Bhagavatam-daily 53 – 11.07.43 – To transcend worldly ups and downs open yourself to higher reality

Onwards towards Krishna. Thank you.
So I have described that na bhātna sphṛṣyate me gādhe vāyuneritaham. So the point here is that there are all these gross elements none of them actually touch the sky. So similarly kāla-śrīṣṭer guṇaipamān.
Similarly actually the soul is not affected. So that means the sky is there. It is not affected by the storm that are created by the wind.
Then if they cause things to blow here and there they cause the rains to rise. None of that actually affects the sky. Similarly the soul is not affected by whatever changes are created by the three modes and time at the material level.
The scriptures especially in their philosophical sections repeatedly stress the transcendence of the soul. That means they point out that the soul is actually unaffected by anything material. At one level Krishna talks about this in that the soul is beyond dissolution, incineration, fragmentation, desiccation.
But at another level the soul that means it is in terms of constitution the soul cannot be destroyed. But in terms of emotion the soul’s faculty is consciousness. And the consciousness when projected into matter affects matter and is affected by matter.
So citta, sat-citta-ānanda. Citta is the innate spiritual cognition of the soul. The capacity for cognition of the soul refers to the citta faculty.
Now the consciousness projected into matter is called as citta. Now citta is affected by the material medium through which it is being transmitted. So at this stage if suddenly the temperature around me becomes too hot, I get affected.
So the body we can say is dead. The body is not affected in terms of being conscious. Then who is experiencing the heat? That is actually the soul’s consciousness projected through the body and affected by the body.
So it’s something similar to a person watching a movie and while watching a movie getting caught in the emotions of the movie and thinking thereby that actually say if the hero gets beaten by the villain I am getting beaten. The solution is not to imagine that it’s really how to end that imagination is to either turn off the tv or stop watching the tv. So that all begins with recognizing that okay I have a life beyond the tv and then I started looking around.
So like that when the soul recognizes its non-material identity and the soul recognizes that okay I have non-material faculties of perception and I have capacities for getting higher spiritual experiences. There’s a whole universe that is hidden from me because of my accessing the world through the senses alone. So actually the senses seem to be our road to reality but they are actually the roadblock to reality.
How? Because you know when we are inside the body we don’t have any way to access anything except through the senses at least at the conditioned level and what we perceive with the senses is only one level of reality. So even for example when science perceives subatomic particles or quantum physics perceives the world in a different way that perception is also different from what we perceive with our senses. So the point is senses give us access to one fragment of reality while denying us access to the rest of reality and they especially deny access to the most important part of reality that is spiritual reality.
How do the senses deny that? Actually the senses don’t exactly deprive us of the higher reality. Just being in a body deprives us of access to higher reality but the senses make us feel that this is all that there is to reality and that’s why they deprive us of the impetus to even investigate some other forms of reality and in this way we stay locked at the material sensory level of reality and don’t even feel the need to inquire. In fact some people may even rationalize and justify this unquestioning faith in the senses, unquestioning devotion to the senses, uncritical surrender to the senses and their perception by saying seeing is believing.
Actually even science tells us there’s so much we don’t see but we know it exists from science. So seeing is believing is actually a very very primitive philosophy. Now moving forward our topic is how does the soul remain unaffected and why does the soul still seem to be affected? The soul is unaffected because the soul is constitutionally transcendental.
Soul seems affected because its emotions are projected into the body-mind mechanism. Now we cannot overnight withdraw our emotions and our consciousness from the body-mind mechanism but rather through the body-mind mechanism we try to root our consciousness towards that which is the reality and that reality is Krishna who manifests externally through various manifestations which connect us with him. So at least philosophically we accept that there is higher reality and there is the possibility for me to perceive higher reality but to do that I have to de-link myself from unidimensional devotion to sensory reality claiming that it is only reality.
I have to stop claiming like that and instead I need to focus my consciousness which is currently to put through the senses on those manifestations divine manifestations which will act as channels, as gateways, as propellers that will lift my consciousness to the spiritual level. So for example we focus the consciousness in the holy name, on the sacred sounds of scriptural verses, on deities. By this these act as channels for our consciousness to rise upward and as they rise upward then our spiritual faculty gradually awakens and then we start realizing that actually none of the things which you thought were affecting me by threatening me were agitating me they were actually worth being agitated because I am different from them.
So by thus recognizing and realizing our non-material side we can stay unaffected by whatever happens at the material level of reality and that is how now as devotees we will also see that the more we chant attentively, the more we study scripture seriously the less we are affected by sensory stimuli, sensory ups and downs and the less we do devotional activities attentively, seriously the more we get shaken by the dualities of life. So by regularly and seriously connecting with Krishna through our prescribed devotional activities and carrying on that Krishna consciousness with us we can realize our transcendence and thus move steadily through the ups and downs of life towards Krishna.