This blog post is taken from the article “Maintaining Our Divine Connection While Living in the Material World” by Swami Chidananda Giri, president and spiritual head of YSS/SRF, to be published in the upcoming 2023 Yogoda Satsanga magazine.
The primary mode by which we get information is through the senses: We see things, we hear things, we taste, we touch, we feel — that’s the interchange between our inner consciousness and the outer world.
This can be either a passive or a conscious process. The yogi wants to make it conscious, because the yogi — the devotee — knows the very sad and actually tragic results of not taking control, of letting the world rule our consciousness.
In so many, there is such a sense of loneliness, a sense of being unworthy or unloved. What is the reason for such great loneliness? Why is there such a great empty “vacuum” in all these people?
The answer is very simple. People are lonely because they have never taken the time to become friends with themselves.
Of course, I’m referring to the higher Self — not the little ego with all of its idiosyncrasies and habits and limitations, but the real Self, the soul.
The Source of Our Strength and Self-Esteem
When there has been no cultivation of a relationship with our real Self, what is the result? The soul is the source of real love, the source of our strength and of our self-esteem. If we are divorced from that, and make no effort to have a relationship or connection with that higher Self, the result is that all of those basic human needs and desires—for love, for validation, for somebody to tell us that we’re worth something—remain unfulfilled. It is tragic.
In the absence of awareness of those beautiful divine qualities that dwell within every human being, people are driven to run after fulfilment in a million different outer ways.
Really, it all amounts to a few very primal, emotional cries: “Won’t somebody love me? Won’t somebody make me feel that I am worthwhile? Won’t somebody give me the sense that I’m loved, that I’m liked, that I’m valued?” As long as individuals are chasing after that validation from outer sources, it will always remain elusive; there will always be that loneliness and that emptiness within.
The Great Change (and Hope!) That Comes From Meditation
But the good news is that this can change from the time that one starts a serious, disciplined, methodical, and scientific practice of meditation—and thereby begins to get to know the true Self. That is where real self-esteem comes from.
We hear in the media and from our educators and leaders in society about the problem of self-esteem, especially in younger people who haven’t yet found their footing or their direction in life. If they don’t know that the source of love and divinity is within them, there is going to be an emptiness, and that emptiness is going to propel an endless search—an endless engagement with social media, with entertainment, with this distraction or that outer pursuit.
It is not that those activities are wrong in themselves; it’s just that they are useless in themselves—useless in filling that vacuum of inner emptiness.
To me those of you who are undertaking a practice of meditation are such a source of hope for the world, because everyone who takes the time on a regular basis to use those techniques of meditation to get some contact with the soul, with that Divine Presence within, is powerfully exemplifying the alternative to the emptiness and the negativity and the loneliness and the alienation that is such an epidemic in the world today.
Spiritual consciousness is the solution; meditation is the solution.
