Simplify Clarify Purify – Three principles for a fulfilling life

[Sunday feast class at ISKCON, Connecticut, USA]

Transcript

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any other questions at the material level so when you function at the material level Krishna says regulate so that part of regulation I will focus on simplify, clarify and purify simplify means that our mind often tends to complicate things unnecessarily nowadays psychologists have done surveys about what makes people happy and now people often think if I have freedom then I can pursue that which will make me happy but it’s curious that the more freedom we have, the more options we have it doesn’t necessarily mean lead to happiness why? because when we have more options that brings more responsibility about choosing the right option so we all need to make choices in our life so if say many of us use cell phones and we send messages on the phone now each time when we have to send a message if the phone started asking what is the font you want to use? what is the font size you want to use? what is the background you want to have? what is the theme you want to have? now if we actually go into settings for everything there can be so many settings and if at every phone every phone message we have to enter all those settings then that would itself take so much time and we would not have time to send a message so there are certain things which are set as default and the idea of setting them as default is so that we can move on to more important things yes, the font is important but the font is not all important the message is important select some font and move on in life so in a simple activity like texting if we have to choose everything that we have to do, everything that is involved we would get paralyzed by the choices similarly in life if we don’t simplify our life then every single choice can take a huge amount of time and energy so for example, if somebody wants to purchase a phone now sociologists have found that there are broadly two kinds of people we call them as optimizers and maximizers so sociologist Barry Schwartz he has written a book called Paradox of Choice in which he talks about how choice can actually become a burden he says if somebody wants to choose which cell phone should I purchase now the optimizers are people who will decide that in the next one week I’ll explore whatever options I can find I’ll arrive at a decision, I’ll purchase a phone the maximizers are people who want to get the best deal so they will want to explore all the possible options for cell phones and they may spend 6 months to 1 year just to decide which phone to take and in general the maximizers get a better deal for their money because they spend so much time to find a better deal but paradoxically the maximizers are not happier with their product why is that? three reasons first is that because they have invested so much time and energy in trying to find the best product they have a huge expectation from the product and when the expectation is huge then no product can live up to that expectation and that’s why they are disappointed so if they spend one year to search for a product and then get some problem with it in one month what is this? so that over expectation causes frustration the second is that even after spending one year and buying a cell phone there is that nagging fear if I had searched more I might have found a better deal in that way that erodes their satisfaction with what they have and the very nature of products is that better products keep coming up all the time so eventually they find a better product and then their dissatisfaction becomes even more so over expectation and the frustration because of that the fear that there might be something better and the frustration on finding something better eventually which they don’t have now so this actually eats away at their satisfaction on the other hand optimizers they understand that in life I have many things to do and I can’t spend too much time on every single choice so they decide in the bigger picture of my life in the bigger purpose of my life this is phone I need it for particular purpose I will spend a particular amount of time buy a phone and move on there might be something better available but this is not the most important thing in my life so I won’t spend so much time so optimizers in general they don’t get the best deal but they have a better life they have a better state of mind so this principle also applies not just with the purchase of products but also applies to our life in general today with industrialization and the advertisements and the commercialization at a mass level of everything we have practically unlimited variety in everything that we choose and this can paralyze if I want to buy a toothpaste there will be 500 varieties of toothpaste which one do I choose so now when we get so caught in things Krishna says the consciousness gets played, pulled in various directions so sometimes we get so caught in small choices that we miss out on making the big choices so if I have 3 minutes before I go somewhere in 3 minutes I have to send a message in 3 minutes I spend 2 minutes and 50 seconds choosing the font and other settings in 10 seconds what can I send so we all have a finite life span and within the finite life span also we have finite time, there are so many things to do, so we have to simplify that means in many things in our life ok just simplify don’t complicate ok I want to buy a particular phone I want to buy a particular gadget I want to buy a particular thing so simplify this getting it the perfect or getting it less than perfect that is not going to be life changing it is ok I just buy it and move on so when we simplify our life how do we simplify simplifying is not by deprivation or abnegation essentially simplify is simply by understanding that there are smaller things in life and there are bigger things in life and so we talk about nowadays with the recognition that human intervention has caused a lot of problems in the ecology there is increasing stress on simple living so Shri Prabhupada the founder Acharya of ISKCON was talking about simple living and high thinking nowadays most people are simply living and hardly thinking just going around, buy this, watch this eat this and we are not thinking about what is really important in my life so that brings us to the second point, simplify clarify clarify means I have to decide what is really important for me so we have to clarify our life’s priorities if we don’t clarify our life’s priorities somebody else will determine our life’s priorities and we will end up wasting a lot of time in things that are not actually important for us, most people’s lives are often consumed in three main activities first is work in 1820 when the industrialization was just beginning there was a thinker who wrote that the biggest problem in future with machines doing so much work is idleness because machines will be doing so much work humans will have nothing to do so the biggest problem for people will be they have so much time they don’t know what to do with that time and we have a lot of machines doing work for us but still