Finding Meaning And Purpose In Life

In this talk, Acharya revisits how the lack of real direction, purpose, and meaning in people’s lives is causing great stress, anxiety, depression, and unhappiness in society. Social commentators and mental health experts have dubbed it the "great unhappiness epidemic". He then examinws the problem and the context in which we can evaluate possible spiritual solutions and alternatives.

This the first in a series of talks about life’s meaning and purpose.

Transcript

Perhaps a little bit challenging for some of us.

Hopefully it won't be.

And I'll tell you why it will be challenging is because there's two ways of considering the meaning of this word life when we speak of finding meaning and of course therefore purpose in life.

One way of understanding life and the way almost everyone thinks of life,

They think of it as the time between their birth and what is called death that people consider life.

From the Vedic or yogic perspective that is incredibly short-sighted.

Their understanding of life is that it is eternal.

It never ends.

There is no possibility of life ever ending.

Death is not the end of life.

Death is just part of a continuum.

You go on.

And if we consider that bigger picture,

Then the time that we spend between what's called birth and death is it's just a small part of a much bigger picture.

And if we want to actually find purpose,

Meaning in life,

Then we are only truly going to be able to do that if we consider that bigger picture.

If we consider life only be the time between our birth and our death,

Whether you have any spiritual inclination at all or religious inclination or anything,

It's still incredibly short-sighted and you will come to certain conclusions.

And the conclusions that you will often come to based on that idea will make you unhappy.

They won't bring you to experience true happiness.

We've been speaking in the,

Was that last month?

Or was it the month before?

Happiness.

We're exploring happiness.

And in that series of talks,

We explored the total failure of materialism.

Materialism is not just the idea that somebody's attached to material stuff and acquiring it.

But there is an underlying philosophy that underlying philosophy is that there is no spiritual reality.

There is no spiritual energy.

There is no,

There is only one energy and that is,

That is matter,

Material energy.

If you buy into that,

You will have to completely embrace the notion or idea that the body is you.

And that is about as wrong as you can ever be.

The body is not you.

It's something that you get to use for a little while and it will age and it will experience death.

You don't experience death,

The spiritual being,

But the body does.

And of course,

If you consider that there is only a material energy,

Nothing else,

How depressing is that?

In reality,

You couldn't actually embrace that totally and not end up extremely depressed.

Now a lot of people have done this without thought,

Without actual consideration,

Buying into materialistic idea that this world is my home,

At least for some time,

That I can actually find happiness here,

Perfect happiness,

That I can find actual love,

This deep and an incredible experience,

That I can find it in the material realm,

That by buying goods,

Consuming goods and services,

By stimulating the body's senses,

Just you can stimulate the senses into a total frenzy and be left utterly unfulfilled.

And you can do that continuously.

You can do that for days on end.

I mean,

If somebody takes a hedonistic plunge and they go away somewhere alone or with somebody else with a view to trying to just go crazy and do everything that you can think of,

You know,

To the most far out ways and just go for it.

You end up utterly spiritually and of course physically and mentally exhausted and just burned out.

It doesn't end on a high,

It ends on a low because that's the nature of things.

So you know,

We've been speaking about what's called the great unhappiness epidemic,

That there has never been a point in time where we see the amount of chronic depression and rates of suicide that we see today.

And it's increasing,

It's on this upward trajectory.

And since 2012,

When they kind of fixed that as the date that the smartphone became widely available,

Widely available,

And they say there is a connection with that,

The acceleration of unhappiness and depression and suicide is,

It's just,

It's mind boggling.

And it is disproportionately happening amongst the younger people,

Disproportionately,

Hugely.

And people,

I was talking to someone last Friday,

And I may get some of it wrong,

But I think it was their daughter was freaking out because she has a son who was 19 and who had spoken to her in a fit of absolute despair and crying and talking about ending it.

And of course,

As a mother,

That's just,

You can't even imagine what that's going to do to you.

And the sad thing is he has a group of friends,

19,

20 year olds this age,

And they frequently discuss,

Frequently discuss suicide.

So we can't trivialize,

We can't fluff off the realities that we face as individuals and as a society.

So of course,

The big question that everybody's confronted with is what's it for?

What is this whole thing for?

What's it about?

We have bought into ideas that are incredibly unhealthy.

And we've taken directions because we feel everybody's sort of telling us and all the messaging that we're getting is reinforcing that this is,

This is what you do,

This is where you go,

This is it,

This is it,

Go for it.

And we've been rather uncritical.

One of the things that causes me some distress is that as a population,

I think we haven't done a really good job at raising children to be truly critical thinkers,

Truly critical thinkers about the stuff that's important,

Life,

Your life,

Your experience of life,

That is important.

And so you've got people that have,

You know,

Multi degrees,

Multi disciplines,

You know,

That they have huge accomplishment in.

And they're really absorbed in their work.

And then every time they turn away from things or step outside of that,

They're just hit with a sense of purposelessness.

It's not like they're not intelligent.

They're incredibly intelligent.

And their ability to analyze mathematical,

Chemical,

Physics,

You know,

Biology,

To analyze things,

To really take things apart is phenomenal.

But in relation to what's most important,

My life,

And my value,

And my purpose,

And what's the meaning of everything?

We have failed miserably.

Our society as a whole has become untethered from true spiritual value and focus and purpose.

And for me,

Something that's really distressful is the older cultures of this world have become infected with this materialistic idea.

I mean,

It blew my mind back in about,

When was that,

About 98,

99.

You know,

I went to a really far flung interior part of India.

And I mean,

They don't even have electricity.

And there's a satellite dish hooked up to batteries,

Which people either charge in their vehicle when they're using it,

Or they bring it to a nearby town and get it charged.

Here's a satellite dish.

And everybody is gathering around the home of the person that's got the TV.

And they're looking through the windows and sitting around on the ground.

And everybody's watching TV.

And who runs TV?

You know,

It's like asking now,

Who runs your life?

Who runs your phone?

Google,

Facebook,

Twitter.

It's like,

And what do these guys want from you?

They only want one thing.

They want your money.

They're not there to help you or do so.

They will provide a service,

Provided you can become addicted to it.

If not,

It's of no value to them.

They will do things for you to get your money.

And we're so out of it.

We don't even really consider who's running our life.

So there's a big problem with messaging.

And yet everybody's being sold on certain political ideas of progressivism.

We're progressing.

You're not progressing.

People are becoming more empty.

Look at the fruit.

Look at the fruit of what's being delivered.

We have all these promises.

But what's the true experience for people?

Progress simply means moving forward in a certain direction.

The idea that all progress is good is a dumb idea.

That's not smart.

Where are you heading?

If you're progressing towards a hellish destination,

If you are progressing towards mental illness,

A breakdown of your life,

Utter purposelessness.

If you are progressing in the amount of alcohol you consume or the amount of drugs you take in your body,

Yeah,

You're progressing.

But progressing towards what?

But people like to bander this term around like it's actually of some value.

No,

Drop that one.

Think about where are we going?

Where are we actually heading?

The idea that we're progressing alone is not a good idea.

If we know progressing towards what and that's where I want to go,

I'm freely making that choice knowing what the consequences will be.

You know,

We've also become untethered from the idea that you have to pay for everything.

There is no free ride in life.

Every single choice that you make,

There will be a consequence.

Every single action that you take,

There will be a consequence.

And we often leap into a series of actions going down a particular path with zero consideration of what the outcome is going to be.

Somebody has said,

Do this,

It's going to be really cool.

And I'm off heading in that direction like 90 miles an hour and I'm going for it.

I'm progressing.

Without any consideration of what is actually going to be the result.

So of course,

Huge topic and here I am,

I get handed these topics and so we have a short time to talk.

Today the purpose of speaking about things was simply to establish what we're currently up against,

What we're facing and we will roll out solutions to the problems and ways in which we can learn to live that will actually make a difference.

There is one thing I really totally agree with the Dalai Lama on.

I don't agree with everything.

Probably shouldn't have said that.

No,

We should be independent thinkers.

He said that for a person to experience happiness,

There's only two things that you need.

One is purpose and the other one is to serve.

And when he said to serve,

It means that you shift your life so it's not all about you.

That you actually take into consideration other people and what they're going through.

The enemy,

The enemy of empathy,

Being able to feel what others feel and to be moved by that is self-centeredness.

And we live in a time and a culture where people are encouraged to make their goals utterly self-centered,

To define their purpose in what's in it for me and that it's all about me.

I mean,

This started way back in,

There were a couple of books that came out,

I think it was the late sixties or early seventies.

And one of them was called Winning Through Intimidation.

It was a massive hit.

And what was the other one?

I can't remember,

But it was in the same sort of vein.

And the idea was,

Hey,

It's all about you.

Don't feel guilty about taking care of yourself and getting things that you need and if you have to do it by squeezing it out of others,

Nothing wrong with that.

That was the fundamental idea.

And this was widely embraced by psychologists and therapists who aggressively spoke to patients about seeking their own happiness.

And the framework was utter self-centeredness.

It doesn't matter how successful you are in an utterly self-centered pursuit,

You will be left alone and lonely and unfulfilled in the end of that journey.

If you define your purpose in life to be all about you and the idea of the you,

Who are you?

We don't even know who we are.

We have utterly lost the plot.

Quite a while ago,

I showed you guys a section of a,

What do you call it,

A documentary that some friends in Europe did and they went out and talked to people in the street.

Who are you?

And everybody,

Well,

I'm a happy person.

I'm like this,

I'm from this.

I'm,

You know,

No,

No,

No.

You strip all that away,

Strip away the boyfriend or the girlfriend and what you're doing and all that.

And in the core,

Your essence,

Who are you?

And people just blew their minds.

It's like,

I don't know.

I've never thought of that.

One guy goes,

I have no idea.

And older guy goes,

I wasn't prepared for such a deep question.

But it's like,

Doesn't that tell you something that you've been around?

I mean,

I can understand perhaps the younger guys,

But you've been around for,

You know,

Doing this thing for 50,

60,

70 years and you still don't know who you are?

Isn't that a monumental problem?

Not just a little tiny problem.

This is a monumental problem.

So we are going to address these things and we will address them on two levels.

What I will call purpose and meaning light,

The light edition,

Where we will discuss things that you can actually add to your life and actually you will begin to feel happier and it will benefit you even though you have not yet actually discovered the deeper meaning of things.

The reason though these things,

And we'll address this probably next week,

The reason these things will actually begin to make you feel happier and a better sense of purpose and finding meaning is because they actually begin,

Begin to deal with your deeper spiritual nature without knowing about it.

That's what happens.

And Iveshwar mentioned,

You know,

He shared a website with me,

You know,

They're calling this month meaningful May.

And it's a website where they're really focused on trying to help people find more meaning in life.

And they have a statement,

Make a difference,

Become part of something bigger.

And in those two ideas,

In those two ideas,

Whether they're applied on the light level or in a much deeper way,

Lies the actual solution to this unhappiness epidemic and this problem that people face.

Okay,

So I think that's about as far as we're going to go.

It was just basically looking at the problem.

You have to come next week to find out about the solutions.

Sorry,

I didn't mean it to be like that,

But it's like when you're watching something on on TV and it gets to the end,

Oh,

God,

I gotta wait for next week.

No,

It's worthwhile.

And in this journey that we're going to discuss these things over the next,

You know,

Three weeks,

Be prepared to listen with humility.

Don't be judgmental.

I will end up saying things that will be challenging.

And just because I don't believe something or I don't accept it,

That has nothing to do with something,

Whether something is true or not.

This I can't use the way I feel about something as the sole basis for whether I will take this on board and actually consider it.

That's not smart.

That's very unintelligent.

We're dealing with consciousness.

And when I say consciousness,

I mean,

It's a state of being how we're dealing with and processing.

We have a value system.

We have a way of seeing things.

If it is not producing complete spiritual enlightenment and we are struggling with unhappiness and a lack of meaning and purpose,

Then you need to consider that stuff that you've taken on board and you hold to be the highest truth may be completely wrong or partially wrong.

The things I'll share with you,

They're not anything to do with me.

I've never I haven't had an original idea in my life.

I'm rather unintelligent,

But I've had the great fortune of being able to hear from people that were tremendous spiritual personalities and be able to tap into an ancient wisdom that has been passed down since time immemorial.

And our challenge is,

OK,

Take it in,

Contemplate upon it,

Consider it in relation to my life.

And an important part is the meditation activity that we do.

This chanting of these transcendental sounds,

These spiritual names,

They have an effect that you don't actually fully understand.

They act on a very subtle and spiritual level and they begin to remove the fog that clouds us.

They begin to remove the coverings that cover our heart for so long and our minds.

And it is like shining light on the subject.

And as one practices this form of meditation,

It is actually transformative.

What's transformed is not you,

The spiritual being.

You are always.

It's like a diamond that has been covered with dirt and mud and rock attached to it.

The diamond is still a diamond.

It's still pure.

The contamination on the outside is only that.

That's a covering.

And when that's removed,

The true nature of the diamond or the gem becomes manifest.

In the same way,

You are an eternal spiritual being.

You are innately filled with spiritual knowledge.

You have spiritual beauty.

You are utterly lovable.

There is no defect in you.

But you have become completely covered.

We have become completely covered.

And what is being projected through all the gunk,

The filters,

Is a distorted picture of my true identity.

This transcendental process is a process by which these coverings become thinned out,

Gradually removed.

And we are able to reconnect in the most wonderful way with our true spiritual identity and experience,

The reality,

The spiritual reality of my existence.

OK?

We good?

Any question?

Probably gone over time.

Yeah.

I'm not trying to take you into the next week's installment.

Sounds like you.

That's the introduction to taking you into next week.

No,

I'm just trying to go back.

No,

No,

I'm joking.

You've established a point that most people are in this state of not understanding spiritual identity,

Understanding your eternal nature.

If we embrace that,

What can we do about society?

When you say,

What can we do about it,

What is the it?

Yet there's this misconception of the self being just as material as the self.

What can be done about that?

You mean for the larger population?

On a macro level,

We should show kindness to everyone.

We should share this spiritual or yoga wisdom.

And we should share this process of the spiritual sound because it is powerful and it is effective.

So no easy things.

Anybody that is in suffering condition,

We should seek to be compassionate and helpful.

But we should help with something that is going to really make a difference.

Okay.

Thank you.

Reviews

Thank you for the introductory talk 🙏

Thanks just what I needed to hear today 🙏