Yoga: Is There a Concept of God?

Aum Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya

So, wow, big topic tonight: Yoga—Is There a Concept of God? Well, a couple of things that, if somebody asked me that question, I would probably ask them, “What do you mean by God?” because there’s a whole slew of different ideas that people have, and some of the ideas that people hold to, I don’t accept as being God.

So, for instance, you’ll usually see it with people that are avowed atheists—they can’t believe that if there was such a thing or person as God, that they would be vengeful, that they would be unfair, that they would take pleasure in the suffering of others, and therefore, they say they can’t believe in it. Well, I completely agree with you. Because if that’s your concept, or that’s the concept that you are rejecting, then I’m completely on board with that.

So, this is a big question, though. What do we mean by this word? What are we referencing?

And yoga—you know, there’s two main ways that the word yoga is understood. One is connected to systems of spiritual practice, or different forms of spiritual paths. And so usually what happens in—you’ll see that people that undertake different forms of practice, somebody may hold themselves to be a hatha yogi, somebody else may say they’re a jnana or jnani, jnana yogi, a karma yogi, a sankhya yogi. There’s so many different paths, or varieties of spiritual practice, that have a name. And so many people think of yoga in terms of being like a spiritual path.

This is also commonly used—it’s not the main way it’s used, but it’s commonly used—since very ancient times they reference what were called the sad darshan, the six different spiritual processes, and one of them was called yoga. And when they used the term there they were—it originated from the practice of what’s called ashtanga yoga, where a person endeavoured to come to the highest form of spiritual realization and experience, through a clear process that was made up of a collection of eight different limbs or types of activity:

Yama; niyama—which was the acceptance of regulation, a lifestyle that you actually embrace and that guides your choices in life. And then there was asana, the practice of posture to bring about health and make it so a person could sit for long periods of time in meditation. Pranayama—pranayama was used principally to calm the mind and bring it under control. Then there was what was called pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses from this world, so one can begin this inward journey of self-discovery to find themself, to find the soul. Then there was dharana, the process of bringing the mind—freeing it from agitation and all the crazy stuff that goes on up there in the mind and bringing it into a very singular focus in preparation for meditation, dhyana.

Dhyana was the process of absorbing, becoming absorbed in that which is spiritual, that which is transcendental—like before this we were using mantra, we were chanting together. That is a form of meditation where one becomes absorbed in that which is spiritual, or transcendental, and it is the power of that which is transcendental that purifies the heart and the mind. Then the attainment of what is called samadhi, where one became fixed in a transcendental experience and realization of both the individual soul and the Supreme Soul.

This practice though, in ancient times, was part of the process of devotion to God, of bhakti. That was its origins. So, this is one way of utilizing the term yoga.

The other way is the more broad application of the word, and how it is used in the majority of the deeper yogic texts and Vedic texts. And the use of the word means the union of the individual soul with the Supreme soul.

So, when somebody asks the question, “Okay, in yoga is there a concept of God?” Actually, according to the way in which a person may have practiced, there may have been a whole variety of different conceptions, of different types of experience and realization and appreciation. It wasn’t just a singular thing.

So, the process of self-realization cannot be separated from the process of God realization. There is going to be a linkage there.

In relation to the—and I’ll just make mention of it here, and we’ll circle back to it in a little bit. I’ll try to keep this as simple as I can. It might be a little bit overwhelming for some people. Don’t panic. It’s fine. Most of us are quite simple folk, and we like to approach things in a very simple and straightforward way. But when I’m asked such a question, I have an obligation to provide a relatively broad appreciation.

So, the process of self-realization means answering the question—there was an acceptance that the body is not the self. This is a temporary residence for you, the spiritual being. You are the resident within the body. Also, the mind is not you. It is a form of covering. There is a subtle body, a gross physical body, and a subtle body, the linga sarira. This subtle body is comprised principally of the mind. And the mind, it was understood, was also not the living being, but the mind tends to really get out of control because of heightened experience of emotional things. It drives our speech. It drives our actions. It drives our desires. And so, the mind was considered one of the big obstacles to self-realization and God realization. And the need for it to become purified and for us to be using it rather than being used by it was considered really, really important.

In the quest to discover who I truly am, I need to answer three questions. What is my essence—fundamentally, what am I made of, in the most simple way you can put it—what is my essence?

What is my position? Where do I fit in relation to all other living beings, this astonishing and vast, almost limitless universe which I am inhabiting? Amongst all living beings, is there one that is greater than all others? And if so, what is the nature of my connection, or relationship, with this Supreme Soul? So, the question of position, it answers, where do I fit, my eternal spiritual nature, where do I fit in in the big picture in relation to everything else?

And then the third thing that needs to be answered, what is my natural function? The spiritual being stripped of the outer garments, the body and the subtle body, the mind, in the pure state, what is the natural function? What is the most natural expression of the soul itself, of the atma?

And so, these three things were of grave importance to come to understand. And in relation to the big question that we have here, we’ll begin to, I think, appreciate this.

Everybody has a sense of something that is sacred. You think so or not? Everybody. All people, in all different situations, we have something that we hold to be of great significance, that is bigger than us. It will vary, perhaps, from one person to another. But that tendency towards seeking that which is sacred and of grave importance, the psychologists refer to it as a religious impulse. Even atheists are religious in this regard. They have their highest truth. They know what an apostate is, you know, somebody who is speaking against atheism. Whether you’re a materialist, it doesn’t matter what, everybody is fundamentally doing the same thing. They’re just directing it a little bit differently.

It was also important to understand that the mind has serious limitations. It is not the highest authority. And whatever conclusions I come to in my mind, that I tend to cling to and hold to be sacred and important and really above everything else, generally there is not an understanding that those conclusions and the state of mind may be in illusion. And, of course, the big problem with illusion is that you don’t know when you’re in illusion. If you did, you wouldn’t be. So, you can have lost the plot in a significant way, be really absorbed in some subjective thinking and experience and feel that it is somehow the total truth, and it may not be at all.

So, in my own life, I—and this is an example—I was raised in a, not a very religious family. They went to church every Sunday, at least when I was a little kid. They kind of didn’t do that later. So, I kind of grew up in what would be termed today as a religious sort of environment. But I quickly came to realize, as a child, that some of the things that I was told, about what is the nature of a higher spiritual reality, or God, I wasn’t buying it. I could not accept some of the things that were being taught to me. And my tendency was then to reject that.

I began practicing yoga when I was 14 years old, ashtanga yoga, and I had many incredible and quite amazing mystical sort of experiences. And one of them was to come to experience what was often referred to as the white light, this great ocean of spiritual energy.

And my readings, which were limited—I mean, you couldn’t get a lot of—I grew up in Te Aroha, and as a young kid, I mean, you could hardly find anything on these sort of subjects. But my readings and my own experience led me to think that the concept of God, or a higher truth, as a vast energetic force of great spiritual reality and love and truth was a higher concept than the idea of a personal God. And I came to that conclusion by using logic and rational thinking, without understanding that I wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards. I didn’t have all the information available. But in my limited experience, the idea of connecting to this great impersonal spiritual energy was a higher idea than the idea of a vengeful and kind of sometimes cruel, personal God. Of course, things were to change going forward.

Part of the problem was that I had bought into the idea that form means a limitation. If there is a God, and that God has form, that’s a limited thing, whereas an ocean of great spiritual energy of light, that’s sort of unlimited, and so it must be higher.

And, of course, the problem was I didn’t really have a proper spiritual teacher, guru. I was just getting something from here and something from there and something from my personal experience. I had no concept of what is called spiritual form. In Sanskrit, rupa means form. Swarupa references spiritual or transcendental form, which is nothing like material form whatsoever.

So, the appreciation of, if we ask the question, you know, God, in Vedic or yogic teaching, wow, what I came to discover later was just astonishing. It is such a deep and broad and vast appreciation that it was just beyond my ability to comprehend and to come to these conclusions on my own. So, I later came to experience, to first receive, and then to gradually experience, that the way in which God, the highest truth, is presented in Vedic terms, it is vast, and it is amazing, and it is so complete. And it has many aspects.

One thing that is inescapable in a spiritual journey, we each have a state of consciousness. The condition of our consciousness determines how we see and experience this world, others, and even God, or a higher spiritual truth. Our state of consciousness can be so clouded and so screwed up that we develop the most grotesque ideas, the most absurd ideas. I was so shocked in—

Firstly, let me just say, in India—they talk about, sometimes people use the word Hinduism, and it’s kind of like, well, in reality, there is no such thing as Hinduism, meaning, you know, one unified thing. Hinduism was a term that was introduced by the Muslim rulers who had come down from East Asia, from Central Asia, from Iran, from Turkey, the Turks came in, the Afghans came in at certain points, and they referenced everybody that was to the east and south of the Sindhu River, they would pronounce as Hindu, and the people were therefore Hindus. They—means they were people of that land.

So, it didn’t define one spiritual practice, or one spiritual teaching, it was just like everybody that was doing different things, they had that label. And consequently, under the umbrella of what is called Hinduism, you have a massive divergence of different schools of spiritual teaching and philosophy with different goals and different things. I mean, it’s mind boggling.

And so, I was just like absolutely shocked when I first went there living as a monk, a brahmachari, in 1970, and I read this story of how a man in this village and his wife were convinced by someone that they should sacrifice their own child in order to prosper financially; they were heavily in debt, and that if they did this, they would succeed in gambling undertakings and get out of debt. And it’s just like, the idea of—how could you take your own child, a three or four-year-old child, and in front of some form of altar, you’re going to slit its throat and chant mantras?

And it’s just like, oh, my God, that was absolutely shocking, and it was a massive dose of reality. Your own state of consciousness can be so perverted and so contaminated, and you are gravitating towards and embracing ideas that actually cannot deliver you any real spiritual understanding or appreciation, but will bring you to incredibly hellish experiences.

So, there was a principle that I got to hear about quite early on. In the Bhagavad Gita, there was one verse where it is, Sri Krishna states,

“As all surrender unto Me, I reward them accordingly. Everyone follows My path in all respects, O son of Prtha.”

So, what this means is there was this big picture. The big picture was this. Rather than looking at things from a sectarian perspective, in the Vedas there was an understanding that we are all eternal spiritual beings. We are all eternally brothers and sisters. We share a common source, a common father, if you wish, and according—well—

The quest to discover my own spiritual identity, this was called sanatana dharma. It means the eternal nature of the soul, of the living being. An actual spiritual quest, whether somebody has a developed understanding or a very perverted understanding, is fundamentally driven by this impulse, but people may practice and manifest things differently. And so, when people undertake different spiritual processes, there was this understanding that there was a common underlying driver. And that was the driver for me to seek to discover my own eternal spiritual nature.

But according to people’s state of consciousness, everybody will practice differently. And according to the different practices they engage in, they will come to perhaps different conclusions.

So, it’s kind of like, somebody wants to get to Christchurch—well, that doesn’t work because they have to go on a ferry. Let’s say Wellington, right? And you’re up in Auckland. Pretty much all buses that leave Auckland and head south are going in the general direction of Wellington, but somewhere along the journey, some of them head off towards Napier or Gisborne, some of them go as far as Palmerston North. So, it’s not that every single bus is going to take you to that final destination, which is Wellington. People may find themselves in different places as they progress along the path.

In this quest to know a higher truth, to try and come to understand, “Is there God?” as I mentioned earlier, one of the big problems that people don’t recognize is that we are experiencing a diverse states of consciousness. A lot of people don’t even really understand what that means.

So, there’s a real famous scientist. His name is Robert Lanzer. Robert Lanzer was—Time Magazine had him down as being one of the five most influential scientists in the world, one year. He was part of the team that cloned the first human embryo. They cloned endangered species. He was one of the leaders in stem cell research and everything. But he’s very involved in trying to understand, what is consciousness? and where and how does it originate?

And he said one of the biggest problems for science is that you have scientists with all of these observations of the world and the universe, and nobody is questioning what role their own consciousness has in that exploration of the universe or of biology or genetics or anything; what role is my state of consciousness playing and how is it affecting how I’m observing things and what conclusions I’m coming to? And he said the fact that science doesn’t address it, is in itself a massive problem, a huge and massive problem. And we know that this is not just true in relation to the observance of the natural world, but the effort to discover that which is truly spiritual.

There’s another problem that the living being faces, and it has to do with the limitations of our senses. All of our senses are very limited.

If you ask somebody, “Can you actually conceptualize the size of the universe?” Anybody that tells you they can is lying. You cannot comprehend the size of the vast universe with all these galaxies that are all around us; and now they’ve got such advanced telescopes, they’re looking at something billions of light years away. You can’t even comprehend how far that is. And so if you think that your mind can comprehend the size of the universe, you’re fooling yourself.

And if you ask somebody, “Can you actually comprehend the size of a hydrogen atom, with a proton, perhaps a neutron, and an electron and subatomic particle, can you actually comprehend how small that is?” And it’s also impossible. You can’t comprehend it.

And if we are going to utilize the mind to search for God—and if God exists, He necessarily exists outside of that framework—we can’t even get our head around the expanse of this thing that we live in. How are we going to utilize the mind alone to find that which is potentially beyond it?

There’s a term that’s used in the Vedas, it’s the word adhoksaja. This adhoksaja, it means beyond the range of experimental knowledge. So, the word can be simply defined as that which transcends the limits of sense perception, or sensuous experience, and that should be incredibly humbling. I mean, one of the big problems that highly intelligent people have is this limitless faith in their mind, like their mind, they can figure everything out. And it’s actually not a possibility.

And so, there was this thing that was drummed into people in these spiritual paths, the yogic paths, was there was this reality of the severe limitation of the capacity of your mind and your senses, and if you wanted to go on a journey, you’re going to have to find and utilize something other than these limiting things.

They speak about, in Vedic teachings, there is a concept of purified intelligence. You know, the yogic system intelligence, or buddhi, was not the way people think of it in the world today what is intelligence. It was a faculty that’s actually higher than the mind. And the way you know it’s higher than the mind, when you are losing control emotionally, and you’re raging, and you’re going to say or do something actually really far out, and you have that little voice, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t say it,” that that little voice is actually this faculty called buddhi, or intelligence. And part of the yoga process was a process of purifying and strengthening this faculty, to help a person develop an innate and deeper sense of things.

So for instance, in the Mundaka Upanishad, speaking about the atma, or the self, or the soul, it says,

“The atma, or the self, is atomic in size and can be perceived by perfect intelligence…”

They speak about the utilization of other faculties that we have, that are actually more important in the pursuit to understanding things.

I mentioned earlier that how our consciousness, our state of consciousness, we can’t even, we cannot even fully appreciate the effect that it has. It’s kind of like coming into a room: if I came into this room during the daytime, and say all the lights were covered by green cellophane, and all the windows were covered with green cellophane, and I walked into the room, and I looked at this mat here, and everything is seen through a green filter, I can’t tell what colour it is. I can kind of like, look at wood, and just by my experience of recognizing grain I go, “Oh, that’s probably brown.” But that’s kind of like deductive thinking. It’s not like I’m seeing the colour.

In a similar manner the consciousness of the soul itself is contaminated by a very subtle, yet incredibly powerful covering that distorts the concept of who we are. And I’ll give you one little example, one little example that demonstrates of how bad things are. I see the entire world and my life and everyone, in relation to me, my husband or my wife, my partner, my children, my parents, my friends, my town or city, my country, my race, my humanity, I see everything in relation to me. I am the centre of my world.

It’s like I’m trying to live a God-like existence, being the centre of everything. I’m not saying that this is really evil or bad, but there is a need to recognize that we are in this state that is very far from the truth of who we actually are. We are deeply influenced by self-centeredness. We’re not the centre of the universe. We’re insignificant.

I mean I, when I was a kid—I was born here in Hamilton. For a few years we grew up in Holland Road, over at Frankton is that? Fairfield, Holland Road. I grew up there. Do I know who’s there now, and what their life is, and what their family connections are, and what they’re going through at the moment, and all the turmoil that they could be experiencing, the happiness or the enormous distress, the pain that all the individuals living in that—I don’t have a clue. It means nothing to me. It means nothing. I’m living in this world where it’s all about me, and I just don’t have a very deep appreciation for a bigger picture.

This state of consciousness though, we’re told it can be purified, that just as you have these eyeballs that you think are seeing the world but actually are not, that you have spiritual eyes, and by a process of purification one can develop spiritual intelligence, spiritual vision, spiritual experience. And it is through this process that one experiences self-realization and God realization.

There’s an ancient text that speaks about this. Actually, it’s incredibly humbling when I realize that I don’t have the power to find God or a higher spiritual truth, I don’t even have the power to discover my actual spiritual identity. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but it means, I can’t do it on my own strength. There has to be some other transformative process.

So in the Brahma Samhita there is a verse that says,

“I worship Govinda, the primeval Lord, who is Śyāmasundara, Kṛṣṇa Himself with inconceivable [heavy word inconceivable, adhoksaja] and innumerable attributes, whom the pure saints see in their heart of hearts with the eyes of devotion tinged with the salve of love.”

Okay, this is a massive point. We’re not going to talk about it. I’m just throwing it out there in the hope that something will—that one day you will be drawn to consider this.

So, in the bigger picture, when it comes to speaking about God, in the yoga system they talked about three aspects of God. “Oh, the Trinity!?” No, no, not the Trinity. There are three aspects of God that one can come to realize and experience. But before we deal with these three there is something else I’d just like to get out of the way. The yoga system was so broad and vast, and so accommodating and uplifting and supporting, that anybody that was on a quest to find a higher truth was supported, encouraged and directed in certain ways for their gradual upliftment.

You see today the word God has become like really out of fashion, and it’s kind of like, [mimes eye rolling] don’t you have a higher understanding or a notion of what this word is or means? And so you get all these people today, they’re not interested in God, but they’re talking about “sending out their intentions to the universe.” Well, that’s God! If you are looking to some greater and higher reality, and you’re sending intentions, and seeking intervention or blessings in your life, that’s a concept of God. You may not refer to it as God, you may refer to it as the universe, but it is the same thing. It’s not different.

So in Vedic teachings they referred to this concept, or idea, as the virata-rupa, or also the visva-rupa, and it was for people, it is described, that don’t have yet a very refined appreciation of the nature of the soul and of a higher transcendent reality, that people were actually encouraged to conceive of the universe as being like a gigantic form that I can relate to, and it may bestow some power or ability or gift upon me.

I would just make one more point in that regard: It’s not a very highly developed spiritual undertaking, because when I send out my intentions to the universe, it’s all about me. “Give me this. Bless me with this. Let me visualize that. Let me express my intention…” and it’s all about me and what I want and what I hope to get. From a spiritual perspective this is not considered a very elevated spiritual undertaking. However, it was highly encouraged, because by this process people will develop a more refined type of appreciation.

So there is one verse in the Bhagavat Purana that describes:

“Learned transcendentalists who know the Absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman, Paramātmā or Bhagavān.”

So, this was the presentation. These were three features of the highest truth. The first one was called Brahman. This is referenced also as the Brahmajyoti. Jyoti means light. Brahman refers to that which is purely transcendental. And so people that tried to undertake, for instance, kundalini yoga, people that were engaged in the jnana yoga process, trying to use their intelligence to analyze and to find answers and to direct their life, sought to have the experience of a complete merging of the individual soul with this ocean of spiritual effulgence and light.

I mentioned earlier that self-realization, I have to answer the question, “What is my essence, what is my position, and what is my function?” The experience of merging into the ocean of light is only a realization of my essence. It tells me nothing about the position of the soul nor of the natural function of the soul.

The second feature Paramatma—atma means the self, or the soul, param means the Supreme. And so the vast majority of yogis in ancient times, they sought to experience a divine union with the Supreme Soul. Their understanding was, this feature of God, Paramatma, permeated the entirety of material creation and specifically sat within the heart of hearts of all living beings.

Patanjali in his Yoga Sutra refers to the living being as purusha. Purusha means person, literally means person. The body is not a person, neither is the mind. It is the living being itself that is the person. When the person leaves, the body manifests its natural state, just dead matter that’s very unattractive.

But Patanjali accepted that amongst all living beings there was one that was unique, and he referred to it as the Purusha Vishesha, that unique and extraordinary purusha whom he termed as Ishvara. Ishvara literally means the supreme controller, and this was this feature of Paramatma, the Supreme Soul, the Lord within the heart of all living beings. In his Yoga Sutra in the first pada, the 24th shloka, he says that

“Īśvara is a special Puruṣa, unlike other puruṣas, untouched by afflictions, (material activity) and the fruit of actions, and latent impressions, or material desires.”

And then he goes on to describe the nature of this extraordinary spiritual personality.

So, in this realization there was an appreciation of this extraordinary personal manifestation of this energy that we refer to as God.

There were some people that hold that the ultimate reality is impersonal, just a vast ocean of energy, and any manifestations of personal incarnations or anything are lesser than the vast ocean of impersonal energy. This is a material conception. This is not a spiritual conception. We are thinking like, if you have form, you’re limited. The sky, the vastness of the universes, the ethereal sky is limitless, therefore it’s greater. This is a material conception. It means that we have not yet come to encounter and understand what is the meaning of spiritual form.

So in Bhagavad-gita this is also addressed by Sri Krishna, says,

“I am the basis [I am the basis] of the impersonal Brahman, which is immortal, imperishable and eternal and is the constitutional position of ultimate happiness.”

Are we doing okay, or we spacing out? Is—huh? I’m sorry if it’s a little bit hard going. It’s going to get really easy real quick. It’s good?

Audience: Inaudible

Acharya das: Its–the point at least I would like to make is, hey, this is a massive, massive subject, and there is so much unique spiritual knowledge that is available on the subject, more than most people think of. And it’s not like just people having some blind faith or blind acceptance. In this yoga process, one was encouraged to not just accept and believe. You must turn your own body and mind into a laboratory where you are going to go on a spiritual journey, where you are going to adopt activity and processes that are going to be transformative and give you unbelievable insight into many of these things.

So these three aspects of God, Brahman, Paramatma and Bhagavan—Bhagavan references the ultimate feature of God as a transcendent and divine personality who exists in a spiritual, or transcendental, dimension, and the only way to gain access is to have a complete transformation of consciousness, a complete purification of consciousness.

In the Brahma Samhita there is another famous verse:

īśvaraḥ paramaḥ kṛṣṇaḥ
sac-cid-ānanda-vigrahaḥ
anādir ādir govindaḥ
sarva-kāraṇa-kāraṇam

and it describes this ultimate reality, also called Ishvara, the same term that was used by Patanjali, but here there is a recognition of, there are many Ishvaras, or powerful controlling manifestations of Godhead, but amongst them all there is one that is supreme, īśvaraḥ paramaḥ kṛṣṇaḥ sac-cid-ānanda-vigrahaḥ, whose spiritual form is filled with eternity; limitless awareness, or knowledge; and a vast ocean of ecstatic transcendental blissfulness.

He’s also addressed as being an anadir adir, without beginning and without end, sarva-kāraṇa-kāraṇam. And so there’s this concept of cause and effect. Everything that you experience and witness is an effect, and it all has a cause. And here this Bhagavan is described as the prime cause of all causes.

The understanding that was presented in the Vedas, though, was that this personality of Godhead manifests in two ways. As I mentioned earlier, according to that verse I read, according to how people want to follow or engage, that they are rewarded accordingly. So one of these features is the feature of God in unimaginable and extraordinary power and opulence. The Sanskrit term is aiśvarya where, when one had this realization and experience, it’s like they know, “Oh God,” you know, they’re in the presence of unlimited greatness.

But there is another feature of Bhagavan which is called madhurya. Madhurya means a limitless ocean of sweetness. In this manifestation of Godhead, this personal feature that is the origin of everything, one engages with this feature of Godhead, with this personality of Godhead, without any conception of, “This is God.” He is the most divine, the most sweet and transcendentally lovable of personalities.

Your desire for love—to love and to be loved, arises from the soul itself. It is not a manifestation of the mind or the body. When it is projected through the mind and the body it is a perversion of a finer spiritual truth. Our yearning for love is because we have an eternal soulmate. We are bonded to Bhagavan, the personality of Godhead, for all eternity, by a bond of kinship, it is described, of great and limitless love.

And so these are extraordinary subject matter that we have only just touched on a little tiny bit, and so we are not doing true justice to these great transcendental truths, but when I’m confronted with the question, “Yoga, is there a conception of God?” it’s kind of like, oh my God, how can I possibly talk about this? Not only am I severely limited in my own realization and experience, but I’m trying to share something that cannot be artificially shared. One can hear about it and perhaps appreciate things, but until you individually undertake the journey of self-realization and God realization you will not know these things beyond just, oh, some nice idea. But that’s nothing in comparison to what God realization actually means.

Okay, I’m going to stop now. Anybody have a question? Was that, was it a bit far out or what?

Audience: Inconceivable.

Acharya das: Inconceivable, yeah?

[Organiser speaks to him] Huh? Okay, so the suggestion is, over dinner we’re gonna do Q&A. You have any questions, I—the thing that I find very heartbreaking is there is no instant way to share the greatest possible journey of spiritual realization and experience, but hopefully people will be inspired and undertake this personal journey and discover for themself.

So I’ll—we’ll chant a little, and then we’ll do a Q&A over dinner. So, I did have a pick somewhere. Didn’t I? Thank you very much. So I’m going to chant the Mahamantra.