Q&A – Finding Meaning and Purpose with Regular Meditation

Does anybody have any question? Can I just say, any kind of question is fine; and I also tell people there’s no such thing as a dumb question or a silly question. Anybody that wants to ask anything that they think will help them move forward in their spiritual journey, it’s of great importance.

Audience:  Where and when did your meditation journey begin?

Acharya das:  Me? I started when I was about 14 years old. I’m now, my body is 74. And I had become a little bit disillusioned with conventional religion and the things that were proposed and—I grew up in a little tiny town in New Zealand, like three and a half thousand people, and you just couldn’t find information. But I came across information that started me on an Astanga Yoga process practice, which I did for a number of years.

I moved from New Zealand to Australia when I was 18, just going 19, and I met one of my spiritual teachers who was visiting at the time, and I was so utterly impressed that he knew what’s going on, and he had real answers, and so I followed him back to India. It was kind of nuts. I went on a one-way ticket with $14, a do-or-die mission to Calcutta. And I spent maybe two and a half years living there as a monk, a brahmachari, and engaged in beginning of my studies.

And then I went with a friend out to Southeast Asia, to the Philippines, to open an ashram there, and I ended up living there for about 35 years. I was based there, traveling a lot. And then I went, stayed in Hawaii for six years, and then went back to New Zealand in 2016, full circle.

So, for me, it’s been a lifelong preoccupation. And then I feel tremendously blessed with many of the wonderful gifts that have been shared with me and so I feel I have a great responsibility to try and repay that debt by sharing with others what I have been given. So that’s been my focus.

Audience: Quick question. How do you know, when you said that like your, let’s just say, external self, so your external, opposed to the soul, what you’re talking about, how do you know what your external self wants is wrong when, like, against your internal self, if you’re trying to fill a gap with something that might not be correct, you know, that’s correct or incorrect?

Acharya das: Yeah. So, one way to check that internally, they have a saying, “You know a tree by its fruit.” If I pursue this path of exploration, of trying to fulfill my desires and wishes, is it actually making me fulfilled and happy? Am I becoming a much better person? Am I having a compassionate impact on people that I encounter, and I deal with, I have relationships with? Is it making me kinder to the world in which we live? That’s kind of big picture.

The fundamental reality—you know, we’re not anti what we’ll call pleasure in general. The desire of the soul is to experience pleasure. The problem is that when I only try to fulfill that need on a superficial level, I can have tremendous rushes, I can have an exhilarating experience, but it doesn’t really make any difference to me in the long run. It doesn’t make me more whole and complete. It doesn’t fill up the emptiness.

So, in almost all yogic practice they also have guidelines for living. So, in the Astanga Yoga process, they call it yama and niyama, things that you should adopt and things that you should push away because it begins to condition you. We become conditioned by our choices and the actions we take and our experiences. It conditions us to quite often keep going down the same path, but harder and faster, rather than trying to rise above it and look for a better way. And so, yama and niyamas, they were principles that people adopted because what it did, it kind of gives you a better platform to function off, and that better platform quite often was living a life of temperance. Are you familiar with that word? Temperance, not excesses, where you really exercise some control over things. And the reason people can do that is because they have some sort of higher ideal that they’re aiming for. So, does that sufficiently answer the question or not?

Audience: Sort of, but…

Acharya das: Sort of? Good enough? Okay, we’ll stop there on that one for now.

Yeah?

Audience: [Indistinct]

Acharya das: Not necessarily. They can be very similar. I used to run a lot of classes in prisons. You know what kind of people are in prisons? You don’t want to hang out with these guys. You’d be frightened. Some of them are like really scary. So, what I would usually do the first day is—if I got 10 guys in front of me, I asked them the question, “How many of you actually had a plan that on this day, at this time, you were going to be here in prison?” And they all burst out laughing. It’s ridiculous. Nobody wants to go to jail, with very few exceptions. Nobody wants to go to jail. So, I said, “Well, doesn’t that tell you something, that you’ve lost control of your life? Because you wanted a certain outcome for yourself. You wanted certain things. And in your pursuit, you ended up here. So, since you didn’t decide to be here, you’ve lost control.”

Life—in life, we need to learn how to make good choices, to engage in action that produces good results, desirable. You want a wonderful life, a brilliant life, learn how to make wonderful choices. And everybody can do that. So, part of the process is then, in mindfulness, I teach people how to control their minds. Just because your mind is heading in a direction, you don’t have to follow it.

Like anger, is anger a good thing or not? Not really. It’s kind of scary, right? Even when we get angry, and we become like an animal, just raging, and it’s like, well, that didn’t improve my life, following that impulse. It didn’t make my life better. It didn’t make my relationships better. I said all this stuff when I was angry, that actually made all the relationships worse. Now the other person is going to be just storing up all of the stuff that I keep saying. And it’s going to harden them and harden their heart. And it’s kind of like, well, if it’s so unproductive—no, not unproductive, it’s so counterproductive, why do we keep thinking that this is the only avenue that we have? Just because I get pissed off about something, it doesn’t mean that allowing anger to take over is the way to find some good resolution to the thing that I’m bummed about. I can intimidate somebody to follow me, but maybe they’re going to stab me when I’m asleep. Really, intimidating somebody doesn’t make life better. It makes everything worse.

So, I would teach these guys that—and in a prison environment it’s just like an ocean of testosterone. And everybody’s just like, urr urr, ffu.. [mimes aggressive super agro face], everybody’s just going at each other. There are opportunities to assault other people and everything, and it’s sort of like—so I tell them, as soon as you feel emotions rising, don’t say anything, don’t do anything. Don’t make any decision. You need to first calm way down. And you may need to ask for a timeout. “Let me go and deal with this and get my head straight, and I’ll come back and address your concern. But right now, I’ve lost control, and anything I say is not going to make it better. Can you give me a little while, and I will come back, and we will deal with it.”

Then go away, do some of your pranayama, your breathing, or some of your chanting. And when you’ve calmed down, think about how do I deal with this? How do I deal with this to make my life better and perhaps that other person’s life better? And come back and re-engage with some intention. Not that you’ve become a victim of your own emotions, but now you’re actually positively engaging, trying to produce a better outcome. That practice is mindfulness, the practice of gaining control of your mind, of being able to step back and realize, I am not my mind. I am not the desires in my mind. I am not the emotions. They shouldn’t be dragging me around. I should be utilizing my mind for my own purposes rather than being dragged around by it.

When you engage in meditation, that mindfulness practice becomes easier because you begin to increasingly experience, that’s not me, this is covering me, and I need to be in control of what’s going on here, not that this is controlling me. In the Bhagavad-gita, it says that the mind can be one’s greatest friend or one’s greatest enemy. People don’t think that their own mind can be their greatest enemy. When you surrender to your mind and it impulsively just drags you everywhere, your life will be very sad and unhappy.

Okay. It’s a pretty long answer, yeah, for a short question?

Audience: That probably leads on to my question. [Acd: Yeah, we’re going back there.] Yeah— [Acd: Before her arm drops off.] You talked about the pain caused by ignorance, [Acd: Yeah] and maybe something that we have inside us that is against a belief or a behaviour, I suppose. [Acd: Yeah] So, going on to what you were just saying, how then can we direct our mindfulness to identify that ignorance to change it, [Acd: Yeah] to make our outlook better, to reduce the pain and pressure [Acd: Yeah]  of holding that?

Acharya das: So, along with the practice of meditation, people are encouraged to cultivate what we broadly call yoga wisdom, to hear about and to consider another point of view, perhaps a spiritual point of view, and perhaps looking at that in relation to my life and experimenting: “Let me try this and see if it makes a difference.” So, I have a website with a few hundred videos that some of which you may find helpful. Most of the stuff I’ve put on there (that’s acharyadas.com.), is, most of the stuff I’ve put there is practical things in life, to try and help us in this journey through life to live a more grounded, a better life that produces better outcomes. And then we engage in the meditation process.

The meditation process will also, quite spontaneously, not like constant, but sometimes you’ve got something, and it’s like, “What the hell am I going to do in this situation?” and sometimes they go away and chant, engage in some meditation. And then at some point, there will suddenly be perhaps, “Oh my God, I didn’t—yeah, maybe I could try this. Maybe I can deal with it in this way.” And we’ll have some inspiration, how to make good choices.

Audience: How do we do that at home? [Acd: How do we do it at home?] Yeah, so there’s so much about breathing manifestation[Acd: Yeah]  in my awareness of all of it. [Acd: Yeah]  This is a new idea to me. I quite like it, although I don’t really understand the words, and I felt a bit silly, because the Hare Krsna’s used to dance through the streets of Melbourne, [Acd: Yeah] and I really mock them or not understand them, and here I am saying…[Acd: Yeah]  That’s, I don’t know if that’s part of my question, but do… doing this at home do you put on an app?

Acharya das:  Yeah. We’ve got stuff on the web that you can hook into. So maybe you can talk to that lady at the back there. She’s very nice. And these guys over here, we’ve got a couple of—the two that came up. They can be of help to direct you. We have a lot of online resources.

The words, the word Hari, Hari means that which removes the burden of our heart, that transcendental potency or spiritual potency that lifts the burden of our heart. And bol means literally like “saying,” so Haribol means to chant the transcendental sound of that spiritual reality that will lift this great burden of my heart. Nitai is short for Nityananda. Nityananda. Nitya means eternal, ananda is great blissfulness, so it’s describing an extraordinary spiritual experience, eternal blissfulness, that is the product of meditation, of self-realization, and God-realization. And Gaura is short for Gauranga, which was the mantra they used at the beginning, which literally means something like the Golden Lord or the Golden One or the Effulgent One. And we’re addressing a higher transcendental reality or truth that will uplift us in our life. Okay?

Audience: [word missed] Sorry, maybe I’m wrong, but the way you chant your prayer, giving respect to your prayer teachers, saying mantra, Sri Krishna, Nityananda, Sri Advaita, Gadadhara, Srivas adi Gaur Bhakta Vrinda, are these then the gurus?

Acharya das: Yes, they are what we would call our param gurus.

Audience: Param gurus, chant on the tulsi mala. So, Gaura is a guru as well, and Nityananda is a guru as well.

Acharya das: Yeah, but the name is not only referring to them as spiritual teachers, but the higher spiritual experience or reality.

Audience: So, nine years ago, when you moved back to New Zealand, [Acd: Yeah]  like everyday life, yeah, I suppose, how did you go integrating this state of mind into like, the more—

Acharya das: Yeah, well, this is part of the process of yoga, broadly, is to learn how to integrate your life as an offering to some higher transcendent reality, or the Supreme Soul, so that everything someone does, from eating to walking, to working, to relationships, to everything, it becomes part of a spiritual offering. My life, my breath, my heartbeat, everything is an offering to a higher spiritual truth. And in learning to live that way, outwardly a person may seem to be just like everybody else, but when you get to know someone that’s actually following that kind of a path, then you see, wow, there’s some seriously different stuff going on here, beyond just the external appearances.

And so, it’s—there’s different paths of yoga, different processes, and in the majority of yoga processes, one turned away from the world in an attempt to escape all of the negative influence and everything and seek a spiritual path. But in the path that we follow, one is encouraged to see the world, for instance, not as mine. There is a mantra in the Iso Upanisad:

isavasyam idam sarvam

It begins, it’s like, “One should see everything animate and inanimate as being the property of a higher transcendent reality or God. One should only utilize that which is allocated for them and not accept other things, knowing well to whom they belong.”

So, this is an ancient, ancient principle that when you live in the world, you know, you should accept what is enough for you, and everything else should be engaged in some higher purpose. Your energy, your money, everything should be engaged in a higher form of spiritual service to try and uplift primarily other people.

So—I mean, I’ve had all kinds of jobs. I had a factory. We were doing like fashion accessories back in the 80s with about 300 employees. I’ve worked as—I developed a process for doing semi-precious stone mosaic, so I used to decorate palaces, and I was a partner with one of the biggest jewellers in the world. I’ve—that’s kind of like the trippy stuff. I’ve also had a lot of really kind of mundane stuff. So, it doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be leading a completely spiritual life as much as I can, or any opportunities and everything that come up—for me, the big opportunities, for instance, to make money was an opportunity to be able to be more helpful, to do greater good for others. So, I’ve been in real estate and all kinds of stuff. I don’t have any education. Should have figured that one out if I left New Zealand when I was 18!

But you can live a life that seems to be just like everybody else, but your purpose for your life has completely changed. Your focus and intent has completely changed, and so your life is not something that takes you away from what is spiritual. It brings you closer to what is spiritual by learning to integrate and see everything properly, see others properly, see this world properly.

Okay? Anybody else? Good enough? Well, you all stayed. Wow, I’m amazed. I’ll come back again if you invite me. No, I really thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to try and serve my teachers and repay my debt. You have all blessed me in that regard, so I am very grateful and thankful.