Welcome everybody! Thank you for making the journey again. I was informed that there are a few people that haven’t been to any of our programs. We welcome you also!
There is a lot of information that we’ve already presented so you may be unfamiliar with some of the things that are being discussed but we hope you’ll have a nice time and receive some information that you do understand.
We are in great debt to our spiritual masters who bring us this transcendental knowledge. When you are in debt to someone, it means you owe them something. How can we repay such a debt of transcendental knowledge? By receiving the gift that they have given us and applying it to our life. This is how we can repay the dept. So we try to do that and encourage others to do so as well.
In this world, especially today, we are very much ignorant of life, we know almost nothing. We go to institutions of learning and they don’t really teach us either. We have great advancement in material knowledge and no advancement in spiritual knowledge so we must cultivate both simultaneously. We need a certain degree of material knowledge to function in the material world, not nearly as much as we have now, but certainly we need material knowledge. However, we need spiritual knowledge also and this is where we are lacking. Everything is out of balance. We focus entirely on material knowledge and have a great wealth of material knowledge on the planet and completely neglect spiritual knowledge, so we are very out of balance in life. We need to bring that balance back: spiritual knowledge/material knowledge. With spiritual knowledge we will understand how to use material knowledge.
There’s nothing worse than a lot of knowledge and no idea of what to do with it. It is like a gun. Some people are very much against guns – ‘All guns are bad.’ Guns are not necessarily bad, they can be used correctly but they can also be used to incur great destruction and damage. So it’s all about the knowledge with which any item is used.
You can take any example, money for instance. Some people say money is bad, money is the root of all evil. And some people say money is good. My friend used to say, “Money is not the problem, money is the solution.” He was obviously inclined toward material solutions. I knew him very well, he was a businessman. No, money is neutral. How you use it determines, whether it’s good or bad. It’s like that with anything – the effect is what counts. If the effect of something (an event, an activity, an object, etc.) has a bad effect, then it’s bad. If it produces a good effect, it’s good.
A medicine taken in the right proportion can cure a disease very well. Under the expert guidance of the physician administering this medicine one can be cured, but on every bottle of medicine they have an instruction, a warning: Keep out of reach of children. They even have tamper-proof lids on some, so you just can’t open them unless you know how because when a kid gets it and he has no knowledge, he thinks, “Oh, red candy!” and it kills him.
So without spiritual knowledge we don’t know what to do with our life, with all the different activities in this world, with our so-called knowledge. So we’re making a big mess and it’s ever increasing. That’s why it’s so important to study the truth. There’s a great Vedic scripture called the Shrimad-Bhagavatam and in the beginning there’s a famous mantra, or sloka, which states, “Now is the time to inquire into the Absolute Truth!”
Now is the time, not later! How much damage can we do later? A lot. How much karma will we create later? How much harm will we do to others? How much more degraded will we become? Later is not the advice, now is the time. So that’s what we should start doing now – inquire into the Absolute Truth.