My Maharishi – Changing the World at 30,000 Feet

My Maharishi – Changing the World at 30,000 Feet

[00:45] Embracing the Collective

Welcome to the Vedic Worldview, my podcast. Thank you for listening and tuning in. I’m Thom Knoles.

I’m going to go down memory lane for a few moments and tell you what it was, give you a vignette of what it was like to work and travel with my master, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. And this vignette comes from somewhere in the early seventies. I’m an old man. It’s hard for me to pinpoint years these days, but I’m guessing it was around 1974 or so.

And when Maharishi would travel the world and give lectures, and he was one of the most known faces, for more than a decade, one of the most easily recognizable faces on Earth. His knowledge and his spread of enthusiasm. There were people enthusiastic to hear him speak anywhere.

And anywhere he went, he would attract, even spontaneously walking through an airport, dozens and dozens of people would hoard around him. If he sat down, there would be easily a hundred people that would gather around him just to hear him talk on any subject, just in a spontaneous lecture in the airport. And he was always ready to address any audience. 

When we traveled, even though we had sponsors, philanthropists who were very generous, who would have offered us any level of comfort in air travel, but Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a very small man by Western standards. He measured about five feet tall at the top of his head, meaning he came about to my chin if I happened to be standing right behind him. And for him, a first-class seat was a waste of money and time.

And besides that, he didn’t get a chance to mix it with people as much. So he wasn’t really into isolating himself, he was into embracing the collective. This is just by way of telling you that we rode in economy class, coach, and we were often on long-haul flights.

[03:19] Exciting Times for Three Travel Advocates

On one particular occasion that’s very memorable and probably quite instructive for you to hear and for me to share with you. I was traveling with two other of Maharishi’s protégés.

I was about 20-something, in my early twenties, and the two other protégés were ancient old men, around about 24, 25 years of age and on their way to 30. In those days, you didn’t trust anyone who was more than 30, unless they were Maharishi, who looked ancient.

And the setup was, we were sitting in three seats in a row, in the same row, three seats with Maharishi sitting in front of us, and you couldn’t see the back of his head because he’s so tiny, and there were two non-meditating people sitting on his immediate left and in the window seat, Maharishi was sitting in the aisle.

And the three of us, his protégés, who were his travel advocates, we made sure that anything that needed to be moved, we moved, if there was anything that needed to get done, we got it done and so on.

It was very exciting times because it’s hard for modern people to realize that you used to travel with no means of communication whatsoever. There wasn’t anything like a cell phone or, long before the internet, if you wished to make a booking on an aircraft, you had to go see a travel agent or talk to the airline office, which was at the airport.

They would print up tickets. There were no credit cards. There was one credit card, but we didn’t have it; American Express. So credit cards hadn’t been invented yet. If you wished to make a transaction of any kind, you had travelers checks or cash. And then if you were traveling from one country to the next, you had to have the money from the country you were going to already in your pocket.

If you wanted to make a spontaneous telephone call, you had to find a telephone booth and they had coins, and you had to have the coins, the currency coins for the jurisdiction that you were in before you could even make a call to change arrangements of any kind. So this was, really, compared with today, very archaic times.

And you’d have to make a decision and go with your decision for days on end because there was no way of changing your mind about anything. And there was no way of informing yourself about anything that was going on anywhere in the world. So it was a very interesting time.

[06:04] Hot Potato Politics

Anyway, there we were, and the three travel advocates, I’m not sure how advocating we were because he was so self-sufficient, Maharishi, and we were in the seat behind him and it was a very hot potato political time in America and around the world.

There were several hot wars going on in the world, and the three of us were in the back seat doing what young people tend to do, which was speaking vociferously and with great enthusiasm about how terrible everything was. You know, “This. Terrible this and terrible that…” and naming the names of politicians and carrying on about, this needs to happen and that needs to happen, and the people who run the world and the industrialists and the military industrial complex and the health system and the this and the that, and really having a good like, you know, “Yeah, yeah,” complain and everything.

And at some point, I noticed a hand appeared from the seat right in front of me, which was Maharishi’s seat, and the hand kind of came up and you have to imagine it wasn’t from the angle of camera, it was from the back. And the hand went like this. Like he was signaling to me behind him to come up there. And so I said, “Oh, Maharishi wants me,” I said to the other two guys. “Oh, okay,” and we got serious and stopped talking.

I undid my seatbelt and I walked up, “Yes, Maharishi?” And he was sitting in lotus position with his ivory-colored silk, dhoti, the robes that he wore called dhoti, and dressed in his, with his long, long hair and his long beard.

He had a head that was remarkably large for his body size. A little bit like when you see an infant, or a toddler, their head’s a little bit too large for the size of their body. Maharishi’s head was like that, and it was accentuated by all of this hair and this big billowing beard that came down.

[08:08] This is the World You Have to Change

And he spoke very much in the way, like, those of you who are familiar with some ancient movie called Star Wars, there was a character in that named Yoda. And Yoda was based on Maharishi, by George Lucas, the speech pattern, everything.

So Maharishi said, “What it was?”

I said, “What? I’m sorry, what was that?”

He goes, “What it was?”

And I said, “Oh. What? What Maharishi? What? What is it you are asking me about?”

“What you were talking?”

And I said, “Maharishi, Oh, we were just talking about the state of the world and all that.”

“What was the conclusion?”

And I said, “Well, the conclusion is, this is the world we live in.”

“No,” he said, “this is the world you have to change and what are you doing about it personally right now?”

And I said, “Me?”

He said, “No one else is standing here.”

I said, “Well, Maharishi…”

“No, don’t talk. Right above your seat, there’s a button. If you press that button, someone will come. And when they come, you ask them for papers.” This is the way he talked. He meant pieces of paper, but I’m giving it to you the way he said it. “You ask for papers and something with which to write.”

And I said, “All right.”

And he said, “And then the three of you there, you’re going to write, ‘This is the condition of the world now, and this is what I’m doing personally to change it.’ It’ll be an essay. Go sit down, fasten your seatbelt, get your tray tables out, push the button, get the papers, start writing. We have another five hours before we land. Before we land. We have another five hours.”

So, I went back and gave the other boys their homework and we all sat down and we were writing. And I noticed that every time I would look over at my compatriot, he would go like this and cover his because he didn’t want me to see what he was writing. He didn’t want me copying off of his sheet.

[10:50] Do That Now

And so I was writing, these are the problems of the world, and I can remember I broke it down into several categories: problems of sociology, problems of physiology, problems of psychology, problems of philosophy. And then I wrote down all these problems.

And then I wrote, I had to write, this was the hard part, what was I personally doing about it right now? Not like in a week, but right now. And I can remember I got about four or five pages out of mine. I’m not sure how many the other guys got, but they were busily writing away and then wadding up pieces of paper and stuffing them in the little thing in the back of the seat ahead of them, and, you know, writing some more and all of that.

And then we could feel the plane descending, the ears were popping and landing gear came down and all of that, and I could see some of the others furiously writing. I felt very smug because I had already finished mine probably an hour before landing and folded it in half so nobody could see what I’d written. We were kind of competitive, even though we were friends. 

The plane landed and I gathered up our things, and Maharishi, I saw the hand come up. He said, “Bring the papers.” And I brought the papers and he just put his hand on top of the papers and he said, “Good.” Didn’t look at it at all. “Do that, whatever’s in there, do that now.” And we got off the plane.

[12:07] Ask, Ask, Ask

So, it was a very interesting time being with him. There was never a moment when you were with him where you weren’t being instructed in some way. You were constantly like… and this was somebody who hardly slept.

He had a night shift and a morning shift and an afternoon/evening shift of people who looked after him. So people who looked after him all through the night because he only ever laid down for two hours, between two and four. And he did it with people in the room. He would lie down on his couch, never slept in a bed at the time that I knew him.

He would just take his silk dhoti and spread it out and put another one over him like that, and he would lie on his side and he would say the following words to whomever was in the room, “Ask, ask, ask,” meaning, “Ask me questions.” And you would ask him questions as he was dozing. This is between two and four.

He’d start to doze and then sometimes he would start to, and the speech would stop, and then you’d hear this little snore thing happen in his throat. And then he’d kind of wake up from that and continue talking, and then he would snore again. And wake up from that and continue talking like that.

And whoever was in the room with him, it was incumbent on us to have a notebook. And we were writing notes and we had these little, what Americans call flashlights, everyone else in the world calls them torches, and you’d have the torch parked under your neck like this, so it was shining on the page. He liked to have the room dark. And then we’d be writing notes, what his answers were to specific questions. And at the end of night shift, all the notebooks were turned into whomever was going to type it.

And I was the typist on many occasions, and I’d had to get everybody’s notebooks and decipher the notes and type some kind of a compendium of what it was that he talked about overnight during night shift. Because day shift was always recorded. There were recording machines or there was video or whatever.

His entire life and everything he spoke was documented in this way. And you could sense that he knew that body lifetime is limited, and he had an entire body of knowledge that he wanted to deliver to the world, and he didn’t need any personal private time. This was somebody who didn’t have a private life. There were just people around him, literally 24 hours a day everywhere he went.

Everything he did, there were people taking notes, listening to what he had to say, asking him questions in the middle of the night.

So, that’s a little vignette of what life was like with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and traveling with him, and him helping us to figure out how we were going to solve the problems of the world from 30,000 feet while we were en route from someplace to someplace, and I can’t even remember where we were on a world tour.

Fantastic memory, beautiful experience, and one that was not atypical, very common experience with him up in the air.

Jai Guru Deva.

[15:44] Q – Did You Complete the Assignment?

Two-part question. How much of what you wrote down did you end up taking into action or like how much of it was a process for you versus, leading into more action.

[15:59] Leaders Aren’t Leading

That’s a really good question. I have the exact number for you. It’s exactly zero.

The things that I resolved to do on that piece of paper and bring into action. Nothing that I wrote down there ever happened in the next 10 years. You know, it was the, the, the mindset that I was in when I was in my early twenties. And most of it turned out to actually be relatively irrelevant.

I think the larger lesson that I received from Maharishi from that time was, rather than complaining about a steady state, be the change, embody the change. And be prepared to act according to the need of the time. I think he also just wanted to hear us all stop whinging and whining back there.

We were having a good kind of, you know, complain about the state of world affairs and foisting it on others, that this was a problem being created by all these so-called leaders. One of the lessons I learned from Maharishi over the next years was that leaders actually aren’t leading, they’re being led by a collective. That it’s the collective that actually expresses and unleashes and gives permission to a so-called leader to behave in whatever way the leader behaves.

So then the real thing has to do with grassroots, you know, getting to individuals. This was one thing I learned from Maharishi, a beautiful analogy he used. If you want a forest to be green, all the trees have to be green. You can’t have a green forest that’s made up of brown trees.

If we want a world to be peaceful, if we want a world to be happy, if we want a world of people who are interacting with the laws of Nature in a way that’s effective, then we have to deal with individuals. We can’t dictate from above, “Everybody behave this way,” because as we’ve learned today, to intellectualize what everybody should be doing and what everybody should not be doing is not a very functional way of dealing with the problems of the world.

[18:32] Change the World at the Individual Level

The problems of the world start when you wake up in the morning and you enter your kitchen, and whatever you’re experiencing personally in interaction with your family, in interaction with other people, that is where it is right there. That multiplied by 8 billion, 8 billion people on the face of the Earth right now.

People not knowing how spontaneously to live life in accord with the laws of Nature, of evolution. They just don’t know how. And so then the mistakes start from the bedroom and move to the kitchen and move to the living room and then move out and then go out the door and then get into the car, or get into the train, or get into the bus or start walking or cycling or whatever, and taking problem consciousness out to the world.

Multiply that times 8 billion, and then there’s going to be this process that, you know, who are the leaders? The leaders are the individuals. This is what I’ve learned. Leaders are not leaders. Leaders are simply the temporary person who, for a period of time, is reflecting back onto the collective, what the collective consciousness is.

And you know, that might be a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes when you look at certain leaders, you might think, “Is that a reflection of what we are?” I’m afraid the answer is yes. And so, if we don’t like what we see in so-called leadership, the change has to happen at the grassroots level. Grassroots means individuals, individuals, individuals, individuals.

And this is our approach in Vedic Meditation. We change the world by changing the experience of individuals.

[20:27] The Bus Conductor Phenomenon

Now, if you can do your arithmetic or mathematics, if it’s even as sophisticated as that, you can see that 8 billion people are going to be hard to reach, but you’d be happy to know that we don’t need to have a hundred percent of everyone meditating, by our own reckoning.

And there’s some kind of, at least, intellectually rigorous thought being put into this. Probably about one in a hundred would be enough, because there have been lots of sociological studies that show that if you can influence about 1%, that 1% of a population influences the other 99% quite strongly.

So we call this in sociology, the bus conductor phenomenon. If you have a grumpy bus conductor who’s taking people’s fares and, you know, affects a thousand people in a day, one grumpy bus conductor can make a thousand people grumpy all day. And if you have a happy bus conductor who’s interacting joyfully with people, that one bus conductor can affect a thousand people all day.

So the idea here is to awaken the fullest potential in a critical mass. There’s a tipping point, a saturation point. In science, we call this phase transition point. What does it take, what percentage of change in a collective does it take to cause massive change throughout the collective? And it turns out that 1% is a magical number.

We see it in biological systems. We see it in sociological systems. One in a hundred. And so now, we used to have to carry a hundred sticks on our back, meaning we have to get this meditation idea to a hundred percent of the population. Now we just have one stick out of instead of a hundred sticks.

And, if you could walk with one stick, it’s very graceful. It’s like a walking stick. Instead of having a hundred sticks bundled on your back, we can reduce our load considerably.

Ninety-nine percent of the people can afford to either ignore our message or simply be uninformed about our message. If about one person in every hundred takes this up, we’re confident that it will cause enough change in the world to steer the direction of the collective.

So this is our approach. It took me years after to learn that. Meanwhile, I wrote down all kinds of useless things in that five hours. Who I was going to talk to. I was going to write a book, and I’m sure that any book I wrote in those days would have been unreadable. I was going to, I was going to do this. I was going to talk to my local congressperson. I was going to, you know, this, I’m going to do that. So and so, I didn’t do any of those things. I did lots of other things.

[23:31] The Light Inside

I taught meditation in incarcerated settings, prisons, for eight years. That was one of my main focuses, because my idea was, if 1% affects a whole population, there is, in the United States, more than 1% of the population, whole population in the United States is incarcerated. Two percent of the whole population of the United States is incarcerated. So my thinking in those days, it was the eighties, was let me go relieve the stress in at least those places. And it was one of the most enjoyable experiences I ever had. And now my colleague Joh Jarvis has taken up the baton and she is teaching in incarcerated settings all over the United States, in some of the toughest prisons in the country.

Her movement is called The Light Inside, if you ever want to look it up. And she’s really bringing the light to those who are inside. And The Light Inside is a very great name because that’s where the light is too, deep inside, meaning the light of consciousness.

So no, I didn’t do anything. Thank goodness. Maharishi made me too busy. I kept thinking, I kept my pieces of paper and I kept thinking, “When is he going to give me a chance to do this?” But he made me busy doing all kinds of other things. And as each year went by, I kept looking at those things that I wrote down when I was in my young twenties, and I thought, “Okay, I think we can relegate this to the history book.”

[25:16] Q – Are My Actions Ineffective?

The second part has changed now. I viscerally understand that elaboration you just went into. I work in the music business, which had a very particular understanding what it was. Everybody knows the music business has some like shady aspects to it, like a lot of business does.

I didn’t necessarily realize how deep it went. I had a lot of ideas how I was going to shift things. I’ve put in a lot of time and energy into affecting what’s around me to try to shift those things. But the deeper I’ve gone, the more I’ve realized that like at the levels of leadership on in so many ways is immovable in some ways at the current state that it’s in.

And I’m finding myself putting in a lot of energy, which is starting to feel a lot like karma more than it is kriya, and it’s starting to feel more like the action that I need to take isn’t necessarily changing it in the way that I used to think that it was, and now it’s showing up in a much more, I don’t know, intimate way of just like sharing that light and like, I don’t know, taking a lot of actions that don’t seem to be the ones that are going to have the biggest impact. And. I mean, I’ve unfortunately had to capitulate a little bit of like what I thought was going to be the way that I would change things, and have an impact. And, yeah. I don’t know what the question is in there, but…

[26:53] A – The Enlightened Grocer in Punjab

I think I can help, you know, that provides the basis for a commentary.

I once asked Maharishi, I was in India with him and there are all these famous saints and I got to meet some of them. And I remember saying to Maharishi once when I was in India, “Who is the one saint who’s the most enlightened in bringing the most to all the people besides you, Maharishi? You know who else is there?”

He said the most surprising thing. He said, “There’s one grocer.” You know what a grocer is? Somebody who sells groceries. “There is one grocer in Punjab. He’s the most enlightened, and bringing the most to everybody.”

And I said, “A grocer in Punjab. You know, not like a yogi living in a cave somewhere who’s…?”

“He’s, he’s very, very Unity Consciousness and everyone who goes to see him.”

And I said, “Is he selling organic grocery or something?”

And he just laughed and he goes, “People don’t go to see him because of the quality of the vegetables.” He said, “I’m sure the vegetables and all of that, they’re okay. They’re okay. They want to buy their celery from him because then they get a chance to see his face. They walk away feeling fabulous and all of that. The celery they bring home, they chop up the celery, they make their celery soup, whatever they do.”

Probably they could buy better celery somewhere else, but they want to buy from him because when they go there, they see that countenance, they feel inside that environment.

They receive what we call darshan. Darshan in Sanskrit means the effect when an enlightened person looks at you. It has an uplifting effect on your consciousness. Darshan. Comes from the drishti. Drishti to see. And he said, “It’s a grocer in Punjab.” And I said, “Could I go and see this grocer?”

He goes, “No, no. Waste of time. You stay here and learn with me.”

[29:05] Valuable Contact

Now this really raises, what is it you’re doing? The grocer could get on a campaign to really begin selling to people the best and highest quality, organic, most nutrient-dense food. That’s not actually how he’s delivering his enlightenment to the world. He’s delivering it by the fact that people have to come and buy groceries and they come into contact with him.

This is another one of the, one of the meanings… in the spectrum of meanings in the array of meanings of dharma, D-H-A-R-M-A, is contact. That which causes you, that which doing causes you to be in contact with others. The thing that you’re doing is not actually as valuable as the fact of the contact.

You know, people come into contact with you, you might be selling swimming pool chemicals, but people get in contact with you, you become the most popular swimming pool chemical salesperson there is. Not because the chemicals they’re buying for the swimming pool are better, but because they just want contact with you, and this really informs us about something.

It’s not so much what it is we’re providing to the world. It’s our Beingness that we’re providing to the world. What do people feel like when they come into contact with you? What do people feel like when they are in your presence? Is there some kind of pretext? And pretext may be our occupation.

There’s a pretext that gets us out of our bedroom, through the kitchen, a little bit of breakfast before going out, and then out into the world. What’s the pretext that delivers us to the world? That pretext is not the dharma. You are the dharma. People coming into contact with you.

And it almost wouldn’t matter what you’re doing. Do you want to change the industry? The industry will change itself if enough people in the collective change. If the collective changes that drives the market. And the industry basically is just chasing the market, trying to figure out how to get the market to pay attention to it. But the effect that you’re having on people just by being in that place, being there, even certain choices that you make are having a consciousness-lifting effect on people. And so it’s the you that’s having the effect.

You could be a fabulous lawyer. There are lots of fabulous lawyers, lots of them. You don’t just need to be the best lawyer. You need to be the one who lifts people’s consciousness when they come into contact with you. They feel good and you may not have even given them the absolute best advice that another lawyer might have given them, but who makes them feel grumpy when they’re with him.

You’re the one who they want to come into contact with. And so, really our occupation and the industry in which we find ourselves, certainly those things are going to change. Those industries will go through change. But they’re going to come and go through change because of people like you simply getting out of bed, having an excuse to get out of bed, have a little something to eat. Of course, practice your meditation first. Then you have a little something to eat and there’s a pretext that takes you out into the world. And then you move around the world, moving around the world, you’re one of the 1% moving around the world, changing people’s state of consciousness as you move.

And then we can see industry change happening incrementally because we’re changing the market by virtue of the fact that we’re just out there living and breathing, and people are in contact with us. This is the effect that meditators have on the world. It’s not so much what you’re doing, it’s the fact that you’re doing, that it’s you. It’s your consciousness that’s being brought out into the world.

So anything that gets you out of your room, provided that you’re a meditator and you’re meditating twice every day, getting out of the room and getting out there and mixing it.

[33:45] Compromising on Coffee for the Sake of Interactivity

This is why, just on very microscopic level, this is going to scandalize certain people, but, you know, sit down and fasten your seatbelt. I love a little cup of coffee in the morning. For those of you who think that that’s Satan talk, I’m sorry, but I actually do.

And, but I like it very well made. I like it artisanal. And I’m not really going so much for the buzz. I’m going for the flavor. And you can have an espresso machine at home and I know how to make espresso better than the very best baristas whom I’ve met who make the best. I know how to make it better than them, but that’s me in my kitchen.

Where I want to go is to get over to my local coffee shop where there are 15 and 20 people all lined up to get the very best artisanal coffee. And then I sit down there and what happens while I’m having my little tiny cup of coffee? People walk up to me and they go, “Could you please explain who you are to me? You know, I see you come in here every day and I’m fascinated. Please excuse me for being rude. I don’t mean to interrupt your cup of coffee.”

And I just look at them and I say, “I thought you’d never ask. I’ve seen you in here every day too. Let me hear your story.” And then I’m in interaction with them and I’m not even trying in any way to convince them to learn to meditate.

I usually don’t even mention meditation. People get around to it and they say, “What is it that you do?”

I say, “I don’t really do. I Be, and I do that twice a day. I let go of all the doings and I just Be. I teach, I teach people how to experience transcendence, meditation.” And then if they’re interested, I write on a little card, my website, and I say, “Just have a look at that, and then see you tomorrow when you have coffee again.” Otherwise I’d be in my kitchen having the best cup of coffee anybody ever could make in Arizona, in my kitchen, made by me. But there’s no interaction there. Let’s engage in the pretext. Let’s go to the place where you’re going to interact.

So it’s the interactivity. This is the lesson. What you do, how you do it. Do your best to do your best. Be the best at whatever you do. That’s fantastic. And aspire to that, that’s really great. But if you’re interacting, you’re doing the work. Meditate and interact. Meditate and engage. That’s what we’re into.

[36:41] Meditate, Show Up, Interact

Don’t be a proselytizer. We don’t want to be a missionary where people see you coming and they cross the street to get away from you because they know they’re going to get yet another lecture on meditation. Just hold back on all of that, and if people manage to kind of prise it out of you as to, you know, what is it that makes you different?

“This meditation thing I do might have something to do with it.” If they ask you about it, then based on their asking, you can mention it. But don’t try to be a kind of a banging-over-the-head missionary, “Meditation, meditation, meditation,” like that. Otherwise people just think you’re someone who’s going to try to convert them to some esoteric religion or something.

Better just to Be the Be and walk the walk, and then if you need to talk the talk, let other people drag that out of you. And spontaneously they will. Those who are more interested and want to go more deeply, they’ll ask you. Meanwhile, do whatever it is that keeps the wheels of industry turning. 

We want nice things in our kitchen. We want nice things in our environment and all of that, whatever keeps the wheels of industry turning. But the real thing you’re doing is showing up. You show up and interact. That’s the effect you’re having on the world. You meditate, you show up and interact.

[38:06] Q – How Do You Stop Your Energy Being Drained?

The showing up and interacting, have you always had the same well of energy for those interactions and or has that grown over time? And is there anything that you do internally to prepare yourself or even guard yourself from it?

Because I notice, I really enjoy going out into the world and having these interactions and I feel light for a while, but I’ll often encounter an energy that just takes too much or pushes too far.

Yeah. And then it costs me more to do that and I have to recover and it becomes then a bit of an internal struggle to want to go out again. Is there anything that you do to guard against that? Or what are your thoughts on this?

[38:58] A – Stability and Adaptability Grows

Gradually, gradually, two things happen. One is spontaneously from inside, you grow into being oceanic in terms of how much adaptation energy you have, how much stability you have, and the integration of those two. The stability and the adaptability that grows and grows and grows.

And so people can come and sup at the table as much as they care to, and you can’t get drained because… imagine being the big giant Pacific Ocean there. Big, giant blue all the way from the Bering Strait and the coast of California over to Japan, all the way down to Australia, all the way down to the Antarctic, massive big blue ocean.

And there’s some little rivers coming here and there. Some of them are dumping some white silt into it, some are dumping some mud into it, some are dumping this into it. Ocean is just ocean. You know, it’s like, “Bring your silt, bring your mud. All good. You know, I’m the ocean.” So, you know, not…

If I’m localized, then when somebody brings the silt, you know, “I’m all silty.” But if I’m big, then what is that? “Some little river trickling some little thing into it. It’s all welcome. Doesn’t matter.” So that one side, which is the supply side, and then the other side is you learning how spontaneously to bring discipline to the interaction, the sociological interaction environment and so then, what is the creative intelligence you can use to terminate an interview?

Having that skill. I used to watch my master Maharishi doing this. He was a total past master at it. Sometimes people would come to him and they would say, “Maharishi, I just need to ask you the most important question of my life, should I get married or not?” And he’d be walking into a meeting or something and they would stop him and get in front of him, you know, with tears coming down their cheeks.

And he would look and he would say, pat their cheeks, and then he would say, “We’ll deal with this later,” and then he’d keep moving. And, that’s a skill. You know, “We’ll deal with this later.” Who knows whether he did or not, or whether the we was the whole universe talking. You know, “we” will deal with this later. I heard him use that one many times.

[41:40] Not Nothing

And on other occasions, if the kriya, meaning the spontaneous right action flow, the eternally refreshed dharma was such. There was one occasion where I was feeling really depressed. I was 17 and somebody had corrected my speech, and I’d discovered that I used lots of words wrong, and I was all depressed about it. But I wanted to be an eloquent master of speech, and at 17, rarely is anybody like that. And this well-meaning person had corrected my speech. It’s a very funny story, I’ll tell some other time in detail.

And I was a bit stunned by this. And also, I think I had a little bit of a crush on the woman who corrected my speech, and I was completely crestfallen that I hadn’t impressed her in that way.

So there I was standing and Maharishi was walking past, and it was at the end of a lecture, and as he walked past, he looked at me and I must have had a look on my face. And he said, “What?” This is the way he talked. He just looked at me and he goes, “What?”

And I said, “Oh, nothing.”

He goes, “No. Not nothing. Come.” No, not nothing come, which meant, follow me. And so I followed him and he sat with me for 15 or 20 minutes and gave me absolutely personality-shifting advice in that 15 or 20 minutes.

Now how did he know what to do? He didn’t give me the, “We’ll deal with this later,” or, or he didn’t just walk past and be indifferent to whatever crestfallen look I had on my face. So what is it that determines when you act, how much you act, how much you let people come and sup at the table of your consciousness?

[43:42] Off You Go

Is it really going to do them good? If it is, you’ll find you have energy for it. If it’s actually just them robbing you of some consciousness energy, like a holdup, you know, you’re being held up by a bandit, you’re going to learn gradually, as your meditation years go by, you’re going to learn how to put a filter on that.

And I can’t give you any one standard formula for it except to say, as your meditation progresses, you’re going to get better at it. Either engaging, or to the extent that you engage, or when engaging actually is just wasting the resources of you and therefore of the world because, you know it’s not good for somebody to have the karma of wasting your time. We don’t want them to create bad karma for themselves.

So being able to bring a thing like that, where there’s some time waste going on, we’re helping them out by helping them stop talking.

And as Maharishi got more and more familiar with me, and now I was really like a disciple of his, he didn’t pull any punches at all. If I was with him and I was getting a little too verbose, he would have no compunction about saying, “Stop talking.”

And of course, what do you say to that? You just stop, and then he would give an instruction and then do his head like that. He wouldn’t even say anything, he was like, “Off you go.” I loved that way of interacting with him, where he wouldn’t let me waste his time. He wouldn’t let me waste my time.

On other occasions, he would force me to say more. And this is what a master is. Someone who has exactly, they can sense from deep inside, and action is coming straight out of the field of Being, whether to terminate the noise or ask for more of it, more detail. Just have that knowingness that as you continue practicing and expanding your consciousness, and you need also to trust the phenomenon when it happens.

Sometimes you might find yourself saying to someone who ordinarily you might have considered it to be a little bit rude, but you might find yourself saying to someone, “Let’s carve out some time later and talk about this. Get back in touch with me in a week,” and then bring it to an end.

[46:27] The Pitfalls of Excess Generosity

Sometimes when we are uncertain about our own self, we’re uncertain about the value that we’re bringing to the world, we’re willing to let the bandits hold us up regularly. But really it’s not their fault. It’s their nature to have a craving to get your attention. And so are you going to let their nature cause them to have bad karma? You know? No. So then being more disciplined and I think if we have to err, we would want to err on the side of more discipline rather than less.

Overgenerosity is a more frequent error than discipline is, being overgenerous. Overgenerosity feeds something, and it has a peculiar effect on people because when you’re overgenerous then the person who’s receiving that overgenerosity, inside them, they start wondering if they’re going to be beholden to you because they wouldn’t, if the shoe were on the other foot, they wouldn’t be as generous as you’re being.

They’re also wondering if you really are very worthwhile because if the shoe were on the other foot, they wouldn’t be paying attention to them as much as you are. And also they have an addiction to attention getting. And whatever information you give them is like water going into a sieve. It just flows right through. Even if you give them valuable advice, they’re back the next day wanting to rob you of consciousness, energy, and attention.

So, it’s not their fault that they’re doing that. We have to be the provider of the discipline. It’s up to us. And, if it makes you feel embarrassed that you brought a conversation to a close, do it politely. Do it gently and nicely. But if it makes you feel embarrassed that you’ve done it, that’s a statement about self-worth that you’re making. 

We need to make the highest statement of self-worth. You deserve the best. You don’t deserve to be robbed by a bandit. So, stay inside your deserving power, and there’s always tomorrow. If we’ve been a little too disciplined with somebody, we can always loosen up the discipline tomorrow. If we’re overgenerous with them today, then we end up having a negative effect on them and on us today. 

So when in doubt, put the brakes on.