How has your spirituality helped you to practically solve the world’s problems?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
you are asking that we are all trying to solve problems when you become spiritual what kind of problems does a spiritual person try to solve and how do they actually solve the problems it’s not about how they actually solve the problem it’s like the range of the problem just from their perspective it’s not about how they solve the problem the range of the problem before I became a monk when I was an engineering student and I was also interested in social service so I used to go to I was a part of a social service organization and I used to go to the slums near my college and I used to teach English history, maths things like that to the children over there was that in India? in India so while I was doing that I found that many of these children their parents, their fathers were alcoholics and they were domestic abuse and all kinds of problems in their house when I met those parents those fathers they are nice people they are nice people on the outside they are nice people but relatives told me that when they drunk they just became like a different person yes so it was not that they were bad people in themselves but at that time they would just become terrible so we, our organization decided to diversify into trying to get people to give up alcohol give up alcoholism so then we did that in one village and when that happened that was a big success for our organization but then the local elections came up and the political candidate he in order to get the votes he brought three truck loads of alcohol and gave it free to everyone and not only the fathers but even their children had drunk alcohol so at that time it got me thinking that we can try to help people but I can teach them English or history or whatever and that will help them but if they are getting sabotaged by their own undesirable habits and there is a ways of thinking who is going to help them deal with that I was in college and I found a student you could say these are poor people these are less educated people they are falling into this but then in my college there was a student who was the topper, number one throughout all his 8 years 8 semesters and he was a chain smoker he said I can’t study without smoking that was his, just smoke and study and then he got the highest paying job in the history of our college very famous but after getting the job within 6 months he got lung cancer and died so I felt that you know tremendous brain highly educated so here you can have uneducated people who are sabotaged by their bad choices and here you have very educated very intelligent people sabotaged by their bad choices I felt across the spectrum there is something within us that acts against us and if there is some knowledge that can help us deal with that that could be very empowering for everyone in society so when I started practicing spirituality I had quite a short temper earlier so then I found that just by practicing meditation the temper went down substantially one of my close friends had been sliding into addictive kind of behavior he became spiritual and he was recognizing I shouldn’t be doing this but he was getting into it getting caught in it he became spiritual, he just broke free from it all so at that time I felt that by sharing spiritual knowledge I can help people equip themselves to make better choices ultimately it’s their choice ultimately what we can do is provide them tools quite often when people are addicted to something it’s almost like that addictive habit is whipping them from inside do this, do this, do this they are helpless, they don’t want to do it but they just can’t tolerate the whiplashes and they end up doing it so spirituality offers us a shelter from those whiplashes and it helps us redirect our desires so I found over the years that there are no magic solutions to all problems in life but definitely by our small choices although the choices seem small we can make significant differences either this way or that way and there are real problems in the world which need real solutions in the sense that there is poverty there is economic mismanagement there is ecological exploitation, environmental issues these need real solutions at the same time these real solutions themselves will not be sustained unless there is basically a change in the patterns of thinking and that change in the patterns of thinking that happens through spiritual growth so I feel that spiritual there are material solutions which are required for certain problems but the spiritual can guide the material so if a person now I still believe in the power of education so students need to be educated in the languages in the maths and all that, that’s important but if there is a spiritual foundation to that then they will be able to use that knowledge more constructively so as I said at the end of the talk our ability to tap our ability is enhanced by our spirituality you see whatever abilities we have we will be able to use them better if we become spiritual so there are various problems which need specific solutions but underlining them all is the basic inner self sabotaging that is happening and that can be countered through spirituality