Living Your Calling in an Age of Confusion.
On the evening of Friday, May 6th, New York’s Bhakti Center partnered with Upbuild to hold a dinner event featuring a talk by Radhanath Swami on the topic “Living Your Calling in an Age of Confusion”.
Upbuild is an educational social enterprise created by Rasanath Das and Hari Prasad, who both used to live and serve at The Bhakti Center as monks. Upon graduation from the monastic order they went on to launch Upbuild which aims at maximizing the human potential by creating environments that inspire genuine purpose and authentic connection. Among the dinner’s 100 guests were many leaders in business, journalism and other creative fields.
Below are excerpts from Radhanath Swami’s talk on how true wealth and happiness are found through finding and sharing the divine love that lies within the soul.
Living Your Calling in an Age of Confusion.
Radhanath Swami: The times like we are facing these days are periods in human history that could potentially bring a rise in enlightenment, or just the opposite. Times of difficult, individually and collectively, are crossroads where we have to really question our lives.
What gives a thing value to a person’s heart is not the monetary price of it, or how it may stimulate the eyes or the mind. What gives value to anything is the exchange of love.
What is valuable? Things can give some degree of pleasure to the senses and the mind but things can never give fulfillment to the heart. Only love can do that. The nature of the heart is to love and be loved. The heart is starving for love. If it is not nourished, no matter what we get, we can never be satisfied and we can never be an instrument to give true satisfaction.
When we realize that love within us, and make it our life’s service to be an instrument of that love, which is expressed through compassion for the body, mind and souls of others, then our life is truly meaningful and fulfilling. With that integrity we can work harder than anyone, if that is required, but it is not motivated by greed, envy or arrogance – it’s motivated by love. By really caring and wanting to make a difference.
The greatest thing that we can pass down through our legacy is compassion, love and care based on moral values – principles of spiritual integrity. There is a saying, that if you lose your wealth you lose nothing, if you lose health you lose something, and if you lose your character you lose everything. Of course we need wealth and we see that when the economy is struggling it can really bring out the worst in people. But where there is compassion, where we see humanity and life itself as a family, then we will make our policies with the mindset that we are caretakers of each other, whether we are in investment bankers, farmers or even swami’s.
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