3 As to bring out the best in you – Awareness Association Appreciation
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.
So I spoke about how to bring out the best in you. I told from my experiences how education opened doors, but it did not empower people to walk through the doors. People got addicted to alcohol, to smoking, or I myself was compulsively hangry.
So what is it that stopped people from doing things which were good for them, or compelled them to do things which were bad for them? So then, when I studied the Bhagavad Gita, I found this three level model of the self. Can you say what is the hardware, software and the user compared to? The hardware is like the body, software, mind, and the user, soul. So the software of the mind is corrupted right now.
And we see science has advanced tremendously in terms of improving physical sensibilities and luxuries. The hardware has improved, but the mind has not been addressed much. And when the software is corrupted, our perception misfires.
That means a small fact leads to a huge emotion. One car crash fills me with paranoia of car crashes. Or sometimes there is no fact and still there is emotion.
Like imagining there is a frog in my belly. So this corruption of the software of the mind makes us subjected to a lot of unnecessary tribulation at the mental level. So much so that people can even become suicidal because of that.
So the way to deal, to correct the corruption of the software of the mind is, first is awareness. When the mind goes into a world of fantasy, just come back to physical reality. Verbalize our physical situation, that will give us control over the mind's imagination.
Pull the mind back to the physical reality. And then also, when we talk about awareness, we realize that I have a non-physical spiritual side which is eternal. How we can infer the existence of this eternal core within us.
From the fact that we all have a longing to live forever and to love forever. Although nothing in the external world lasts forever. So just like the African child desires a pizza, where does the desire come from? That's the question.
So our desire doesn't come from the external, it comes from our internal. So the more we become aware of spiritual reality, and meditation is meant to help us become aware of spiritual reality. Fix the mind from the changing to the unchanging.
That calms us down. Second point is association. Our contemporary culture fills us with materialistic association which fills us with desires.
And these superficial desires are things that are not really important for us. They bring with them many fears. So our desires are not just linear, they are triangular.
If we associate with spiritual people, then our spiritual desires get increased. And last one is appreciation. Instead of looking at the things that we don't have and being dissatisfied, we appreciate what we have.
And what we have is a big feature of what we have we don't know, that is we have a spiritual core. Like I am caught in a ground floor level, it's very hot. I don't know that this building has a higher level, that there is air conditioning.
So if we just discover our spiritual side, like discovering a feature in our own device, which we didn't know. When we realize our spiritual side, appreciate that at the spiritual level, I can experience calmness, I can experience clarity. And beyond that, appreciating spiritual reality means that there is an order to the universe.
Science discovers the material order, but there is an order beyond that. If we don't look at the spiritual order, then what we end up with is islands of meaning within an ocean of meaninglessness. When we understand there is a higher order to the universe, then we focus on that which is in our control, and that which is out of our control, we entrust it to the higher order.
Bad things can happen, but good can come out of the good, good out of the bad. So when we appreciate the higher spiritual order to the universe, then we play the part of the part, and let the whole take care of the whole. Thank you very much.
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