How to Take Control of Your Life

How to Take Control of Your Life

[00:45 ] Locus of Control

Thank you for tuning into my podcast. I’m Thom Knoles. This is the Vedic Worldview. The subject that is so fascinating to people is the subject of hypnotizability. Properly speaking, it comes under the subject heading in psychological terminology of suggestibility.

Suggestibility here is being used as a scientific term to indicate the degree to which the person who is in question has what we call an internal or internalized locus of control. Locus is spelled L-O-C-U-S of control versus an externalized or external locus of control. And locus of control is a psychological term that refers to, from where our experience is being governed. So what is it that governs what I’m experiencing?

If I am somewhere in the middle, I have partly internal locus of control and let’s say 50% external locus of control, then I can acknowledge that my mood state, or my internal workings of my mind are, at least partly, 50% in charge of how I’m interpreting a gray, rainy, cold day.

If I have an externalized locus of control. And these are all extremes, just to make a point, because it’s always extent, to what extent internal and external. It’s not absolutely internal or absolutely external. It’s not black and white. So think of it as being a slide. Am I a certain percentage internal and a certain percentage external, or the other way around?

The more externally our locus of control lies, and this is at any given time because we, all of us change, minute by minute perhaps, certainly hour by hour, in where our locus of control lies. But when we are externally locussed, then we are going to be convinced that the environment or the people in the environment are the cause of what we’re experiencing.

Now, this is on any scale, whether it’s pejorative as in negative experiences or positive experiences. You know, “I feel so good because I’m in the presence of a hive of bees that have descended on a tree branch in the backyard, and since those bees have been there buzzing around I’m feeling completely elevated.”

Even though that sounds as though someone is having an intuitive, subtle, perhaps even spiritual response to the bees, it’s rather heavily weighted on the exterior because the same person, when the bees all decide to relocate and hive somewhere else, then there could be a moment of, “Oh, now the bees are gone. It’s not the same as it was yesterday. I’m sad because the bees are gone.”

So one of the ways in which we can determine internal versus external is the extent to which the ever-changing relative world seems to be the cause of either my elevated state or my depressed state. Or my angry state, or my sad state, or my fearful state, or my invincibility state.

[04:23] Self-Sufficiency and Field Independence

Generally speaking, the more internalized locus of control is, the less one seeks identity. That means who am I and what am I? Who am I the experiencer? And what am I experiencing? The more internalized the locus of control is, the more one has a greater degree of self-sufficiency and is able to take responsibility for what one is experiencing.

So for example, with a very internalized locus of control, one might see a gray cloudy day, which could cause seasonal affective disorder in somebody who’s prone to that, meaning they get depressed when it’s cold and rainy and clouds everywhere. The person with an internalized locus of control can sense that I could interpret it this way, and if I put on certain music that accentuates this, then I could structure a moody state, but it would be me doing it. 

On the other hand, when I read how happy the farmers are about the rain that’s just come and I contemplate how the trees and the branches and the bushes must be loving all this, I could decide to turn this into a very happy state where we love every raindrop that falls from the heavens and when it rains, it rains from heaven, just like all prosperity.

The suggestibility is related to this function of internal external localized or locuses or loci of control. This relates to another way of describing the same thing with slightly different language: someone who is field dependent and someone who is field independent.

So field independence means I’m having the experience that I’m having independently of the field around me, whatever’s happening in the relative world. Field dependent means the world is responsible for what I’m experiencing and I cannot get to levels of either happiness or, if I am unhappy it’s being caused by somebody else or something else, circumstantial or situational. It could be social, it could be allergenic, “Oh, when the juniper trees produce their pollen, I’m always like this,” and so on and so forth.

So you see where I’m going with this. When we look at the degree to which somebody can be hypnotized, and this is such a mysterious word, you know, we even have words for it that are based on historic characters.

[07:03] The Hypnotizable Ones

The famous Mesmer who was a stage hypnotist who used to be able to get people from his audience to do all kinds of embarrassing things on stage, which ordinarily they wouldn’t do in any other social context or to… look, for example, he could make people come up on the stage who looked all elegant. 

He lived during the Victorian era and he could make otherwise very demure women who were dressed in Victorian gowns start barking like dogs on the stage and hopping around. He could make people feel so hot that they couldn’t stand it and beg for mercy. His name was Mesmer and we’ve used his name in the word mesmerizing. Something as mesmerizing means it appears to be particularly hypnotic.

And stage hypnotists know something, which even most hypnotherapists know, but they don’t like to talk about, and that is this function of external versus internal locus of control, field dependent, field independent. Most stage hypnotists will use some kind of a technique, and I watched one of them once and they used the following technique.

“All right, I want to demonstrate the power of hypnotic suggestion, and I have the voice that’s going to really make this power over you.

“Now, I would like everyone in the audience to put their hands together like this. Lock your fingers together. It’s very important that your left finger is on top. And now elevate your hands above your head like so, and now I’m going to count to three and you will not be able to pull your hands apart. 1, 2, 3.”

60% of the audience get their hands apart and he notes which ones don’t. They’re the hypnotizable ones. So when he calls people onto the stage to get them to bark like dogs or to take off their shirts or to do any other kind of socially embarrassing thing, he’s only picking on the ones who couldn’t pull their hands apart.

They’re the hypnotizable ones and there’s always some kind of a way of determining who’s hypnotizable in the audience and who isn’t. And about 40% of the population are slightly more hypnotizable or perhaps grossly more than the other 60%.

Hypnotizability has an interesting relationship with capacity to perform well on IQ tests. Generally speaking, the better someone can perform on an IQ test, the less hypnotizable they are. In other words, the people who are the lower 20 to 30% in IQ test results are also the most hypnotizable people. So there is a relationship with discriminating capability and creative intelligence capability and hypnotizability.

There’s also a middle category of people who are not actually hypnotized but who go along with it because it’s part of the fun of the party. And we refer to them as a scientific term, the fakers, the ones who fake being hypnotized for social reasons.

[10:23 ] Mass Suggestibility

So setting those people aside for the moment, there are people whose raw suggestibility is greater and there are people whose raw suggestibility is lesser. And in the advertising business, you have to know all about this because there’s a percentage of the population that simply will not respond to certain kinds of advertisements that are on, say, the back of a bus that has a large amount of exposure to people driving in traffic, or on the side of a bus.

There are some people who see those things and it has no effect whatsoever on their buying trends. And there are other people who see those and even though they would swear they’d never seen it, in fact, they start buying differently. It changes the choices that they make when they’re confronted with having to make a choice of products or services.

So hypnotizability is a very, very profound concept and one that we can think about as a collective phenomenon. When we see mass collective phenomena of enthusiasm, the first thing that comes to my mind is the place where I was born in Munich, Germany. But Munich, Germany, in the very early days of Adolf Hitler when half a million people got into the square who had never learned how to Heil Hitler before.

And by the end of a two-hour rant and rave by the very charismatic Austrian, who was speaking to the grievances of the post Versailles Treaty Germans, he had all of them Heil Hitler by the end of a very short period of time. We see relatively high suggestibility there, setting aside for the moment the fakers, the ones who were just going along with it because they didn’t want to have a bad relationship with their date that night or with their spouse or whatever it was.

And so, fakers aside, certainly there is a high degree of suggestibility evident in certain kinds of historic events where entire collectives can get behind a very pivotal idea.

The perhaps the most gruesome version of this would be a lynch mob, where a group of people decide on mass to break into a jail and take a prisoner and without due process, go out and execute them.

So, suggestibility is a very important thing to understand.

[12:50 ] The Anti-Hypnotic Benefits of Vedic Meditation

Interestingly, when people learn Vedic Meditation, their mind settles down into the least excited state on a regular basis. They begin to experience the deep, unbounded, non-changing field of consciousness on a regular basis. When measured over a period of time, Donald Miskiman, in the 1970s discovered that their internal locus of control grows. Their field independence grows. They become less field dependent. They become less externally, with a less external locus of control. Meditators, in short, become less and less hypnotizable. Not more hypnotizable, less hypnotizable.

So frequently when people will ask me, “Oh, this meditation that you practice, is it like hypnosis?” I’m going to say, “No. It’s anti-hypnotic.” Anti-hypnotic, meaning it gives you a sense of your source of experience being completely internal. That in fact your state of consciousness is what you’re experiencing as the world.

The world is not a world that structures my state of mind. It’s my state of consciousness that gives me the world in which I live. So the world is a product of my consciousness state, not the other way around. And this consistent result in people who practice Vedic Meditation, is very, very telling. It’s a very interesting subject on its own.

It’s also very explanatory of why it is that Vedic meditators have that sense of, as I’ve spoken about in another podcast recently, vairagya. Vairagya is the Sanskrit term, which is used by Maharishi Patanjali, the writer of the Yoga Sutras, to describe a symptom of the practice of Vedic Meditation that you can be fully engaged and yet find yourself as the innocent witness, rather non-attached while activity is going on. 

This is the internalized locus of control beginning to dawn in a meditator. And so then to what extent can somebody who’s a meditator be, to use a colloquial term, hornswoggled into a thing? To what extent can a Vedic meditator be convinced by the kind of excitation of a mob moving in a particular direction and go along with that?

To what extent do Vedic meditators have their experience structured by things they see on the internet? Or to what extent do they have their experiences structured by the rather convincing and persuasive elements of the world around them? To a lesser and lesser extent is their identity governed by that.

[15:48] Spontaneous Responsibility

In the ultimate state of consciousness that is gained in Vedic Meditation, it’s called Cosmic Consciousness. In which one at all times in the waking state is perpetually experiencing the vast Unified Field backdrop as my true inner Self. This is my true inner nature. In other words, I am The Universe having a human experience.

I’m not merely a human who meditates and occasionally has universal experiences. I’m The Universe experiencing as a human. And in that state, the I Am part, I am The Universe, is the experience that’s being had inside. This is the most fundamentally grounded internal locus of control. And so then one is, one finds oneself spontaneously responsible for and acknowledges responsibility for whatever it is I’m experiencing.

And so, is it possible for somebody who is a Cosmically Conscious person to have a broken heart, for example. Yeah, sure you can have a broken heart, but you’re not going to be defined by broken heart. Are you going to be able to feel excitation and laugh at a great comedian? Yes, you can laugh at a great comedian and feel excitation, but you’re not going to be defined by that experience.

So now we’re using the language, the metaphysical language that comes out of the Vedas. What is it that grants you your definition, your sense of what you are and who you are? Is it something inside you? The big something? Or is it something exterior to you?

We look at various kinds of religions in this way too. People can become very religiously excited about ideas of supreme divinity being external to them. You know, that that which is divine is outside me. That which is, which is devilish, is also outside me.

There’s the devilishly outside thing, and then there’s the supremely divine outside thing. It’s always something that is other than me, something other than me. This is externalized locus of control.

In the state of consciousness that comes after Cosmic Consciousness, we call it God Consciousness because in that state, one has the capacity to experience the finest, most supreme value in the relative world. One experiences that divine status as an extension of one’s own self. It is not in any way something other than me.

And really this is theologically far more sound than other versions of the story, which, though they claim that ‘God,’ to use, put that in quotes, whatever that means to you, is omnipresent. In order for God to be God, God has to be omnipresent. But the kind of omnipresence that’s usually talked about, is actual quasi presence. God is everywhere and in everything except for in me, the wretch who needs saving. So I’m the one exception to God being omnipresent.

Or human beings are the one exception to God being omnipresent. Or my mother-in-law is the only exception to God being omnipresent. So, when there are exceptions to omnipresence, this is the watering down of the concept of God. These kinds of concepts of that which is divine and omnipresent are not internalized, they’re externalized.

So this whole set, this whole question of field dependence and field independence, internal locus control, external, these are fascinating questions that have application right across politics, right across theology, right across sociology and also individual psychology.

Bottom line, Vedic Meditation makes you less gullible. If gullibility has ever been a problem in your life, practice Vedic Meditation twice a day and you’ll become more discriminating and less gullible.

[20:28] The Role of Disruption in Evolutionary Change

Guest: You just talked about this in a very individual level. Can you talk about how it might play out on a more macro level among groups of people, and I think on the theme of evolutionary changes, we talked, for the better.

Thom Knoles: Evolutionary change is a very interesting topic just on its own. It’s related to this obviously. Evolution is the product not just of a steady state of progress, but it’s a product of disruption.

If you disrupt a steady state, then you get, by interrupting the steady state, you get adaptive forms and functions.

Let’s use the example, which is extreme, simply to make a point, of the asteroid landing on the Yucatan Peninsula some multiple tens of millions of years ago during the end of the Jurassic period.

As it impacted the Earth, and actually tilted the Earth slightly from its ordinary orbitalstratum, the impact of the asteroid also created lots of other things. It created a global winter that occurred because there had first been a 5,000-foot high tsunami that didn’t just go locally. It went completely around the Earth.

The tsunami was so high that it came in as far as Arizona in North America. Can you imagine a tsunami that big? It came in all the way to elevations of as high as 5,000 feet altitude. It effectively wiped out in excess of 95% of all extant life on earth, except our ancestors. Somehow our ancestors survived it.

And there were lots of species that we know today that survived it. Particularly reptiles that had feathery like scales and who had already conquered the air, and had become aviary lizards, aviary dinosaurs, who are the little beautiful birdies outside that we see every day now. 

You see some beautiful, colorful birdies sitting in a branch tweeting at you, that thing had ancestors that were tyrannosaurus rex, or were velociraptors or whatever else we have in Jurassic Park, the movie. 

So the evolution, as we know it, we, who we really like ourselves, but there’s no way, and most anthropologists are in agreement on this, there’s no way we would be here had that asteroid not hit.

[23:02] The Downside of Contentment

So when we look at the ability of evolution to flow and function, there needs to be disruption. And disruption to the steady state is in fact an evolutionary phenomenon when taken in a large enough, you know, when you have a large enough time perspective, you can see that only evolution comes out of it.

And evolution is not just things progressing along without any interruption. In fact, that’s anti-evolutionary. What that leads to is stagnation and it leads to extinction. What has to happen is for adaptive forms and functions to appear, there has to be interruption/disruption of a steady state.

So when, let’s say politically, there’s a massive interruption to a steady state, what are the adaptive forms and functions that arise from it? New ways of thinking. What we see, that which didn’t work as a style of thinking has now been made extinct, and that which is going to work as a style of thinking is now coming into the consciousness, but it requires disruption in order for that examination to occur.

One of the things which Maharishi Patanjali from 2,700 years ago, the author of the Yoga Sutras, when he was asked a question about what is the greatest enemy of enlightenment, his answer was very surprising.

He used the Sanskrit word santosha. What does santosha mean? Contentedness. Contentedness is the enemy of enlightenment. Imagine. Imagine that. What does that mean? It means really, if we will understand it, if we put an adjective in front of it, premature contentedness.

When prematurely we’re content that evolution is occurring because there hasn’t been an interruption or a disruption for many years or even decades, then we are on the verge of extinction. And so what’s going to happen? That premature contentedness is going to invite disruptive behavior. It has to happen. And when it happens, the response is adaptive forms and functions. So new ways of thinking, new ways of interacting.

And so this should be a great relief to people who are very worried right now. I come from the sixties and so this is nothing compared with that. But people who are very worried right now about disruption occurring in the political world, disruption is a sign that evolution is about to take place if we’re open to it.

If all we do is decry the disruption then we’re missing the point. We’re missing the point of it. We have to be a catchment for the adaptive forms and the adaptive functions that are going to be yielded up by the disruption. And then we have to take those forms, those functions and move forward with them. Otherwise all we’re doing is making a lot of noise about, “The asteroid hit. The asteroid hit. Oh no. Oh, no, no. How terrible. How terrible. How terrible.”

But you know, our little furry ancestors who were furry at the time of the asteroid hitting, were relieved of the greatest challenge to their evolution to the days of the iPhone. And their greatest challenge of their evolution to what we are today was the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs got taken away by the thing that nobody would want to happen. A 5,000 foot tsunami and a global winter that went on for tens of thousands of years. Multiple iterations of it, multiple glacial ages, which our ancestors found a suitable environment in which to thrive. 

It was only, I’d like to remind people that 12,000 years ago, there are two twelves here, 12,000 years ago, there was a population bottleneck, and the entire world population of homo sapiens was 12,000. There were 12,000 of your ancestors, your grandmothers and grandfathers, great by many, many multiples of the word great. Were one of the 12,000 people who were extant, who had lived on the ice for 10 millennia. Imagine that.

[27:42] Phenomenal Adaptive Capacity

10,000 years of glaciation and didn’t just survive it, thrived on it, thrived on the ice. And so in relatively recent times, besides the advent of agriculture, we also have the advent of us all becoming sissies. Genetically, we are actually very robust people. We’re very robust beings.

When we look at the cranial structures of our ancestors who lived during the population bottleneck, they have the same cranium as we have. Meaning the brain was identical to the brain we have today. Nothing much new has happened to the brain since the last glacial period. And so you have the same brain as people who thrived on the ice for 10,000 years, and there were so few of us back in those days. Now there’s 8 billion of us, but we’re all descended from the same genetic stock.

And what’s our capability, what’s our adaptive capacity? Phenomenal. Compared with the kind of laziness that we’ve got into where we’ve just settled into, “I have to have my room temperature at exactly, 76 Fahrenheit or 24 Celsius. I have to have this and I have to have that, and I have to have that. And I have to be really careful about where my little proteins are and my little amino acids and things.” 

From ancestors who basically ate whatever moved or whatever they could dig up, and followed the seasons around successfully for more years than modern civilization has existed.

So we really have to contemplate for a moment, we come from stern stuff. We shouldn’t be over awed by relatively marginal political phenomena. 

Be the catchment for the adaptive thoughts, the adaptive forms and functions that arise out of disruption.

And this is a great time for harvesting. We need to be in harvest mode right now, not in anguish and falling down and crying-about-it mode. We need to be harvesting.