Rethinking Climate Change – a spiritual perspective

So before speaking I will offer some ancient and traditional invocations to invoke auspiciousness, to offer respects to my spiritual teachers, to our very ancient 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

aum namo bhagavate vasudevaya

So, Rethinking Climate change – a spiritual perspective: this is kind of a subject that I’ve actually spent a lot of time studying in different ways for really long time, and I feel very happy to be here with you guys. This is sort of like activism central is it, huh? In Melbourne? Somewhat? Hopefully.

I’ve long passed 70 years of age, and the time allotted to me is not so long. Looking at the clock ticking away. And so the idea—I’m very passionate about my spiritual interests and the idea of being able to share something with you that might make a difference and might multiply and amplify, to me is great fortune.

So, considering the lack of time and the seriousness of the situation, it’s going to be a bit of a no-fluff presentation (not meaning to be derogatory or anything), because the urgency is great, and I may end up—I think there is a massive need to challenge everyone’s thinking on the subject; and so I might end up saying something that might be considered controversial or even a little bit challenging. And it’s sort of like, well, I might be even challenging that which we hold to be true or good or essential. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, because when we are challenged we have the opportunity to reexamine things and either to become more strengthened in what it is, the direction that we’re heading, or to see if there is a need to alter our course somewhat.

So, I wanted to start the talk with a quote from a gentleman, his name is Gus Speth. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. He’s an academic and an environmentalist. He was—he’s a lawyer as well, from America, and he was the former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and he was a former administrator of the United Nations development program, so he speaks with some authority. He states:

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty 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.”

What do you think? That’s pretty down to earth. That’s very, very real. So he points to cultural and spiritual issues at being the heart of all the problems. I’ll just address, first, some of those cultural problems as viewed from a spiritual perspective.

The biggest challenge to this planet, to humanity, to things, is actually the culture of materialism. It is the culture of materialism that is responsible, disproportionately responsible, for many of the problems and issues that we are facing. Of course, the other part of materialism is what’s called hedonism. Hedonism is the basic idea that by stimulating my senses and mind I will be fulfilled and happy, and therefore I will consume things and do whatever I need to, to whip my different senses into a frenzy to find some form of satisfaction or fulfillment. This is an absolutely bankrupt idea, that has no truth to it whatsoever.

So, people are generally very unaware that we have faced now just about a hundred years of intense conditioning, like really intense conditioning on these subjects, that is really shaping the way everybody is thinking. And many of the things that have been adopted by individuals and societies, they weren’t there until about a hundred years ago and since that point; that for thousands of years humanity survived all kinds of difficult situations with a completely different framework than what has been adopted in more recent times.

Some of the things I’m going to share with you will probably be quite mind-blowing. Well, I hope they are. That’s the intention at least.

There was this situation that arose out of the 1st World War. When America became involved in the 1st World War, the captains of industry, as they call them, were absolutely elated. It was a miracle. It was fantastic, because they just kept blowing all this shit up, and so the demand for manufactured products, whether it’s things of war or things used in war, was huge, was absolutely huge. And so we had this incredible situation where so many men went off to war, and the women actually started moving into the factories, and it was just like—and production was going 24/7 in a lot of places. And of course, profits rose, and it was— it overstimulates the economy. And everybody, at least at the top, are dancing for joy.

And then the war ends, and now they’re freaking out, “How do we keep the party going? What do we need to do to keep the party going?” And so there were all these conversations amongst the captains of industry and the politicians and the people at the top, what do we need to do? And the consensus was, there has to be a massive and radical change in society.

There was a famous banker, his name was Paul Mazur. At this time, during this period, Lehman Brothers was the biggest bank in America, and he was a director, the first non-family member to be a director. And he wrote an article that was published around about 1920 (somewhere there, 20 to 22, somewhere in that space), and he put forward an idea that was being discussed. He wrote,

“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.”

Is that amazing or not? I mean, it’s absolutely mind-blowing that there was such a conscious decision to bring about a massive social transformation.

They didn’t have fashion as we know it now, where every season, every year, it changes. And it doesn’t matter if you’re cool and radical, or you’re high society elite, somebody’s driving this, the whole idea of new desires. It used to be that people were primarily focused on utility. There was an overall trend in apparel, but people didn’t buy new stuff until the old stuff was worn out, that was the basic idea. That has been just—it’s gone by the wayside really, really big time.

So one of—well, let me just read another quote. This is from a guy by the name of Adam Curtis, and he did a—he is a BBC documentarian, really smart guy. He did an amazing four-part series called The Century of the Self, very worthwhile looking at, and it studies the transformation and change in social psychology over the last century, and the ramifications. So he says:

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

So this is a big shift from idea of social awareness and a sense of duty and responsibility and the collective good, to now being completely self-centred. It’s all about me and my feelings and my desires. It wasn’t like this a hundred years ago. It wasn’t even like this 60 years ago, and this transformation that’s rolled through the land is monumental.

And one of the guys that that really contributed it was a—he’s actually creepy, and he’s hardly known. His name was Eddie Bernays. Eddie Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was the one that actually made Sigmund Freud famous and shone the light on psychology, modern psychology.

Sigmund Freud proposed ideas that had to do with the manipulation of societies as a whole. A lot of people don’t know this, but he thought individualism and stuff was dangerous, and if the masses are not controlled then you have very precarious and dangerous situations; and they pointed to the Bolshevik Revolution as proof of that. This is where the headspace was at.

Eddie Bernays became quite good in a craft that was called propaganda. Propaganda was the term that was used to shape opinions. However during the 1st World War the Germans became very expert at propaganda and caused chaos in Europe with propaganda, and so propaganda got a bad name. So Eddie Bernays thought, well, we can’t keep referring to it as propaganda. We need a new name for it. You know what the name was that he dreamed up? Public relations! Okay? Public relations used to be referred to as propaganda.

Eddie Bernays, he was very influential—he became an advisor to Woodrow Wilson, who was the president in America, and he was charged with creating a particular image of Woodrow Wilson, particularly in Europe, as being the savior and the hero and the knight in shining armor that saved Western Europe from the perils of the Russians and the people allied with them—I’m sorry not the Russians—the Germans. And he did an exceedingly good job, and was seen everywhere in in high circles, and he was admired for his creativity.

And so then, as part of this transformation that was going on to keep industry going, and to get people consuming stuff, and eating, just sucking it all in as much as you could, he was approached by the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry was really concerned, because back then women didn’t smoke. It was considered completely unacceptable. And so they were really upset because they could only exploit half the population, the dumb guys, so we need to get the dumb chicks on board too. That was the thought.

And so they asked Eddie Bernays if he could help them put together a campaign to transform people’s thinking about smoking. He said, “I will, as long as I can engage two psychologists, and I have a free hand in designing and rolling out the campaign.” They said, “Yep, go for it.” And it was big bucks, because this is big money, the industry. So, he came up with this plan. He was the first guy that really began utilizing spin, he was really good at it, putting a spin on things.

So, he approached a contingent of women at a St Patrick’s Day Parade, which was really a big deal in New York. These were the suffragettes, who were fighting for the right to vote, and many of them were socialites. So he talked to them about the need to have a revolution where you are visibly seen to be pushing back against men-dominated norms. And he told them, “I want each of you to bring a cigarette and something to light it with, and hide it on yourself, and on my command, you will all pull it out, light up the cigarette, and you’ll all march down the street together in the parade smoking. We’re going to stick it to the guys.” And they did it.

And he got all of the press together, and he told them, something really exciting was about to happen, something really amazing. “Be ready, be ready with the cameras.” He said, “You are going to see women lighting up the torches of freedom.” And the next day in all of the major capitals of the world there were pictures of women walking down the street in this parade, smoking cigarettes, and it was “Women Lighting Up the Torches of Freedom,” his catchphrase. And of course, the rest is history. Then that was the way that women displayed their anger at not being able to vote and everything, they all just started smoking. And of course, this tobacco company was, “Oh, this is amazing. How many more millions do you need? We got to keep this guy going.” So it was like gross manipulation.

He was hugely responsible, or at least carries a great deal of responsibility, for the collapse of the economic system during the Depression. He was the one that convinced stock brokers—the stock brokers and the government, that you need to get the public into buying stocks. He was the one that manipulated that whole thing that led to—you know, it was just catastrophic.

So he was rather obscure. The majority of people don’t know much about him, but he was the one who started utilizing all of the techniques of psychological manipulation.

There was this—something that advertising did really quickly was to identify that every single person is feeling some emptiness within, and all you have to do is associate products or services with the promise that this can fill up the emptiness. That’s really what it’s all about. That’s how it works. And of course, over time they’re become incredibly manipulative and fine-tuned in the way that you are manipulated to do things.

You know the guy that that designed the like button on Facebook? Yeah? No, well, I mean, the like button, you know? I mean that guy, he was charging $15,000 per head for a one and a half day seminar on how to get people to do things, how to manipulate them with little icons and cute little things and stuff, to get people to act on something. It has become so fine-tuned, the use of psychological manipulation, we’re not even aware how deeply we are affected and influenced by all of this stuff.

So, there was another guy that, around about the 1930’s, he developed what was known as Keynesian economics: Lord Keynes, he became the most, probably the most influential economist in the last century. He really felt that the only way to—he was the one that was able to formulate ways of predicting boom and bust cycles in the economy, which was important for governments, and it was important for people. But he developed an idea, he spoke of a proposal that prosperity delivered by economic growth brings all good, and the great engine to deliver economic growth was to cultivate in people greed and envy.

This is not like—it didn’t just happen. Somebody, they consciously decided this stuff. The fundamental model of advertising, components: one is the recognition that everybody’s got this emptiness; and then tying a product or an experience to filling up the emptiness and finding happiness, is key to selling.

I mean, I—just because it’s so ridiculous, the—probably the last big Coke, Coca Cola campaign, where they got this little thing, pssht, they turn the top, and it pops off, and bubbles come out, and then the slogan is, “Open happiness.” And we’re so jaded that we just look at it and shrug. We don’t see how terrible that is, that statement and promise. And it’s like, what the hell is going on with society that we’ve become so jaded we don’t—we’re not even moved by this kind of stuff anymore?

I’ve spent most of my life living in Asia. I went from Australia. I grew up in New Zealand. And I went to India when I was about 19 and became a monk and lived there for some time.

Then I went with one of my very close friends and mentor out to Southeast Asia, to the Philippines, to open an ashram there. I’ve lived there for about 35 years. I’ve lived very simply. I know how to build a house. And I built a house with just a machete, a bolo. I can thatch rooves, I’ve planted rice, and pounded it every morning, and winnowed it.  I’ve lived that lifestyle. I’m very comfortable in these cultures.

And I’ve also been to the other extreme. I developed a process for manufacturing—or for doing mosaics from semi-precious stones. So, I was tied up with the world’s biggest jeweller and we’d decorate palaces and private jets and stuff with these, just unbelievable stuff. So, I’ve kind of had exposure over a broad spectrum of different social groups. I’ve been involved in lots of different things. In that way, I’m very, very fortunate.

While I was in the Philippines, some guys from the Catholic Church really liked some of the stuff I was talking about.  And they would haul me along in front of these big groups of church leaders to talk on stuff, particularly on consumerism. That was one of the focuses. And so, I asked these guys one time, “Have you guys ever heard of the Ten Commandments?” ([to current audience] I don’t know, have you guys heard of the Ten Commandments?) The Ten Commandments…

And everybody kind of like laughs, and they think that’s really quite funny to be asked that question. And I said, “Isn’t it supposed to be that if you transgress one of these commandments that you are actually meant to be condemned, that you are off to a really bad place, that things are not going to be really good for you?” And they all agree with that.  At least that’s the teachings.

So, I asked, “Well, have you ever heard of one of these commandments, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods’”? Meaning you shouldn’t be looking at what others have and developing or cultivating a desire to have it too. That is considered degraded, sinful. You’re out to lunch big time if that’s what you do.

And I said, “So what the hell has happened here? We have a whole economic system that’s built on that principle. The big driver is advertising. And what’s advertising about? ‘Look at me. I’m so happy, and my life is so perfect.  If you just had what I had, you’d be so happy too.’”

Isn’t that advertising?

And it’s like, well, I asked them, “How the hell did that happen? That you guys are meant to be religious, and this is meant to be one of the principles that you’re following, and how many of your priests or bishops or leaders are up in arms about this because it’s meant to be degrading of humanity. It sets you on a really bad course. And nobody’s saying anything about it.”

But, you know, perhaps 60, 80 years ago, people would have said something. But this process has been so slow. Well, no, it’s not slow.  It’s been rapid, but it’s creeping, and it’s incremental and so, you get caught up in it too. And you don’t see where you’re going, because everybody else around you is being pulled in the same direction.

And so, this guy, Lord Byron Keynes, he proposed that the two single most important things to cultivate in humanity so that there can be economic development is greed and envy. He states—some people objected to that idea when he first proposed it, because it was so shocking, and his response:

“The day might not be all that far away when everybody will be rich,” he said.  “We shall then, once more, value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”

So, he’s saying that cultivating these bad qualities in people, making them greedy and envious, yeah, we understand that’s not good, but it’s useful.  And we must value the useful over the good until we get where we’re going. Then we can once again value the good over the useful.

“But beware,” he continued, “The time for all this is not yet.  For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul, and foul is fair for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still for only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

Okay? This is the world’s preeminent economist talking about completely degrading humanity for the purpose of economic development.

And of course, that idea is kind of like it’s really strange. You notice that there’s just a pervasive concern about the economic growth. But you ask economists, what are we meant to be growing into? No one can tell you. I mean, if there was a farmer out there planting something, and it was growing, and he put a stake in the ground, and it keeps growing, and he keeps watering and fertilizing it.  And you ask him, “Well, what are you doing here?” “Oh, I’m just growing this plant.” “Yeah. And then what?” “Nothing. It’s just going to grow and grow.” It’s kind of, he’d be a nutcase. He’d be loopy.

But economists are doing it with the economy, and that’s okay because they got PhDs and stuff. They know what they’re doing. It’s just astonishing that nobody has described that place that we’re aiming for, that when we get there, then we can turn everything down, and now we can just maintain.

We are in a situation where the economic growth, growth is there for growth’s sake.  And all the politicians are terrified if the growth slows down, because they get voted out of office, because all the people have been so dependent upon the goodies, and that greed for consumption has been all taught to them, and everybody’s been psychologically manipulated.

So, there was a guy that came along, he became well known in the very early 70s.  He was considered quite radical. His name was E.F. Schumacher. Anybody heard that name? He wrote a book called Small is Beautiful. He was an astonishing guy. He was an economist. And he had been sent to Burma, Myanmar.  In those days it was still Burma, and it was a British colony, and he had gone out there to help the development of the coal industry. Why not? People need the energy, and it’s cheap when we get it off these guys. So, let’s help them develop it.

But in his stay in Myanmar, he was deeply influenced by the pervasiveness of the Buddhist culture and teachings, where people didn’t overly aspire for more stuff and better houses and more goodies to use. They had a different perspective, and he was so influenced by it, it caused him to really rethink things. Like really big time.

He wrote the following. And you’ll see here his thinking:

“The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed, and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features, but are the very causes of its expansionist success. The question is whether such causes can be effective for long, or whether they carry within themselves the seeds of destruction. If the human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed and envy loses the power to see things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very success becomes failures. If whole societies become infected with these vices they may indeed achieve astonishing things, but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence.”

Are we okay here? Yeah? Nobody wants to throw anything or—?  We’re good? Cool.

So of course, this pathway that was established and developed (and it’s been a hundred years now since it really started in earnest) has so utterly transformed society. And the use of technology, it’s mind-blowing how much of an amplifier it is of bad ideas—could be an amplifier of good ideas, but it’s an amplifier of bad ideas, and it’s accelerated the messaging of consumerism, and has brought about what can only objectively be described as the enslavement of people. At least that’s my less than humble opinion. And of course, I think that’s catastrophic. The effect that it’s having is catastrophic.

We live in a time of extraordinary unhappiness. It’s described as being a crisis of unhappiness, of mental health issues and serious depression, and nobody’s tying it to what the hell has happened in society, and the adoption of these new values and directions that everybody’s buying into. So okay, let’s find a treatment.  Let’s find a new chemical substance, or a new way of processing things, or let’s stop people from saying bad things or whatever. That’s what we need to do. And it’s kind of—you know the fragility, the inability to cope and to deal with stuff is all part of where we’ve been led and what has happened.

You guys heard of Tristan Harris? He was the chief ethicist for Google. He was meant to be advising Google on how ethical their products were. Needless to say, he didn’t last very long, because he’s a really good guy. He’s highly intelligent. He knows the whole tech scene. He’s a—anyway… So, he ended up leaving and becoming an ardent critic of what’s going on in the tech sphere. And he went before the US Congress. He was invited to make some statements on his evaluation of things, and his statement was.

“The business model of big social media companies is to create a society that is addicted, outraged, polarized, performative…

[Mimes taking a selfie:] Get another one—performative.

“…and disinformed. That is just the fundamentals of how it works.”

That was his statement.

The way society is transformed and what is considered acceptable behaviour is just, it’s amazing.

I was down in Geelong (Is that the name of the place? Yeah.), doing a little talk down there, talking about selfie culture. And I hate that word. I hate it, because it’s so destructive. It sends out this wicked message. We’ll get into that a little bit later.

But the idea was, 15 years ago, before these things showed up, if you were in a park or at the beach or something, and someone came up to you, and handed you a camera and said, “Could you please take a picture of me?” You’d go, “Yeah sure.,” and they’d go like [posing], and you’d take a picture. Then they’d, “Thank you very much.” And then they’d go to the next person, “Could you take a picture of me, please?” “Thank you very much.” “Could you guys take a picture of me, please?” People would be watching this, and they would think there’s something really disturbing about this person. They’ve got serious problems. That was the pervasive understanding. And that consciousness, that idea, that perception, this is part of human development. And anybody that was displaying these tendencies was considered narcissistic, very unstable, and not desirable company.

Now this has become the norm. In such a short period of time this has become the norm. And we don’t get it because we’re on the inside, and we’ve been pulled by the current.  We’ve been swept along.

There was one of the original directors of Facebook who resigned, because he was really upset by the direction of where it was going, and he understood how manipulative social media was.  And he made a public statement: “They have literally rewired our brains so that we are detached from reality and immersed in tribalism.” Okay. These are guys that know what they’re talking about. They were part of it. They watched it. They saw the effect.

So, in that vein, it’s rather naïve to think that the promotion of alternative fuels is going to solve the crisis around climate and other things. I think I’m making a pretty strong case. There’s a hell of a lot more to do with human nature and desire and what is valuable and what is important. The attempts to simply utilize alternate forms of energy are not going to make a difference. It’s just not.

You know, what’s his name? Um, Schmidt. He was one of the big guys from Google. And I watched him in an interview, and he’s saying the urgency to develop interplanetary travel is the highest priority for humanity because it is only a question of time before we trash this place, and we have used up so many resources that it will be unlivable. And so, we need to be working on it now to make it so we can go other places.

And it’s kind of like, oh my God! Do you even hear what you’re saying? It’s just like, really? Really? That’s the answer? How about we change how we’re living? How about we actually, there’s some sort of internal revolution of the heart, and we start promoting the idea of living a different way and heading in another direction. It’s just like everybody thinks electric cars are going to solve the problem. People have got no idea. You know that parking buildings in cities are not designed to handle the weight of electric cars?  Road barriers on the road are not designed to safely prevent accidents when an electric vehicle goes off the road, because it’s like double the weight of a conventional car.

One guy says, “Have you ever seen a lithium mine, the devastation on this vast scale? And then, what are you going to do with all of the solar panels, because they all have limited life, and you’re talking about—people are talking about using thousands of hectares of solar panels. What are you going to do with all the batteries?

I mean they’re trying to—they are building in Scandinavia trucks—I was watching a program on it. You know how—the weight of the batteries to move an electric truck, four tons, 4,000 kilos for one truck. How many trucks are out there on the road? And what, this is not going to affect things?

The problem is you’re not going to convince everybody anyway. The electric grid can’t handle the loads that they’re talking about. And what are you going to use to generate all the electricity? Seriously? You’re not going to be able to use wind and solar because it’s not reliable and dependable. And if you were going to use those—and it’s just like so much stuff about this… Personally, I’m really in favour of renewables. The problem is you need backups to them. But you only need all the stuff because everybody’s become so dependent on all the crap that we’re told is essential, to be able to live a dignified life and to be happy. And it’s untrue. It’s absolutely untrue.

The big problem is this reality that greed and envy have become the driving forces. Greed means, fundamentally, buying anything I don’t need. And envy is looking at what others have and thinking, “Ooh, I need some of that.” That’s what envy is.

So, advertising rightly recognized that all human beings experience some level of emptiness. But instead of trying to understand what is at the base, what’s behind that, and to see if there is some way of filling up that empty space within, we have this model where emptiness drives the search to fill up that space.

And of course, that drive is fuelled by envy and greed, which then, actually, the effect that it has on human psychology, it’s like pouring gasoline on the fire. “Oh, there’s a fire, there’s a fire, let’s put it out. I got some liquid in this can. If I put liquid on the fire, I’ll put it out.” It’s gasoline. Boom! It burns hotter.

And so, we create these dependencies, where we’re always told, “Well, if it’s not fulfilling me, I’ve got to kind of turn up the volume. I need to add a little touch of Tabasco, I need a twist of lemon in there or something. I’ve got to really fuel this dumb—” but it’s a reality to some degree, this idea that variety is the spice of life. I’ve got to consume, consume, consume, always consuming, always looking at the new stuff, always checking out the new stuff. There is a perpetual hunger, the idea of, what’s next, what’s next for me to consume or experience or do? And the big challenge is to learn how to say enough and what is enough.

I think, in spite of some of the negative things attached to it, I think that the erosion of religion has been really negatively impacting humanity, because there were principles that were espoused that had no longer been espoused. One of them is temperance. Don’t get shit that you don’t need. Greed, envy, and gluttony: these were categorized within Christianity, at least, as being seven deadly sins, deadly because they’re destructive. And yet we’ve developed a whole society that celebrates these things.

There was a thing called avarice, which is the greed for money. Now, anybody that’s hungry for money is called motivated. And corporations like really motivated people. They reward it. They highly reward it, the more motivated you are. But in plain speak, it’s just like, that dude’s really greedy and just obsessed with money. And it’s all based on this idea that money is going to make me happiness. I’ll be able to buy my happiness.

So, there is a need to cultivate another world view, which is what I’ll just touch on very briefly. Most people think that, yeah, materialism is bad, and it’s good if we were more spiritual. Isn’t that more or less an idea that’s out there? But if we ask, what is materialism?

In the ancient sages and yogis of India, they had a definition of materialism. They say the foundation of materialism is the idea that I am material.  Oooh, what’s that mean? The idea that this body, which I am occupying, which is comprised of material energy, is “Me.” And spirituality, the foundation of spirituality, was the appreciation that life is special, that life is unique, that it is inherently spiritual, that you are an eternal spiritual entity temporarily residing in a material body.

 

This thing that we call life, the period between birth and death, is not very long. It goes by in a blink. While you’re in the middle of it, you think it lasts forever. I tell you what, I can tell you from my own experience, it goes by in a blink. And now I’m looking down the road, and I’m going like, well, shit, I’ve got about 10 years left in this body, if I’m lucky, and more than that would be fantastic, but if I’m lucky. And there’s so much that needs to be done. How am I going to help people to actually come to this understanding, to actually have this spiritual experience? It’s called enlightenment or self-realization, to become so deeply, deeply aware and experience the reality of my spiritual being.

And in doing that, everything becomes transformed: the way that you look at yourself, of course, wow, the understanding, the selfie, and that’s why I said earlier, the selfie, I’m just so down on the selfie. It’s such a terrible message, because that body is not you. It doesn’t matter what you do to it. You can give it all kinds of experience, and everything, it leaves you what? Empty.

The guys in Geelong, I was telling a little story that really actually affected my life. I grew up in New Zealand, in Te Aroha, in a little town, 3000 people, and you’re just like a complete idiot as a teenager. The only thing you can think of is getting drunk and finding someone to try and have sex with. That was like, you know, what everybody was thinking about, and what they were doing in their life. And it’s completely ridiculous.

And I was with my friend in his car, and he had a girlfriend with him, and she was bitterly complaining to him, and said, “You don’t actually care about me. You’re only interested in my body.” And that was like—I was about maybe 14, going 15—that idea was mind blowing, but then I kind of put it aside.

But then when I became more interested, about the same time, I started getting into Eastern mysticism and yoga and things. And so I was—I started thinking about that, in relation to what I’m learning. My God, that’s such a profound statement. That woman was on the threshold of a spiritual experience, if she actually really thought about what she was feeling and experiencing, and really explored it, and allowed that to guide her life. But everybody just sort of like, we flip over these things.

The thing that is really going to change what’s going on in the world is for people, not to adopt a new “ism,” whatever it’s going to be, but to cultivate an understanding of our spiritual existence, and let that guide and direct our life. And the way that we look at ourselves, the way that we will look at others, the way that we will look at this world that we are privileged to be in, will be completely different.

One of the aspirations of the yoga practitioners was to become what’s called an atmarama. This word atma means the self, and atmarama means one who is completely self satisfied. They don’t feel empty. They don’t come home and go like, “What am I going to do now?” and flip on the TV or go open the refrigerator and stand there and look, like something’s going to happen, or whip the phone out and start scrolling my social media, or call someone and start gossiping about stuff. My God, all that stuff is so pointless, and empty, and unsatisfying, and just leads to a deeper experience of the emptiness and the lack of fulfillment.

What’s needed is an actual revolution of the heart. And if I can influence any of you to pursue such a revolution, and to seek deeper spiritual answers to the great problems that we face in our lives, don’t worry about everything else—well, I’m not saying don’t worry at all. But we need to get some of our own stuff done first. If I have nothing to share, then I got nothing to share.

If I’m taking care of myself and taking care of the things that need developing, I have an enormous amount to share, and I can be influential. And my humble request is that you kindly consider these things that we’re speaking of, and to begin your own inward journey to find yourself, your true spiritual being, to have an awakening, to experience the joy of spiritual discovery that is completely fulfilling, to experience the awakening of true spiritual love, and to compassionately share that with others. That is my humble request.

Nobody threw anything at me. I’m feeling pretty lucky.

This is challenging. You want revolution? This is, this calls for us to actually make a stand. It’s hard, because we’ve been taught and conditioned to see things a different way. We have been dragged into a profound illusion, and we’re thinking the illusion is the reality, and it’s not. The way that they have perfected psychological manipulation, it’s so intense. We don’t even recognize the effect that things are having on us.

Cultivation of what we call yogic wisdom is important. I mean, look at this place, you got all these books. Fantastic. What do books represent? Knowledge. But we must seek what is actually eternal, what is spiritual in nature. That is true knowledge. You can have all kinds of understanding about the way the world works and be ignorant, to be very far from any contact with your actual spiritual being, to spend an entire life absorbed in the body as being the self, and then you die—well, you don’t die, you’re eternal. You leave. The body dies.

And it was like, what was that all for? What did I actually achieve? If I’m still empty, if I’m still lonely, if I’m still in want, what was the value in everything I did? All it did was condition me further to keep going the same way. This is what it means to have a revolution of the heart. The heart means that which we treasure. We must come to value that which is eternal and true and real.

Apart from cultivating spiritual knowledge and wisdom, the thing that will transform you is the process of meditation. Meditation is not a mental activity. It’s not something you do with your mind. It is an immersion of the self in that which is transcendental, that which is spiritual.

In my mind, it’s, I got two sort of pictures there. One is like, you go to India, and you see people bathing in the sacred rivers, standing waist deep in the water, offering some prayer, and then, dunking into the water. Or, here on a hot day, and then somebody goes down to the beach, and you’re all sweaty and hot, you’ve been doing some work or whatever. You walk out into the water, and then you just flop into it, for that incredible experience and effect.

So, meditation means that we take our mind, our body, and our self, and we immerse it in that which is spiritual, primarily spiritual sound. And by doing this, by building a habit, a meditation habit, it gradually removes all of the things that cloud our heart and our mind.

It’s like the sun on fog in the morning, it just begins to burn it off, and the fog dissipates, and we begin to see with enormous clarity, and we connect with our true being, not that temporary being, our true being. And as we see things and experience things differently, the way that we connect with the world, with others, is very wonderful, meaningful, and is good.

Okay, so pretty serious, yeah? But I love this stuff. This is my life.

So, I will lead you in a short chant. And I ask you, when we do this, just as I suggested, just close your eyes and rest your mind, rest your heart in this spiritual sound, and then afterwards, if you’ve got any questions, I will attempt to answer them.

So, I’ll chant the mantra, Aum Hari Aum.