Manage the mind through introspection and meditation

Talk at University of Colorado

Manage the mind through introspection and meditation

I welcome all of you for this lecture. We will discuss on the topic the mind. We will be speaking the topic of my mastering and managing the monkey mind. The mind is a word which has many meanings; for example that Albert Einstein the greatest mind of the 21^st century, then the word mind refers to the intellectual ** of a person. The word mind can be ‘keep that in your mind’ that means remember it or the word mind can also refer to the idea of memorizing something or paying attention, pay your attention to this, it can be recollection, it can be incognition, the Bhagavad-Gita uses the word mind in the more specific sense it explains that the mind is subtle faculty within us, if we have computer, the computer has a software computer, has a physical hardware, and there is a user. So the software is itself invisible, and we can say this is the place where the software is stored but we cannot point the software directly. Similarly the subtle element, that a software that interfacing the user and the hardware. Similarly the mind is in the Bhagavad-Gita analyzes the subtle element which interfaces between us spiritual beings and the physical body which we have and the world around us. So to make this little easier all of us at different times sense some voice within us and for example right now I’m speaking to all of you but there is a voice speaking inside me. That voice is saying that ‘you’re going to forget what you are going to speak’ and I will make fool of yourself. So the voice within speaks in different voices and different tones but there is something within us which speaks in various ways whatever happens there is something within us which passes comments, if somebody walking, the mind says the person has not dressed very well, the person walks like this that. Everything there is some comment being passed on. So what is this faculty, what is this thing within us that is speaking these things? So that the Bhagavad-Gita says the mind. So usually we think of external and internal, in terms of the body, for example there is a class **  it is outside ** and if there is some thought within me, thinking of something I think that is inside me. But what the Bhagavad-Gita tells us is that everything inside me is not in. That means there is that we of course as spiritual things are there but along with us there is software we could say and which has been programmed by our own past habits, past desires, past experiences. Most of you know about the soul, the soul is Sat-Cit-Ananda. Sat is a Sanskrit word which means eternal and Cit is the conscious, Ananda joyful.  So Sat is a Sanskrit word, in English there is no such word as Sat  I as an author I often write things and after writing when I want to proofread them I have a text to speech software, ‘read it’ so this text to speech software reads this if I write  the soul is Satcitananda the software changes it to while reading it reads it as the soul is Saturday-Cit-Anand, so it has changed the word sat to Saturday. So here it’s something like AutoCorrect that is working but AutoCorrect is working incorrectly. So this is an example of an inbuilt program. Just as there is a program for spell check and maybe AutoCorrect but now similarly there is a program within us and that program where that program is stored that is in the mind. So this program the mind often contends programs that are not healthy for us and if we don’t deal with these unhealthy programs these will end up under using our energy or rather dissipating our energy and not fulfilling our potential. You know when there is a machine and if the machine has a lot of friction internally then the fiction sucks its energy and then whatever external power is coming into the machine a lot of it gets consumed in the friction and the external productivity of the machine decreases. Similarly there are self-sabotaging programs within our mind and these actually make us underuse our potential. So managing the mind essentially it means correcting these self-sabotaging programs. So I’ll talk about there can be many programs some of the specifics of the programs will vary from person to person but I’ll talk about some general patterns which are often are unhealthy.

So the first is the mind makes us fight more battles than we need to.

Suppose there is some kind of confrontation going on war or whatever, one person is here and one person is here; both are fighting. It’s an equal fight. But if there is a one person here and there are three people here it becomes much more difficult fight to win. The mind when we have to do something, when I said that the mind makes us fight more battles then we need to, that means we are doing one thing at a particular time. The mind adds the past and the future to the present. And by adding the past and the future to the present the mind makes the present situation far tougher than what it needs to be.

So I talk about this in two terms about how the mind adds the past and the future to the present. So for example if I’m giving my first public speech and that time I shutter and stammer and I’m not able to give any good performance. Then at that time the mind immediately goes off the past and maybe in the childhood had some stammering problem, mind starts to remind me of that or maybe I  knew some friend who always stammer who had a lot of difficulty and I start thinking maybe I become like that and basically the present is some problem but the mind by adding events from the past, by adding memories from the past burdens us.

So if there is a porter who is paid to carry a 10 KG weight and imagine that port the adds 20 KG weight more on top and oneself carries 30 KG and he is going to be paid only for 10 KG.  So who would want to add more weight than one wants to carry. So we all have work to do but the mind transforms the work into a workload. That means rather than doing just a job at hand, the mind makes us think of, ‘Oh that time I had so much work, so much trouble that time when I tried to do this went wrong and that happens’ and if there is a just the work to be done we can do it but when the work becomes workload then it becomes the crushing burden. Then that dissipates our energy. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna says in the 13^th chapter, in the 21^st verse

kärya-käraëa-kartåtve

hetuù prakåtir ucyate

puruñaù sukha-duùkhänäà

bhoktåtve hetur ucyate

so he saying that kärya-käraëa-kartåtve that cause and effect, this causal change happens in the world and that is where the events take place, but experiences are what happen in the inner world and our experiences are determined by our mentality by our world view. Say someone is carrying a glass of water and somehow it just slips and falls and the water gets spilled everywhere. Then that’s what has happened. The event that has happened. Maybe there was somebody pushed him, maybe there was some slippery thing on the floor, somehow he just spilled, and that time the mind adds the burdening, ‘You are clumsy ** and with this the message, it was a small event ‘okay I just slipped and fell; others are laughing I can also laugh. Just get up and move on with it’,  but when the mind interprets the event then that event doesn’t remain just the event in the outer world it becomes experience often it becomes the disheartening experience. So the mind makes us fight if I slipped and fell down, l can get up but if  when the mind adds a whole gamut of emotions and it’s own interpretation of the event based on the emotions then the problem becomes much more difficult. So life determines our problems but our mind determines their size., how big the problem is going to be. The more we think of the problem.

There is some movies in which there are some 50 people are shown. There are 2 persons are fighting and one person suddenly becomes bigger and bigger and this other person feels like I’m a dwarf how can I fight with this giant. So like that when we dwell on a problem, when the mind dwells on the problem then that mental energy gets invested in the problem and when the mental energy is invested in the program the problem starts becoming bigger and bigger and as compared to that something is wrong. Sometimes when such small events happen it is like somebody slips and some water spills then that person starts thinking that I’m a clumsy… And after that that person may become afraid to carry water anywhere. And just a simple act of carrying water can cause stress and cause anxiety. When we unguardedly let the mind dwell on certain events, certain things that happen in the outer world then the mind causes that problem to become bigger and bigger. And in comparison we start thinking I’m so small, I’m so worthless, and then we disempower ourselves. So the mind makes us to fight more than we need to by adding past memories to whatever has happened in the present and by adding its own interpretation of what has happened. So another thing that the mind does is it adds future, in future the mind adds often dystopian imagery. All kinds of horrible events it’s like I’m driving the car I see some small crash has happened and I start imagining when I’m driving my  car brakes may fail, and the wheels may come off, when we see some movies or elsewhere where the wheels have gone off and then the mind starts running on an overdrive imagining all kinds of terrible scene. So the mind sometimes takes some stimuli and for different people there may be different stimuli that might trigger the mind. But in this stimuli that triggered then the mind starts playing a horror movie. And in that horrible movie we are not the spectators, we are the spectacled, we are the person who are the victims, and this horror movie in which we become that can paralyze us. So fear is not a problem. Fear of what comes after fear is the problem. Fear is a healthy protective human instinct. If I look down from a big height at that time the fear which I’m experiencing a huge drop that’s natural human psychological defense mechanism to protect us from danger.

So it is not possible that we can ever be free from worry and anxiety entirely. Some of the amount of worry and anxiety makes us duly cautious. Sometimes, some people are completely free from worry and then that makes other filled with worry about them.

As they say fools rush in where angels fear to…. Children don’t understand that’s there is some danger, children might think oh this fire looks so shiny let me put my hand over it. They are fearless and that makes their mothers fearful. So fear itself is not undesirable. Similarly the worry and anxiety is not itself undesirable but when healthy fear even the healthy worry when that sends us off on a dystopian fantasy when it makes us imagine all worst-case scenarios whose probability is very low.

Once there was this lady every three month she would go to the doctor, ‘have I got cancer? ‘have I got cancer? The doctor would say, ‘you’re perfectly healthy, don’t worry’, ‘no have I got cancer?’ So after 40 years going like this finally the doctor told ‘yes you have got preliminary cancer’. ‘See I was right’. Now regular health checkup is good but paranoia is unhealthy.

So the mind when it goes into the future it goes into all sorts of negative fantasies utopia unrealistically positive fantasy dystopia is unrealistically negative fantasy. So when that happens that can also paralyze us. Sometimes people get panic attacks sometimes the panic attacks because of some psychiatric problems but quite often the panic attacks are simply because the mind is going on a uncontrolled flight and when it goes on this flight then we start envisioning the worst possible scenarios. When I talked about the mind going to the past or going to the future this itself is not unhealthy that is fine, going to the past to learn from the past is good if say last time I was speaking I stuttered and stammered if I recollect that I think what causes this stammered maybe I was looking at some person who was glaring at me and just that looking at that person started disconcerting me and this time I can avoid looking at it. People were afraid of speaking in public and you cannot avoid eye contact with people when we speak in public. Sometimes that the people get panicked on seeing others there advised to look between two people both will think you’re looking at them and you’re not looking at anyone. So if we think calmly what triggered some undesirable actions in the past you can learn from them. So learning from the past is good but learning from the past is possible when we are in control. But when the mind is in control we don’t learn from the past but we fall back into the past that means we are just simply, we paralyze ourselves by negative memories from the past. And that whether the mind is in control or that I’m in control that I will talk in a later part but the same may apply to the future. So preparing for the future is important, so if there are some dangers preparing for those dangers is good.

For example if somebody’s flying by plane and if that time if a person is a person learns okay these are the security measures, safety measures that have to be taken. That’s how I should oxygen bags and that is how I should use the water bag, but all the various things that are there precautions learning them is good but if every time a person is going to enter a plane and as soon as the air hostess starts explaining the security measures that have to be taken and I start thinking oh my plane is going to crash and I’m going to fall into the ocean and my water bag will inflate and I will drown and the one before the drowning one is drowning in the mind.

So this sort of unrealistic and worst case scenarios in this case there is firstly they are unlikely to happen, secondly even if they are likely to happen what can we do about it?  There is nothing we can do except prepare. Take whatever precautions that are possible and we take them, but unfortunately when the mind goes into dystopian fantasies more it starts playing this horror movie and it just lose it. Especially in high-pressure sports, sometimes there is a defining moment, a final moment and some players lose their cool at that time, and say simple move to make in football, simple shot to play in baseball, but person just fools up. Then we will say that these people choke under pressure. So what is that choking? What causes that choking? So in many sports that is cricket, baseball, football they say it is a game of the mind, more than a game of the body or as much as the  game of the body.

So people have to be mentally strong to succeed and what applies to sports, applies to our whole life also. So envisioning future possibilities, future problems and preparing for them is good; but just passively letting the mind paint up all kinds of terrible scenarios, that is dispowering and that is undesirable. So now how do we I talked about how the mind disempowers us.  I said that the mind makes us fight more battles than we need to by adding the past and the future and when the mind adds meaning, it interprets events in such a way that they become sometimes they disheartening experiences for us.

Further the mind basically flitters.  Flitters means like a bird may move from one place to another or a monkey may move one place to another. So the mind doesn’t focus. A fan which is round and round and round but the fan gets nowhere. It just stays where it is all the time. Our mind also goes round and round and round at least a fan gives some air but our mind often gives us nothing. What the mind does quite often is it puts our thoughts and our actions out of sake. So I’m doing one thing and thinking ‘ I’ll do that, if I do that right, or if I do that wrong and I have to do that’, So there is ABC when  I’m doing A I am worrying whether that I will do B right or not and when I’m doing B I am a worrying whether I did A right or not, and I worry whether I will do C right or not, and the time I come to see, I realized ‘Oh! I did A also wrong and B also wrong. Then I’m doing C and I’m worrying I have to do A & B again and because of that  worry I go and do A and B and  I remember I did C also wrong so I will do C also.

So the mind puts our thoughts and actions out of sake and because of that also our energy gets dissipated. We are often habituated to think of our schedule, think of our time availability in terms of activities, okay in the morning I have to do this, in the afternoon I have to do this, in the evening I have to do this, and that is fine enough analyzing our day and our time expenditure but that is not complete enough. Because our time is not consumed only by our activities, it is also consumed by our thoughts. If  say we hire unpleasant interaction with someone then I see a student going to the class we are looking at the white board and we are looking at the teacher and after half an hour what happened. We are just thinking- why that person said that, when that person said that I should’ve said this. That could have been a fitting come back. I never think on my feet I should learn to think on my feet, next time I will see this. And the mind scolds-** so that event that person may be snubbing us, it happens within 10 seconds but sometimes that one incident and the thought that situated; that may take 10 hours. And we never ** in our schedule, but thoughts take time when the thoughts take time it is same as the mind is taking the time. So when we consider this fact that the mind puts the thoughts and actions out of sake then we need to recognize how do I get them into sake. Why do I just say, ‘concentrate’, all these problems which we have talked about these are sometimes thought of and problems because of the lack of will power. Say that is why do you worry so much! Cool down! Don’t worry! cool down  sometimes that may help but cool down suppose somebody had a high temperature 102 ‘cool down man’, you can’t cool down like that. There is a physical disease that is there and the cooling down the temperature of the body is not just a matter of our own willpower. There is a temperature I have got then I need a proper process. I have to take some medicines and that will help the temperature to go down. Even for that I need willpower to take the medicines regularly and I need the willpower to make sure that I don’t expose myself to stimuli that may make the fever worse. I don’t go out in the cold or whatever. But willpower alone just as it is not enough to cool our physical temperature; similarly willpower alone may not always cool our mental temperature. When the mind gets hot just tell the person cool down, yes it can help to some extent but there is a limitation to that. Just like if a person is always habitually morose whatever suggestions we give that person is like expert in finding problem with that solution and that time, ‘why do you always have a hung face, smile a bit. Smiling can help, smiling can make not only a person look better but feel better also, but there is a limit for that. If I’m sitting on this chair and there are 50 thorns on this chair and somebody says it’s fine you will feel better, well may be! but not really. So just a shift of attitude is not enough when there are real problems out there. Shift of attitude is important but the real problems will also to be dealt with. So the Bhagavat-Gita explains that,

praçänta-manasaà hy enaà

yoginaà sukham uttamam

upaiti çänta-rajasaà

brahma-bhütam akalmañam

In the 6^th chapter 27^th verse, it is said that brahma-bhütam when we understand our spiritual nature; not just understand but when we experience our spiritual nature then praçänta-manasaà the mind becomes peaceful the mind becomes calm upaiti çänta-rajasaà all the passion, the agitations, anxieties within the mind becomes **. The mental temperature cools down.

So what does it mean to experience our spiritual nature and how does that calm the mind down? If somebody is in the ocean, and in the ocean there are always going to be waves and when the waves are there, the person is going to shake up and down, that is inevitable, but if that the same person is in a boat and then the waves are still going to be there, and the shaking is also going to be there but it is going to be much less and if that boat is anchored with something heavy and firm; the shaking will be much much much lesser.

So in this case not stopping the waves but stopping our shaking. So the world we live in is a place of change; the weather changes, the job scenario changes, the moods of our friend and colleague changes, our own mind’s mood changes. The same thing which I like today, I may find it boring tomorrow. The mind can say about in a relationship; I can’t live without you and a few days later the mind says I cannot live with you. So this is the oscillation. So the change is constantly keep happening and in fact if we look at the world around us the only thing constant is change. So everything is changing and because of this change it naturally creates some uncertainty, some anxiety, some worry, some insecurity.

Now the researchers studied anxiety quite exhaustively in the last century, for some very interesting features that have been found that people in the first world often have fairly good amount of material security, social conveniences and comforts; as compared to that people who are  in third world have far greater uncertainty, insecurity, inconveniences. And yet the researchers have found that the people in the first world suffer from higher anxiety level than the people in the third world. Not only that when people from the third world come to the first world their anxiety levels also go up.

So now what is the reason for this? If the externals are relatively more comfortable, more available and what causes the anxiety? What is causing the higher anxiety level is not our outer uncertainty but inner instability. Inner instability means that this is not a matter of comparing the first world with the third world, it is more the matter of a materialistic worldview and spiritual worldview. In a materialistic worldview matter is all that matters, that is functional materialism. Even there is some God exists, okay He exists somewhere I exist here, He’s happy there and I’m happy here why bother about Him? So God, spiritual sky, soul; all these don’t matter, that is functional materialism and then there is fanatical materialism. Fanatical materialism means matter is all that exists, nothing else exists. So of course this is its worldview both philosophically and scientifically plot, I won’t go into that direction.

I’m talking about managing the mind here, so in the materialistic worldview; matter is all that matters and the matter is always changing, so because of the constant change of matter there is uncertainty and that causes anxiety and when there is nothing unchanging to hold on to, then the anxiety level shoot up. What we need to deal with the mind’s oscillation I said that the waves are going to come, there is a boat and the boat is further anchored with some heavy immovable object and the oscillation will be much lesser. So like that we live in a world that is largely materialistic. So to manage the mind it may have a spiritual community, if we have spiritual friends, some spiritual association regularly that places us in a boat and then we connect ourselves with the ultimate anchor i.e. God, who is revealed in the Bhagavad Gita to be Krishna. Then that connection stabilizes ourselves. Prayer is when we speak to God, and meditation is when we hear God. The board are the ways of communicating with God that is. Prayer is when we speak our heart to God and meditation is when we hear God. Both are ways of communicating with God. There are different ways of meditating; the mantra that we chanted just now that one of the most accessible forms of meditation. Why is it the most accessible because sound acts as a elevator to raise our consciousness from the material to the spiritual. So the spiritual sound; whether it is singing like we did kirtan or it is  individual prayer through meditation, if we just try to fix our consciousness on the sound, the sound will raise that consciousness upwards and as we feel ourselves rising upwards the uncertainty, the insecurity, the worries they will be there but they  will not worry us so much. we will be calmer, and we will be able to deal with the situations better.

Suppose person is in a disaster afflicted, so there is a fire, there is flood, there is live electricity, wires exposed person is in anxiety and suppose a rescue helicopter comes from above, drops a rope and rescue, pulls up. The person is still at the same area but now he is a raised up and because he is raised up although the problem is there one doesn’t feel immediately threatened by the problem. So if we connect with ours spiritual side, if we connect to the supreme spiritual reality God then that connection raises us above our situations and then we can be concerned without being disturbed. It is not that spirituality means we don’t worry about anything. We all have issues to deal with but we want to deal with the issues we don’t want to be devowed by the issues and without a spiritual connection that is what happens. We get consumed by the worries and whatever associated negative means come up from that but when we connect ourselves with spiritual sound that raises us up and then we can deal with the situations. This is the problem these are the possible things that can happen this is how I have to deal with them. So with respect to, I’ll quickly go back and I’ll conclude the class. I talked about; with a spiritual perspective how can we deal with the minds various misdirecting happens; the bad program that are there within us with respect to the past and the future.

So if we are spiritually connected then we are calm, when we are calm then if we look at the past then we are aware, this is like if I said to someone you are a lazy bum, person says ‘you insulted how dare you speak like this?’. And that’s natural. And we either counter it  how dare you speak like that? Or ** the person will try to correct oneself for that will no longer be true. So when some insulting criticism comes from outside then know we actually resisted and tried to correct it but when the same label is offered by the mind within us, instead of countering it we accept it.

For example if I have to wake up early and do some work and you know in the sleep we become inactive but often the hand is active to switch off the alarm. And then wake up. ‘You’re a lazy fool’. When the mind starts what happens is when we are… When the alarm is ringing that then that time the mind says ‘sleep for some more time, maybe five minutes,’ and when those five minutes become 25 minutes the same mind will scold us, and ‘why did you sleep so much? You are such a fool you’re lazy, you’re useless, you will never be able to do anything in your life’, some small 20 minutes sleeping becomes this statement about your life, ‘you’re never going to do anything in your life’, if somebody else said that to us we would be angry with that person but rather when the mind says that instead of being angry we start becoming depressed, ‘oh maybe it’s true’.

You know if two people are fighting in a boxing match, there is A and there is B , and A  gives a bad punch and B falls down. And now B has fallen down and say it’s a bad punch, okay I have fallen down and now if B wants to rise and fight then should look around at one’s coach or look at one’s friend, he will say, ‘come on get up fight’, but suppose B has fallen down and asks say, ‘will I be able to win in this match, A will say never.’ In the same way the mind only knocks us down the mind only makes us oversleep and then I asked the mind ‘will I be able to become a better person’ it stays ‘never’. We need positive spiritual association to inspire us to bring out the best in ourselves. And when as I said if we practice meditation regularly, if we understand this spiritual wisdom of Gita, then that helps us to catch the mind ** otherwise the mind makes us act and many times we do something then we say ‘why did I do that? I never wanted to do that, why did I do that?’ But it is as if there is some stranger have entered into us, some ghost has possessed us, and made us act like that but when we meditate regularly because we are spiritually connected when the mind starts pushing us, we say this is the mind this is the mind which is talking. So recognizing the enemy is practically the biggest part of dealing with the enemy, when it comes to the mind. Because the mind inside us and unfortunately we are going to think whatever inside me is me, there is something within me which is hostile to me then we are under watch out.. So the spiritual wisdom enables us  to distance ourselves from the mind, to become a little more analytical about our thinking. When we catch the mind we can stop the mind but if we don’t catch it then there is no chance of stopping it and this is actually especially possible when we do meditation. When we do meditation the mind goes here the mind goes there at that time we can observe, ‘okay the mind is good let me bring him back. The mind is good let me bring it back.’ And we focus on the spiritual sound by that the mind slowly calms down and Bhagavad Gita says something very interesting that the mind can be both our enemy and our friend,

bandhur ätmätmanas tasya

yenätmaivätmanä jitaù

anätmanas tu çatrutve

vartetätmaiva çatru-vat

So he says in 6^th chapter 6^th verse, ‘for one who has controlled the mind, the mind becomes the friend and for one who has failed to control it the mind remains his enemy’. What this means is that again, if I’m thinking about the past but the mind is in control then I will simply become paranoid but if I’m thinking about the past while being in control then I can analyze and I can learn from the past. So the way to control the mind best way is by connecting with the reality which is far greater than the mind and the highest of reality is God – Krishna and He becomes accessible to us through spiritual sound. The very word Mantra means Manas trayate iti mantra the sound which frees us from the various problems of the mind it creates..

I quickly summarize I started by talking about how the word mind can have many meanings. In the Bhagavad Gita the mind of refers to the thing within us which often works against us and the mind works against us in many ways. I talked about a few.  The most fundamental strategy by which the mind work against us is it makes us fight more battles than we need to. By adding past to the present which in the past has gone wrong, or by adding future to the present,  everything that can go wrong or by adding meaning to an event, by adding so many interpretation like one mistake and you are a good for nothing fool. So the mind in this way this empower us and the way to deal with the mind is, yes! it’s not just a matter of willpower as I was saying, just as physical temperature cannot be cooled down just by willpower similarly mental temperature cannot be cooled just by willpower, yes willpower helps but willpower is to be coupled with the process and that process is connecting with unchanging reality. So what fuels the mind in its various undesirable is change, change causes anxiety, change causes insecurity and the change causes anxiety not so much because of the external change but internally if there is a  materialistic worldview then that causes further anxiety. As I said the first world the anxiety levels are higher than the third world, so just as we need medicines to cure, to bring the physical  temperature down, similarly to bring the mental temperature down we need the medicine of meditation and what does the meditation do it gives us something unchanging to connect with. God is supreme unchanging reality. Just as the boat in an ocean it will become steady if it is anchored similarly we when connected with God becomes steadier. The best way to do that is through spiritual sound because spiritual sound acts like an elevator it will raise our consciousness from material level to the spiritual level and with ourselves spiritually connected, we can catch the mind. When the mind starts taking us in the wrong direction we will have that inner clarity and this is the mind’s speak I don’t have think about these things. Let me focus on what I’m thinking, so that capacity to perceive the mind becomes enhanced and then the capacity to counter its influences also becomes enhanced, when we connect ourselves spiritually through the wisdom of the spiritual literature like Bhagavad-Gita, and practically through the process of meditation which gives us the experience of the reality higher than the material level.

Thank you very much. Are there any questions?

Q.1. how can we acquire the mind and why is it default setting negatively?

A:  The mind is the apparatus that we need to interact with the body, with the world. So we are spiritual beings so as spiritual beings we cannot interact with the world around us. Just like the astronauts go in to space they need space suits, similarly we need interface for connecting with the world—

çrotraà cakñuù sparçanaà ca

rasanaà ghräëam eva ca

adhiñöhäya manaç cäyaà

viñayän upasevate

so in the 15^th chapter 9^th verse Krishna says that the five senses-acquiring senses the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue and the skin; they are all centered around the mind and through these viñayän upasevate we see pleasure in external objects. By our very nature we are pleasure seeking creatures and when we are spiritually unaware we seek pleasure in external things.

So the mind is a part of the necessary apparatus that we have for interfacing with the world, this is the soul that is eternal and whenever it is present and interfacing with the material world it needs a mechanism. And that mechanism includes the mind. The word that is used for this in Bhagavad Gita anaadi means beginning-less, just as the soul is the beginning-less similarly time when we acquire the mind that is also beginning-less. So more importantly is that why does it have negative scripts? That is because of the influences from externals in the present as well as in the past. So because we are living in largely materialistic culture, so we are by default, by nature pleasure seeking creatures but where we see pleasure that will be determined by the culture we live in. So if the culture is materialistic then naturally we start seeking pleasure in material things and that causes us anxiety. The problem with the materialism is that it makes us dependent for our happiness on things that are not in our control. The external things that may be wealth, position or power or even our own looks, these are not really in our control for a very long time. For sometimes they may be in control but they slip away from us over time. So when we become dependent on those things and further it is not just our position of those things it is our possessing them more than others. Not only should I look good I should look better than others, not only should secure good marks but I should secure better marks than others. Not that I should have a new smart phone my smart phone should be smarter than that of others. So this especially in today’s culture you know we live in a not just in materialistic culture but aggressively materialistic culture, aggressively materialistic culture means that we are exposed to the best of everything. That means I have a cell phone but advertisements all around are showing me cell phone which is far better than mine. I may have a decent physic but the movies, the billboards they all showing people the easy way to become miserable just to watch advertisements. So what happens is the advertisements essentially show us all the things that we don’t have. That’s how they make us purchase those things. So because we live in a aggressively materialistic culture so quite often we are bombarded with the things that we don’t have and that creates negative mental patterns, ‘Oh your memory is not good enough, your speech is not good enough’, essentially all that which is boiled down to, although people may not speak this directly that you’re not good enough and that can be very demoralized so just like that with respect to today obesity is a big problem and people are caught in a terrible crunch, on one side we have so many advertisements of food items, ‘this looks good, eat this and that’ and on top of that there are advertisements of all kinds of fine tasty food which are all filled with the fat quite often and along with that there are advertisements of people who are super-slim, so what  you do? It becomes mental torture practically. So because of being exposed to excessive materialism and natural the result is that we cannot have all the things that are running glamorized, so that creates negative thought patterns. So to the extent we can avoid unnecessary exposure to materialistic stimuli we will find that the negative thoughts patterns will become less. It may also happen that in ours social circle be it our family or friends there might be people who has given us negative patterns, So because of that also negative thoughts patterns come up and if we learn that then we need to keep distance from them and that also can help us to counter those negative thoughts patterns.

The Bhagavad-Gita gives us very encouraging message that no matter what the word thinks of us God always loves us, Krishna is right there within our heart and He is always that and His presence in our heart, His love for us doesn’t depend on anything, there is nothing that anyone that can stop God from loving him. Nothing that we can do that can stop Him. Right now this may just be a theoretical concept for us but if we practice meditation and experience the elevation, the pacification of the consciousness by that we start realizing that the reality of God’s presence and God’s love and that becomes the greatest inner-security by which we can counter the negative mental habit that we may have acquired in the past.

Q2.  Sometimes we may have doubts about God’s existence and *** spiritual, so how do we deal doubts which come from the mind how do we deal with them?

A: The doubt is a function of the intelligence, The Srimad Bhagavatam which is an important devotional classic states that ‘doubt is the beginning of intelligence’, the first function of the intelligence is to doubt that is why many countries advertisements to children who are very  small are legally banned, because the children don’t have the intelligence to evaluate, they can’t doubt they are shown something, they think this is right, this is how it is, I’ll get that doll, I get that animal. They are happy. So the doubting is a sign of intelligence but doubting is not the only sign of intelligence. We can and we should doubt, there are things which should be doubted in life but one of the things is we should learn to doubt ‘doubt’ also. The doubt can tell us what is wrong; doubt can never tell us what is right. Actually if we study philosophy, somebody starts starting philosophy as academic discipline then within few years one can become trained as soon as someone presents his philosophy he can start pointing holes in it, this problem this problem! Then it becomes more like a intellectual game whatever argument you give I find faults in it. Now using doubt to acquire knowledge is like using immobility for transportation, for motion. They two are opposite. So when I said we should learn to doubt ‘doubt’  that means we need know that doubt tell us what is wrong but that doubt is never going to tell us what is right. So if we want to know what is right eventually we need to go beyond doubt.

With respect to doubts about the existence of the God, the existence of the God can be understood in various ways, sometimes say some people think that science has a disproven God or the scientific theories, there are many atheistic scientists; one atheist wrote a quite a well-known book ‘how everything came from nothing’, science has proven that God doesn’t exist, we don’t need a God for the universe. That the book was how everything came from nothing, and if you read that book then nothing is quite a thing. Basically to have nothing produce everything the scientists have had to redefine nothing so that it is something. Quite a thing in fact. That nothing is the complex quantum mechanical vacuum which requires pages upon pages of the most abstract mathematics to describe. The point is that science and quite often many doubts come from science about the existence of God but science and God can seem contradictory if we do not understand what science rests on. Science offers explanations for the things but how does science offer explanations that means if everything just came from a bang,  if we just remove God entirely, remove spirit entirely and assume a purely materialistic worldview then what is the story of the universe- nothing existed because of nothing and then because of the nothing something happened to nothing and because of that something from nothing everything came and not only that is the question of original —-if science has been able to explain the new things but it has been able to explain things because of its ability to observe and find patterns in nature.

So millions of people before Newton saw fruit falling, and most of them picked it up and ate the fruit. Newton thought ‘why did this fruit fall’? and now this can point to the intelligence of Newton and yes intelligence has to be given credit. But when he questioned ‘why did the fruit fall’? In this case an assumption that there is an answer to the ‘WHY’.

If I got just a scribble of paper which- **sense to it then I just throw it away. But if I saw this scribble of paper and I started thinking, maybe this is some message written in the language that I don’t know and I start comparing this with various scripts that I know and I start taking the labor to find out what it means? which language that it is written in? That taking that labor itself assumes that there may be some meaning over there. So the very quest of science rests on the assumption that there is order in the universe. The question where did this order come from? And not only is the order in the universe, there is order of mathematical precision. F=GM1M2/R², that is what Newton came up with, based on his observations and the principles of gravity. If everything that just come without any higher intelligence anywhere in the world, just by the random changes in the matter, then our brain is just a random collection of Stardust and the world around us is also a random arrangement that has come from the Stardust and on top of that mathematics is just a concept within the biochemical patterns in my neuro— so why in the wide world should the behavior of objects outside co-relate with the patterns of the ways in which electrochemical in the brain cells ** I hope this point is clear. I’ll put it in a different way, science offers explanation, and God offers us explanation for explain-ability. By this universe is explainable? If the stars moving in this cosmos, there are atoms that are moving around then why should their motion co-relate with mathematics which is just a concept in my hand, when both my head and the stars have just come from Stardust. So God is the explanation for explain-ability. It is not that science and God are contradictory. They offer explanation at different levels. Science functions with the premise of looking for material explanations for material phenomena and it does a great job in giving material explanations. But the material explanations are not necessarily be complete explanations. For example I came for this program in a car and if someone was observing the car and say the wheels of the car started moving. Now I can give explanation for this at two levels: one level is why the wheels start moving Oh because the wheels are connected to the crank shaft and they go to the ignition and there is a spark in the ignition, and why there was a spark in the ignition? We go back, there is a key which was in the vertical position and the key move to the horizontal position that is why the wheels started moving. It is the correct explanation but is it a complete explanation? No, I desire to come here that is why I entered the car and I moved the key from vertical to horizontal and the wheels started moving. So science by definition looks for material explanations for material things and because God is nonmaterial by definition, science does not find God. But that does not mean the science and God are contradictory but there are explanations at different levels. So science explains material phenomena through material causes, where as God is the explanation for the explainability at the material level. There is a famous Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, so he said, ‘an equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God’. E=mc² how did that equality come about? That equality is a fact that there is in nature how it did come about? We have discovered it. So if it is because of say thinking that I am being unscientific by believing anything spiritual that is a cause of our doubt. Then understanding how spiritual and the scientific co-relate, that will clarify the doubts. Sometimes the doubts may come because of some problems that come in our life. We think okay I’m worshiping God, maybe then that should mean that God should protect me or problems should not come in my life, then if problems come that may cause— so now when that happens again if we study Scripture carefully the Bhagavad-Gita tells us that this world is a place of misery. What it means is that here our bodies are going to ** they are going to grow old, there are going to be problems in the world. So quite often to the contrary the materialistic propaganda tells us ‘you just buy this and you will be happy, you get this you’ll be happy’, so actually when we face problems rather than that causing us down, ‘yes the spiritual wisdom told that this world is a place of problem and I’m experiencing the problems. So it’s true but this is not the— Bhagavad-Gita also tells us is that there are problems but we can rise above problems by our connection with God.

mac-cittaù sarva-durgäëi

mat-prasädät tariñyasi

atha cet tvam ahaìkärän

na çroñyasi vinaìkñyasi

In the 18^th chapter 58^th verse Lord Krishna says that ‘if you become conscious of Me, you will pass over all obstacles by My grace’. So then we can think rather than doubting, does God really exists? I’m having so many problems and He is not helping. Yes God has told in the Scriptures there are problems in this world and experiencing ** so one part of Scripture I found it to be true and let me see the other part of the Scripture, what is the other part? Scriptures gives us the process by which we can raise our consciousness at spiritual level and we can experience the relief. The problem itself will not immediately go away, but the mental burden because of the problem subsides, it goes down. Anyone anywhere if we turn towards prayer, if we say participate in spiritual music, we experience it really and we pray to God, we meditate, we experience relief and that that is at our level the experience of the reality of God.

Bhakti Pareshanubhav Virakt…..

Devotion is the process that gives us Para-Isha-Anubhava – experience of God who is the higher reality. When a baby is very small at that time, the baby is newborn, the baby doesn’t even know that there is something called a mother. All that baby knows is if I put my mouth over here I get milk and say the baby is and it’s cold at night and baby is shivering then mother puts a  blanket at that time the baby doesn’t know that there is the mother who loves me and puts a blanket but the baby experiences the relief from the cold. The baby experiences the warmth. And as the baby grows up then she starts understanding oh there is a mother who love me and then when she feels the blanket my mother has put the blanket. So that understanding happens when she grows up. Similarly we are like spiritual infants right now, so we can’t really pursue the existence of the God but when we turn to prayer and meditation, we can experience the relief. We can experience the relief from anxiety and that is the experience of the reality of God and as we move forward that reality becomes clearer and clearer.

Q3. If the total number of souls is fixed and why is that the population increasing?

A: see that the population increased and the number of souls they are related by several underlined assumptions, there is one assumption is that souls are present only in the human beings, when we say the population is increasing who has done the population of mosquitoes, who has done the census of microbes, we have not done that. One of the things that the Bhagavad-Gita says is the soul is Sarvagatah that means it is capable of being present in various bodily forms. It is not present only in human form. Basically the soul is symptomized by consciousness; wherever consciousness is present the soul is there. So the human population which you observe that is only one specie that this soul is present. The soul if goes back to God then it will not come back yes that’s true. That is like some souls are getting liberated and going, some we could say human—-decrease but that is not the only way of entry or exit. The idea of population explosion is based on the notion that it is a closed system. The system is not closed; the system is open. There are souls from the lower species who come up and there are many souls in the human form keep coming back also. So especially because souls from the lower species come up that is why the population is not reflective of the total count of the souls. The population increase as far as the census go, The Bhagavad-Gita says that what we live in an age called Kaliyuga and this age is age characterized various kinds of problems; one problem—-is also result when there is lot of population. So the point is this question that because the souls of number of souls are fixed this because the soul cannot be created that should mean that population should not increase that is based on a assumption that  no souls anywhere else, if souls enter from other species and that is how the soul population can increase. Just like suppose there was an alien who came to earth and it was told to observe the population of earth. And that alien comes to this classroom and observes, hovering at the back and they find that ‘maybe before this class the classroom was empty’, between at 6 o’clock there was a population explosion in the classroom. If we look at the vastness of the time span of the universe according to science, the time for which census is also been taken that itself is limited and for us to make a categorical statement based on that, it is a huge extrapolation from the available data. Just as population may have increased here in this classroom but what about elsewhere? Students come here there that cannot be created that can come from somewhere else. So yes by understanding the human population is not a closed system for souls rather than the problem doesn’t come.

Q3. What explains God?

Answer: Every system of knowledge begins with certain definitions and without understanding those definitions we cannot move forward in any branch of knowledge. In Geometry something which no dimensional is called a point, something with one dimension is called as a line, now a line is a set of points; if I use the logic by algebra how can accumulation of zero dimensional entities create one dimensional entity. It is like a sum of zeros creating one. It doesn’t make sense. Every field begins with certain definitions. So that definition of God is Sarva karana karanam -the cause of all causes. Now this definition is if the foundation of explaining everything based on a God-centered world. Now any explanatory setup if we take any body of knowledge, it requires some terminal point. Without a terminal point nothing will move forward. So in the materialistic worldview if we see where the original matter did come from?  that itself is again as to have an assumption. It was just there.

Science for example if science—– entirely from non-spiritual perspective it may say that the laws of nature exists as they are.  Now going forward from this, this is the beginning definition of God, because we live in a world of cause and effect, so we tend to think that every cause, every effect must have  a cause. If a child reads a novel for the first time, and child say Oh there is a hero, there is a heroine, there is a villain, and after reading the whole novel the child comes to know there is an author. And again child asks where is the author in the book. So the author is not in the storyline, the author is not in the timeline, so the author made this storyline and the timeline and the author exists outside. So similarly God exists outside the frame work of time and place. And even from the point of pure logic if we say. that the cause of everything cannot have a cause. If it has a cause then that will be the cause of it. So we have to take the chain of causality to some terminal point.

Even science has confirmed that the universe is itself not eternal, it had a beginning point. So the causal change wherever it stops that stopping point is God. Materialism holds that matter is some tiny bit of matter is the cause. So they said that that is the similarity which has the infinite energy, infinite temperature, infinite visible mass which is beyond mathematical description, beyond physical realization. It is here we have science proposing something necessity, something which is beyond science. Any school of thought has to come to a terminal point and within a materialistic worldview science comes to our terminal point of which goes beyond science, if the science is materialistic but the spiritual worldview doesn’t require terminal point which is beyond its worldview. The spiritual worldview say is that yes there is God and there is matter and there is energy and there is consciousness these are the energies of God and if there is just a lump of matter that will not create anything, if there is an intelligent builder that builder can create things. So God is the cause of everything and God is the point where all explanations **. Alternatives to God which are a matter if we say matter the matter itself does not have causal ability to produce things and the materialistic worldview requires something which is outside of itself to begin with. A God centered worldview does not require anything outside of itself to begin with. In that sense God if we understand the definition that He is the cause of all causes then the search for all explanation ends in God.

Thank you very much, Hare Krishna !!!

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
the topic of mastering the managing and mastering the monkey mind mind is a word which has many meanings for example Albert Einstein is called the greatest mind of the 20th century where the word mind refers to the intellectual faculty of a person or the word mind can keep that in your mind at least remember it or the word mind can also refer to idea of memorising something or paying attention pay your mind to this it can be recollection it can be cognition the bhagavad gita uses the word mind in a more specific sense the bhagavad gita explains the mind is the subtle faculty within us if we have a computer the computer has a software the hardware has a software and there is a user so the software is itself invisible we can say this is the place where the software is stored but we can’t point to the software directly so similarly the subtle element is the software interfaces between the user and the hardware similarly the mind is in the bhagavad gita’s analysis the subtle element which interfaces between us spiritual beings and the physical body which we have and the world around us so to make this a little more clear all of us at different times sense some voice speaking within us for example right now i am speaking to all of you but there is a voice speaking inside me that voice is saying that you are going to forget what you are going to speak and you are going to make a fool of yourself so the voice within speaks in different voices different tones but there is something within us which speaks in various ways whatever happens there is something within us which passes comments if somebody walks in the street the person walks like a flower there is some comment which is passed on so what is this what is this thing within us that is speaking these things that is the bhagavad gita tells the mind usually we think of external and internal in terms of the body for example this is external to me and if there is some thought within me i think that is inside me but what the bhagavad gita tells us is that everything inside me is not me everything inside me is not me that means there is that we of course as spiritual beings are there but along with us there is a software which has been programmed by our own past habits, past desires past experiences i believe most of you know about the soul the soul is sat-chit-ananda, have you heard this term sat-chit-ananda so sat is a sanskrit word which means eternal and chit is conscious ananda is joyful so sat is a sanskrit word now in english there is no such word as sat so i as an author i often write things and after i want to proofread them i have a text to speech software read it so when the text to speech software reads this, if i write the soul is sat-chit-ananda the software changes it to, while reading it it reads that the soul is sat-chit-ananda so it has changed the word sat to saturday so here it is something like autocorrect that is working but the autocorrect is working incorrectly so i type sat-chit-ananda and it happens sometimes in ms word also, i type sat-chit-ananda and it gets changed to sat-chit-ananda so this is an example of a inbuilt programme just as there is a programme for spell check and maybe autocorrect so now similarly there is a programme within us and that programme where that programme is stored that is the mind so this programme the mind often contains programmes that are not healthy for us and if we don’t deal with these unhealthy programmes we will end up underusing our energies or rather dissipating our energy and not fulfilling our potential you know when there is a machine and if the machine has a lot of friction internally then the friction sucks its energy and then whatever external power is coming into the machine a lot of it gets consumed in the friction and the external productivity of the machine decreases similarly there are self sabotaging programmes within the mind and these actually make us underuse our potential so managing the mind essentially is correcting these self sabotaging programmes so I will talk about there can be many programmes and some of the specifics of the programmes will vary from person to person but I will talk about some general patterns which are often unhealthy so the first is that the mind makes us fight more battles than we need to the mind makes us fight more battles than we need to suppose there is some kind of confrontation going on war or whatever and there is one person here and one person here both of them are fighting it’s an equal fight but if there is one person here and there are three people here it becomes a much more difficult fight to win so the mind when we have to do something when I say that the mind makes us fight more battles than we need to that means we are doing one thing at a particular time the mind adds the past and the future to the present and by adding the past and the future to the present the mind makes the present situation far tougher than what it needs to so I will talk about this in two terms about how the mind adds the past and the future so for example if I am giving my first public speech and that time I stutter and stammer and I am not able to give a very good performance at that time the mind immediately goes off into the past and maybe in the childhood if I had some stammering problem mind starts reminding me of that or maybe I knew some friend who would always stammer who had a lot of difficulty and I start thinking maybe I will become like that and basically the present is some problem but the mind by adding events from the past by adding memories from the past burdens us so if there is a porter who is paid to carry say 10 kg weight and imagine that porter adds 20 kg weight more on top and oneself carrying 30 kg and is going to be paid only for 10 kg so who would want to add more weight that one wants to carry so we all have work to do but the mind transforms work into workload the mind transforms work into workload that means rather than doing just the job at hand the mind makes us think of that time when I tried to do this this went wrong and if there was just the work to be done we can do it but when the work becomes a workload then it becomes a crushing burden then that dissipates our energy in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says in 13th chapter 21st verse so he is essentially saying that that cause and effect this causal chain happens in the outer world and that is where events take place but experiences are what happen in the inner world and our experiences are determined by our mentality by our world view say someone is carrying a glass of water and somehow it will slip and fall and the water gets spilled everywhere then that is what has happened maybe somebody pushed maybe there was something slippery on the floor at that time the mind adds a burdening message you are a clumsy baboon and with this message what was the small event it slipped and fell I can also laugh but when the mind interprets the event then that event does not remain just an event in the outer world it becomes an experience and often it becomes a disheartening experience so the mind makes us fight so if I slip and fall I can get up but when the mind adds a whole gamut of emotions and its own interpretations of that event based on the emotions then the problem becomes much more difficult so life determines our problems but our mind determines their size life determines the problems that we are going to face but our mind determines the size how big the problem is going to be the more we think of a problem maybe there are some movies in which there are some shifting people shown two people are fighting and one person suddenly becomes bigger and bigger and then this other person starts to fight so like that when we dwell on a problem when the mind dwells on a problem then that mental energy gets invested in the problem and when that mental energy gets invested in the problem the problem starts becoming bigger and bigger and as compared to that sometimes a small event happens like somebody slips and some water spills but that person starts thinking that I am a clumsy buffoon that person may after that become afraid to carry water anywhere and just a simple act of carrying water can cause stress, can cause anxiety so what is happening here when we unguardedly let the mind dwell on certain events certain things that have happened in the outer world then the mind causes that problem to think to become bigger and bigger and in comparison we start thinking I am so small I am so worthless and then we disempower ourselves so the mind makes us fight more battles than we need to by adding past memories to whatever has happened at present and by adding its own interpretation of what has happened so another thing that the mind does is it adds future the future the mind often adds often dystopian imagery all kinds of horrible events which may come up I am driving a car and I see some small some car crash has happened or my wheel may come off maybe you have seen some movie also where the wheel has gone off and then the mind starts running on overdrive imagining all kinds of terrible scenes so the mind sometimes takes some stimuli and for different people there may be different stimuli that might trigger the mind but when the stimuli get triggered then the mind starts playing a horror movie and in that horror movie we are not the spectator we are the spectacle we are the person who are the victims and this horror movie in which we become the victim that can paralyse us so fear is not a problem fear of what comes after fear is the problem fear is a healthy protective human instinct if I look down from a big height at that time the fear which you feel on seeing a huge drop that is a natural human psychological defence mechanism to protect us from danger so it is not possible that we can ever be free from worry or anxiety entirely that some amount of worry or anxiety makes us duly cautious sometimes some people are completely free from worry and then that makes others filled with worry about them as if the fools rush in where angels fear to tread children sometimes don’t understand there is some danger let me put my hand over there they are fearless and that makes their mothers fearful so fear itself is not undesirable similarly worry or anxiety is not itself undesirable but when the healthy fear even the healthy worry when that sends us off on a dystopian fantasy when it makes us imagine all worst case scenarios whose probability is very low once there was a lady every 3 months she would go to a doctor so after 40 years going like this finally the doctor said see I was right now a regular health checkup is good but paranoia is unhinged so the mind when it goes into the future it goes into all sorts of negative fantasies utopia is unrealistically positive dystopia is unrealistically negative so when that happens that can also paralyse us sometimes when people get panic attacks sometimes the panic attacks can be because of some psychiatric problem but quite often the panic attacks are simply because the mind is going on an uncontrolled flight so when it goes on this flight then we start envisioning the worst possible scenario now there is certainly when I talk about the mind going to the past or going to the future this itself is not unhealthy going to the past to learn from the past is good last time I was speaking I stuttered and stammered if I recollect that and think what caused the stammer maybe I was looking at some person who was glaring at me and just that looking at that person started disconcerting then this time I can avoid looking at it people who are afraid of speaking in public and yet you can’t avoid eye contact with people when you are speaking in public sometimes people get panicky on seeing others they are advised to look between two people both will think you are looking at them and you won’t be looking at anyone so if we think calmly what triggered some undesirable action in the past we can learn from that so learning from the past is good but learning from the past is possible when we are in control but when the mind is in control we don’t learn from the past we fall back into the past we paralyse ourselves by negative memories of the past and how to differentiate between these two whether the mind is in control or I am in control that I will talk in a later part but the same I apply to the future preparing for the future is important so if there are some dangers preparing for those dangers is good for example if somebody is flying by plane and at that time the person is these are the safety measures that have to be taken this is how I should use the oxygen bag this is how I should use the water bag learning them is good but if every time a person is going to enter a plane and as soon as the air hostess starts explaining the security measures that are taken I am going to fall into the ocean and my water bag will not inflate and I will drown and even before the drowning one is drowning in the mind so this sort of unrealistic and worst case scenario in this case firstly they are unlikely to happen secondly even if they are likely to happen what can we do about it there is nothing we can do except prepare take whatever precautions are possible we take them but unfortunately when the mind goes into this dystopian fantasy mode it starts playing this horror movie and we just lose it especially in high pressure sports sometimes when there is a defining moment a final moment and sometimes some players lose their cool at that time and whatever simple move to make in football simple shot to play in baseball a person just fools up and then you say that these people choke under pressure so what is that choking? what causes that choking? so often in many sports it is a game of the mind more than a game of the body so people have to be mentally strong to succeed and what applies to sports applies to our whole life also so envisioning future possibilities future problems and preparing for them is good but just passively letting the mind paint up all kinds of that is disempowering and that is undesirable so now how do we so I talked about how the mind disempowers us the mind makes us fight more battles than we need to by adding the past and the future and the mind adds meanings interprets events in such a way that they become sometimes disheartening experiences for us further the mind basically flitters like a bird may move from one place to another or a monkey may move from one place to another so the mind doesn’t focus a fan moves round and round but the fan gets nowhere it just stays where it is all the time our mind also goes round and round at least the fan gives some air but the mind often does nothing what the mind does quite often is it puts our thoughts and our actions out of sync so I am doing one thing so there is A, B, C when I am doing A, I am worrying whether I will do B right or not when I am doing B, I am worrying whether I did A right or not and I am worrying whether I will do C right or not and by the time I come to C, I realise I did A also wrong and B also wrong then I am doing C and I am worrying I have to do A and B again and because of that worry, I go through A and B and remember I did C also wrong so I have to do C also so the mind puts our thoughts and our actions out of sync and because of that also our energy gets dissipated we are often habituated to think of our schedule think of our time availability in terms of activities ok in the morning I have to do this in the afternoon I have to do this and that is a fine enough way of analysing our day and our time expenditure but that is not complete enough because our time is not consumed only by our activities it is also consumed by our thoughts say if we had an unpleasant interaction with someone and then as students we go into the class we are looking at the white board or looking at the teacher and after half an hour what happened? we are just thinking why did that person say that I should have said this that would have been a fitting comeback I never think on my feet I should learn to think on my feet next time if he says that I will say this so that event, that person snubbing us it happened maybe within 10 seconds but sometimes that one incident and the thought that is created that may take 10 hours and we never factor it in our schedule but thoughts take time and when thoughts take time it is essentially the mind that is taking the time so when we consider this fact that the mind puts our thoughts and actions out of sync then we need to think how do I get them into sync one is we just say concentrate now all these problems which I talked about these are sometimes thought of as problems because of lack of will power say that is why do you worry so much, cool down, don’t worry now sometimes that may help but suppose somebody had a high temperature cool down man you can’t cool down like that there is a physical disease that is there and cooling down the temperature of the body is not just a matter of our own will power but there is a temperature I have got then I need a proper process I have to take some medicines and that will help the temperature to go down even for that I need will power to take the medicines regularly to make sure that I don’t expose myself to stimuli that may make the fever worse I don’t go out in the cold or whatever but will power alone just as it is not enough to cool our physical temperature similarly will power alone may not always be enough to cool our mental temperature and the mind gets hot, you just tell the person cool down yes it can help to some extent but there is a limitation to that it’s like if a person is always habitually morose whatever suggestion he gives that person is an expert in finding problems with that suggestion and that time why do you always have a hung face, smile a bit smiling can help smiling can make not only a person look better smiling can make a person feel better also but there is a limit to that if I am sitting on this chair and there are 50 thorns on this chair and somebody tells me smile you will feel better well maybe but not really so just a shift of attitude is not enough when there are real problems out there shift of attitude is important but the real problems need also to be dealt with so the Bhagavad Gita explains that in the 6th chapter 27th verse of the Bhagavad Gita it is said that when we understand our spiritual nature not just understand but when we experience our spiritual nature then the mind becomes peaceful the mind becomes calm all the passion agitation, anxiety within the mind becomes pacified the mental temperature cools down so what does it mean to experience our spiritual nature and how does that calm the mind down if somebody is in ocean in the ocean there are always going to be waves and when the waves are there the person is going to be shaken up down up down up down that is inevitable but if that same person is in a boat then the waves are still going to be there and the shaking is still going to be there but it is going to be much less and if that boat is anchored to something heavy and firm then the shaking will be much less so in this case we are not stopping the waves but we are stopping our shaking so the world we live in is a place of change the weather changes the job scenario changes the moods of our teachers change the moods of our friends and colleagues change our own mind mood changes the same thing which I like today I just find it boring tomorrow the mind can say in a relationship I can’t live without you and a few days later the mind can say I can’t live with you so this is the oscillation the changes constantly keep happening and in fact if you look at the world around us the only thing constant is change so everything keeps changing and because of this change it naturally creates some uncertainty some anxiety, some worry, some insecurity now researchers have studied anxiety quite exhaustively in the last century so some very interesting features have been found that people in the first world often have fairly good amount of material security social conveniences and comforts as compared to that people in the third world have far greater uncertainty insecurity, inconvenience and yet the researchers have found that people in the first world suffer from higher anxiety level than people in the third world not only that when people from the third world come to the first world their anxiety levels also go up so now what is the reason for this if the externals are relatively more comfortable more available then what causes the anxiety what is causing the high anxiety level is not outer uncertainty but inner instability inner instability means that this is not a matter of comparing the first world and third world it is more a matter of a materialistic world view and a spiritual world in a materialistic world view matter is all that matters that is functional materialism some god exists he exists somewhere, i exist here he is happy there, i am happy here why bother about it so god, spiritual side soul, our spiritual side all these don’t matter that is functional materialism and then there is fanatical materialism fanatical materialism is matter is all that exists nothing else exists so of course this world view is both philosophically and scientifically flawed i won’t go to that direction but the result, i am talking about managing the mind here so in the materialistic world view matter is all that matters and matter is always changing so because of the constant change of matter there is uncertainty and that causes anxiety and when there is nothing unchanging to hold on to then the anxiety so what we need to deal with the mind’s oscillation i said that the waves are going to come there is a boat and the boat is further anchored to some heavy immovable object then the oscillation will be much lesser so like that we live in a world that is largely materialistic so to manage the mind if we have a spiritual community if we have spiritual friends some spiritual association regularly that places us in a boat and if we connect ourselves with the ultimate anchor that is God who is revealed in the Bhagavad Gita to be Krishna then that connects so prayer is when we speak to God and meditation is when we hear God so both are ways of communicating with God prayer is when we speak our heart to Him and meditation is when we hear God so there are different ways of meditating and the mantra that we chanted just now that is one of the most accessible forms of meditation why is it the most accessible? because sound acts as an elevator to raise our consciousness from the material to the spiritual level so the spiritual sound whether it is singing and we did kirtans or it is individual prayerful meditation if we just try to fix our consciousness on the sound the sound will raise our consciousness upwards and as we feel ourselves rising upwards the uncertainties, the insecurities, the worries they will be there but they won’t worry us so much we will be calmer and we will be able to deal with the situation so suppose a person is in a disaster afflicted area there is a fire, there is flood, there is live electricity wires exposed, the person is in anxiety and suppose a rescue helicopter comes from above drops a rope and pulls up that person is still in the same area but now one is raised up and because of being raised up although the problem is there one doesn’t feel immediately threatened by the problem so if we connect with our spiritual side if we connect with the supreme spiritual reality God then that connection raises us above our situations and then we can be concerned without being disturbed we can be concerned, it is not that spirituality means we don’t worry about anything we all have issues which we have to deal with but we want to deal with the issues we don’t want to be devoured by the issues and without a spiritual connection that is what happens we get consumed by the worries and whatever associated negative meanings come up from that but when we connect with our spiritual sound that raises us up we can find this is the problem and these are the possible things that can happen and this is how I can deal with it so with respect to, I will quickly go back and I will conclude the class I will talk about with a spiritual perspective how can we deal with the mind’s various misdirecting habits the bad programmes that are there within us so with respect to the past and the future so if we are spiritually connected then we are calm when we are calm then if we look at the past now we are aware it’s like if I said to someone right now you are a lazy bum how dare you speak like that and we will either counter it that person will either counter it how dare you speak like that if there is some truth in it that person will try to correct oneself so that it will no longer be true so when some inciting criticism comes from outside we actually resist it and try to correct it but when that same label is offered by the mind within us instead of countering it we accept it for example if I was supposed to wake up early and do some work and somehow I just you know in the sleep we become inactive but often the hand is active to switch off the alarm switch off the alarm and wake up you are a lazy fool now when the mind starts goading what happens is when the alarm is ringing at that time the mind says sleep for some more and then that 5 minutes becomes 25 minutes same mind which told us to sleep why did you sleep so much you are such a fool you are lazy, you are useless you will never be able to do anything in your life some small 20 minutes sleeping becomes a statement about your life you will never be able to do anything in your life if somebody else said that to us we would be angry with that person but when the mind says that instead of being angry we start becoming depressed if two people were fighting a boxing match there is A and there is B and A gives a bad punch and B falls down so now B has fallen down now it’s a bad punch now if B wants to rise and fight he should look around at one’s coach or look at one’s friend and say come on get up and fight but suppose B has fallen down and then asks him will I be able to win in this match he will say never the mind only knocks us down the mind only makes me oversleep and then I ask the mind we need positive spiritual association which will inspire us to bring out the best in us and as I said if we have if we practise meditation regularly if we understand the spiritual wisdom of the Gita then that helps us to catch the mind in the act otherwise the mind makes us act many times we do something and then we say why did I do that I never wanted to do that why did I do that it is as if some stranger has entered into us some ghost has possessed us and made us act but when we meditate regularly because we are spiritually connected when the mind starts pushing us this is the mind talking so recognising the enemy is practically the biggest part of dealing with the enemy when it comes to the mind because the mind is inside us and unfortunately we tend to think that whatever is inside me is me so as we understand there is something within me which is hostile to me then we are on the water so the spiritual wisdom enables us to distance ourselves from the mind to become a little more analytical about our own thinking and then when we catch the mind we can stop the mind but if we don’t catch it, there is no chance of stopping it and this is actually especially possible when we do meditation when we do meditation, the mind goes here that is the time when we can observe the mind is good, let me bring it back the mind is good, let me bring it back and we focus on the spiritual sound and by that the mind slowly calms down and the Bhagavad Gita says something very interesting that the mind can be both our enemy so in chapter 6 verse for one who has controlled the mind, the mind becomes a friend for one who has failed to control it the mind remains the enemy what this means is that again the if I am thinking about the past but the mind is in control then I will simply become paranoid but if I am thinking about the past while being in control then I can analyse and I can learn from the past so the way to control the mind is the best way connecting with the reality is far greater than the mind and the highest reality is God and he becomes accessible to us through spiritual sound the very word mantra means the sound which frees us from the various problems the mind creates and to conclude I will quickly summarise I started by talking about how the word mind can have many meanings in the Bhagavad Gita the mind refers to the thing within us which often works against us and this the mind works against us in many ways I talked about a few the most fundamental strategy by which the mind works against us it makes us fight more battles than we need to by adding past to the present by adding past to everything that has gone wrong or by adding future to the present by adding everything that can go wrong or by adding meaning to event by adding its own interpretation to its event one mistake and you are good for nothing so the mind in this way disempowers us and the way to deal with the mind is yes it’s not just a matter of will power as I was saying physical temperature cannot be cooled just by will power similarly mental temperature cannot be cooled just by will power yes will power helps but will power needs to be coupled with a process and that process is connecting with the unchanging reality what fuels the mind in its various undesirable fantasies is change change causes anxiety, change causes insecurity so and change causes anxiety not so much because of external change but internally if there is a materialistic world view then that causes further anxiety as I said in the first world anxiety levels are higher than the third world so if we have just as we need medicine to cure to bring the physical temperature down similarly to bring the mental temperature down we need the medicine of meditation and what does meditation do it gives us something unchanging to connect with God is the supreme unchanging reality and just as a boat in an ocean will become steady if anchored similarly we when connected with God becomes steadier and the best way to do that is the spiritual sound because spiritual sound acts like an elevator to raise our consciousness from the material to the spiritual and with ourselves spiritually connected we can catch the mind when the mind starts taking us in wrong directions we will have the inner clarity this is the mind speaking, I don’t have to listen to it I don’t have to think about let me focus on what I can do so that capacity to perceive the mind becomes enhanced and then the capacity to counter its influences also becomes enhanced when we connect ourselves spiritually through the wisdom of the social literature like the Bhagavad Gita and practically through the process of meditation which gives us experience of a reality higher than the material thank you very much are there any questions thank you very much I was wondering how then did we acquire the mind and why is its default setting so negative how did we acquire the mind and why is its default setting negative the mind is a part of the apparatus that we need to interact with the world we are spiritual beings and as spiritual beings we cannot directly interact with the world around us just like an astronaut going to space they need space suits similarly we need interface for connecting with the world so in the Bhagavad Gita chapter 8th verse Krishna says that the five senses not the quiet senses the eyes, the ears, the nose the tongue, the skin they are all centred around the mind and through these we we seek pleasure in external objects by our very nature we are pleasure seeking creatures and when we are spiritually unaware we seek pleasure in external objects so the mind it is the mind is a part of the necessary apparatus that we have for interfacing with the world and the soul is eternal so the soul is eternal and the soul whenever it is present in interfacing with the material world it needs a mechanism and that mechanism includes the mind so the word that is used for this in the Bhagavad Gita is Anadi Anadi means beginningless the soul is beginningless similarly the time when we acquire the mind that is also beginningless but more importantly is that why does it have negative scripts that is because of influences from externals in this as well as in the present as well as in the past so because we are we are living in largely a materialistic culture so we are by default we are by nature pleasure seeking creatures but where we seek pleasure that will be determined by the culture we live in so if the culture is materialistic then naturally we start seeking pleasure in materialistic and then that causes anxiety the problem among the many, one problem with materialism is that it makes us dependent for our happiness on things that are not in our control the external things whether it be wealth or position or power or even our own looks these are not really in our control for a very long time sometimes they may be in control but they slip away from us over time so when we become dependent on those things and further it is not just our possession of those things it is our possessing them more than others not only should I look good I should look better than others not only should I secure good marks, I should secure better marks than others not only should I have a new smartphone, my smartphone should be smarter than that of others so this and especially in today’s culture we live in a not just a materialistic culture but an aggressively materialistic culture aggressively materialistic means that we are exposed exposed to the best of everything that means I have a cell phone but the advertisers all around me are showing me cell phones care far better than mine I may have a decent physique but the movies, the billboards they are all showing people with the easy way to become miserable is to watch advertisers so what happens advertisers essentially show us all the things that we don’t have that’s how they make us purchase the things so yes because we live in an aggressively materialistic culture so quite often we are bombarded with the things that we don’t have and that creates negative mental patterns your memory is not good enough your speech is not good enough your intelligence is not good enough essentially all these messages boil down to although the people may not speak this directly you are not good enough and that can be very demoralising so it’s like with respect to today obesity is a big problem and it is people are caught in a terrible crunch on one side we have so many advertisements of food items oh this looks so good, eat this, eat that and on top of that there are advertisements of all kinds of fine tasting food which is all filled with fat quite often and along with that there are advertisements of people who are super slim so what do you do? it becomes mental torture particularly so because of being exposed to excessive materialism and naturally the result is that we can’t have all the things that are being glamorised so that creates negative thought patterns so to the extent we can avoid unnecessary exposure to materialistic stimuli we will find that the negative thought patterns will decrease and it may also happen that in our social circle be it our family or our friends there might be people who have given us negative messages so because of that also negative thought patterns come up and if we learn that then we need to keep a distance from them and then that also can help us to counter those negative thought patterns Bhagavad Gita gives us a very encouraging message that no matter what the world thinks of us God always loves us Krishna is right there within our heart and he is always there and his presence in our heart his love for us doesn’t depend on anything there is nothing that anyone can do that can stop God from loving us nothing that we can do that can stop us so right now this may just be a theoretical concept for us but if you practise meditation and experience the elevation the pacification of consciousness by that we start realising the reality of God’s presence and God’s love and that becomes the greatest inner security by which we can counter the negative mental habits that we may have acquired in the past basically we experience doubt of the existence of God and so it also comes from the mind so how do we get out about the existence of God doubt and the sign of God that’s why I have to see there are many countries where advertisements to particular where are you able to hear when I repeat ok I will start it’s going off Hare Krishna am I oh I have to touch this Hare Krishna ok ok fine Hare Krishna Hare Krishna am I audible now so the question is that sometimes we may have doubt about doubts about God’s existence and the existence of anything spiritual so how do we these doubts also come from the mind how do we deal with them yes so doubt is a function of the intelligence the Shrimad Bhagavatam which is an important devotional classic states that doubt is the beginning of intelligence the first function of the intelligence is to doubt that’s why in many countries advertisements to children who are very small are legally banned because the children don’t have the intelligence to evaluate what is this they can’t doubt they have shown something this is how I get this doll so doubting is a sign of intelligence but doubting is not the only sign of intelligence we we can and we should doubt there are things which should be doubted in life but one of the things is we should learn to doubt doubt also doubt can tell us what is wrong doubt can never tell us what is right actually if you study philosophy somebody starts studying philosophy as an academic discipline then within a few years one can become trained as soon as someone presents his philosophy you can start pointing holes in it this problem then it becomes more like an intellectual game whatever argument you give I will find fault with it now using doubt to acquire knowledge is like using immobility for transportation for motion they are two opposite so when I said we should learn to doubt that means we need to know that doubt can tell us what is wrong but doubt itself will never tell us what is right so if we want to know what is right eventually we need to go beyond doubt so now with respect to doubts about the say the existence of god the existence of god can be understood in various ways the very existence sometimes you say some people think that science and science has disproven god or this scientific theory or that scientific theory there are many atheistic scientists there is one atheist who wrote a quite a well known book he said how everything came from nothing science has proven that god does not exist we don’t need god for the universe the book was how everything came from nothing now if you read that book nothing is quite a thing basically to have nothing produce everything the scientists have had to redefine nothing so that it is something quite a thing in fact that nothing is a complex quantum mechanical vacuum which requires pages upon pages of the most abstract mathematics to describe so the point is that science and quite often many doubts come from science about the existence of god but science and god can seem contradictory if we do not understand what science rests on the science offers explanations for things but science how does science offer explanations that means if everything just came from a bag if we just remove god entirely remove spirit entirely and assume a purely materialistic world view then what is the story of the universe nothing existed because of nothing then because of nothing something happened to nothing and because of that something from nothing everything came and not only that not only is the question of origin there science has been able to explain many things but it has been able to explain things because of its ability to observe and find patterns in nature so millions of people before Newton saw fruit falling most of them picked up and ate the fruit Newton thought why did this fruit fall and now this can point to the intelligence of Newton and yes intelligence has to be given to you but the very question why did the fruit fall indicates an assumption that there is an answer to the why if I got just a scribble of paper which made no sense to me then I would just throw it away but if I saw this scribble of paper and I started thinking maybe this is a message written in some language I don’t know and I start comparing this script with various scripts that I know and I start taking the labour to find out what it means which language it is written in that taking that labour itself assumes that there may be some meaning over it so the very quest of science rests on the assumption that there is order in the universe the question comes where did this order come from and not only is there order in the universe there is order of mathematical precision your f is equal to g m1 m2 upon r square that is what based on his observation and the principle of gravity now if everything had just come without any higher intelligence anywhere involved just by the random changes in matter then our brain is just a random random collection of star dust and the world around us is also a random arrangement that has come from star dust and on top of that mathematics is just a concept within the biochemical patterns in my neuronal cells so why in the wide world should the behaviour of objects outside correlate with the patterns of the ways in which the electrochemical in the brain cells fire I hope this point is clear ok I will put it in a different way science offers explanations God offers the explanation for explainability science offers explanations God offers the explanation for explainability why is the universe explainable there are stars moving in the cosmos there are atoms moving around why should their motion correlate with mathematics which is just a concept in my head when both my head and the stars have just come from star dust so it is so God is the explanation for explainability so it is not that science and God are contradictory they offer explanations at different levels science functions with the premise of looking for material explanations for material phenomena and it does a great job in giving material explanations but material explanations are not necessarily the complete explanations for example here I came for this programme in a car if someone was observing the car the wheels of the car started moving now I can give explanation for this at two levels one level is why did the wheels start moving oh because the wheels are connected through a crankshaft and they go to the ignition and there was a spark in the ignition now why was there a spark in the ignition you go back oh there was a key which was in the vertical position and the key moved to the horizontal position and that’s why the wheels started moving that’s the correct explanation is it a complete explanation now I decided to come here that’s why I entered the car and I moved the key from the vertical to the horizontal and the wheels started moving so science by definition looks for material explanations for material phenomena and because god is non material by definition science does not find god directly but that does not mean science and god are contradict they are explanations at different levels so science explains material phenomena through material causes whereas god is the explanation for the explainability at the material level there was an Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan so he said an equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of god f is equal to g e is equal to mc squared how did that equality come about so that equality is a fact which is there in nature but how did it come about we have discovered it but how did it come about so if it is because of thinking that I am being unscientific in by believing anything spiritual that is the cause of our doubt in understanding how spiritual and scientific correlate that can clarify the doubt sometimes the doubt may come because of some problems that come in our life we think okay I am worshipping god I am devoting myself to god maybe then that should mean that god should protect me or problems should not come in my life then if problems come that may cause some doubts so now when that happens again you know if we study scripture carefully the Bhagavad Gita tells us that this world is a place of misery what it means is that here our bodies are going to age, they are going to grow old there are going to be problems in the world so quite often to the contrary materialistic propaganda tells us you just buy this and you will be happy you get this and you will be happy so actually when we face problems rather than that causing us doubt you know spiritual wisdom literature told that this world is a place of problems and now I am experiencing problems so it’s true but this is not a pessimistic thing but the Bhagavad Gita also tells us that there are problems but we can rise above problems by our connection with god in the 18th chapter 58 verse Krishna says if you become conscious of me you will pass over all obstacles by my grace so then we can think rather than doubting does god really exist I am having so many troubles god has told through scripture that there are problems in this world I am experiencing this to be true so one part of scripture I have found it to be true now let me see the other part of scripture what is the other part scripture gives us a process by which we can raise our consciousness to the spiritual level and we can experience relief the problem itself will not go away may not immediately go away but the mental burden because of the problem and anyone anywhere if we turn towards prayer if we say participate in spiritual music and we pray to god meditate we experience relief that is at our level an experience of the reality of god bhakti paresha anubhava viraktiranyatra bhakti, devotion is the process that gives us paraeesha anubhava experience of god who is a higher reality so when a baby is very small at that time the baby is newborn the baby does not even know that there is something called a mother all the baby knows is I just put my mouth over here and I get milk and say the baby is cold at night the baby is shivering then the mother puts a blanket the baby does not know there is a mother who loves me and puts the blanket but the baby experiences warmth and as the baby grows up she feels the blanket oh my mother has put the blanket that understanding happens when she grows up similarly at our level we are in spiritual infancy right now so we can’t really perceive the existence of god but when we turn to him in prayer and meditation we can experience I said the blanket we can experience the relief from the anxiety and that is the experience of the reality of god and as we move forward that reality becomes clearer and clearer did I answer your question? so Bhagavad Gita says that soul can neither be created nor be destroyed and once we have is there a total count in the number of souls if yes why that is? so is the total number of souls fixed if so then why is the population increasing see the population increase and the number of souls they are related by several underlying assumptions that one assumption is that souls are present only in human beings when we say population is increasing who has done the population of mosquitos who has done the census of microbes they have not done that one of the things that Bhagavad Gita says is the soul is that means it is capable of being present in various bodily forms it is not present only in human form the human body is basically the soul is symptomized by consciousness wherever consciousness is present there is soul so the human population which we observe is only one one species where the soul is present so the soul can transform we mentioned one possibility if a soul goes back to god it will not come back that is like some souls who are getting liberated that will cause some population we could say some human cow to decrease but that is not the only way of entry or exit the idea of population explosion is based on the notion that it is a closed system system is not closed system is open there are souls from the lower species who come up and there are many souls in the human form coming back also especially because souls from the lower species come up that is why the population is not reflective of the total count of the soul and the population increase as far as the census goes the Bhagavad Gita states that what we live in is an age called Kalyuga and this age is an age characterised by various kinds of problems one problem is resource scarcity and that resource scarcity can also result when there is a lot of population so the point is that this question that because the number of souls is fixed because the soul cannot be created that should mean the population should not increase that is based on an assumption that there are no souls anywhere else the souls enter from other species and that is how the soul population can increase just like suppose there was an alien who came to the earth and that alien was told to observe the population of the earth and then that alien comes to this classroom and observes hovering at the back oh maybe suppose before this class, this classroom was empty and for 2-3 hours it was empty and now it is so between 6 o’clock there was a population explosion on this classroom. If you look at the vastness of the time span of the universe even according to science the time for which census has also been taken that itself is limited and for us to make a categorical statement based on that it is a huge extrapolation from the available data just as population have increased here in this classroom but what about elsewhere? students have come here, they are not being created, they came from somewhere else here. So similarly when we understand that the human population is not a closed system for souls there are other sources and that problem does not come that is your question? any other question? so the question is what explains God? yeah, every system of knowledge begins with certain definitions and without understanding those definitions we cannot move forward in any branch of knowledge in geometry something with no dimensions is called a point something with one dimension is called as a line now a line is a set of points if I use the logic of algebra how can accumulation of zero dimension entities create a one dimensional entity it is like a sum of zeros creating one it does not make sense so this is axiom in geometry so every field begins with certain definitions so the definition of God is because of all causes now this definition is the foundation for explaining everything based on a God centred world now any explanatory setup any school of any body of knowledge it requires some terminal point without the terminal point nothing will move forward so in materialistic world we used to see where did the original matter come from that itself again has to have an assumption it was just there science for example if science is from entirely non-spiritual perspective it may say that the laws of nature exist as they are so the now going forwards from this this is the beginning definition of God because we live in a world of causal effect so we tend to think that every cause every effect must have a cause if a child reads a novel for the first time oh there is a hero, there is a heroine there is a villain and then after reading the whole novel the child comes to know there is an author where is the author in the book the author is not in the story line the author is not in the time line the author meet the story line in the time line and the author exists outside similarly God exists outside the framework of time and space and even from the point of view of pure logic that the cause of everything cannot have a cause if it has a cause then that will be the cause of everything so we have to take the chain of causality to some terminal point even science has confirmed that the universe itself is not eternal it had a beginning point so the causal chain wherever it stops that stopping point is God materialism holds that matter is some tiny bit of matter is the cause so they say that that is a singularity which has infinite energy infinite temperature, infinite visible mass which is beyond mathematical description, beyond physical realisation it is here we have science proposing something, necessitating something which is beyond science, are you getting this the point I am making, any school of thought has to come to a terminal point and within a materialistic world view science comes to a terminal point which goes beyond science if the science is materialistic but the spiritual world view doesn’t require a terminal point which is beyond its world view the spiritual world view says that yes there is God and there is matter and there is consciousness these are the energies of God and so if there was just a lump of matter that could not create anything if there is an intelligent builder, that builder can create things so God is the cause of everything and God is the point where all explanations begin and alternatives to God which are matter, if we say matter matter itself does not have causal ability to produce anything and a materialistic world view requires something which is outside of itself to begin with, a God centred world view does not require anything outside of itself to begin with, in that sense God if you understand the definition that is the cause of all causes then the search for all explanations ends in God thank you very much Hare Krishna