Speaker 1: Good morning.
Speaker 2: How are you doing today, sir?
Speaker 1: I'm doing very well and how are you. Oh.
Speaker 2: Very excited to share a conversation with you, because I
think that you're transparent and real enough to say, yeah,
you know what, I think we all need to be
having conversations like this around the entire planet.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, as kind of yes, it hopes
to be that.
Speaker 2: Person locating that place a piece. We are in a
time now where, in fact, I was just reading this
morning that because of technology and because of our demand
to live in the past, we have a hard time
dealing with the present, and we need to have conversations
with people like yourself who have invested in the present,
and there is a payoff in so many different ways.
Speaker 1: That's you know, I love to I love how you
phrased it.
Speaker 2: How do you get to that place? Though, because it's
more than just opening up a book.
Speaker 3: You're right, it's a series of choices. It's a series
of commitments to understanding the root of why it is
that we feel the way we do, why we feel
and complete and that leads you to understanding the futility
of living in the parstling for the future and being
more president than that, and there's a series of practices
and questions that take you to that place.
Speaker 2: I love that you say questions because that's one of
my favorite things to do. I do a thing called
defragging and where I invite listeners on iHeartRadio. You've got
to ask yourself the questions and then question the answers,
because if you keep asking everybody else, well, then give
them your shoes so they can walk a mile in
your shoes.
Speaker 3: It's an excellent point, and I think part of the
questioning process has to be married to observation. Sure, you
can definitely observe other people's choices and the people's lives.
I mean, we don't live in isolation, so it's definitely
good to learn from others in that respect. But I think,
of course, as you said, our experiences unique and should
be treated that way.
Speaker 2: Isn't it interesting that you say we don't live in isolation,
but there are certain leaders in this world right now
that would prefer that we have just us, only us,
And it's like, I think we just step backwards there.
Speaker 3: Well, I think there's often a lot of people that
don't want to accept reality as it is, and they
want to live in their own fantasy.
Speaker 2: Yoga is so important to you. Now, there's one question
that I've always had because my meditation is nidra, and
when you really take the time to study what nidra is,
it is a journey unto itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean ya, Yoga as a whole I think
fits that moniker or journey onto itself. And I think
it's one of those things. I mean, there are many
forms of it. To come in all of them now
would be too much, But I think it's one of
those things where people think it's one thing, but at
the depth, it's an entirely different thing. It needs to
be approached with a different perspective than most people have
learned to approach it with.
Speaker 2: Isn't it the communication with your mind, body, and soul?
Speaker 3: It is, absolutely, It's about creating a harmony between all
of them because I think one of the big I
would say tragedies of human existence at the moment is
how fragmented we are. Our mind wants one thing, our
heart wants another thing, the body wants another thing, and
we live in an internal turmoil where everything is pulling
in different directions, and it leads to poor decision making.
It leads to a lot of limitation on what we
could be living and what we could be experiencing.
Speaker 2: I just recently read a story where people are not
so strong when it comes to religion, but yet they
call themselves spiritual. What do you see from your own beliefs?
Speaker 3: I think one two are are the same in it's
an arrow of category. So I look at it this way.
Spirituality is the domain. So let's say spirituality is the NBA,
religion is the LA Lakers. So what I mean by
that is there's a domain of spirituality, and of course
religion is just one brand of it. And I think
a lot of people are getting frustrated with religion in
that sense because it might be a little more limiting,
it might be a little more restrictive. But spirituality as
a whole is a project that has never been abandoned
and continues to be practiced even by the religious.
Speaker 2: Please do not move. There's more with Swami coming up next.
He thanks for coming back to my conversation DC podcasting
as being that one thing that you know reached beyond
the four walls of the church, because I was heavily
inspired when I heard that you have a podcast.
Speaker 3: It's a way of reading people. In the modern world,
I think that's all it is. I mean, the church, spirituality,
human conversation. It's just been a way of transmitting wisdom, knowledge,
trying to listen to people, learn from people, share with people.
And I think nowadays podcast it's just another way of
doing it. It's a way that is more effective, reaches
more people. And that's what it's really all about.
Speaker 2: Your philosophy, what is that based on? Because I mean
it's you know, you have philosophy versus human psychology. Those
are two completely different things, but don't we have to
have both of them in order to work, you know,
for growing forward.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say they are completely different things. Is I
think there's a tremendous amount of overlap. I mean, if
the true philosophy is trying to explain the world around
us as we see it, it's a love of wisdom
in the original Greek. And so I think human psychology
is one understood properly, is centered around understanding our mechanisms
and how we function and what we're naturally, let's say,
in pursuit of and I think knowledge is one of
those things, the philosophy that we have in our tradition
is more centered around a God centric philosophy. It's a
and learning to love God, live in devotion to God.
But it's not a God that is very hyper defined.
It's a God that is present in all things. And
in that sense, we learned to be in relationship with
all things, to learn how to navigate all things with
a sense of divinity.
Speaker 2: And how do you handle it personally when someone because
I know how I react when people say this, I
don't know where God is, which God was here? I
can't find God, And I'm going, wow, like you just said,
God is in each and every one of us at
all times.
Speaker 1: Correct.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's an era of method more and
more often than not, in an error of perspective when
people think that God isn't here and they don't even
look for him.
Speaker 1: If I'm told.
Speaker 3: That something is not in my house, I'm not going
to spend time looking for it in my house. I'm
going to go look elsewhere. And so I think it's
a question of wrong information to the beginning of the
journey and therefore consequently a poor journey, because we haven't
been fed the right information in order to find that
which is so near and dear.
Speaker 2: So many preachers, including my own, which is Stephen Ferdy
from Elevation Church, they always say that the greatest lessons
are found in the darkness. So when I'm challenged, I
will go looking for the lessons. Do you do the same.
Speaker 3: I don't think that any conception of spiritual life or
love is complete if we just take it to mean positive,
sweet experiences. I mean, a parent that chastises their child
is doing it out of love, and yet the manifestation
of that love is chastisement. And so I think that
it's very important for us to be able to navigate
the tough moments in life and to start to see
the divine lessons that are being given there, because to
ignore them is to invite them back into your life repeatedly,
and if you can extract the wisdom from it, you're
going to invite a negative experience to repeat itself time
and time again. And for the record, I've met Stephen Fridick,
and he's a great man.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, thank you so much for saying that. Yeah,
because he absolutely is. One of the things that we've
learned is we continue to age in life, and that
is is that we think that age is wisdom. I
don't buy into that because I think that you can
be an old person and still make the same bad mistakes.
Speaker 3: I fully agree age goodv it to do with it.
It's all to do with how you've navigated your mind
and how your relationship you have towards your mind, Because
all your habits and your reactions are part of your mind,
part of your understanding of mind, part of your understanding
of yourself, your nature. How you navigate all of that,
and all of this can't be rectified. The one thing
I see people struggling with so much, and I like
to correct it is when people say it is how
it is, I am how I am. I can't change.
I think that's a terrible thing to say to yourself,
and it's absolutely untrue. Everybody can change, given the right
tools and the right time.
Speaker 2: Where do you go in order to receive? Because I
mean I live in a forest here in South Charlotte.
I go into the forest, I take my walk through
the forest. I'm here inside the home. But where do
you go to receive?
Speaker 3: Well, I live in a monastery type of environment. It's
an austroam in an upstate New York, and so for me,
It's about being with my community, being with like minded individuals.
Speaker 1: And this isn't our myrap state of New York, and.
Speaker 3: That's where I spend my time when I want to,
in a sense recharge spiritually.
Speaker 2: Wow, you write, you're so out there in the community.
Where can people go to find out more about you?
Speaker 1: I would say two things.
Speaker 3: They can go on Buckti Marga dot us so b
h A k t I m A r g A
dot us, Or they can go on my personal Instagram
profile where I have links to my podcast where I
do a lot of announcements about what I'm doing. Personally,
I do a lot of programs in New York City,
That's where I'm primarily active and elsewhere in the world
as well. So my personal profile swam me Revity Conta
on Instagram.
Speaker 2: How about your writing? What are you doing with your writing?
Because I know I can tell that you're a writer
and you're a thinker.
Speaker 3: True my thinking tends to take the podcast as a
platform right now, writing we just finished. I co authored
a book recently with a couple of my fellow colleagues
on Vedic philosophy, so Eastern philosophy from the Hindu tradition,
and that book is caoled to do me Vedante. It's
been launched only a couple of months ago and will
be soon available on all the digital platforms. But it's
really an attempt to summarize Eastern philosophy into a modern context.
What is it that we are trying to resolve? Solve
however you wish to put it, and a very concrete
sort of presentation of the three fundamental topics of Eastern spirituality,
which is who am I?
Speaker 1: Who is God? And what is our relationship to this world?
Speaker 2: Oh that's poetry. That's beautiful. I could tell that you
really are very much committed to that.
Speaker 3: Well, I've been a monk for sixteen years now and
it is something that I have absolutely chosen to dedicate
my life to. I looked at the world, looked at life,
and I felt like I can do many things, there
are many doors open to me, but nothing will be
as rewarding and as fruitful to dedicating my time twenty
four hours a day to aid the pursuit of God
and be sharing that with other people in whatever way
I can serve them, whatever way I can help them.
And I felt like there are many other worthy pursuits
in life, but nothing seems to captivate me as much
as that, And so if I can dedicate all of
my waking hours to that, then that's what I'd like
to do.
Speaker 2: You've got to come back to this show anytime in
the future. The world needs to hear your story, your journey,
and your vision.
Speaker 1: It would be my pleasure.
Speaker 2: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 1: Okay, you too, Thank you so much.