Positive Thinking 08 – I of IDEA – Understanding our identity boosts our positivity

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Hare Krishna welcome back to our discussion on positive thinking we are discussing now about the first element of the idea idea is an acronym which describes in a nutshell the essential spiritual wisdom of the Vedic literature which is the foundation for sustainable positive thinking so I-D-E-A identity, divinity, eternity and activity in that I is what we are discussing identity normally when someone asks us who are you we tell our name we tell our profession we tell our position we may tell our nationality all these are parts of our identity but at the same time these are not our core identity we can change our name, we can change our nationality we can change our profession we can change our position and yet despite all these components of our identity changing we remain the same so there are components of our identity and there is a foundation of our identity and spiritual wisdom focuses on that foundational identity where does my sense of I-ness come from I may say I am an Indian even our gender I am a male or I am a female that is based on a sense of I-ness so where does the sense of I-ness come from that actually comes from our spiritual core and all the designations, gender, race nationality, profession all these are external they are external components of our identity but the foundation of our identity is our spiritual core and that the Bhagavad Gita explains is the soul Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita that dehino sminyatha dehe kaumaram yauvanam jara utha dehantara prapte dhirastra pranamohiyate he says dehino asminyatha dehe that inside this body dehino asminyatha dehe inside the body there is dehi and the body undergoes change Krishna, we talked about how we can change our our profession our position Krishna talks about our the change that happens through our age we say initially I am a child I am a young person I am a middle aged person, I am an elderly person I am a senior citizen so Krishna does not deny these identities but he takes us beyond these identities and he says these facets of our identity change but still we remain the same and that unchanging core is the soul so modern science also is slowly pointing towards our spiritual side so for example the phenomena of consciousness is being increasingly recognized by science as irreducible so although we can find correlates for our emotions in the brain nowhere in the brain is there anything which tells us who is the experiencer who is the experiencer no part of the brain makes triggering of no part of the brain makes us feel that I am the experiencer it makes us make certain chain of actions happen there are famous Nobel laureate physicist John Eccles and others said that the source of consciousness is extra cerebral the brain is like a computer but it is programmed by something outside of itself and that programmer that is the soul so it is non cerebral it is beyond our brain it is non material so there are also many case persuasive case studies of near life experiences and past life memories which point towards the existence of something which is beyond the body in near death experiences there have been documented cases of people whose body and brain had completely shut down and yet they were conscious if consciousness were just a result of certain neuro chemical actions in the brain then how could we be conscious when we are not conscious this points to the eternal the source of consciousness being beyond the body, beyond the brain and that is the soul so similarly past life memories means that there are people who have recollected facts about someone else’s life which facts which they did not, they could not have known by normal means, intimate facts not only have they had recollection of facts but they had recognition of people not only recognition of people they have also had they have also had behavioral patterns similar to what those people had in their previous lives and not only that they have also had birth marks and birth defects similar to what the deceased person had in the previous life so that person was like a circle who lived here and this person is a circle who lives here so there is no commonality between them at the material level, the commonality is at the level of the soul so the same soul has transmigrated from this body to that body and that’s how the person is able to remember so past life memories also point towards the existence of a soul beyond the body, so through the phenomena of consciousness, through near-death experiences through past life memories we can understand the existence of a soul these are scientific pointers and the author Colin Wilson has stated that the sheer amount of evidence the sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting that you cannot see the mountain so there is substantial evidence for those who want to see it and of course the evidence for the spiritual side of our being that is outside the subject of a course on positive thinking but suffice it to say that science offers pointers and spirituality offers us clear pictures clearer understandings of what science points towards and the Bhagavad Gita explains, now the question often came in western philosophical circles that if there is a spiritual side to our being, how does the spirit interact with matter the Bhagavad Gita offers a sophisticated tripartite vision of reality wherein there is spiritual reality, there is subtle material reality and there is gross material reality and through the media of the subtle material reality the soul interacts with the gross matter just as we interact with a computer’s hardware through the means of a software so we, the user is the soul, the software is like the subtle body which we can roughly equate with the mind and the hardware is like the body so our present existence in that sense is three dimensional body, mind and soul and all these comprise our present being but our essential being is spiritual so without going too much into the philosophy let’s focus on our subject that is, okay, how does understanding our identity help us in positive thinking, so in three ways we can say at a broad level first is freedom from negativity created by bodily issues by bodily misidentification now we we may dream for, dream about and aspire for, strive for a dream figure as they say but all of us we may find that there is some deficiency we may be too tall or too short or too fat or too thin or too fair or too dark and often our bodily identity leaves us dissatisfied and that causes negativity but all, whenever we feel our bodily identity is not good enough or we feel that I am not good enough and that makes us insecure so say, a woman who is obese and is always worried about her obesity feeling inferior and insecure as not being sufficiently feminine and attractive because of the obesity you know, if she understands that I am not the body then just that understanding that I am not the body can actually free one from so much negativity now obesity can be a problem and needs to be dealt with but obesity doesn’t have to become a source of constant negativity and cause trouble because of that so we can become freed from the negativity when we understand that oh, I am not the body a lot of negative complex can be we can become free from it and secondly, freedom from negativity by identification with the body, with the mind so the mind is as I said like a software and just as software can get corrupted with malware or viruses similarly, our mind can get corrupted by negative thought pattern, negative habits and overall it may just become make us into a glutton for suffering, glutton for negativity we stake in more and more negativity and we cause ourselves suffering by that but when we understand that we are different from our mind when we understand, ok, this is a program which is there, but I am not this program, this thought pattern is coming but I don’t have to accept this thought pattern I am different from my thought pattern and I can change my thought pattern, just as we can change the program, when we understand that we are different from our mind, that itself creates a safe and empowering distance from the negative thought patterns of the mind and thus we can deal with the inner negativity also with more confidence, further freedom from the negativity caused by fear of death we all eventually are going to die and yet we very vigorously deny our mortality so that we can continue to live and live as we hope but when we understand that death is not the end, death is not a termination, this is just a transition, we as souls will be going from this body to another body after our death, when we understand this then we won’t get too caught, too infatuated we won’t get overwhelmed distressed, horrified afflicted by the thought of death, we can face death with dignity and with confidence if we have cultivated spiritual consciousness how we cultivate spiritual consciousness is something we can discuss in the later part of our course presently we can consider the example of Socrates he, when he was arrested and he was going to be poisoned he said that you can’t even catch me how will you kill me and he himself willingly drank hemlock, the cup of poison by which he was killed, so the point is that he was fearless even in the face of death and that fearlessness came because of his understanding of our spiritual identity of one’s spiritual identity so we can also become free from the fear of death by understanding our spiritual identity so to summarize the I aspect is identity we have various aspects to our identity our nationality, our gender our education, our position but these are peripheral central identity is that we are souls and there are strong scientific pointers to the reality of our spiritual side through the irreducibility of consciousness through near-death experiences, through past life memories and further we discussed how the understanding that we are a soul, how does the soul interact with the body, through the mind which is like the software, the soul is the user and the body is the hardware, so our existence is three dimensional and understanding our spiritual identity can free us from the negativity caused by misidentification of the body, negativity caused by misidentification of the mind and negativity caused by the fear of death thank you, we will continue and discuss about divinity in our next talk Hare Krishna