Refreshing One’s Dharma – Part Two – Questions Arising

Refreshing One’s Dharma – Part Two – Questions Arising

Welcome back to the Vedic Worldview. This episode is a questions arising episode where listeners pose questions to Thom, arising from the previous episode on Refreshing One’s Dharma. If you haven’t yet listened or watched that episode, we encourage you to do so before listening or watching this one.

You’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes or description attached to this one. Jai Guru Deva.

[0:45] Q – How do I find the balance between judgement and “helping” and unconditional love and acceptance of others?

So, when I was a child, I spent a lot of time thinking about how do I change the situation, and how do I change the people around me? So this really built into my wiring.

And so now as an adult, I think about, kind of a spectrum that is jerky judgmentalism, and acceptance somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and an unconditional love on the other side of the spectrum. And I do know in my own experience that meditating, having these practices to get into a better state of myself, I tend to end up on the unconditional love side of the spectrum more.

And when I’m not in those states, I’m on the jerky side.

And then also, too, having a desire to do good in the world. So, kind of trying to balance that whole soup, which is, you know, how do I help others around me?

How do I be accepting of any version of anything?

How do I not be judgmental, because what do I know anyway? And how do I also get to a state that I think you’re articulating too, which is evolved consciousness of unconditionally loving everything around, because it’s me ultimately anyway? I’m struggling with that kind of interim step.

[02:37] The Actions Arising from Unconditional Love

Yeah. We need to get out of a boundary that we do create socially, which is, what does love act like? In fact, any mother will tell you that love sometimes acts like, “Don’t play with that electrical power outlet with those hairpins anymore!”

And maybe even a little bit of, you know, pulling the hand away and looking at the child and giving the child this [raises finger] could be a perfect expression of love. That mother just prevented that child from being electrocuted.

On the other side, a mother’s love may be, “Come to me. Tell me about what hurt. I want to know all about it. Let me see. Maybe I can put my hand on it. Maybe I can kiss it better,” and all of that, “And you just stay with me for a few minutes. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Same mother who was shouting with a shrill voice over a hairpin going into the electrical power outlet is the same mother who might be soothing the child or encouraging the child.

Or if a child gets a little arrogant and says, “At my school, I’m really like the best in the school and there’s nobody as good as me,” the mother may raise one eyebrow and say, “Oh, you think so, do you?” Which, you might think, well, my mother might say, “Yes, that’s right, that’s who you are,” but she might be creating a tyrant by too much of that.

So then, what action comes from unconditional love? And really now, I hope I’ve illustrated, it’s not always the same thing. Unconditional love should be the policy of where we want to be, but we have to get out of the boundaries of what action necessarily comes out of it.

Sometimes the very best action will be, really, quite severe disciplinary action. On other occasions, the action of unconditional love will be just complete warmth and acceptance and caring.

[4:56] Moving Towards Unity Consciousness

To understand really how to act, we have to move through different consciousness states and arrive closer to a state which we call Unity Consciousness. In Unity Consciousness, one has familiarized oneself so thoroughly with the underlying Unified Field in one’s own consciousness, a new realization dawns. “My own access to what once I thought was my Unified Field actually is not mine. It’s the Unified Field of all things. If I can experience Unified Field inside me, can I not experience Unified Field as it’s appearing in another?”

And the answer to that is, “Yes, you can.” You can start to experience how the big Self, capital S Self, that deep Unified Field value, what it’s feeling like inside of the form and function of another, and you then gain an understanding of what is the best action in this moment.

It may be that somebody, in hoping that interaction with you will yield something valuable for them, is hoping that you’re going to create sharp boundaries for them. They may be hoping that somebody loves them enough to actually tell them to stop or to tell them where the sharp boundaries are. Or it may be that they’re just hoping for someone who’s going to listen and not create the noise of providing solutions all the time.

Sometimes, in our hurry to be the answer to every problem, we might be making a lot of solutions noises that people really just don’t want. They just want to be able to express the suffering they’re going through. And so then how do I know? Is it incumbent on me simply to quietly listen with empathy?

Or is it incumbent on me to race in and try to solve it? Or is it incumbent on me to dive in and even stop the person from going any further because they’re about to violate a law of Nature and I can stop that? It’s all love. It’s love, and really love has to do with Unity.

[7:32] Spontaneous Action vs Well-Thought-Out Action

I wax lyrically on this in other podcasts. What love actually is, it’s Self recognizing Self. When big Self can recognize itself in another form, then love happens.

“I love my finger.” Why do I love my finger so much? Well, because when I do that to it [strokes finger], I can feel myself inside there. I can feel my consciousness being index-finger-like. Oh, and the little pinky. “The little pinkies. I’m really into that little pinky. It’s so pinky. It’s me being a pinky. I just love being a pinky down here.”

When we can play with this and think about, “What does it feel like to be a toe? Love the toe.” Why do you love the toe so much? You’re in there. There’s an aspect of you; it’s toe consciousness. And maybe the toe has a hangnail and needs to get trimmed and needs to have some attention on it and needs to have some scrubbing or something like that.

And the toe, individually as toe, might be going, “Ouch. Ooh. Oh, you’re scrubbing me. Oh, you’re clipping me. Oh,” like that. But big Self knows best what to do with toe to make toe much more happier for most of its toe life.

So, like that, when we’re in Unity Consciousness, we could feel what’s needed and we act spontaneously without having to figure out, “What would love look like here?” Because when we try to figure out what would love look like here, and we’re doing it purely intellectually, it’s not spontaneous right action. It’s well-thought-out action, which may end up actually feeding undisciplined behavior. Or it may be attempting to solve a problem where there wasn’t really any seeking of a solution.

Or it may be that you didn’t act enough, that you thought, “Okay, I’m just going to listen,” but listening wasn’t actually the ideal thing. Maybe listening was. Maybe listening wasn’t.

And so how do we know? We have to stop the condition of “other” from being our reality. There is me and there is other. Actually, no such thing as other; there’s no such thing as other.

Toe is not other. It’s my toe. I’m experiencing inside of it. I know from inside what my toe needs. I know I don’t have to have a pros-and-cons list. I just know spontaneously what it needs.

[10:21] Trial and Error

And so, like that, awakening the deep inner consciousness takes this out of the realm of intellectualization. The intellect can later on have great satisfaction as an archivist and an historian and look at it and say, “Looks like I did exactly the right thing,” which in that case was nothing.

Or you can look at it and say, “Looks like I did just the right thing, which is to provide a solution.” Or, “Looks like I did just the right thing,” which was whatever it is you ended up doing.

When Being goes straight to action, thinking comes third. Typically, we have this underlying field of Being, which as someone who doesn’t meditate, we don’t even know we have it. So, our first introduction into the process of action is the thinking that emerged out of the field of Being.

That’s, in fact, what’s happened. Thinking has emerged out of the field of Being, but as a non-meditator, we don’t know about Being. All we know is about thinking. We don’t know where thoughts came from.

Now we, as meditators, can sense Being underlying the thinking process. But as we become more adept meditators, we start to notice Being generates action, and thinking is a third thing.

Rather than you think, think, think, think, think, and then you commit to action, which, by the time we actually commit to the action, might be out of date. And typically, it is. It’s a little bit too late. Even if we get it right, which we only have a percentage possibility effect of getting it absolutely right, we’re constantly adjusting. Note the number of times we hear ourselves saying sorry to people.

“Oh, let me just give you a hug.”

The person who’s crying, they go, “I don’t really want a hug. I just want someone to listen to me.”

You say, “Sorry.” Trial and error. “Oh, well I thought giving a hug was the right thing to do here. I don’t know. Maybe not. Sorry.”

Or maybe instead of that they say, “Why are you just talking to me? Why don’t you just hug me?”

“Oh, sorry.” It’s kind of bouncing back and forth like, “I got a little bit wrong. Now I have to get it right now. You know, where’s right, where’s wrong?” I’m kind of adjusting myself as I go. Lots of trial and error is as much error as it is trial, and getting it right.

[12:58] Awakening the Being Inside of Us

So, we end up creating kaṛma from this. The repercussions of an action that were not actually straight out of the Unified Field.

So we want to develop Unity Consciousness. In Unity Consciousness, we’ll have that spontaneous capacity to engage in actions that are frictionless, and the ability to get it right.

So, two things that we’ve covered here. One is transcending “other.” You know, there’s no other. It’s Self inside there. To what extent can you experience the Self inside? And inside the extended Self? We’ll stop calling it other. We’ll start calling it extended Self.

“To what extent can I experience Self inside of extended Self?” And if the answer to that is minimal, then we need to keep practicing our meditation technique morning and evening, and advancing our practice until it’s definitely, and, “I’m doing that all the time.”

And how do you know you’re doing it all the time? The reaction from the extended Self, what we would historically have called others, the reaction from the extended Self is, “I don’t know what it is, but I just feel so good with you all the time, even when you’re saying quite disciplinary things to me. Thank you. I needed that. How do you do that?”

And deep inside, the answer is the individuality is not doing it, Universality is doing it.

So, then this takes the whole thing out of the field of intellectualization, having to intellectualize right action. Frankly, it’s not possible intellectually to figure out what is the perfect right action, the perfect spontaneous right engagement in any given time because the Universe has so many moving parts.

There are so many things going on, and they’re moving all the time. And so, you know, better for it to happen spontaneously on the level of Being, and for that we have to awaken Being inside of us and then awaken that realization that my inner Beingness is the same Beingness that’s inside of the whole extended Self around me.

[15:24] Q – Can we have Unity with inanimate objects?

Hearing you speak about Unity and there is no other and other is Self, where does that extend to? I think we’ve all kind of accepted now that plants and animals are just more extensions of us, but I am curious when you say other, and we are everything around us. Would that extend to inanimate objects?

And is that, could that be related to sometimes the empathy that we feel? Like sometimes, I want to use a pillow that hasn’t been used because I almost feel bad that it hasn’t been used. I want to give it energy or my attention. And I feel that way often. And I’ve heard other people feel this way about objects, so I’m curious….

[16:14] A – Hello Lamppost

I was riding in the car around about the time the man shouted this morning, and I was listening to the radio, which is an odd thing. I’m in a rental car and the radio, normally I don’t listen to radio, but it just turned on by itself. And the song that was playing was the Simon and Garfunkel song from 1966 called, I don’t know, Feeling Groovy.

And I heard this one line where Paul Simon says, “Hello lamppost. What you knowing? I come to watch your flowers growing. Ain’t you got no rhymes for me? Doot’n’do, do, do. Feeling groovy.”

There is somebody having a conversation with a lamppost, and really, from the Vedic perspective, there’s no such thing as inanimate, because all things are Unified Field and Unified Field is conscious. All forms, all phenomena are Unified Field.

Now, we can talk about repertoire. What is the repertoire of a rock lying on the ground in terms of how much consciousness it’s able to express? What is its breadth of repertoire? Well, compared with a human, it’s very low repertoire, but we can’t say the rock is not conscious.

It’s in rock consciousness. And, does rock consciousness have a degree of capability of perception and so on? Of course it does. It’s limited compared with a human, but would a rock enjoy a little bit of love? Would the lamppost enjoy some love? Evidently. We put it in our music and in our lyrics and songs and poetry.

[17:59] Waves of an Underlying Continuum

We are in a living conscious universe. It doesn’t just mean things with measurable nervous systems. 

Now, in physics, we can see phenomenology like this. If we take, for example, an electron that’s circling around a nucleus of an atom at dizzying speeds, and if we bounce it out of its orbit, and theoretically you could move it light years away, that electron will find its way back into orbit around its mother nucleus in a given period of time. It’s going to find its way back.

What we’re witnessing here is, evidently, memory inside of even subatomic particles. We can see the world around us, and the whole world around us is made of particles, tiny, tiny little particles, and the relationships between them.

When we go into their subtlest aspect, it turns out they’re not even particles, they’re wave functions. And waves are waves of an underlying continuum. This electron and that nucleus are simply different humps in an underlying continuum of Oneness, and it knows itself.

So, this is a very good thing to do,to sense what all forms and all phenomena, we won’t just stop with forms, but to sense, because phenomena means the behaviors that exist between the forms, the relationships that exist between the forms that unite them and which cause interactivity. Those are also conscious.

All forms are conscious. All phenomena are conscious because there’s no non-Unified Field, and Unified Field is conscious.

So yeah, get into it. Talk to those lampposts, Ask them what they’re knowing.