How bhakti transforms our desires. Sunday feast class, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.

Once more I'll read the poetic translation. Soon he walks the righteous way, Finding peace that will not sway. Proclaim with faith and flourish, My devotee will never perish.

Kshiprambhavati Dharmaatma Shashvachanthim Nigachyate Kaunteya Pratijanihi Name Bhakta Pranashyati Let's recite once, all of us together now. Kshiprambhavati Dharmaatma Shashvachanthim Nigachyate Kaunteya Pratijanihi Name Bhakta Pranashyati If you like, repeat after me. My dear Lord, Take away the conditionings That take me away From Your unconditional love.

Om Gyanati Nirandasya Gyananjana Shalakaya Chakshuramila Tamyena Tasmai Shrikarave Namaah Namaah Om Vishnupadaya Krishna Prashtaya Bhutale Shreemate Bhaktivedanta Swami Dinaamine Namaste Saraswati Deve Gauravali Pracharini Nirvishnush Shunyavati Vashchatya Deshatarini Vanchakalpataru Vyascha Kripasindhubhyavecha Patitana Pavanibhyo Vaishnavibhyo Namo Namaha Jai Shri Krishna Chaitanya Prabhu Nityananda Sri Advaita Kadadhara Sri Vasadhi Gauravakta Vrinda Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare Thank you very much for coming today. And today I'll discuss on the topic of desire transformation. How our spiritual practices can elevate and transform our desires.

So, let's begin by I request different participants to read one one of these paragraphs. Would anyone like to read the first paragraph? My dear Lord, let me take heart that I will swiftly become righteous. Let me not focus on how long the inner struggle seems but on how eternal its destination will be.

Rather than worrying about either overcoming temptations or failing to do so, help me see how I can keep moving forward through all situations. Help me treasure the peace that comes by irreversibly reaching your shelter, where no inner impurity holds me to more experiences outside your shelter. Yes, thank you.

So, when I So I have been a monk for nearly 30 years now. I was introduced when I was in India. I was studying engineering and at that time from my early childhood you may notice when I came in I needed crutches for walking so I was not much into physical activities I liked to study and I had a lot of faith in the power of education.

That education can open doors and create a better life so in India the 10th standard exam is very important so after I finished 10th I did quite well so immediately I started offering free tuition classes for kids who were about to go into 10th and when I got into my engineering at that time I joined a social welfare organization and I was a part of the educational wing and I used to go to underserved communities, we call them slums in India so some of you may have heard of that Indian movie called Slumdog Millionaire so we would offer free tuition classes to the kids over there and the idea was that if we consider our life journey, for all of us we want some doors to open for us. Now if these doors open maybe education opens some doors, employment opens some doors maybe a good relationship opens some doors for us so if we open doors then we can have a better life and that was my idea and after I started doing these classes, we became friends with the kids many of these kids would tell from their homes what was going on there was a lot of alcoholism especially among the fathers and then there was domestic violence and once I was teaching history, I was talking about World War I and after that one of the kids came and told me how there had been severe violence in his home so I started thinking how much am I really helping these kids talking about which war happened when, when they are worried about when a war is going to break out in their own homes so I talked with the leaders of the organization and we decided to diversify into de-addiction so we got some experts for anti-alcoholism to come and speak we also learned some things and we spoke to the parents now the fathers when I would meet them, they seemed to be nice people they were grateful that I was coming and teaching their kids but then these kids would tell me that once he gets a bottle of alcohol in his hand, he becomes a different person so then many of these people, they all resolved to give up alcohol and it was almost like a positive chain effect and a small community everybody there resolved to give up alcohol and we were very happy with that and then I went back to my home for my semester break I was staying in a hostel at that time and after a couple of months when I came back to my dismay, I found that not only the parents but even the kids had started drinking so in between there had been an election a local municipality election and one of the candidates in order to woo the voters had brought truckloads of free liquor and that's when it struck me that image stuck with me if we are talking about opening doors and that's important but on the path of life there are trap doors and if we fall into those trap doors then no matter how good the doors be that are open for us we won't even walk through those doors and this was not just something, so I had faith in the power of education but I noticed that it was not a problem only in these underserved communities I was in one of the top colleges in India and there also I saw kids some of my co-students getting into drugs and alcohol my room partner, very diligent student he had come from a very poor family his parents had taken loans to get him to this college and somehow he didn't do well in one exam and started drinking and just couldn't give it up so you could see that he was sliding down and I was no saint I was fortunately not into any gross bad habits but since my childhood I used to get angry a little bit I had a bit of a temper and since my early childhood I used to love the English language so one of my hobbies was to pick up a dictionary and memorise words so I had a fairly good vocabulary and I soon discovered that a good vocabulary and a bad temper is a deadly combination everybody gets angry at times but most people when they get angry they just become incoherent they may yell and scream but often they don't speak anything meaningful and this person has just lost the plot that's what we dismiss the person they become aggressive but it doesn't make much sense but because I had such a good vocabulary and I had some analytical ability so when I would get angry I would really become sarcastic and cutting and I was a nice person at least I thought I was a nice person but there would be these moments of insanity and then I found that many of my friends were keeping a distance from me so those were the days of pre-technology we didn't have India developed a little later since it was the early 1990s so we didn't even have very common as like a recording device it was a tape recorder or something like that there were no mobile phones at that time so one day I got very angry with a friend and I yelled at him and after that I forgot about it and then one of my other friends he recorded what I had spoken and then he played it now if you have never heard your voice when it is recorded first time if you hear it it sounds different, it doesn't sound like your voice so what happened when he started speaking that, he played that recording and said who is this and then he didn't say anything and I kept hearing this sound like a really mean person and then as I continued hearing how nasty, how can somebody speak like that and my friend allowed me to continue on this and then after 4-5 minutes he said you know who it is so you know him very well I said who is that, that's you I got the shock of my life at that time so I said I don't want to be like this I can't recognize this as myself I can't believe that I spoke like this so that's when I realized for me also there was this trap door into which I was falling and I felt I have to find out what is this, what makes us act in this way how can it be stopped so the specific trap door may be different for different people but we all have these trap doors into which we fall and much of our attention in life goes to what doors are not opening for us why am I not getting promoted if I am working in this job why do my family members not listen to me why doesn't this happen, why doesn't that happen we spend a lot of energy on worrying about when and how we can open the doors to a bigger and better life but these trap doors they keep sabotaging us so that is when my reading I was always an avid reader but that's when my reading started becoming more internal, I started reading about psychology philosophy and then I came to spirituality and that's when I came to the Bhagavad Gita of course I knew the Bhagavad Gita because in India it is the book of official piety but I first approached it as a book of wisdom and there in the third chapter, 36th verse I found that Arjuna is asking exactly the same question that I had by what am I engaged as if compelled to do things that I do not want by a force that I can't understand so I said this is the question I also have what is going on in my inner world so it seemed as if my desires are sometimes not my desires so that's what led me to the journey of understanding the inner world and then thinking out how to transform that inner world so here this is the point that sometimes when we, this kind of self-sabotage happens when this self-sabotage happens there are two extremes reactions that we often go towards, we consider a pendulum one extreme is denial either we try to deny it never happened or we say oh that was just a one off thing and we try to deny the gravity of it the other extreme is we become hopeless either hopelessness or sometimes it can be shamelessness also I am using shamelessness not in a value judgmental sense but in the sense that we become brazen this is just the way I am, this is who I am take it or leave it so both are harmful and the Gita offers us a better way it says that what we can do is we can identify and then we can rectify that this is a part of us but it is not who we are there is something inside us that is not us and that distances us from who we actually are so let's explore this a little bit more who would like to read the next paragraph oh infallible lord your love for me is unconditioned so now the Gita offers a very interesting philosophical understanding of how desires come from and there are some philosophies which say desires themselves are bad and sometimes in the name of spirituality they say give up all desires but that is not exactly the teaching of the Gita at all so the idea is that while there may be a conditioning inside us which may be strongly self-sabotaging us and this self-sabotage it broadly happens in two ways it is through desires so desires we desire the things that are harmful for us or it can also be through emotions we look at the negative all the time we feel negative about ourselves and these are related if there is self-sabotaging desire then the negative emotional reaction can be denial or it can be hopelessness so the self-sabotage when it happens how does it happen it happens because what the Gita says is our desires are misdirected so there is a three level understanding of the self there is the soul, there is the mind and there is the body we exist at three dimensions so the body the mind and the soul and these are like a computer system in which the body is the hardware the mind is the software and the soul is the user so from the soul comes out is this yellow color visible from the soul comes out the light of consciousness so consciousness is like the stream of light that comes from the soul so for example now can you see this flashlight coming from here so the source of light is the soul and the beam of light coming out is consciousness so this consciousness comes out from the soul through the mind, it goes to the body and then goes to the outer world so for example right now you are sitting and you are a soul and your consciousness is coming out from the mind and then it is coming if you are hearing this talk, it is coming towards me it is coming towards the beam of light now if there is some other thought in your mind maybe you are hungry and you are thinking what is going to be the food today when can I have the food then that thought will pop in and that will distract so the consciousness comes from the soul but it doesn't always go straight out depending on what is in the mind the consciousness can get distracted and now normally the way the healthy mind functions is that for us if there is an external stimulus there is an internal reaction so if our body is healthy if somebody touches you on the shoulder what is the matter? one time I was giving a talk in America in an auditorium and the organizer wanted to tell me something urgently so he came from behind on the dais and he tapped me on the shoulder he tapped me and I almost screamed to contain myself I told him I had actually fallen on my shoulder and I have a sprain over here he said I am sorry I didn't know that so if there is an injury then what happens small stimulus huge reaction so the healthy condition is the response is proportional to the stimulus but the unhealthy condition is the response is not proportional to the stimulus a small stimulus huge response so for example what applies to the body what applies to the body also applies to the mind just as the body can get injured the mind can also get injured so here in this vision what I said is the mind is like the transmitter of consciousness so consciousness goes from the soul to the mind but the mind is not just a transmitter the mind also has impressions inside it and these impressions inside it can be positive negative so for example if suddenly a sound comes from here there is a fire here get out that person's volume may not be much louder than my volume but all of us that is much more significant so what will happen is that might be a small stimulus coming in fire but when it goes in it immediately becomes bigger and sometimes this small stimulus leading to a big reaction is good so the mind can act as a transformer for our consciousness but sometimes this may not be good so it can also be a the impressions can cause a distortion so for example I have a friend in America he is he works in a fortune 500 company very successful professionally but previously he was a bit of an alcoholic now he was a high performing alcoholic because he has a very high IQ he is very good at his job but when he would start drinking he would just completely become dysfunctional so once he was invited to because he was very successful in his company so he was invited to an international retreat corporate retreat in Switzerland and when he went there he had to go to the board room for a meeting as he was passing by there were some drinks kept on the table nearby he just glanced once at it and then went in and he went into the board room to meet and he saw his boss and he told me I was looking at my boss and suddenly inside my mind so inside my mind my boss body changed into a bottle of alcohol and I just couldn't hear what my boss was saying I couldn't understand I couldn't respond and that's when I realized I am in big trouble so now it is not that he is staring at the bottle of alcohol for hours but a small stimulus huge reaction so this is impressions this is in Sanskrit there is a word for it it is called samskar have any of you heard this word samskar samskar is impressions inside the mind they are deep in our psyche the samskar you can write it in English as some scar we all have some or the other scar in our psyche now for somebody who is addicted what happens a small stimulus huge reaction now trauma is also a form of samskar if somebody had been in a road crash a car crash and then next time anytime they hear a loud sound of brakes screeching or some objects colliding they may become panicky or somebody is in a war and they got PTSD post traumatic stress disorder then what is happening a small stimulus huge reaction so the point is when our desires we are talking about self sabotage over here when we have any kind of self sabotage what is actually happening is certain unhealthy samskaras are there in our mind and they cause small perceptions to lead to huge reactions so it could be fear it could be anger it could be craving whatever it is small perception huge reaction and when this starts happening for a person who does not have that samskara say imagine two people are going by a bar and one of them has never drunk and has no interest in drinking and the other person is nearly an alcoholic now both of them see the same perception but what happens for the person who has never drunk there will be no craving that comes at all for the person who has drunk repeatedly an almost irresistible craving will come up and the first person may tell the second person just use your will power say no to it now what happens is yes will power is important but the sheer force with which the impulse comes from inside will power often seems to not be enough and the person seems to get overpowered so it is the mind is programmed and the good thing about the mind is while it is programmed it is also programmable we can change the programming of the mind so let's move to the next paragraph who would like to read this yes please oh supreme guru help me realize and remember that whatever seems exciting turns out to be boring whatever promises enjoyment delivers the opposite entanglement torment, bereavement let me stop craving new versions of the same say something, say things that have already disappointed me let me instill your fear yes so I will make one more point this is a slightly philosophical point but if you understand this then you will understand how bhakti is so powerful in changing the impressions in the mind so the Gita explains that where does pleasure come from ultimately see, all living beings at one level are biological machines we are biological creatures and we are driven by two things to survive and to reproduce but we human beings we seek something more so I talked earlier about this let's put it another way that the soul and the soul is in a particular body now if you see non-human beings, animals, birds they basically mate and seek pleasure as per their biological instincts in the mating season the cow is there, cow might be normally very gentle but when it comes in the rut it will be very difficult to control it but once that mating urge is over, the season ends the cow becomes very peaceful so when an animal is hungry it can become dangerous but even tigers sometimes if they are well fed they may pass by a human being and not attack a human being so what happens in the non-human species basically the living beings are more or less satisfied with whatever pleasure the body offers according to its biology when the urge to eat comes, we eat when the urge to mate comes, we mate but in the human form the soul's consciousness is much more developed and by that the result is that we seek more pleasure than what the body can offer we naturally seek more pleasure than what biologically the body is designed to provide so that's why for example, if you see a cow day after day, month after month, year after year the cow will eat the same grass now we human beings if we are told to just for one month eat the same food everyday we will find it difficult some people find it unbearable there are so many different cuisines, so many different varieties within each cuisine and we want to try so what happens is that we, because the soul so in animal body versus human body in human body the soul seeks pleasure and in some ways we can say the body provides pleasure now this equation in animals, this seems to be more or less whatever pleasure is sought by the soul is provided by the body but in humans, what happens is what we seek pleasure is much more than what the body can provide and because of this we will see that it is in the human form that often our very search for pleasure gets us into trouble almost all addictions, nobody is born from their mother's womb with a cigarette in their mouth so what happens is it's a search for pleasure so we humans are in a very peculiar position in this world that we want more pleasure than what the body can offer us and that's why we explore various things birds may have migratory patterns but birds don't go for sightseeing we humans go for tourism and then we may explore different relationships so many things we do for pleasure but the problem is because we want more pleasure than what the body can offer we try to explore more and more material pleasures in new forms but all material pleasures are ultimately limited by the body we may have more variety but we cannot really increase the quantity how much food can we eat now even if somebody were a billionaire somebody owns the best hotels in the world now how much food can they eat our consciousness is so developed that we would like to have pleasure at every moment of our life and with the best food that money can buy we can only enjoy a few times a day the Egyptian pharaohs tried to bend their way out of this dilemma they had their physicians design painless vomiting pills so what they would do they would have these golden plates and they would eat a huge feast after the feast was eaten their belly was full then they would take a will for vomiting painless vomit everything out and then eat again and in that way they tried to find a way out of nature nature's limitation on the pleasure that we seek but the body is not simply just a bag you can fill and empty the whole physiological system is impacted every time we take in food so those pharaohs who tried it didn't live for very long and then after that they stopped the experiment so we really can't circumvent or bypass this bodily limitation on our quest for pleasure and this does not mean that nature has made us to be frustrated that's not the point the point is that we are meant for another kind of pleasure so the soul if I go back to that earlier model the soul, mind and body I discussed and then there is the world outside so when the soul's consciousness goes through the mind to the world and beyond that there is the world through the body to the world in this direction what we are seeking is material pleasure but the Gita explains next to us, within us is God God is this divine manifestation inside us called as the super soul, the Paramatma and what the Gita explains is God is not just some all-pervading light or just some controlling person or a judge God is actually all-attractive He is, the divine is a reservoir an ocean of happiness and when our consciousness gets directed this way this is the path to spiritual pleasure and whereas material pleasure is temporary spiritual pleasure is unending so it's to extend this metaphor here say there is an ocean over here and this is not an ocean of salt water it's an ocean of sweet delicious water and if we are here somewhere now from that ocean various drops of water have come out and so this ocean is compared to God who in the Bhakti tradition is known by the name Krishna and so God is like an ocean of happiness and everything that gives us pleasure in the world is like a drop that has come from the ocean so in that sense all this is material pleasure and God is an ocean of spiritual pleasure so now all the drops come from the ocean but all the drops don't take us to the ocean some drops may take us away from the ocean some drops may take us towards the ocean so now the drops do have there is real water in it but it is extremely tiny now for somebody who is thirsty and they just want their thirst quenched even a drop may seem to be great and they may chase after the drop, they get the drop but then the drop does not really offer relief so for all of us in our imagination whatever pleasures we think oh eat this all these things will give me pleasure and they give us some pleasure but most of the time the pleasures don't really live up to their promise now they turn out to be at best a disappointment but sometimes what happens imagine if somebody is chasing after this one drop and they get a drop that's not enough I want more and they look for another drop and they go further and they chase another drop and they go further and that way what has happened is in chasing the drop that has come from the ocean they are going further and further away from the ocean so addictive pleasures are like this when somebody takes alcohol or does drugs they get a high that it feels like nectar for that moment but then after that it ends and they want more and then the person starts losing themselves in the pursuit of that pleasure so now we in our human body when as I said earlier that the pleasure we seek and the pleasure the body can provide us is a mismatch now this mismatch is by intention so that we will look for some other source of pleasure so that we will look for something higher in life and that is how spiritual awakening can happen but unfortunately we may end up looking for new versions of the same pleasure and that is unfortunately what is being increasingly facilitated through technology so through technology we get newer and newer versions of the same pleasures and then what happens we may say somebody goes and watches a movie now in a movie maybe a hero and heroine are dancing and kissing and all those things and then people are watching the movie they think if only I would be there I would have such an attractive partner I would be happy now what happens is they are watching that but it is all in their imagination most people who do binge watching they also want to eat something maybe eat some popcorn or something why? because everything is imaginary something has to be real so in that way what happens technology makes us believe that somewhere out there I will get that pleasure and nowadays with our smart phones and social media there are so many ways we get dopamine hits so every dopamine hit that we get is like one drop but that one drop is taking us further and further away from the ocean so when we start practicing bhakti, for example you come to the temple, we have a spiritual talk, we participate in kirtans so when we start practicing bhakti it is that we are turning towards the ocean so bhakti is a yoga so bhakti yoga is the process by which we learn to connect with the divine and the more we connect with the divine the more we start experiencing a higher happiness in our life let's read the last paragraph and then we can have some questions who would like to read the last part? oh supremely merciful lord please weaken within me the inner forces that draw me away from you strengthen my longing to live with you live in you and live for you yes so now I talked about these impressions in the mind I said the mind is like a programmed machine but it is also a programmable machine so how bhakti reprograms the mind that is the last part I will talk about so I am based in Mumbai in India in Mumbai there is this small thing have any of you heard of it? it is the world's biggest movie industry it is called Bollywood so now suppose somebody on their browser has visited a website called Bollywood.com and maybe they visited 5 times, 10 times and now they come for a spiritual talk like this and then they hear about the Bhagavad Gita and they want to know what is the Bhagavad Gita so they open their browser and start typing Bhagavad Gita they type B and what happens? they wanted to visit Bhagavad Gita.com but Bollywood.com comes as autocomplete now they didn't want to go to Bollywood.com but it came as autocomplete is it because their phone is their enemy? no the phone is simply stored in the browser history the sites they have visited so our mind is like that mind is like a browser and whatever we have sought for pleasure the mind stores in its browser and then whenever we feel a need for pleasure the mind pops up, ok come on drink, watch TV do this, eat this, watch this, whatever, buy this and then it just goes in that direction so by default often our pleasure seeking goes on a path that is faulty that is not necessarily the best path but even if Bollywood.com has come as autocomplete a person can still type out Bhagavad Gita it is 12 full letters to be typed, it can seem like a 100 mile marathon but once they type it, what happens? that also gets stored in their browser history and next time they type B still Bollywood.com might come as the first autocomplete but somewhere down Bhagavad Gita.com will also come as autocomplete and if they visit Bhagavad Gita.com 10 times, 20 times and they don't visit Bollywood.com then what will happen? Gradually Bhagavad Gita.com will start coming as the first autocomplete so that way simply by visiting so say yes to this and no to this by that simple way to change the browser history that same principle applies for reprogramming our mind so the Gita calls this as, it uses two words it talks about the 6.35 Abhyasena to kaunteya vairagyena chagrohyate so Abhyasa is repeated practice and Vairagya is saying no so we may have certain tendencies and the self-sabotaging tendency may seem to be coming again and again but if we just learn, if we come in the spiritual association and connect with people who are seeking higher happiness who are seeking to connect with the Divine and especially practice the process of Bhakti that connects us with the Divine then that will create new impressions in our mind and this is where rituals can be very powerful sometimes the word rituals has a negative connotation why are you being so ritualistic however rituals are very different from routines see when we do routines for example everyday we may have to do our laundry or do our dishes or clean our home that is a routine the point of a routine is to get the thing done now routines don't need our full attention if we are doing our laundry we can be talking on phone with someone we could be hearing a podcast it just requires some basic level of attention but rituals ideally speaking the point of the ritual is not to get the thing done it is to get the experience the whole point is to get the experience to enter into the experience so for example once there were two kids who used to quarrel with each other and start fighting with each other so both their mothers met and they said we will train our kids to calm down whenever you feel angry with the other person both of you take five deep breaths calm yourself down so one day one of the kids came back with a black eye and a bleeding nose what happened? didn't you breathe till five? didn't the other kid breathe till five? what happened? now the point of deep breathing is not just to finish that is not the point of deep breathing the point of deep breathing is not to meet the count of the breaths it is to actually experience the deep breathing and that's what will calm us down so the point of ritual, say for example before we started this talk we had kirtans now we would have kirtans after that also so the point of that is not just to meet a particular number count of singing the mantras it is to enter into the sound it is to become absorbed in it that's why this is often called as mantra meditation so the impressions that are formed inside us what happens is, this is the last point I will make say this is my consciousness and say this is the sound so I am talking about how impressions are formed so initially the sound, the sacred sound is like one component in my consciousness there are many things, this is a room, I am sitting on this floor there are these people around me and this mantra is one component but as we pay attention to it what happens is that same sound starts becoming bigger that stimulus starts becoming bigger and when it starts becoming bigger it's almost as if our consciousness enters into that sound so this is where we pay attention this is where we gain absorption so when we are absorbed in something we feel as if we are transported to a different place we feel as if we are experiencing something divine and the more the absorption happens the stronger is the impression that is formed inside us and the stronger the impression that is formed inside us the faster will be the transformation in us so the more we experience the divine experience peace and joy and connection with the divine the more our mind will get reprogrammed and from self-sabotage we will move towards self-realization realizing our potential for unending happiness so I will summarize I was talking today about desire transformation and I talked about three main parts within it the first is I talked about self-sabotage how that's a universal problem in different ways where our own desires we may want doors to open for us for a better life but there are trap doors that if we don't close then we will be sabotaging ourselves and how do we close those trap doors that was the question that led me to the Bhagavad Gita and these trap doors where do they come from they are samskaras they are impressions in our mind so these samskaras what they do is basically these impressions, small perception huge reaction and that's how a small sight of a desirable object may trigger overwhelming desire and how do we deal with this I talked about how we humans our soul seeks and what the body provides there is a huge mismatch what we seek is much more than what the body can provide and that's how we are prompted to move from seeking drops that have come from the ocean and instead of seeking the drops we learn to seek the ocean.