You Are Not a Prisoner of the Past

Source: Gautam Jain

This post is part three of a three-part series.

Vedanta teacher Gautam Jain (addressed as Gautamji) is a senior protege of world renowned philosopher and author A. Parthasarathy. Currently the head of the Vedanta Cultural Foundation, he has dedicated three decades to full-time study, research, and propagation of Vedanta, which is essentially the teaching of the Upanishads, humanity’s primeval spiritual textbooks dating back thousands of years.

Mark Matousek: You've said that prioritizing duty leads to happiness in life. How can we balance the call of duty and the personal demands of desire? How can social roles free us rather than become prisons?

Gautam Jain: If you live a life based on duty, you will not get attached. Your focus will be on how you can benefit the other person. Attachment comes when you say, “What can that person do for me?” That destroys the relationship. If you can think in terms of what you ought to do, life becomes very clear and pleasurable. You become the giver, no longer the taker. If you say, “You do this for me,” you become a beggar, but if you say, “How can I serve you?” you become a giver. That’s how you ought to live your life.

MM: How do we work with the effects of causes that we didn’t create? Such as inherited trauma, stories we inherit from our families, and circumstances we never wanted?

GJ: It’s actually the opposite. (smiles)

MM: What do you mean?

GJ: You choose the environment you are born in. Your parents don’t choose you. Now, I know this may sound like something you may not have heard about or explored, but analyze what happens in life. You have a desire and your body takes you. The body is the means to fulfill that desire, right? Let’s say you have a desire to buy a shirt and your body takes you to the mall, to the store so you can fulfill that desire. Then after you buy the shirt, now you’re hungry. You have a desire for food, so your body takes you to the food court in the mall. Correct? Your desires propel your body to act. This is life.

Similarly, before birth, all the desires you have take the appropriate body for their fulfillment. This includes your parentage, the parents you’re born to, the environment, the country, the culture, the community. It is all a combination of your desires that create that environment. This is the cycle of birth and death. In fact, when you die, the body is dead. The desires will take the next form, the next body, to fulfill themselves because the desires are still there. The goal of human life is to liberate yourself from the cycle of birth and death. That’s called enlightenment. That’s why it’s called moksha in Sanskrit. Moksha means liberation from the cycle of birth and death. It’s a novel concept to the Western mind, but if you analyze it with logic and reason, this is the only way to explain why we are born and why we die.

MM: If I’m born into a family where there’s a lot of trauma, you’re saying that something in me chose that birth and that my desire is to heal through that trauma? My desire is to work through that karma?

GJ: Here is what happens. You are a prisoner of your past, no doubt, but you are also a producer of your future. It works like a bank balance. Your bank balance today is the sum total of all the pluses and minuses from today backwards, but what your bank balance will be five years from now is not predestined. It depends on what you do from today onwards. You should focus more on what is in your control from today onwards because that’s how you change. It’s up to you. Nobody can prove it, but you must examine it.

MM: How does an awareness of the higher Self help the struggles of the little Me?

GJ: All the agitation, all the stress [of the ego], is caused by selfishness, I and mine. When your thought is on the higher Self, you’re not thinking of your lower ego and egocentric desires. You are free from all those agitations. Of course, that is the whole spiritual path. (smiles) The spiritual path is a way to transfer your thoughts to what is beyond all this, to the Self. Vedantic knowledge helps you do that. It teaches you about what the Self is and how to pursue it. As you get grounded in that, all these lower desires drop off and you get free from these agitations.

MM: What do you think about spiritual bypassing? Folks who want to leapfrog their unhealed neuroses into perfect wisdom?

GJ: It’s like saying, “I’ve never exercised before, I’ve been unhealthy all my life, but I want to bypass the gym and get a great body.” It’s not going to happen. You have to put in the hard work. You can’t become a saint overnight. All the great saints put in hard work and changed themselves. You have to do the same. There’s no instant path to enlightenment. I’m sorry. That’s why hardly anybody comes to real knowledge, real spiritual wisdom, because they don’t want to put in the hard work. That’s the only way.

MM: One last question, Gautamji. What is the most difficult part of being an Eastern teacher in the West?

GJ: The most difficult thing is trying to communicate to people how important this knowledge is, because I can’t put it in a test tube and show you. When it comes to spiritual knowledge, you have to grow yourself and experience it for yourself. I can’t prove it. That is the real tragedy, trust me. If I could show you the peace, happiness, and elevation you get with this knowledge, stadiums would not be large enough! Although this knowledge can change your life, hardly anybody wants it! That’s the real challenge.

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