Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is the Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and I'm your host. And today we will be starting the Raja Yoga Foundation course. This is gonna be a five part series. I'm going to put the whole course down in the playlist so you can review them and re-watch them. And so today is the first lesson out of five. And what's the purpose of doing this course? Well, in meditation, we're practicing learning how to be silent. Talking to myself in a certain way, telling myself that I'm a soul. My nature is peace and so forth. But there's a whole. Foundation of knowledge that is very, very helpful for meditation and spiritual effort. So we're gonna be covering that on the podcast. So let's get started. So today the first lesson is soul. You are a Soul. It's a very powerful sentence. Uh that was the sentence that sparked my interest when I heard that you are a soul. I really that. A awoke something in me, and I was very, very interested to learn more. So today we're gonna learn what is a soul. So a soul is living consciousness. And I'm gonna put a picture here. So there's a picture of a person and a point of light and the world of light. And so this kind of a mystical way of looking at it there. But what is a soul? The soul is living consciousness. So I am living consciousness. If you've been watching the podcast, you know that I'm. Saying this all the time. So it's the first lesson. It's the first principle, the first piece of spiritual knowledge. I am a soul. Growing up in as Christian and as Catholic, I used to hear, I have a soul, or my soul is going to heaven when I die. But in spiritual knowledge, the first piece of knowledge is I am a soul. I am the living consciousness. That's using this body to express myself in time and space. I am living light. I'm the living being. I'm eternal. When I'm meditating, I'm telling myself that I'm starting to reorient myself in a spiritual way. The second part of the idea that I'm a soul is what is the qualities of the soul. What are the qualities of the soul? So the qualities of the soul are love, peace, happiness innocence, benevolence, stillness, wisdom, purity. Those are all the essential qualities of the soul. So you may ask, well, before we do that. How do I use this in meditation? Well, I am a soul and my nature is peace. That's a very easy way to remember the basic principle of Raja yoga, meditation. I am a soul. I am the living consciousness. I am the one looking through these eyes, listening through these ears, moving this body. My nature is peace. So as you're listening to this, you may think, well, if that's my quality, why don't I feel peaceful? And most of us, I'm gonna say, do not feel peaceful most of the time. And if my original nature is love, peace, purity, happiness, benevolence, and so forth, why don't I feel that all the time? So now we're gonna go through the second part of the lesson, which is the mind intellect, and impressions, or I'm gonna use another word, sanskars. So I'm gonna put up a picture here. So I want you to look at the picture while I'm talking, and I'm gonna talk about each aspect of the picture. As you see, there's the mind, there's the intellect, and then there's, it says impressions, but I'm gonna use the word sanskar. S-A-N-S-K-A-R. That word is a Sanskrit word, but it doesn't have a English translation, a proper English translation. So I'm gonna explain what a sans scar is. So I'm a nurse. As many of you know, and I trained to be a nurse. I wasn't always a nurse, so I went to school to become a nurse. So I learned about nursing. I went to clinicals and I practiced being a nurse. I got into the company of other nurses. I have memories of being a nurse. I have a whole knowledge base around being a nurse. I made money being a nurse. I can. Problem solve in the context of nursing and so forth. I have nursing leadership, I have higher education and so forth and so on. But right now as I'm talking to you, I am not using the sanakars of a nurse. However. However, if someone was to walk by right now and fall down and hit their head. You can bet that all the sanskars of a nurse, all the knowledge and all the experience and all the memories and all the critical thinking and all the perspectives are gonna come up to be used in that situation. So what is a sanskar? It's, it's a full, comprehensive way of being that has knowledge and memories and, and, uh. Uh, perspective and critical thinking, thought patterns, emotional patterns that come up to be used at a certain time based on the situation. Another example would be driving a car. Most of us as adults have the sanskars of driving a car, but right now as I'm sitting here, I'm not using them, but I still have them. So when I get behind the wheel of the car, those sanskars come up. So that's what I mean by sanskar. So back to the picture here. So if you look at the top there, you have the mind. So the mind, we did a lot of episodes on the mind. The mind is the feel of experience for the soul. I have thoughts and feelings and dreams and wishes and imaginations and things in the mind. And all my experiences are really happening in the mind. If you test that, you can see that there's this example again, like you have four people that watch a car accident, and then you interview all four people and they give four slightly different interpretations of what happened because in their mind they have a different field of experience. Each one of us has our own unique mind and our own unique field of experience. Then you have the intellect. Now the intellect is very important and very powerful, and it has three. I'm gonna talk about three functions of the intellect. One function is to evaluate. So the intellect says, this is right, this is wrong, this is good, this is bad. This is good for me. This is not good for me. Intellect makes that determination. Second thing the intellect does is it reinforces our beliefs and feelings and faith and whatever convictions we have, the intellect gives a sense of support for that. So if I, if I fall in love with somebody, I can say, yes, I'm in love. That's the intellect saying, I do feel that way. Yes, it gives some power and support to our feelings and beliefs and faith. And the third and most important thing that the intellect does is it assigns identity. Now, what's an example of that? So let's say you are a man and you are married, and you find out that your wife is pregnant, and then immediately you decide, I'm quitting smoking. So what happened there? Something happened, your wife got pregnant, and all of a sudden after let's say 20 years of smoking, you're gonna quit on a dime. Why did you, why were you able to quit? Because the intellect said, I don't wanna be a father who smokes, so then I'm not gonna smoke anymore because that's not who I am. So that's one example. But the intellect can also tell you who you are. I am. A nurse, I am a woman, I am whatever, right? Who tells us who we are? So how does this all work? All everything that I just said. How does it work? So look at the picture now and see. So let's say you are about 12 years old. You, you're hanging out with your friends and your friend says, here, have a cigarette. Back to the smoking again, smoking is an easy example. Maybe nowadays people don't smoke as much, but. When I was growing up, smoking was a really big thing. So 12 years old and your friend says, here, have a cigarette. Well, maybe the intellect is gonna start talking. Maybe the intellect starts saying, this is not a good idea. You know, grandma died of lung cancer. Mom is gonna kill me. I'm too young. We're gonna get caught. This is not a good idea. But what's happening in the sanskars now, the sand scars I talked about like sand scars that you learn, but you also have sand scars based on your development of your life. So for instance, a five-year old is gonna have different sense of life and a sense of priorities and a sense of how they are than a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old, or a 30-year-old. So in our stages of life, our perspective changes naturally. So those are sanskars also. So what are the sense scars of a 12-year-old? Well, the 12-year-old might be thinking, well, I really wanna be like my friends. I don't wanna be left out. I don't wanna be made fun of, and so forth. So right there, there's a conflict between the mind, not a conflict, but there's a difference. The mind, the sense scars are sending up these thoughts and feelings into the mind, and the intellect is saying, this is not a good idea. So when that happens, a decision will be made. Either the intellect will win out and you don't smoke, or the sanskars and all those feelings and emotions will win out and you will smoke. In this case, let's say that I did smoke and the the reinforcement went to the sanskar, the emotional reaction and the emotional feelings. The next day I come back and I come out to hang with my friends again, and my friend says, here, have a cigarette. You can bet that the intellect will not be talking as loud the second day as it did the first day. Why? Because I already overrode the intellect. I went against that one that was trying to say no. So it gets weaker. Can you see how over time, a week, a month, a year, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. The intellect basically goes to sleep. Without the power of the intellect, it's very hard for me to make major decisions. Can you see how addictions would happen then? Can you see how we would react to things? Can you see how maybe we would wanna stop some habits, but we don't have the power to do it. It's 'cause the intellect is weak and we have a reinforcement of that emotional and then activity. So the emotion comes and I'm acting. So stimulus action. Stimulus action, stimulus action. So in the picture, you see the mind and sancar mind. Sancar mind sta the intellect is just asleep. So what does meditation do for us? Meditation only does one thing. It doesn't make us happy. It doesn't solve our problems. It only wakes up the intellect. That's all it does. When you're sitting in meditation. And you have a moment of peace and you're not thinking about the world and you're not having an emotional state. You are giving the intellect rest and the mind rest and the intellect begins to wake up. Now, one thing I forgot to mention about the intellect, it works based on the information that it was given. So if I have a religious background and all the information that I gave have about the world is about from my religion or from my culture or whatever, that's how the intellect is going to decide things. So what we're doing in spirituality is we're giving the intellect new information. It's not new, it's basically, it's what's already there. I'm informing my intellect that I am a soul. I'm giving it language to create this identity as spirit. I'm spirit. I am a soul. My nature is peace, so I'm giving it that information now. So meditation is waking up the intellect and I'm informing it. This is who I am, this is my nature. And as we go through these lessons, I'm giving the intellect more information. Like we're gonna talk about karma, we're gonna talk about different levels of consciousness, different things that I can be doing or experiencing in meditation. That's all information from the for the intellect. And how does this help me? Well, if I have a new idea of myself or a spiritual idea of myself, that has me as peaceful, and then I find myself angry. At some point, perhaps the intellect will wake up and say, wait a minute, maybe I don't need to be angry. I can say, in my experience, it doesn't take long for that waking up of the intellect and giving it the new identity to work with, it doesn't take long for that to have an impact on our emotional states. After two weeks of meditating, my anger went way down. It was pretty much gone. It's amazing how quickly you can have results. So that's the mind intellect in sanskars. So that is the end of the first lesson, the Soul. I would recommend that you maybe watch it again if you're interested. Also, I'm gonna put some links down in the description for meditation, for more information for free online classes and so forth. If you wanna learn more, you can check out the Brahma Kumaris website and find a center near you where you can go in person and meet other people and have an in-person experience. And that's the end of the first lesson. So we'll see you in the next lesson, which will be the three levels of consciousness and the supreme soul. So thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time. Take care.
