The great Indian Epic, the Mahabharata, has loads to teach us about current events, aka this crazy, destructive, and destabilizing time we’re living through. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Podcast First Words
The question I’d like to ask you all tonight is about the intersection of your spiritual practice and current events. And I’ll say a little bit before the discussion.
We can talk about what’s happening in our country, and by default, to the rest of the world, in political and cultural terms. However, what’s happening is so profound and so destabilizing in a host of different ways, and also engaging and perhaps distracting, that it really has direct relationship with our spiritual practice.
So are we bringing the View, our practice, and the fruits of our practice to bear in our way of relating to this? And how are we doing that or not doing it? How are we succeeding in doing that or how are we not succeeding at doing that?
There’s a great degree of groundlessness right now. How are we relating to that groundlessness? There’s a lot of turmoil. How are we relating to that? There’s a lot of outrage. How are we relating to that?
There’s shock, grief, excitement, and all kinds of things happening. These could deepen our practice if we relate to it using our practice. Or it actually could pull us away from our practice. That could happen if we somehow internally decided that certain aspects of this were too important to bring our practice to them. Too important to try to work with them with our practice.
When I say too important, I mean when people have crises, sometimes they say, “Oh, I was having a crisis so I didn’t do meditation because I was too swept up in my crisis.” Or “I was so upset. And, you know, I didn’t do my practice. Because what I was upset about was so important that I had to abandon my practice for a while. You know what I mean, right?” So maybe some of us are doing that, too?