Overcoming discouragement 2 – Empower yourself with gratitude

[Talk at Brisbane, Australia]
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Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I think we are destined to have a small table laughter laughter no problem no offence intended laughter laughter so grateful for all situations means that I am grateful even for this situation that has come in my life sometimes some terrible things happen and its not possible human to be grateful for it, its extremely difficult you suddenly say we lose our job or we are diagnosed with some terrible disease or some relationship suddenly breaks up or breaks down or whatever, so many ways bad things can happen and and sometimes we may have this idea that a devotee should see that everything that happens is good, but sometimes there is this, in India or maybe here also some people have something they call a gita saar the essence of the gita and about the statement they put it there is that everything that happened is good, everything that is happening is good, everything that will happen will also be good now I have read the gita hundred I have recited the gita at least hundreds and hundreds of times I have never found any verse like this in the gita nowhere at all in fact the whole thrust of the gita is not about what happens but about what we do because the original question was what should I do what is my dharma what should I do and if you look at the Mahabharata of which the gita is a part then when Draupadi is dishonoured, when wicked people try to dishonour her nobody tells her whatever happened is good it would be horrible to say something like that so there is a difference between saying that everything that happens is good and everything that happens can be for good this is a bad thing but some good can be much more so if we start thinking that I should not feel bad when bad things happen and it is not humanly possible human emotions are just they are changing but still not laughter so laughter so when bad things happen it is natural to feel bad about it we are not meant to suppress our emotions and say so discouragement is also a natural human emotion it’s A if something terrible has happened and somebody doesn’t feel discouraged we could say that they are very advanced but we could also be concerned have they become emotionally so deadened that they don’t feel anything at all so we don’t want that kind of deadening of our emotions so when an emotion comes upon us we accept I am feeling discouraged right now but we can’t rise above that discouragement that’s different from denying or suppressing at one level we can see emotions simply as psychological reactions to life events just as there can be physical reactions to life events say if the temperature drops then we may start feeling cold and we may start feeling shivering now different people bodies are different some people even a little temperature drops they need multiple layers of warm clothes and some people lot of temperature drops and still they go with just normal clothes so different bodies are different if somebody says I am feeling cold and we tell them don’t feel cold what do you mean don’t feel cold that’s not in my control I am feeling cold now what you can say just because I am feeling cold it’s not that I will not do my service I will not do my work I will still do it you can’t deny the physical reaction but we don’t have to let the physical reaction determine our action on a life event so just as feeling cold is a physical reaction to a life event similarly feeling discouraged is a psychological reaction to a life event and it’s natural if we invested a lot of effort, a lot of energy in something and it didn’t work out we will feel discouraged so it’s just human and it’s not that we have to suppress that and different people have different capacities to resist cold, tolerate cold similarly some people can go on with a lot of setbacks and still maintain their morale some people a few setbacks and they start coming back they start feeling very discouraged so we all have to understand how our mind is and work with it so if discouraging situations come in our life and we feel discouraged there is no need to repress that emotion or feel guilty about it this is how I am feeling but how can I move forward how can I move forward means that ok I am feeling cold right now so what do I do I need to get more warm clothes then I can go out so that if I am feeling discouraged then I have to do what it takes to encourage myself and then move on no need to deny or suppress the discouragement but move forward so how do we move forward we are talking about how we can change our vision of the situation yes this is terrible we can’t be grateful for the bad situation for the discouragement that has come in our life but we can be grateful in all situations how? by looking at the big picture I will explain what that means we talk about the three things the title of this session is ACE your life with gratitude or ACE is A C E when bad things happen look for the good around the bad that’s A C is look for the good that helps you to combat the bad and E is look for the good that will emerge from the bad and after I explain this we will be having an exercise where you will have to write something down in your diary about this so that you can apply you can be able to analyse and apply that so in the Bhagavad Gita so this is look for the good around the bad look for the good to combat the bad and look for the good that emerges from the bad what do we mean exactly by this that in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna gives a very interesting metaphor of comparing consciousness with ocean in 217 he states that so he says for the spiritually advanced souls their consciousness is like an ocean and disturbing desires or disturbing situations that come into their consciousness they are like rivers when a river enters into an ocean the river is not much disturbed the ocean is not much disturbed because the ocean is so big similarly he says if our consciousness is big then life’s ups and downs will be like rivers they will come in but they will not disturb us in contrast if our consciousness is like a puddle is like a puddle and then a river comes into the puddle devastation all around water will over flood and things will get devastated so if we make our consciousness like a ocean then it will be easier to apply these principles so now what determines the size of our consciousness whether it is like a ocean or whether it is like a puddle that is determined by what is present in the consciousness what is present as our foremost attachment in the consciousness say if now the cricket season is going on, cricket world cup is going on so somebody is very attached to cricket and then their consciousness is filled with cricket one of my friends is in London, he was telling me that his friend had come from India to London just for the cricket matches, so he said that he purchased a ticket in black he purchased a series of tickets so he purchased a ticket for the India New Zealand match which cost him 800 pounds which is like 70,000 Indian rupees for one ticket and that is more than the cost of the India England flight also in fact to and fro flight and then he had purchased the ticket so he lost all that money and he also purchased a ticket for the India Pakistan match and that had cost him in black 2000 pounds that’s almost like 1.8 lakhs or something like that and now he is this was like a huge part of his life savings and he is desperate, he said he was an atheist but I am praying that the match happen now so if the consciousness is filled with cricket and then if the match doesn’t happen or if your favourite team loses it will be devastating last time I think in the final 2-3 finals the Sri Lankan team went to the finals and lost so after that about 12 people in Sri Lanka committed suicide the players who played did not commit suicide but the spectators the fans the fans fire away they committed because their consciousness was so obsessed in that so if our consciousness is too attached to something and that is the thing that fills our consciousness then when something some disruption happens in that then it is like a river coming into a puddle everything will be destroyed if my consciousness is attached to say my job I am a software engineer I am this and that and somehow if I lose that job then it will be an unbearable devastation now of course all these things are important our job, our family, our health all these are important but they are not all important so whatever is our attachment how big is the object of our attachment that will determine the size of our consciousness if you are attached to small things then small things can disrupt that if you are attached to a cricket match you say cricket is not a small thing well ok, you may feel it is a big thing but there are people who are starving there are big big issues in the world as compared to that, that is not that big a thing so if our consciousness is like an ocean then the reverse of worldly ups and downs coming in won’t disrupt this so the process of bhakti yoga is meant to help us make us attached to Krishna when Krishna comes into our consciousness our consciousness becomes like an ocean and with Krishna present in our consciousness as our foremost attachment, then even if bad things happen to us we don’t get that discouraged actually some discourage from there, but Krishna is always my lord, I am his servant let me keep serving him I will come back to this theme little later again becoming attached to Krishna but let’s look at these points now the so why I talk about this ocean example is that if our consciousness is like a puddle then even if there are hundred things good in our life we won’t be able to see them also because this one thing has become bad and that is the end of my life for somebody who is like a who is a mad cricket fan that my favourite team lost I will end my life now you are young, you are healthy, you have a good family you got a job, how many people have that you can’t even think about those things but we need to expand our consciousness so yes this source of discouragement is there in my life, this has happened but ok what are the good things in my life look for the good around the bad when something bad happens, our consciousness gets hooked to that, why did this happen why did this happen and that entrains us but ok, this bad has happened and I don’t know precisely why it happened, what has happened what are the good things in my life if you start looking at it that way oh there are a lot of good things in my life at a very basic level if we are alive that means there is more right than wrong in our lives laughter we are all probably of different ages there are some small children also but probably 25 to 50, 60, 70 whatever, so now there are millions of people who die before they come to the age that we are at so there are certainly many things right in our lives so look for the good around the bad ok ok is that all ok when we look for the good around the bad that essentially means we count our blessings and this is something which if we regularly do list what are the good things in my life so the nature of today’s world is that it’s filled with not just materialism but aggressive materialism, aggressive materialism means we have the whole advertising industry advertisements are so widespread in today’s world that most of us may not even think that maybe more than 100 or 200 years ago there are no advertisements at all and now we see them everywhere, now of course because of mass production of goods there has to be lot of distribution so people have to promote but one result of exposing ourselves to too many attractive tempting stimuli is that we keep seeing all the things that we don’t have the whole consumer economy runs on greed or you could say on consumer dissatisfaction what you have is not good enough get this, get this, get this and in general in every situation in our life we can look at what we have or we can look at what we don’t have if we look at what we have we will feel satisfied if we look at what we don’t have we will feel dissatisfied let’s take an example suppose after this programme there is prasad there is no suppose, prasad is there but suppose after this programme there is a special kind of prasad where everybody is going to get a special item everybody is going to get one special item and everybody is going to get a different item so now we are all taking prasad and say I have a delicious item in my plate but I am looking at what is in your plate and what is in your plate and what is in your plate and although I have something delicious, seeing all it is there in others plates makes me, I can’t even taste what is in my plate so unfortunately for many of us something like this happens there are many good things in our life but the world around us shows aggressively shows us all the good things that we don’t have and when we look at that we all want to be happy in life isn’t it? no we want to be happier than others to be happy is possible to be happier than others is impossible because if others is like an infinite number I will become happier than this person but there is somebody else who is happier than me and usually we think that other people are happier than what they are that is also a problem but instead of having this comparative, just look for the good around the bad this bad thing has happened I got this disease or I lost my job or this happened what are the good things in my life and if we make it a regular habit to look at these things note them down, remember them then we can cultivate a consciousness that is more positive, that is more grateful Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita 17th chapter 16th text says that discipline of the mind is is cultivating satisfaction cultivating satisfaction is a very interesting idea what it means is normally we think of satisfaction as an emotion I am feeling satisfied I am feeling dissatisfied but what Krishna is saying is satisfaction is not just an emotion satisfaction is also a decision that means if I decide that I will focus on the things that I have in my life the things that are right in my life that decision to focus on the things that are good in my life that will lead to the emotion of satisfaction but if we don’t make that decision then the emotion may sometimes come and most of the time it will not come so yes there are discouraging situations in my life but what is right in my life that is the first thing this is a regular if you could make a regular habit of writing down the things that are right in your life and not just writing them down thanking even people who are secular or atheistic, many psychological surveys have concluded about the have confirmed rather the benefits of cultivating gratitude being grateful is a very health affirming and life affirming emotion now it’s interesting that even atheists they also want to cultivate gratitude oh I am grateful no who I am grateful to I am grateful in general ok well gratitude is good but to be grateful in general is like to be married in general yes I am married who are you married to, no I am married in general what do you mean by that there has to be an object for the gratitude so if there are things which are good in our life some of them we have made an effort and we have made them good but many are good inspired without our doing anything so how are they good, there is some higher controller because of which they are good so gratitude is definitely a very positive virtue and that can help us counter discouragement so look for the good around the bad and now if we have made this list and we keep this regularly with us we will do an exercise after few minutes but then we can focus look on second point C look for the good that helps you to combat the bad that means that ok there are many good things in life suppose say suddenly we come to know that we have lost our job it can be distressing it can be devastating but ok what is the good that I have ok I have experience I have some qualifications I have some contacts I have good health, I have a social circle these are things which I can combat so basically when distress comes in our life if we dwell on the distress we start feeling powerless but if you look at what we have, the resources that we have that can help us to deal with the distress then we feel grateful I mentioned earlier that I was very sick for a long time and doctors couldn’t diagnose so after a long time after one and half or two years of undiagnosed sickness finally when I went to doctor doctor was looking very green and he said you have got TB my first reaction was thank god and the doctor looked at me and said you have gone crazy you got TB, why are you saying thank god now I said thank god because at least now you know what is the disease so it is bad that I have TB but it is good that at least I know what I have so that is now we know how to combat it how to deal with it otherwise we just don’t even know what to do so look for the good that helps us to combat the bad suppose we get some terrible disease then okay at least the disease is curable at least there is treatment maybe I have health insurance or I am in a country which offers free treatment look for the good that helps us to combat the bad and when we start focussing on that good then we start recognising that okay things are bad but they are not so bad that I have to become dejected, that I have to become hopeless I have some resources to combat the bad and actually just a year or so ago I met a I met a devotee’s daughter at 12 she was diagnosed with cancer and at 15 it was incurable at 15 she passed away but she was always so cheerful and when I met her I was talking with her and she said that I said what helped her, how was she so cheerful so she said that actually I read in the Bhagavad Gita this world is a place of mysteries so she said that there is enough unhappiness in the world the world does not need one more unhappy person what an attitude she says let me be as happy as I can let me try to be as cheerful as I can sometimes some people become sick and then they are sick in the body but they become so irritable they complain so much they become sick and their caregivers become sick of them so if we don’t do that we can combat it at least I have some caregivers I have someone to support me to take care of me be grateful for that so if there is nothing, if the disease is also incurable still we have our consciousness I can focus on consciousness of Krishna I can focus on whatever is a source of happiness for me, I connect with that so look for the good that can help us to combat the bad and the third E is look for the good that may emerge from the bad now emerge from the bad means that although bad things happen in our life God is expert enough Krishna is expert enough that he can bring good even out of the bad so in fact if you look at nature, this is broadly the way nature works nature breaks things to make them better clouds in the sky can look very beautiful but if the clouds only stay in the sky nothing happens then the ground no longer looks beautiful the ground becomes sparse and dry the clouds have to break so that the rains come then the ground looks very attractive but you have to blow it blow means again you have to break the ground then when grains come grains they have to be broken and made into flour powder ground then only they become edible grains are not edible otherwise and sometimes I go to devotee’s house for prasad and sometimes devotees make prasad and all the items are arranged so artistically I feel as if eating this is committing violence to art it’s so beautifully arranged but if you don’t eat it then you will have no food isn’t it so beautiful things have to be broken down only then we will get energy so like that nature often breaks things to make them better so we had a particular plan for our life and that plan is currently disrupted that plan is not working but some good will emerge from it if we have that attitude then again we can have positivity now we can say when will the good emerge we don’t know but if we are looking for the good we will notice it if we are not even looking for the good what will happen is that sometimes some blessing comes in our life and we look at the blessing as why are you disturbing me we neglect it so we have to look for the good that will emerge from the bad and if we have that attitude we will find that a lot of good will come in our lives if you look at Shri Prabhupada’s life he is probably the example for us of how many things can go wrong in anyone’s life he was he wanted to assist his spiritual master’s mission so he thought that I am already a grahastha so it will be unfair if I just abandon my family so let me work hard let me earn a lot of money and I will support my spiritual master’s mission through donations and he worked very hard to expand his business but somehow he tried first in Kolkata then he tried in Prayag, then he tried in Mumbai but various things went wrong and although he worked hard throughout his life what to speak of giving donations he did not even achieve significant level of financial stability also so that was a big endeavour it didn’t work then he thought let me assist my spiritual master’s mission so he started writing back to Godhead magazine and he was distributing it himself he was writing it himself printing it at that time Prabhupada was sacrificing so much that he would have so little money he would choose whether he would use the money little money that he had to buy his breakfast or he would buy money to print the back to Godhead magazine and he would use that to buy paper, not buy money, buy paper to print back to Godhead then he would go to the printer the printer would say Swamiji have you had your breakfast he says it doesn’t matter he would arrange for something for Prabhupada sometimes so to that extent Prabhupada would go, but what happened nobody was interested he would go and try to give people who were not interested and then he was just walking in the streets and a cow came and knocked him down and he was lying alone on the streets of Delhi then he tried to start an organisation, League of Devotees he worked very hard and got a beautiful, got a nice property in Jhansi and he had a very big government dignitary to come and inaugurate and newspapers published covered it quite a bit and then there was a clique against him and the very people who were supporting him they conspired and he had to leave that place the place which was going to be the international headquarters he had to leave it there was no quarter for him over there and he had to leave then he came to Delhi and he thought let me work with my godbrothers and he said I’ll assist them in their mission, I’ll help them publish their magazines so Prabhupada was so sincere and zealous about it that he talked with the printer and he persuaded the printer to double the quantity of magazines to be printed without any extra cost but then his godbrother told why are you making changes, you should just do what I am telling you to do we don’t want all this expansion business so his fingers his wings were clipped over there and then he had to leave from there then after that he decided to come to America at that time he had no money, no followers no support practically speaking the only material resource Prabhupada had at that time was his body that was also 69 year old body but even that resource collapsed, he got two devastating heart attacks somehow he survived that and he came to America and he came to Butler Pennsylvania and he was living there and he was there treated like a like a museum exhibit how strange Swami from India, people would come to see him and take his photo but not hear from him then Prabhupada came from there to New York then he was staying at a particular place and a generator over there stole Prabhupada’s tape recorder and he took it away and that was the only possession practically he had of any significance and from there he came to Lower East Side and there was one American who seemed very interested and it seemed as if he would become the first devotee Prabhupada even wrote to his patrons in India saying that he will become the first western devotee and that person David went high on drugs and he came to attack Prabhupada and Prabhupada is a 70 year old man, he used to flee for his life from there so every single thing that he had done just backfired backfired everybody most people have big ambitions in their lives say if somebody is a small child he says what do you want to become? I want to become the president of America that’s the most powerful person I want to become but then as he grew up ok I am in New Zealand I cannot become the president of America ok maybe I will become the prime minister of New Zealand ok as you grow further up I will just become the wealthiest person in my country ok then after sometime as you grow up life keeps beating us with reversals with discouragements I will become at least the wealthiest person in my family and then still life keeps beating us by the time we graduate if I get a job it will be good so the point I am making is that discouragements dishearten us and they decrease the size of our ambitions but Prabhupada it was not like that one after another he faced reversals and at the age of 69 he had practically no success not worthy success in his preaching for 40 years and what did he say I want to go to America now people at that time thought he is crazy he has no following in India and if he can’t persuade people in India what is he going to persuade people in America but Prabhupada’s vision was because Indians are attracted towards Americans if he persuades Americans then it will persuade Indians also so Prabhupada’s dreams remained big and once one of his disciples wrote to him and said that oh none of my god brothers are supporting me my god family is constantly causing me discouragement so Prabhupada said my god family also gave me nothing but depression compression and frustration so but he said we should not become discouraged because we are operating on a different platform our focus is Krishna we are trying to serve Krishna so why I am telling all this background is that Prabhupada there are so many bad things that happened but he just persevered and when he persevered what was the good that emerged in the last 10 years of his life he built 108 temples wrote 70 books inspired thousands, millions of people to raise their consciousness to come towards Krishna consciousness went around the globe 14 times and it was a spectacular success and then we understand that all the difficulties that Prabhupada went through before that they increased his glory that his devotion was so great that despite all these difficulties he persevered and then so look for the good that emerged from the bad at that time Prabhupada did not know what could emerge but he persevered and by that extraordinarily good emerged so he had to go through extraordinarily bad things but by that extraordinarily good things also came so even if right now things are difficult we can just be patient so the standard example from nature that you can get for that is see if a new bird is born a new bird is born the birds are called Vijay twice born first they are born inside the shell so now when the bird is born inside the shell at that time it starts exerting force to break the shell and it tries to break the shell so what happens it manages to crack the shell and maybe a little wing comes out and then the shell’s edges crack again it snaps back into place and the bird feels that pain but in the bird it pushes again and as it keeps pushing slowly slowly laboriously the shell breaks apart and when the shell breaks apart then the bird emerges and when the bird emerges that bird is able to fly so there were some researchers who thought that we can nowadays we are trying to artificially accelerate natural processes for example make plants grow faster so they thought why should these birds in the shell have to go through so much painful process of trying to break the shell so when the bird is born we can see the bird egg moving we will break the shell and get the bird out but what happens by that is the bird’s wings don’t develop and although it’s a bird in body actually it’s not a bird with wings heavy enough to build it, to hold its weight and to fly and that bird just stays on the ground so for that bird the struggle of going through breaking the shell is essential for the good to emerge of it being able to fly so similarly for us sometimes the bad that we go through may be necessary for some good to emerge so if we have this understanding then we can even amid discouragement shifting positive so we will have a short exercise now so you can you can look at I will tell the exercise but before that any questions any questions about this till now sir that was the question I had in mind but you know the destiny going back to this lecture where you gave the example of this water tank and the water going in and the destiny and the output and we don’t know the time so that’s where the frustration comes because of that delay but I think I got a reply last sentence that’s what I saw Krishna Consciousness helps there during that time that I am doing the right thing and the result should come yeah that’s true so Krishna Consciousness is a longer long term perspective by which we can perceive it okay there is no question two people were enthusiastic for the mic but no that’s right okay so I will summarise and then we can have this exercise and then we can continue after that so I spoke to now on the theme of how we can look at discouraging situations more positively so because of destiny some unfavourable situation is there right now in our lives so what do we do we can’t be grateful for all situations but we can be grateful in all situations to try to think that everything that happens is good is almost like denying our humanity because when bad things happen we naturally feel bad the Bhagavad Gita doesn’t say that everything that happens is good what it says is that everything that happens can be for good and when bad things happen and we feel bad we can just see them as see that as psychological reaction to life event just like when the temperature drops we feel cold so we see that as a physical reaction to life event seeing it this way helps us to accept that I am feeling bad but just as we don’t let the cold control our life similarly I won’t let the discouragement control my life except that I am discouraged right now but just as we learn to how do I deal with the cold so how can I encourage myself and move on so for encouraging ourselves I talked about these three things so basic theme was that if our consciousness is like a puddle then one thing we are attached to and that thing goes wrong we will feel our whole life is ruined but if you can make your consciousness like an ocean then even if some things go wrong just like a river coming into the ocean it will not be so disturbed so we may be attached to many things in our life our job, our family, our health, our looks our social position and all these are important in their own places but if our foremost attachment is the biggest reality Krishna then any disruption in these would be too disruptive for us so to expand our consciousness means that when we face some difficulty we look for the good around the bad, I talked about counting our blessings satisfaction is not just an emotion but also a decision the advertising industry constantly makes us look at all the things we don’t have and feel dissatisfied it’s like we have a delicacy in our plate but we are looking at the delicacies in everyone else’s plate and we feel dissatisfied so make a habit of writing down the good things that are there in our lives then second is when we have this list if we face some specific difficulty look for the good that helps us to combat the bad so when the bad things have happened if we just look at the bad things we will feel resentful and powerless but if you look what is the resource I have to give you and when we find I have these resources when we feel some sort of perspective, some sort of power and that negativity goes down and thirdly look for the good that emerges from the bad and in that I talked about three things I talked about how nature breaks things to make them better whether it is clouds or earth or grains or even artistically arranged plate of food so then I talked about Prabhupada’s example of how so many reversals but through it all the glorification that was revealed at the end was extraordinary and then I talked about the bird inside the shell it has to go through that growth pain of breaking the shell with great effort that’s what makes it swing strong similarly for us the difficulties that we are facing they are meant to strengthen us they are meant to make us grow spiritually so when we are attached to something and that thing gets lost or that thing gets disrupted then at that time if we see there is an opportunity for me to grow, to shift my attachment from that thing to Krishna then that’s how that situation will help us to grow, it will increase our devotion our attachment to Krishna and then when we emerge from that situation we will be stronger so the with that hopeful positive attitude if we look for the good that may emerge then whenever the good comes we will see it we will be able to tap it so that was the talk which we had just now so now the exercise for you is we will have about 5 minutes for this so there are 3 parts, like with ACE there are 3 parts to it, first is that look, write 5 things that are good in your life and you can write spiritual things but don’t just write only spiritual things because when material problems come we feel spiritual is too impractical so look for the material things also that are good, but don’t keep only material, only spiritual write for 5 things that are good in your life and not just write it but something which you really value then second part is that you can look at think of some major thing that is troubling you something that is causing you discouragement and from those 5 things short list 2 or 3 which you feel you can use to combat that thing and the last is can you look back at your life and think of an incident when some good can emerge from a bad, you went through a bad situation but some good emerged from that, now that memory can help you have the faith that maybe some good will emerge now also from the bad, so 5 minutes for this points are clear 5 things which are good in your life 2 or 3 which can help you specifically combat a bad that is there in your life a difficulty that is there in your life and one instance of how something good has emerged from a bad in the past in your life thank you