Spirituality in an age of science – Managing the messy mind

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so thank all of you for coming here today evening and I will be speaking as the title suggests the topic of spirituality in the age of science this is a very big topic and I will be focussing within this on a topic which is not so philosophical but is more practical or something of immediate and empowering relevance for ourselves that is the topic of managing the messy mind once a group of ten friends came to a metropolitan city for an outing and they got a room on the hundredth floor of a hotel skyscraper hotel they went by an elevator kept their luggage fresh in themselves and then went out to see the sights in the city when they came back they found to their dismay that the power had gone off that meant they now had to climb up hundred floors so one of them got an idea let us entertain each other by telling stories and each of us can tell a story that lasts for about ten floors ten levels, then we can reach the hundredth level like that, so they all agreed they started telling the stories and some of them told slightly longer stories so by the time the turn of the last person came, they had already come to the 95th 95th floor he said now tell your story he said no I can’t tell my story it’s a tragedy no tell it come on we all told the story, now if I tell the story, it will shatter your hearts no please tell it as they were talking like this they were climbing up everyone was pushing him to tell the story he was saying no, finally 98, 99, 100th floor they came when they came in front of their door he said I have to tell you the story now I have forgotten the key downstairs laughter laughter laughter so actually in the last five centuries especially, science has made tremendous advancement we have climbed up the tower of knowledge and the kind of technology that we have today say by just pressing a few buttons you can talk with anyone in any part of the world that would have been unimaginable not just 500 years ago even 50 years ago so science has made stupendous advancement at the same time something seems to be missing as Martin Luther King has said our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power we have guided missiles and misguided men we have phenomenal power to guide the world outside us but inside us there is a turbulence of thoughts, emotions desires doubts, fears and they make us act in ways that harm ourselves and harm others so the key is the art of becoming happy, we all want to be happy we all want to become better human beings we want to contribute better do better justice to our talents and eventually become happy but despite the scientific progress somehow people are not happier so the mind is a mess WHO said that for the current century not the current millennia the biggest health problem is going to be mental health and when you talk about mental health it is not just anxiety and some other disorders which we are talking about they are anxiety related disorders depression and then from the mind behaviour related problems to the addictions all these are phenomenal and alarming numbers but the mind is attacking the body in the sense that psychosomatic problems are big big health hazard and it is not just in terms of the mind inducing certain diseases in the body but literally also people with disturbed minds often end up getting so frustrated that they contemplate suicide and even commit suicide so according to WHO 1 million people commit suicide every year this figure of 1 million is actually, it implies 1 suicide every 40 seconds that means since I started this talk almost 15 people have committed suicide this figure is actually more than the number of people who are killed in wars murders, terrorist attacks all combined together that is more than the number of people who are being killed by others are the people who are killing themselves so why do people end their lives suicide is of course a very complex issue but underlying it is an inability to deal with life’s issues and that is actually often the result of the mind magnifying the problems that we are facing so when we imagine the problems to be bigger and bigger and we feel that I am small I can’t deal with this, we get crushed go ahead yeah now there is of course through science we have medicine for the mind but mental medicine is often a bigger mess there are books written not by some conspiracy theorists but by insiders in the field of science in the two books written by psychiatrists and scientists themselves one is cracker why psychiatry is doing more harm than good by James Davies and the other is age of anxiety history of America’s turbulent affair with tranquillizers by Andrea Tone now these books document these are just two books there are several books like this which document how people with mental health problems they go to psychiatrists and they take treatments and quite often the treatments instead of curing their disease or curing their problem it ends up perpetuating their problem now why is that I am not here criticising psychiatry per say, there are psychiatrists who are very diligent, dedicated hard workers who try to understand map the human brain and try to treat patients to the best of their capacities but there is a fundamental problem in dealing with the inner world you go ahead the problem is that when we pathologise it means human problems by pathologising human problems we perpetuate them human problems means all of us in our life journey we face loss, we face failure, we face rejection we face reversals of various kinds and this is just a part of being human and there are mature human responses to such problems and there are immature responses see, life determines our problems our mind determines their size life determines our problems our mind determines the size of those problems that means say, we go for a party or we come to class and then we see an acquaintance and we smile and greet that acquaintance and that person just snubs us now that snub happens in maybe 10 seconds but then for the next several hours we will be seething with anger, how dare they do this to me you know we are sitting in a class we are not hearing one word of what has been spoken in the class, our mind is on a dance of revenge fantasies I am going to snub them I will snub them in public in such a way that I will take revenge now that moment just passed that problem just passed in a few moments but the more we dwell on it the bigger and bigger the problem seems to become and that person is going on with their life they may not even have intentionally snubbed us they might have just not noticed us or even if they have, they are going on with their life and we are reducing ourselves to a seething mass of nerves so many times if we see the problem is like if somebody is a porter and the porter has to carry 10 kg weight it’s difficult but it’s manageable but if the porter instead starts carrying a 40 kg weight it becomes much more difficult so the problems we face in life are like a 10 kg weight but our reaction to those problems when we resent those problems when we rage over those problems they are like an addition of a 30 kg weight on it and then we make the problem our mind makes the problem bigger than what it needs to be and thus the mental health becomes deteriorated so now what happens in psychiatry is there is a well known experiment done a case study done in England there is one person who was told to go to 6 different psychiatrists and he was told to describe certain symptoms I have anxiety I have negativity I have fear so he described a set of symptoms and this is well documented in psychiatry what happened was 6 different psychiatrists gave 6 different diagnosis the same symptoms 6 substantially different diagnosis each of them said this is your problem this is your problem and based on 6 different diagnosis they proposed 6 different prescriptions and actually none of them helped the patient so now why did this happen? because when we come to the inner world things are not tangible say if somebody has got malaria somebody has got pneumonia somebody has got tuberculosis then things can be seen under a microscope ok this is a germ over here this is the infecting agent and this is the medicine that can cure this infection but when it comes to the inner world there are simply symptoms and there is no biological tangible cause that can be isolated examined in a microscope and treated and that is why analysing and treating mental health problems often becomes an exercise in guess work so ok you have this symptom, this symptom, this symptom and if people have these symptoms it can be this disease so whichever symptoms the particular doctor who is analysing he or she highlights they give a particular influence based on that unfortunately not only is the analysing of mental health based to a large extent on guess work along with that there is also the whole big money that is funding the pharma industry so before 1950s medicines for mental health were practically unknown if you go to a doctor you got a wound, some fracture, some disease in the body, the mental health you just deal with it by coping with life by learning to cope with life now here again I am not minimising the importance of psychiatry or medicines if there are sometimes structural problems some people have brain damage or there are chemical problems where a particular hormone or a particular chemical is less in the brain and these are again measurable, tangible problems but when the problems have no structural or chemical cause and the problems are primarily behavioural people feel very fearful people feel very short tempered or whatever for such kind of things where the problem is primarily behavioural without any biological basis to a very biological cause of the problem then the treatment, the analysis the diagnosis becomes very speculative the treatment also becomes very speculative and because there is big money in the pharma industry especially for treating mental health then quite often the treatment is perpetuated longer and longer and in fact some of the companies which treat mental health their budgets or their turnovers are bigger than the national budgets of several countries so when money and medicine are brought together in a field where things are not tangible then it is a very very messy situation that comes up so now when there are human problems we need spiritual solutions more than biological solutions more than chemical solutions now chemical solutions as I said they can be needed in certain situations but there are, we need to grow internally to deal with human problems and that inner growth happens when we understand our spiritual side go ahead so now is this idea of we having a spiritual side is this for real or is this just some people’s imagination that we have a spiritual side no we have to understand that science works in a particular way science looks for matter not for spirit that means science works by looking for material explanations for material phenomena so Newton saw a fruit falling what could be the cause of this, he came up with the theory of gravity and this method works very good, very effectively when material factors are all that is involved but if there is a non material factor involved science cannot detect it just as if I go for fishing and I have a fishing net which has a hole of 1 inch by 1 inch then no matter how long I cast the fishing net any fish that are smaller than 1 inch in their size I will never be able to catch them they just slip out of the holes similarly science casts a net at the world to catch knowledge about the world but because its net is material it looks for material factors and when any non material factors involved it slips out this is not a criticism of science every method has its focus and when its focus it has a scope so when I focus on something if I am looking at you I cannot be looking here or looking there so there is a focus and science is very powerful where it focusses but its very focus also limits its scope just as I cannot, I can use an x-ray to understand the health of a person but no matter how scientifically advanced our x-ray machines or CT scan machines will become, they cannot tell us the personality of the person what is the nature of the person what are they like, are they introverts, are they extroverts are they sociable, we can’t tell that you know, if say we want to form a relationship with someone, we are not going to say let me see your x-ray before I decide to form a relationship or not, we need to know something different and this is a different thing for that purpose no matter how sophisticated a camera I have if the camera is black and white, I can’t see a colour image so now when we come to our inner world there are emotions there are thoughts, there are desires all of these are real for us but they are not observable in their originality how can I observe a thought, how can I observe an emotion when scientists when researchers now they know that if a person is dreaming if we keep probes on the brain, we can find out based on the kind of waves that are formed in the brain or the kind of movement that is there of the eyes called rapid eye movement, that is happening then we can know that the person is dreaming but no matter how advanced the probes become, we cannot know what the person is dreaming by knowing how the brain is being activated I can know, ok the person is dreaming but if I want to know what the person is dreaming, I have to wake them up and ask them, what were you dreaming? so there is a irreducibility to the experiences that we have and they cannot be analysed in material terms so what is the locus of our experiences who is it that is experiencing that something you and I, we are actually at our core non-material so now science cannot prove this but science can point to this, so I will talk about one experiment here which points to this, go ahead this Dr. Wilter Penfield is considered the father of neurosurgery he is a Nobel laureate and he wrote a book mystery of the mind and what he did in this book is, he did many experiments for nearly 4 decades and one of the experiments which was very significant was that he had a subject whose brain he activated through electrodes now it is well known that certain areas of the brain are connected with certain bodily functions so for example, the frontal lobe of the brain is connected with motor nervous function so he activated the frontal lobe he asked the subject, raise your hand when he raised his hand, what happened he said, I raised my hand, put your hand down put his hand down, what happened I put my hand down then afterwards he used the electrodes, the probe to activate that part of the brain and then what happened, my hand went down, did you raise your hand no I didn’t, you did he deactivated the probe your hand fell down what happened, my hand fell down did you put your hand down no, I didn’t, you did now to understand the implication of this experiment consider say a computer and a printer if I have a printer next to a computer and there is a print button when I press the print button the printer hand of the computer moves it’s my computer I can press the print button or while I am observing, you can come there and you can press the print button either way, whoever presses the print button the printer hand of the computer will move so analogously the area of the brain which controls motor nervous function that is like the print button the print button is pressed, the hand moves up or hand moves down now in the second case, it was Dr. Penfield who pressed the print button who activated that part of the brain in the first case who activated it in the first case who activated it so Dr. Penfield tried to activate while repeating the same experiment he activated different parts of the brain and when different parts of the brain were activated, different things happened in the body but no area of the brain when activated ever gave the person the feeling that I am doing the action that I am raising the hand the subject was simply observing not doing based on this Dr. Penfield concluded that the source of consciousness is extra cerebral so consciousness originates in some source outside the brain and understanding this is vital for managing the mind so ultimately we are human beings we are on a human journey we are neither scientists nor are we spiritualists we are human beings and whatever helps us to move forward on our human journey we can be open to those sources of knowledge and empower ourselves science offers us knowledge and spirituality offers us knowledge so science can help us make things better outside things we can improve them phenomenally spirituality can offer us insights which can make our inner world better lets move ahead so the Bhagavad Gita is an ancient yoga text from India and it offers a tripartite three level model of the self now who are we? this question is asked and there is a three level answer to it we have the body the mind and the soul all these three comprise our present being and to understand this the body is like the hardware of a computer the mind is like the software and the soul is like the user now if my computer is not functioning one possibility is that some hardware part is damaged and then I have to repair the hardware other possibility could be that some software is damaged, some software is corrupted may be some virus has infected the software then at that time I need the appropriate process if I start tinkering with the hardware no matter how expensive and how extensive the changes I make in the hardware they are not going to make my computer functional because the problem is not in the hardware the problem is in the software similarly when there are mental health issues if we try to treat them simply by biological means simply by using some tranquillizers some drugs then that is like trying to repair the hardware when the problem is in the software no matter how much we change how much we change the hardware the computer is not going to function similarly no matter how much chemicals we pump into the body we may temporarily feel good but actually we won’t become better so why would we temporarily now when we take tranquillizers when we take mental health medicines we do feel better now how is that we feel better that is simply a physical reaction to a physical stimulus I come from India so in India when relatives come to meet a family and they have a small child then what happens the relatives just to have some fun with the child they may tickle the child they tickle the belly of the child and when the child is tickled the child starts laughing so now when the child starts laughing is that laughter happiness is that laughter happiness what do you think yeah laughing but if that were happiness and we all want to be happy in life then all of us could get our own perpetual tickling machines isn’t it whenever we want to be happy activate the machine and we will be happy no that laughter is not happiness it is biological reaction to biological stimulus but that is not happiness happiness is something internal which may express itself as laughter if somebody just comes along and twists our face so that there is a smile on our face that is not happiness so like that sometimes some chemicals may be inserted into the body and researchers may decide may find that ok when a person is happy these chemicals are more in the brain and when they are unhappy these chemicals are more so if you want to remove depression decrease that chemical and increase this chemical so we may take some medicines by which we decrease this chemical which is supposed to be associated with unhappiness and increase the chemicals associated with happiness now will that make a person happy actually the chemical composition of the brain is not the cause of emotions it is the result of emotions just like laughter is not the cause of happiness laughter is the result of happiness when I am happy I naturally laugh now if someone physically we make a machine which makes me move my move my jaws in such a way that I am laughing that is not happiness so we cannot if we mistake the cause and effect then we perpetuate our misconceptions so what happens with tranquillizers and other mental health drugs is that they try to change the chemical composition of the brain and they think that by that people will become happy temporarily we feel good just like if a child is glum and somebody comes and tickles the child may laugh they may temporarily feel good but that is not the solution actually the child has to be beloved, cared and whatever needs to be done so that they become happy so happiness comes from something much inner at our core of our being so when negative thoughts, worries or pessimism all these they infect the software of the mind when the software is infected then at that time we need to develop healthy thought patterns it is not just a matter of taking some chemicals and that is where life’s spiritual dimension comes into picture so please move ahead this is a little intricate slide spirituality is also a higher dimensional science just as in science there is theory and experiment so Newton observed the fruit falling based on theory of gravity and then he experiments not just a fruit, a stone, any object and not just here in different parts of the world the experiment verifies the theory similarly spirituality has two limbs, there is philosophy and there is religion so philosophy gives us postulates that about the nature of the spiritual side of life so for example the Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical book and it tells us this yoga text tells us that actually I talked about this three level model of the self that is the philosophy, so that is like a theory now how do I know whether it is right or wrong that is by doing some practises and religion is not meant to be just a set of rituals, although quite often it is like that, it is meant to be a set of practises that enable us to either verify or disprove the postulates that are given in the philosophy now unfortunately when spirituality is not approached in an integrated way like this, both philosophy and religion coming together then it can have counterproductive consequences go ahead go ahead so Shri Pramopad is a great modern day yoga exponent, bhakti yoga exponent and he explained the relationship between philosophy and religion, go ahead go ahead so if we have only philosophy and no religion philosophy and religion is just mental speculation maybe it’s like this maybe it’s like that maybe that is how it is so different people can come up with their own different ideas of what things are but how does anyone know what it is it’s all just in the head and there is no way to transform ourselves to realise anything higher, that’s what happens when philosophy is divorced from religion go ahead go ahead on the other hand if religion is divorced from philosophy and there is only religion and there is no philosophy then that is at best sentimentalism and at worst fanaticism so today we see fanaticism in some religions and that is because the religion the practises are divorced from a proper philosophy then the idea becomes my way is the only way and everyone who is not following is my way, they are going to go to hell and some fanatics say not only are you going to go to hell, we will help you get there faster so that idea comes up and that leads to intolerance that leads to violence that leads to terrorism so now this is because of a misapplication of the spiritual path, so the spiritual wisdom when both of them are brought together, there is philosophy and religion and there is proper understanding of life’s higher dimension and there are practises by which one can realise the higher dimensions of life so I will talk about one aspect of realising higher dimensions, go ahead yeah so spirituality is a higher dimensional science that means it is not experimental it is experiential the thing to be which we want to experiment is not out there, it is in here so if I want to study a bacteria or study a microbe, I can put it under a microscope, but here we want to experiment with our own consciousness and that’s why it’s not just experiment it’s an experience so material science is experimental, spiritual science is experiential so science often operates with controlled experiments, ok I want to observe the behaviour of this chemical, then put it in a controlled environment where no other chemicals are going to affect it and then observe its changes so we do controlled experiments so similarly when we come to spirituality, we need to control, but that control is of our inner world, that is we experience through self control we subject our consciousness to certain stimuli and avoid other stimuli and thereby we open ourselves to higher dimensions of reality go ahead so one aspect of this is one aspect of spirituality is a higher dimensional science is mantra yoga mantra refers to spiritual sound sound that has spiritual power within it so this mantra, there are many different mantras which are chanted in different traditions and the idea of mantra is etymologically manasatrayateti mantra that sound which has the power to free the mind from its negativities, from its misgivings so going back to the software analogy, the mind is like the software and mantra is like the antivirus software so when we expose our consciousness to mantras, when we chant mantras, the negativities in the mind get cleansed and that’s how we become more positive, more focused, more productive I’ll talk about two aspects of this, how the mantra works, mantra acts as an elevator of consciousness I told earlier that our existence is three levels, there is body, mind and soul so at the level of the soul there is natural joyfulness because the soul by nature is joyful in fact because our souls are joyful, that’s why we are always joy seeking that’s why we always look for pleasure so that pleasure is found at the spiritual level, so we could consider this as a multi-story building, the body the mind and the soul, all three are aspects of our being, but presently our consciousness is caught at the material level, so we chant spiritual sounds so for example we chant the mantra, Hare Krishna Mahamantra Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Ram Ram Hare Hare, so this mantra acts as an elevator of our consciousness so when we are at the material level of consciousness, this mantra, if we focus on it if we concentrate on it, then it is like entering into an elevator then our consciousness rises upwards rises upwards, and then as our consciousness comes to the spiritual level we experience natural peacefulness and joyfulness in the Bhagavad Gita in the 6th chapter 27th text it is described that as our consciousness rises to the spiritual level, chant then you become peaceful, Sukham you become joyful this is an elevator of consciousness it’s like say if there is if we are in a building where there is flooding at the ground floor there is flooding but the water is not reaching the second floor then I just take an elevator and go up, then I become safe I become free from the threat of being flooded by the water so like that, at the material level there is anxiety there is negativity, there is uncertainty but as soon as we rise to the spiritual level of consciousness we become peaceful and secondly mantra acts like an inner muscle builder now we all do, we may be doing workouts to improve our health to improve our muscles so when we chant the mantra at that time that is like an inner workout what this inner workout does is it makes us more powerful in choosing the kind of thoughts we want to focus and rejecting other thoughts so in our mind there are many thoughts going on, I’ll conclude with this example that say suppose we are browsing a particular page on our device maybe phone or computer and say there is one article which we are reading and there are many other links over there so now while reading that our eyes may go to some other link this article seems interesting, I click on it and then we go over there and then we sometimes especially we may start seeing some videos or watching some images and sometimes people spend hours and hours and I have to say why did I waste so much time, so surfing on the net becomes suffering on the net so we waste so much time, now imagine if in future there were a device so sophisticated that if we are reading an article and if we just look at the link, that link would pop up we don’t have to click on it, we just look at the link and that link expands, pops up now we would be lost, just looking at the link and we will go from one side to another side to another side one page to another page, so our mind is actually like that right now say you are focussing say you are trying to hear what I am saying I am trying to focus on what you are saying, now suddenly this clapping has started, that’s like another link that has come so now if you focus on that what could the clapping be, oh maybe there is a birthday party going on whose birthday might it be, is there a cake over there so like that you know the mind has multiple clickable links in it constantly and whichever you focus on that pops up and that grows and if our inner muscles are not strong, then whichever link is seen, we just choose that and we get caught, we get caught and we get distracted and when we get distracted, we are not we cannot be productive we sit down to study one hour, we are in our library but our mind has gone on a tour of the universe we are not able to focus if we could focus we could become so much more productive so when we chant the mantra then this mantra chanting becomes like an inner muscle builder because when you focus on the mantra the mind goes away focused by that our capacity to concentrate increases and that capacity to concentrate is our inner muscle so we can choose what we want to focus on and thus earlier I said about how when the mind dwells on problems, it makes problems bigger and bigger but when our inner muscles are strong, ok there is a problem but I don’t have to think about the problem constantly I can think about more constructive things I can think maybe of solution of the problem or I can just leave the problem and think of other things, later on when I am calmer I will come back and think about how to deal with the problem, so if our inner muscles are stronger, then whatever we are doing, we will be able to focus on better and when problems come in life we won’t let those problems grow bigger and that way we will become more productive and effective in our lives and this inner change is what spirituality can offer us, inner empowerment by which whatever abilities we have we will be able to tap them better, so spirituality increases our ability to tap our ability we have certain abilities but if our mind is distracted we can’t tap those abilities but when we become spiritual it increases our ability to tap our ability and thus we can become better achievers we can become more constructive and more successful in our lives, so I will summarise I started by talking about how do we need spirituality in the age of science, we talked about science phenomenally transformed the world around us and science has made things better but we need spirituality to make people better, to make ourselves better we discussed how despite the enormous advancements of science as Martin Luther King said that we have guided missiles and misguided men we discussed the story of how people climbed up 100 stories but they forgot to carry the key of the room, so like that science has ascended enormously in knowledge but the key of becoming happy in life, that has been forgotten and that requires managing our inner world, and in the inner world we discussed how the mind is a mess the mental health problems are the biggest health challenge in today’s world and the mind is attacking the body not just through psychosomatic diseases but even through suicidal allergies more than the number of people who are being killed by others are the people who are killing themselves 1 million people commit suicide every year and when science tries to deal with mental health issues, often that creates bigger problems we discussed about how pathologising human problems ends up perpetuating them, because if the problem is structural, or there is a clear chemical deficiency which is causing a problem, then certainly psychiatric treatment is fine, but if there is behavioural problems, then trying to use psychiatry to treat that is like trying to cure a software problem by changing the hardware, it just doesn’t work we discussed how the Gita offers a 3 level model of the self, the body is like the hardware the mind is like the software, and the soul, the essence of who we are is like the user we discussed Dr. Penfield’s experiment about raising hands, based on which he concluded that the source of consciousness is extra cerebral and then I talked about how spirituality is a higher dimensional science just as in science there are experiments to verify a theory or to disprove a theory, similarly in philosophy in spirituality there are practises which can verify what the philosophy is teaching us science has two limbs, theory and experiment spirituality has two limbs, philosophy and religion, and if there is philosophy without religion there is mental speculation, if there is religion without philosophy, that is sentimentalism or fanaticism when both are balanced together then spirituality becomes a potent form of inner empowerment and inner transformation and in that connection I discussed about spirituality is an experiential science, not an experiment science not an experimental science and for experiencing, rather than controlling the environment around us we need to control the environment within us and a key aspect of controlling the environment within us is practise of mantra yoga wherein we expose our consciousness to spiritual sound, and this exposure to spiritual sound, what does it do? it elevates our consciousness, it is like the antivirus software which cleanses the corruption in the software of the mind and how does that cleansing happen? In two ways one is, mantra acts like an elevator of consciousness by which whatever negativity, anxiety, insecurity at the material level, if our consciousness rises to the spiritual level, we don’t feel that just like if there is flooding at the ground floor, but if I go to a higher floor I am not troubled by the flooding and secondly, mantra yoga acts like an inner muscle builder so within our mind there are many thoughts going on and we need to focus on what is important, but like visually clickable links, whatever you focus on, those thoughts pop up and then we get distracted so when we focus on concentrate on the mantras, that enhances our capacity to concentrate and that increased capacity to concentrate is like our increased inner muscles and they help us to focus and become productive in whatever we do, so our ability to tap our ability is enhanced by our spirituality. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Does anyone of you have any questions? Yes please So, in meditation is there a mantra that helps you focus on what you want? Ya, yes Mindfulness involving breath control is also very helpful because our breathing is connected to the state of our mind.
When we are agitated we naturally breathe faster so if we consciously try to slow down our breath we can become calmer, we can become more focused. Now when we do mindfulness we depend primarily on our own power it is our capacity to be mindful, whereas when we chant mantras the mantras invoke higher reality. We are consciousness, we are tiny sparks of consciousness and there is also the infinite consciousness the infinite consciousness is infinitely powerful so when we focus, we chant mantras which link us with that higher consciousness then the power of that infinite consciousness empowers us to overpower our mind’s negativities so we get higher assistance of course we have to endeavour, whether it is in mindfulness or whether it is in chanting, we need to endeavour, but we get help from higher powers, so I would say that mindfulness is like mindfulness exercises, they also definitely help, but they are like climbing up the staircase whereas mantra chanting is like entering an elevator so in elevator there is power other power, electric power which lifts us up, so like that in mantra chanting there is the power coming from the infinite consciousness that helps us in the elevation of our consciousness the purpose of both is the same, mantra yoga gives us access to higher power so that it becomes easier does it answer your question? any other questions? yes please spirituality is experiential it’s not like one carcass that now they use mindfulness meditation and yoga, and I feel like spirituality can be strengthened with science, science is just taking a hypothesis and spirituality needs to be a group of hypotheses that can be tested using science, I am not saying that you shouldn’t use spirituality until all the hypotheses are tested, I am just saying that it will work quickly, yeah of course as I said that science is experimental and spirituality is experiential does that mean that science and spirituality can’t coexist, was that my implication? no not at all certainly science and spirituality can both reinforce each other the problem comes when the jurisdictions are not understood and they say good fences make good neighbours if you understand this then there can be a cooperative so as I said broadly speaking science deals with the outer world science deals with the material world spirituality deals with the inner world that is the spiritual side of our personality but there are definitely areas where both of them intervene and when we talk about science it is not that scientists are necessarily materialists or anti-spiritualists many scientists are also spiritually minded and ultimately many psychiatrists psychologists they are also intelligent caring people who want to help now some of them they stick to only one methodology for trying to help then they may limit themselves but those who are open as I said they adopt meditation practises they adopt mindfulness even for mantra chanting also there has been research done in various universities studies have been done and found that mantra chanting helps people in becoming more positive in their attitudes so that way when I said that spirituality is experiential in some ways the experience can also be subjected to scientific scrutiny but then we have what are called hard sciences and soft sciences physics is considered a hard science, sociology and even psychology to some extent is considered a soft science so in that sense there is a slight difference between the two but definitely science and spirituality can co-exist in fact they can not just co-exist they can complement each other spirituality does not so science if it recognises jurisdiction and gives spirituality adequate recognises the role of spirituality then from science point of view spirituality can co-exist when we talk about spirituality the spiritual is never the replacement of the material the spiritual is the complement of the material that means when we talk about being spiritual even spiritualists have to eat, spiritualists have to have to take care of the body there is a saying in spiritual circles your spirituality won’t clean your teeth for you so if I wake up in the morning it is not by chanting my mantras my teeth will become clean no there is a physical process required for that and we don’t take the physical process so if some people do not have a proper understanding of spirituality then they position they may position spirituality as contradictory to science science deals with material phenomena and how they interact spirituality deals with the spiritual side of our life and it gives us a broader understanding by which we can use the material more effectively so it is not that say for example the Bhagavad Gita is a yoga text where Arjuna is a warrior and the speaker of the Gita Krishna doesn’t tell Arjuna to renounce his duty as a warrior rather the Gita gives Arjuna a spiritual direction for using his material expertise so in that sense spirituality doesn’t reject the material but rather it helps us to direct the material more productively that’s how both can coexist definitely thank you any other questions yes please so basically so genetics has been found to be associated with personality and behaviour so can advancement in genetics replace spirituality or it can provide happiness and it can play a spiritual role see genetics is is a very remarkable body of knowledge that has been uncovered in the last century and like any body of knowledge which newly comes up you know quite often there is a reality and there is a hype so the reality of genetics is that now again this is a complex subject I will put it simply genes are like programmes that determine the unfolding of bodily structure and behaviour simple so now this programme so for example when we get certain genes from our parents when we are born so those determine our pigment colour our height, our bodily structure various aspects of bodily structure but our personality in terms of our core being that transcends our genes so there are twins twins have similar genes and there are a kind of twins which are called as monozygotic twins that means when one zygote is formed first by the union of the sperm and the egg and after that that one zygote splits into two sometimes two sperms and eggs unite together then the twins are formed but sometimes one sperm and egg unite and a zygote is formed but later during the gestation that zygote splits into two now when this happens the two twins that result they are called as monozygotic twins coming from one zygote and monozygotic twins their genes are not just similar they are identical because they come from one zygote and yet monozygotic twins have distinct personalities they are not, they may be physically identical but they are psychologically emotionally they are distinct now if our genes was determining everything about us then monozygotic twins should be entirely identical not just physically but emotionally psychologically entirely it’s not like that so there is an aspect to our personality that goes beyond our genes and the genes determine our physical structure but at our core we are spiritual beings and as a spirituality and genetics they deal with different areas of jurisdiction now by changing genes there can be certain aspects of our functions that can be changed and that can happen even when say if a person gets brain damaged sometimes when brain surgery is done or brain damage happens now people’s personality changes now that does not mean necessarily that personality has originated from the brain that is personality or consciousness that is transmitted through the brain so one of the pioneers of psychology was William Jeans and he gives the example that the brain is like the prism for the light of consciousness so now consciousness is the light that comes into the brain and from that is transmitted out if the prism gets broken then the image that is found outside the prism that will change why? because the prism is a structure through which it is getting transmitted for example if I have a computer and say I am doing I do accounting, I do planning I do writing, I do various functions of my computer say if the area of the computer if my computer is divided into various drives and area where I have saved all my financial accounts that gets deleted then I can’t perform the financial activities I can’t do that because that part has been deleted of the computer but that does not mean that I have become depleted in it, I am distinct so like that genetic the brain function the change in dimension of the brain structure or change in brain structure can affect people’s behaviour in some ways because certain tools that they have for functioning those tools get affected similarly genetic change can limit or expand the tools available to us and by that to some extent some aspects of behaviour can be changed but the personality itself it comes from a non-material source, the genes no matter how detailed we go to understand them the genes are ultimately made of atoms and molecules and atoms and molecules don’t have consciousness we are conscious beings so in that sense genes can shape the structure of the body and changing genes can change the tools available to the soul for functioning in the body but the soul or the source of consciousness still remains different does it answer your question? do you have something else you would like to ask? you didn’t get it? ok fine thank you any other questions? are you talking about it’s basically I mean in a simple language that for example if I develop this is there a possibility that this will transfer to my next generation or will they be influenced by this what do you get in this environment? it’s about learning about yeah it’s about how that yeah it’s unschooled a little bit it’s like kind of like that the parts that are yeah see specific developments in science there are principles and there are specifics when we come to specifics within science there can be different branches of science and I am not a scientist I have a science background in education but I am not a scientist so I may not know the technicalities of what you are speaking so I will focus on principles see the the body is a machine like a hardware and that hardware if we tinker with the hardware certain functionalities of the machine can be changed the specifics of how we change the tinkering that can vary depending on the sophistication of the approach that we have so sometimes the idea that we can that our genes determine us this can be taken to alarming extremes the whole project of eugenics you may have heard of that in the history of science that was what propelled Hitler’s Nazi Germany he had the idea that certain races are more fit than other races and he said that we Nazis are the fittest race and the Jews are the unfit race so by evolution the unfit will be removed we will help evolution on the way and we will remove the Jews so that was called social Darwinism which is later been disproved but the idea that we are entirely functions of our genes now that has been historically abused a lot so certain races were deemed inferior and there was rejection or exploitation or discrimination of those races that have happened also so we have to be careful when genes genes and theories of social genes are extended beyond their specifics now as far as our spirituality changing our personality and that passing on to the next generation that’s possible because spirituality when we practise that is the spiritual affects the material so there have been researchers which find out which have determined that certain areas of the brain which are associated with deep thinking they are activated when people meditate and when they are activated that means the synapses in the brain they are better formed over there and those synapses are better formed the person becomes more intellectually developed the next generation may also pass it on, that’s perfectly fine we shouldn’t just, the problem comes when we when we conflate or mistake the mechanism to be the person the mechanism is not the person the mechanism is the means for the person to function and changing the mechanism doesn’t change the person, it changes the tools available for the person to function are there any questions or should we stop here should we as a human being should we strive always to find a happy situation good question should we try to become happy try to find happy situations or should we just train ourselves to be happy in whatever situation we are actually both are there both aspects are there and there are certain aspects of our life which are changeable certain aspects of our life which are not changeable and we need to differentiate between the two we need to talk just couple of days ago I gave a seminar on spirituality, it was topic was that transform anxiety into intensity by spirituality so actually what I mean by that is there are certain things in our life which are not in our control, certain things are in our control when we focus on the things not in our control that causes anxiety when we focus on the things that are in our control that brings intensity say student is studying for the exam at that time they worry what will come in the exam what will come in the exam will I be able to answer the questions that causes anxiety, but they focus ok now I have to study this I have memorised this, let me revise this so that I don’t sleep out of my mind tomorrow is the exam, this is the last time for me to revise what I have studied throughout my year, that will bring intensity so focussing on what is in our control that brings intensity, obsessing over that which is not in our control causes anxiety so in our life there are certain things which we can’t change and resenting them only increases our misery so learning to accept the reality as it is that is foundational for becoming happy, if you are resenting reality you can never be happy that’s why training our mind to accept the unchangeable is an important component of finding happiness but that does not mean that we become static and passive and don’t take any initiative in life there are areas in our life which we can change, where we can improve we can become better and we need to focus on that so some of us may have talents in some fields, some of us may not have some talents in some fields, so if I just worry I don’t have talent in this field I don’t have talent in this field, I just become miserable if I find that I have talent in a particular field then I work on that and improve that, then by improving that I am able to perform better I am able to achieve better that also helps me to become happy so talent plus commitment leads to achievement whatever talents we have, we have to have commitment to develop those talents, talent plus commitment eventually leads to achievement, so like that we also need to endeavour to do things which will bring value and happiness in our lives so happiness has both those aspects accepting things which are unchangeable and focussing on things which are changeable did I answer your question? you had a question? sorry? okay, fine.
are there any other questions? let’s give a big round of applause applause applause applause thank you very much as I said, the books are available one about the mind and the different questions and answers so I’ll go for a donation of $5 to ask you to send me books if you’re interested there’s a person who’s manning the booth you can see him and food is being served out you can stand in the line there’s a couple of announcements from now onwards there’s no break every Monday we’re going to start again we’re going to send out the recipes we’re going to send out what we’re going to make so from now till Thanksgiving