Weathering Life’s Storms

Namaste everyone.

So, before speaking I will just offer some auspicious invocations, it’s in the Sanskrit language, offering my respects and thanks 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, big subject and not a lot of time to discuss it, so I’ll move a little quickly, and I’ll give you some very big picture ideas that I absolutely promise are really foundational to living a good life, having a good experience in life.

Life by nature is going to be filled with different varieties of storms and different types of challenges. How we deal with that is of great importance. Unfortunately, especially now with social media, with the influence of advertising—I mean a lot of us are little bit beyond middle age already. I’m already 73, been around the block a few times—and we’re seeing that the reality is people are being increasingly sold unrealistic ideas about life, about the nature of the world and the things that you are going to encounter. They have all these lovely phrases, “Be all that you can be,” and everything, and a lot of it is actually crap, I’m sorry, and it’s really important to be cognizant of that, otherwise we will develop unrealistic expectations about life.

And so when we are confronted with some of the real hard realities of what it is to experience life in this world then people break down. I mean we have monumental numbers, when you look at the mental health issues, particularly amongst young people. Older people have been through more. Younger people are like so soft, and been told all of these nice things that you hear, and so there is a lot of fantasies built about life, about relationships, about what you can actually achieve and do. And when people run into the hard reality that I’m not going to be able to do everything I want, and life is not always how I want it to be, then there’s a little bit of a breakdown

I was just reading this morning an article written by a reasonably young person, actually becoming very critical of what they were exposed to. And I’ll just read out a little passage:

“Too many of us, young and not so young, have been told too many lies about what it takes to succeed at work, and not nearly enough truths. “Follow your dreams,” is the exhortation of many college commencement speeches [of course, in the US college is university] but it is nightmare job advice. [The advice is follow your dreams. It’s nightmare job advice, this person says.] All those bright shiny aphorisms that are spoon-fed to young employees, like follow your dreams, and know your worth, and many more, well, the truth is that they don’t really work at work. While we are all born with personal worth we have to earn our professional worth.”

So, a lot of employers complaining about younger people with a strong sense of entitlement, where I deserve it because I’m worth it, but I’m not going to work for that worth. I’m not going to build it myself.

But of course, apart from that just a lot of people have a really hard time with relationships, and just goal setting, realistic goal setting, and dealing with the things that we deal with. And of course, the ultimate thing that we deal with is the aging process and death. I mean, I encourage people to spend some time in old age homes. Go and see if you can be of some help, comfort someone. But then you are confronted with the reality, oh my God, this is where it all goes. And it’s kind of like—and it becomes shocking, that thought, or that idea. Whereas in reality we should not be shocked, because we should know what is the nature of life; because if I don’t understand what is the nature of life, how can I live a good life, if I spend all my time chasing dreams and aspirations that are unrealistic? Realistic aspirations are good but unrealistic ones are not.

So the reality is—and please, and you can correct me if I got this one wrong, life is tough, or not? Everybody’s having a cruisey time? It’s all coming to you and…? No, life is tough. It’s the very nature of life; but because it is tough it doesn’t have to be a bummer. It doesn’t have to be depressing. It doesn’t have to be sad. It’s just the nature of dealing with things in life.

Are we okay with this? Or you want me to stop already? I am—I don’t do the unicorn and rainbows and butterflies. That’s not what I do. It’s important to be a hardcore realist for you to come to be able to live a successful and happy life, and that’s within your grasp, but you have to be down to earth and realistic about it.

So, as I already mentioned, just the very nature of life is that you will encounter great storms. Some of them are not so bad, some of them are really bad, and the question is how to deal with this. One of the most important principles to embrace is, there is a famous saying in English, “This too shall pass.” Even when you find yourself in some of the worst places in life that may seem to go on for, almost, at the time it seems like forever, things do pass. You do get beyond it. And living by this principle, and being able to hold on to it very tightly when you encounter difficulties, is really important, because it offers you stability.

When they had sailing ships, which wasn’t that long ago. Really! I mean my grandparents grew up, some of them, in houses that had dirt floors, and they put newspaper on the walls to try and keep things warm. That wasn’t that long ago. And much of the world is currently living like this or has newly just moved beyond this. The time in which we live now is uniquely different, but we are losing contact with some of these very real things.

So in ancient time—well, it’s not ancient, it’s not that long ago, when they had sailing ships, no GPS, no internet connection, no weather report, okay? You’re going to sail around the world and have no idea what you’ll encounter. You don’t know, until you suddenly sense—you know, being able to see further means there’s a drop in pressure. Being able to see clouds on the horizon, you know, we’re going to face a storm. And I’m in the middle of an ocean, in a dinky boat. They weren’t that big. And you’ve got all these people on there. And you could be encountering typhoons or massive storms; and what do they do? They pull all the sails up. They tie them so they don’t get shredded. They tie everything on the deck and everything below, and you go below deck. You close the hatch, and they put a piece of wood through it. It’s called battening the hatch. And they know this will pass. Whether it’s going to be one day, two days, five days, it will pass. And we simply cannot do anything about it. We need to just ride it out, do the best we can under the circumstances. And once the storm has passed, they open everything, they come out on deck. They inspect what damage there was and make repairs and continue on their way.

This is a wonderful analogy for life, learning how to live this way, that when times are tough, batten the hatches.

When times are tough, another little short thing: don’t make it worse. And we’re really good at that, right? Things start, like, there’s a flare up, there’s a relationship conflict or something, and somebody speaks aggressively. And then what do we do? We succeed in ramping it up because of the way we respond. And then they ramp it up because then, the way they respond. And it’s just like, oh my God, you know. How can we get past it if our next move is going to be making it worse?

So, it’s a really important principle in a lot of aspects of our life: don’t make it worse. We may need to ride this one out, and don’t make it worse.

So, just with these two principles, it can really, really help in giving us relief from what would otherwise be a sense of desperation. When I feel like I’m losing control of my life, and there’s all these influences and things happening that I can’t change, I don’t have the power to change it, and I feel like I’m sort of like somewhat losing control, if I’m just focused on that there will be a sense of desperation which will often become almost like depression or at least great sadness. But it’s like, well, it doesn’t have to be that way, there are options available to me.

Shifting now to a more spiritual perspective: the very nature of the world is that everything is temporary. Nothing lasts. It’s only in the fairy stories where they have, “and they lived happily ever after.” Is that a reality for anyone? if it is, amazing and wonderful, but for the vast majority of people, no, that’s not real living happily ever after.

The nature of the world is that things are temporary. They go up, it’s like reach a high, and then they go down. And then we look for another way to go up, and then it goes down. Then a lot of the time it’s just Wrrrrrrrr, just on the daily grind. And then occasionally a little whoop and then it Wrrrrrrr.

Being realistic and understanding the nature—This world is not perfect; it will never be perfect. And seeking perfection in this world and in other material personalities—massive mistake. That’s unrealistic. We have to learn to deal with our self and our situation, and to take other people for what they are and find a way to cooperatively and, hopefully, compassionately live together, pursuing something that is higher or something that is better.

They have a little bit of a saying, “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” That only works if you do both of those things. If your life is spent just hoping for the best, but not making any preparation for the worst, that’s about as bad as it gets, where you’re just hoping against hope, hoping and hoping, but you’re not encountering the fulfillment of those hopes. And if you encounter then something that is you consider detrimental or painful or difficult, then it’s sort of like just, throw up your hands in despair and burst into tears and go hide somewhere, and I don’t know, drink or take drugs or whatever you do to get through it. And hopefully, when you wake up, things will be better, which they never are.

Are you guys okay with this? Huh?

So, what we’re encouraged to do spiritually, the most wonderful and life-transforming thing that can happen to you is for you to begin to discover the reality that you are an eternal spiritual being, residing within this body. This body is actually not you. Is that a shocking idea? I mean we all have some, often, sense of that. And the little meditation that we did at the beginning was—that type of thing is to try and help people develop a greater innate sense that “I am not just this, this garment I’m wearing around.”

If I was it would be a real shocker, because once it starts falling apart it’s depressing. And it can’t do anything other than fall apart—that’s the trajectory. It’s built like that. It’s designed this way. And just wishing it was different and hoping it would be different is not a good way to build a very happy life.

Is this too hardcore or what? No? Anybody wants to throw anything at me, or—? Just checking.

So, there is a very ancient text that we—one of many that we study is called the Bhagavad-gita. And it deals with yogic wisdom in the most wonderful way.

(Are we getting too hot? Should we turn that one off in the back there? Are you—how are you guys feeling? You alright? It’s getting a bit warm. Okay.]

So let me just read one verse from this text:

“Those who are seers of the truth have concluded of that which is material there is no endurance.”

So, this is one of the natures of the material energy, and things made—like my body is made of material energy. Of the…

“material there is no endurance. And of that which is eternal, [talking about my spiritual being or what some people call as the soul. In Sanskrit they use the word atma which means the actual self] and of the eternal [or the self] there is no change and they have concluded by studying the nature of both.”

So, the truth is that we are temporary residents within this body, the bodies that we are using. They shall pass, but I will continue to exist because apart from the material energy, there is a spiritual energy. All life manifests because of this spiritual energy. But I spend almost my entire life falsely absorbed in this idea that this body is who I am. But this is actually not true. I am an eternal spiritual being residing, I am giving life to this body, I am lending life to this body.

When we understand these principles, it really begins to change how you look at the world, how you look at the purpose of your life. It begins to really change how you look at others, how you begin to actually live. The foundation of all spirituality is the understanding that I am spiritual, I’m an eternal spiritual being. The foundation of materialism is the idea that I am material, meaning I am this body in which I am currently dwelling.

If we could learn how to batten the hatches and know that the difficulties we encounter in life, that they shall pass; if I learn not to make things worse, meaning, I don’t just surrender to what’s going in my mind, if my mind is on a rager, I should say, “No, I’m not following that.” I can choose whether to manifest great anger or to take it in and really calm down and think, “How should I respond to this situation? What should I do to make things better? What do I need to do to actually get somewhere?” If we could just do that your life would become way better, and you would feel far more empowered, because your choices and your decisions determine what kind of life experience you are going to have and what will happen to you, and learning to make really good choices is the key to experiencing a really good life.

A fantastic framework for facing the storms of life and even not the storms, all the stuff in between, is something that’s referred to as the Serenity Prayer. Have you heard of this? I mean it’s like a key influence in anybody that’s struggling with addiction, alcohol, drugs, anything. I mean it’s a really important part of those kinds of programs that really build resilience in people and an ability to be more thoughtful in your life. And the Serenity Prayer is:

“Grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change…”

I’ll just talk about this for a second. Why serenity? Why Serenity? That serenity comes from not just being caught up in your mind and the rages that it goes through everywhere, but being able to step back and peacefully consider, “Should I just accept this, because I don’t have any power to change it?” This is a monumental step in life if people can be thoughtful like this. And this doesn’t mean that you’re become some kind of genius. This is just really basic human living.

The second part is,

“…grant me the courage to change the things that I can,…”

Usually, in life we don’t accept that things that happen to us, even though we have no control. Can you control how somebody talks to you and what they say about you, and how they treat you? You can’t control that. But then we’ll spend all our time, “Why did they say that? How come…?” and we’re just like caught up in this whole world, revisiting this thing that I have no control over. But what do I have control over? I have control over the decision, “How am I going to let that affect me?” Am I going to let it affect me? Am I going to completely change my life because of what someone said or did to me? That’s ridiculous. I need to have a better plan than just reacting to everything that comes to me. I need to be the one at the driver’s wheel and have set a course and going somewhere. And I can decide if I’m going to let something affect me or not. Of course, it will affect me, but do I have to respond to it? Do I have to keep thinking about it? Absolutely not!

And the final line is,

“…and grant me the wisdom to know the difference.”

—the difference between what I can change and what I can’t. This is a fantastic, and it’s actually a deeply spiritual guide for life. If you want to weather the storms, using this as a map, as a GPS to follow, will not only benefit you, it will actually make your life really wonderful.

But this, the spiritual knowledge of my being a spiritual being residing within this body: You know, if I ask somebody to show me a picture of when you’re a baby or a little child, and someone shows it, and you look at it, and then you look at them, and you go, “Oh, where’s that body now?” Somebody will go, “Oh, this is still the same body it just grew.” No, I’m sorry, it didn’t. It is a scientific reality that within two years, 98% of all the atoms in your body get replaced. Within five years everything, including your brain, has all been replaced. It’s new energy, it’s a new matter, but you remain the same. You are still the same person, the one who is experiencing all of the constant change.

And so, with my life I go through this, you know, of birth and then growth, then maturity and reproduction, and then things going into decline, and finally death. [Whispers:] “Don’t say that word, it might come true!” It will come true! It’s the only thing you can rely on in life—you’re going to die. Don’t be afraid. It’s okay, actually, you are not going to die, your body is. You’re going to leave it, you’re going to move on. That is just like, wow, what a revelation that is, what unbelievable comfort. And it’s not a false comfort. It’s a reality.

So, this too shall pass, batten the hatches, you are an eternal spiritual being. You don’t have to be enslaved by the mind and follow it everywhere. You can begin to direct it. And following the guidelines of Serenity Prayer can make it so that you become powerfully equipped to live a decent life that can actually produce a great sense of peace and calm and happiness.

And the single most powerful thing that you can do to make that a reality for you is to engage in the process of meditation. These meditations that we do—they’re not just like “Wow, that sounds nice, and it makes me feel a little bit good.” It is more far out than that. Just by engaging in the process where we just learn to immerse ourself in this spiritual sound, transcendental sound, it begins to clear the heart and the mind of all the dust and cobwebs and the debris and the damage and everything that people have been through. And it’s—you start having clarity. You gain more control of your life. You can begin to make really, really good decisions, and your life can become quite wonderful.

And with that, I’m going to stop. Okay?

So, it sounds like we’ve got a few takers for the proposition. So, what I’ll do—could you pass me that? I’ll lead you in what we call kirtan. Kirtan is a singing meditation, and we will be using the mantra behind me, Aum Hari Aum. So, I’ll sing this twice, and then, I’ll get you to respond also. And we’ll see if we can have a really nice time here.