Selfie – Self = IE – Two things that technology provides and two things that spirituality provides

[Talk at Bhakti Lounge, Wellington, New Zealand]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you for coming today.
And I will speak on the topic of the missing self in the Selfie. I got the thought for this topic recently I have been reading about the intellectual history of the West. I come from India.
India has also become westernised. So we see enormous amount of technological progress. And yet, despite having this technological progress, we see that people don’t seem to be happier.
Martin Luther King put it that, we have guided missiles and misguided men. So, we guided missiles. Phenomenal capacity to control the outer world.
And yet, the capacity to manage our inner emotions seems to be missing. So on Sunday, I will be speaking more specifically on the mind and the psychological issue. So, how are the Bhagavad Gita’s initiated yogatics, what insights it offers us.
Today, I will focus more on the imbalance and what its causes. So, the Selfie represents probably the most contemporary and widely used form of technology, a product of technology, fruit of technology that we are using today for our pleasure. We use the phones extensively and the selfies we take with our phones.
So, that represents technology and its gifts. And despite enormous gifts, we see that mental health problems especially are far far more than in the past. So, I will make this talk in four parts.
The Self and the Selfie. The difference between them is of two letters, I and E. So, I will talk about this I and E. What technology offers and what spirituality offers. So, through technology, broadly speaking, we get two things, information and entertainment.
Information, like never before, like was inconceivable a few hundred years ago, is available to us today. With the internet, Wikipedia, with so many online sources, whatever we want, we can just Google and get it. And with information comes power.
With it comes control. If you want to invest somewhere, you want to take some treatment, you want to choose a career option. For everything that we do, we need information.
And therefore, information brings with it great power. And information can be about the practical things that we do, information can be about how the broad world works around us. The information that we have is so huge, that we have access to is so huge, that today even a primary school student can have access to more information than what a doctorate might have had 50 years ago, and certainly 100 years ago.
So, the information and the control that it brings is huge. And along with that, another area where technology has transformed our life at a mass level is through entertainment. Now, technology has many, many aspects, but with respect to how it matters to us eventually.
Entertainment has always been a part of human life. It’s a part of every culture. The singing, dramas, dances, always been there in every civilisation that we know about.
But the sheer scale of entertainment and the variety of entertainment that is available today is unappreciated. Many people sometimes feel that in the past, when there was no TV, people must have done some boring acts. It was so boring.
There was a survey done in America, and they found that what is the psychological state of people over a period of time, in the course of their life, normal life? 5% of the time, they’re happy. 5% of the time, they’re distressed. And 90% of the time, they’re bored.
90% of the time, bored. So, entertainment, if you consider today, among all the various professionals in the world, entertainers are probably the most paid professionals. A surgeon can fix a broken leg, but a surgeon doesn’t get even one-tenth of as much pay as somebody who can kick a ball with a leg.
India is often considered to be a poor country. In India, we have the Indian Premier League, which is a cricket tournament. And this is a 55-day tournament.
And the amount of money that is spent on the IPL is enough to feed all the hungry people of India throughout the year. So, entertainers get paid phenomenal amounts of money. Now, this money, where are they being paid it from? It’s paid from you and me, from all of us.
And normally, what we value reflects our values. That means, if we are ready to pay so much money for entertainment, that means we consider it to be such a vital need. If food is unavailable, say there’s a drought, and sometimes some merchants may hoard the food and raise the prices.
We can’t live without food. So, no matter whatever price is charged, we pay for it. Because we need it.
So, similarly, if we feel that we need something very strongly, then we are ready to pay a lot for it. So, the fact that entertainers are able to earn so much means that entertainment is felt to be such a great need that people are ready to pay a huge amount for it. So, entertainment itself has always been a part of human society.
But the kind of mania that is associated with entertainment today, that is unprecedented. India, the whole Indian subcontinent, is quite cricket mad. So, this is near India, below India is Sri Lanka.
In Sri Lanka, in several cricket tournaments, they came to the finals and they lost. So, in the third tournament when they lost like that, several people in Sri Lanka committed suicide. Cricket fans.
Now, the cricketers themselves didn’t commit suicide, but the cricket fans committed. Because for them, cricket had become way, way too important in their own estate. They completely invested in that.
So much so that when a team lost, what is the use of living? So, information and entertainment, both of them are available to us in a huge degree today. But at the same time, is this leading to satisfaction? Is it leading to fulfilment? In India, the prominent educational institutes are the IITs, the Indian Institute of Technology. So, I was in an IIT recently, and one of the professors, very senior professor, he had come to meet me.
He was supposed to talk over there. He was telling that a major concern for the IIT students, for IIT management is that many youths are committing suicide. And these are the best students from the whole country.
And the IIT management found that almost all the students are committing suicide in a standard way. The way they would commit suicide was, there was a fan in the house, in the room which they were staying in. So, they would tie a rope to the fan and tie the rope around their neck.
And they would use some stick and they would use the stick to turn on the button of the fan. And as soon as the button would turn on, the fan would start moving. And you get a painful death.
So, there in the IIT, management meant in the sense, suicide is a huge danger and you deal with it. And they had an expert committee appointed and the expert committee came up with a recommendation, replace all the fans with air conditioners in the room. And they actually spent a huge amount of money in doing that.
Now, the fans are not causing people to commit suicides. So, unfortunately, we don’t know how to stop people at an internal level from committing suicide. So, at least stop the external cause.
External stimulus or external instrument. Yes, the IIT management also knows that we have to deal with things internally and that’s what the professor was talking with me. But the point is, that the way we live in the world, we often overemphasise externals.
And thus, we try to deal with issues at the external levels. So, the more information we have, the more entertainment we have. Information is considered to be more intellectual, more for learned people, more for thoughtful people.
Entertainment is just for fun. But we have both and still, we don’t seem to be happy. IIT is a place where students are very intelligent.
But still, they are succumbing to self-destructive behaviour. So, this I and E, I’ll talk now. So, what technology can provide us? But what spirituality can provide us? I’ll explain the term I and E. Intention and emotion.
Intention and emotion. What do I mean by these things? Let me backtrack a little bit. And go to the time when the technology through judgement started off in the Western world.
At the start of the age of science, roughly 16th, 17th centuries, at that time, the science observed the world around us. Scientists, they decided that this world is so complicated. So, Galileo said that everything is mathematics.
Pythagoras said that long ago. And Galileo reiterated that. So, they felt that the world out there is so complicated.
If you want to study it, we should focus on those aspects of reality of the world around us that are measurable. So, the world was divided in two characteristics. Nature, by the way.
The world is in nature. That’s called primary characteristics and secondary characteristics. So, primary characteristics are those which are measurable.
So, length, breadth, mass, speed. All the parameters that are measurable, they were focused on in science. Let’s study them.
And the idea is that if something is quantifiable, then it can be expressed and correlated through mathematical equations. And then you can make theories based on it and you can control it. And this approach led to a phenomenal amount of success in terms of not only explaining the pattern of behaviour of various material objects, but also understanding the principles underlying by which we could develop technology.
The very nature of human attention is that when our attention focusses on one thing, it becomes disfocused from other things. So, this happens not only at an individual level, it can happen also at a global level or at the level of humanity itself. So, as science became more and more successful and that success started nearly reaching the broad breadth of humanity in terms of technology, attention became focused more and more on the measurable aspects of nature.
And those parameters which are not measurable, they were relegated to the background. So, for example, intention and motion. These two are fundamental to the way we function in the world.
We all decide to do something and then we have certain amount of resolution or determination about doing that. And associated with it, we have certain motions. Now, both of these are very vital to the way we function in the world.
And neither of these are quantified. Neither intention nor motion can be quantified. So, if somebody is angry, I say, how angry are you on a scale? He says, I’ll take a scale and beat you first, then you’ll understand how angry I am.
We can’t quantify anger. I can say I’m a little angry, I’m very angry, I’m unbearably angry, but that’s not a measurable mathematical quantity. And although it’s not measurable, still it’s real.
The emotions that we experience are real. And similarly, all of us have different strength of intention. Sometimes you want to do something and no matter what obstacle comes, you’ll do it.
Sometimes, okay, I want to do it, if it works out, fine. If it doesn’t, I’m not so concerned about it. So, our emotion and intention usually shape the way we function in life.
And yet, they don’t figure in the scientific map of the world. Science, since the beginning of science, there has been a debate about what exactly does science do? Does it tell us what is reality? Or does it give us a model of reality? What is the difference between the two? A model is like a map. A map is very useful when you want to go on a journey.
Nowadays, when we drive, we have a Google map with us. It tells us to turn left, turn right. And the map can help us.
Okay, here there is this beautiful volume. Here there is this very scenic beach. Here there is this beautiful mountain.
And we can go there using the map. But the map is very valuable and vital for navigating the territory. But the map is not the territory.
Just by moving our finger on the map to a beautiful hillside scenery, we are not going to experience the beauty of the territory. The map is a model of the territory. Similarly, science, when it looks at the world, what does it offer us? Does it tell us about reality as it is? Or does it give us a model about reality? So this difference between model of reality and reality, let me give you an example to illustrate this.
Now suppose you are driving from here to some nearby city. Do you drive from here to Auckland? Or is there a question in between? Do you drive from here? Suppose you are driving from here to Auckland and you are going to meet your friend. And first time you are trying out a map.
You are trying out Google Maps. First time, turn left, you will come to this bridge. Turn right, now you will come to this mountain bridge.
And as each direction gives, we find that whatever is predicted as per the direction is true. So as each direction turns out to take us in the right way, our faith in it increases. This map is accurate.
And then finally, when we reach our friend’s home, we knock on the door. And they open and welcome you. And then you look at your map.
This map doesn’t show you. This map doesn’t show you, so you don’t exist. So everything in your brain doesn’t exist.
The map is not meant to show you. Show people. The map may be very powerful in navigating the territory.
But the map does not describe all of the territory. It is a tool, it is a model. So similarly, science is a model.
Now I start by saying our science divides reality, or the world around us, the observed world around us, into primary and secondary characteristics. So primary are length, height, breadth, speed, all these measurable qualities. Science focusses on that.
And science offers a correlation based on these parameters. Correlation using the laws of nature as understood by science. But what science considers as secondary characteristics, they are primary in our experience.
Now when you meet someone, say after that you go home and you know, I met somebody today. Okay, tell me something about him. Now how many of us are going to start by telling the height and the weight and all those parameters of that person.
Somebody is very tall or very short, you might tell that. Somebody is very fat or very thin, you might tell that. But when we interact with people, it’s not just the physical parameters that we obsess over.
They are one part of the person, they are definitely a part of the person. But it’s the personality of people that matters most to us. So the scientific map of the world does not take into account these non-measurable parameters.
So the two non-measurable parameters that are relevant for us are intention and emotion. They are left out of the map of science. And through technology, we may get more and more information and we may get more and more entertainment.
But without the right intention and without the right emotion, we cannot find satisfaction. The right intention means, technology can provide us a huge amount of information. But it is based on our intention that we choose which information we want to use.
Through the internet, we can learn hundreds of things. But people may use the internet for trivial things, for self-destructive things, for destroying others, for hurting others. So our intention is something which is up to us.
And our emotion. We all have an emotional side to us. But when I talk about our emotion, what I refer to is, what do we experience our emotions in relationship with? So the Sri Lankan cricket fans, their emotions were so centred on the cricket match that when their team lost, their emotions went so wild that they were ready to come to suicide.
So where to direct our intentions, where to invest our emotions? This is something for which technology can provide us a lot of options. But technology cannot tell us where to invest. Einstein said that we can have, we can talk about the scientific, we can talk about the ethical foundations of science.
But we can’t talk about the scientific foundation of ethics. We can say, is science being used ethically or unethically? But whether it is being used ethically or not, that is something which is intimate. Science itself is neither moral nor immoral.
It is amoral. Amoral means morality is not a parameter in science. Somebody can use science for ethical, moral purposes, somebody else can use it for immoral purposes.
What we should use it for, science itself does not tell us that. Science can give us arsenic. Now what we use it for, that’s up to us.
Now most people may not abuse science. Some people may abuse science. It’s not that science is responsible for people who abuse science.
The point is that scientific knowledge does not provide us this guidance. If a young boy gets arsenic, then from a science textbook he can come to know that if he puts arsenic in the breakfast of his grandmother, he can get to the inheritance quickly. Now whether he should do it or not, that is something entirely different source of knowledge is required.
So our happiness depends not so much on what information we have or what entertainment we have. These are definitely parameters in what can make us happy. But our happiness depends primarily on how our intention and our emotion are directed.
And for this, for directing our intention and emotion properly, in a way that is healthy for us, this is where spiritual knowledge comes into the picture. This non-measurable aspect of reality, that is actually a part of who we are. So the Bhagavad Gita explains that our current existence is three level.
There is body, mind and soul. So we could roughly compare it to the computer system, between the hardware, the software and the user. The hardware is like the body, the software like the mind and the user is the soul.
The scientific progress focusses largely on improving the hardware, on making things better and better at the physical level. But at the internal level, the level of the mind and the level of the consciousness, the soul, things are not addressed by science. So what are we meant to live for? Bad knowledge is what we can get from spiritual texts.
So this consciousness, which is who we essentially are, this consciousness, the Bhagavad Gita explains, is eternal. It is coming from a non-material particle, that is the Atma. And this consciousness is the source of our intention and the source of our emotion.
It is the source of all the actions that we do. And to the extent the consciousness is pure, to the extent our intention and our emotion will be directed in a healthy way. I was at a mental health care centre in New Jersey, near New York.
I was giving a talk to the mental health care providers there. We had a lot of questions and answers and discussions. So one of the points that they were raising is that when people become mentally disturbed, there can be various levels of disturbances at the mental level.
But when people are mentally disturbed, basically their inner compass goes haywire. The most extreme of these mental health disturbances could be people who are psychopaths. They don’t feel any pain or remorse when they do something wrong.
Some of them are even sadistic, where they get pleasure in causing pain to others. And normally for all of us, our emotions, we all experience emotions, but there is a sense of perspective in the emotion that we experience. Say somebody steps on us, as I step on our foot, we feel angry, we just push them off.
Now, suppose they step on us and we push them off, and we push them very forcefully, they fall down and injure their leg. You feel apologetic, that is overreaction. So, our emotions, they become disproportionate.
Sometimes there are cases of road rage. When I first came to the western world, a major difference I found on the roads in India and the west is that in the west people hardly ever blow horns. Considering if somebody blows a horn at you, that means you made a serious mistake in driving.
In India, every car has written there, horn please. The idea is, don’t ram into me, at least blow a horn so that I move aside. So, the point is that in India, driving is much more difficult.
And because driving is so much more orderly in the western world, so if somebody does something disorderly, it is quite upsetting. So, there are cases of road rage, where people, just if somebody does something wrong in driving, and somebody honks at them, they get so angry, especially in America, where people have guns freely with them. So, there are cases when somebody honks, and a person picks up a gun and shoots that person.
Now, most of the time when people do something like this, they themselves think, what can I do? What can I do? Why did I do that? But, if we do not have, if we are not able to manage our emotions in a proportionate way, then, quite often, technology can actually worsen our emotions. Everybody gets angry. But, if a person is a frail person, they may even slap someone in order to burden them much.
But, if somebody gets angry and they have a machine gun with them, you kill a hundred people before they are controlled. So, what happens, the greater the control we have externally, the more power we have, the more power our emotions get to do harm. Conversely, of course, to do good also.
The point I am making here is, that technology not only does not provide us means to channel our intention and emotion, but rather, if our emotion and intention are not channelled, technology can lead to great havoc. Technology is not the cause. We do not blame technology for anything.
The point here is not to criticise technology. The point is to contextualise technology. Contextualise means understand what it provides and what it does not provide.
So, it is spirituality that tells us that our life has a higher purpose. The Bhagavad Gita explains that we are souls on a journey of spiritual evolution. Spiritual evolution, it simply means evolution of our intention and evolution of our emotion.
Children, when they are small, they make a sound, they make a sound chasm. And a wave comes and breaks it. They start crying.
Their emotions are caught in small things. Their intentions are quite small. What do you want to do today? I want to play with my friends.
So, as we grow up, our emotions and intentions are also meant to grow. We may still have our childhood toys. And if a toy breaks, still we feel bad.
But we would feel as bad as we would if we were children. Because we grew up. Our emotions have now become invested in bigger things.
Our intentions are meant to be directed towards bigger things. So, just as biological growth itself is meant to lead to the elevation, the evolution of our emotions and our intentions, this journey is further taken forward by spirituality. What spirituality tells us is that our emotions and our intentions are meant to be directed towards something eternal.
In the world around us, there are many temporary things. And all these things, if we invest our emotions in them, if we direct our intentions towards them, we will get some pleasure. We could have a wide variety of things.
Somebody can just watch sports matches and think, I enjoy this. Somebody can think, I want to earn a lot of money. And in that, when I have a big house, when I have a big car, then, I’m happy.
We could say that’s more productive than just wasting time playing video games or watching games. And this is where most people’s emotions and intentions are directed. But what is the result of this? The result, we could say is, I call this as WWS.
What is WWS? If you want to say how people’s lives are mostly spent, when they are at this level, when their intentions and emotions are caught in material things. Everybody has to work. Work, work, work.
In 1920, I think, there was a social critic, he said that 50 years down the line, the biggest problem in society will be that machines will do all our work and we’ll have nothing to do. So what will we do with all the idle time that we have? That is the biggest crisis in society. It has happened like that.
All the machines have come, people are working. And when we work, work, work, we get tired. And then we come back home, or nowadays along the home, we want a break.
So we watch TV, we watch movies, we watch videos. So they watch, watch, watch. Now when we watch, we watch TV, watch movies, watch videos.
If there is some TV serial, it might be a one-hour TV serial, say 53 minutes in the TV serial. And 7 minutes are what? Ads. We have ads here also.
Commercials we have, isn’t it? Now, the 7 minutes of ads, of commercials, the amount of money that is spent to produce them, is often many times more than what is used to produce those 53 minutes of serials. Because from the broadcaster’s point of view, that is the most actionable item. That’s what.
They want people to buy this, buy this. So when you watch, what happens? Oh, you know, your phone is not good enough. Your hairstyle is not good enough.
Your dress is not good enough. Your car is not good enough. So, then, you get all those desires.
Then, next thing you do is shop. Shop, shop, shop. Like alcoholism is addiction, shopaholism is also addiction.
You just get compelled to shop. Shop, shop, shop. Shop till you drop.
So now when we shop, what happens? That doesn’t, shopping doesn’t come free. You have to pay for it. And we have to pay for it.
How do we pay for it? We work more. Work more, work more, work more. And then we feel more tired, more frustrated.
So we want to get a break and watch more TV. And then watch more TV, watch more TV, again you get more desires. Buy this, buy this, get this, get that.
So we shop more. So in this way, work, watch, shop. It becomes like a vicious cycle.
It’s a WWS. Worldwide stupidity. So unfortunately, this is how most people’s lives are going.
The intention and emotion is just caught in these things. Working, watching, shopping. And hoping to get some pleasure out of it.
But we are meant for something much bigger. We are souls and we are meant for eternal happiness. So seeking the eternal doesn’t mean rejecting the material.
It means redirecting the material for our spiritual growth. So when we understand that we are meant for attaining lasting happiness, how does that come? We are finite souls and there is an infinite soul. And the loving bond between the two, there is a lasting happiness.
Establishing that loving bond is the purpose of Bhakti Yoga. So to the extent we adopt this process of Bhakti Yoga, to that extent we grow in our life. To that extent, we, our intention evolves and our emotion evolves.
Intention evolves means that we understand that we are meant for bigger things. Our capacity for persevering even amidst obstacles increases. And emotion means, we all experience emotion with respect to various things.
But the higher, the richer, the sublimer things we experience emotions with. The richer our life becomes. So somebody may eat and get some pleasure.
Somebody may watch TV and get some pleasure. Somebody may do some art and get some pleasure. All these are ways in which our emotions are invested.
But if we could invest our emotions in a way that connects us with eternity, then that is the most fulfilling avenue for our emotions. So Bhakti Yoga is not reclusive spirituality, it is inclusive spirituality. Reclusive, some people think becoming spiritual means to become a recluse, go away from the world.
But Bhakti Yoga is inclusive spirituality. Now whatever our current interests are, whatever our talents are, whatever our abilities are, we can use them to connect with Krishna, with the infinite consciousness. If you like music, then music can be used to have spiritual songs, spiritual music.
If you like art, you can use art for a spiritual purpose. So wherever our emotions are invested, we connect them with the Supreme. And through that, we can experience sublime happiness.
We can experience happiness that is far greater than what we experience normally. I’ll conclude with one anecdote of how Bhakti is inclusive spirituality. So this is a story of one person who was in the American army.
And when he was in the American army, he was introduced to Bhakti. And then when people start practising Bhakti Yoga, often they become initiated. So he became a Bhakti practitioner.
Because he was in the army, his spiritual name became Parthasarathi. Parthasarathi refers to God who is the friend of a warrior. That’s his spiritual name.
So after he became a Bhakti Yoga practitioner, he was a part of the team that was supposed to go to the Middle East. He had no interest. He says, I’m a spiritual practitioner.
I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to be involved in political violence. So he talked to the spiritual guide and said, if that is your profession, then you cannot just reject your profession.
Do it in between your spiritual consciousness. So he went to the Middle East war fields. And because the opponents were often using guerilla war, attacking anytime, ambushing.
So all the soldiers were very jittery and nervous. There was a lot of stress. And he, because he had spiritual knowledge, understood that I am a soul.
I am indestructible. And he would chant the names of Krishna. Even when he would feel Krishna, Krishna, Krishna.
He would chant it. That gave him calmness and clarity. He was a squadron leader.
So there were several close calls. And he managed to lead his team with great presence of mind. After one close call, where his presence of mind saved the day, one of his colleagues asked him, how do you stay so cool in such situations? And he was about to answer.
Suddenly struck him why he would be sent to Iraq. When he became spiritual, he naturally wanted to share spiritual wisdom with others, his colleagues. But in the comfort of America, they had no interest in spiritual knowledge.
But now here, when they were on the border of life and death, they were very interested. So he started telling them, actually I have spiritual knowledge. I understand that I am soul and indestructible.
And we all can realise our spirituality by by chanting spiritual mantras, by repeating spiritual sounds. And he told them about the Krishna mantra. And as he spoke about this now, because it was a matter of life and death, they were much more excited.
They heard it and they had actually seen him staying calm and composed. So they all started adopting it. Now, several times afterwards, whenever he would go out for a operation, he would give a pep talk.
He would tell everyone, life or death, we are souls, we are parts of God. Remember God and everything will be fine. And everything will be good.
So he was also a very good singer. And as a good singer, he started, because it’s not that the soldiers on the camp, they are always fighting. They also have their own recreational time.
So he started having a spiritual music club over there. And there, his friends started coming and they all started enjoying the spiritual music. Singing, dancing, playing instruments.
And eventually, he wrote a series of journal entries and he called them Battlefield Bhajans. Bhajan is basically spiritual music. Battlefield Bhajan.
And he said that, actually, whatever spiritual knowledge I had learned, I internalised it much more on the battlefield than I had even at my home or even in a spiritual centre like a temple or a meditation centre or whatever. And his colleagues also became engrossed by that. So this knowledge is something which is as an inclusive spirituality.
So whatever we are doing, if our emotions become elevated, then we won’t be driven by such self-centred desires. We can make a greater contribution. Our intentions won’t be so fragile.
Even if we face difficulties, we will be able to persevere through difficulties. So whatever field of life we are working in, if we bring spirituality into our life and spiritualise our intentions and emotions, then in that field, we can make a greater contribution. And we can find greater satisfaction with or without technology.
Selfie can help us in our outer world. Technology can help us in our outer world. But it’s spirituality which helps us now in our world.
As a technology can make things better. Spirituality can make people better. Spirituality can make each one of us better.
So that we can use technology and we can contribute better in our lives. So I’ll summarise. I spoke today about the missing self in the selfie.
I started by talking about how the unprecedented case has come, the last few hundred years, compared to that, technological advancement. And selfie represents a very consumable product of technological advancement. And yet, people seem to be distressed, depressed, suicidal, mental health problems are going up.
So I discussed what technology can provide and what technology can’t provide. There’s a difference between the words self and selfie. So IE, what was the IE two things that technology provides profusely? Information and entertainment.
Information can give us, provide us control on the outer world. What we do out there. Entertainment is available again in a huge way.
But we see that we become more and more dependent on entertainment. Astronomical amount of money is being spent on entertainment. And yet people seem to be more bored.
We have huge amount of information available, but people are using that information not always in constructive ways. We discussed what defines our life is not just the entertainment that we have and the information that we have. What defines us much more is another set of IE.
What is that? What’s which IE provides us? Intention and information. Thank you. Intention, I talked about how in the history of science at its start it focused more on the measurable parameters of nature, considering them to be the primary characteristics.
And because of that when attention focusses on one thing, it becomes dis-focused from other things. So the focus on the measurable parameters led to scientific advancement in a big way in terms of our capacity to control the outer world. But our inner world left immediately.
Science offers us a map of reality. But in that map intentions and emotions are not actually integrated in it. And our quality of life is determined much more by our intention and emotions than by the information or entertainment or other bits of technology that we have.
When I talked about how spiritual knowledge can elevate our intention and emotion that without that most people stay caught in their intention and emotions are caught in WWS. What is that? WWS, what is that? Words? Words? What? Shop. Worldwide stupidity.
That’s what. We work very hard interminately using our intention. Invest our emotions watching entertainment and then invest our emotions in shopping.
But this leads only to very little fulfilment. It doesn’t lead to any lasting satisfaction. But when we understand that we are souls on a mighty life journey of spiritual evolution and that the purpose of life is to elevate our emotions and elevate our intentions.
Get them to evolve. Children, their emotional intentions are caught in small things. As we grow older our emotional intentions grow higher.
So similarly, by practising spirituality, we learn to use all our material resources for connecting with each other. Whatever talents we have, whatever things our emotions are invested in right now if we spiritualise them. If we practise bhakti yoga by chanting sacred mantras and by spiritualising our consciousness then we will experience that our emotions and our intentions will direct us productively.
Bhakti yoga is not an inclusive spirituality but inclusive spirituality. So we can when our intentions are spiritually directed we get much greater determination to pursue when our emotions are spiritually directed then we are not driven so much by self-centred emotions. We can, our emotions become more selfless and sublime and thus we can, whatever field we are working, make a better contribution and relish greater satisfaction.
So technology and spirituality can go in parallel. Technology can make things better. Spirituality can make people better.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Are there any questions or comments? There is something that you would like that you felt you could carry home with you.
I was curious is bhakti yoga trying to attain something like a purer form of deep thinking or something beyond? A purer form of what? Of a human being. Is it to attain something beyond thinking or is it to be a purer being? Is bhakti yoga meant to become a pure human being or to attain something beyond being? It’s both. As human beings we become more purified by the practise of bhakti.
And also our core identity transcends our humanity. What bhakti wisdom explains is that we are souls and we are sparks of consciousness and we are animating. We are present in this body.
So we are not human beings. We are spiritual beings on a human journey. And our human journey is one lap in a multi-life marathon.
So beyond this lap there is further destinations. The soul is eternal. The body is like a home for the soul.
And normally if we have a home we would like to have a permanent home. If we have a rented house we would like to have our own house. So the current body that we have is like a rented body.
It’s a temporary body. We are here for some time but we will be ericted any moment. That’s what death is.
Death is not destruction. Death is basically, one could say the emigration of the soul from the body. And the soul goes to another body.
So if our consciousness evolves where we go after our life depends on what we love. As long as we love the temporary, we will stay in the temporary world. When we learn to love the eternal then we arrive to the eternal world.
So Bhakti Yoga helps us while we are living as human beings to become more pure, to become less selfish, less exploitative, more contributive. In that sense it purifies us. And eventually by the practise of Bhakti Yoga as we direct our consciousness towards the eternal if we become attached to the eternal before we die in this life, then we are in the eternal.
If we do not complete that journey then we continue in the future life. It’s an evolution that is going on. If the evolution is completed then we go beyond mortality to immortality.
That’s the transhuman existence. But if we do not complete that journey then we continue on in a human life, in another body where we continue our evolution. Does that answer your question? Any other questions? Maybe some of you can share some point that you felt you carried home anything you felt was something that struck you, something that spoke to you something that you found relevant.
I was just thinking about this in terms of how a lot of people use social media for example especially Instagram almost as a way to promote Bhakti or to promote other forms of yoga. I don’t have my phone on me but if I were to go to hashtag Bhakti I bet there’s a whole lot of people who are putting up selfies in order to promote Bhakti philosophy. So I just wonder how do you use Instagram? Or social media? Is it possible to use technology to achieve or facilitate connections with the Supreme? Oh yeah, definitely.
So can we use technology to connect with the Supreme or to connect others with the Supreme? Yes, definitely. As I said that Bhakti yoga is inclusive Technology is not the problem. It is the mentality with which you use technology that is the problem.
Technology is a very powerful resource and some people may be luddite about pure technology but that’s not practical. You know in the Middle East there’s a story of Aladdin and the jinn and the jinn is like a mystical being that comes out of the lamp. So once the jinn has come out of the lamp you cannot send it back inside.
All that you can do is make the jinn do good work otherwise it will do bad work. So technology is like the jinn who has come out. Now we can’t send it back inside.
We can’t live without technology especially if we are living in a mainstream society today. So we can put it to constructive use. Let’s say that there are 2-3 main things that especially social media has become like the language through which people communicate today.
Let’s say there’s a verbal language through which we communicate. There’s cultural languages. So technology has become a part of the culture today.
Social media. And if we do not share spiritual wisdom then all the people who speak that language will be left out. So we definitely need to make spiritual wisdom available wherever people are.
And that means using technology. Now the challenge is by using technology is that we want to use technology without being used by technology. Without being used by technology in technology in marketing it is said that when any product is offered free then that means you are the actual product.
Nothing comes free. We are given something free, that means we are being targeted by it. So it’s very easy to get caught and distracted.
So if we are clear about our purpose when we talk about intention and emotions if we are practising spirituality adequately and through our bhakti practise we are strong in our intentions and we know where to invest our emotions. Then we can use technology to reach a large number of people who would not otherwise get connected with spirituality. So it’s a matter of what our consciousness is.
The Bhagavad Gita talks about three modes of material nature. It’s goodness, passion and indolence. These are three broad ways people think or live.
So if you want to say goodness, goodness is first contemplation and then there is action. Think and then act. In passion there is first action then contemplation.
So it’s that some people speak to express their thoughts and some people speak to discover their thoughts. They speak, what did I say? I had a slip of tongue. So what happens? First action then contemplation.
That is the mode of passion. And the mode of ignorance is neither action nor contemplation, simply delusion. Neither just doing nothing, just living in the head or living in the imagination.
So to some extent technology can promote living in ignorance or in passion. People can just spend hours and hours clicking some images on the net, playing video games, watching this, watching that. There is no action, no contemplation.
So in that sense it can fuel the mode of ignorance. Or it can fuel the mode of passion also. There is action, no contemplation.
Do this, do this, watch this, go here, go there. But if we are spiritual enough to be contemplative before we act, then we will be able to use technology to act. So thank you very much.
Hare Krishna.