Audio Transcript

The Age of Excess

For those who are coming for the first time, as I speak, you will notice there will be silence in between my words, and that silence is intentional. It is for you to imbibe the meaning behind the words. So this whole talk is more like a meditative journey, which all of us are taking together.

Childhood Memories and Early TV Experience

Years back, when I was a young boy in the late 80s, we had one single TV channel in India. I was from a small town. And that channel used to come on from around 5 in the evening for a couple of hours, maybe 10 or 11 in the night, every day. That’s it.

Sundays were a very special day because on Sunday we used to have a movie every Sunday, one movie a week. And I still remember, we used to be very excited. We used to anticipate from Wednesday onwards, you know, we’ll have that movie on a Sunday night. And on a Sunday, the whole family used to get together, have a lot of fun watching the movie.

Explosion of Media and Instant Gratification

Fast forward 20 years, around 20 years, 2012, 2013, now we had 120 channels. In India, you could have 120, 30 channels, whatever you want to watch. And I was in India at that time. And I was with a friend who used to watch a lot of TV. And he made a very odd comment to me one day. He said, Rajiv, there is nothing interesting to watch on TV. And that led me to think, you know, I went back to my time. And I was like, we had one movie a week coming on. And we were very excited to watch it and we had fun watching it.

Now you have 120 channels, 120 different points of entertainment, there are movies 24-7. Still, you say there’s nothing interesting to watch, alright. Fast forward 10 years more, 2021, you have those 120 channels and you have content on demand. So there are a million movies on Netflix and Hulu or YouTube. And you just need to press a button. And you don’t have to wait. Like in TV, even if you had 120 channels, you had to wait for the next episode. It would take a week’s time to come in. But now it’s instant. You don’t have to wait.

The consumption depends on your appetite. So you can binge watch. I don’t think binge watching was even a word maybe 10 years back. So now you can binge watch. 20 episodes, one day. Back to back. So the next day you must, you should be incredibly happy. But are you? When you watch or you indulge in that binge watching, you wake up the next day, you feel more empty. You feel guilty. You feel depressed. You feel life has no meaning. And then you start that consumption again.

Culture of Excess and Its Impact

And that is the age we are living in. There is overload. There is excessive, there is obscene amount of content and entertainment and things. And there is instant gratification. So these are two things. There is excess, excessive, and then the ability to gratify ourselves quickly, instantaneously. And both things go hand in hand. And this excess is not only in our daily life. It reflects in our society, it reflects in countries, it reflects in the world.

Do you know what is the defense, annual defense budget of the world? I think it’s around 2 trillion dollars. So we are spending 2 trillion dollars in making things which are great at killing others. Can you imagine that excess? We have more than 15,000 nuclear warheads. What are we going to do with them? They say a country should not have more than 100 warheads because if you use those 100 warheads, nuclear warheads, you will not only destroy the enemy, you will eventually that nuclear holocaust or winter will destroy you as well. So say US uses 100 warheads on any country, USSR. USSR is wiped out. But that will also wipe out US. So logically, no country should have more than 100 warheads. It’s redundant. But you see, every country has more than thousands and thousands of these warheads.

So this culture of excess, this culture of obscene over abundance is everywhere. You want to have sexual experience? Go on hundreds of apps, hook up one night stand. You can have sex, sexual escapades to your heart’s content. And the more you have, the more depressed you feel. Now why is that?

The Paradox of Abundance

We as a society, compared to our grandparents, we have twice as much as cars. We have larger houses. We eat three times more than they used to. We have much more abundance, luxury things, big TVs, faster cars, more clothes, more food, more options. But, paradoxically, over the years, and you can read all that research, you can search on the net, the amount of happiness has declined. Not only that, there is a mental health crisis. Depression and anxiety in the last few years have skyrocketed. It’s off the charts.

If gratification or indulgence could make us content, complete, whole, then this excess wasn’t a problem. But sadly it does not. Though the TVs and the ads and this entire consumeristic society would want you to believe that buying the next thing or indulging in the next experience will somehow fulfil you or make you happy. We are getting more and more restless, shallow and impatient as a society. And the impatience is springing from this instant gratification. Just to test the patience of the people, go on a red light and when it turns green, just wait there for three seconds. Just three seconds, you will hear a honk. You will hear a honk, someone honking. Why? Impatience. I don’t have time. Three seconds is way too much for me to wait for someone else on the red light.

But with all this impatience, with all this gratification, why are we getting more depressed? And I’ve yet to come across someone who says, my God, I have so many excess of friends, close friends. I’ve never heard someone say that. Oh my God, I have so many people I can talk to and they are so connected to me. People would have hardly one or two people with whom they’re connected, not even that. So in terms of human connection and that love, everything is shrinking. But in terms of indulgence and gratification, we are having more and more and more and more.

Technology vs Life

I’ll give you a very interesting example. We landed on the moon in 1961, 1969. And so we had this lunar module which had computers in it. Now you’ll be surprised the computer there, the memory RAM was 4 MB only. The phone in your pocket has 4 GB of RAM minimum. The processor on the lunar module was, I think it was 0.04 megahertz and your phone would be at least 3 megahertz. So the phone that you carry in your pocket is thousands of times more powerful than the technology they used to go to the moon. What do you do with that technology? You order food, you leave nasty comments with people you don’t like and obviously you look for sex. But are we better off? Jokes aside, does that technology that leap from 50 years, you know, there’s a huge leap. What I’m trying to say, we have come from having the technology which powers a rocket to having that in our pockets.

So, technology is going up, life is going down. And one comes face to face with this truth that the modern life is somehow not conducive for mental well-being. I’m not even talking about spiritual quest which is here. I’m just talking about here, you know, just living a decent everyday normal life. Modern life is not conducive to that. If it was, probably we would have seen the graph go up, we would have seen happiness go up, we would have seen depression go down. So unfortunately, happiness is not on sale on your local mall. You can’t buy it there. The paradox is you think that experiences or things will somehow fulfill you. But they don’t.

Investigating Desire and Emptiness

So what’s the way out? If gratification and fulfilment of desires is not making us happy, what will make us happy? Or what will give us that contentment? It’s not even contentment. You see, we are trying to fill a hole. There is some emptiness in our hearts. There is a restlessness. There is a loneliness. And somehow we are trying to fill that. So we can now see, obviously, fulfilment of desires might not fulfil this emptiness. So what do we do? We first have to investigate this emptiness. We need to first investigate this whole complex of desire and fear. Because without understanding these impulses, we can never unravel the complex roots and the depth of those roots. They are very deep. Desires and fears are the two things which dictate most of our actions. Even for enlightenment, that’s a desire, or you want a particular spiritual state of mind, or peace, or happiness. They are desires. And most of our actions are dictated by either a desire or a fear. And the roots run deep.

Realising Completeness

And once we start investigating, we find something really incredible. That I am complete in myself. And that’s a message I have been sharing. I keep sharing with everyone because that’s what I want people to know. That you are complete in yourself. You are enough. In this moment, psychologically, emotionally, mentally, physically, you are enough. You have had enough experiences. You have accumulated enough stuff. It relies that you are complete and enough. And even if you accept that, even on an intellectual level, that I am complete in myself, I don’t need anything from outside to fulfil me, to complete me.

This endless addiction to the external will drop off. So either we really investigate, we understand the roots of desires and fears, or we accept or realise that we are complete in ourselves. That no amount of sex, or relationship, or food, or Netflix can fill that hole.

Spiritual Path and Overflowing Consciousness

And the whole spiritual journey, the whole spiritual path is to come to this basic realisation. That nothing of value can come from outside. That this consciousness is not only complete, it overflows. You will incredibly, and some of you might have experienced that in your meditation and in your life where you have stumbled upon a state where the love, the joy is so much that it just overflows. You can’t contain it. It’s everywhere. It just bursts from all parts of your being. And imagine if we as a society can function from that incredible state. How would the world look? How would the society look? How would your neighbours look? Instead everyone trying to fill this hole, everyone says I have more and enough and I can give and share.