God, Gods and Goddesses Part 2

god, gods, and goddesses part 2

[00:54] Your Experience is Your Own Consciousness State

In our Part One of God, Gods and Goddesses, we concluded that all states of consciousness have a world and that whatever you’re experiencing is actually your own consciousness state. We paralleled this with the neuroscience concept that everything that we think is in the outer world is actually something for which our brain has built a model, and that with regular stimulation at any level of the gross sensory perception—by gross, I don’t mean, “Ooh, gross,” I mean, gross as in the opposite of subtle—regular, overt, sensory stimulation, will allow our brain to build models that correspond with what it is we’re being stimulated by.

If something is too subtle for us to perceive, thereby not allowing us to have regular stimulation from it, we won’t build a model for that thing and for us, that thing simply doesn’t exist. The form or phenomenon, which rarely gets a chance to stimulate our sensory perception or our brain, will not have models built for it.

[02:01] Celestial Layers of Creation

And so we talked about the state of consciousness, which in the Vedic language is translated into “God Consciousness,” that state where one has the capacity to experience sensorially, the celestial layers of creation—celestial is a word that’s used as a term of art in describing this, the very, very subtle, that which is the earliest manifestation coming out of the field of Being—is a result of the regular practice of meditation, which takes the mind into that transcendence of Being, and then allows the mind to, in subsequent sessions of meditation, to experience that subtlest layer, where Being is becoming, where Being is beginning to manifest, where the unmanifest is manifesting into various forms and phenomena.

Most of these are outside the reach of the average level of sensory perception, but as a result of practicing meditation, twice every day, our internal capacity to perceive, our internal sensory acuity, grows and grows and grows to such an extent that we’re able to have the acuteness of sensory perception to be able to detect regularly phenomena, which are the first things to manifest out of, if you like, the Unified Field, that underlying field of intelligence, which we can touch upon every time we meditate.

[03:31] Seeing the World in Animate Terms

As a result of regular stimulation in this way, first of all, in meditation, later, outside of meditation, one develops the ability to, and when I say, “see,” I’m putting that in quotes, because I mean to perceive, to experience on the level of the five senses, sight, taste, touch, smell, and sound, to be able to experience a variety of forms and phenomena that are explanatory of the way in which the laws of Nature cascade.

What is a cascade? We touched on this in the last time and we’ll review this now. A cascade means a sequence of causes and effects where one thing happens, it causes certain effects. Those effects become the causes of the next part of the sequence, which then end up becoming the causes of further effects.To be able to see meaning, perceive accurately the cascade of causes and effects in the natural world around oneself. 

The state of God Consciousness is a state in which the brain has done what the brain, human brain, is known to do, which is to personify things, to take things that are supposedly inanimate and to assign to them a sentient quality, to be able to see the world around oneself, not just as an extension of oneself as in, an inanimate extension of oneself, but to see the world in animate terms.

And this is not on the level of a faith-based proposition. Not that one is told, “If you believe that the world is animate, if you believe that all the forms and phenomena are sentient, that is thinking beings, then that’s how you’ll see it.”

This isn’t faith-based. This is simply explanatory of a regular occurrence that comes as a result of extended practice of Vedic Meditation.

So this might be a time to review very quickly, seven states of consciousness, which are elaborated upon by the Vedic worldview.

[05:38] Sleep State of Consciousness

The first and least of the conscious states of course is sleep. We can’t say sleep is a state of true unconsciousness. Why? Because you can be roused from sleep. That is to say, you may not be able to be roused by a tiny noise, but if somebody were to click their finger very loudly near your ear, then that should be enough to wake you, or if someone was to say your name, or to stimulate you in other ways.

So the fact that you can be roused from this state indicates that there is at least some faint consciousness of the outside world available. So sleep is a state of not nil consciousness, but the least-conscious state. It’s the state in which, in deep sleep, in which the least amount of memorable activity ever occurs.

[06:29] Dreaming State of Consciousness

The next state of consciousness, which is a little more conscious than sleep, is the state of dreaming. So dreaming consciousness is described as that state where a variety of experiences that are not shared by others, and therefore for that reason, we call them, quotes, unquotes, “illusory.”

Why do we say illusory? Well, if I’m experiencing something that nobody else can verify or validate in the same time period, supposing I and a friend, or I and a lover fall asleep next to each other for a half-hour nap, and he or she has a set of dreams and I have another set of dreams, and we compare notes after waking, neither of us is likely to describe a shared experience.

One person may have dreams of nonsensical nature. Somebody else might have a terrifying dream. Or you might have a dream that has some logical sequences in it, but the other person had nothing but non-sequitur sequences in their experience, in their dream.

And so dreaming consciousness is a conscious state, but it’s a conscious state wherein, compared with the waking state, the dream elements cannot be verified or validated.

[07:42] The Advantage of Paralysis While Dreaming

If you are being attacked by a tiger in a dream, your body physiologically will attempt to respond as if you’re indeed being attacked by a tiger. Your heart rate will accelerate, you’ll begin becoming breathless, your body will fill up with stress chemistry and so on.

Fortunately, while dreaming, our human brain condition has evolved over the millennia to paralyze us while we’re dreaming so that it’s very difficult for us to act out on anything dreadful we experienced during a dream.

If you try to get up and run from the tiger, you’ll find that your legs can’t move and that’ll translate into the dream as, “I tried to run away, but I couldn’t move my legs.” Or you might find that you try to shout or scream, but  you couldn’t scream, you were muted.

And this is because there is a natural paralysis that occurs while we’re dreaming, and I say, “Thank goodness for that.” Imagine a very high-density population apartment area in  a major city where everyone who was asleep at night was able fully to act out physically on every dream they had. There’d be nothing but pandemonium in the night.

[08:50] Nil Shared Experience

So we can dream but dream is not yet in that realm of shared experience.

This is one of the reasons why, when somebody begins to describe a dream to you, generally speaking, you have to draw upon all of your best manners and brace yourself a bit because as they describe their dream, they’re describing something in, as it were, in words and in text, that you yourself didn’t experience.

A dream is something which is experienced by the dreamer, uniquely, as the full dream experience. When a dreamer tries to describe exactly what they were experiencing, the conceptualization of it into words, usually leaves a lot to be desired. And generally speaking, unless one is a trained professional, it’s very difficult to listen to the dreams of another.

Although most of us will smile and attempt to look interested, the dreams of other people, generally speaking are a little bit boring to listen to, although our own dreams are very fascinating to us.

Imagine watching a film and then trying to describe to somebody, the sensory experiences, the music, the musical score, the acting, the visuals, the amazing cinematography and all of that, and then just describing it in words, a lot would be lost. This is the similar thing of trying to describe dreams to people.

The point that’s being made here is that there’s relatively little unity available in the dream state. Unity meaning shared experience. “So to what extent can somebody else have a shared experience with me while I’m dreaming?” Virtually nil.

[10:29] Waking State of Consciousness

So waking state comes next. We have sleep state, no shared experience. We have dream state, very little shared experience, perhaps a little bit of relatability.

In the waking state we have a variety of consciousness states, all the way from being semi awake but awake, and hardly able to respond accurately to stimuli, to someone who is very awake, very alert, and very interactive with a variety of stimuli, able to be aware of multiple inputs of multiple consciousness layers through multiple sensory inputs at the highest level of waking consciousness, the waking state we’re very familiar with.

However, it needs to be said that the waking state is not just one consciousness state. There are as many variations of the waking state as there are people experiencing it.

Two people who have grown up in the same family, as siblings, who have had mostly the same kind of sensory input and mostly the same kind of education, growing up in the same kind of environment in which they’ve had very similar shaping and formative experiences, could have opposite political views, could have opposite views about the role of human sexuality, could have opposite views about a variety of things. Two consciousness states can spring forth from very similar upbringings. We’ve seen this many times in our experience of humanity.

So we know that waking state is not just one state, it is a state with infinite amount of variation in it, depending on how conscious one is able to be in that state of a vast variety of inputs, and the way in which one interprets those inputs with reference to experiences one has already had.

[12:17] Relative States of Consciousness

So waking state is the third consciousness state. So we have the sleep state, we have the dream state, we have the waking state, and these three states we call “relative.” They’re relative, not just because they’re ever changing, but they’re relative because they are related to each other.

The waking state; we are awake to the extent that we’ve been rested through sleep.

The dreaming state; we dream to the extent that we are unstressing various kinds of stimuli, overloads generally are released during the dream state that came during the waking state. We can only dream if we sleep, so waking and sleeping end up having input into the dream state.

The sleep state; we sleep to the extent that we’re tired from the waking state. We sleep to the extent that dreams will allow us to sleep. And so if we are awakened from our sleep and we go into dreaming, then that’s the end of the sleep state and that’s the start of the dream state.

So the sleep state has an impact on dreaming and waking. The waking state has an impact on dreaming and sleeping. And the dreaming state has an impact on both sleeping and waking.

If we release a lot of stress during our dream state, our waking state is a little clearer.

[13:37] Deprivation of Consciousness

Deprivation of any consciousness state causes suffering. Let’s look at that concept for a moment. If you deprive somebody of the waking state, then their muscles will atrophy they’ll have a loss of longevity, that is to say, their conscious experience of what happened during their body life will be grossly interrupted.

There have been psychiatric experiments done on human beings where they were kept asleep for, in some cases, many years. And we know from this that the deprivation of the waking state and the dreaming state is deleterious to the human condition, obviously.

What would happen if you deprive someone of sleep state? Well, any mother of a newborn infant can tell you that. As you have sleep deprivation, you start to lose your capacity to tell the difference between two things that might look alike, but aren’t quite the same. So our differentiation capacity, our ability for sensory discrimination and intellectual discrimination between items, decreases. Our ability to be alert and to respond actively and interactively to stimuli in the environment decreases. Short-term and long-term memory, both take quite a beating from sleep deprivation. Feeling emotion, how you feel, sense of wellbeing, all of that…

[14:56] Sleep Deprivation

Sleep deprivation, notoriously, is bad for you and causes immunosuppression, makes you more susceptible to various kinds of illnesses.

Let’s look at dream deprivation. What happens if you have somebody who has waking state, they’re allowed to go to sleep, and in sleep research it’s been demonstrated many times that if you let someone sleep but you watch them carefully, monitor them either with an electro-oculargram, which is a little silver chloride device that is glued near the eye, that allows the researchers to hear an alarm whenever the person starts having rapid eye movement, indicating that they’re dreaming while sleeping, or simply watching for rapid eye movement when the subject is asleep, but then gently waking the person each time they get REM – REM is rapid eye movement or dreaming sleep, and then letting them go back to sleep again – but each time they start to dream a little, you wake them gently and then let them go back to sleep again.

After about three days of dream deprivation, people began dreaming in the waking state. The need to dream is so strong that they’ll begin having psychosis. Psychosis in this case will be defined as having experiences that are outside the realm of what is the norm, in other words, having unique experiences that no one else in the room was having. Dreaming while waking.

So dreaming while waking occurs, psychosis can be induced by deprivation of the dream state. Atrophy and other deleterious effects can be caused by the sleep deprivation, by waking state deprivation.

And sleep deprivation, it’s effects are notorious. We all know because we’ve all done sleep deprivation to ourselves, either willingly or unwillingly over the years of our lives.

So the point is that if you stop someone from experiencing one of the regular consciousness states, then you will cause that person to suffer grossly.

[16:57] Sleep Training

Now the Vedic worldview says that the entire population, almost, is deprived of a fourth state, a fourth naturally-occurring state, which our culture has forgotten to pass down, in the same way that we might have mothers who, through their mothercraft, have passed down to new mothers, knowledge about how to induce the sleep state in children.

How to get children to begin conforming with and complying with the social contract that, when it becomes dark in the night, since our eyes don’t work very well outside, we have become diurnal animals and we like resting nocturnally, and children under a certain age are indifferent about what time they go to sleep.

As any mother will tell you, a child can be crawling around on all fours and, if they get tired enough, they’ll fall asleep, landing straight on their face on the carpet, or in any other position. Whereas as years go by, due to acculturation, we’ve trained children in how to sleep at night.

It is a training program. We have certain little songs that we sing, certain little books that we read, certain little cuddly things like teddies, certain cozy environments, a room that has a platform in it, a pallet, which we call a bed, the bedroom, the special room for changing the state of consciousness.

You go into that room. You darken the room. You initiate certain sleep-inducing rituals, like songs or lullabies or books or reading, or turning down the lights, or little background noises, whatever your techniques are. There are techniques that are handed down generation after generation as to the best way to get a child to change their state of consciousness systematically at a certain time of the night, preferably early in the night, and then train the child, if they wake up again, how to go back to sleep again and begin sleeping all through the night.

Children don’t naturally do this. It’s been demonstrated many times that children who are bereft of this kind of training will just sleep anytime for, in two hours here and an hour there, even into adulthood, if they’ve never had the training of nocturnal sleeping.

So we do have training techniques to get people to sleep and sleep is the basis of the dreaming state. So once people begin sleeping regularly for long periods of time, then the dreaming consciousness state is a product of that.

[19:27] Turiya – The Fourth State of Consciousness

But there’s another consciousness state besides waking dreaming and sleeping, which we believe, in the Vedic concept, that once upon a time every culture had.

That is a fourth condition. It’s not the waking state, it’s  the dreaming state, it’s not the sleeping state. It is a fourth state of consciousness. In Sanskrit we call it “Turiya.” Turiya means the fourth in Sanskrit.

Turiya is the state of consciousness where one is awake inside, not actively thinking, not dreaming. One is in a state, generally speaking upright, in an upright position, experiencing a condition of consciousness, knowing consciousness. That state should naturally have been occurring if it had been properly taught.

If the culture had remembered how to teach the techniques of how to get to that state, then most children would have acquired that fourth consciousness state by the time they were four or five years of age, and they will have mastered it by the time they reach majority, meaning the end of their minor years, say around, in females that’s around 17 to 18, in males that’s in their early twenties, their brains would have adapted to the state and been able to experience it regularly.

The fourth state of consciousness is that state of consciousness in which one is hypo-metabolic. That means the body is an extraordinarily deep level of rest while the mind is wide awake and alert, but not thinking.

[21:01] The Absolute

In that state, the body is able to release its deepest stresses that have accumulated over the period of a day. And that means that this would play out on the other three relative states, and we’re going to now set the fourth state apart and refer it to it as the state of, quotes, unquotes,  “The Absolute,” capital T, capital A. The Absolute.

Why The Absolute? Because it’s a state whose content never changes. It is just consciousness of an unbounded type, not bound by thought or temporal experiences, consciousness standing alone. The state of Being. The one indivisible, whole consciousness field.

The Vedic worldview goes on further to say it is not an individualistic experience, that the state of Being that one can experience in the fourth state is in fact, the Unified Field itself.

It is the one indivisible, whole consciousness field out of which not only all consciousnesses are derived, but out of which all particular behaviors and all forms and phenomena are derived. So that is The Absolute state, Turiya.

[22:19] Samadhi

Now, when you learn Vedic meditation, regularly you go into that Turiya state. There’s another name for it in Sanskrit, which is “Samadhi.” Samadhi, S-A-M-A-D-H-I, samadhi means that temporary period where the mind ceases to think and experiences pure transcendence.

The body is able to release all of the stresses. With release of stress happening regularly during meditation, the load on the brain and body to release stress during dreaming is much relieved. And so dreaming starts to become lighter and lighter. The requirement for sleep is not as desperate as it is without meditation.

Without meditation people require lots and lots of sleep because their body is very, very tired and fatigued and overloaded with stress, and the only means they have for releasing stress is a little bit of dreaming through the night, which then interrupts the sleep.

[23:17] A Decrease in Suffering

But you add the fourth state in and suffering begins to decrease in life. This is consistent with our theory that deprivation of any one consciousness state will cause suffering.

One of the reasons why population is suffering so grossly, everywhere we look, suffering in every area of life, you might be wealthy and suffering, you might be poor and suffering, you might be culturally adjusted and suffering, you might be culturally a misfit and suffering… Suffering seems to be the lot of the human condition, irrespective of situational variation.

And so how to bring an end to suffering? Stop depriving the human condition of the fourth state. In other words, introduce knowledge of the techniques that can be passed down generation to generation of how to transcend thought.

And that’s exactly what Vedic Meditation attempts to do. We teach a technique whereby you can close your eyes, settle down into your least-excited state transcending, which you experienced that underlying field of Being, turn that into a regular systematic twice-a-day experience, and then something new begins to happen. The building of a fifth state.

The fifth state of consciousness is a state where that underlying field, that Turiya, that fourth condition, no longer is purely transcendent.

Transcendent means it is beyond something, beyond thought in this case. You go beyond thought, beyond the waking state, beyond the dream, beyond the sleeping, to experience pure, inner wakefulness. Individuality experiences universality in that fourth state.

[24:59] Nitya Samadhi

With regular practice that fourth state begins to persist and it is experienceable as an underlying baseline reality in one’s waking state first, and then also in waking, dreaming and sleeping. One starts to experience that, “I am one with that underlying baseline that I touch upon every time I meditate.” It no longer is purely a meditation-dependent phenomenon.

It’s not solely meditation dependent. One can experience it at any time during waking, dreaming or sleeping, the underlying reality of the true nature of the inner Self. And here we’d have to spell Self with a capital S.

So fifth state of consciousness also has a name, Nitya Samadhi. Nitya, in Sanskrit, it means eternal.

Nitya, N-I-T-Y-A.  Samadhi, S-A-M-A-D-H-I, the permanent state of that backdrop of being no longer meditation dependent. It’s there outside of meditation. It’s there during the waking state. It’s there during the sleep state. One’s experiencing, “I’m awake inside and my body’s asleep. My brain is in a dormant state. My body’s asleep, but I’m experiencing it.”

A little bit of dreaming may come, very light dreaming, and then a few hours of resting in that way and one is fresh and ready for the day. It doesn’t require hours and hours and hours of unconscious time because we’re no longer deprived of the fourth state, so suffering has decreased.

[26:34] AKA Cosmic Consciousness

When the fifth state of consciousness has occurred, and it has an English name, “Cosmic Consciousness.” Cosmic in this case, alluding to all inclusivity, the all-inclusive state, the state that includes every, each of the other previous states. The fifth state, Cosmic Consciousness, is a state that is inclusive of sleeping, of dreaming of waking state, and of transcendence.

Cosmic Consciousness, lived for a while, is that, which as we said, in Part One of God, Gods and Goddesses, awakens inside one, the capacity to produce the finest products from digestion, soma, S-O-M-A, and as soma sharpens the sensory perception and the brain begins to attune itself to the subtlest phenomena that are perceptible by a human, which by the way, are quantum mechanical phenomena, our brain begins to regularly be stimulated by that layer of life, which we would refer to as celestial.

[27:36] God Consciousness, Unity Consciousness

So the celestial no longer is something that’s outside the reach of the senses. And since our senses regularly are delivering super subtle phenomena to the brain, the brain begins to model those into personifications and one starts to experience what is referred to as quotes, unquotes, “God Consciousness,” the sixth consciousness state.

The sixth consciousness state is a graduation from a natural graduation from the fourth state. Living life in the sixth state for long enough, one starts to develop such an acuity of sensory perception that one begins to experience “Unity Consciousness.”

Unity consciousness is that state where the deep, inner Self, which knows itself to be The Absolute field, can experience itself, that is to say the transcendent Absolute field, in all forms and all phenomena. 

Unity consciousness alludes to the Self, finding everything around it, not to be nothing but an extension of oneself. The ultimate state of empathy. The ultimate state of being able to experience deeply within another, another form, another phenomenon, to experience its baseline as one’s own baseline and to experience all of its cascades as extensions of oneself.

Unity consciousness, the seventh consciousness state. In the seventh consciousness state, one looks back on God Consciousness, the sixth state, as “I’m experiencing, or I was experiencing, variations of my own Self.”

What were these fabulous beings that one experienced? Worlds of beings and, and the hierarchy of the worlds of beings?

[29:26] Ishwara – Supreme Being Personalized

There was one being that was the most attractive, the most adorable, the one to which one related the most. Supreme Being. In Sanskrit, we call that Ishwara. Ishwara means Supreme Being personalized. That is to say one’s own experience of Ishwara might be quite different to someone else’s experience of Ishwara.

 Since God must be a self-referral phenomenon, everything is a self-referral phenomenon, God must be included in that. So one realizes, in Unity Consciousness, the reality that that supreme quality of Self, in fact, is an extension of one’s own absolute transcendent baseline. In Unity Consciousness, one no longer experiences, primarily difference through the senses.

Generally speaking, we can conceptualize about unity. We can say things in constitutions of countries, for example, like we’re all members of the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. And we can say lovely words about the unification of humankind, but we actually, on the level of our senses, don’t experience that.

What we experience is difference. I look at you, you’re different to me. You think different. You have different songs playing in your head. You had a variety of different experiences today than I had. And we can get along with each other okay. We’ll look for areas of shared experience, that’ll be lovely, but we have to accept that really we’re mostly difference and with a little bit of unity here and there.

[29:45] There is Only One Thing

In Unity Consciousness, the senses deliver that everything is an extension of Self. There’s only one thing, one indivisible, whole consciousness field manifesting as all of this variety, and the underlying nature of all of this is perceptible on the senses as being “Me,” oneself. 

Everything is an extension of the capital M, Me. Not the little you that grew up in Kansas or something. The big view, that big consciousness, that Unified Field value of you, finds itself as the basis of all forms and all phenomena.

And so that also includes whatever one experienced in God Consciousness.

[31:50] Different Worlds From Different Consciousness States

So we have different worlds emerging from different consciousness states. There are different states of being that allow different expressions of different worlds. When we talk about the variety of shared experience that can be had.

We said that in sleep, there’s no shared experience. Two sleepers might wake up from sleeping and say, “There was nothing. Do you agree?” “Yes, there was nothing.” Well, that’s a kind of shared experience, but only from the point of view of the waking state. In sleep itself there’s no shared experience. In dreaming there’s very little, if any shared experience, 99.99 repeater of dreams are not shared by anybody else. You have to tell people your dreams in the waking state.

In waking state, we have a modicum of shared experience, a modicum. I might be drinking a fizzy root beer and saying, “This is yummy and it reminds me of my childhood.” You might be drinking a fizzy root beer and saying, “This is disgusting. I don’t like the taste of it. It reminds me of licorice or something like that.” And you don’t have a good experience of licorice.

So two people drinking the same drink may be having completely opposite experiences. And so on, and so on with every kind of compared experience.

There are some moments of the crescendo of unity that might occur when one is talking about waking state experiences. And these are little islands of unity being had in mostly in “ocean of differences.” And we look for those islands. We kind of desperately cling to those islands of unity here and there, wherever they may be.

[33:28] No-thing-ness

Then we have Turiya, the fourth state, in which all experiencers are experiencing the same thing. One indivisible, whole conscious field with no thought. No thought means no events. No changeover. No nothing.

And so it is a shared experience, but what it’s sharing is that there is no-thing-ness, nothingness. That no-thing-ness is the colorless sap, as in a flower, which makes itself into everything in the flower, but it itself has no particular color. It is un-manifest.

Fifth state of consciousness, baseline of being everywhere. I am the Self. And I’m that unboundedness and all of these relativities, the body, everything else is just ever changing. Everyone is ever changing. All things are ever changing. There’s relativity and then there is the big Self inside oneself. Being, the underlying baseline. It’s Nature’s bliss, and so it finds bliss in all forms and phenomena.

Sixth state of consciousness, God Consciousness, where the acuity of perception has grown to such an extent that the subtlest phenomena bubbling up out of the unmanifest field can be experienced systematically and modeled, and one’s brain turns it all into a celestial world of beings.

Seventh state of consciousness, Unity, where all of this, the celestial, the gross relative, the subtlest relative, everything is nothing but variations on the big Self. The big Self finds itself in everything. It finds itself at the baseline of everything.

In Unity Consciousness, two experiences are for the first time experiencing the same thing. “I am Totality. Are you Totality? I know you are.” So two experiencers, both understand each other to be Totality and they agree in silence. No need to even speak it.

[35:37] What is the Action?

So we have these seven consciousness states. God Consciousness is just one of those states. Now God Consciousness is a state in which there’s knowledge, and knowledge always begs action.

So you experience the celestial world, what are you supposed to do about it? What is the action? What is the action? And the action that is implicit in the God Consciousness state is to sit up and learn about all of the cascades of the laws of Nature.

[36:13] Creation, Maintenance, and Destruction

There are three major players in the cascades of evolution that we see, and they are creation, maintenance, and destruction. And we’re going to begin to see in God Consciousness, what the various beings are that are perceptible, not just on the level of faith or conception, but on the level of direct sensory perception.

What are those beings that are in charge of the way that the laws of Nature play through creation, innovation, improvisation, and connectivity as the creation-operator field? And into maintenance, the maintenance and sustenance of whatever it is that continues to allow progressive change to occur? Maintenance operator. And the destruction operator, that which disintegrates or brings to a conclusion, whatever it is that no longer makes an active contribution to progressive change? Whenever its shelf life has been reached, then that thing will begin to disintegrate.

And these three, creation, maintenance, and destruction, have particular personified beings that are associated with them that you can perceive with your senses. Again, this is not faith based. This is sensory experience and an explanation of sensory experience.

[37:43] Knowledge of the Laws of Nature

Then as one develops this capability, one starts to become very knowledgeable about how all of the laws of Nature interact with each other. What are the true causes as opposed to proximate causes?

What is the true cause, if you want to say, of global warming? Well, the true cause of global warming is not carbon in the atmosphere. It’s the human condition of dissatisfaction with wherever you’re sitting. You don’t like where you’re sitting so you have to burn something in order to move to another spot because you’re convinced that happiness exists somewhere else. You turn on your motor vehicle and burn some fuel and emit carbon into the atmosphere in order to get to the place where you think happiness is.

“So I’ll go to the happiness place, cause I’m not in the happiness place now. And I’m convinced that if I move my body around a lot, that I’m going to get happy.”

[38:38] A Mindless Wild Goose Chase

And so what’s the cause of global warming and global climate change? Well, the proximate cause is the atmosphere filling with human-emitted carbon. What’s the cause of the human-emitted carbon? All the people using carbon-burning things. What’s the cause of people doing that? Largely dissatisfaction. “I’m not happy and so I have to burn something. I have to move. I have to move around.” And so a mindless wild goose chase, chasing after happiness from one place where it’s not to another place where it’s not.

And the ultimate cause then of the negative environmental condition in the world is human unhappiness. And we can address this as much as we like and keep coming back to the same thing. What are the causes of crime? Human unhappiness. What are the causes of the need to take over the territory of others, hegemony? Human unhappiness.

[39:43] Awakening a Field of Bliss

If we challenge all of these assumptions and say, what if we were to awaken inside a field of bliss in every human, a state where their baseline of happiness was fabulous? Well, we know that there aren’t any happy terrorists. We know that there aren’t any happy bank robbers. We know that there aren’t any happy men that beat their wives. These are all the behaviors of grossly unhappy people.

First of all, we would see the elimination of all those behaviors that come out of gross unhappiness. We need to find our full mental potential, develop our full capability and experience, on the level of experience, not just on the level of theory, experience complete satisfaction and an understanding of the entire way in which the universe in which we find ourselves naturally works.

[40:35] Subjective Means of Gaining Knowledge

And this needs to be done on a level of the consciousness state itself, answering all the questions rather than waiting to read it in an encyclopedia or on Wikipedia or online somewhere. So the subjective means of gaining knowledge wins out.

Subjective means of gaining knowledge, where you expand the capacity of the knower rather than simply treating people, humans, in their younger years, as receptacles into which you pour knowledge, like pouring tea out of a teapot into teacups, that instead you awaken inside them that baseline of consciousness, which has in it the home of all knowledge. It has in it the home of all the laws of Nature.

Awaken that baseline and you’ve enlivened the subjective means of gaining knowledge, which brings with it the satisfaction and understanding of how all the laws of Nature interact, and that in turn reduces the experience of human suffering to nil, to the nil state.

So elimination of suffering through the gaining of Self knowledge. This is not the first time anybody’s talked about this, by the way. In India it’s been talked about for thousands of years. Ancient Greeks also talked about it. Aristotle was a great champion of the first science. The Aristotelian demand was Aristotle’s demand that the very first thing that any student  needs to be learning is about the nature of the true Self, capital S.

[42:11] Knowledge of the Knower

The knowledge of the knower, not just knowledge of the known. And so knowledge of the knower, knowledge of that which is the home of all knowledge. Think of it this way. Our consciousness produces tens of thousands, some cognitive scientists say sixty to a hundred thousand individual thought forms occur in a day.

These individual thought forms are streams of energy and intelligence. Energy, creativity, and intelligence. And the source of thought is deep inside that consciousness field. If you can capture that home, that consciousness field, that is the source of the tens of thousands of streams of energy and intelligence that occur every day in a human life, then you have captured the home of all thinking. You’ve captured that, which is the baseline from which all possible thinking occurs.

That itself is a field that has deeply embedded in it the behaviors of all the laws of Nature. This is how the greatest of the scientists actually made their greatest discoveries and notable among those, as I’ve said before, Albert Einstein, who found deep within himself, the answer to the behaviors of light and space and relativity.

So this will bring to a conclusion for the moment, the subject of God, gods and goddesses. And we can pick up this topic again, in case the listeners are all very eager to hear a Part Three.

Jai Guru Deva