EWS #54 Questions from viewers (5)
Dec 7, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:52):
Namaste and welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste. Today we take up an important topic on illness, especially mental illness. There are a number of questions and I'll take them slowly with you. The first question is, can mental illness be cured by yogic force? And this person writes, I see so many mentally retarded cerebral palsy children. Why are they so? And then she says, also if I attribute the illnesses to the karmic process, I will lose the empathy towards all people suffering from chronic degenerative and autoimmune illnesses like dementia, Parkinsonism, peripheral neuropathy, muscular dystrophy, etc. Why do these illnesses occur? What is the right approach towards them as a doctor? How can we treat them? Allopathic science has no treatment for these. So many try homoeopathy and all sorts of alternative treatments to no effect. And then she says, I wanted to know what you think about the degenerative disorders affecting the human body, nervous system in particular, like dementia, and also the immune-mediated disorders. I want the human body to get rid of the propensity to acquire these diseases, and I want to work upon that. How do I do that? To radically uproot them. And then we had another question from Mihica, and she said why do we see so many instances of these diseases at this time in the evolution?
Sraddhalu (0:02:59):
Especially with young children. Especially with young children, yes. I want to take up first the question about viewing illnesses as karmic consequence. Because that's the one which is most conflicting for a doctor. If you recognize that an illness is the result of a karmic action and the illness comes as a form of punishment, then are you even allowed to cure it? Aren't you interfering with some process? At least that's the conflict which it evokes and it will bring me to that pet peeve I have about blaming everything on karma. It's something we have touched upon a couple of times already. But in some the idea that everything is a consequence of karma is rooted primarily in the Buddhist philosophy and then subsequently finds strong basis in Jainism, both of them having their base in India. Buddhism did not survive as a strong force in India although it spread subsequently to large parts of the world. The problem of the Buddhist philosophy is that it threw out God and soul from reality and so what's left is seen as one gigantic machine. The appeal of Buddhism is also that it threw out God and soul. So for an atheist or a highly rationalist, materialist scientist or a mind that is moulded by the materialist science, Buddhism has a great attraction because it offers you a means of developing your mind and liberating your consciousness in whatever way you can by means which does not require you to accept God or soul or anything to do with spirituality.
Narad (0:5:08):
And yet there is the aspect of compassion that's so powerful.
Sraddhalu (0:05:13):
And the compassion then comes almost as a corrective that you must have compassion for those who suffer. But the suffering itself is unavoidable because it is tied to the causes and conditions and the chain of karma. And so you can do nothing about the suffering itself except change your consciousness to get rid of the suffering. The whole thing acquires a very strong movement of withdrawal from life. In one of the meetings we had, it was in the Czech Republic, we had a discussion on the current problems, primarily around climate change, economy and things like that. And there was a very strong Buddhist practitioner who kept saying, we have to change ourselves, we can't change the problem unless we change ourselves. And on the other side, there was a Jewish rabbi who said, wonderful, please continue to change yourself, while I as a banker, of course he was [role] playing, I as a banker will continue to take advantage and keep you enslaved. And so it forced that correction that you can't just be so self-focused that you forget that you are responsible to change your environment. But again, if you stay within that framework, your attempt to change your environment is causing more karma, and it's always fighting against the full burden of all the karma of the past, and the situation seems almost intractable.
And so the first correction we will bring back is, reintroduce the free will of the Soul and the Divine, which is also utter free will, and look at this whole machinery to whatever extent it's there, as itself an expression of the free will in the play, and if it is a machine, it is at best mechanical on a very superficial and limited level. You take one step up and already you have a free will. So if you stay with the physics of it, if you're sitting in a gigantic clockwork and your body is one of the cog wheels, then yes, you are bound. But the moment you start applying your thought and you choose to change your position in the machine, you extricate yourself in thought only, you start taking steps, apply your free will, already you are disengaging from the machinery and at some point you have even the free will to break the machine and end that whole entrapment. The whole idea is implied in the whole Buddhist philosophy and yet the sense of karma is so overwhelming. So when it comes to illnesses, to view all illnesses as an outcome of karma first of all would be an error. Yes, we can say an illness has a karmic cause or a karmic trigger or there may be a karmic element which is involved in the illness and the suffering but recognize that an illness, pain, suffering, ignorance itself as the root cause of all these is an aberration and a falsehood. And so every step, every effort must be made to overcome these things. We can't say just because we are born in ignorance that we should just accept to remain so. We have to make that effort. So even if there will be a karmic cause to an illness, we have to make the efforts to break that and reverse it, undo it, or whatever form it may be. But if you think of karma as purely mathematical, then you have to compensate for it by other means. So if you take away somebody's illness and fix it, that karmic content has to exhaust itself through someone else, maybe upon you and that creates a whole new realm of confusion and fear. There is a lot of fear associated with that whole machinery of karma. Whereas if you recognize that karma is only one of the factors as a mechanical or semi-mechanical action-reaction, you intervene, you can neutralise the karma in the very act of intervening. Or the patient makes an effort to change consciousness and they can disengage from that lower grade of karma which belongs to a certain level of consciousness. So as a doctor or even as just a person of goodwill, we should make every effort to reverse illnesses and whatever may be caused karmic or otherwise and we are perhaps not equipped to differentiate, we will make all efforts to free the person from the needless suffering. No suffering is necessary. It may be used but it is not necessary. It may be used to grow but it is never necessary unless you choose to stay stuck and refuse to change.
Narad (0:09:58):
And you mentioned the word will. And in Savitri he says, ‘faith shall be changed by an unchanging will’. Very powerful.
Sraddhalu (0:10:06):
And this is a much bigger perspective. Fate is something much larger than these little ripples of karma. And even that can be changed. And if the will is strong enough to change the fate, compared to that. So as a doctor, it's best to not look at things as karmic and view them entirely as caused by circumstances, bad habits or a person's psychological or other conditions or circumstances, whatever it is, and we have to set right the causes, conditions, circumstances. I'm using the vocabulary of Buddhism, causes and conditions, but you have to set it right and move away from the illness to good health as far as possible within your capacity. But then there can be genuinely karmic causes or triggers even for illnesses and it is often used to justify, especially illnesses where you seem to have no suitable solution or cure. Cancer being one such or many others which has nervous degenerative disorders. And if you go to astrologers or palm readers or mind readers (more common), they will just tell you, oh, it's karmic.
I have even seen a lot of spiritual teachers, who will say, karma.I know of a very famous teacher who is in fact a very saintly person, highly respected for what she embodies in the consciousness that she lives in, in her higher states, who does not necessarily have the wisdom or the deeper understanding of things. She just lives in a higher state or a certain purity of consciousness, which is her work. And I know from one of her disciples that they were made to slog it out, work very hard through day and night. They hardly had enough food, enough sleep. Eventually, all of them rebelled. And that's when she came down and met them and said to them, do you know how much karma you're burning up through all this? And I thought it was such a perverse view and it's used in many traditions to justify needless suffering and it's misused in this manner. So all this is to say that it's best not to think in terms of karma but just what we have to do to get free. What about these little children? Exactly, especially with children when you don't have a good reason, the easiest way is to ascribe it to, must be some karmic reason. And it's one way by which we can accept what is otherwise unacceptable. And so it's a palliative. A lot of people who do past life regressions, come back, it may be a complete fantasy, but they'll come back with a story. I hit you in past life, now you're allowed to hit me. Okay, so I accept. Its just a way of accepting, but you can accept without needing to find some reason even if it is an imagined reason. The first thing is to accept it’s there. And now what do we do? Push with full force to change it. It is very interesting the thing I saw this morning. You know recently there was a change in Google, the ownership of the head of Google and Alphabet. And one of the companies in the Alphabet, I forget the name, it is something with Co something. It's a company that is trying to work to cure death. That's the way they word it, curing death. And I said, yes, this is the way it should be looked at. Death is a disease. And it has to be cured. It's an illness, it's an aberration, it's not something which we should just accept. But what we can do is first accept it's there. Okay, now what do we do about it? Well, we'll start curing. And that is the best way to approach both as a doctor and as a person of goodwill. But then I want to look at the big picture of why young people get sick. Illness is physical, but even more psychological, which was one of the questions. There is a statement of J. Krishnamurti, where he says that it is something very...
Audience (Joel) (0:14:35):
It is not to be in good mental health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Sraddhalu (0:14:44):
The wording is something like this, that you cannot be in a good condition if you have adjusted yourself to a profoundly sick society. First recognize that society is sick, mentally and physically, and of course spiritually at the core of it. Physically sick because there are poisons in the environment, lifestyles are destructive and completely misaligned from nature. As a result there are mental illnesses as well as physical illnesses. Mental illness is much more so and we will look at quite a few causes for that. Because the society itself is functioning in a way which is perverse and contrary to the soul's aspiration. And the natural unfoldment which you will see in a forest. You don't have to go too far to have a natural and healthy life and then there is a spiritual sickness which is the sum total of all these distortions imposed on the soul, suffocating the soul's aspiration. If you go back barely a hundred years ago it was not so bad. You had the space to follow a deeper aspiration, you had the time, you had the leisure. Today you don't have any of that and there is a squeeze which is put. And so all of these lead to sickness on all levels. Something has to give and the weakest point gives first. So I want to quickly summarise all the different things which are impacting young people today, particularly from the standpoint of mental illness, not so much the physical, but you see there is a common element with the physical.
So broadly speaking there are three kinds of mental illness. The first is the fake mental illness, meaning it's not a mental illness but they want to call it a mental illness. And quite a large number of children are thrown into this category, where the doctors or the parents consider it a mental problem when the child is perfectly normal mentally. And it is the society or the environment which is perverse against which the child seems to be abnormal. So if you ask a child to adjust to a system which is inherently suffocating to his creativity, well, he's going to rebel. And then if you call that rebellion a mental illness, then you are the terror. And then if you try to fix that with medicines or therapy, then you're actually worsening the problem. And the child just ends up completely knotted up because he's convinced that he's sick. I think I mentioned a few sessions ago, the example of a young man that I met. And he told me he was on psychiatric medication, going through all kinds of treatment. And he had come to the conclusion after much therapy that he had a problem since childhood and his problem was that he lacked confidence. So I said, okay, what is the example of lack of confidence? And he gave me a few examples that when he meets a new person, he's always hesitating. He cannot stand before a group and speak publicly in front of strangers and present his case and so on. And otherwise, when he's alone, he is fine. So it's a lack of self-confidence and he said it goes back to my childhood when I was eight years old. I said, okay, show me one person in your school or a classroom who was able to do that better than you. And out of his whole mass of let's say a few hundreds, maybe a few, four or five could do that, they could stand up on the stage and speak or perform. And I said, how many times did they practise for that? Of course many times and ask how many times have you stood on stage? Never. He went through his entire education late into his late 20s, never once had stood on stage or practised. I said before you go and make a presentation now for your business, do you practise? Never. So suddenly this young boy is expected to stand up in front of complete strangers and make a presentation of something he has never practised, wouldn't he hesitate, wouldn't he be nervous, wouldn't he be confused, wouldn't he go back and forth, which would only compound his nervousness more. It's a completely normal situation and if you trace it back to the time of his school days, he was completely normal compared with all other children who had exactly the same problem as have all children. And unless you put them through that exercise of standing before on the stage, they'll never learn to be able to do that and even today as an adult when I stand on the stage in front of a large group there's a point where your mind and your body becomes a little tense and there's a layer of anxiety, you may call it nervousness it's always there because that's how your human system is built to be, that a situation is demanding your system perks up. But it's not a sickness and you've been treated for that you've been put through psychiatric drugs and the drugs once you're on it, they are addictive so you can't even stop them because that makes you more sick it's terrible and to start reversing that process is such a big problem. Unfortunately, so much of the children's illness is of this category.
Sraddhalu (0:20:07):
In New York, I was told more than 50% of the children are being given psychiatric drugs to help them keep clear focus and attention. And almost all of them have been diagnosed as attention deficit or hyperactive disorder and attention deficit means the fellow is sitting bored in the classroom and you call him he is deficit in attention! No, that's your classroom which is deficit in interest, don't blame the child and don't make him sick. But the whole industry wants to sell more medicines, the same with hyperactive disorder. The child is hyperactive, no he's full of energy, his body is growing, give him the activity that he needs. Instead you're asking him to sit down and not move for a few hours, the child is not ready for that. And so all of these, most of the attention deficit and hyperactive disorders are completely fake. They're not illnesses. Even as you grow older, if they have other problems such as lack of self-confidence issues, self-image issues. Every girl at some point is staring in the mirror and says, I'm not as pretty as that one. Every boy goes through similar image issues, ‘the girls don't like me’ or whatever it is he's currently bothered with. Everybody has this and it's a normal developmental stage. You don't need to give medicines for that. You didn't even need therapy if the family was there for you. If the social setting was healthy, that's your therapy. But today there is no society backing you. The society is itself too sick. Family is not there because you go home, you are all alone. So many examples I have seen of children going home, parents are working, both parents are working. There are no grandparents. So, in India you might have maid servants, sometimes not even that, or they are wandering, waiting for time to pass along with children, having nothing to do. And then of course, idle mind, devil's workshop, all kinds of things can happen.
But the one thing which is always there for them is television. And with television, the worst of the junk. There is another example, a young boy asked me, I have a lot of fear. I said, where does it come from? So he gives me a whole list, fear of death, fear of accident, fear of injury, fear of ghosts, fear of maybe my parents will die, whatever it is. He gives me a long list. I said, where does it come from? So after a few layers of probing, I discover he is in the habit of watching horror movies and often before going to sleep. And why? Because that's what all the other children are doing. Okay, and then he justifies it to himself, maybe watching the horror movies, I will develop courage and overcome my fear. And you see how the whole thing has got warped. And I had to tell him, just stop all that. It's only adding to the fear. And the horror movies are actually showing you circumstances which are physically never happening. So every horror movie, let's say there's a demon or a ghost which is flying, does things, moves things. Have you ever seen or have you ever had a record of a ghost who actually broke houses, picked up objects? It doesn't happen. Even what is called poltergeist phenomena, at best is noises. And there are very few cases where things have been lifted up, you will find, I can count on my fingers in the last 1000 years, which are recorded in history. And those were such exceptional conditions that you don't even find them in a normal city life, for example. So why are you filling the mind with such extreme filth, fear causing, just before going to sleep? And the parents don't realise because they are too busy, they are hoping that the school will fix it and they don't have time to go into depth or just don't know. They don't know what's happening. Everyone is doing it, so my child has to do it. So we have a large quantum of junk being filled into the minds and emotions of young children and at the same time in the biology, a lot of junk through the food and the environmental poisons and all of this is creating instabilities.
Sraddhalu (0:24:32):
So coming to mental problems, these are significant causes. There are other causes which are from the food and the water, which we have touched upon but it's worth repeating in the context of mental problems. All the water you drink today is passing through plastic. If you're travelling, you have a plastic bottle which is leaching chemicals, plastic, which are hormone mimics. They're oestrogen mimics. And they're enough in the water to disrupt your hormonal balance. If you're sitting at home away from the sunlight and not drinking from plastic, from your safe tap water, all the piping inside the house is plastic today. In the old days you had lead piping, which was extremely harmful. It was a nerve toxin, as lead is. If you go back to the most healthy period of piping, everyone used copper. But it's expensive. And you could, in principle, use plastics, but the plastics would have to be certified food grade safe. So you may have plastic piping today, let's say a place like Delhi, your plastic piping going through walls and then going out of the walls outside exposed to this heat and so you may have direct sunlight on the piping or if you have indirect heat, it may easily hit 40 degrees in the summer and it is leaching. The water stays stagnant in it. The tank on top of the building is also made of plastic and it is exposed to the sun directly and it gets really hot. So everywhere you have plastic being leached. And so you are still getting the same hormonal disruption just from the water that you drink and there is no way to avoid that, if you are living in a city. If you are lucky you are in the countryside, hopefully your water is not poisoned by the chemicals you've pumped in the fields which have gone into the water. But these are major hormonal disruptors which directly impact emotions and thoughts of course as a result.
So here is one significant cause for a lot of emotional problems in young people and even a lot of obesity which comes from the hormonal disruption, thyroid problems which are growing everywhere. Some of this is coming from the food also. A lot of restlessness and hyperactivity is coming from the food which includes poisons which are neurotoxins. A lot of the colouring which is put in food is known nerve irritant. Not obviously toxin, but if it's irritant, it's toxic. It's just not killing your cells, but it's irritating. It's just a step towards killing them. So there's all this happening and you don't know why you're living in the biology, the body that you have plugged into, your consciousness has plugged into, is unstable, is pushing your consciousness, agitating it. And with all the effort you might make to calm yourself, the base in the body is unstable. And this is the problem which is in the extreme becoming mental problems or behavioural problems. From a spiritual perspective, you can do all the changes you need to do in your consciousness, but the base in which your consciousness sits, the body itself, is still the foundation for your action in the material world. You can disengage from the body and find your calm and freedom but you plug back into the body and you'll find all these imbalances are present. A lot of problems in the body are tied to food not having enough nutrition. Almost every Indian has a vitamin D3 deficiency. Although you are exposed to the sun, or maybe not enough, but even if you are, you have a D3 deficiency. Why? The answer is not obvious. It could be food related, it could be some other genetic... Whatever it is, there is a D3 deficiency. What does it do? It makes you tired. It makes your cells work less efficiently. And all your biological processes and with it your mental processes are pulled down. And suddenly you find you don't have enough energy to hold attention and a chain of other consequences.
Sraddhalu (0:28:52):
I was recently shocked to discover and I don't think I've mentioned it here that this whole program backed by the United Nations to put fluoride into human beings. I'm putting it in a general statement. You all heard that the United States has fluoride in the water and every time that they find there is public unrest, they dump more fluoride in the water. The last 15 years, this is from a person who is directly involved in the water supply in the United States who told this, in the last 15 years they have been asked to increase the quantum of fluoride enormously. Who is doing that and why? And what Fluoride does, it tilts the balance of your mind to make you more susceptible to suggestion, to make you more compliant to orders and this is done openly in many countries by dumping it into water. I believe China also has it in the water and then this is the part I discovered. I thought we are safe in India because water here is purified with chlorine as a gas which goes out eventually. And I discover as part of the UN program, whichever country doesn't put fluoride in the water, they put it in the salt. And they don't tell you that they put it in the salt. And India is part of that game. And how did this happen? Because you're drawing salt from the sea. If you go back to about 25 years, maybe now, we had salt which used to be manufactured locally, everywhere. Any seashore, people would gather seawater, dry it in the sun, clean the salt, take off the top clean part and then sell it. Until the government banned salt production and said it is for your own good to prevent you from having thyroid problems, that we are going to introduce iodine into the salt. And now this production of salt had to go to a company which would re-melt the salt, introduce iodine and dry it again and sell it to you. So it was basically a company's, it was a scam of companies to now take charge and decide the salt prices. If you recall, Gandhiji had a major struggle to bring back to the common man the right to make salt when he was fighting the British and that did not happen this time. Instead we just accepted, okay, it's for our own good what they didn't tell you is that along with iodine they are also inserting this fluoride.
Sraddhalu (0:31:30):
And this supposedly is because it's good for your teeth but for that you are supposed to drink it and it has to go into your body it will cause all other kinds of problems but somehow it's supposed to be good for your teeth from inside out? No. The only use of fluoride for your teeth is a topical application from outside and not from an inside-out process. So there's a game which is designed to influence the mental processes and then there are other chemicals which are similarly brought in which affect the mind. And then there's a whole thing around vaccination which has been found to affect young children. So what I'm getting at is the reason given for vaccination being linked to illnesses, let's say generally, is that in the vaccine you have a diluted bacterium which is going to be inserted in the body. It is diluted and weakened sufficiently that it will not give you a full blown case of whatever illness it is. But to preserve it, because you have to put it in a vial that has to last for so many months in the field, they surround it with all kinds of poisons, which are preservatives. Now there are preservatives which are relatively safe and preservatives which are extremely dangerous. Mercury is a known neurotoxin. So to put a preservative that has mercury content is unacceptable. Formaldehyde is a high quality poison and to insert that in the vaccine is unacceptable. So there are ways it could have been done which could have been less dangerous. And what we do find is people who have done independent tests have discovered all these extreme poisons in the vaccines. So it's not to blame the vaccination as a principle in itself, although Sri Aurobindo was against it and for reasons which perhaps on some other occasion we could discuss. And when there was an attempt to vaccinate the ashramites, there's a correspondence of Sri Aurobindo with the ashram doctor where he says that, ‘please don't do this’, he uses this phrase ‘that dark principle’. What's the dark principle of vaccination? That you introduce a sickness so that your body becomes immune to the sickness. So there are better ways of doing it but even accepting that as a principle. So what did Sri Aurobindo do by the way? What he did was he said all right you can for the sake of appearances, jab a couple of people and then let people who are workers within the ashram community, who are not part of the ashram system, let them be given and for appearances sake do what is required and then get rid of that whole exercise. So, even if you accept the principle as valid, the method, the manner in which it is being done and the poisons put in the vaccination liquid has been found independently to be extremely dangerous in many places.
Sraddhalu (0:34:30):
And so there are of course suggestions that there is an agenda behind it. Bill Gates is on record. I've seen the video, where he says that through his vaccination programs they will reduce the world population. And you wonder what's the connection? Well one of the connections is that in the vaccine one can introduce certain elements which reduce human fertility. And so a child vaccinated once will have a lessened fertility for the rest of his life or at least for a long time. And so some of these agendas can easily slip in if there is not independent validation of these things. We cannot blindly trust knowing that these same companies have deceived us and failed us before. All this to say that there is enough junk which is coming in the biology which affects the mind and in a serious way. I've spoken of cinema, I've spoken of general decline of society, food and other adulterations. There's one more which is a significant cause and that is the pressure which we place on the children today which is only worse. The demand and expectation in what we described today as the rat race, where every child is being prepared through the entire educational system to get out there to fight and to reduce his worth to a number which in the examination system is the exam marks and which in the world is your salary. You've identified yourself with a number and that number is going to be chasing you in other forms. So recently it happened, it was a family of people who were visiting the ashram for the first time and I was describing to them how the community, the ashram community works with no exchange of money. After a while, one of the person said, but then how do you measure the value, the worth? I said, well, that's exactly the point. The money value is not there. You measure things in terms of their quality. So again, she thought for a while, and then she said, but how do you measure if somebody has done enough or not? And I said, what is the value of love? How will you measure the financial worth of love? And she stopped. She had not thought. And then she was confused. So I said, a person who does the same work with love is more valuable than a person who does the same work with, let's say, hate or lack of interest. And everything in a system where you've removed money as the prime driver, everything is now measured by an intrinsic worth. And still her problem was, how do you know if the person has done enough work or not? You need to reduce to a number to ensure someone has done as much work as someone else, or find a way of valuing intellectual work with physical work in terms of some number. It was a struggle for her. And I realised how deeply this has gone because 20 years ago this idea was fascinating, people would say, ‘oh yes, this is so wonderful. I'd like to be part of a world like that’. Today it has got so entrenched that they don't even think of it as something wonderful. They think of it as un-understandable because that whole system of reducing to numbers has gone so deep and so the problems of self-image, self-worth, etc. have all been exaggerated to this degree where every child emerging into adulthood has serious problems of identity, which of course leads to a lot of other psychological problems.
Sraddhalu (0:38:18):
So all this is, to categorise, first I said there are three kinds of mental illnesses, so the first one, it is not a mental problem, the actual cause is something altogether different and maybe there is no problem except the society being sick or your system being sick or your classroom being too boring. Second kind of mental problem is, which also we have touched upon, through pressure of society, your psyche or the deeper psychology is damaged. You have an image issue, identity issue, adjustment issue, relationship issue. If all your life you've just been driven through that machine of the programming of society and education, you don't know how to have healthy relationships. And then all your relationships or attempts to have relationships are awkward. I give an example here, this was part of the Indian cinema until barely 10 years ago and still is in large parts at least in southern cinema you still see this a lot, where the heroine, the pretty girl is walking down the road. The hero who is the most handsome, the most strong, the most intelligent, the most everything and perfectly matched for her. But sometimes he's a bit of a mischievous person, he now chases her and he is trying to seduce her, get her to like him. What does he do? He starts harassing her, grabbing her, pulling her hair, pulling her clothes, creating anything which today would be called harassment. Comes and stands in front of her, blocks her way, she has to move aside and she makes all the appropriate gestures of being hurt and then being coy and then being attracted and eventually yields and begins to like him. Now this you will see in all the cinema of the old phase. What does a young boy who is growing up, who has never had a healthy relationship and especially with nuclear families where you don't even have sisters and brothers to know what it's like to meet somebody of the other gender, you don't know what it is like, you don't know how to relate, you don’t know as a boy you don't know what it is to feel towards a girl as your sister or as a girl you don't know how it is to feel towards a boy as your brother. So the only relationship you have is sexual or what you have seen in the cinema and then you try to replicate that. And once you get into that mode of trying to irritate the girl to attract her because you like her, you don't realise that you are actually creating the very opposite response because that's not cinema, this is real life. Real life people get upset, they get scared, they hate you because you are harassing them. And at some point you get so frustrated that the impulse goes beyond your control and then you have all kinds of aberrations of behaviour.
You are teaching young people to live by warped values to a degree that and with nothing positive coming the other way, to a degree that they have no other reference. So good person inherently is unable to do that, which you saw in the movie and so comes to the conclusion that I am not good enough, nobody likes me. So it is interesting that I have seen across many age groups, girls who are very eligible, who have this image problem - i am not good enough, boys who are very eligible, who have this image problem - I am not good enough. And if only they knew what each other thought, they probably wouldn't have a problem at all. But that's not how it works, unfortunately. So you have this whole second grade of mental problems which are artificially created by warped society and warped training and warped education. That's your second type of mental problem. And then there's a third type of mental problem, which is the real mental problem. And a real mental problem boils down always to two things. One, either a biological defect, which allows the psychological defect, but is not in itself a mental problem, but it makes possible the actual psychological problem which is always an influence from outside. A negative influence of some force which has got a foothold or a hook into you and then there are degrees of that which can end up in influence or end up in possession. Possession also can be partial or complete. But always behind mental problems is some link to an influence outside us. If the biology is weak or has some defect, instability, it allows for that influence to act. But if the biology is strong, then the strong mental imbalance triggered by the first two causes can lead to a gap or an exposure in which something can hook into you.
Sraddhalu (0:43:15):
And so this is what I want to touch upon. A lot of the things we have discussed already can open to that. So one for example, people taking drugs. At the moment when you have taken drugs, because it's acting at a biological level, you cannot shut it down. If you were consciously entering the vital world or opening to the vital world, you experience danger, instantly you could shut down and block it, which is what happens in sleep. You wake up, when you have a nightmare, you wake up and you're protected. But in the pressure of drugs, you open to the world and now you hit this nightmare, you have a living dream basically, waking dream and the nightmare hits you, you cannot get back, because biologically you've been prevented, you've been exposed and at that point that force can either cause you such a strong energetic, psychological scare that the scare lasts, it leaves a gash, a wound psychologically or because you are exposed, it can hook itself into you and get a link, which afterwards it still continues to feed on and can be a two-way link. It can draw your energy or it can infuse you with thoughts and emotions. So it feeds, some of these beings feed on you and they feed on your suffering, they feed on your confusion, they take joy in it or they can trigger the confusion and then feed on your distress or in the worst case, they enter you and then stay stuck inside your consciousness. And that's one of the most difficult things to get free from. So just drugs opens you to that. And consider how many children today are exposed to that.
Second thing which can do that is a cinema of horror, where you are shown these ugly images and horrible images, you are watching them. And who watches cinema in daytime? Very few. Mostly it is at night. Even if you watch in daytime, you're in a dark room which is in the cinema hall or theatre for practical reasons. So you're in a state in which your biology is put in a half sleep state because all is dark, your subconscious is all exposed and open and whatever you've shown goes straight into your subconscious and horror movies go straight there and implant those images and those energetic qualities. I remember when I as a child when we saw what is the closest to horror, acceptable in the ashram playground okay, it was mild compared to what we have today. There was some science fiction cinema called green slime and there's little creatures making weird noises. As an adult today I would laugh, it's so silly, but as children it's scary. I remember coming back from the movie and then for weeks I heard this, the suggestions, those images, those sounds in my subconscious popping up. You're going to sleep in the evening, you close your eyes and then those things come back. What do you do? How do you get rid of it? And as a child you can't.
[Narad] I had the same experience.
[Sraddhalu] Knowing that, why would you expose children to this? And this was the Sri Aurobindo ashram where we had a filtration system that the Mother had put in place and removed all the horrible stuff. So we never saw real horror. What we saw was this really mild, silly thing even, with real horror. And I've had that happen when I've seen on television, for example, something real horror, sometimes just the image coming in and you can feel that you are exposing yourself to a certain quality of energy and if you don't shut it immediately, afterwards that link stays, something of that imprint stays in you and especially if they have used certain symbols and this goes into a very dangerous area.
Sraddhalu (0:47:12):
There are symbols which incarnate or hold a certain power. So maybe we have had a discussion, we should have a discussion about symbols. The Mother’s symbol for example represents her consciousness. You place the symbol, it has an effect. In that space physically, the photograph is a symbol. Finally it is ink on paper, but as a symbol it can incarnate something of the force. We had a friend in Sri Lanka who narrated this to us. They had a fire in the house by accident. This is way back, 30 years ago. And they said the fire burnt everything and it came along the wall and it stopped just where the Mother's photograph was there. Physically it had the effect of protecting. And we have many such examples. Equally there are demonic symbols, satanic symbols and the cinemas particularly use those symbols powerfully. You will be surprised to know politicians use these symbols in their public discourses. With their hands they make gestures which are satanic gestures and it's their way of invoking that force on the people to seize, to possess them, to follow what they want. A lot of the rock, hard rock and metal music, they use these symbols very openly. And they, who's that? Madonna, for example, there's a whole series of videos which I recently came across, where she's actually saying it in so many words, that calling the devil, invoking, worshipping the devil. And then I've seen videos of some of these rock musicians who tell everybody all of you are damned to go to hell, will you join me and everyone shouts saying yes, yes we join you. They think it's fun, they think it's a joke, but they are made to make gestures, symbols, statements which have the power to invoke the Asuric energy and they are made to do it and so that entire hall all those people are being made to go through a satanic ritual of invoking a dark, asuric energy into them. The very opposite of what the yoga would do, which is to open yourself to the Divine and invoke the divine consciousness of freedom, of light, of growth and here they are doing the very opposite and a child sitting at home watching the video or listening to that music is being pulled into that, unknown to him. He thinks it's just a piece of music. He doesn't even know what the words are.
So another example, a lot of these music videos have words which basically go to this vocabulary that says something like, I hate the world, the world is useless, you want to die, I want to give up, get out of this. Basically taking you to the point where you get fed up with the world and are ready to commit suicide. Some of them openly say, I just want to die, I want to commit suicide, what are the different ways and even use the words to describe the different ways of committing suicide. Now the wording is such and said in a language which is with an accent which is strong enough that someone who does not follow the accent will be listening to the latest hit song and they're just listening to the beats and the words are going in as a programming subliminally and leading the children to mould their consciousness inside out. It's extremely toxic and opens you straight away to those forces. Now I'm going in depth in this because this is one of the primary causes for the increasing real mental illnesses in young children. The moment you open to this, very quickly something inside you resists, especially if the soul's influence is strong, it starts resisting and blocking, but that thing is already plugged in and then you have a struggle, a quarrel, a push and pull. So many of these people, the problem starts with, this voice tells me I'm not good enough, this voice is always criticising me and they identify with the voice saying I am criticising myself. I don't know what to do, I have an image problem, and if you explore, you don't accept their interpretation. You explore to see what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? You go down two or three levels and what they have is something which is criticising them. I asked them to point out a location. It will be here, here, somewhere around them, in their aura. It comes from here. I said, but where are you? I am here. So there is a voice here and I am here. So do you realise that's not you? Ah yes! I’ve come to the recognition, it's not me. What do you do with that which is not you? Will you refuse it? You throw it out. But nobody is bothered to go to that level of detail. You go to the doctor, doctor says, oh you have an image problem, here's a medicine or go into therapy. What does therapy do? Be strong, be confident. It's not going to the root cause of the problem. It just creates a veneer and appearance and the person is taught to be a hypocrite. Put up an appearance of confidence and so all of society is being warped more and more and to correct the warp, you warp more and so on. If in the process the hook is strong enough, it can get you to the point where it drives you crazy. So, this voice is bothering me 24 hours always, I am criticising, I am so fed up, I have to do something where I lose myself, go to sleep or I use medicine to fall asleep. When I'm closing my eyes, the voice tells me, see you are not good enough, you have done nothing good in the day, all the day you have wasted, you are wasting your life. And I asked the person, is that what you think about yourself? No. I said, do you like what you are doing? Yes. Are you happy with what you did? Yes. But the voice says I am not good enough. So that's a step towards real mental sickness. It can harass you to the point where you break down and you get so vexed with yourself and so on. The more subtle form which is more difficult to detect where actually the influence gets into you and now what you're talking to as a person is a mixed influence and this is much more difficult to detect. So the mixed influence, the person puts a front which is all good and then there is something which is slightly perverse which uses the front to do its perverse thing and they're apparently doing good things but all the time there's this twist which comes to trigger people, to make people upset, provoke them and then they get a perverse pleasure doing it. That's the more hard, that's really the mental illness, but you will not detect it. Many of these people will be called sociopathic and in current psychology, they'll just categorise it and say it's a type. But no, it's not a type, it's a possession. It's not the psychic being that leads, it's not even the conscience, it's not even your goodwill, which would all be reflections of the psychic influence at least. It's an external perverse influence which hides behind this good appearance.
Sraddhalu (0:54:32):
And then the last category will be the more extreme where there is an actual possession. And then partial or whole the person's life is generally taken off track completely. And spiritually there is very little one can do for that life, very likely they can't go too far because once there is a hook there, it takes a very painful process and a slow process to get free and the person has to then strengthen and close their aura, their protection and then rebuild. It's like restarting your life from scratch and it's not easy for many people. So many examples where the Mother was informed of a person who had a possession, she would remove the possession, person would be fine. After a few weeks the person gets back into it and Mother was asked why does it happen? She said when that thing is taken out they suddenly feel themselves empty, their life doesn't have the drama, so they call it back and that's the tricky part. You could get the person free but what do you fill it with and unless the person has a very clear, strong spiritual centre which they can cling to mostly for the rest of their life, the spiritual potential is completely blocked out. And imagine how many millions of children are being made to go through the, I am going to use a strong word here, initiation into satanic practice, in these programs where they go and chant things and make gestures, it's an initiation ritual. If you went to a spiritual environment and you did an initiation ritual, you are consciously connecting to a source. You go to that satanic environment and do an initiation ritual, what happens? So, unfortunately, a lot of this has happened with the young people. I have touched upon this, it's a bit dark, and it's not something nice to speak about, it's not something nice to think about, but we have to know. We have to face the reality of what these things are doing, and only by knowing we can take steps to counter it.
And so, as a parent, if you are watching this, observe what your children are listening to. Take time to listen to what they are listening. Take time to watch what they are watching. Take time to converse with them. If nothing else, build at least a personal deeper rapport where you link with them in their deeper aspiration. Let there be someone in the world with whom their deeper aspiration can flow out and connect. And if you have a spiritual connection and you link to them in their deeper aspiration, it will be enough to be able to neutralise or at least give them the strength to refuse those influences. A child who has grown up with that inner awareness and sensitivity, when they meet these kinds of spaces or these kinds of music or programs, they feel uncomfortable and they will avoid it because they know inside that it's not good, it's wrong or it's dangerous. This is your most effective way of helping children and giving them the necessary protection. But take the trouble to watch, take the trouble to listen and do not ignore the signs. And always remember, the Mother's help is with you. Call for that help, call for her protection. As a parent, you can surround the children with the protection even if they are too young to call it themselves. Surround the children with the protection that you invoke and let that presence be their familiar consciousness. If you are in a spiritual family, that's not enough unless you take trouble to transmit this experience and this sensitization. We know of so many examples of people who met the Mother, they had all the spirituality and the devotion in their family, it was not transmitted to the second generation and the third generation lost it completely. Even there were people who returned Sri Aurobindo's relics which were in their house which was a centre. The centre became defunct, they returned the relics saying what do we have to do with this? So it's not an automatic guarantee just because you have had an intense experience that they will have it also. You have to take the trouble to transmit the spiritual values, the light and at the very least, the sensitivity and the joy of relating to the Divine Presence.
[Narad] Thank you. Namaste.
[Sraddhalu] Namaste.