How can I rise above material desires in a world so focused on possessions?

Let’s try to understand this through an example... Say, you love the taste of tea. But what if you are given tea after you eat a sweet? Would you have the desire to have tea? No, because you would find the tea quite bland then, isn’t it? Similarly, the taste of the bliss of the Soul is the sweetest of all, after which your interest in these materialistic desires shall wane off on its own. ☺ When you taste the bliss of the Soul, the pleasures of the world, no matter how sweet they seemed earlier, become tasteless, automatically, and eventually, the inner temptations die down completely. What is the bliss of the Soul like? rnParam Pujya Dada Bhagwan, the Enlightened being, has said, “Eternal happiness, bliss, is within you. Your real Self i.e. the Soul is an abode of infinite bliss, and yet you are looking for happiness in temporary things!” The Soul is our very own Self (Aatma). It exists in every living being and that’s what we really are! The inherent property of Soul is eternal bliss. But we are unable to experience it because there are veils of ignorance that have fully covered the knowledge of the Soul, the eternal bliss of the Soul. When all the coverings over the Soul get removed, such Absolute Soul is called God (Parmatma)! rnGod is the Absolute Soul, without any coverings over it, and hence, is an abode of eternal bliss. Eternal bliss means happiness that never ends! Therefore, Param Pujya Dadashri advises, “If you like happiness and you do not like misery, then worship God. And if you like misery and do not like happiness, then worship the material things.” He further asserts, “Until one is under the societal influence (lok-sangnya), there is nothing but pain there, and if one comes under the influence (sangnya) of Gnani, the Enlightened One, then there is nothing but happiness, happiness, and even more happiness.” What is lok-sangnya? Loksangnya means to believe that there is happiness in whatever people have believed there is happiness in. Say they have believed that there is happiness in materialistic things, then, you too believe the same. And to believe that there is happiness only in the Self (the pure Soul residing within) is the sangnya of the Gnani!! Gnani is the Enlightened One. So just hold the strong hand of Gnani. Following the sangnya of Gnani, your work will be done! How?? Let’s understand... How do we taste the bliss of the Soul? Through Self-Realization! rnYou may wonder, ‘Self-Realization takes years and years of hard penance and austerities, and life after life, it requires renunciation and forsaking of worldly life to make it happen. That’s not easy at all, especially for me! So how do I?’ But don’t you worry since we are born in the age where we have the Science of Akram. Self-Realization is very easy, when attained the Akram way! Through Akram Vignan, we attain Self-Realization in just two hours only, where Gnani, the Enlightened One, with his divine spiritual powers, burns all the deluding karma sitting over our Soul, and awakens our Soul. And putting in a line of demarcation between our real Self (Soul) and the relative self (John – please insert your name here), he graces us with Self-Realization that, ‘I am really a pure Soul, whose function is only to see and know. I am separate from John. John has all materialistic desires, whereas I, the Soul, am pure, untainted, untouched and unaffected by any kind of material desire that John may have.’ Thus, Gnani separates for us, the territory of the ‘real’ from the ‘relative’, and thereby dissociates the Soul from John. Thereafter, all that we are required to do is, following the Gnani’s words and instructions, keep this separation intact. The material desires, by their very nature are temporary, and on the other hand, the bliss of the Soul, the Self, by its very nature, is eternal. Hence, there is nothing to worry anymore, after Self-Realization! In the awakened awareness of the Soul, when we ‘see’ and ‘know’ the material desires, as they arise, remain for some time, and then vanish away; without getting involved in any of the desires, then through this internal penance, we not only free ourselves from the bind of old materialistic desires that we carried forward with us from the past life, but also begin to experience the taste of the bliss of the Soul more and more, after which new desires do not enchant us anymore! To read more, visit: https://dbf.adalaj.org/c634xonu