Before I begin to speak, I would first like to offer my respects to all our great spiritual teachers, our masters, who bring this knowledge to us.
The Supreme Lord and His representatives, the great masters, want to see us happy. And they know that the only way we’ll be happy is to experience spiritual happiness. They understand perfectly well that all of our material happiness, pleasures, etc., are very, very shallow, very temporary and they don’t really make us happy. They’re conscious of this and we’re not. So when they send a message to us, it’s the message of how to be truly happy.
Everybody’s sending messages. The airways are so full of text messages that you can’t see through them almost! I just read that the average teenager sends 100 text messages a day, average… That is on a slow day. Can you imagine? Everybody’s sending messages, but these messages don’t carry any valuable information.
So when God and His devotees send a message to us, that’s the message that we need to hear. And the message is very simple, very clear.
The first part of the message is this: you are not your material body. You think you are, but you are not. You think you’re a male or a female, or a human, you’re black or white, old or young, you’re a parent or a child, whatever you think. But that’s really not true. That’s the condition of your body. All of this identity that we claim to be our ‘self’ is a false identity. And we live by this false identity: this is who I am.
But really, when we hear the true message, the first part of that message is: no, no, you made a mistake here. That body which you take to be yourself is just a vehicle, a temporary residence, apartment (however you want to describe it), in which you live.
And then there is a little more to this same message: you are not your mind. Many times when a person realizes he is not his body, he still identifies himself with his mind. Whatever the mind says, we think: that’s me speaking, that’s me desiring, that’s me. But actually no, that’s another mistake. That’s the second body: the mental body, sometimes called the astral body. People get very excited about the astral body, astral dimension, “Oh, it’s so spiritual!” It’s not spiritual at all. This is the subtle material dimension, second covering, second layer of clothing.
So the final conclusion is: you are not the body, not the mind, you are the person inside the body and the mind. You are spirit soul. Your essence is spiritual energy, not material. You are an individual, eternal individual spiritual spark. That’s your eternal identity, it never changes.
Our material identity changes all the time, but we don’t change because spirit is eternal, matter is temporary. So that’s the first part of the message of life. If you don’t know this, you’ll never get life right, and almost nobody knows this. And those who know it, at least theoretically, they don’t apply it, they don’t live by that truth.
Really one way to look at life is that it’s a big problem that we’re trying to solve. So we spend our whole life trying to solve this problem. And the problem is: how to be happy. This is the problem we’re trying to solve. So from the beginning of the time we enter this body till the time we leave the body, we’re working on this problem: how can I be happy?
We do so many things to solve the problem. We grow up, we go to school, we get our educations. We put so much value on material education. I’ve recently read the statistics which was quite revealing. It shows to what great length and difficulty people go to get their material education. In America it costs a lot of money to go to university and get your education. I’m sure it does here, too, but I know in America it costs a lot. A lot of people can’t afford it. So they take out a student loan. They borrow money to pay for this education. They leave school with their education, but they also take with them a huge debt which they have to pay off. So in America the student loan debt, let’s call it the national student loan debt to make it clear, is greater than the national credit card debt. That’s a lot.
So you can see the people put so much importance on the material education. But how many people will spend on ruble on spiritual education? We give all of our presentations for free and still people don’t come. If we charged money, nobody would come, “Why should I pay for that? It is not worthy.” What if we’d said, “Ok, we’ll educate you in spiritual knowledge but the cost is $100 000.” Can you imagine? People would be attacking us!
So this is the idea. We, the spirit soul, identify with our body, so our body is so important, but it’s not even us. And no matter what you do, it’s going to die anyway. You see, no matter how educated you are, you are still going to die. We, the spirit soul, don’t even know the value of our self, of our own life. We spend all our time and all our energy taking care of our physical body and our mental body, and spend no time taking care about our self. And the reason we spend so much time on our body and on our mind because we think, “If I do this and I do that, it’ll make me happy.”
This is the goal in life for everybody. It doesn’t matter what body the soul is in. The soul in the dog body has the same desire: I want to be happy. And he has his dog formula for happiness: enough to eat, warm, soft place to sleep, sex life when it is available, etc. Yes, it’s dog formula for happiness.
But because the soul is the same, no matter what body, the goal is the same, because it’s the nature of the soul to be happy. This is who we are: by nature, we are happy, joyful persons.
But the reality is: in the material world it’s not our experience. So we’re always looking, looking, looking, looking where it is to be found.
So when we get this message from the Supreme, the answer is given very clearly: you, the spirit soul, need spiritual food, you need spiritual happiness. Material happiness will never solve the problem.
So that was the idea: we’re trying to solve this problem but we make a mistake in the very beginning. I like mathematics because it’s such an exact science. No opinions, no speculations, it’s just the way it is: 2+2=4. So imagine we’re trying to solve a big mathematical problem and just in the beginning of the problem solving we make a little mistake: a little addition mistake or a little subtraction mistake, some mistake. Then we work this huge problem from that point. And everything else is so correct, but when we get to the final answer, it is wrong. You hand your paper into the teacher and she marks “wrong.” You’ll never get the right answer until you go back and correct that original little mistake.
So our life is like that. We make that mistake in the beginning: I am the body. And so we spend the rest of our life solving the problem. But we never get the right answer and we never will. We leave this body, we go to another body, we’re still working out the same problem with the same error. It happens again and again, and again. We fail, we fail, we fail to solve the problem.
So the wise professor, the Supreme Lord, and His representatives say: here is your problem, right there. You must address your spiritual needs. And when you do, you will become spiritually healthy and spiritually happy. This is the message.