth hundreds and hundreds of billions, where they’re just making it so you have a desire, either something is pushed to you or you have some sort of, you know, there’s a desire that’s been planted there, and you look at it and then right there, right there in your home, buy. You can just buy stuff. Everything is like so accessible.

And the problem is that there is this reality that when I stimulate the body and the mind in different ways with different experiences, while I may receive some form of a rush, it doesn’t last and it doesn’t fulfill me. I am left again feeling empty, and then I think I have to turn up the heat, turn up the volume. I’ve got to go for it. I’ve got to go a bit further in order to get what it is that I feel that I need to bring me that happiness. And what we don’t see is that we’re just on this increasing downward spiral into quite often unhealthy behaviours, unhealthy ways of looking at myself and others and the world. It’s just like it gnaws away at us.

We tend to think everybody else is happy and I’m not. And that idea is, whoa, that’s precarious. When you start adopting that kind of idea, it is unrealistic and it is fundamentally untrue.

So, we all have these devices, practically everyone. There’s a few marginal—people on the margin who are going back to the old flip phones and stuff, really basic, texting and no internet, and they’re just shocked at how much their life has improved. It’s actually become better. And what we’re not appreciating is the actual model—I tell people, you think you’re in control of this? You think you’re in control of what you’re looking at and what you’re doing? We don’t recognize how much control is being exerted over us. This is not just a little simple phone. On the other side of this is a monumental array of computing power that’s watching everything I’m doing. Even when I start doing a search, and I erase one or two words and write something else, that goes in our folder, because it tells people how you think, how you respond to things, it gives ideas of how you can be more easily exploited.

A couple of years ago, a guy by the name of Tristan Harris—he used to work for Google, he was hired as an ethicist. He was meant to examine Google’s products to see if they’re ethical or not. He didn’t last in the job very long. They didn’t want to listen to him, and he’s now become very outspoken. And in a hearing at the U.S. Congress, in the testimony, he said,

“The business model [of these big social media companies] is to create a society that is addicted, outraged, polarized, performative, and disinformed. That’s just the fundamentals of how it works.”

You understand performative? It’s like everybody’s performing for the camera. That’s why you need to take like 30 selfies so you can choose which one you want to blast out to the world. Like everybody’s so interested! You’re such an interesting person! Everybody wants to know what you’re doing.

I heard this saying when I was in Asia, where the food gets delivered, and somebody makes a grab for it, and someone goes, “No, no, no, no, no, no, the phone eats first.” It’s like, what!? Really? What you’re eating is so interesting, everybody wants to know about it? This is what it means to be performative. It has become quite unnatural.

From the yogic perspective, if we want to approach the subject of, “How should I be living to produce a good outcome? After all, the reality is, wherever you’re finding yourself in life and the current experiences you’re having, they are always the result of choices that you’ve made, decisions that you’ve made, actions that you’ve taken. And so it stands to reason that if you could learn how to make really brilliantly good choices, your life would actually be a lot better. But if you’re going to make really good choices, you need to be the one behind the wheel. You need to be in charge of your life. You need to be in charge of your mind, rather than your mind and desires dragging you everywhere. You should be the one deciding: What’s the content? What am I going to think about today? What am I going to focus on?

The baseline, the most foundational principle to living a more spiritual life is to cultivate an understanding that we are eternal spiritual beings temporarily residing within this temporary material body, which is a garment. It’s not really us. We are the one within. We are the experiencing entity within. And even my mind is not me. And I kind of have a choice to be constantly just going with my mind wherever it’s going, wherever it’s taking me, and taking that so seriously and embracing that to be the reality, or I can decide, “I ain’t going there.”

In one of these ancient yogic texts, it describes that the mind can be one’s greatest friend or one’s greatest enemy. That’s pretty stunning, that my own mind can be a greater enemy to me than anything or anyone else. That’s not an exaggeration. This is the reality.

The process of meditation is a process by which we begin to discover what I’ve utterly become disconnected from, my true identity as an eternal spiritual being. The body is not you. All you have to do is attend a funeral; or to be present, of someone that you know well who is leaving this world, and witness what remains after they have left. That thing that remains, the body, is exactly that. It’s an outer shell. It’s an outer covering.

But unfortunately, we have spent almost our entire life absorbed in the idea that this body is me, and it’s going to be through this body that I will find love, I will find happiness, I will find fulfillment, all of these things, and it’s really determined by what the body looks like and how it moves and behaves. And that’s just not true. It’s just absolutely not true at all. And so the process of meditation, one of the—not one of the, the main reason it can deliver on the promise of peace is because it helps us develop, not just an understanding, but to experience the reality of who I am as an eternal spiritual being temporarily residing in this body.

And when we talk about the subject of balance, it’s just like, oh, from the view of a transcendentalist, it’s just like, so sad. Everybody’s just utterly locked into this idea of the body as being the self. I have an unlimited need for happiness. That arises from the spirit soul itself. I have a need for love, to love and to be loved. This also arises from me, the spiritual being within. But the problem is I try to fulfill what are fundamentally spiritual needs through the agency of this body. And so I can stimulate my body and mind, I can whip it into a frenzy, and as soon as that climatic moment is over, it’s back to shit. Now what? Right or not? We all experience this. This is not some sort of trippy idea. This is a common truth.

The process—Well, let me just finish that thought. We spend probably 100% of our time, energy, effort, money on trying to fulfill the desires of the body and the mind, and we experience that it doesn’t fulfill me, and I still feel empty. I still feel some loneliness. I feel there is something missing. And I don’t really spend very much time fulfilling what are actually spiritual needs. I don’t… It’s like I’m spiritually malnourished. I am in need of spiritual nutrition, but I’m not eating spiritual foodstuff, spiritual experience. That, my dear friends, is called unbalanced.

Some people just think, wow, if I can get the body together and then the mind, and I can just focus it on trying to enjoy the world, that somehow then everything will be in balance and perfect. No. Doesn’t matter how far out it gets, there’s always going to be this experience that it’s not enough.

So what I’d like to propose is, if you can try to cultivate what we’re broadly terming yoga wisdom, if you can cultivate this appreciation and understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being, and I need to allocate at least some time during the day to this experience, to awakening this connection, my true spiritual identity. The form of meditation that we are sharing is called yoga sound, or transcendental sound, or spiritual sound meditation. This sound that I speak of, it has been with us since the most ancient of times. It descends from a spiritual platform, or place, and it has been handed down by self-realized yoga meditation teachers since time immemorial. And when you engage with it, it has a unique effect.

The effect that it has, I compare it to when you have a foggy morning, and you look out the window and everything’s just white, dense fog, but as soon as the sun rises, you can’t even see the sun, but when it rises, the power of the rays of the sun is that it begins to burn off the fog. It begins to dissipate the fog. Then soon, oh, I can see the car now. I couldn’t see it when I looked out the window earlier. And then as it begins to further burn off, oh, now I can see the trees across the road, and I can see the hills in the distance. And soon the fog is completely burned off and I’m seeing everything with great clarity. This is a legitimate example of what it means to become self-realized, to move from that position of being utterly lost.

Oh my God, the insecurities when you actually think of the body as being the self, that this is me, the insecurity tied to that is just monumental, particularly when it starts aging a little bit, then it’s just like total panic. Everything’s heading south. Maybe I will no longer be lovable. Maybe nobody will want me. Nobody will want to be with me. And so I’ve got to do all this artificial stuff to kind of like artificially make it look like it’s younger than it really is in the hope that I will be loved, in the hope that I will be wanted, that people will want me as a friend or someone to love. That is a life of anxiousness. That is a life of anxiety. It is a life that is not one of balance.

When we cultivate this understanding of my own spiritual nature, as this awakening begins, I begin to look at other people differently. I no longer see them only as that body.

I had this experience when I was a teenager. I grew up in New Zealand. It doesn’t sound like it, but I left pretty early, came here, then went to India and spent most of my life in Asia. But when I was young and crazy, we used to just go out in the cars, when we were about 14, everybody’s sort of like drinking, and you’re trying to find some girls, chicks we used to call them, and it was like this, try to hook up, and go party somewhere. And it’s sort of like—and I remember being in this car, my friend who had the car, and I was just in the back seat, and he had this girl with him. They’d been hanging out for a bit. And then she was having this bitter complaint to him, and it really shocked me at the time, a little bit, but then later when I thought about it, and it’s always stayed with me. And she said, “You don’t really love me. You’re only interested in my body.”

Okay, who are you if you’re not the body? She was internalizing, having this experience that you don’t care about me. You’re just into playing with the body that I have and wanting to exploit it and try to gain sexual satisfaction for yourself from it. Not that there is any such thing as sexual satisfaction. If there was, you’d do it once and it’d be all over. I’m satisfied. The more you do it, the more you want it, that means not satisfied. Filling up an empty space. I’m not down on that. I’m just making an observation.

But this is incredible. Yet, she was constantly presenting herself as being the body, flashing the boobies and the butt. It’s all young and perky when you’re 14, 15 years old. She wanted people to recognize the body, but she was at the same time having this conflict, this experience, you don’t actually love me, you’re just interested in my body. And it was kind of like, well, that was an opportunity for great self-realization. But of course, it didn’t necessarily occur.

This process of meditation using spiritual sound is utterly accessible to anyone and everyone, all of the time. If you could cultivate a habit, a meditation habit, where you allocate even 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day, but the importance is to be able to do it on a regular basis. Don’t do a whole bunch at one day, and then forget about it for a week, and then try again. That kind of approach isn’t, it’s a little bit helpful, but it’s not very helpful.

If a person develops a meditation habit, it will change you, and it will change your life. It will wake up this disconnection that we have. We will now be able to identify more deeply with our true spiritual being. It will be gradually revealed to us who we are as eternal spiritual beings. And the process, this process of engagement with spiritual sound, is the process by which we actually feed—I’ll put it in a way, it’s like feeding the soul. This is spiritual nutrition, and it has an extraordinary effect.

As you grow in this understanding of my own spiritual identity, it will begin to shift, of course, massively how you see yourself. It will completely change how you see others. And it will change how you are looking at this world. That will all change, and you will be able to live, make your way through this life.

You’ve got a certain amount of time allocated to you. There is only one single outcome to being born. It’s called death. It doesn’t go anywhere else. Right? Or not? And yet we don’t want to think about it. We don’t want to deal with it. We don’t want to be very serious about it. But actually, if we lived with that appreciation, the way in which we would spend our time, the way in which we would deal with others, would really be different. It would be really different, the way that we would look upon this world and recognize, actually, I can’t really own anything—maybe for a short time, but I showed up with nothing and I’m leaving with nothing. And just that framework will help you live a life of infinitely greater balance, and you will begin to experience what will become profound inner peace, so even when you are in the middle of a storm, a storm is raging all around you, and you recognize, I don’t have any power to change this I learn to, what they call “batten the hatches.”

It’s an old saying they had on sailing ships, when you run into like a hurricane or a tropical storm when they would sail. And it’s like you didn’t see it coming, you can’t see it coming (they didn’t have weather satellites), until it begins to show up. The atmospheric pressure, the air pressure changes, and they notice that, then they see clouds forming on the horizon. And then there’s wind, then the waves, the seas get rough, and then here it comes. And you know what? You can’t do anything. They go below deck, they close the hatches, and they put a batten through it so it can’t fly open. And you’re just going to have to ride out the storm a little bit. And when it’s over, you come out on deck, you survey what’s happened and the damage that was done, and you set about fixing it so you can continue on your way. That’s a pretty far-out way of looking at things. It teaches us tolerance.

There’s this thing called the serenity prayer. Have you heard of it? It’s really—it’s used a lot in AA programs and drug addiction programs, and it’s wonderfully profound. It’s just three lines–it’s actually longer, but they usually just use three lines. The first line is, “Grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change.” And I tell you what, life is full of things that you can’t change. “Why did she say that to me?” “Why has that guy been such a…” And we want to invest so much time and effort in trying to change things that we cannot change. We cannot. How is it we are going to come to have the serenity to be able to accept things for what they are?

“Grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change. Grant me the courage to change those things I can.” That’s a big ask. And one needs to be courageous to make changes in your life. We want to focus on everybody else and what they’re doing. We don’t want to take responsibility for our own life. The third line, “…and grant me the wisdom to know the difference.” It’s so beautiful. It’s like you can live by this code. This can become a powerful guiding light in your life.

So what we’re going to do now is we’ll do a little bit of meditation. I’m going to use two mantras. The first one, we’ll see how good the guys are, is going to be this one, Haribol, Nitai Gaur, Nitai Gaur, Haribol. What I’m going to ask from you is, don’t overthink it or whatever, just relax. I use the comparison, you go to New Caledonia or Bali or Fiji, you go to some tropical place, and you walk out into the ocean and it’s balmy. It just feels amazing. You walk out waist deep a little bit more, then you just let go and fall back and just float in the ocean. It feels wonderful. That should be the approach to meditation.

Meditation is not a mental activity. You’re not trying to control the mind and do stuff. That kind of stuff is often called—it’s pre-meditation. Actual meditation means to become absorbed in transcendence, absorbed in that which is spiritual or that which is transcendental.

So, when we do this chanting, I will lead, just like Jiva was doing earlier, and I’ll leave it up to you if you would like to respond or not, or even just do it mentally. It doesn’t matter how you sound or anything. And I would suggest you actually close your eyes if you think you can get the mantra together, just so that you’re not disturbed by others around you, and it becomes more of an internalized experience. And then I might also chant another mantra that’s also often called the Hare Krishna mantra or the Maha Mantra that is used by a number of different people. It’s been used since time immemorial. So, I will chant this mantra twice.