What the self seeks beyond the selfie

[Talk at MNC Salesforce, San Francisco, USA]

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
then victory is guaranteed for us. Thank you.
Thank you for having me in person. Today is a special event, a special conscious looking at sales force event. Normally we do live streams just in person so we all are very lucky.
So, Chaitanya Acharya is a motivational speaker, an author and a life coach. He is highly regarded by the audience this year. He is intellectually stimulating presentations on addressing modern day challenges within and around us based on timelines to the universal principles.
His talks and articles offer elegant spiritual perspectives on a wide range of topics including science, management, economics and wellness among others. An engineer by education and a spiritual observer by training, Chaitanya Acharya has suspectedly had over 2000 daily wisdom meditations to unearth the treasure of timeless wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita in the form of the world’s only Easter daily scripture www.easterdaily.com. Apart from offering 20 hours of listening to Chaitanya Acharya’s talks, Chaitanya Acharya has also been invited to be part of the UNESCO world homophobic summit. So, please welcome Chaitanya Acharya.
Am I audible behind everyone? Yes. So, good afternoon everyone. I’m grateful to be here amongst all of you today.
And as I mentioned over here, I’ll be speaking on the topic of the missing self in the selfie. The PowerPoint has become a little distorted. So, if you can skip it, I know more of the content, I’ll speak it.
So, the selfie represents one of the most attractive products of scientific and technological progress. We live in a world where we have facilities that were unimaginable for most people even just a decade ago. Just press a few buttons and talk with anybody in any part of the world.
And many of us have comforts that were unavailable for even kings a few hundred years ago. Air conditioning is an example. So, the progress in the outer world has been phenomenal.
And yet, there is some kind of existential vacuum that is there. Because of which, we see internally there is dissatisfaction, frustration and even self-destruction. Whether it be slowly through addictions or suddenly through suicide.
Over a million people commit suicide every year, which amounts to one suicide every 40 seconds. Which means in the duration of this talk, around 80 to 100 people will have committed suicide. So, what is it that is missing? We have enormous comforts and yet we seem to be distressed.
So, we could say that we are comfortably distressed. We are comfortable physically but distressed internally. And what is the self that is distressed in this way? What is it that we are missing because of which these phenomenal facilities also do not provide us the satisfaction that we long for? The Eastern Vedic wisdom traditions explain that our existence has multiple levels and success at one level does not compensate for failure at another level.
All of you are professionals and you have families or you will have families in future. And you know that sometimes we can get so caught in our professional lives that we neglect our family lives. And then if some upheaval happens over there, all the success in our professional life cannot compensate for the trauma or the distress that we experience in our personal lives.
Both are important and both we need to have success on parallel lanes. Similarly, with respect to our own being, the ancient yoga text the Bhagavad Gita explains that our existence is at three levels, the body, the mind and the soul. And one way to understand this three-level existence is to compare it to a computer system wherein we have the hardware, the software and the user.
So, the hardware is like the body, the software is like the mind and the user is like the consciousness or the source of the consciousness which is known by different names. We could use the name soul for it. So, we look at the physical world around us and the technological progress which has happened has enabled us to gain significant amount of control over external things.
As I said, if the temperature goes up, we can bring it down. If it goes down, we can bring it up. So, this capacity to control the externals leads to the notion that we will be able to control more and more and this notion that we can control more and more can become an infatuation, can become an intoxication, can become a distraction from reality.
In today’s world, among the highest paid professionals are the entertainers, movie stars, sports stars. Entertainment has always been an integral part of human society throughout history. But the sheer amount of money that people spend on entertainment and the sheer amount of money that is spent on providing entertainment is mind-boggling.
In India, there was an award-winning boxer, a biopic was made on her movie. On her life. And the movie star who made the biopic, who enacted that wrestler, that athlete, she earned more by that movie than what that athlete made throughout her life.
So, what a society values reflects its values. What we are ready to pay money for reflects what we consider important. So, we are ready to pay so much for entertainment because we feel entertainment is so vital.
As I said, entertainment is important. It gives us a break from the monotony of our lives. But sometimes, if there is so much infatuation, where millions and millions are spent on entertainment, what is the psychology behind it? We’re using technology to increase our capacity to control the outer world.
But there is dissatisfaction. So much so, that we want to escape from the real world to a fictional world of entertainment. And get some relief, get some joy therein.
Again, there is nothing wrong in seeking entertainment. But when it becomes an obsession, sometimes in sports matches, a particular fan’s favourite team starts losing, then the fans go on a riot. I come from India where cricket is a national craze.
Sometimes if the national team loses an important match, there are people who break their TVs. There are people who even attempt suicide just because they lost a match. So, the sense of perspective of what is how important is lost.
And in that sense, a title like the missing self in the selfie, that means the selfie represents technological progress. But within this technological progress, somehow the sense of perspective of what is important is lost. Actually, I got this thought of this title from a news report which I read in an article in India.
A group of friends had gone for outing to a lake and they were swimming in the lake and then took a selfie. And they took a selfie and they came out. Actually, it was a video selfie.
And when they came out and they look at the selfie, they were just having so much fun that they didn’t notice that one of them was missing. And then when they replayed the video, they found that this friend was in the background and he was drowning. He’s calling out, calling out.
He’s trying to call out. But somehow whatever happened, no sound was coming from his mouth. He’s waving, waving.
But because everybody is looking at the camera, nobody looked around and noticed. When they saw this, sorry, they rushed back to the place and they found that he had drowned already. So, sometimes while looking at the selfie, we may get so caught up that we miss out something much more important.
So, the two points of we being comfortable and yet comfortably distressed and our obsession with technology, which makes us, with special entertainment, which makes us lose a sense of perspective. These two things point to an essential reality that the promise of external control and pleasure, which we get through our progress in technology, through our capacity to have better and better gadgets, through our capacity to align the outer world to our means. This can make us forget the reality that just aligning things to our will alone cannot pacify our mind.
Our mind needs something more. The hardware, software and the user is like the mind, that’s okay. The body, mind and the soul.
So, the mind is essentially like the software and if the software gets corrupted, then no matter how good the hardware is, it won’t help us. Now, what could be the corruption of the software? That corruption is essentially the idea that we can find satisfaction by controlling external things and making external sensations pleasurable for us. Yes, it is true, as I said, if it’s very hot, we feel distressed, we feel irritated, but if the temperature is comfortable, how much do we think about it? Just move on to other things.
So, the great misunderstanding about happiness, that is the virus in the computer, in the mind, is that by getting pleasant sensations externally, we can become happy. So, sometimes in a family, there is a small child and all the relatives get together. Relatives may start tickling the belly of this child and when the belly is tickled, the child may start laughing.
Now, if the child laughs, is that laughter happiness? Is the laughter produced by tickling happiness? You could say, yes, he’s laughing, he’s happy. Yeah, but if that were happiness and we all want to be happy, then we could get our own personal perpetual tickling machine and whenever we want to be happy, just tickle ourselves. We’ll be happy.
Now, tickling, it may produce the reaction of laughter, but it is very superficial. It alone is not happiness. So, when we think of happiness in terms of getting pleasurable sensations and we can get more and more pleasurable sensations through technological progress, through entertainment and through manipulation of the outer world around us, but this will not lead to fulfilment.
There is some pleasant sensation, but it’s there for some time. After that, it goes away and the more we try to control external things in order to get more pleasurable sensations, the more we become dependent on those external things and if any external sensation becomes unfavourable, becomes unpleasant, it becomes very difficult for us to bear it and when these unfavourable sensations are such that we can’t resist them, then we, in order to escape those sensations, end up choosing destructive courses of action again to get some pleasant sensation. So, I want things to go the way I want in my life and when they don’t go that way, I don’t feel good.
So, in order to feel good, I may just drink or take drugs or do something else which gives me good sensations, but that leads to trouble again. So, basically, when we try to, when we equate happiness with getting pleasant sensations, that is the virus in the software of the mind and that sets us on the path to frustration because if sensations alone were pleasurable, then people who are drug addicts, they take drugs and they feel high, but they should be the happiest people in the world, are they? So, the missing self in the selfie is that in the infatuation with technological progress, we end up forgetting what it is that is truly important, what it is that will lead us to fulfilment. There is sensation which can lead to some titillation, some pleasure, but there is absorption.
Sensation refers to what we get from the outer world. Absorption is best got through contribution, through what we can offer to the outer world. So, we all are units of consciousness and we all have our capacities, our talents, our abilities and all of these are meant to be channelled constructively.
So, as I said, the hardware, the software and the user. So, like that the consciousness, or the soul, the mind and the body. So, we are looking for sensations and seeking pleasure over here, but higher happiness comes through absorption.
If we look back at our own lives, when we worked for some cause bigger than ourselves, when we contributed constructively, when we were deeply immersed in that, we look back and we feel this was what provided me real happiness. That was something which was meaningful. I felt I was doing something worthwhile and we look back and we feel satisfied by that and that is a much deeper level of satisfaction.
As compared to the satisfaction that we may get through sensations. And as long as we keep looking for pleasurable sensations as the sources of pleasure, to that extent, when unpleasant sensations do come upon us, which they will, no matter how much we become technologically advanced, how much we become financially strong, how much we become politically powerful, still unfavourable, unpleasant sensations will come upon us. And when they come, if we have become habituated only to pleasant sensations, then that will be unbearable for us.
In fact, most of the people who succumb to addictions, one reason is that they’re just unable to bear the unfavourable sensations that are coming in their lives. So if we can raise our consciousness to a higher level, where we can seek pleasure in something higher than sensations, then that is where we will find fulfilment. So when we experience sensations, who is it that is experiencing sensations? Nowadays there’s a lot of study of the brain.
Neuroscience is an in-field which tries to understand what consciousness is and where it comes from. So last year I had been in Canada in a university speaking and one of the most celebrated neuroscientists in Canada is Dr. Wilder Penfield and he studied the human brain for more than 40 years. He wrote several books.
One of the last books he wrote was called The Mystery of the Mind. And there he describes a series of experiments that he conducted to try to understand where consciousness comes from. So now we know that different areas in the body are controlled by different centres in the brain.
So say this part of the brain controls the motion of the hands. Now the brain can be triggered by external probes, say external electrodes, by which particular areas of the brain can be activated. So he did this experiment in which he asked a subject to raise his hand.
When subject raised the hand, he said, what happened? He said, I raised my hand. And he observed using probes, so that particular part of the brain had become activated. Now put your hand down.
Put his hand down. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Put your hand down. So he did that and he put his hand down, that part of the brain had become deactivated.
Then using external stimulation, he activated that part of the brain and the hand went up. He said, what happened? He said, my hand went up. Did you raise your hand? No, I did.
You did. Then he deactivated that part of the brain. The hand went down.
He said, what happened? He said, my hand went down. Did you put your hand down? No, I did. You did.
Then Dr. Penfield repeated this series of experiments while probing, activating other parts of the brain. His purpose was to find which part of the brain would make the subject feel that I am the activator. And no matter which part of the brain he activated, never did the subject get the feeling that I am raising or I am lowering.
So if a particular part of the brain was activated, the subject might suddenly remember something that happened in the childhood. Something someone had spoken 30 years ago, they may remember. Some smell that they had smelled 25 years ago, some other place, they would remember.
But they would not get the sense that I am raising the hand or I am lowering the hand. So to understand the implications of this, so we have a computer here and say we had a printer next to it. And we press the print button.
If I press the print button of my computer, the printer’s hand will start moving and it will start printing. So similarly, if we consider the printer hand to be like the human hand and the print button to be like the centre in the brain. Then in the second case, it was Dr. Penfield who came and pressed the print button.
He activated that area of the brain and then the printer hand, the hand started moving up and down. Who activated that area of the brain in the first case? The brain is a tool for transmitting consciousness by which the body can be controlled. But the brain is not the source of consciousness.
So after several decades of experimenting like this, Dr. Penfield concluded that the source of consciousness is extra cerebral. The brain is like a computer, but it is programmed by something outside of itself. The brain is a part of the body.
It’s like in a computer, we may have a central processing unit. Similarly, the brain is like a central processing unit for the body, which is like the hardware. But beyond the CPU is the software and there is a user beyond it.
So there are higher levels of existence of our being beyond our body. And when we look for, when we equate happiness with sensations, the result is we can’t bear unfavourable sensations. And when the unfavourable sensations come, the pursuit of getting something favourable makes us go on destructive tracks.
So instead of this, if we could raise our consciousness upwards so that we can experience happiness at a higher level, then we would not get caught by sensations. Last year, when I was in America, I was in Florida area and at that time the hurricane Irma had struck. So many of us left from Florida to other parts.
So one of my friends was caught in a building, was staying in that place and somehow he couldn’t get out of there. So he was staying there and he could see the water level rising outside and there’s no way out for him. Sitting, waiting, panicking, trying to contact someone.
And then as he was sitting there looking around, where can I go? He just saw behind a closet there seemed to be something there. He just moved the closet and he saw there was a door over there and that door led to attic. So he just climbed up the attic and the water level rose, rose, rose.
It covered the ground level. But in the attic he stayed safe. And after that the water level went down and he came out again unscathed.
So similarly, in the world around us, if we live primarily at the physical level and the physical level distresses come, troubles come, the flood is coming and we don’t know what to do. But if we discovered, just like he discovered this building had a higher level and he could just go to that level. Similarly, when we understand that our being, our existence has higher levels beyond the physical, there is the mental and there is the spiritual.
And if we can ascend to these higher levels of existence, then we all can experience a higher relief which frees us from the need or from the craving for getting pleasant sensations or from the compulsion to avoid unpleasant sensations. We can just rise higher and spiritual wisdom is ultimately meant for this purpose. Spiritual knowledge is meant to help us raise our awareness from the physical level to the mental level to the spiritual level.
I would like to do a small thought experiment to get some understanding of what I mean by the mental and the spiritual levels. So all of you can sit comfortably wherever you are and take three deep breaths. Close your eyes first and with me, you can take three deep breaths.
One, two, feel your whole body relaxing. The breath come in and go out. Now with your eyes closed, look at whatever appears in front of your eyes.
You may see this room where you are sitting. You may see your loved one. You may see some friend.
You may see your home. In fact, you may see on the inner screen many different images coming and going. Or you may just see an inner screen with some pattern of colours.
You may see the sky. You may see a forest. You may see various things on that inner screen.
Images coming and going. As you look at these images, try to take a step back and look at who is looking at that inner screen. On the inner screen, you are seeing various images.
But while looking at the inner screen, try to take a step back and look at who is looking at that inner screen. No matter how many times we try to take a step back, we can’t see the observer because we are the observers. If we try to look at the observer and step back, the observer steps back with us.
Take three deep breaths again and then gradually you can open your eyes. You can open your eyes now. So right now you’re looking at me.
You’re seeing this power point. So this is the outer scene. This outer scene appears within us on an inner screen.
And there is an inner seer of that inner screen. So normally the inner seer, the inner screen and the outer scene are in one line. And that is when perception happens.
When we are attending some talks, sometimes our mind likes to go for a walk. Our mind just goes here, there. And then if in the middle of the talk there is some joke and everybody starts laughing, the mind comes, hey what was the joke? Tell me, tell me.
So what happens at that time? You know, we were physically there, but we didn’t hear it. So we can perceive what is happening out there only when what is out there forms an image in here. The sound outside has to register or has to be depicted on the screen inside.
But this inner screen, which is normally meant to act as a window by which we can see what is out there, this inner screen sometimes starts acting like a TV screen. And it takes our consciousness somewhere else. We are sitting in a talk, but on that inner screen we may start seeing our favourite movie or our favourite movie star.
And then nothing registers. So this inner screen is the mind. And the inner seer is the soul.
So when perception happens, actually these three are in line. The soul is the perceiver. The mind is the presenter.
The mind is the screen, the monitor. And the world outside is what is meant to be depicted on the monitor of the mind. So when we look for happiness, when we basically equate happiness with outer sensations, then we are trying to get images from the outer world to be formed on the inner screen.
And we want pleasant images to be formed over here. But when that doesn’t happen, then it becomes unbearable. But if you understand that this inner screen and the inner seer are different from the outer scene, then even amidst difficult situations, we can direct our consciousness beyond the difficulty.
Problems are often there for us in the outer world. So the world determines our problems. We determine their size.
The world determines our problems. We determine their size. What do you mean by we determine their size? It basically means that we choose how much we dwell on a problem.
If somebody has hurt us, somebody has insulted us, now they’ve done that and they’ve gone their way. If we keep replaying it on our mind continuously, how could he have done that? How could she have said that? So there are many things happening in our life and we could be going on with our life, but on our mind that replay is happening. How could he know that? How could she say that? And because of that, we can’t experience life at all.
If somebody has hurt us, somebody has insulted us, we may need to take some action to deal with that. But when this replay is going on and on and on, we are not doing anything constructive. We are simply burning internally.
So life will give us unpleasant sensations, but when they start getting replayed on the mind again and again and again, then that increases the magnitude of the suffering. Resentment of reality often hurts much more than reality. We face some unpalatable reality.
Say we are going for a outing with our friends and just the previous night we get some flu and we are lying on our bed and we are thinking, my friends are enjoying over there, I am sitting here. Why did this happen? Why did this happen? Now having a flu is a little uncomfortable, but we just feel weak, we feel tired, we sleep, we feel a little fever, but it’s not a big pain. We could live with it, but the big pain is in the mind.
Why did this happen? Why did this happen? Why did this happen? It’s like something inside us is holding a whip and whipping us again and again and again. So the reality is I got a flu because of which I couldn’t go for a picnic, but my resentment of that reality hurts me much more than reality. So earlier I said that the virus is, that virus that corrupts the software of the mind is the idea that pleasant sensations are the source of happiness and unpleasant sensations will cause unhappiness, I have to avoid them at all costs.
So when we have this misconception that pleasant sensations will lead to pleasure and therefore I must get pleasant sensations, then that causes the mind to replay again and again whenever any unpleasant sensation comes. So on the screen of the mind something else could come. Now we could think maybe of our work, we could think of reading something, watching something.
Now what is the technology available, even if we are lying on a bed with flu, we can be doing so many things, but if the mind keeps replaying, why did this happen? Why did this happen? We become distressed. So spiritual knowledge or spiritual practise helps us to decouple the mind from the unpleasant sensations at the physical level. The unpleasant sensations are coming at the physical level and sometimes even after they go the mind keeps replaying it and because of that replay we hurt ourselves much more than what we need to.
So if we could decouple this that okay that has happened but I don’t need to keep replaying this. We may understand it, why am I thinking about it, somebody has just forget it, but we’re just not able to do it. Why? Because the mind and the body have become very strongly bound to each other.
That bondage happens by our conceptions. If we conceive of something as pleasurable, suppose there’s an alcoholic and an alcoholic is not able to get a drink, somebody else might tell you don’t get a drink today, what happens? Maybe you can drink tomorrow, but for that person because the desire for alcohol is so strong, not getting it for one day or for even one hour, what happens? The mind keeps replaying, you must get it, you must get it, you must get it. Oscar Wilde is a British playwright, he said giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world.
I have given it, I have done it over a hundred times. I have given up smoking over a hundred times. Why did I have to give up a hundred times? Because I gave up once but it didn’t give me up.
It kept coming back. So what happens over here? When we are attached to something, then that thought, that desire, the craving for that experience keeps replaying in our mind and if we get something opposite to it, that also keeps replaying in our mind and this replay of sensations or stimuli connected with sensations is what aggravates our misery. To the extent we could avoid this replaying, to that extent we could become disconnected from distress.
In fact, the Bhagavad Gita defines happiness as Yoga is not just physical yoga postures. Yoga is basically connection with spiritual reality and disconnection from material reality. Not disconnection in the sense that we don’t care about the material but it is that we don’t depend on material sensations for pleasure.
So I’ll conclude with two points and then we can have some questions or comments if you have. So how do we bring about this decoupling? Our mind is just replaying. Why did he speak like that? Why did this happen? And that replay is going on and on and on.
We’re just not able to think about anything else. So this can be done at two levels. First is that like this person who was trapped in the flood understood, oh there is some there’s an attic over there where I can go.
Similarly, when we at least at the intellectual level understand that there are higher levels of being. So there is the body and the mind and the mind is replaying whatever is happening at the level of the body, at the level of some sensations and that is causing us agitation. That is causing us stimulation.
So somehow we could raise our consciousness above the body, above the mind to something higher. That is a spiritual reality and meditation is essentially meant for this purpose. We often think of meditation as do some deep breathing, think of some candle, focus on some candle, see some sight in nature, focus on that.
Yes, that can be meditation. However, meditation to have its fullest benefit requires us to raise our consciousness above both the physical and the mental to the spiritual level. So the mind will keep speaking whatever it wants.
Say, suppose we are working in a place where there are some, say you are sitting in an airport and doing some work and there are some announcements going on or there is some music going on, some movie going on over there. Now we cannot stop that music or movie going on over there. But if we just focus on our work, that music and movie will just become like a background noise.
It will be there but it won’t distract us. Similarly, for us, we immediately can’t stop whatever is playing or replaying on the mind. But we can raise our consciousness somewhere higher and meditation is meant to give us a spiritual focus for our consciousness.
So earlier we did the thought experiment where there is the outer scene, there is the inner screen and there is the inner seer. So something is replaying on our inner screen and that’s causing us agitation. But if we had somewhere to focus apart from that inner screen, that replay is happening but we direct our consciousness elsewhere.
So that is meditation. When we meditate on spiritual reality, it may not immediately calm the mind but it bypasses the mind. Okay, the mind is agitated but I’ll focus on this.
Okay, there is this noisy music, noisy TV show going on but I focus on my work and then that just goes into the background. So when we practise meditation regularly, then we learn to focus on the reality beyond the mind and there are various ways of practising meditation. We practise what is called mantra meditation.
Mantra is special sound. In fact, mantra can be said to be spiritual power encased in sound. One metaphor for understanding the mantra is like an elevator.
When we chant the mantras in a reverential contemplative mood, then that mantra acts like an elevator for our consciousness. So we repeat the mantra again and again and again and that takes our consciousness upwards from physical reality to mental reality to spiritual reality and as our consciousness rises upwards, we start experiencing calmness, we start experiencing clarity, we start experiencing ourselves as distinct from the body and the mind, from whatever is happening at the external level and even whatever is happening at the internal level. We start saying, I am different from this.
I am the observer of this. It is easy to understand that we are observers of the outer world. Oh, this person has got angry.
Maybe I’ll be a little cautious. I won’t provoke this person further. We can observe that if we see somebody getting angry but if we are introspective, we can also observe.
I am getting angry now. Better let me walk out of the situation. Otherwise, I’ll speak something, this will get aggravated.
So we can observe ourselves. I am getting angry now. I am getting a little irritable now.
So we can observe ourselves internally. This capacity we all have latently but meditation increases that. Mantra meditation helps us to raise our consciousness to the spiritual level beyond the material, beyond the physical and beyond the mental.
Along with this, the practise of meditation, it helps us realise that we at our core are indestructible. We are beyond whatever agitation is happening at the physical level, what is happening at the mental level. That brings us calmness and then we can respond to the outer situation without getting into knee-jerk responses.
We can respond more thoughtfully, more effectively and over a period of time as we keep ascending to the spiritual level and start experiencing peace and power at the spiritual level. Then the mind itself will stop being so dependent on sensations for pleasure and when it stops being dependent on sensations, it will start getting agitated lesser and lesser. If I have only some stale food to eat, I don’t have anything else and somebody starts saying, this food is so stale, why are you eating this? Just throw it away.
We will not be ready to throw it away. Why? Because that is the only thing we have. But if somebody offers us a delicious feast, we just eat this and then we start eating it.
Do you want to keep this stale food? No, I don’t need it now. So the pleasure at the level of sensations is like that stale food. There is some pleasure but in the pursuit of that pleasure, there is a lot of agitation.
But if we don’t know any other pleasure, we just hold on to it and that causes us far more trouble than it is worth. But once we start raising our consciousness to the spiritual level and experiencing satisfaction, peace, power at that level, then even if sometimes some unpleasant sensations come up, we won’t get overwhelmed by it. Okay, it is there.
It will be there for some time, it will come, they will go. At the physical level of reality, nothing is permanent. So even the unpleasant situations that come, they are also temporary.
So the second point I was trying to conclude with is, one of my friends, he had gone to a forest area and there he found a leech biting him. He is very intelligent. He has experienced living in the forest.
Some leeches when they bite, if we try to pull out the leech, their hold is so strong that when we try to pull out the leech, they will rip out the whole skin. It will be a deadly wound. But if we just let the leeches, let the leech do its work, it’s a little scary.
You can see its tubule, you can sense its tubule entering into our skin, we can sense our blood being sucked out. It’s scary, but the leech’s capacity to suck blood is not infinite. It has its own tubules.
Once they are filled, then it will itself fall off or we could just flick it and it will fall off. So similarly, sometimes some situations come in our life which are like leeches and they bite us. Now if we have equated happiness with pleasant sensations and then these unfavourable situations come, they’re just unbearable and in trying to avoid them, we do various things which only aggravate the situation.
That’s like trying to pull out the leech. But if we understand, this is temporary. It will come, it will go.
Just tolerate it, just tolerate it. Unpleasant sensations, if we look back at our life, so many times some unpleasant sensations have come, they’ve stayed, they’ve gone. Just tolerate it.
The leech will suck its blood, but it will let go. That unpleasant sensation will come, stay for some time, it will go away. And we will have avoided complicating our life in trying to avoid that sensation.
And especially if at that time we can focus on spiritual wisdom, we can through meditation raise our consciousness to the spiritual level, then that can give us deeper realisation of the reality of our spiritual essence. Yes, I was experiencing this unpleasant thing at the physical level, but still by my spiritual practises, I stayed calm, I stayed composed, I stayed clear. Therefore, the spiritual stuff is real.
It is not just some conceptual thing. It is something which is experiential for me. So in this way, we can see the problems in our life and unpleasant sensations the problems produce as opportunities or as stimuli for taking the elevator of spiritual practise and experiencing our spiritual side.
So I’ll summarise what I spoke. I spoke on the topic of the missing self in the selfie. The selfie represents one of the most popular products of scientific and technological progress.
And this technological progress has given us enormous unprecedented levels of comfort. And yet mental health problems are increasing. People are becoming addicted, suicidal.
So we are comfortably distressed. So why is that? Primarily because we have equated happiness with getting pleasant sensations. And entertainment which provides us an abundant amount of pleasant sensations, we are ready to pay phenomenal amounts of money for that.
However, pleasant sensations, the pleasure that they give is very temporary and peripheral, superficial. It’s like the pleasure from Tickling. It’s a happiness, but it’s not really happiness.
And more importantly, in the course of life, inevitably unpleasant sensations will come. And when we can’t, when we have equated happiness with pleasant sensations, unpleasant sensations come, we can’t tolerate that. And then in order to get some unpleasant sensations elsewhere, we get into alcoholism, we get into drugs, into variety of other things.
And even if we don’t do that, still the presence of the unpleasant sensation at the physical level starts replaying again and again in the mind, on the screen of the mind. We discussed how the mind is like the inner screen and the soul is the inner seer. So I talked about Dr. Penfield’s experiment of raising the arm to show that the source of consciousness is extracerebral.
So the brain is like the CPU in the hardware, the body is the hardware, the mind is the software, the soul is the user. So much of our distress comes because life gives us problems, but we determine, life determines our problems, we determine their size. When we keep replaying, why did he do like that? Or why did I have to get this flu? That replay of the unpleasant at the level of the mind keeps causing us distress.
So if we could decouple this unpleasant physical sensation from its replay at the mental level, we could minimise our distress. And the way to do that is to raise our consciousness to somewhere beyond the mental. That is to the spiritual level of reality.
So the mind is like a TV that is playing. Say we are at the airport and we are playing, but it’s playing, but we focus on our work. Whatever is happening on the TV doesn’t matter.
So just like this young person was caught in a flood and they found, oh there’s an attic where I can get relief. Like that when physically unpleasant sensations come, if you understand that you have a spiritual side which is beyond these sensations, that there we can get relief. And meditation is meant to help us focus on spiritual reality.
Mantra meditation acts like an elevator for our consciousness by which you can raise it to the non-material spiritual level. And when we become habituated to fixing our consciousness on the spiritual level, then the unfavourable sensations of the material level will not agitate us that much. We’ll see them like leeches.
They are unpleasant, they are biting us, but instead of overreacting and pulling out our own skin, just let them do their work. They tolerate those sensations, they come, they go. And through our absorption at the spiritual level, we can not only tolerate what is happening unpleasant at the physical level, but also realise our spiritual essence.
And thus increase our capacity to go through life and whatever unpleasant sensations it may send our way in future, without getting unduly agitated by them. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming.
If you would want to hang around, if you have some questions, reflections, you can feel free to stay around and we’ll enjoy the conversation. Thank you so much. So if any of you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
Thank you for coming.