How can a person coming from difficult family and cultural conditionings grow spiritually?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
on as a bunch of westerners, mainly we have some people from India and some people in India listening to the show but as a bunch of westerners mainly, we find ourselves to be what we call dented cans a little bit broken we say that, when you say I came from a pious brahmin family me and Kastuba a few of us, a handful of us know what that means you grow up worshipping deities you grow up from childhood chanting the Bhagavad Gita you grow up from childhood hearing the pastimes of Ram Leela and Krishna Leela you worship you understand the brahmins and you have a family priest, etc you’re not going to the prom or going to pep rallies or going to or dating when you’re 12 it’s hard for even an American to even grasp that so, a lot of us don’t have cohesive family units, we didn’t grow up in that we grew up in broken families a lot of times there’s been a lot of trauma growing up in the west we come off, we present very well in the west, we’ve got wrinkle free lawns, our highways are together, we have guard rails on cliffs, we present great, but that real family unit has been cracked, there’s been a crack in the seal and because of it we grew up with a lot of trauma, a lot of issues we grew up with either overbearing parents or missing parents and it’s driven us to drugs, alcohol elicit sex, sex addiction drug addiction running away from home no regard for our parents matter of fact, getting out of the parents, giving our parents the finger, running away from home ask your question I’m just trying to I’m trying to give him what he’s dealing with so we grow up with a lot of trauma, we grow up like our face ground to the dirt and now broken we’re looking towards light what do you do in Bhakti when you’re coming from so much baggage, when you’re coming in where you can’t trust where you feel a little where you have a lot of self-loathing how do you deal with a mind like that where we don’t trust there’s a lot of self-hatred going on there’s a lot of voices in our mind telling us we can’t do that you’ll never be as good as that how do you bring that into a Bhakti circle without making tons of offenses right sometimes it seems very simplistic oh you just chant the holy name please let him talk I just want to make sure he gets this gets the understanding here yeah firstly I would like to say that the grass always seems greener on the other side so after I have spent some time traveling in the western world I would say that whichever devotees or spiritual aspirants I have met from America from UK from Australia I have seen an enormous level of earnestness now it is true that say actually the first person who I met who was who was from a divorced family was after I came to ISKCON at the age of 24 that is the first person I met so it is as you said the family unit is very was at least very stable quite a at least two decades ago but I would say that if we consider there are two ways to look at spirituality see one is that how we have been living in the past so if we put our fingers vertically then the way we have been living in the past some of us may be living in as you said well established family units with a with a good sense of connection and responsibility and some of us may not be living that way may be opposite and we could say spirituality is above that so this is one way of looking at spirituality that it is a progression but another way of looking at spirituality is it is like this it is like this means whatever as material level is it is like horizontal it doesn’t matter from wherever we are materially we can access life spiritual side so I find that the most important thing for growing spiritually is that sense of earnestness and that sense of wanting to grow spiritually wanting to explore spiritually and that I have seen in whoever I have interacted with so I would say that that sense of earnestness sometimes gets lost in India because of complacency or this is just a part of our culture we have grown up with this so it is always there one of the teachers in our tradition would say that the people who miss the train the most are the people who stay next to the train station because they are right next to the train station I just go and catch it so but those who stay far away from the train station they make it a plan I have to come here in time right take it for granted they take it for granted maybe so now having said that with respect to your specific question I would say that spirituality the way I usually talk about it is that there is the inner world and there is the outer world and technology in which the western world has progressed enormously technology makes things better and spirituality makes people better so technology helps us to transform the outer world and by that in the western world that has been done enormously now spirituality helps us to better organize and improve our inner world and that is where if the two can come together then we can actually be a part of not only making our own lives better but also the world better so the spiritual wisdom of the eastern world it’s especially the way you have created a congenial spiritual community if you get a community like that we all can go beyond whatever wounds we have from the past now we are all in some ways we are products of our past but we are not prisoners of our past I like that we are products of our past but we are not prisoners of our past tattoo! Tattoo time! I’m going to tattoo that right on my back what do you think? sorry about that continue please so spiritual growth helps us to whatever wounds we may have from the past we can always grow from there so I often like to use the example of a software now if we have a computer system with a hardware software and user so that’s like our body, mind and soul the body is like the hardware, the mind is the software and soul is the user so if we consider say like google if I search something on google and you search something on google we will not get the same find same hits because google tracks what all history we have searched before and it customizes the results I didn’t know that no like when you plug a url into you know it starts to fill it out for you like automated alright our mind is also like that so whatever we have thought of before whatever we have dwelt on before that becomes stored and that comes back as a auto prompt so if say somebody has I suppose in India many of you know the movie industry is called Bollywood like we have Hollywood so if somebody has visited Bollywood.com repeatedly then they come to a spiritual talk, they hear about the Bhagavad Gita and they want to find out what is this Bhagavad Gita and as soon as they type B in their google their browser immediately it gives Bollywood.com they wanted to go toward Bhagavad Gita but Bollywood.com comes along so that’s like the product of the past yeah that’s the product of the past so what comes up in our mind what kind of actions we are prompted toward that will be determined by our past but just because Bollywood.com has come on my browser that doesn’t mean I have to select it and go ahead for somebody who has selected Bhagavad Gita before as soon as they type B Bhagavad Gita will come and immediately they will go there for somebody who had typed Bollywood.com before they will have to put in more effort B has come Bollywood no I don’t want to go there I will type Bhagavad Gita and then I can go to Bhagavad Gita.com so certain promptings will come to us from our past but we always have the free will to choose now now that choosing may require a little more effort based on the kind of choices we have made or the impressions we have got from the past but the Bhagavad Gita tells us that we always have free will and that free will it is something which we can either increase by choosing properly or decrease by not choosing properly but that free will is always there so and the spiritual resources provided by the Gita help us to expand the ambit of our free will so that is how whatever be the past the spiritual wisdom of the Gita can help us create a bright future for ourselves you know a lot of times when I am typing stuff on the computer that auto suggestion is like so strong that it is making actually more difficult to just write what I want to write and then you actually have to make sometimes I go 2 or 3 times and I get the same wrong word before I click and choose not to use the suggested word that they are putting, the suggested spelling the suggested word, especially when you are doing a lot of Sanskrit stuff right, because the things