Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste.
So I already demolished Christmas and New Year’s last time. So how about some food for thought and maybe for your New Year’s resolutions, if you do that. I don’t know. But in any case, some good advice from an old guy who’s been around the block at least three times.
I think in my life, I’ve lived as much as maybe three lifetimes of most of the people I know who formed an identity early in life and stuck with it. I’ve always been moving; I’ve always been improving. I’ve always been working on myself and changing, learning new things and going new places.
It’s only within the last couple of years that I’ve settled down a bit. Other than that, I don’t think I’ve lived any place more than six months in my life since I left home on the day of my 18th birthday.
So here’s some good advice from the old guy:
Number one, stay out of trouble. You know, this is one of those really obvious things: like, don’t antagonize the government. You know, don’t… don’t confront the bullies on the block. Keep a low profile.
Don’t get involved in controversies. Don’t get involved in movements. That which seems really cool and ‘with it’ and contemporary right now could turn into subversive or terroristic organization later on.
You don’t know. You don’t know what’s behind it, who’s behind it, who’s sponsoring it or whatever. And you don’t know how the policies of the government or whatever are going to change in the near future. They change all the time. So it’s better to stay out of politics.
You notice on this vlog, I never talk about politics. The reason is… it was a couple of reasons. It changes too quickly for opinions to have any meaning, number one; and number two, whoever wins later on in the game may decide to declare you a subversive for your activities or opinions. So stay out of politics.
You know, life is already hard and complicated enough. Stay out of trouble. You don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit. I don’t care what anybody says; stay out of jail. And white collar crime also counts. Just don’t do it. There’s no need to inconvenience yourself and ruin your prospects for success.
So next is, life is a marathon, not a sprint. In other words, don’t go for the short-term rewards. Go for the long term. Why is that? Because anything that’s really worth doing is worth doing well. And that means it takes a long time to master it.
You’ve probably all seen the curve where a person’s feeling of mastery peaks in about one third of the time that they need to really learn a field. They think, “Oh, yeah, I got this,” you know.
No, you don’t. And if you stay with it, you’ll find out you don’t. And that makes you very humble—humble enough, hopefully, to go the rest of the way and really become an expert.
And the other thing is that: spiritual life especially takes a long time to bear fruit. If you go for the short term, feel good, you know, the… the what we call in Zen, Satori. Then you miss out on the long term, deep realizations, the four Paths. These take a long time to mature. But when they do, they’re permanent. Bhakti, pure bhakti, ecstatic prema-bhakti could take a lifetime to develop.
Any of these things that are worth doing are worth taking a whole life to get good at. So be dedicated. Go for the long term. It’s not a sprint.
Another reason is reputation. People who go for short-term gains often do so at the cost of betraying their friends and losing their trust. But if you want to be somebody that has a reputation for being honest and fair, who doesn’t take the short-term gains, but wants to make sure that everybody wins because that makes him stronger; then in the end, you’ll be very happy that you didn’t go for the low-hanging fruit.
Number three, life is very much like an investment. And this is another long- versus short-term thing. Real investors, you know, like check out Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett is probably one of the best investors. And his firm has long-term investments in major firms. So they don’t just buy up a company or make a huge stock purchase or whatever on a whim, or expecting to turn a quick profit in a couple of weeks. They go for the long haul: years.
So you see, the real experts in any field are the ones playing the long game. Don’t get sucked into going for short-term benefits, when the people who are really observing the field are going to see that. And then your reputation is going to become limited by that. You’re going to be seen as a short-term player, and nobody is going to want to do a big deal with a short-term player.
That’s just the way it is.
So you might find in the spiritual arena that almost everybody is a short-term player. Almost nobody makes a major lifetime commitment, you know—and when they do, they get it wrong. They do it to an organization instead of to a principle. And this is why they don’t attain. Oh yeah, they get high rank and so on in the organization. But they don’t actually attain the enlightenment that they were capable of.
So next: invest in yourself. Start your own business. Don’t work for somebody else, or work for somebody else [only] to learn your way around the business world, and to save up enough to start something yourself.
Live within your means. If you have to eat ramen or peanut butter sandwiches or kitchari for a while, do it. Right: you have to learn the ropes. You have to learn your way around the business world. But once you do, once you know the rules and you spy an opportunity, don’t hesitate: jump at it.
It’s so easy to start a business these days—I mean, just ridiculously easy. For me, it was effortless. I was working at one company and my boss was really impressed with my work and he recommended me to another company as a consultant. And my income tripled overnight.
It was effortless. And because I did good work on time, under budget, my reputation spread. I never lacked work. I could leave the country for two or three years and come back and immediately get work. That was the result of my reputation.
And I always worked for myself. I worked at home. I had my home office. I worked when I felt like it and I didn’t get rich, but I made good money, enough to retire.
So next thing is educate yourself in language and learning. Did you ever notice one of the really weird things about school is that they never teach you how to learn? I always thought that was really strange.
And they also don’t really teach you about language. Yeah, they try to teach a little vocabulary and grammar and stuff like that, but they don’t really teach you how to look up words, how to spot when you have a misunderstood word or a wrong definition of a word, and then how to go look it up.
Well, we cover that in depth in our series Matrix Learning. So I’m going to put a link to that up here, and you can check that out on your own. But the two most important things to learn are language—because language is the vehicle in which all knowledge is transmitted—and the science of learning itself.
So check out Matrix Learning. It’s a subject that’s only taught or was taught in elite colleges and prep schools. I have no idea if it’s still taught. Judging by the quality of our elites, I kind of doubt it.
OK, the next thing is, who do you want to be for the rest of eternity? This is probably the most important question that you can ask yourself, because you’re going to be around forever. We all are. So who do you want to be?
You want to be a completely unimportant person on planet Earth for the rest of eternity? Probably not. Earth is kind of a dump these days. It’s not a very pleasant place to live. There’s all kinds of disturbances, there’s all kinds of problems. And it’s only going to get worse because it’s Kali Yuga. So you don’t want to be on Earth.
You want to be on a higher-level planetary system like Janalok, Tapolok, Maharlok, Svarga, Brahmalok or some Siddhalok. One of those higher planetary systems. So you should orient yourself toward doing the work to qualify to live in those places.
It’s just like if you want to emigrate to another country, you have to make an application. You have to get a visa. You have to be approved and accepted and you have to qualify. Otherwise, you don’t get past the border.
And it’s the same thing with our next life. Our next life can be in any number of different conditions or places. So where do you really want to go? Well, of course, that has to be part of your spiritual study. And that’s a big part of Tantra, a big part of Bhakti.
Karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, and to a certain extent rāja-yoga are really systems for improving our destination in the next life. And also you can select a specific destination and condition of life and go for that. And that’s one of the reasons why we do this series, is to educate you how to do that.
So in your life, the last days and hours of your life are the most important. Why? Because those are the days and hours that determine where you go in the next life. And that next life could be as exalted as being a Brahmā of another universe or even this universe. Or it could be as a bacterium in some polluted place, you know, on this planet or below.
So it depends on you. Krishna says, taṁ tam evaiti kaunteya.
yaṁ yaṁ vāpi smaran bhāvaṁ tyajaty ante kalevaram taṁ tam evaiti kaunteya sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitaḥ
“Whatever you think of at the time of death, that quality of being you attain in your next life.” — Bhagavad-gītā 8.6
So the last few days and hours of your life, you better be thinking of very high things. And of course, that’s really difficult to do because the body is falling apart, the mind is disintegrating. So you have to have a strong habit, a very solid habit of sādhana, chanting mantras, meditation and so on, established before you get to that stage of your life.
So that means the best time to start spiritual life is when you’re a young kid. The next best time is right now, today. So if you haven’t started sādhana, if you haven’t started making the choice where you want to go and how you’re going to get there, then man, you better get on it.
Next: whatever you want to learn, go to the source materials. Don’t bother with secondary, tertiary sources. Let’s say you want to learn Vedic bhakti. Well, go to the Purāṇas, learn Sanskrit, take the trouble, learn the philosophy, learn the background. Go to the original source materials and read.
Other people can translate, other people can comment, but the original is always the original. I mean, even if you’re a Christian, go to the original Greek New Testament—you’ll be in for some surprises. nBecause it’s nothing like the translations, or I should say the translations are nothing like the original. Even though, yeah, there are problems with even the original sources, but if you go with a good Concordance and start going through the Greek texts, man, you’re going to learn a lot.
Same if you’re a Muslim; go learn Arabic, go to the original Quran, and so on. Whatever it is you want to study, even if it’s physics, go to Newton, go to Einstein, Bohr, Feynman.
Go to the guys who discovered the things that you want to study. Don’t rely on secondary sources. If you need to learn the math, learn the math. You’re a smart guy, right?
And finally: anything that won’t be true in a hundred years is probably irrelevant. See, that’s another reason we don’t do politics. It’s so transient, it’s so much a function of today’s opinion.
Look at the newspaper, take any big newspaper, look at the front page. How many of those stories on the front page of today’s paper are going to be important a hundred years from now?
Likely, none of them.
But birth and death and suffering, and the material world and how to get out of it, how to better your life, how to be independent, how to be free, how to enjoy life. All these things are going to be important not only in a hundred years, in a million years.
So whatever you do, prioritize your studies to focus on the things that are going to be important down the road—way down the road. And the minimum timescale you should be looking at is the end of your life. What’s going to be important 50, 60, 70 years from now?
That’s what you’re going to have to focus on because when those days come, you will have already long ago set your course and built yourself up to the person that you aim to be. So if you take into consideration now, what’s going to happen to you in the future?
We know this for a fact, you’re going to get old and die. Everything else is up for discussion, argument. Everything else is chancy; everything else is a crapshoot. But those things are for sure. They are for certain.
So you have to do now what will help you best prepare for those days, those inevitable days when your thoughts will determine your destiny.
Āūṁ Tat Sat. Āūṁ Śakti Āūṁ.