How Enemies Are Created

How Enemies are created

The Easiest Thing on Earth

Today we will talk about creating the birth of an enemy, or uncreating an enemy that was born by our creation. Creating enemies actually is the easiest thing on earth, evidently, since enemies appear to have abounded everywhere.

[00:01:03] Everyone claims that there’s somebody else who is in charge of what they’re experiencing, some enemy or other, someone who is an enemy of something. An enemy of change. An enemy of non change. An enemy of progress. Enemies of freedom and so on and so forth. We hear the word enemy a lot and it occurs to me then that the creation of an enemy is a very, very simple thing to do. Very easy to create enemies.

Ignoring the Laws of Quantum Mechanics

[00:01:35] All we have to do really is to ignore the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the name given to the branch of physics that is the most successful element of modern science to date. We say that because quantum mechanics can make predictions to many decimal points of accuracy, both in time and space, something which no other theory of modern science has been shown to be able to do.

[00:02:04] And quantum mechanics states this,  there is only one indivisible, whole conscious thing. There are not as many as two things in the whole of the universe. There’s one thing. That one thing is the Unified Field.

[00:02:20] And we say it is conscious for a very simple reason; it can be demonstrated, in lab science, that the smallest things that we think are particles actually are only particles if we observe them, or if we attempt to measure them as particles. What really exists is a field.

The Beginning of Difference

[00:02:38] A field, in this case the Unified Field, an indivisible whole field that has in it the entire potentiality of all forms and all phenomena, but in an unmanifest state. When it breaks its symmetry or curves itself, like an ocean, a flat surface of an ocean curving itself, then that curvature, we could think of that as being a wave, is the beginning of difference.

[00:03:05] And in order to have an enemy, we have to have difference, right? We can’t have an enemy if there is no difference. And so difference is that, which emerges out of an expectation of difference. We say that the Unified Field is one indivisible, whole and conscious for a very simple reason. Consciousness exists.

[00:03:27] All things, all forms, all phenomena are nothing but perturbations or undulations, are properties of the one indivisible, whole field.

“Out There”

[00:03:38] Consciousness exists. I’m conscious. You’re conscious. Little house dust mites riding on the motes of dust in this room are conscious to an extent, they have a repertoire of behaviors.

[00:03:49] And so consciousness exists. Since all things that exist are properties or forms or phenomena that are born of the one indivisible, whole thing then the one indivisible, whole thing has, as one of its many properties, consciousness.

[00:04:05] This is a very simple logic. It was taught to me by professor Brian McCusker, who was the professor of high-energy nuclear physics at the University of Sydney for many, many years, one of the world’s best known experimental research physicists.

[00:04:23] And so then the one indivisible wholeness is our reality that in fact everything that you think is “out there,” is actually a form that is a projection of your own consciousness state.

“I Wouldn’t Behave That Way”

[00:04:40] In the Vedic Worldview podcasts in the past, I have alluded to a basic and fundamental tenet of the understanding of Vedic science, and that is that nobody can behave in any way other than the state of consciousness in which they find themselves. Someone who is behaving in a particular way is expressing the state of consciousness that they’re in.

[00:05:05] We can take this idea and strain it slightly by adding some therefores to it; therefore it’s not possible to stop someone from behaving according to their level of consciousness. Someone always will behave exactly according to the consciousness state in which they find themselves.

[00:05:26] And so when we look at the creation of an enemy, it’s a very simple thing. All we have to do is, for a moment, pretend that if I were the “other,” if I were the other, then I wouldn’t behave that way. And the fact is, if you were the other, you would be exactly in the state of consciousness therein.

[00:05:49] If you’d had their exact upbringing, if you’d had their exact background, if you’d had their exact genetics, you would be them. And so you would be behaving the same way they’re behaving.

Enemies as Part of Our Storyline

[00:06:02] So behavior is a product of the consciousness state of a person. But if we would like to have an enemy, and sometimes having an enemy seems to suit us, then all we have to do is ignore the fact that people only ever behave very predictably in the state of consciousness that they’re in.

[00:06:23] And then if we want to have an enemy, and I say want to because it’s evident that sometimes having an enemy seems to serve us a little bit, like having an itch to scratch, there’s this itchy thing and if you scratch it, it gives you some kind of satisfaction, even though it’s annoying. Sometimes enemies seem to be part of our desired storyline.

[00:06:46] Somehow when we wish to give aggrandisement to our individual status and structure to, if we’re feeling a little insecure and we feel as though we need to demonstrate our superiority or our greater cleverness or our greater capability to destroy, then we’ll arrange an enemy.

Enemies Match Our Expectations

[00:07:09] Enemies can be arranged very, very simply just by making believe that you wouldn’t behave the way that somebody else behaves, if you were them, and the fact is if you were them, you’d be them. So if we simply ignore all that for a little while and for long enough, we’ll end up managing to get ourselves all flustered and angry about having,”enemies.”

[00:07:36] Enemies are an effect which is caused by a quantum mechanical phenomenon. When we go to measure an electron in an otherwise empty vacuum, an electron will appear if what we’re looking with is an electron probe. If we look to find a photon with a photon probe in a vacuum, we will find a photon.

[00:08:01] Those things appear, which match our expectation. What is it you’re measuring for? That thing for which you’re measuring is the thing that appears.

[00:08:11] So when we go looking for enemies, enemies will appear in abound, and when we get tired of having enemies it’s very, very simple to not have an enemy.

You Can’t Kill an Enemy

[00:08:21] The idea that you can get rid of an enemy simply by killing its physiology is obviously a fallacy. I’ll demonstrate that just by laying out before you a few facts. In the early part of the 20th century, a war occurred in which some 60 to 80, depending on which way you wish to look at it, million people died, which later on we called World War 1, because there was a second one coming up, 15 years later, after the first one was signed off in an armistice.

[00:08:53] When the next war came, something on the order of a hundred million people died, and all of this killing of human bodies was in aid of getting rid of enemies. The idea was that you could eliminate fear of an enemy by killing the right kind of people in the right kind of numbers.

[00:09:15] And so by the end of the 20th century, we had devised many industrial-strength killing machines. Everything from machine guns that could shoot bullets at a speed that an entire infantry that was shooting single shot rifles wasn’t able to shoot. One person could destroy an entire line of other human beings.

You Can’t Even Vaporize Them

[00:09:37] And then when we began to harness nuclear technology, in the 1940s, late thirties and forties, we discovered that we could create, over a city, a thermonuclear explosion that would wipe out people by the hundreds of thousands, indiscriminately. 

[00:09:57] You wanted to get your enemy to stop being your enemy, all you had to do was vaporize entire cities of women and children and non-combatants, and they would come to the table.

[00:10:11]So the idea that we’re going to get rid of fear of enemy by vaporizing people or shooting people by the millions, is very obviously inaccurate because today we live in a kind of fear, based on the kinds of killing technologies that we created in the last war, that has been unmatched. A fear that, not only would elected governments not be the only people who had these weapons, but that anybody who can read things on the internet, would be able, if they only had a few simple ingredients, to manufacture thermonuclear weapons of a size and a dimension that could vaporize a good part of a city, if not an entire city at a time.

[00:10:56] And so when we have individuals who have possession of what was once government secrets, then we have a universal fear. We never know who’s going to do what with anything at any time.

Uncreating of Enmity

[00:11:10]So when we get tired of all of the enmity that we create, then it’s very simple for us to uncreate it. The uncreating of enmity has to do with a sufficient number of people, and it doesn’t need to be everybody, a critical mass of people learning how to go to their own least-excited state.

[00:11:32] That least-excited state that we touch upon in Vedic Meditation is a state of pure Being. In that state of pure Being one is experiencing one’s individual access point to the Unified Field. One is awakening inside oneself, Unified Field consciousness.

[00:11:52] When we awaken Unified Field consciousness inside of ourselves, there are two things that happen, one of them is quantum mechanical and the other is classical. I’ll make a distinction between these two.

[00:12:04] Quantum mechanics has to do with the way in which the one indivisible, whole field can itself be vibrated so that it causes awakening of that same field at any distance and across space and time. Classical means the way in which individuals affect other individuals.A Better, Transcendental Parental Model

A Grumpy Bus Conductor

[00:12:25] Let’s look at classical for a few moments. There is a famous experiment called the bus conductor experiment. I believe the first time it was ever performed, it was in London, and the idea was that if you had a grumpy bus conductor or an actor who was acting the role of a grumpy bus conductor, the person who takes the fees and fares and tickets from the passengers, that that one person transporting, through many trips in a day, thousands of people to their places of work, could end up making thousands of people unhappy and grumpy.

[00:13:01] In other words, our interactions with each other on the classical level, that classical level means a person dealing with another person, ignoring for the moment the baseline of oneness in the Unified Field that they all share, but a person, and just through their superficial behavior affecting others, could make people very grumpy.

[00:13:22] I’ve worked in penal institutions all over the world and I can tell you that in those penitentiaries, the unhappiness that is in the atmosphere is palpable. It’s as if the atmosphere is saturated with unhappiness because in that localized environment you have so many people who are just desperately unhappy and who don’t want to be there, including by the way, the people who are employed and who work there for a living.

Spreaders of Happiness

[00:13:50] If this is true, the opposite must also be true. It must be that if we can have a sufficient, critical mass of people who are the spreaders of happiness, that one person who is a very happy person, who has baseline happiness, can affect many, many others and awaken inside them some hopefulness, some cheerfulness, some happiness, a kind of rubbing-off effect on others. But there’s something deeper than this.

[00:14:20] Studies that have been done have shown that if sufficient numbers of people practice meditation that entire populations’ crime rates go down, and it doesn’t take a lot of people. Something on the order of 1% of people practicing meditation appears to be enough in a community or a city or a town to reverse even violent crime rates.

[00:14:44] And so there is something going on deeper inside the individual who meditates than simply the rubbing-off effect. That effect is the effect of the individual mind splashing down onto the unbounded Unified Field. The field itself is immovable, but the surface of this ocean of consciousness, that is the source of all Being, all things, all forms, all phenomena.

A Ripple Effect

[00:15:09] The surface of it is malleable. When the individual mind touches that surface, it creates a ripple throughout that field and that field, when it has a ripple going through it, will affect every part of the field for quite a large proximity.

[00:15:26] Think of someone who throws a little pebble into a very still lake, a still mirror-like finish of a lake, and you throw a little pebble right into the center of it. When you throw that pebble into the center of the lake, what happens is rings of waves go out from where the pebble impacted the surface of the lake and those rings of wave travel right throughout the surface of the lake and touch every little bay, every little nook and every little cranny.

[00:15:57] And so if we can quieten the mind, bring our mind to its state of least excitation, when the mind, when the individual mind, touches down, makes contact with the surface of that Absolute field, it creates a wave of all of the qualities of that field everywhere, and what that wave is, it’s a wave of Unity.

Reunification

[00:16:22] Unity means the unification of two things that were previously not unified. Two things that previously were thought to be unconnected, like the two tips of the fingers of one of your hands and then you follow the finger down to its base, in the palm, and you discover that the two fingers emerged from the same one palm.

[00:16:45] It appears that two individuals, or many individuals, might all be completely separate and have nothing to do with each other, but the fact is that our individuality is sourced in that Unified Field. When we start awakening that Unified Field in ourselves, through meditation, when we splash down on that inner quiet consciousness field, then what happens is we begin to undo all the dynamics that are necessary for enmity to exist.

[00:17:15] Enmity is the quality that makes an enemy an enemy. It’s the quality that makes you someone’s enemy or makes someone else your enemy, the quality of enmity.

Relatability is the Enemy of Enmity

[00:17:28] What happens instead is the awakening of a feeling of extended self relatability, relate-ability. In order for an enemy to exist, there has to be no relatability.

[00:17:44] This is why militaries the world over, for time immemorial have been at their wit’s end to figure out how to keep the soldiers that are fighting on their side from thinking of the people they’re killing on the other side from being anything like them.

[00:18:00] Relatability is the enemy of enmity. If you can get people to relate to who’s on the other side of the barbed wire, or on the other side of that boundary, or across that field, or down below you if you’re in an aircraft about to bomb them, if you could begin thinking of them as being like you, then it becomes very, very difficult to do anything to harm them.

[00:18:25] Because it’ll dawn on you that in fact, just like you, they don’t wish to be killed by you. And  that they eat food every day, they want water when they’re thirsty, they have children, they have love in their life, they have desires that need to be fulfilled, and all of that, just like you.

It’s Natural to Want to Relate

[00:18:44] And so in order to maintain enmity, we have to turn someone who is an enemy, if we desire them to continue being an enemy, that we have to turn them into, “its.” They have to be an “it,” not a human. Not a thing that you could relate to, and to be an it. To dehumanize them, we usually like to come up with names for them.

[00:19:08] So we have some kind of derogatory term that we use to describe the people that we have to kill. And they are all under that heading, that “it” name.

[00:19:19] Whatever that “it” name is, “That’s what this thing is that I’m removing from the earth, because if it’s anything like me, how can I do this? How could I do this to someone who’s just like me? The thought that I would behave exactly the way they behave, if I were raised in the way they were raised, under all the climatic and geographic and cultural circumstances in which they’re raised, is a thought that’s anathema to me.

[00:19:43] “If I’m a soldier, they have to remain “its: and if they’re not “its”, I can’t kill because my natural human tendency is to want to relate.”

Interested in Sameness

[00:19:53] We want to find sameness. We’re not actually on a hunt for difference, unless we’re on hunt for difference, we might be wanting to create enemies for all those interesting reasons of self-aggrandizement that I referred to earlier, but unless we want to create enemies, our natural tendency is to look for same-ness. We are looking for shared experience.

[00:20:19] This is the human trend and it is becoming more and more and more so since the dawning of the current age. The current age is not an age which is devoid of conflict, but it is an age that, so far, since the last world war, has been devoid of world wars.

[00:20:39] There hasn’t been a war involving multiple nations going up against other multiple nations ever since the 1940s.

[00:20:48] And even though we’ve had weapons of mass destruction where we could easily use those to intimidate or to kill off hundreds of thousands or millions of others, we haven’t wished to do it.

[00:21:01] We somehow want to have the global community. We seem to be more interested in sameness. This is because, according to the Vedic worldview, this is a time of an age of enlightenment. Believe it or not, even though there are many, many elements of ignorance, still very outstanding, darkness is very much more evident when more and more light begins to appear, there’s also unifying features.

Unifying Access to Knowledge

[00:21:29] Unifying knowledge, unifying access to knowledge, the way in which humanity’s voice and concerns and inquiries transcend national boundaries, where we can so easily be in connection with each other, anytime, 24 hours a day.

[00:21:48] Now, mostly what’s still going down in those conduits of communication is a lot of garbage. We might be pushing garbage down the pipelines of communication, but nonetheless, the pipelines are built and we do have the capacity to commune.

[00:22:04] If we can only raise the consciousness of the collectives involved, then we’ll begin to see a finer quality of information and knowledge going down all of those newfound communication pipelines that now exist today.

Sibling Rivalry Has Always Been a Thing

[00:22:21] So what does not having an enemy look like? Very often we use words like, we can use masculine terms like, brotherly, “We need to be more brotherly. We need to be more sisterly.” I heard a woman decrying the fact, the other day, she goes, “Oh, there’s no sisterhood. Women just seem to hate each other.” And I just said, “Well, let’s not stop there. There’s no brotherhood either because men seem to to hate each other, or they’re afraid of each other. Either afraid of each other or hate each other.”

[00:22:48] This tendency shows us that we need to get out of these sibling models. The idea that you’re going to not have an enemy if you are a sibling, in consciousness, of that person, a sister or brother is a fairly immature way of looking at it because sibling rivalry has always been a thing.

A Better, Transcendental Parental Model

[00:23:08] I like a better model and this model has to do with a transcendent parental model. That is to say, as we grow in knowledge, and let’s not mistake the word parental, with the word patronizing, parental means the ability spontaneously to inspire others, to come to you for support, to come to you for knowledge.

[00:23:33] The inspiration value, the onus for being inspiring is on whomever finds themselves in a more heightened consciousness state. A more heightened consciousness state is going to have certain features about it. A sustainable lifestyle. A lifestyle of sustainability.

[00:23:52] A heightened consciousness state is going to have other features about it. The ability spontaneously, whenever requested to, to give wise and trusted counsel that works.

[00:24:04] A heightened consciousness state is going to be seen, virtually universally by all, to be a state of greater wisdom, not just knowledge. Knowledge is one thing but the way in which knowledge works in an integrated fashion is wisdom.

The Weapon of Speech

[00:24:21] Knowledge might simply deal with simple truths. Truth on its own is not wisdom, because it could be true, for example, to walk up to somebody and to explain to them how they smell bad. You’re speaking a truth. Is it wisdom? Is it wise to do such a thing?

[00:24:38] If you really want that person somehow to have a unity experience with you, to have a shared experience with you, to raise a truth which causes attention on difference and to call out difference constantly, this is using speech, though speech is a candidate for communication –  commune means comm, with, une means unity, two – instead of communing, instead of having shared experience, speech is now being used as a weapon. The weapon of speech.

[00:25:10] Weaponized speech is speech that uses sounds and words to highlight difference. And so then truth can still be used to highlight difference.

Arranging Truths to Awaken Shared Experience

[00:25:20] Truth can be a weapon that causes greater enmity, but wisdom doesn’t use speech in that way. Wisdom has to do with the capacity to know, at what point is it wise or in aid of a greater amount of unity and shared experience to, for the moment, not highlight every single truth?

[00:25:44] Knowledge on its own is not wisdom. Knowledge is simply awareness of truths. How do you arrange those truths in such a way that you can cause, and awaken inside of somebody, shared experience of humanity, the shared experience of it.

[00:26:01] And so that greater wisdom is one of the byproducts that we’d be looking for if somebody were to be laying claim to being in a heightened consciousness state. A spontaneous parental role, not someone who operates on the basis of fear-based administration.

We Cannot Afford a Third World War

[00:26:18] If the way that you motivate people to move is to use fear to motivate them, then fear-based administration is going to cause ever-increasing distinction and difference and cause greater and greater enmity, and when enmity reaches a certain critical mass, what happens is self-destruction.

[00:26:40] The entire system goes into self-destruction, using the knowledge of the laws of physics, for example, to make thermonuclear weapons and to use them in any way that you feel like, some people might call it indiscriminate, you would call it very discriminating.

[00:26:54] And so then if we want to move away from enmity, and I’m going to put the case that it’s about time we do so, because this is an era where we cannot afford a third world war. It’s not just that we must prevent it, we actually cannot afford to have it.

Green Forests Have Green Trees

[00:27:12] What we don’t seem to realize is that individual behavior contributes to collective behavior.

[00:27:19] My teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had a great analogy that he used. If you want a forest to be green, each individual tree has to be green. You can’t have a green forest that’s made up of brown trees. Or, if you had one green tree to hide all of the brown trees behind the one green tree, from a slightly different angle, it’s a brown forest again.

[00:27:43] If we wish to have world peace, the problem of world peace is a problem of the world’s magnitude. Seven point, I think it’s three, 7.3 billion people on the face of the earth right now and as a population, expanding by tens of thousands every hour of every single day, day and night.

[00:28:03] If we wish to have world peace we have to break down the problem of the magnitude of all the individuals of the world into sizable portion. We have to look at individuals.

1% Critical Mass of Vedic Meditators

[00:28:15] What is the critical mass of individuals that I think would have to practice Vedic Meditation twice, each day in order to turn the tide from ever-increasing discovery of difference to an ever-increasing desire and trend to discover unity amongst each other? I think it’s about 1%. About one in a hundred.

[00:28:38] I believe that about 99% of the world can afford to completely ignore the gifts that meditation brings. If about one in a hundred people take up and become fascinated by the practice of Vedic Meditation, and begin practicing it every day, there’ll be sufficient splashing down onto the Unified Field, creating that ripple effect through the baseline of all people, and there’ll be sufficient rubbing-off effect of people who are becoming wiser, more and more charming, more and more capable, more attractive in their behavior, less and less stressful, more and more approachable.

[00:29:17] These kinds of people need to exist in larger and larger numbers. The exemplars, the preceptors, a preceptor, someone who teaches by precept, by example, an exemplar, someone who, they teach by example.

[00:29:31] And so the job of the teachers of Vedic Meditation is to teach about 1% of the world to meditate. It’s still a huge number, but it’s doable, it’s eminently doable. Are we interested in absolutely everybody on earth meditating? Well, that would be a lovely thought, but probably not necessary.

A Turning Point

[00:29:51] And so we just have to take a look at what it is that’s doable in order to create a critical-mass effect. Critical mass is a very, very interesting thing. A turning point, a saturation point.

[00:30:05] If you want to take a super-saturated saline solution and crystallize it, it takes far less than 1%. You only have to put one salt crystal in that super-saturated saline solution and the entire solution will become crystallized instantly.

[00:30:24]We look at the human brain, it takes far less than 1% of neurons in the brain to fire in a particular direction of a sensation or an action, for the other hundreds of billions of neurons of the brain to follow suit, for the whole body to go into action.

[00:30:41] And so 1% is really something that represents, in my opinion, a critical mass that could bring us very, very strongly into the age of enlightenment, which is in fact, trying to dawn right now. The age of enlightenment is beginning to dawn. When there is a new day coming then prior to the dawn is the darkest hour.

Prepare in the Darkness to Celebrate the Dawn

[00:31:06] If you’re going to celebrate a dawn, you have to make preparations in the darkness. And we’re making those preparations, I believe, by allowing the information about the wonderful effects of Vedic Meditation to spread far and wide.

[00:31:20] You sit easily, close your eyes for 20 minutes, let your mind settle down to its least-excited state. The mind spontaneously follows the charm of a pulsing sound that you use, a specific kind of personalized mantra that is used in this practice.

[00:31:36] No concentration is needed. No controlling of the mind. No hypnosis, no contemplation, no concentrating, no mood making is needed. The mind simply follows that ever-diminishing sound that pulses away and becomes more and more charming with each increasingly subtle pulsation until that little sound, the mantra, vanishes.

[00:32:01] And when it vanishes, the mind is left for a moment in a state where there is no mantra and no thought replacing it. And that state of being awake and aware without a thought is a state of bliss. It’s a state of serene, inner contentedness. It is the individual mind, if you think of the mind as a wave, the individual wave of the mind, collapsing into the flat unbounded ocean of the Unified Field consciousness.

[00:32:32] And so touching on that state every day, several times in each sitting, and then twice every day, practicing that as a regular systematic program, coming out and engaging in activity in whatever way you find natural to do. Vedic Meditation, doesn’t say to you, “Oh, you should be doing this or you should be doing that. Or, wear this kind of clothes or change your name to something that you tell everybody at Thanksgiving or whatever.” There’s no big cultural challenge in practicing it.

We Need to Step Into Our Power of Wisdom

[00:33:01] You could even just say, “Look, I’m not interested in all of the Vedic aspects of the meditation technique, I just want the stress-release phenomenon. Just let me meditate twice every day as a stress-management tool. I want to rid myself of stress.”

[00:33:16] Well, you can do that too, it doesn’t matter. You might be an athlete and you’ve heard that meditation brings about faster reaction times and improved athletic performance, then you learn to meditate purely for that reason. Practice it every day.

[00:33:32] You’re still one of the 1% who, whether you intended to or not, are bringing about a greater and greater dissolution of enmity consciousness. And this is the time for that.

[00:33:44] This is the time now for us to grow up and mature into that parental consciousness state, into that state of each of us individually stepping into our power of wisdom. We each need to step into our power of wisdom.

People Behaving Desperately

[00:34:00] When we look at humanity, especially if you have a glance through modern media at humanity, what you’re likely to see is a lot of desperate behaviors. People who are behaving desperately. 

Desperately trying to look trendy. Desperately trying to be cool. Desperately trying to keep up with the latest fashion. Desperately trying to look powerful. Desperately trying, in almost all cases failingly, to make their individuality something absolutely fantastic when in fact the wisdom factor inside is fairly hollow, fairly hollow. So desperation is one of the most outstanding marks of the failed attempt at happiness of the modern generation. Desperation.

[00:34:53] And instead of being desperate, let’s just learn how to effortlessly take our mind to that least-excited state and experience that deep inner bliss.

The Behaviour of Happy People

[00:35:03] The mind which exposes itself to bliss again and again, is a mind which is not capable of consistent destructive behavior. Somebody put it this way once to me-A.S. Neil, if you want to look him up, can’t remember his first name, but I know his first two initials are A.S., Neil is his last name, a progressive educator from Britain to whom I spoke once, and he came to visit my master Maharishi, and I got to talk to him for about an hour-and he put it to me this way that, “It’s not a happy man who robs a bank. We don’t find happy people, robbing banks. It’s not a happy man.”

[00:35:41] And he spoke in those words, man, because that was the way that people spoke in those days. Historically, this was the 1960s. “Not a happy man who beats his wife,” he just used that as an example. “We do not see any happy terrorists.” When was the last time you met a happy terrorist?

[00:35:58] Happy people don’t behave in ways that are divisive, destructive, and attempting to get attention through the use of fear and death. That’s not the behavior of happy people.

[00:36:15] When we awakened baseline happiness through regular daily practice of Vedic Meditation, then spontaneously, we began to behave in ways that are more inviting of shared experience. Shared experience.

Playing the Role of the Offended One

[00:36:29] People who may once have even been hostile to you, as you practice your Vedic Meditation twice, each day, they find it absolutely compelling to somehow identify with you, to somehow learn what it is that’s changed you, that’s made you more and more capable. It’s made you less and less offendable. The idea of offense, in order to be offended, you have to agree to play the role of the offended one.

[00:37:00] And my master had an analogy for this too. He had so many great analogies. “Imagine going to a party,” he said, “and everybody’s standing around eating their little hors d’oeuvres and things, and then a butler comes with a tray and on the tray is a dagger, and the butler says, ‘ Is there anybody in the room who would like to take the dagger and stab themselves with it?’

[00:37:21] “And most people were saying, ‘Well, no, not me,’ and the other, ‘no, not me. I wouldn’t to do that.’ But then somebody goes, ‘Oh, I’ll give it a try. I’ll take the dagger and stab myself with it.'”

[00:37:31] This is the example he used, when someone offers offense to you, someone offers to you to be offended, will you accept the offer and become offended?

[00:37:44] To be offended one has to accept an offer of someone behaving towards you in a way that you considered to be offensive. In other words, what is your state of consciousness?

Utter Indifference to Negativity

[00:37:59] My master used to teach that the environment and surroundings are here to increase our happiness. The surroundings are the product of our state of consciousness. We create them and we are, in turn, influenced by our surroundings.

[00:38:13] Sometimes in those surroundings, people find it necessary to express their own less-conscious state. They’re less conscious. And when they do so they entertain negativity.

[00:38:28] The way to deal with negativity is to develop the skill of being utterly indifferent to it. If you stoop down to the level of negativity and try to fight it out on its own level, then you’re also becoming tainted by that.

I Accept Your Consciousness State

[00:38:46] It’s better to rise above it because a thing can only be offensive to you if, in a certain way, you agree that it applies to you. Once when my master was teaching, somebody in the question time in an introductory talk in London, made a statement about him that the average person would have considered to be very offensive.

[00:39:10] They made a racist statement about him because he was a brown man, an unusual thing in those days to see there, and, because they didn’t like the ideas that he was propagating, that people could learn a meditation technique and live life in bliss, they had some kind of vested interest in everybody suffering.

[00:39:31] Anyway, this person stood up at the microphone and just absolutely let loose a string of what would normally, by most people, be considered to be offensive statements. And my master Maharishi just went silent, smilingly, and then when the man finished, he just laughed and laughed and laughed.

[00:39:51] And he said, “I accept your consciousness state. I accept your consciousness state. And I accept everything that comes from it. Thank you very much. Next question.”

This is What Goes On

[00:40:01] And at the end of that, I remember saying to Maharishi, “Didn’t you find that offensive?” And he said to me, “Well, there were 10,000 people in the room,” it was at the Albert Hall in London, “there were 10,000 people in the room.” He said, “None of those people thought that that man was talking about them. They all thought that that man was talking about me, but I didn’t think he was talking about me. 

“So I was just like everyone else in the hall, I was hearing some words that didn’t apply to me and everyone else in the hall, the other 999,000 people, they we’re all thinking that he wasn’t talking about them, he was talking about the guy on the stage, but the man on the stage,” Maharishi, said, “I didn’t feel he was talking about me either, so there was just this noise coming from one person that wasn’t particularly helpful noise,” and he said, “and this is what happens. This is what goes on.”

Dogs Bark, Elephants Walk

[00:40:58] On another occasion when I was in India with Maharishi, he used a very beautiful analogy based on a thing I saw. I saw an elephant walking through a village one day and I told him about it and he said, “What were the dogs doing?” Because in India, there are a lot of feral dogs around everywhere.

[00:41:18] And I said, “Well, the dogs just came out barking by the dozens.” He said, “There it is. The elephant enters the village and dozens of dogs come barking from everywhere, but the elephant doesn’t mind, she’s just happy that some dogs are enjoying barking.” Can an elephant really harm a dog? No.

[00:41:43] And I mentioned to him that this elephant, true to his analogy, when she lifted up her front foot to take a step, and she was carrying a log in her trunk, a big log, when she lifted up her front foot to take a step, one of the dogs, one of the curs, got underneath her foot and barked at the foot that was hanging in the air.

[00:42:05] And she just waited until he finished barking, and then when he finished showing off to his friends, the dog took off and went over to the side and only then she put her foot down, keeping the dog completely safe, and continued walking.

[00:42:19] So in India, there’s this fabulous saying, ” Dogs bark, elephants walk.”

Elephantine Consciousness

[00:42:24] What consciousness state are you in? Are you the elephantine consciousness or are you in the barking consciousness? It’s important to be in the elephantine consciousness.

[00:42:34] Now we cannot just decide, “Okay, that’s it. I’ll snap into elephantine consciousness right now.” We have actually to release our stress. When we have stress accumulated in our physiology, it affects our mind, it affects our brain and it gives us a hair trigger of stress reactivity.

[00:42:56] As our first behavior, the moment we imagine that somebody has offended us and we think it’s possible that it might be true, we think it’s possible that others might think it’s true, then we react in that offended fashion, this is the dogs barking.

[00:43:14] We can’t just say, “Okay, I’ll be the elephant now,” and pretend not to be offended even if we are offended. This isn’t about mood making or pretending not to be offended. It’s about literally raising and expanding that of which you are conscious.

Cosmic Consciousness and the Cascades of Cause and Effect

[00:43:32] This is what expanded consciousness and heightened consciousness mean. It means that you’re capable of fitting a larger number of things and of space and of time into one consciousness.

[00:43:47] What is it, what is the expanse, the extent of your capacity of your consciousness? What is the spread of it? How big is your consciousness? Is it individual head size, or is it room size, or is it city size consciousness?

[00:44:06] It’s possible for your consciousness to become cosmic, to experience its own cosmic size. That’s an enlightened state. Cosmic Consciousness.

[00:44:18] When we have Cosmic Consciousness, we can see all of the cascades of cause and effect and we can sense that all aspects of nature, all forms, all phenomena, all people, to get very personal here, all people, are simply behaving according to their own level of evolution.

Royal Invincible Grace

[00:44:40] Were you ever like that? Of course you were. People who say, “I’d never behave that way,” either have a very poor memory or they have a memory only of one body in which they’ve lived.

[00:44:53] In the Vedic worldview we’ve come up through generations of bodies. We have grown through many lifetimes to our current consciousness state, and we can’t remember all of those lives, but all of us have at one time or another behaved in every kind of less conscious fashion.

[00:45:12] But now we don’t have to go into all of that. Let’s make a resolution that we’re going to live in our most-heightened consciousness state.

[00:45:21] When we’re in our most-heightened consciousness state, can we say, “The elephant has enemies, dog enemies?” Elephants don’t have dog enemies. Elephants are happy that dogs are enjoying being dogs. That’s all. It doesn’t want to try to stop the dogs from being dogs. Dogs bark, that’s what they do.

[00:45:38]They make those sounds and all of that and what does the elephant do? Just continues proceeding with that royal invincible grace. Royal invincible grace, elephantine consciousness.

[00:45:50] This is my wish for all of those who are listening to this program today, that we make the resolution, and if you don’t yet practice Vedic Meditation, you should learn how, and very quickly. Go to my website, thomknoles.com, T-H-O-M-K-N-O-L-E-S.COM and find out how you can learn Vedic Meditation as soon as possible.

Making Enmity Redundant

[00:46:16] For those of you who are already practicing regular, twice-a-day, diligent practice, and become more and more educated about all of its effects. Become more and more educated about the intellectual understanding of your experiences so that you’re inspired by your own growth and your own progress in it, to continue being regular in it until you reach a state where you’re not only able to touch on that cosmic field during meditation, but that’s a state of consciousness that you’re in at all times, 24 hours a day during waking, dreaming and sleeping. This is my wish for all of those who are listening now.

[00:46:57] And so I have to say just as a final thing, if you’re enjoying having enemies, that’s all right. You’ll graduate from that.

[00:47:05] And when you’re finished with having enemies and finding that scratching itches all the time is not necessarily the most graceful way to be living, and trying to make yourself into something big by having enemies who somehow you destroy or whatever, when you want to come out of that enmity consciousness, just start practicing your meditation twice each day.

[00:47:27] For those already practicing it, relisten to this recording, listen to it again and again and it will really sink in. There’s a higher consciousness state in which you can engage where enmity no longer needs to be the guiding principle of your life.

[00:47:53] Jai Guru Deva.