EWS #164 More Questions on Recent Topics

June 3, 2024

Alina (0:00:31):
Namaste! Welcome back to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste, Sraddhalu.

Sraddhalu (0:00:38):
Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.

Alina (0:00:42):

We are happy to continue this series, and today we will be taking some questions that we received from our viewers in the last, from the last two discussions and then we will continue with other questions that are pending for a while.

You may freely post your questions in our chat box or you may send beforehand at our email ID: integralstudies.in [at] gmail [dot] com. We will start with the first question we received from a nickname PMRP. He is asking: “What happened to Japan in World War II? What happened in their psyche to become violent?”

Sraddhalu (0:01:30):
So there were a few questions pending from the evening series 162, where we discussed the nation soul and this was in the chat box on that day. The question about “What happened in their psyche to become violent?” presupposes that something changed.

Actually if you look at Japanese history, and some of the traditions, some of the values which are very highly respected, they go back to a certain Kshatriya temperament, that is the warrior temperament. If you see the values of the Samurai and the depth to which they are imprinted in the Japanese culture, you get a sense of that; that it's been there for a while. Now it was not violence for the sake of violence. It was power, force, for the sake of honour. And honour was the ideal in that sense, for the kshatriya ideal. And to protect the honour, to defend the honour, there had to be a strength.

And then sometimes when the honour was completely lost, the strength itself became so purposeless that the only way was to extinguish that strength by harakiri, that is self-immolation. And the way that is done also is very stylised, is very honourable. And the, there is a ceremonial act in which the person prepares himself, dresses in the finest clothes, sits down in a certain poise with full honour, never showing emotion, never showing disturbance and then takes his sword, and the way its cut also, the way it is inserted, to hit the centre of lifeforce, the Hara, that's why it is called harakiri. So the centre of the chi which is in the uh, centre below the cardiac centre, we could say it will be closer to the third chakra, which is the physical centre of life-energy in the body, and it is from there that the entry of the sword has to take place, and so on.

So that tells you straight away the focus on life-energy, lifeforce, honour as a, as an ideal, a mental-vital ideal perhaps because both aspects were deeply ingrained, and then the power to defend. So the violence is not a crude violence of the barbarian. It is a highly sophisticated utilisation of that strength, the kshatriya temperament. So what happened during the Second World War particularly was that something of the nation's spirit was hijacked by the national ego. This is a struggle, you must understand, that took place across the world.

To fully appreciate this, one has to go deeper into Sri Aurobindo's description of how the nation soul is emerging and particularly the last couple of hundred years where the formation of the nation state itself has been taking place in a way that is still very young, is still not fully developed, not fully organised, the nation form itself has not fully come into its own, and this is a very precarious transition. In that phase, when the two great wars took place, we find in Europe, Germany being the most developed, ready to enter the subjective age, and at the, literally at the forefront of this having pushed the boundaries of the intelligence and the intellect to some form of limit, ready to break out. And that's when the subjective phase and the false subjectivism of the ego comes in.

(0:05:23)

Elsewhere, in the world also, wherever there was an attempt for the nation soul to organise itself, the national ego had a tendency to hijack. So you see this happening across many countries. And when you have these grouped together, it's not to say that the allied powers were free of national ego, they were equally (in) national ego, the difference was in what they stood for, and this was Sri Aurobindo's point.

He says, initially when the Second War started, he treated it more as a struggle between nations, although there were tilts of highlighting of, emphasis of, values. At some point the Axis powers moved much more to the suppression of freedom and which would be of course uh, extremely damaging to the evolution of humanity, and the Allied powers stood for some, we might not say a true freedom, but some appearance at least of freedom. And that's the time when Sri Aurobindo took a clear stand on, in support of the Allied powers because that freedom had to be protected.

Now what happened in practice after the Second World War: even the freedom which was fought for has been hijacked, the results you are able to see today and in the lines we have already discussed many times of an attempt to control humanity itself, and so on. So what happened in Japan was: the national soul having an opportunity to come forward, the national ego came forward more easily, which is the case for all nations at some time or other. But when that happened, it hijacked the full power of the civilisation and took it in a different track.

So you had some exceptional, examples of courage, self-abnegation, complete dedication to an ideal, nation, the king, the emperor, or the ideal of Japan itself. When there were those, when Japan began to lose, they would take off in an airplane loaded with bombs and go and do a dive into the ships and destroy themselves in the process. It was called the Kamikaze attack where the person would aim for the turret of the ship. You see the weakest point in these military ships at the time where the turret, that is the, the chimney, from where the air went, the opening went all the way down straight into the boilers. So if you could drop a bomb inside the chimney, it would go into the heart of the ship and explode from the depth and the core of it, and everything was finished.

You could explode bombs on top, you could even hit torpedoes, and some of these had multiple walls with gaps in between and multiple layers even in the construction so that the core of the ship was protected by so many layers. And so you could hit many bombs and the ship would still go on even after severe damage, even after taking-in water partially. But if it went through once through the chimney, the entire ship was finished, it would sink within a very short time.

So these people would fly and aim for the chimney and dive bomb, at least practically sink into it, while dropping bombs would also sink into it and explode. It shows extraordinary courage. Never once as they were taking off, never once showing any emotion. These are exceptional features, exceptional qualities, but they were all turned, unfortunately, to the hijacked nation soul by the nation ego or some other, secondary influence.

The problem there also, you see, in Japan, in the Japanese culture, the hierarchy is extremely important.

Now this is something which we will touch upon perhaps in a different angle later when we discuss something about language and the way language moulds the mind, which will be perhaps part of a discussion about a question on Sanskrit, but after a few [laughing] weeks perhaps.

But I want to take this example prematurely of Japan that if you see the Japanese language, it has hierarchies in the speech. So for example, the English language is extremely flat. You say ‘You’, ‘You’ could be anybody and it is still the same word ‘You’, there is no second. There is in the old English a term ‘Thou’ which is addressed to someone greater, respect, something divine, so ‘To Thee’.

(0:10:02):

You see Mother's prayers: “To Thee”, because you don't, you don’t say to the Divine ‘To You’. You could. But when the language offers you an option, well, you use that ‘To Thee’ because there's a sense of the sacred, the sense of something so elevated as to be beyond the human. But in the normal English as it is today, that's not even known. I have had people, it was American in this case, who said, ‘Why is Sri Aurobindo writing this funny language?’ when [laughing] he uses these terms “Thee” and “Thou”, ‘What is this funny language?’. Because it's not even taught, unless you've gone into poetry and then you touch that.

But other languages, let's say, uh, even in French for example, there is ‘you’, but there is also ‘you-plural’. So the plural is as, like a superior poise which you address to somebody to show respect. Or, in most of the Indian languages, you have again ‘you’ and then the ‘you-plural’ to show the mark of respect. So two levels are quite common. In a more colloquial form, sometimes as a third level to somebody who is very intimate, very close. In Bengali, ah, you will say ‘Thui’, ‘Thui’ will be a very personal, not just you but you very intimately close or to a child showing great affection. So occasionally you might have this third gradation.

But in Japan, you have multiple levels of hierarchy in the way you address in speech. Now one of the things that does, the nature of language is, it shapes your mind, it shapes your thinking very deeply. So automatically, you don't have a choice, you have to pick which of the levels you mean when you use a certain word. So when you speak, you must by force recognise what is the hierarchical position that you are addressing. And of course the highest would be reserved for the highest power structure. And implicit to this form of language is the submission to the higher authority, where obedience, loyalty, becomes then intrinsic to the culture itself.

Now the problem with this hierarchy, however much you may be genuinely committed and idealistically committed in the hierarchy, if the top part of the hierarchy is hijacked, your idealism has been totally hijacked. It happened in our Ashram for example, when we had that whole controversy around the book that was abusing Sri Aurobindo and declaring him a madman and a sexual pervert published with support of ostensibly from the administration of the Ashram because they did not say anything against it, so implied was the declaration of the publisher and the author that it had the full backing of the Ashram. There were people in the Ashram who simply took that position, ‘We will do whatever we are asked to do’. One of the very senior administrators even told me, ‘I am a loyal soldier’.

The question to me was: Soldier to whom? To the Mother or to the hierarchy which you are now submitting to? And this question does not come when you are programmed to obey a hierarchy. You saw the same thing happening in Germany, during the war when some of the lower ranks of soldiers were made to commit certain extreme atrocities, later when they were questioned, the response was, ‘I was following orders’.

And the problem with that of course is if you don't follow the orders you might get shot in the times of war, that can happen if insubordination is unacceptable in the army. But on the other hand, when you do follow the orders, you end up shooting innocent people and sometimes in doing very horrible things.

So the problem of the hierarchy is this. At the same time when the top leadership can be enlightened and awakened, the same hierarchy can be put to extraordinary use and achieve extraordinary things. And we see something of that mix, for example, in China of today, where the leadership, which is the control centre, now the Communist Party, has chosen to do things which are reasonable, you have extraordinary rapid growth in technologies and possibilities, but if it is diverted to military use and other interests, the whole country is hijacked by the national ego.

So the play of the soul-ego combination is very mixed in such cases.

And there is a very interesting example that I came across, I am digressing, but it, it’s about the hierarchy. I saw an interesting video of a Chinese person describing how during the Cultural Revolution, the government gave an order saying that birds are eating up all of our grain, so in order to have more grain for the people, you must kill all the birds. And the people obeyed because they said, ‘Ha, here is an enlightened leadership, we have to follow, they know better’, and they killed all the birds. And the result was, the next year with the crop, there was the attack of the locusts, because there were no birds to kill the, to eat the locusts, and the locusts destroyed the crop.

(0:15:18):

And the other example given was, there was a river which was meandering, so typically rivers go in the serpentine, oscillating passage. And what is interesting is, it is inherent to the way the river flows: if as the river flows, there is a slightest deviation, let's say there's a stone, and the water curves, automatically the water will start etching the point of the curve and start cutting there more and more and depositing sand on the other side. So the tiniest nudge which could start with a pebble will force a deep groove and then in reaction to that will be the other side, it will begin to expand, and it will begin to expand again on this side, and so the oscillation begins. Given enough thousands or million years, the river would become enormously oscillating. Now the interesting part about this is, that’s nature's way of course, of ensuring the water spreads across, creates the largest surface, uh, waters the soil, allows the soil to go deep, and so on.

Now here was the intellect, not very regenerate, obviously using a power of intellect uh,  with the ego taking charge rather than looking deeper or higher to understand. And the order it gave was: Well, the river is meandering, we are losing water, we are wasting water because it spreads all over the soil, cut a channel straight through to bypass the meandering river.

So there was a large curve and they made a straight line through.

And the people worked hard with great enthusiasm, obeying the order of what they trusted as the superior intelligence, so once they had cut the channel, all the other parts where the river was nourishing the soil dried out, nothing would grow. And where they had just cut the straight channel, the river flowed and then sank into the ground, it would not continue because there was no clay to support. Now clay is one aspect of it. There is the other side which is the river as a living being, there is a life force, and when you interrupt the flow of life force, it weakens, and the weakening life force will also weaken the water, not just clay being, uh, no clay being here and the water sinking under but in the source itself you will have less water coming, and the entire chain, the river collapsed, and people were left without water and without food.

And this is an example shown of how the top-down model can be disastrous or can be powerfully effective, and this is what happened in Japan also. So what was interesting, the common feature of many of these Axis powers was this kind of a very disciplined, hierarchical uh, training, almost a military discipline, which was easily hijacked by the ego.

And this is one of the things one has to be very careful of uh, in any hierarchy, in any structure. Make sure you never compromise the leader, the top leadership and the core. Never compromise there. Once a little bit here, and then they sneak in and the forces get in and they can hijack or destroy anything.

So this, I think, would, it's a longish explanation, but I went a little beyond the scope of the immediate part of the question.

We can go to the next question. The next question, yeah. Yes.

Alina (0:18:49):
Yeah, I can go to the next question. Shantha, she's writing: What about..

Sraddhalu (0:18:55):

Aditya, Aditya’s question.

Alina (0:18:57):

Sorry! Yes-yes.

Aditya: “Does media play a role in influencing the psychological type of a nation? And does India has a psychological, a single psychological types similar to Japan because India is too heterogeneous unlike Japan?”

Sraddhalu (0:19:18):
Mmhm. Yes, it's a very good question, very important, because India is in quite an extraordinary case in many ways. When you read Sri Aurobindo's description of the civilisational ideals across the world, he points to India as having as its civilisational ideal  spirituality, and of course qualifying the spirituality itself as life-affirming, life-embracing, life-transforming, not ascetic. And it's important to notice this, because otherwise one is distracted by the extreme diversity of the Indian civilisation, the cultures, the subunits.

(0:20:10):

I had an interesting discussion with a professor of, I think, religion, in Switzerland, in one of the elite universities. And she was explaining how uh, various places in Middle East and then in Europe, the nation was defined by the religion. And so in her course she teaches this that is the religion which defines the boundaries and the people. And then she said to me:

‘And India, ho! So crazy! So many religions! So complicated!’ And she said a few more things which by which she implied that India could not ever be one nation.

Now this has been a position of many European academics who came with this idea, and so they thought that they could break India, using this religious divisions. And you see also in history uh, many attempts for, well, religious struggles, viewpoints between religions, but never has it ever defined the people, which is interesting.

What, when you look back, and it goes all the way to the Mahabharata, at the point of the Mahabharata which let's say is about 5100 years ago, maybe about 5200 years ago, 3100 BC is about the time when it finished. So when you look at the Mahabharata, it's the integration of all these states, at that time kingdoms, integration of all these to form the cultural unit which would be the basis for the nation that will be India. And so the cultural foundations are laid there which unify them all, and this great war is actually a unifying war in which all that is opposing that unity and all that is opposing the future evolution is literally destroyed. There was a gridlock of values, of commitments, of loyalties.

You see this was one of the problems in Japan, linking it to the previous question, you have a loyalty to the emperor but you have also a loyalty to whatever is the truth that you live for, and if the emperor gives a command contrary to that, what do you follow? And this was the Kshatriya's dilemma in India during the Mahabharata war that you knew that you were on the side of the wrong, but you had the loyalty, and there were so many examples, they would literally say:

‘I have eaten the food given by so and so, at a time of desperation, I can never betray’,

‘I have made an oath, I have made a commitment, I am bound to my oath’, and so the truth be damned, practically. You don't think that, you don't say that, but that's what it comes to. You cling to some artificial moral, ethical, poise, choice, commitment, made in a very different context, and now that is conflicting with the higher truth. Do you choose the higher truth and even choose to abandon this?

Or, do you say, ‘But I have given my word and there is the ego of my greatness, my word, I have never broken’? And so, will you stick to your word and ego's superiority or say ‘But this word has to fall apart because the Divine Word is different, the Divine command to me is different, the greater truth for humanity is greater than my silly statement made in a very limited context’?

And so, those who could not do that effectively were wiped out literally, and at the same time there was the welding of the nation. And so, it's very interesting passage in the Mahabharata. The result was, there were these very rich kingdoms, very rich cultural units, and yet held with this common basis which is the spiritual foundation of the Vedic culture. And now a cultural unit and a greater integration of that space has begun which then later organises into a political unit partly through a transition under British rule.

One could, need not have had that, but, well, that was the circumstance of that transition. So you have a nation, and it was never about religion, it was always those cultural values going back to the Vedas which allows for this extreme diversity and even extreme diversity of religions and yet holds this. And so the common feature is the underlying spirituality of the Veda. Unlike other civilisations where the civilisational goals were cultural, ethical, sometimes economic, artistic, uh, mentally idealistic, and so on, where necessarily there was a boundary limit beyond which it could not cross. This spiritual underlying ideal is potentially able to embrace all humanity because it is based on this idea that the Self is one and we are all aspects of the same one Self.

(0:25:23):

Now it does not mean that in India that Self has been realised, it just means that that idea that ‘All this is an expression of one underlying Self’ is so deeply rooted in the culture, in the thinking, in the uh, emotional life of the people through the Puranic stories, and then through the philosophies in the thought, and even in the sciences and the arts, underlying always there is this going back to the underlying one Self which holds it all together. Even if you take music or dance or the martial arts, they will all go back to the Self, and they will all relate to the Veda somehow or principles which are derived from the Veda, through the Upanishads, or through the Ayurveda, and things like that.

So that sense of an underlying unity even in idea or lived as a, as a value in life is what holds India together. And this allows for this extreme diversity, so extreme that it is almost impossible to believe that it should be able to hold. But that's where you see the potential for the future of humanity. If this principle can now extend beyond the boundaries of the political India and extend into the world, then you have there the foundation on which human unity is possible. And so if you have to create a space where human unity could be attempted to be practiced, it would have to be in India. And that's why Mother said, she chose Auroville to be established in India. No choice there! [laughing]

And Auroville being established becomes like a nucleus, drawing, pulling, all these mm, nation-souls, ah, national consciousness, into this different value system. It's happening very subtly, it's happening behind the scenes, people are not always conscious. But if it could be brought into the conscious awareness of the people, that work could be done much more rapidly, and this is where the external articulation makes such a big difference.

So, coming back to the question: Does India have a single psychological type?

Yes, it is a psycho-spiritual type, not purely psychological, therefore, India can be so heterogeneous and yet hold. But then the question: “Does media play a role in influencing the psychological type of a nation?” Yes, but it goes both ways, and then we will see also the advantage when used correctly. So the media type, the media emergence within a nation, will tend to form the type or follow the type of the nation.

Now in Japan, you cannot imagine the media criticising the king, the emperor, ever. You will never find the media criticising Japan itself or Japan's policies. They may criticise a person, an individual, or, but they will never compromise national self-interest. And this would be true of many nations around the world but not all.

India particularly has somehow in the very inception of the media soon after India became free of colonisation, the, those who ruled India, Nehru, and I'm using the word deliberately because he considered himself a ruler and not a servant of the people, you know that incident where he said to the American ambassador Kenneth Galbraith that ‘I am the last Englishman to rule India’, so he considered himself an Englishman, he considered his role to rule India, and you can see the result was a continuation of colonisation of the mind, and with it all the institutional bodies that were grown or which should have been rebuilt, recast, reshaped, they were all a continuation of the colonial.

So one of these, apart from the constitution itself, one of these was the media framework which Nehru put directly under control and influence of what was at that time the Russian communists. And the result was, communism, communist mentality, interests, and the link of the KGB controlling the Indian media, all these became ingrained so deeply that the, even to this day the schools of media in, and the universities of media into which the government pumps tons of money, they are still inherently anti-national! In the very training they give to their students, they are taught to think against national interest. And they are extremely leftist, and so on.

(0:30:09):

So the result in India is, your own institutions are attacking you and the media in this case is extremely damaging, it has gone a long way to destroy Indian values. So, does the media play a role in influencing the type? Yes, but equally the media is formed by the type. In Japan this would be unthinkable. If somebody did that, he would be removed very quickly.

But in this case, the media is a representation of the confusion which is there also in the collective identity within India and so the difficulty of the passage. And of course, this multiplicity of, and diversity of types and interests and cultural or even religious controls, all these have been misused by other powers from outside India. But all this is to say that while the media itself is influenced by the type of the people, there is also the media which influences the future-type of the people. And this is the key-part for us now to discuss.

If in Japan, gradually, somebody seize the media and began to teach the opposite values, you could, over a few generations, severely damage the national consciousness and its values, civilisational values. Now you will be surprised when I say, ‘You can damage it’, because it can happen, it does happen that when a civilisation lives for its high ideals, it grows; and Sri Aurobindo explains, when it turns away from those ideals, it sinks and loses its capacity, its power. And this is the example you see: the Greece of today is no comparison to the Greece of 2,000 years ago, for the civilisational values.

And so, yes, you can subvert those values, and the people will fall, the civilisational will collapse, and that's the power of the media and the educational system. So one of the very skilful things the leftists do, and they are Past Masters in how to overthrow civilisation, the first thing they do is: they cut you off from your roots, they will stop telling you the things which matter, and fill you with a lot of junk, and your mind is so busy that you give up, you stop thinking or you stop uh, trying to absorb, you just become a passive receptor and just soak-in whatever junk is poured into you.

So they did that with great effect in India, but this goes back to the colonial, colonial time under Macaulay and his system of education to brainwash the Indian people. And that continues of course, with the additional leftist agenda. The next thing they do, once you have crossed two or three generations that the memory doesn't remain, they introduce now the contrary values. And that's what you see happening today in what we discussed earlier also in the gender-confusion, and so on. But the groundwork for that prepared goes back for at least two generations.

And this happened in the United States also. The educational system was taken over somewhere in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And then the decline of values began. And one of the things they did was, they dumbed it down to such a degree that today in many cases in the public schools, you will find 18-year-olds who are still learning what in India a 12-year-old would learn, and they're not even aware, it's gone so bad.

So, yes, media can play a very important role, education can play a very important role in forming the future by highlighting those values, broadening them, integrating into the national life as far as possible, or, by undoing that and this too has happened.

I don't know how it is in Japan. I do believe from whatever little exposure I've had, there is a loss, but the loss is much more by the distraction that the media offers, rather than highlighting those values there is this distraction which turns away. You are so busy doing other things that these things tend to fade. But it may also be a passage from an evolutionary point of view of loosening what was too rigid to allow for something larger to begin to fill-in and flow.

So at least in India, we can look at it in this way, that, not that this was the best thing to happen, but having happened, the best use that can be made of it is, to allow for a greater flexibility of the consciousness, but as quickly as possible those values have to be, the soul-values have to return on a civilisational level.

I think, we can go to the next question. The next question is from the EW, evening series of last time of 163. Akilesh has asked..

Alina (0:35:12):

[inaudible]

Sraddhalu (0:35:13):

Ha-yes! Alina is back! Yes, we can here you!

Alina (0:35:17):

Can you hear me?

Sraddhalu (0:35:19):

Yes!

Alina (0:35:25):

Can you hear me?

Sraddhalu (0:35:27):
Yes, we can here you!

Alina (0:35:28):

Oh.. my Internet is…

Sraddhalu (0:35:35):

Have you unmuted? I think, her connection is not good! Mhm, I think, I’ll read! Next question is from Akilesh, he is asking: “A male person with a female tendency whose character is the same..”

Alina (0:35:56):
My, my connection..

Sraddhalu (0:35:58):

Yes, go ahead!

Alina (0:36:02):

Haa! Ok! Akki, Akilesh, [laughing] he is writing: “A male person with female tendency, his character is same as a female, how he can face difficulties in family life?”

Sraddhalu (0:36:20):

Yes. So, the question is very specific: If a male person has a character similar to a female, how can he face difficulties in family life? Now I am not too sure, I have to guess a little bit of the scope of the question! When you say, “character”, I understand, this is different from sexual attraction. Similarly, when he says “difficulties in family life”, I am assuming, it is ah, interactions with people and not just the sexual life, but so I’ll cover both perhaps if that comes.

Remember what we discussed in the last couple of sessions about this: Not to confuse three very different things.

One is the biology, which is rooted in your genes and thereby the physical form of organs which would be associated from it, and the chromosomal structure you cannot change even if you mmm, harm the body by cutting off certain parts.

The second thing which is very different is your psychological temperament, a cluster of qualities, and some which you may associate with more masculine, some which you may associate with more feminine. But it is not so much about the qualities. It’s the way the qualities are used which is different between masculine and feminine. The same qualities can exist in both. So if I had to draw an image, I would put it like this. [gestures] (0:37:42) You see. So the palm represents the central bundle of qualities and they are common to both. But in one case, the qualities are slanted in this way, the other case, the qualities are slanted in that way. But the bundle of quality is pretty much the same.

Occasionally, as it happens, depending on the degree of your development, there may be a separation in the overlap. So, there are many qualities in the male which are too distinct and are missing in the less developed female, many qualities in the female which are too distinct and are missing in the less developed male.

But assuming both are well developed and more rounded, then the overlap of qualities will be almost the same, but the emphasis of the qualities, the way they function, would be different. So in that case, to me, it does not matter what character ah, is it more masculine, feminine, according to the current social values or norms or the people around you and what they think does not matter. If that's your way, the way you flow, well, just flow with it, do this way you would want to do, it doesn't really matter.

And the question of difficulties in collective life would simply be: Can you use those qualities well? If you use them well, people will respect you irrespective of whether it looks more feminine or masculine for that local cultural value system, or you will end up anyway gravitating into a cultural milieu that better matches your balance of qualities and their expression.

So I would simply say, do not worry. Live the life as completely as possible, develop your qualities, push their boundaries, enrich them, and push the lines of excellence that are natural to you and develop yourself, the rest will fall into place, do not worry. If the question is for a child who is still in the growing years, then there may be an issue of being teased by others, ‘Oh, he is so uh, feminine or too masculine or whatever terms they use to criticise, laugh it off, it doesn't matter, your life is not what they think, your life is what you do with it. So again you would equip the children to face it and deal with it.

And one of the ways is simply to turn around and say, ‘Look, I can do all this, you can't do that!’, and the, you put the others to shame, those who criticise you, ‘Just because I am more gifted, more capable, I have a richer capacity, uh, you find it odd, you are inferior in capacity, so you criticise me, try to be like me and be more complete in your capacities’. And in other ways to play that.

(0:40:20):

But if the question is more about uh, the female tendency being more in a sexual uh, inclination or as difficulties in family life, you mean in the sexual relations, then one would have to review whether you are suited for that particular framework of the family. But again here my view personally is, you are not defined by your sexual inclinations, you are defined by so much more of which your sexual inclinations or tendencies are a very superficial and almost physical-vital grade narrow band. These are easily modifiable also. A lot of these go back to habits.

Children who have been molested at an early age tend to have aberrations in these tendencies. If you can undo that harm, then you will find things will very quickly fall back into a rhythm that adjusts to the circumstances. And as I pointed out in the example in that discussion what Sri Aurobindo says, you put men only on an island, eventually they will tend to be gay; during that period you bring them back mixed with female companions, and they would tend to again return to earlier patterns. These things are somewhat fluid because the sexual drive has no purpose other than fulfilling itself, and these things can be easily balanced out. I know of many cases where uh, people also had tendencies or even you would have normally considered them to be gay who were in a family life and very healthy and very comfortable and that tendency was there also as an underlying tendency. It's no big deal. So I'll simply say, it's a question of choice of what is more important for you and find the balance in what works.

Since the question does not have more specifics, I think, I'll leave it at that. We can go to the next. Next two questions are related, both are from characters of the Mahabharata. Yes, Alina!

Alina (0:42:34):
So, I will read both questions together. Shantha, she is writing:
What about Arjuna's disguise?”

And Chen Dock, he is writing: “Shikhandi is also one of the interesting characters in Mahabharata. Hope you can elaborate upon it too.”

Sraddhalu (0:42:53):
Yes, both are interesting questions and they come from this discussion on the third gender. Arjuna has a phase in the story of the Mahabharata where he along with the other Pandava princes, they have to live in disguise for one year, and if they are found out, then again they have to go back and live in the forest for so many more years. So they have to be very well in their disguise because they know the enemy is looking for them to expose them.

Now Arjuna had a curse which took place. It's a very interesting passage, and these things need a much deeper exploration. He goes to heaven. Now what does that mean? And as he goes there to visit Indra, it's like a human being in a human body is going to meet Indra, what does that mean? And it goes back to a period in which human beings had a free exchange in material body with beings. Were they material beings? Were they materialised beings? Were they extraterrestrials? That's really the question we need to view but for a larger discussion another time.

So Arjuna goes to meet Indra. On the way into his court, he meets this Apsara who falls for him and says she wants to marry him. But Arjuna says, ‘You know what, you were married to one of my ancestors’, because the time frame of earth time and the heaven time is very different, so, ‘I have to treat you like a Mother’. And the Apsara is very upset. She says, ‘How dare you insult me and I live in the divine kingdom, for me these moral values have no place’. And since Arjuna insists, she curses him that he will become a eunuch, he will lose his manhood.

And then of course Indra reduces the curse. You see, one of the things about curse is, it's a power put out, you cannot undo it, but you can modify it. So Indra reduces the curse to one year and says, ‘You will have the choice when you will have the curse activated on you’. So when Arjuna has to hide, he activates the curse, and for one year he is a eunuch, and then he is living in a, in the kingdom under some king as a eunuch and nobody knows he is actually Arjuna because Arjuna was extremely virile. So this idea, it's not as if he has changed his gender or sex or anything, but it's this reduction of the virility. And like I mentioned last time, it's really a removal of something rather than a change. So that's one example.

(0:45:29):

The Chen Dock's question is about Shikhandi, which is more fascinating.

So, she has, to cut the story short, she has been slighted, insulted, abandoned effectively, because of certain events by this Bhishma who refuses to marry her because he has a vow of celibacy and so he cannot marry and yet he has conquered her and so no one else will marry her, so finally she is without a husband and she makes it her mission to destroy him. And for that purpose her body is not strong enough, so whatever, through whatever tapasya she is given the boon ‘In your next incarnation you will have a body that will be strong enough and you will be able to kill him’.

So she immediately immolates herself, takes birth again, comes now. Here you see very interesting is this obstinate passion which almost as if aligns to soul's purpose to such a degree that it drives even the line of incarnation and the purpose of the next life. So implied in this is something quite fascinating, and you will find this in many of the more rich religious traditions, you will find this in Buddhism also, as well as in most of the yoga traditions, that at the time of quitting the body, what your mind is upon is the direction in which your soul moves for the next incarnation. At least that's what you are told.

There is a truth to it. If at that moment, because the choice of the next life is made at that moment when you are leaving this, you look back, you see what's missing and then you turn to fill it. And that's when the choice is made for the next step. But if at that moment something surges up very intensely, ‘I have really missed this’, or ‘That is so important’, and that comes up strongly, that becomes the line of the impulse which takes you into the next incarnation.

So they will tell you, ‘Prepare yourself for that passage’. In some of the Sufi traditions they make a big deal of it, that you have to die before you die, so that you are ready for the death. And so you are as if tuned-in, so tuned-in that when you have to leave the body, you have made the commitment, whatever your goal is, for some of them it will be to get out of the reincarnation cycle or to take a higher birth or whatever it is, you are primed for that, you are one-pointed in that purpose, and so she is one-pointed in this revenge.

Now she takes birth in a female body, but the king to whom she is born, now that's a very strong lineage because it's a very special strength she can inherit, the king receives an intuitive guidance that he has to raise her as a son. So from childhood she is given all the training to make her body strong and fighting-fit.

So this is another important principle to recognise: While it is true that in the biology there is a balance in the strength of the muscles that the male muscles are stronger than the female muscles and the female muscles are softer than the male muscles generally, the early years of upbringing and the food you eat and the kind of work you do and the exercise you do can make a huge difference, but into that if you bring in the soul-intention, that can make all the difference, literally it can reshape the whole framework of your subtle body, which then defines your gross body.

Now as a full-grown adult, if you change something in the subtle body, it may take many years for it to settle into the gross body, depending on whether it's soft tissue or bone. Bone will take up to seven years. Soft tissue can change within a few months even or weeks. So subtle body to gross body transition is most rapidly done during the period of growth because your body literally is replacing itself so quickly, more shorter than seven years. So a one-year-old child growing to let's say five years, the body volume has more than doubled. From five years to twenty, your volume would have tripled probably. Now that means the total replacement, multiple times over. So if your subtle body is shaped suitably, your gross body is actually reshaped into whatever template you choose, if that's the soul's choice.

(0:50:05):

So literally this woman comes out with the full strength of what's needed to be a warrior on the battlefield and to defeat, to kill Bhishma. Then there's some complexity in the story that for a brief while because of the boon of some uh, yaksha, these are vital beings, there's some exchange of the sex, but that's not important. What happens is, when she approaches to face Bhishma, he recognises it is the same one, he recognises it is a woman, and so he puts down his bow, he says ‘I cannot fight a woman’.

That's his dharma-value system, right? So he puts down his bow and Arjuna is hiding behind Shikhandi and releases a volley of arrows and kills him. And so you see here again one of those things we discussed of the Mahabharata, the value system which was intermediate gives way to something or rather takes over a higher truth, both sides to some extent even.

But this idea of Shikhandi being half-man, half-woman in the popular term, it's not quite so, she is a woman, but she has built herself up as a full-grown power of what would be there in the male vehicle, and yet she had to be a woman to fulfil that purpose of killing Bhishma, because if she was born as a male it would not serve because she could not defeat him. So, these are two cases which are much misrepresented in the, let’s say, gender agenda today where they will say, ‘Oh, this is actually a gender-mix’. No, it's not. It's a very clear thing. And like I said, if you distinguish between the biology, psychology and the sexual attractions, there is absolutely no problem.

And we can go to the next.

Alina (0:52:01):
Rupali: “In counselling psychology there is a massive movement to become a cheer affirmative therapist, so much so that some people with this agenda has started posing as patients and targeting those who don't work through the lens of gender, how to mitigate through these attacks? I usually explain that gender is perhaps but just one aspect of identity, but there is always something more.”

Sraddhalu (0:52:37):
Mmhm, yes, I would agree with the way you approach it. In fact, the whole problem of this gender-confusion agenda is to reduce a person to their sexual attraction, to their sexuality. And that's the most crude animal part of you in a sense. Because when you say sexual attraction, what defines your sexual attraction? It's not something you chose, it's not your mind. It's something which is level of an instinct of biology-vitality, and some of it may be influenced by some past programming, but that's about it.

It's all at a level which is almost unconscious, instinctive, crude animal life basically. It's a whole different story that you can lift the whole sexual relation and experience to higher values, that's a different story. But what they are speaking of in this agenda is, well: What's the drive that's possessing you at that moment: If you just replace, one of the things you can do for understanding better, replace the word ‘sexual’ by ‘anger’, because the vibrational quality, the two are exactly the same, Mother says. If not for the pleasure component, the anger vibration and the sex vibration are the same thing, same grade, same agitation, same instinctive impulsiveness. Same thing.

So: Is my anger moving this way or that way or in this form or that form? It's still belonging to an instinctive animal level. Don't define yourself by how your anger expresses itself because that's not you at that moment, it's a compulsion of an instinct of an animal grade. So to want to reduce yourself to that or want to reduce others or reduce the whole discourse of identity to that is a perversion, it's a retrogression of the evolutionary impulse. The evolutionary impulse wants to rise at least to mind and if possible beyond mind. To be a human you have to be living by mind values, otherwise you are not human, you fall back to animal level.

And that's part of the thing, the problem with this whole agenda that when somebody, I gave this example and these are very real examples, uh, in school a teacher approaches the first day of the school students and says, ‘My name is so and so and I am of this’ whatever sexual attraction. And is that your value that you want to present to the children as your identity?

But unfortunately this has been the brainwash, and children are being given this as the brainwash. I looked at some of the textbooks being for kindergarten children, for parents to read to the children, and the textbook is about a child who wants to now discover who he or she is, as whether male or female, and on the basis of a sexual attraction, at kindergarten level, and they are told ‘You don't know who you are, you are on a quest to discover yourself’. And the definition of ‘Who you are’ is sexual attraction. No, I am sorry, that is a perversion!

(0:55:40):

So, I come back to that point which I have made in those discussions: Sexuality has no place in children's lives until their, they are biologically and psychologically mature enough to have a healthy sexual relation. Till then, no, your identity is not that. Your identity is your soul and your soul's aspiration and the mould that your soul has, well so to say, infused.

So I'm still making a difference:

The soul's personality infused into you versus the inherited and externally formed personality. First you are the soul's personality, and then to the extent that the things in your inherited and external-influenced characteristics aligned to the soul personality, those are part of you. To the extent they are not, to the extent they are contrary, well, they are not a part of you. They are, let's say, inheritance.

For example, if you wore clothes which were metallic and rigid and your arms were always like this rigid, would you say that's what your arms are? ‘No, that's what my clothes are which are restricting my arms which are much more fluid and flexible.’ Isn't it?

You wear thick gloves which are rigid, you can barely fold your fingers, will you say you are not supple? You will say, ‘No, it is this, the gloves which are rigid’.

If your gloves are coarse, harsh, because you have to hold heavy, sharp things, it's not that you have lost sensitivity, it's the outer coating which is insensitive. Isn't it?

And in this way we have to distinguish inside-out. So you may say for example, ‘My inner aspiration is this, but the vehicle of my body or my emotions or my life energies or my mind has these limitations, which then I must overcome so that these external layers reflect my inner layers’. To the extent you are able to do that, you are fulfilling your soul's purpose. To the extent you are suppressing your soul's values by the limitation of your outer nature, or imposing them and even suffocating the soul, you are going against the reason you were born for.

So, the sense of our identity must be brought back to its truth, which is the soul who chose to take birth. That is your true identity. All else is secondary. And all of our psychology must be rebuilt on this principle.

Now, to the extent that western psychology allows this or does not, you have to then play with the vocabulary and the means available, but to the extent possible, speak of it, say it in these terms, explain it this way. And as it comes to “counselling psychology”, which is the term that Rupali has used here, since the goal is to counsel somebody, to overcome some distress, some difficulty, the key will always be inside-out.

The difficulty and distress always belongs to the surface layers. It's your gloves which are rigid or torn or cracked or twisted or whatever. You have to go back to something which is true within you which is free and from there push to undo the damage. And so putting the reference back to the deeper truth will be essential for the success of any such counselling. Again, depending on the people, you may or may not use specific vocabulary, you may or may not speak of soul, or so on, but even if you don't use that word, the concept will have to be there that:

There is a truth deeper within you that is the true you. And that's not your emotions, it's behind your emotions. Your emotions come and go and they change. What of you is most permanent? It is only that which is permanent which is true. What is changing, fluctuating, well, it's appearance, it's temporary, it's not permanent and therefore less true compared to that which is. And so even when you look back at somebody who has been through trauma, the trauma comes outside-in always, so the damage also, even if it goes deep, is an outside-in damage, and so the healing must be also inside-out.

We will have more of this in a later session, but I think, this is the point to be made.

(1:00:13):

What is missing? As far as I am aware, not enough people in academia who are putting forward this view. And so the nature of this, what they call ‘modern psychology’, being largely driven by academic papers and the consensus of the collective, it often takes a generation or two for new ideas to seep-in, and that needs to be done though for those who feel committed to want to do that.

For me personally that's too long, I don't have the time or the patience to deal with that kind of engagement. What I would do I will try to do when I can, but otherwise I would focus on those who already value, those who already share these deeper things and then move as rapidly as possible with them.What generally happens, and we see that in the western model of change of academia, an entire generation dies out to be replaced by a new generation with different values. So feed this, support this, nourish this, the soul values being essential, and then I suppose, that's the best way we can move forward.

We can go to the next question.

Alina (1:01:24):
Rohan is writing: “I am 34-years-old disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and currently doing Integral Yoga under their guidance. I'm also a brahmachari and leading a pretty lean life out of my savings and some meagre earnings through online music channel. My question: Should I be worried about taking medical insurance as a bet that will hedge me against any unforeseen circumstances like accidents or diseases? I'm unable to convince myself and my family for going unhedged when it comes to medical care. Although living a sattvic life, I am surrendered to the Mother, but also I don't want to nurture a doubt in my mind regarding this conundrum. What if something comes up then it would be an unnecessary financial burden on my family. On the other hand, paying annual medical premium is also a significant burden on my early financial budget. Mother wanted her children to be fearless, but this issue is something where I need help. Please guide how to take this decision.”

I think many of us are [Alina is laughing] in this kind of position so very much looking for an answer.

Sraddhalu (1:02:55):
Yes. Ah, a lot would depend also where you are in the world, but the [gesturing within quotation marks] ‘background’ will make this situation clear. Ah, as you see across the last 50 years, there has been increasing corporatisation of human life, and these are corporate interests which want human beings to become consumers and dependent and feed the machinery of profit for the corporation. Insurance used to be at one point a form of support for a collective. So if everybody saves a tiny bit, occasionally when somebody gets really sick or has an accident, then that saving can go to help that one person.

It's a very simple idea. And ideally if it was done the right way, nobody would be strained. The problem is when insurance itself becomes a gigantic octopus corporation, multi-layered, of massive profits at the top, and increasingly less benefit to the people, then you have this problem.

So let me explain this a little bit. The way it works: If you start an insurance company, let's say in India, from scratch, you are not allowed to operate as a company unless you are reinsured at the backend, because in case your company goes insolvent, you have to have somebody insuring you as a company, which means a large chunk of your profits from the insurance you have to pass on to that other entity which does nothing other than feeding on you. They have no publicity, they have no engagement with people, they only feed on you as an independent corporation. And behind that is another international insurance company which is very big, again which is just a ‘octopus’, for want of a better word, feeding on them. And all the profits up there are massive.

And here is the company which is doing the hard work. It can of course sink, and they do make them sink sometimes deliberately, and then they will be backed by that insurance which will prove to the rest ‘See, that's why you need our backing’. But they do nothing else.

So what happens here? On this level of the front of the company, you as an agent or as a, as part of the hierarchy are paid more money if you give out less insurance. The less the payout, the more the profits, the more you get paid.

So the entire machinery is designed to suck out money from you and give you back as little as possible. This is where the problem has come. Had it been genuine, let's say you are a community of 20 people, everybody puts out a little bit of saving and that saving is used when one of us has some financial or medical problem, it works fine.

(1:05:44):

But when you have this machinery which feeds on and sucks out a huge percent, I believe these go into something like 70 to 80% in some of the more, uh, what they call ‘mature economies’, that means, where there is complete monopoly, there is no real competition anymore, competition is just for appearance, then that's the level of amount of money, profit, that's taken out. Having understood this, we understand why the annual medical premium is so high.

Now comes the other catch. So the insurance company teams up with the hospitals and with the pharmaceutical companies to make it such among themselves that together they profit more by creating a cartel. How does this cartel work? The hospital raises the costs, and if you are insured then the insurance takes care of it, if you are not insured then you get severely damaged. So in order to be able to manage the raised costs, you insure yourself, so the insurance company benefits, hospitals make profits also higher.

Next step, the insurance says, ‘Well, based on the deals we have made with you’, now that they have full acquiescence of all the people forced into insurance, ‘based on that, we will only pay up to 80% but not the whole’, so again, they force you to bear that burden, ‘unless you go for a higher premium insurance, then we might bear a greater burden’.

What happened in the United States, and this was one of the great tricks that the, the corporate lobby played in uh, what was called ‘ObamaCare’. It was the only thing Barack Obama could present as any achievement during his 8-year tenure, otherwise you find, he did nothing, absolutely. Under him all the wars increased, ISIS grew with American weapons, with American training, all the problems increased. But this was the only thing they claimed was an achievement.

But what was the achievement if you look deeper? Everyone was forced to buy insurance, those who didn't buy had to pay much more. So effectively it is a cartel, which is what makes the whole thing so expensive and the premiums keep, will keep rising.

So the question now really is: Where are you in the world? If you are already within the cartelised system, you don't have too much choice. Because even if you get a little cold and you are hospitalised for a minor injury for a day or two, the bills would be so high if you are not insured. The trick then would be to go for the lowest grade of insurance that you can afford to have and hope that you don't get too sick, and so on, if you cannot afford it.

But if you are in India, if you are in one of what they will call ‘less mature markets’, meaning, it's not yet a monopoly but they are pushing it gradually to become a monopoly and they have 10-year timeline, 20-year timelines, they are not worried. They are programming your children today while your children are still in kindergarten so that when they complete their education, they will be suitably programmed to become now in the, in the pipeline of buying insurance for the rest of their lives.

That's how they think. So, if you are in such a space, which is not so mature, then you make a choice. And I'll set the context for the choice, with a few stories first. So I was working in the Ashram Archives. We were putting up the new cold storage. There was a lot of work being done with what were the specifications, and so on. And one of the things which they wanted to do was to set up a fire alarm inside with a fire sensor and with the halogen sprays to put out the fire, fire extinguishers. And I came to my teacher, M.P. Pandit, and I mentioned to him that this is what they were doing.

And he made an interesting comment. He said that the Mother said that the things that you fear are the things which you invite. And in his view, it would have been better that we did not do that. I was very hesitant because I knew this would not be acceptable. I mentioned this to somebody who was, I was working with in the archives and he laughed. I mentioned to Pandit-ji that this was the response. And he says, “Yes, since you have a group that is so mixed, then it's better to follow what is the belief system of the group”.

(1:10:25):

You see the way it worked, if the entire group held a certain faith, the faith itself acts as a protection almost down to a physical level to the extent that within you that faith is integrated as close to the body-consciousness as possible, you are completely protected. In the part where the faith does not exist or a contrary faith exists, which means what you call ‘the doubt’, aśraddhā, contrary faith in the Divine, the doubt, ‘Oh, but what if’, in that part there is as if a weak point, an opening, because it is receptive now to that other possibility. Doesn't mean it will happen. But if you are now brood on it, if you start thinking about it, if you start worrying, then you are activating it, and the resonance of that activation will invite the equivalent vibration. You are thinking, ‘What if’, and the thing you conceive of becomes a formation, you are feeding it mental awareness, thoughtform, lifeforce from worry, emotion, distress, anxiety, you are feeding it life-energy, it becomes like a formation which actually goes out and fulfils itself.

So, the solution finally will come back to you. And I am setting all this to describe that. Take one more example. Ravindra-ji, who was in charge of the Ashram Fruit Room. He's quite an extraordinary personality. He was one of those, I think today it's okay to say it, because there is nobody around who, who would be hurt by our saying it. He was one of those very extraordinary titanic beings that the Mother kept very close to her so that they might not do harms outside in the world. It was an, you know, you would call it an ‘asuric being’, but I will just use the word ‘titanic’, titanic vitality. And there was a time, and totally dedicated to the Mother, there was a time when he would pull the entire cart full of vegetables and fruits, like a horse or an ox would pull, and he would do it himself in the hot sun. And we have seen him walking from the Ashram gate to the Dining Room and back on the tarred road. And in those days the way the tarring was done, they would actually pour it and sometimes it was not too well mixed, so you would have these patches of liquid, semi-liquid tar, in the heat of the sun, it would bubble. It wouldn't stick too much. Of course, if you dragged your slippers on it, it would stick. But if you just pressed on it, it would leave an imprint. It was so soft, but there would be bubbles inside. It was so hot. He would be walking barefoot from the Ashram to the Dining Room and back, under the midday sun, and slowly walking, no, showing no distress at all. And I think there was also an aspect of pride at this. And then he was living in the other extreme of the Ashram main building. So that was the north-west corner and Mother is in the north-east corner. And sometimes he would laugh, hha-hha-hha-hha-hha, and it was such a powerful laugh, you could hear all the way to the Mother's Room. Titanic laughter! And of course there were aberrations which came which unfortunately which are part of that nature, strong vital, but Mother worked basically to get the allegiance of the beings behind and put them to work to the service of the divine creation. And there were some extraordinary people like that, and they had loyalty to her, total loyalty, and she built them, she trained them for this. So all this is to give a background of him.

And then he shared this example with us. Oh, there is another aspect to it. Mother put him in charge of the assignment of work in the Ashram, and this is a question which bothered me a lot: Why would such a person be given such a responsibility? Because it was misused in many ways. And sometimes with, he took pleasure in putting you in the wrong, wrong kind of work. And then I was told this incident, I was told that Mother had given the work to somebody else and the person could not manage, he didn't have enough vitality to face the pushback that the work required. And afterwards when they had to replace him, they had a committee five and even those five very quickly became extremely aggressive and uh, rude, crude, as a defence mechanism because they could not take the pushback.

Very interesting to see that. So it gave me a deeper understanding of how that whole thing works and the nature of that. Anyway, so we come now to. So, he was an extraordinary person, ah, you have to really appreciate this.

(1:15:12):

One incident he shared with us. He was, in the days of the Fruit Room, he had to store the fruits and to give them to people, and that was his work, and again he would do this: the fruits would come through a window, he would turn this cart which would go all the way up, store elsewhere, arrange, distribute, bring it down. And this was before the cold storage came which came a little later. Before the cold storage came, once there was a huge load of oranges that came. And normally before they spoil you start distributing them. Mother said: keep these oranges for me and I want to give, I want you to give me two oranges every day for the next few months. And Ravindra-ji went: ‘What are you saying, they will all spoil?’ Mother said, ‘just do as I am saying’. So he goes back, he piles all these oranges. Next day he said, ‘half the oranges had spoiled’.  He went to the Mother and reported: ‘Mother, half of them have spoiled.’ Mother said:’Just do as I am saying, give me two oranges every day.’ Now obviously she was doing something, she was putting her force on the oranges. And then he said, miraculously from the next day on, not a single orange spoilt. And every day he would give two oranges to the Mother in juice form and it went on and on until the entire stock was over, not one orange spoilt.

So when this is done, he goes to the Mother and says: ‘Mother it's worked very well, but why is it that the first day half the oranges spoilt?’ And his response was, uh, the Mother's response to him was: ‘because you didn't have faith!’ Fascinating! So the receptivity within us, the faith, even if it is in the mind, emotions, when it is not there or if it is not sufficiently stable, things can happen but eventually if the foundation is strong enough, it can stand. And I am reminded of this incident only because what became the cold storage was earlier his Fruit Room, so that is why this comes to mind most easily.

So coming back to this question of insurance, if one has that deep conviction that you are protected, perhaps a minimum of vigilance is required on your part and a minimum of opening and alignment to the Divine and an invocation of the protection and that nothing untoward can happen to you, if you have that conviction, that faith, you don't need anything.

And for the things which you might need, not out of fear, you plan it out and the money you would give to the insurance company, you put in a savings account, you keep accumulating it, effectively you're paying the premium there, but to your own account, so it never goes out. And you have the discipline not to misuse it for other things, you say, ‘Oh, I have so much savings, let me blow it on something’, which is trivial. No, you protect it. That's a discipline you have to follow. This is meant for any untoward requirement in the future, whatever kind, medical or other emergency, anything required, that's emergency funds.

Now what you could do, and this is how I would recommend ideally if you choose not to go for insurance, you set apart a certain percentage of your monthly earnings, whatever that may be, what percentage you choose, and you save that, but you put it in a form where it maximises the growth of money. So it will be in a fixed deposit for example, not an investment where you could lose it, but in a fixed deposit because this is for emergency, it's not funds you are going to play with. And you keep accumulating that regularly. That effectively is your insurance.

Somewhere within you is the trust that you will not ah, need to use it or what you will need when you need will be just enough. If it does happen for some reason that there is a problem and your savings are not enough to cover that, then on the basis of those savings you can do other things, you can take help from people, from friends and say, ‘Look I will pay you back in so much’.

If your intention is sincere and you have done this correctly, you will find the necessary help. So in practice, before insurance companies existed, this is what people did. Effectively that's a single person insurance! Isn't it? And you have the faith, the trust, that whatever is required it will work out. If there is a crisis, you will be given the help also. Now I know of cases, enough cases, all through for many decades, I've heard of so many cases where when the problems came, the help came and even financially as required, sometimes down to the day.

(1:20:18):

Literally the person has nothing and tomorrow is going to go into default and then somebody calls up and says, ‘Ah, by the way’, and then something works out. That's it! If you have that faith that you will be looked after, you don't need to worry. And this, as a practical measure, you keep tithing, taking out a certain percentage and build on it. That's it. Simplest way out.

If you live in a mature cartel of the pharma lobby and insurance lobby, then an equivalent would be done by taking the minimum insurance required and expecting that you won't need to go beyond that. So in practice what they do also because it's a cartel, they only bind you to certain hospitals. So if you go for a minimum insurance, hopefully you will also be tied to cheaper hospitals. If you go for a higher premium, they tie you to a higher cost hospital, so effectively you lose.

So stay with something simple, minimise the medical exposure, eat healthy, exercise, live a healthy life, you probably won't have any serious problems, and if you do at any point you have just the bare minimum coverage required to take care of it. Beyond that you don't worry too much. If, on the contrary, you have persistent worries, persistent fears and annoying feelings of danger and compulsion, then, well, you do not have sufficient faith or receptivity or stability in your consciousness, then you do whatever is required that keeps that part which is distressed quiet.

In practice though, you will find, if you have a strong psychological compulsion like this, then even with your insurance, you will always have doubt: Is this good enough? Do I need more? And so on. So eventually, you are forced to face that psychological problem, deal with it there, build the faith, realign, and put it to test even, by doing little things and build the faith by doing things through experiences, and so on.

When it comes to family, again depending on the kind of pressure you are at, and especially if you are part of a collective pressure like I said, uh, my teacher's example that in a community where you don’t, they are not shared values, you are vulnerable as a group. So if in the family you have the faith but others don't, they have persistent fears and they keep pushing those fears into you or in the collective consciousness, then you do not have the protective bubble. You may need to take certain measures. Again, what those measures are between these two models which I have discussed, find what works.

I think, I’ll just take a quick look at the question, chat box. So, Incarnate Truth is saying: “Unfortunately in the US, I found it easier to get healthcare in Brazil which is privatised if you are not a citizen but highly regulated with regards to margin charge, master inflation, not price control, with high interest, I'd recommend the US get a no-risk CD certificate or deposit up to maximum insured amount, your money is safe.”

-Okay, these are practical decisions, you can see what works. But the principle which I'm describing is really one of choosing which is the mechanism by which you make savings either on your own or through an insurance vehicle but also balanced on the basis of your consciousness and the priorities uh, that you live by and to the extent modified by the collective that you are a part of.

Alina (1:24:11):
Could we say, Sraddhalu, could we say that this is valid in, also for private pensions?

Sraddhalu (1:24:19):
Yes, yes, very much. Eventually what is a pension doing finally? They are forcing you to save with the government and the government gives it back to you at some point. Why are they forcing you? Because they assume that you do not have the basic self-control or discipline to protect your own savings that you will be tempted at some point to spend it.

So again it comes to that: If you don't trust your own capacity, then you would do that. If you do trust your own capacity, I would suggest not to save with the government but make your own vehicle for preparing for your long-term pension, or depending on your skill and capacity, a part of that you would invest and work it out.

(1:25:04):

So here is a good way to think about it. Let us say, you have a certain income. Ah, arbitrarily I am putting the income amount as a 100, a 100 of whatever it is. So you are earning a 100 every month. Of course depending on the lifestyle and your expenses, I would straight away divide these into three: one-third, you will keep for future; one-third, you will use for daily expenses; one-third, you will use for upgradation of quality of life for yourself, for community and larger society that you feel as your family, which would include donations to institutions or activities which you think are worthwhile also.

Now I am just throwing one third as an arbitrary amount, you could have split it in various proportions suitable to you, depending on your expenses you might save 10% and use 20% for upgradation and all the rest may go in actual expenses of the day. But I would still say, review your expenses. It all depends again on your priorities. So if for example every day you eat out, compare that cost with cooking at home every day, and the cost can often be up to 3 or 4, 5 times more, sometimes 10 times more depending on what is the level of comfort that you seek or the brand name that you are looking for in your eat-out. If you are out to impress others, then you will necessarily spend much more.

This is the reason why many of these film stars who earn in the millions, they actually end up losing everything down in a few years. And you would wonder, how is that even possible? If you had a million, straight away you would put more than half at least as future protection. But they can't, because they have to maintain that fake appearance. So they will buy a car which costs a 100 times more than a normal car but whose function is exactly the same, which just got a brand name. Or they will buy makeup or whatever other use things  which are a 100 times more because of a name. Actual content is exactly the same. So you have to be very practical about these things.

And if your values are clear, you don't need too much to live comfortably. And what you do need, if you plan it out in this way, you set aside that amount for upgrading quality of life, and you find you do need a car, you will go for what is, what works for you, the lowest price which is functional and fuel-efficient long term, you may save for it or buy it on a higher purchase loan, etc., those are mechanisms, but finally you still have to end up paying or you end up saving. If you plan it out and there is a basic discipline of use of money, one can easily manage, and with the trust and the Grace, in the Grace that you will be helped as required.

I think, anything else Alina you would like to add or?

Alina (1:28:10):
No, no, thank you. Shall we go to the next question?

Sraddhalu (1:28:15):
Okay. I'll just touch one more question which is from the chat box. That have to be, will have to be last because we've finished our time. There is this interesting angle which is asked by Anupam, he says: “Can you explain the spiritual significance of Arjuna as this Brihannala, that is the eunuch, during that period of one year he masters all the arts such as singing and dancing?”

Alina (1:28:46):

…

Sraddhalu (1:28:47):

Gna-ha, yes. So, during that year “he masters all the arts such as singing and dancing”. Yes. Because first of all in the primary training as a warrior, singing and dancing were not on the priority, but in his role as a eunuch that was on the priority, so he uses that time to grow, which is the principle which I have always been highlighting: Always whenever you have an opportunity, expand your capacities, expand your nature's flexibility, and skills, and powers, and intensities, and everything.

Now it so happened during that period he had only access to that training, so he makes the most of it. But I would say, for us, especially when you are at a student age, and I generally say this to young people: Till the age of 25 do not specialise, especially if you have the skill and capacity. Some people don't have that, they have a very narrow track, and so even with them I'll say: Push the boundaries, your narrowness is not inborn, or if it's inborn it's not uh, innate. Push the boundaries. But if you find, there's not much you can do or it doesn't interest you, fine. But especially those who have a richer capacity, you don't have enough time to do everything, well, push the boundaries to a later age, develop all your skills. And if as it happens with Arjuna, it comes in late age, well, go ahead, do it at late age also, including all these things.

(1:30:14):

So I think, when I was in the school years, I had very unusually taken up also the dancing class for two years. And no boy, I think as far as I know, no boy had ever done that in the Ashram School, but I wanted to, and I wanted to develop whatever skills came with it. And I could see where, what worked, and what was helpful. I would have liked to do much more, but I found it too slow, the training itself was too slow. I could have learnt so much more given the same time, but, well, that's how people do. On my own if I needed to, I could have done much more even in any case. And I might still do at some point if the body is flexible enough.

But even at a late age, my mother at the age of 60, she, I released her from the house responsibilities, I said, “You've done that all your life, now you go and you be the student and learn”, so she started, at the same time, at the, from the age of 60 onwards, she joined the theatre programmes, then the calligraphy, singing, dancing, craft work, swimming, going to the gym, and a few other, couple of other things, I don't remember, I counted at some point 7 or 8 activities she was doing. And she did that for a few years and then after a while certain things began to drop off on their own, and that was it. She said: “Okay, now this, I don't need more”. But it showed a certain capacity. Had she been younger, she could have done much more within that, but this was useful.

There is no age which should be for you a limit that says, ‘Oh, now I have reached this age I cannot do’. Other than biological limits, maybe at the age of 80, you can't be doing cartwheels and somersaults though there are people who still do, but then you have to have maintained your body. But you start doing what you can and softly, gently, depending on the flexibility, you push the boundaries and extend.

Always learn something new. If you have the free time, learn something new, never leave yourself idle. As long as you are learning something new and there is a growth in consciousness, even your biology brain cells are growing. We have discussed this. And that keeps you young. Your lifeforce is flowing, replacing, it's not stagnating. Aging comes from stagnation. And when it's your lifeforce is flowing, your biology cells grow, flow, and so on, you actually stay young. And Mother said this that you are young, she has seen people who are younger at 80 than those who are old at 18, and it's only because of this growth.

I have shared at other times the example of a very famous poet, writer, playwright by the name of Satwalekar. He is, great fame is to have translated the Mahabharata, I think, into Marathi. He came to the Mother at the age of 93. Now consider, at that age most people would say, ‘Oh, I have done mine, been there, done that, nothing left, now I am waiting to die’.

No. He comes to the Mother and says, “I have just started translating the Mahabharata”, which is the longest poem in the world, I think, it is 100,000 lines or couples, couplets of 100,000?, “I have just started translating”, and he says to the Mother, “please bless that I will complete this before I leave this body”. And Mother blessed him. His soul's aspiration received the sanction! He continued the translation till the age of 107, completed the translation, and then only quit his body.

Now during that period you can imagine how much growth there would have been, because it was challenging, it was pushing the boundaries, but the body kept up, the mind kept up, and grew, literally. So, taking the example of Arjuna, during that period, it was an opportunity, he made the most of it. Well, each one of us should learn from this.

Every day we have some opportunity, and irrespective of our age, what we can, let's grow, because this is the reason for which our souls came from the One that is All-Complete. You see, the Divine-Consciousness is utter autarky, it is complete in itself, needs nothing. In order to experience growth, you have to come out of that needing-nothing condition as a projection, as a part of the whole. And though you are still in essence the One-Self in complete autarky in essence, in content you have projected out as a soul to enter evolution and be able to grow.

(1:35:01):

And because That is complete, this is potentially complete, the potential for growth is also infinite, unending, without limits, and more than you can imagine in possibilities. And therefore, any growth is always aligned to the soul's purpose, growth of course in capacities, in skills, always upward, always towards Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram. In the experience of divided consciousness, these three represent the Sacchidananda, the Truth, the Sacred, the Beautiful,―now not just in form,―in feeling, in ideas, in quality, in consciousness, in values, in every way. That's the growth and the direction of growth.

Such should be our sense of purpose irrespective of the specialised line of responsibilities, and work, and so on. I think, we will hold this as our aspiration and concentrate together on this.

Namaste.