We spend much of our time improving our material life. Yet, however successful our material life, it does not bring permanent happiness or peace.
The ancient Vedas, that vast store of ancient treasure of knowledge, teach us the difference between making changes to our material reality and our internal experience of life.
If we explore these Vedic ideas deeply we can unlock the secrets to enduring happiness.
We have physical bodies. We want to survive. Death is always a threat. We are, as humans, inherently vulnerable. Therefore, much of what we do is motivated by our desire to control the uncontrollable. We fear death. Therefore, we create a world in which we try to avert death.
Yet, however much technological progress we make, whether this “progress” helps us live healthier, longer and more materially luxurious lives, nothing we do changes the reality that we are all going to die.
Studies show that, once a person has secured a place to live and enough to eat, there is no correlation between happiness and wealth.
Yet we spend so much time in the pursuit of comfort that is well beyond the essential requirements of survival.
So how can we really change our reality? How can we use the wisdom of the five thousand year old Vedas to access this treasure of happiness in this turbulent world? How can we alter our internal state irrespective of our material situation?
The Vedas explain that you and I are “not the body”. Our body is a temporary vehicle. When we jump into a car to go on a journey then we do not become the car. Therefore, our eternal soul, when she (the soul is feminine) takes a body, the soul does not become the body.
We are eternal souls not bodies. Our souls emit consciousness. It is our consciousness that pervades our bodies and fills it with life.
However, when this pure consciousness mixes with the material world, it becomes impure or “conditioned”. Our soul, while not becoming the body, “identifies” with it.
This is the reason we suffer.
Each one of us is a unique soul, a unique living entity and yet we all get caught up in temporal designations such as “I am British” or “I am in India” or “I am a man” or “I am a woman”.
As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such change.
Bhagavad-Gita
Chapter 2 Verse 13
All of these temporal identifications bring us suffering because we become ignorant of our real identity as eternal lovers of God.
Our soul is situated in our heart and consciousness is emitted from here like rays of the sun from the sun. Each one of us is a part and parcel of God, a minute and infinitesimal particle of His Infinity.
When we reconnect with our source, when we become conscious of our true eternal identity then everything changes because we can truly understand this material world and not be overwhelmed by its contradictions and challenges.
The Vedas teach us how we can fill ourselves with infinite God-love consciousness. By doing so our actions can be propelled by a super-consciousness that changes our inner world and informs all of our actions.
In my next article, I will explore what the Vedas call the three modes of nature and how awareness of these can help evolve our consciousness.
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