What externals can help us stay spiritually grounded?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Not wearing the beautiful orange robes, but struggling in a powerful life.
So, how can you practically stay spiritually grounded? Actually, orange robes are no guarantee of spiritual consciousness. So, spirituality ultimately is about the color of our consciousness, not the color of our dress. Now, there are three levels when we talk about raising our consciousness.
In the yoga tradition, there are three modes of material nature. Tamoguna, Rajoguna, Sattoguna. Mode of ignorance, mode of passion, mode of goodness.
These are basically more the function, in the mode of ignorance people are lethargic, apathetic. In the mode of passion, hyperactive. Start one thing and then this reacts, this goes wrong, this goes wrong.
What is happening? And in the mode of goodness, people are thoughtfully active. So, one way of putting this is, starting with three modes, goodness, passion and ignorance. Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, some people wonder what happened.
So, to the extent we can situate ourselves in nature’s mode of goodness, then that helps us to not be reactionary, not to have negative reactions. So, as you said, being close to nature, regulating our breath, that all brings us to the mode of goodness. When we are in the mode of goodness, knowledge emerges from that.
Clear understanding comes and we can make wise choices. Just finding out what are the activities within us, for us, that calm us down. For some of us it may be regulating our breath, some of us it may be going for a walk, some of us it may be just going close to nature, some of us it may be journaling.
We all can find out which activities calm us down. That is, one level, we come to the mode of goodness. Beyond that, there is the spiritual level of consciousness, where there are specific spiritual practices.
So, as I said, yoga, meditation, these are all various levels of practices, which brings our consciousness to the spiritual level. And regularly engaging in these practices helps us to make spiritual consciousness a regular experience. So, if we daily have some time for meditation, then that enables us, that makes spiritual consciousness a familiar consciousness for us, something which we do regularly.
Then when there is a crisis in our life, when there is something that is troubling us too much, we can take shelter of the spiritual. If we don’t have a habit, then the consciousness stays so caught in the material things, that we can’t draw it out and focus on the spiritual. But a regular practice helps us to focus the consciousness on the spiritual.
And as I said, there are different forms of meditation. So, now, there is spiritual consciousness and there is also devotional consciousness. In spiritual, we focus primarily on the imperishable eternality that pervades, that underlies material existence.
Beyond the body, there is a spiritual core. Beyond the changing material world, there is a spiritual reality. Devotional means that we go beyond generic spiritual reality to specifically the topmost spiritual reality, that is God, the absolute God.
So, now, there are specific mantras that we can chant. So, mantra meditation is one form of meditation and that helps us to raise our consciousness rapidly upwards. So, I’ll give you an example of, say, the two-story building.
The material level is the lower story, the spiritual level is the higher story, higher level. So, various forms of meditation and yoga, they are like climbing up the stairs. But mantra meditation, specifically mantras, which are centered on the names of God, they are like an elevator.
It’s like the elevator comes down, you just stop it, and the elevator lifts up. So, like that, when we chant the mantras and we enter into the mantra, our consciousness goes deep into the mantra, then just by that, our consciousness will rise upwards. And by the repeated utterance of spiritual sound vibrations, we fill our consciousness with love.
So, we have to create a regular regimen of spiritual practices. And those will shelter us when we face difficulties in life. And as such, for all of us, life, our choices in life, they never progress along the straight line.
It is more of disorientation and reorientation. Say, when a plane flies from one place to another. Yesterday, I came from Seattle to Boston.
So, when I fly from one place to another, the plane, more than 90% of the time, it is off course. Because of the wind pressure, because of the atmospheric condition, because of the cloud clustering. Now, it is because of the cloud, it is reoriented.
The autopilot system is reoriented. So, like that, the very nature of life is that we get disoriented. So, we need reorientation.
And the best way to do this reorientation is through spiritual association. So, there are individual practices, I talked about earlier. But the reorientation happens much more powerfully when we have some spiritual association.
So, programs like this, if there are spiritual programs like this, if you participate on a regular basis, then they remind us of this. Spiritual side to my life also is important. So, we will go off track, but we reorient ourselves.
We go off track, we reorient ourselves. We keep reorienting ourselves, overall, we progress towards the spiritual destination.