Learn from the Gita the temperament to transform talent into achievement

[Talk at Ujjwala Career Academy, Nasik]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna, so I am honoured to be here amongst all of you. I’m sorry I was a little delayed in coming. And as I heard about how here material education and spiritual education also, some education of values is being provided, and I’m happy to be of some assistance.
So I’ll speak on the topic of the relevance of the Bhagavad Gita in today’s world. And I’ll start with two incidents. Last year, I was in America, I was giving a talk in Ohio State University, and I spoke on the topic of regulating our mental diet.
Just as we regulate our physical diet, I was speaking to the vegetarian society over there. And I spoke on regulating the mental diet. And after that, a young American boy came.
And he told me that just before this talk, he was contemplating suicide. And something within him said that maybe he had seen the poster for that talk. He said, I mean, I should just go and hear this talk.
And then he told me after the talk that when I heard this talk, I understood that it was not I who wanted to commit suicide. It was a voice within me, which was prompting me to do it. It is not that I wanted to do it.
So the gist of my talk at that time was that our mind, the Bhagavad Gita explains, it is like a programme. So just like we may have, if we use phones, or if we use computers, we may have a browser. And there are certain default settings in a computer.
Say, if we visit a particular site repeatedly, if I say visit New York Times repeatedly for looking at news, so as soon as I type N, the browser will complete the NY Times. Although I’m not typing, it gets completed. How does that happen? That is like a default setting, which is there in the machine.
So similarly, our mind is like a machine, which has default settings with it. And these default settings are often set by the world, by the culture, by the people around us. And often these default settings are not what are good for us.
They are often harmful for us. The same boy who said he was about to commit suicide, he’s not a one-off case. There are, according to UNESCO statistics, 1 million people who commit suicide every year.
This figure of 1 million means that one person commits suicide every 40 seconds. Since I started this talk, 5 people have already committed suicide. 10 people almost, 5 to 10 people.
Another way to understand the gravity of this figure is that the figure of 1 million is actually more than the number of people who are killed in murders, in wars, in terrorist attacks, in road accidents, in all ways in which one person might kill another, violent crimes. That means more than the number of people who are being killed by others are the number of people who are killing themselves. So what is it that makes people take this extreme step of wanting to end their own lives? Yes, all of us have problems.
All of us have sometimes problems that seem insurmountable, unbearable. But not everybody who faces insurmountable problems chooses to end their lives. Some people do that.
Why is that? That is because their mind is programmed in a destructive way. The mind is often an enemy inside us. And this mind, the Bhagavad Gita explains, 6th chapter, 5th verse, Krishna says that you should learn to elevate yourself with the mind and not degrade yourself because the mind can be your friend and the mind can be your enemy also.
So he says the next verse, therefore train yourself to make your mind your friend and then you will be happy. If the mind remains the enemy, then you will never be happy, never be successful actually. So I will come to happiness and success a little later.
But let us focus on this mind right now. So our mind is constantly being programmed by the world around us. And how is programming happening? It is through various cultural influences.
So for example, if somebody has a new phone, you have a new phone. It is so cool. Everybody admires that.
And then anybody who does not have a new phone, I think, hey, what is this? I do not have a new phone. And that new phone, that does not stay new for very long. In a few months, another new version of the phone will come.
And then again, this old phone, I do not get the new phone. So what happens is we are identifying our self-worth with the worth of our phone. And if I do not have a good enough phone, I start thinking that I am not good enough.
So this is how the programming happens. Say for example, now Valentine s Day is coming. So then there is, yes, everybody needs relationships, everybody wants sustainable relationships.
But this Valentine s Day, often, it takes the tender sentiments of our heart, and they are commercialised and exploited. And that happens through so much cultural pressure. Now, if you do not give a card to someone, it means you are not cool.
If you do not get a card, that means you are not attractive. This has got nothing to do with it. Just giving or receiving cards, that may not even be the beginning of a relationship.
Relationships are much more deeper, much more complicated. But this is just ways in which our own perceptions of ourselves are shaped by the culture around us. And we often have certain programmings about ourselves.
Now, maybe I am lazy, or I am fat, or I am short, or I am tall, or I am, in India, people are infatuated with fair skin. If you go to America, America people go on the beaches so that they can tan their skin. They want to make their skin, they feel it s too fair.
I want to make it a little dark, dark is attractive. So, what has happened is, whatever situation we are in, there will always be people who will point out that there is something wrong with this. So, Oscar Wilde, a British thinker, and he said, fashion is a form of ugliness.
Fashion is a form of ugliness, so intolerable, that we had to change it every six months. So, the same thing that is fashionable now, after six months, it s old fashioned, old fashioned, give it up now, I have to get something new. So, in this way, our self-worth is shaped by people around us.
And that way, many times, things that don t really matter, because of the programming of our mind, we take it very seriously. And when we take it very seriously, we get discouraged, we get overwhelmed. So, we all want to achieve things in life, we all want to be successful.
But unless we learn to evaluate and correct the programming of our mind, the mind will sabotage us. A few of us may go to the extreme step of contemplating or doing suicide. But in many small ways, the mind keeps sabotaging us.
When we study, but while studying the mind, you will not be able to do this. You will not be able to do this. When I started public speaking about 20 years ago, there was a lot of stage fright.
And there are social scientists who say that for many people, the greatest fear after the fear of death is the fear of the stage, will paralyse on stage. So, what happens, the same people can speak normally, very easily in conversations. But as soon as they go on the stage, there is a voice inside that says, you are going to make a fool of yourself.
You are going to forget everything. You know, people are going to laugh at you. Actually, this voice is the voice of the enemy within.
And this voice will sabotage us. And the whole Bhagavad Gita s message is practically meant to equip us to counter this negative inner voice. Most of you know the setting of the Bhagavad Gita.
There are many wisdom texts in the world. But no wisdom text has a setting as dramatic as the Gita. The Gita was spoken on the battlefield.
Consider the Bible, the Quran, many books of wisdom are there, but none of them was spoken on the battlefield. And what is the significance of the Gita being spoken on the battlefield? All of us have to fight in life. We may not have physical fights, but life presents us with so many problems and we have to fight against those problems.
And at the start of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna had lifted up his bow and he was ready to fight. But then he contemplated, okay, I have to fight. How can I fight in this war? And he put aside his bow.
In 1.46, the last verse of the first chapter, Arjuna says, it said that Arjuna put aside his bow. He said, I cannot fight. In 2.6, I cannot fight.
He put aside his bow. Now, Arjuna’s bow represents our determination, our confidence. So often, when we face problems in life, Arjuna was a trained warrior.
It was not that he was scared of seeing the opponents. Now, he had fought with the opponent, just in the Mahabharata, just before the Kurukshetra war, sometime before that there was the Virat war. And in the Virat war, Arjuna had single-handedly defeated all the Kaurava heroes.
So it was not that he was lacking in capability. Now, success requires, success if you want to, you know, achievement, that’s the equation. Talent plus temperament leads to achievement.
Talent, we all need to have some talent. But talent alone is not enough. Temperament.
Temperament is basically the capacity to manage one’s emotions, the capacity to direct one’s mind. So talent plus temperament leads to achievement. Now, there are a lot of emphasis in today’s world on talent.
And you should be able to memorise nicely, you should be able to write clearly, you should be able to present well. And developing talents is important, no doubt. But there is very little training offered in today’s education system for developing the temperament.
And that is why in India, cricket is not just a national game, it is a national obsession. So in fact, if you go to America, for them cricket is an insect. They don’t know cricket is a game, they play baseball over there.
But anyway, every country has its own games, which are very, very popular. If you see in every sports, there are players who may be very talented, but they choke under pressure. South Africa had that label of being chokers.
In all pressure matches, they lose from winning positions. Now, South Africa has as a cricket team, they have a lot of talented players. But somehow, they just couldn’t have the temperament in the key matches.
And that’s why they can’t do it. They’re not really done well in the cricket World Cup finals or World Cup championship or whatever. So talent alone is not enough, temperament is also required.
And our temperament is what can be developed by spiritual understanding. In the whole Gita, Arjuna had to fight a big war. And the Gita does not speak any word about how to fight a war, or how to shoot an arrow, what skills to use in archery, it doesn’t speak anything about that.
Because Arjuna was not lacking in talent. He had already trained himself and he was an expert archer. But at that time, his temperament went down.
And he just lost his cool. He said, I can’t fight. So he, it is described that he was in tears.
Normally, many people, especially men, they say it is a sign of manliness, I will never cry. Men don’t cry. That’s what the idea is.
And especially those who are heroes, those who are warriors, or even if they are in excruciating pain, an arrow pierces their body, still, they see it as a sign of their virility that they will not cry. But Arjuna, who was a great hero, he was reduced to tears, even before the war started. And his tears were not because he was fearful of the enemy.
His tears were because his mind had attacked him from inside. And that mind had paralysed him. That mind had overwhelmed him.
And so that warrior, who with the fiercest of wounds would not cry, was reduced to tears because of the attack of the mind. So the Bhagavad Gita setting demonstrates how deadly an enemy the mind can be. And by the end of the Bhagavad Gita, what has happened? The last verse, 18.78 says, यत्रपार्थो धनूर्धर तत्रशीर विजयो भूःतेर धुर्वानी तेर्म तेर्मम So it said, यत्रपार्थो धनूर्धर, पार्थ is Arjuna, another name of Arjuna, धनूर्धर, that means he is the holder of the bow.
He has picked up his bow. So at the start of the Gita, he has put aside his bow in discouragement. But after hearing the Gita, he picked up his bow.
So that confidence, that determination which was lost, he regained by hearing the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita. So the temperament which had become weakened, that became strengthened again. And then he was able to fight in the Kurukshetra war and achieve the most stupendous success of his life.
So that’s why talent plus temperament leads to achievement. And we are all working on our talent, but we also need to spend some time in developing our temperament. So this default conditioning that we all have, this always sabotages us.
You can’t do it, you know, this is like this, this is like that, you are like this, you are like that. We have to stop listening to it. And how do we stop listening to it? Now, we have to listen to positive messages.
The Bhagavad Gita gives us positive messages. It helps us to understand who we really are. So we have our bodies, but at our core, we are all souls.
The soul is pure, the soul is powerful, the soul is a part of God. We are all godly. And we all, by our connection with God, have access to great power within us.
So the more we understand spiritual wisdom, the more we will be able to strengthen our temperament. And then whatever it is that we are doing, we will be able to do it more effectively. When we talk about temperament, it has many aspects to it.
As I said, one is the negative messages that come, we come through. But temperament also has a positive side to it. What is that positive side? I came back from America, I was in UK, and I gave a talk in Cambridge University.
So while I was coming back from Cambridge, my escort who took me for the programme, we passed by the tree where Newton is said to have seen the fruit falling. That is, that is a pilgrimage place for scientists. So now that is the incident where, now most likely it is not the same tree, it is a descendant of that tree, that tree would not last for 400, 500 years.
But it is considered a very significant place. And that incident, when Newton saw the fruit falling, and then he postulated theory of gravity, that is considered to be the engine that started off the train of modern science. Now, it is certainly, it is certainly Newton’s brilliance, that at that time on seeing something so simple as a fruit falling, he thought of something, some sort of theory of gravity.
At the same time, there is a universal principle over there. Imagine if instead of Newton, there is a monkey sitting over there. So the monkey, if the monkey had seen the fruit falling, what would the monkey have done? Just picked up the fruit, eaten it and gone on its way.
Isn’t it? And not just a monkey. Millions of human beings have probably seen fruits falling. Most of them have just picked it up, picked it, eaten it and gone their way.
So, man, you may say there is nothing wrong in picking up a fruit and eating it. What is wrong with it? There is nothing wrong. If we are hungry, we can eat the fruit.
But the point is, to eat is an impulse. And Newton, he might also have had that impulse. But he did not act on that impulse.
He used his intelligence. What made this fruit fall? And asking that question, what made this fruit fall, led to the theory of gravity being postulated. So if we, we all have our impulses, and if we act on our impulses, we will miss out on many bigger things in our life.
If Newton had acted on the impulse of eating the fruit, he would have missed out on the theory of gravity. So our impulses, they all show, direct us towards short term things, towards immediate things. It is, now, when we talk about discipline, or when we talk about commitment, what does it mean? It actually means, or using the same word temperament, temperament essentially means to act not with our impulses, but to act with our intelligence.
The impulse may say, come on, eat it. But intelligence says, no, wait. So our temperament essentially is the capacity to curb our impulses and to develop our intelligence, act according to our intelligence.
And this is what the Bhagavad Gita did for Arjuna. And this is what the Bhagavad Gita can do for all of us, can help us to curb our impulses and act according to our intelligence. So that is the, so the negative part of the mind’s programming is that it always keeps saying, you cannot do this, you cannot do that, you cannot do that.
That also we counter when we understand ourselves spiritually. And on the positive side, that when we act not based on an impulse, but our intelligence, then we can fulfil our potential. What does it mean to act according to our intelligence? It means that we all have four basic drives.
The Mahabharata talks about this as aahar, nidra, bhaya, maithun, food, sleep, sex and self-defence. These are four basic urges we all have. And they are biological drives, to some extent they are biological necessities, they are taken care of.
But when we become obsessed with them all the time. One of the pyramids in Egypt, there is a saying written over there. It says that you live on one fourth of what you eat.
On the remaining three fourth lives your doctor. What that means is that most people overeat. And by overeating, they get problems and then they have to go to a doctor.
So the eating is a natural biological need. But when people get obsessed with eating, then there are so many other things which they could do with their life, but they can’t do it. Because they’re constantly thinking of eating, constantly thinking of eating.
Similarly, they’re constantly thinking of mating, constantly thinking of so many other things. If we just act according to our impulses, we miss out on much of our potential. To the extent we develop our intelligence, we can achieve the higher potential of life.
So I’ll conclude with one saying, which I’ll elaborate. What does it mean to approach ourselves with our intelligence and to live according to our intelligence? What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.
What we are is God’s gift to us. All of us have certain talents. All of us have certain gifts.
Some of us, our talents may be very easily visible, our gifts may be very easily seen. Some of us, our gifts may not be so easily seen. And especially, I talked about initially the conditioning, the programmings, the society glamorises certain gifts.
So for example, if somebody has very good looks, the society may glamorise that. Or in today’s educational system, somebody has a very good memory, the society may glamorise that. And we may evaluate ourselves in terms of those glamorous gifts.
Say, I don’t look so good or I don’t have such a good memory. And we feel ourselves inferior. But in the process of comparing ourselves with others, we may miss out on the gifts that we have ourselves.
If at all we are to compare ourselves, it’s best to compare ourselves with ourselves. Today, I should be a better version of what I was yesterday. Tomorrow, I should be a better version of what I was today.
If we compare ourselves with others, we unnecessarily subject ourselves to negativity. If God had wanted us to be someone else, He would have made someone else. If God had wanted us to be someone else, He would have made someone else.
He has made us. That means He wants us to be us. He wants you to be the original you.
He does not want you to be a secondhand Xerox copy of someone else. Of course, when I say God wants you to be the you, He wants you to be the best you. So how do you become the best you? If we act on our impulses, we will become you, I will become I, but I will become the worst I. If I act based on my intelligence, I can become the best I. What do I mean by that we all have our gifts, but we may not see our gifts? Suppose you go to some marriage or somewhere where there is a big feast after the programme, but this is a special feast where everybody in their plate has different items.
So what is in your plate is different from her plate, what is different from his plate from my plate. Now suppose all of us have got delicacies, nice food, but all of us we have different things and say now I have my feast in front of me, but instead of enjoying the feast, I am looking what is in his plate, what is in her plate, what is in their plate, what is in their plate. The more I look at what is in other people’s plate, the more I will be dissatisfied.
Although there is good stuff in my plate, but still I am dissatisfied because instead of looking at what is in my plate, I am looking at what is in other people’s plate. So unfortunately, now we will not do this usually if it’s food, but we do this with respect to our talents, our gifts. Now instead of exploring and discovering what we have and using what we have, we keep looking at what others have and either we feel inferior because we don’t have the things which others have or sometimes we feel superior because we have some things, but either way we are not developing what we have.
So satisfaction is not just an emotion, satisfaction is a decision. That means satisfaction, now that means okay I have certain talents, I don’t have certain talents, but rather than always feeling sorry for myself because I don’t have this talent, I don’t have that thing, I am satisfied with what I have and I will develop what I have. So what do I mean by satisfied? Sometimes I say I don’t feel satisfied.
Yeah, sometimes that feeling of dissatisfaction may come, but satisfaction is not just a feeling, it’s not just an emotion, it’s a decision. How is it a decision? It’s like if I have my feast in front of me, my plate in front of me, if I focus on my feast and I eat it, I enjoy it, I’ll be happy. If I make the decision, I would look at what is there in other people’s plate, I’ll just focus on my plate, I can be satisfied.
So satisfaction is an emotion, but it is also a decision. When we make the decision to focus on what we have, we will become more and more satisfied. And then we can develop our talents.
So what we are is God’s gift to us. So rather than feeling inferior or feeling resentful, I don’t have this, I’m not like this, I’m not like that, just focus on what you are, develop your talents. And what we are is God’s gift to us.
And then what is our part? What we become is our gift to God. So we all have certain talents. With these talents, we are meant to make a contribution in life.
The Bhagavad Gita says, In the 18th chapter, 46th verse, Krishna says that by your work, worship Him. By your work, worship Him. And in this way, in this way, you can attain perfection.
Now some people translate this as work is worship. Actually, work is worship can be a ethical principle. That all work should be treated with dignity of labour.
No work should be looked down upon. So in that sense, we can say all work should be respected. But work is worship is not a philosophical principle.
It is not the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita. Gita’s teaching is work as a form of worship. If work itself is worship by itself, then the donkey will be the greatest worshipper.
The donkey works so hard. So no, work can be made into worship. How? That is by proper consciousness, by proper attitude.
So when we understand that whatever situation I am in, whatever position I am in, that is by God’s arrangement. Let me now try to make the best of it. So what we become is our gift to God.
We are all in this life journey, we are meant to make a constructive contribution. And when we focus on our talents and we develop those talents, then we all can make constructive contributions. Right now, you are all young in the formative stage of your career.
And especially when we go through adolescence and early teens, it’s a very turbulent period. Why is it a turbulent period? Because all of us are evolving in our identity. See, when we are small children, we are all identified as the son of so and so, the daughter of so and so.
That is our identity. Now when you grow up and you have a position in some, you have some social position, some office, in some company, somewhere, you have your position, then you have your identity. Okay, I am an engineer, I am a doctor, I am this, I am that.
But when we are in the educational phase, it’s like a flux. We don’t really want to be identified simply as the son or daughter of someone. But we are not yet carved out our own identity.
So in such a situation, whom we associate with is very important. Because the people whom we associate with, they will shape our identity. They will determine the programming of our mind.
So if we associate with spiritually minded people, if we read spiritual texts, then we will get a positive self-conception. If we associate with people who are excessively materialistic, then materialistic disposition means we’ll always be dissatisfied. We’ll always be seeing what I don’t have and I will be dissatisfied by that.
So by spiritual association, what will happen is we will have a positive self-conception. And with that positive self-conception, just as Arjuna at the end of the Bhagavad Gita was able to become confident, fight and attain victory. Similarly, we all can in the respective battles that we have to face in our life, we can fight and we can become victorious.
And that requires us to examine and correct the programming of our mind. The mind can be an enemy, the mind can be a friend. And the Bhagavad Gita gives us the knowledge by which the mind which is the enemy can be made into a friend.
To the extent we study the Bhagavad Gita, to the extent we internalise its teachings and apply them. Bhagavad Gita’s teachings don’t require us to renounce the world. It doesn’t require us to do anything impractical.
All it requires is to bring God into our life, to make our life centred on God. If we do that, then we will become stable in whatever situation we are in. And we will be able to, whatever talents God has given us, we will be able to do justice to them, make a positive contribution in life and we will gain satisfaction.
So I’ll summarise. I started, I spoke on the topic of what is the relevance of the Gita in today’s life. So I talked about the Ohio State University student who was on the verge of committing suicide.
Why? Because something in him was telling, just end your life. So there is a voice inside us all which makes us do self-destructive things. And what that voice is, how that voice comes about and how it can be corrected, all that is taught in the Bhagavad Gita.
So I talked about how suicide is a big problem. One million people, means more than the people who are being killed by others, they are the people who are killing themselves. So the mind can be a big, big threat.
So how does the mind work? The Bhagavad Gita explains that the mind is basically like a programme. And it is programmed by the culture around us. And I gave the example of materialistic culture.
Say, it makes us determine our self-worth by, say, the worth of our gadgets or by our looks or by how many valentine day cards I get or how many valentine day cards I give. That’s superficial things. Our self-worth is something much bigger.
But this is the kind of, this is the kind of conditions that programme our mind. So the Bhagavad Gita setting where Arjuna has to fight a war, but he is reduced to tears, unable to fight, putting aside his bow. That happens because his mind attacks him from within.
So his, we all have confidence, but our confidence is lost when the mind starts sending negative messages from inside. So Arjuna put aside his bow and his bow represents our confidence. And by the end of hearing the Gita, he had again picked up his bow ready to fight.
So that was what means, it means that we can also, by understanding spiritual wisdom, we can also regain our confidence. So what is the spiritual wisdom I talked about? What is the equation for success? Do you remember? Talent plus temperament leads to achievement. So our modern material education trains us in our talents.
It helps us to develop material skills. But there is very little training offered for temperament. And even in competitive field exports, if players or teams don’t have temperament, their talent, they cannot, they cannot achieve things based on that.
And same can apply in our life also. So how do we develop our temperament? We have to change the kind of messages that are coming from for us. So that if we study spiritual texts, we can evaluate what are our default conditions, what are our programmes and make our mind our friend instead of enemy.
And that involves acting not on our impulses, but acting on our intelligence. So Newton, he could just have eaten the fruit and gone away, then he would have missed out on the potential of discovering the theory of gravity. So our impulses keep us shortsighted.
Our intelligence makes us farsighted. And our intelligence helps us to achieve our potentials. So the Bhagavad Gita trains us, Bhagavad Gita’s knowledge helps us to curb our impulses and to nourish our intelligence.
And then I talked about what does understanding ourselves with our intelligence mean? It means to understand that what we are is God’s gift to us. So we all have talents. Instead of comparing ourselves with certain glamorised, talented people and feeling inferior, we can look at what talents we have and develop them.
Rather than looking at what are the delicacies in someone else’s plate, look at what is in our plate and enjoy that. Satisfaction is not just an emotion, it’s also a decision. If God had wanted us to be someone else, he would have made someone else.
He wants us to be us, the best us. And how do we do that? So after we accept this is what I am, these are my talents, let me develop them. What we become is our gift to God.
So by accepting our talents, by developing our talents, we can re-envision our life as a form of worship. Work itself is not worship, but work can be done in a mood of worship. When we bring God in the centre of our life and make envision our life as a service to God, then we will be able to develop our temperament and then our talent will translate into achievement.
And to just encapsulate one of the most practical ways in which you can connect with God, in which you can bring God into our life, stabilise our mind is by chanting the names of God. We chant Hare Krishna Mahamantra, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Ram Ram, Hare Hare. Just chanting this mantra, it is a way to calm the mind.
You calm the mind, it becomes stabler and then our temperament becomes stronger. In this way by understanding the spiritual message of the Gita, we all can develop our potentials, make constructive contributions in life and achieve satisfaction. Thank you very much.
Hare Krishna. So, Kamal sir requested me to speak for about 35-40 minutes. So, I thank you for providing support.
I know it is a little disruption. All of you are eager to hear about the analysis of the