Heroes and Villains

Heroes and Villains

The Trichotomy of Evolution

Thank you for listening to my podcast, the Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles. Today, we’re going to have a chat about heroes and villains, and much to say on this subject because heroes and villains really is an expression that we give using the very Western philosophical worldview that has to do with dichotomy.

[00:01:12] In other places we have talked about and analyzed another way of looking at the world, the Vedic worldview, which is, and believe me, is an actual word in the dictionary, trichotomy. The trichotomy of evolution being made up of three characteristic behaviors.

[00:01:36] Creation, which includes inventiveness, improvisation, and the connection, new connections being made between existing things. So a creation operator.

[00:01:47] Maintenance operator. That force in Nature that maintains whatever it is that continues to make itself relevant to the process of progressive change. And so this is the maintenance operator force.

[00:02:05] And then a third force, which is destruction operator. Though we have to take care to understand that destruction means the dis-integration of anything that has become irrelevant. All things that exist, from the Vedic point of view, are relevant for a period. There’s a, if you like, shelf life of relevance during which time a form or function may make itself relevant to the process of progressive change.

[00:02:38] But all forms and all functions, at some point, lose their relevance for continuing to make a contribution to progressive change, and it’s at that point that that particular form or function, style of relating, behavior, whatever it may be, becomes dis-integrated, starts to lose its integrity and falls apart.

[00:03:02] And then we have creation again. So creation, maintenance, and destruction are the trichotomy of evolution.

Writers of History and Drawers of Maps

[00:03:12] Heroes and villains. These are very interesting concepts just on their own to look at.

[00:03:19] First, we have to make a statement about where it is and what it is that gets to write history and draw maps. The victors of any particular epoch of time are the writers of history and the drawers of maps. Those who get to name things, to demonstrate where boundaries lie, and who get to name who are the heroes and who are the villains.

[00:03:47] And so then the people who come out of any epoch, having been victorious over those who opposed their point of view, are the ones who write the stories and who create the heroes and villains mentality.

[00:04:05] All of us enjoy, and I say it like this because, though we may have a distaste for what we have decided is a villain, all of us enjoy placing things into these two dichotomous, that means two-sided, divided into two aspects, those things that are villainous and those things that are heroic.

Consciousness Drives Behavior

[00:04:28] With reference to what? With reference to whatever our consciousness state may be.

[00:04:34] So, to back up a little bit, in the Vedic worldview, we have a fundamental tenet and that fundamental tenet is that a state of consciousness is that that drives thinking and behavior, a state of consciousness.

[00:04:52] Let’s go into that a little more deeply. Consciousness exists, but it exists with a variety of expansive capabilities.

[00:05:04] The consciousness of a flea. Does a flea have a sense of what it’s doing when it’s riding on the back of a black rat during the middle ages at the time of the bubonic plague? The flea may have been infected with the bacterium that was responsible for the plague.

[00:05:26] The flea is just doing what fleas do. Biting the rat, sucking its blood. The rat is simply doing what rats do, which is to find warmth in the winter and coolness in the summer and available food sources.

[00:05:42] When it turns out that the fleas hop off the backs of the rats in somebody’s home and then bite a human, is the flea being evil in the process of transmitting to the human the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague? The black death as it was called back in those days, which killed off perhaps, and estimates vary, some say as much as half of the entire population of Eurasia was killed off of the human population by this phenomenon.

Semi-Omnipotence

[00:06:18] And so, where is evil? And then there will be those who want to fall down on the side of, “Well, there is an almighty intelligence that itself is nothing but pure good, and it has opponents,” which really begs the question about how almighty the almighty is, but we’ll come back to that.

[00:06:40] The opponents of the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent one, are those who are evil. And so then if there is some kind of engagement between the interests of good and the interests of evil, then in the process of this, all kinds of mayhem goes on.

[00:07:04] And so the dichotomous explanation of looking at all world events and saying, “This thing was evil, that thing was good. God is good. And the devil is evil.” And so there is something that is fundamentally opposed to that which is omnipotent.

[00:07:26]This is a very interesting question just on its own as to the sustainability of that view. Something that is omniscient, meaning absolutely all knowing of past, present and future, something that is omnipresent, meaning absolutely everywhere, not quasi-present, but absolutely everywhere.

[00:07:46] And now we have to put in parentheses, does that also include permeating every molecule of the evil ones? We’ll close that parenthesis there.

[00:07:57] And then omnipotent, absolutely all capable, and yet finding itself vexed by the existence of that which is opposed to it.

Bifurcation – Breaking of Symmetry

[00:08:11] Herein we have one of those dichotomies of paradox that has been analyzed in many, many, much more intellectually rigorous places than on this podcast. These are the kinds of subjects that are aired in schools of theology worldwide.

[00:08:32] Interestingly, the Vedic worldview gets relatively little airtime, even though it has a ready solution for all of these concepts.

[00:08:42] And that is that there’s one indivisible, whole consciousness state. That one indivisible, whole consciousness state causes itself to bifurcate, that is to break it’s symmetry, and to move into storylines through the creation of sequence.

[00:09:02] From the non-sequential unmanifest form, which is a once-upon-a-time concept that once upon a time there was just pure Being that hadn’t yet become anything, non becoming Being, Being in its unmanifest state, which then bifurcates, breaks its symmetry, and comes into manifestation.

[00:09:27] The other view, which is a deeper and more sustained view, is that at all times there’s a level, a layer, of the entire process of the universe that is just pure unmanifest. Unmanifest breaking it’s symmetry, coming into being as an underlying phenomenon that is perpetually everywhere and at all times, arriving into sequence from the non-sequential into, putting into sequence all of its capabilities, all of its potentials.

Elevational Theater

[00:10:09] And in aid of what? To make an entertaining story for itself. It wants to enjoy variety. It wants to enjoy something other than simply eternal Oneness. And so it creates storyline.

[00:10:27] In order for there to be a story we have to have a concept, which in the Vedic worldview, we use the concept of elevational theater.

[00:10:38] Elevational theater goes like this, you start a story by establishing a status quo. There’s a status quo and you can describe the status quo in great detail. And these are the entities within the status quo. This is what the status quo does. This is what the status quo is experiencing.

[00:11:00] And generally speaking, in order for a story to have a kind of good beginning, to get your attention, it has to be something fairly fabulous. Like a fabulous status quo, or at least one where there’s quite a degree of contentedness.

[00:11:19] In his trilogy, Tolkein uses, his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he uses the status quo of the Shire with all of the hobbits, little creatures that just live in contentedness, farming, celebrating, keeping to themselves, and don’t really want to be bothered by anybody.

[00:11:40] In Genesis, the status quo is the triumvirate of the Supreme Being, Adam, and Eve, and day goes in and day goes out and everybody’s content. Everyone has absolutely everything they want. There’s no striving. There’s no acknowledgement of a potentially better state.

The Supersymmetric State of Contentedness

[00:12:02] And so we have a symmetric condition. The symmetric condition, whether we’re looking at the Tolkien model or any number of other models, is followed then by a breaking of the symmetry. Something comes into the story that breaks the symmetry.

[00:12:19] It causes that supersymmetric state of contentedness to fall apart, and the falling apart, the disintegration of the symmetry, from the Vedic perspective, this would be that destruction operator moving in where there is too much maintenance.

[00:12:39] Too much maintenance means too much contentedness and complacency and not any change. The ever-repeating known is beginning to move in the direction of what it moved away from. What everything moved away from was Oneness, Being, Oneness, Being, Oneness, Being, Oneness, perpetually.

[00:13:03] And so then when we have a story where everything is just pure contentedness and nothing ever changes, then there is Oneness, Being, Oneness, Being, Oneness, starting to reflect itself inside of storyline.

[00:13:18] Maintenance operator is too strong in this condition. So destruction operator comes into play. Without destruction operator coming into play there’s no room for what comes after destruction operator, which is creation operator again. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

The Fall From the Status Quo

[00:13:37] So maintenance breaks its symmetry, and then there is the fall from the status quo. A fall from the status quo means everything changes. Conditions change. The desirability of something better occupies the minds and hearts of all entities, and then the climb.

[00:14:00] The climb out of the fall into a higher level of knowledge, of greater capability, and then a degree of satisfaction is reached and a new plateau starts.

[00:14:13] And so we have maintenance followed by destruction, followed by a rise into a new plateau, which involves creativity, recognition, improvisation, cognition, inventiveness, and so on.

[00:14:31] And then arriving at a state of an appropriate degree of satiety, a fancy way of saying satisfaction, a certain degree of satiety is reached and everyone is sated, therefore there’s no need to create anything new.

[00:14:48] And maintenance operator, once again, begins to rule the day for many, many days. And then after a certain number of days, it becomes intolerable since there’s no new story, and the story has to begin again.

A Sawtooth Pattern of Plateau

[00:15:04] In order for that to happen, maintenance operator has to be disintegrated by destruction operator, and then creation operator to create the new status quo.

[00:15:13] And so we have a sawtooth pattern of plateau, followed by fall, followed by a rise above the previous plateau, followed by maintenance, followed by a fall, followed by a rise above the previous plateau, a new plateau, a new fall, et cetera.

[00:15:32] And this pattern can be applied to any kind of storyline. You look at any sort of story and you’ll see this pattern. The differences in stories have to do with where do you start the story and your narrative of it and where do you end the story and your narrative of it?

[00:15:52] Some stories began during the middle of a climb to a new status quo. Some stories have their beginning, the narrator decides to begin the story, at the depths of a previous fall, from that deep darkness.

[00:16:08] Some stories, many stories, and I would say, really quite the vast majority of stories, begin in a plateau in describing a steady state prior to its fall.

[00:16:22] And so then in this process of plateau, fall, rise, plateau, fall, rise, like that, there have to be certain roles played. Certain roles have to be played, and these roles, when we look back with just the eye of what position we want to take, based on who succeeded, and succession here is what succeeded means. Succession from a previous state to a new state…

Succession

[00:16:55] In this case, success is not used in the way that we use it in Western terminology. Success does not mean you arrive somewhere and stop. Success in the Vedic perspective means succession. It means that a moving on from previous condition, moving on from previous role, succession after succession, after succession.

[00:17:21] And so then who has succeeded and who has been a successor of a previous state? And then how do you name all of these people? The dichotomous way of naming them all is to use the idea of heroes and villains.

[00:17:38] Who brought about a fall? Who brought about that which is new?

An Eternity of Torture

[00:17:45] In the Christian worldview, and I’m not just picking on Christians, we can apply this to any religion, but most of my listeners will be more familiar with the narratives of the Christian worldview, we have the Romans, for example, playing the evil ones in the transition from the Jesus of Nazareth, moving from being in a body to being liberated from that body.

[00:18:14] The narrative states that, in order for God to make everybody happy and to make himself happy, he’s the Creator of all of these beings, but he has a problem, and the problem is they violate his commandments and his rules and laws. And he has another absolute rule, which is that, “Anybody who violates my laws has to go for eternity into punishment.”

[00:18:43] Not just to go into annihlation, when ceased to exist at the end of their life, or if their life is brought to an end, but to actually go into an eternity of continuous torture and a demise, the pain of which is unimaginable, forever and ever, and ever.

[00:19:03] This means longer than the entire scope of the creation of the Universe itself. Even if the universe itself were to come to an end and go back into its singularity, those who violated the planet earth, violated the will of God, would continue on being tortured forever and ever, and ever.

Saved From Hell

[00:19:23] And then those who had managed to be judged as a better supplicants of the commandments of God would live by the sight of God in heaven forever and ever, and ever, and ever.

[00:19:40] And so then this “forever-ness,” this eternal concept on one side, and another eternal concept on the other side, annihilation, and then into very specific categories, good and bad.

[00:19:55] Romans were supposed to bring about the demise of who later on was decided upon as being the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

[00:20:06] And yet though it was thought that if you believed that Jesus was the Messiah, delivering you to the good side of God, then your belief in that and your belief in the fact of his torture, in the fact that he was born on the earth as the son of God, and was made into an example by the Romans and was very grossly tortured with lots of pain and lots of suffering that, having accepted that he’s your savior and that that suffering took away your suffering, and if you believe that for long enough, or to a sufficient degree, then you’ll be saved from the eternity of punishment and hell.

Were the Romans Villains?

[00:20:50] So then the Romans have to play that role of being the bad guys. Pontius Pilate asks the community of the Jews of the day, “What do you want to do with him? Thumbs up or thumbs down?” Enough people gave a thumbs down that the Romans commenced their torturing techniques.

[00:21:10] And so then we look back and we say, who are the villains in the story? Well, all of those, especially the Romans, of the day who brought about the death of the Jesus of Nazareth.

[00:21:23] But then the question has to be asked, didn’t we also say that he had to be tortured? Didn’t we also say that if he wasn’t tortured, if he wasn’t made to suffer, that then the sins of humanity wouldn’t be carried away by his suffering? Didn’t we say that in order for this great salvation to occur somebody had to play that role?

[00:21:45] We could ask the question, what if the Romans had, instead of torturing him, what if Pontius Pilate had said, “I really like your philosophy, your idea. And I really like you, and I accept you as my Lord and savior, and let’s get all of Rome on board with this.”

[00:22:03] And what if they had celebrated him? And what if he’d lived to be, instead of 33, he’d lived to be 133, teaching what he taught?

Or Were They Heroes?

[00:22:12] The fact that he hadn’t suffered, the fact that he didn’t come to earth to die and nobody performed that would have meant that nobody was saved and everybody would’ve ended up going to hell, because the doctrine is that all experiencers are sinners.

[00:22:28] They all are the products of the imperfection with which they were created and their original sin caused by Eve being seduced by a snake to eat the apple, condemned them to eternal suffering in hell, just by virtue of their creation, by virtue of their existence.

[00:22:50] And so we look at this and we go, “Well, the Romans were bad. But hold on. If the Romans were bad, who was going to perform the function of torturing and killing Christ? Were the Romans actually heroes or villains?”

[00:23:05] From some perspective, they must have been heroes. In fact, if you look at this critically enough, even from the Christian perspective, they must have been heroes.

[00:23:14] They volunteered to go to hell forever by virtue of torturing Jesus and making available to all those who believed in his story, the eternity of heaven. And so heaven came by virtue of the terrible behavior of the Romans.

[00:23:33] So now we look at these things and we see evident conflicts in all of this, and who were the heroes and who were the villains?

We’re the Good Guys

[00:23:42] Let’s stop there and change tack slightly and we’ll try to come back and unite some of these points.

[00:23:48] Is there a villain who thinks to herself or himself, when they wake in the morning, “I’m an evil one and today I’m just going to get out there and be just as evil as I can be. I have an agenda of basically being bad. And I’m going to be as bad as bad can be.”

[00:24:10] And, contrary to that, we have the hero in our imagination who wakes each morning and thinks, “Hmm, I have to go out and stop the behavior of those who wake each morning and decide that they’re going to be bad.”

[00:24:26] In fact, when we interview in detail, people in the past to whom history relegated, in the history, writers relegated, that they were evil or bad, they actually believed that they were not the villains. They believed that they were the good guy.

[00:24:45] “We’re the good guys who are going to save the world from certain evils. We have God on our side. We’re going to bring about a world that we have a vision for, that has existing evil in it and we’re out to destroy that.”

Standing Outside of Our Indoctrination

[00:25:02] Then on the other side, you have, there are these people who’ve risen up. They think that they’re going to create a world for us, and cause us to live in it, which is a conception that they’ve had from their evil minds, and we reject that and we’re going to fight them.

[00:25:20] And so then the battle begins. The epic battle World War I, World War II, the American Civil War. You can look at any kind of war and find these two parties who, later on, victors of history relegated to these individual people, the roles of evil versus heroic.

[00:25:42] And who is the heroic one? Well, what state of consciousness are you in? From what perspective are you viewing this? In what kind of family did you grow up? What were you indoctrinated to think about the events of history?

[00:25:58] And so is it possible for us to stand outside of our indoctrination? Is it possible for us to move into a different consciousness state and look at all of this from some Cosmic perspective as to what is actually going on?

[00:26:17] And it turns out that what it is when we do that, and there is a way of doing that, which we’re going to dive into in a few moments, what we understand, what we get to understand, is that there’s a continuity of these three phenomena.

Communists and Capitalists

[00:26:31] Plateau, maintenance, fall from maintenance, destruction operator, causing a fall from the maintenance, too much maintenance causes destruction, and then a rise beyond that disintegration into creativity, the invention of the new, the improvisation, the attainment of degrees of satiety, followed by complacency.

[00:26:58] That’s the new plateau, the complacent plateau, where we feel as though we have created the world that for us, that is to say, the experiencers who played a particular role in the rise, that we’ve arrived at a place of complete satisfaction. We don’t need to invent anything new. We don’t want to invent anything new. We can’t imagine anything better than all of this.

[00:27:25] And maybe we might even make laws that say, if you start to imagine anything better than all of this, you might be one of those wicked ones who’s planning to bring all this down. We’ll give you names like anarchists. Or if you happen to have a different economic position to the capitalists of the world, we might call you communists, and really turn that into a dirty word, the idea that you live in a communal economic system.

[00:27:53] Or, if you are communists, you might look at the other dirty word, which is, the capitalists, who try to make profit out of everything that they do. Profit driven, profit motive, driven society, evil, evil.

All Of Us Want to Be Heroic

[00:28:09] And so who is evil? Who is heroic? It all depends on what kind of viewpoint the indoctrination into what kind of viewpoint has your state of consciousness arrived?

[00:28:22] Your current status of your state of consciousness has had many inputs. How do we rise above indoctrination that has to do with heroics and evilness?

[00:28:33] All of us want to be heroic. We want to think of ourselves as, “I was a great hero in a battle against something.” Maybe it was a battle against ignorance. Maybe it was a battle against bad people. Maybe it was a battle against stupidity. Maybe it was a battle against people who were too smug, who thought they were the smartest people on earth and got too politically correct?

[00:28:58] Maybe it was a battle against somebody of a different color to my skin? You know, if we go back enough, scientifically, we were all the same color once. We only divided into different colors sometime during the great ice ages, when some of us went north and some of us stayed in the south and our melanin levels changed in our skin and our bodies were adaptations, form adaptations, to the critical pressures of evolution in the environment.

We All Started From the Same Place, But…

[00:29:31] “But basically we all started from the same place, but I’m against those people of those color who sing those kinds of songs and they eat that sort of food that has certain spicy smells that I don’t like. And I’m in favor of these kinds of people, whose skin is this color and whose noses and eyes have this shape.

[00:29:48]” And who eat this kind of food and sing these kinds of songs. And I don’t want those people taking over these people. And these people need to stay integral and maintain forever and ever, and ever. And those people are the people who are going to challenge our existence and our satisfaction, and our complacency.

[00:30:08] “And we call ourselves ‘conservatives’ because we like to conserve that period of time, which we’re thinking of where great satiety and complacency occurred. Where we had the ability to turn a blind eye to everything that was happening everywhere else in the world to create a bubble in which we’re all just satisfied with each other. And we’re just all going to inbreed here and keep eating the same foods that don’t have any of those things that smell funny in them.”

[00:30:39] This kind of maintenance operator mentality invites something. It invites dis-integration of the steady state. And so that disintegration is a very necessary thing.

Holding On to Complacency

[00:30:53] The disintegration, the rise to a new status quo, creativity, inventiveness, all of that. And then we, once again, have a steady state. This also will change. It changes in response to the satisfaction state of its participants.

[00:31:14] When we live a life in which we do not expect change, when we don’t want change, when we won’t embrace change, when we have unwarranted and premature contentedness, we start to have complacency. And to maintain our complacency, it requires us to practice ignoring things.

[00:31:38] We have to ignore what’s happening to all the participants in the rest of the world that we live in. And we have to build barriers against their influence in a physical walls, or customs walls or entry walls, and you’ll keep those people from in any way infiltrating.

[00:32:00] And so we end up designing a status that has to go through a more critical form of dis-integration. The longer we choose not to embrace change, the longer we hold on to our premature contentedness and complacency, the more critical and pivotal the change becomes when finally the resistance to change breaks down.

Being the Seer

[00:32:31] So who’s going to play a hero, who’s going to play a villain in all of this? We have a third position that we’d like to suggest that you take. And that is the position of being a seer. Someone who is a seer, someone who can see large patterns, large-scale patterns going on, to see what is the future that is in the making right now?

[00:33:01] At any given moment, the entire future is assembling itself, right before your eyes and ears and all the rest of your senses, but to what extent are you deaf or blind to those things that are shaping up right before you?

[00:33:17] A seer is someone, a rishi is the word in Sanskrit, rishi means seer, a seer is someone who can see the trending of the behavior of the laws of Nature that drive storyline.

[00:33:34] A seer is someone who can take a position of watching who’s playing what role, who is triggering what cause, and what will the cascade of effects be from that. A seer is someone who doesn’t consider themselves to be a hero or a villain. They’re simply a knower of process.

[00:34:00] And, if anything, they take the role of someone who has the capacity, to whatever extent anybody inquires worthily, they have the capacity of giving an idea of what Nature’s own trend is.

How is Nature Trending?

[00:34:17] How is Nature trending? If Nature is trending toward, from the depths and darkness of a fall, trending towards inventiveness, improvisation, inventiveness, and creativity, then how do you ride that wave of Nature’s intentionality at this phase of a story?

[00:34:39] If Nature is intending the move from creativity into a period of maintenance, how are you able to ride the wave of maintenance operator function, being one of those who helps to maintain all of that that continues contributing to the evolutionary process?

[00:35:01] If Nature is in the mood to bring about the dis-integration of, and then overdue disintegration, of a steady state, then how can you play the role best, of being someone who helps to cause the crumbling of that which is no longer helpful, no longer use useful, and which in fact that maintenance may be causing the suffering of many?

[00:35:29] How can you be someone who destroys destructive power? The destructive power of maintenance?

A True Hero

[00:35:35] And so then a true hero is somebody who is a seer, someone who has through their senses, the capacity to witness, which of these three elements, creation, maintenance, or destruction, is predominant in any given moment, with reference to any given form, with reference to any given phenomenon.

[00:36:00] A seer is someone who does not take a position of a thing being good or bad. A seer is someone who simply witnesses function. Function. What is the function of a form? What is the function of a phenomenon?

[00:36:19] Understanding that and being, all the time, in the right place at the right time and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is a quality of someone who is a Knower of reality. A Knower of reality is someone who can see these three forces of Nature in interplay and is not surprised by things.

[00:36:47] Nature will always be, in its play and display, will always continue to be amazing, it’s just that it’s no longer surprising, because a seer’s expectations are geared to what is actually happening.

Zero Rigid Attachment

[00:37:04] The degree of rigid attachment in a seer is zero, zero rigidity. And so then watching the trends of Nature, and helping others who may be perplexed about what’s going on to gain a better understanding of what’s actually happening.

[00:37:25] Getting an understanding of, if there is anything eternal, the eternal play and display of these three operators, creation, maintenance, and destruction, creation, maintenance, and destruction, in all of their forms and all of their braided plots and all of their tendencies, and being someone who can report from the highest consciousness state on what is happening, with the largest amount of perspective.

[00:37:55] And so we consider these, from the Vedic perspective, these rishis, of all time, and there’re always rishis, at any time of human history, there have always been rishis, there always will be rishis, people who are seers, who can give an impartial, an impartial, and can relate, an impartial telling of at what phase of a story anything is.

Impartial Guidance

[00:38:27] If you come to a seer with misery because you’re in a relationship that has, for quite some time, lost its relevance to evolution, the seer will be able to impartially guide you into how to bring about change and to be the change agent.

[00:38:49] If you come to a seer and you are in a relationship whose factors and functions continue to provide the opportunity to thrive, then a seer will advise you on how to maintain form, function, and the joy of relating. This is just using relationships as an example.

[00:39:13] If you come to a seer feeling lonely, too singular, all one, another way of spelling all one is removing one of the l’s and you have alone, A-L-O-N-E, all one, all alone, then you want to have the variety and the joy of shared experience, a seer, given the ability to see your situation, can teach you how to begin having the joy of shared experience.

[00:39:46] So, you’ve had too much shared experience in a way that isn’t continuously helpful? How to bring an end to that.

[00:39:53] If you want to know how to maintain that which is continuing to cause thriving and enrichment of life, then knowledge about how to maintain that. You want to get out of the business of being all one, alone, a seer can give you the techniques and the dynamics whereby you can suddenly be in shared experience, and the thriving of that.

Become a Rishi

[00:40:20] So like that, what is the seer’s role in the entire evolutionary process? To be able to see the reality of what is relevant behavior. From where does relevant behavior come?

[00:40:37] Now, we don’t want to have to rely upon others always to be seers for us. We want to become a seer ourself. We want ourselves to be a seer, a rishi.

[00:40:52] We want to enjoy that status of being able to know exactly to what extent the world around, the forms around, the phenomena around me, the relationships in which I’m engaging, the stage of those relationships, the styles of functioning of all of the whole of the world, by which I’m surrounded and which influences my daily life, how to act in a way that brings about the most relevant and most ideal behavior for the moment.

[00:41:31] To become a seer is the advice of every seer to every non-seer. Become a rishi. Become a seer. Become someone who is not bewildered by change. Become someone who is not frightened of the inexorable force of change.

[00:41:55] Become someone who steps out of the dichotomy thoughts of good versus evil. Become someone who can see the unfoldment of a storyline and be a participant in it and enjoy it and even document it. A teller of the story of evolution.

[00:42:16] This is the advice coming from the Vedic worldview on the subject of heroes and villains.

[00:42:33] Jai Guru Deva.