Hypnosis vs Meditation Podcast Episode with Thom Knoles

Hypnosis and Vedic Meditation

Is Vedic Meditation a Form of Hypnosis?

Thank you for listening to my podcast The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles.

[00:00:07] In this episode, I would like to look at the subject of suggestibility. Suggestibility is a very interesting concept, and one that really has vast social implications.

[00:00:25] Very often we hear the word hypnosis and people will often ask me, “Is Vedic Meditation, a form of hypnosis?” And I’m always quick to say, “No, it’s not. In fact, it’s anti- hypnotic.” Sometimes people are disappointed by that answer because they’ve been hypnotized to think that hypnosis is always a good thing.

[00:00:48] In fact, what I want to demonstrate here is that, the hypnotizability or suggestibility of our society is largely at the basis of our entire social structures’ problems, and that suggestibility on its own is really an issue that is a hidden factor, inside of our own lives, individually, and inside our entire cosmic social life, worldwide.

[00:01:20] Let’s examine what it all means. And for this, I need to educate you on a few terms. Somebody who is ‘field dependent’, someone who is ‘field independent.’ Field dependency and field independence are two factors that play inside of our consciousness at all times.

[00:01:45] None of us is absolutely field dependent or absolutely field independent. There’s a ratio. You might be 50:50, you might be 75:25 and so on.

Locus of Control

[00:01:59] What does it mean? Field dependency means, “I rely upon the field, the world out there to explain my experience.” And so if we were to look at somebody who was very field dependent, we would say that they had an externalized locus of control. L-O-C-U-S, locus means the fundamental place from which a person’s life or experience is governed, that is their locus. Locus of control has to do with where it is that we place credit or blame for what we’re experiencing.

[00:02:39] If I have an externalized locus of control, then for example, and I’ll just make a few examples extreme to prove a point.

[00:02:48] “I can’t have a good day because the weather spoiled my plans. I can’t have a good time or a good day because my spouse started an argument with me that we didn’t finish and I left home and I came to my workplace.

[00:03:05] “I can’t have a good day because the sandwich, which I wanted to order for lunch was unavailable. I can’t have a good day because there are people out there who are dreadful, who vote for the wrong political party, and that bugs me. I can’t have a good day because…” and so on, you can just fill in the blanks.

A Construct of Exterior Influences

[00:03:28] In other words, I’m not responsible for what I’m experiencing, others and outside inputs are responsible for what I’m experiencing.

[00:03:38] “My experience would probably be great, if everything around me was just great. If I had more money, I’d be really happy. If people would agree with me more, I’d be really happy. If people agreed with me absolutely, wow I could be just in a bliss state.

[00:04:00] “If the weather was always weather that suited me, or if I could have sufficient notice to move to a different region for a few days while it rained, cause I might acknowledge that rain is necessary, then I just come back to sunny weather all the time, then everything would be great.

[00:04:17] “If these body sensations that I have from various things that I’ve experienced or various things I’ve inherited were better, then I could be great.”

[00:04:28] And so the “I” inside is a construct of exterior influences.

[00:04:36] “People are responsible for what I’ve experienced. Events are responsible for what I experience. My life is nothing but a sculpture of stuff that has happened or stuff that has yet to happen.”

The External Locus of Control at Play

[00:04:52] So this is a classic external locus of control at play. This person is highly suggestible. This person is living their life and gaining their sense of identity, the sense of who they are and what they’re experiencing by virtue of what the world is up to, the world including people, the world including the climate, the world including all events that occur.

[00:05:23] And so, “I’m not responsible. The world’s responsible. I am a construct of the world.” This is the external locus of control, and we would call that person field dependent.

[00:05:36] So field dependency in this regard means that I have a very little control over what I’m experiencing, and there’s no inner construct and it leads to a sense of, “I’m not responsible. It’s not my fault. Everything is somebody else or something else.”

Field Dependency and a Narcissistic Approach to Life

[00:05:58] Strangely enough, strangely enough this is one of the primary features that supports and feeds a narcissistic approach to life. Narcissistic, sometimes is thought about as, somebody who thinks they’re the greatest and they’re the best, and they’re always looking at themselves, and so on. Not true.

[00:06:19] A narcissist is somebody who is constantly thinking about themself, constantly thinking about their experience, but who gives credit or blame only to the world for having created them that way. And they are incapable of taking responsibility for whatever it is they’re experiencing.

[00:06:41] What they’re experiencing has to be either credited to some force that came in from the outside, that they discovered, or blame for what they’re experiencing is given to other people, other things, and they’ve been treated unfairly or they’ve had their rights and their interests violated by the world constantly. “And this explains why I am the way I’m.”

[00:07:10] Not all people who are field dependent are narcissists, but certainly all narcissists are very field dependent. They have a very self-critical self view, but they are in the process of self viewing at all times and always engaging in the ideology that, “My happiness or my lack of happiness is based on other people, because actually I’m just a perfect being, but the world is so imperfect that I’m constantly battling with that field dependent externalized locus of control.”

Internalized Locus of Control

[00:07:49] Now let’s look at it’s opposite. And the opposite again is not a polar phenomenon. Nobody is grounded in either externalized locus of control and field dependency or grounded in internalized locus of control and field independent. But we need to examine both poles in order to understand what we’re talking about here.

[00:08:14] An internalized locus of control means that, “I acknowledge that I’m in a bad mood, but it’s not because it’s raining. It’s because I’m in a bad mood. And there are things that I’ve done that have got me into the bad mood. I acknowledge that I’m in a good mood, but it’s not because it’s sunny or because other people have behaved in certain ways, I just feel good. And I feel good from inside myself just because it’s not caused by anybody.”

[00:08:43] This is an example of the kinds of statements that might be made if anyone was required to make statements about what is governing their experience when they have an internal locus of control dominating their awareness.

Who is a Control Freak

[00:08:58] Internalized locus of control means field independent. “I experience what I’m experiencing independently of the world.” This is somebody who, irrespective of the weather, could take a walk outside, equipped if necessary against the rain, but take a walk outside in a rainstorm and be in a very happy mood while doing it.

[00:09:21] This is somebody who accepts the need of others to change and doesn’t attempt to restrict the change because their happiness, with an internalized locus of control, who is field independent, their happiness is not dependent on others conforming to their tendency to want to control.

[00:09:43] So let’s look at this idea of the need to control others because, “Others are responsible for what I’m experiencing.”

[00:09:51] Control freaks come in a great variety. There are those who are just blatant control freaks who are demanding and who are wielding fear-based administration and whose behavior is intimidating and threatening, and so they are blatant controllers who would absolutely acknowledge that they are controllers and that they have to be, because unless they control, “Everyone’s just going to behave in ways that don’t serve me or serve my interests, so I’m going to make people behave the way I want them to behave.”

[00:10:25] Someone who is a happy dictator. By happy, I don’t mean that they don’t actually have baseline happiness, but they are content in the fact that they are a dictator and they are self acknowledged. They are fewer in number.

The Loving Controller

[00:10:41] The other kind of control freak is what I refer to as the loving controller. A loving controller is somebody who will tell you that, “Yes. I admit that I am, manipulating you or manipulating your experience by various means, through a system of graded rewards or graded punishments, but I’m doing it for your own good. I’m doing it because it’s good for you. To conform to my way of thinking and to what it is. The ways I need you to behave.”

[00:11:17] And so this is still the behavior that’s coming out of an externalized locus of control, the need to control the world around oneself.

[00:11:26] ” I need to feel good about what I’ve done, and so I have to make sure that everybody around me behaves in ways that suit me and meet my approval, and even if I secretly and quietly manipulate and influence people, it doesn’t matter because it’s for their own good. I’m a loving controller.”

[00:11:45] So loving controllers use various kinds of techniques to mask their very apparent activity of making things happen the way they want to happen, because of their own internal sense of the need for the outside world to behave in certain ways so they can feel okay.

The Element Of Suggestibility

[00:12:06] And, in general, we can now look at the element of suggestibility. Those who are field dependent, those who have an externalized locus of control, are also more suggestible, much more suggestible. They’ve already adopted the idea that they’re not responsible for what they’re experiencing, but that the world is responsible for what they’re experiencing.

[00:12:34] Their behavior is going to be a behavior of controlling the world because they need to have appropriate influences. They’ve sold themselves the idea that certain things will make them happy, other things will make them unhappy, and so they have to make sure they get conformity one way or the other, either through brute force, in the case of an acknowledged dictator, or through sneaky behaviors in the case of a loving controller.

[00:13:03] They’re still convinced that they can’t be made happy unless the world is conforming. These are people who also suffer, in the case of an absolute dictator, more quietly and suppressed, in the case of a loving controller, a little more evident, they suffer from having questioning what it is they’re doing, and is it right?

[00:13:26] “Is it right for me to be doing this all the time, to be manipulating people and controlling people and trying to make them behave in certain ways that suit me or which I can look at it and say, ‘Oh, they achieved this and they achieved that. That was me that did that. I got them to do that. They’re taking credit and that’s okay but it was actually me.'” Loving controller.

The Field-Independent Person

[00:13:45] The field-independent person, they’re experiencing what they need to experience from inside. Their resources are within. They derive their happiness from a deep inner sense of self.

[00:13:59] Perhaps they practice Vedic Meditation twice every day. 20 minutes is the amount of time we suggest. And on a regular basis, they go deep into their consciousness and experience that unbounded inner supreme contentedness. Saturated with that, they come out to the world. If the world is able to behave according to ways that resonate with that person’s way of consciousness, then that’s okay.

[00:14:28] ” If the world is not able to behave in those ways, then, well, maybe it will later and we’ll see. Nobody can behave except according to their state of consciousness,” thinks the person who has an internalized locus of control and who is field independent.

Suggestibility and Influences of the Outside World

[00:14:47] Suggestibility is at the root of almost all of the social dysfunction that we see. Sometimes people will claim, “Well, I’m not suggestible,” and yet the advertising world knows the opposite. The advertising world spends billions of dollars because it’s been demonstrated that you can successfully manipulate the behavior of potential buyers by cajoling them, frightening them or attracting them into certain buying patterns.

[00:15:23] And it relies upon that element of society, which is the more suggestible element of society. Those people who are more suggestible don’t realize it, but when they read an advertisement on the back of a bus as they are going from one place to the next, that advertisement has in fact influenced what they’re going to watch on television or what they’re going to buy, or which particular product they consider to be reliable.

[00:15:49] And suggestibility is the giving away of oneself to the influences of the outside world.

[00:15:59] In order for hypnosis to occur, there has to be a certain critical mass of suggestibility in a subject, in a person. If a person doesn’t possess a certain amount of hypnotizability, a certain amount of suggestibility, they simply cannot be hypnotized.

[00:16:19] It’s true to say that the greater the field independence of an experiencer, a person, the greater their internalized locus of control, the less hypnotizable they are, the less that they respond to suggestion. Suggestibility has to be at a certain saturation point in order for it to govern behavior.

Mass Suggestibility

[00:16:44] When we look at collective behavior, collective behaviors that, could be, in some cases, the agreement to support even heinous crimes. One of the favorite whipping posts, and we can use it just because it is a favorite is, the fact that, in Germany, during the pre-war period and the buildup of Adolf Hitler’s power base, he would speak to hundreds of thousands of people, and have them all cheering him on, and have them all goosestepping and have them all extending into the Heil Hitler salute, and so on and so forth.

[00:17:26] People who later on after the war regretted their own behaviors, or even dismissed them and said, ” He made us do it. It wasn’t us. He made us do it,” but nothing like what happened in Germany and in the countries that it gobbled up in the pre-war period, nothing like that could have happened without mass and collective suggestibility.

[00:17:50] And so we see mass suggestibility, an entire collective, able to be manipulated into behaviors which even they themselves, at a later date, look back upon and regret. Not that we have to regret in order for suggestibility to have occurred. Suggestibility is in fact, a social phenomenon and it basically shows a weak-minded population, weak minded at the time. Not that they’re perpetually weak, but at the time of being suggestible, there’s weakness. Weakness in this sense means, the lack of inner strength of knowing my own inner-self.

Being: The Fountainhead Of Creative Intelligence

[00:18:32] What is that inner-self? The Vedic worldview asserts that deep inside of every human is an unbounded field of consciousness. We call it Being.

[00:18:44] Being is the fountainhead of creative intelligence. It is the source of thought. The Vedic worldview takes it even further than that. It says that, one’s individual experience of that least excited state, that baseline of being is in fact, the baseline of being of the entire universe, that if you go deep inside yourself and you step beyond thought, that what you are becoming for a moment, what you’re identifying with, what you’re experiencing is the baseline of the Unified Field of consciousness itself, which is permeating the entire universe.

[00:19:27] It is the baseline out of which all the laws of Nature emerge. For the individual is the baseline out of which all thoughts emerge. When one settles down into that transcendent state during meditation, and experiences oneness with that state, even for a few seconds, then what happens is the individuality becomes aligned with universal cosmic intelligence.

[00:19:55] That intelligence that is at the baseline of the whole evolutionary process by which everything is subject to one cosmic law, evolve, grow, become more sophisticated day by day, move in the direction of elegant consciousness, move in the direction of ever-increasing complexity in a sophisticated fashion being unified inside of one indivisible whole consciousness.

The Cause of the Evolutionary Process

[00:20:28] And so what is it that causes the evolutionary process? It is that baseline of cosmic law that states that everything needs to expand, everything needs to grow, everything needs to become more and more capable. As we settle down in meditation into that state and touch on that state, one of the products of that that has been measured is that when we come out of our 20 minutes of meditation, and once again, go back into the world, we are less suggestible.

[00:21:02] The mind starts to move in the direction of greater and greater field independence and becomes less and less field dependent. The locus of control becomes more and more internalized and less and less externalized. One starts to be able to realize that, “I am the source of my own happiness,” or “If I’ve made myself unhappy, I’m the source of my own unhappiness.”

[00:21:32] One tends less to look for scapegoats for explaining why it is I’m experiencing what I’m experiencing, one begins to acknowledge with greater and greater frequency, that “I’m the source of my own experience and I acknowledge that,” but with even greater importance, being able to adjust the state of consciousness so that it is more productive, more capable, more creative, more inventive, more innovative, and has in it a greater and greater capacity for making itself relevant to the need of the time.

Hypnotizability and Suggestion

[00:22:11] And so hypnotizability, is Vedic Meditation a hypnosis technique? Well, if it were, you would make the assumption that people who practice it are going to become more and more suggestible.

[00:22:24] A suggestion is a very interesting concept. Sometimes people will say, “Surely hypnosis is a valuable thing?” Well, we have to ask a few basic ethical questions.

[00:22:35] If I am suggestible and I want a change of behavior then who is it who is deciding which change of behavior is the one which is in fact, going to make me the most productive and evolutionary being or citizen? Perhaps I hypnotize myself to not make sexist statements anymore, and as a result of that, I don’t make sexist statements, but as a result of that, also I have given over my individuality to a concept that didn’t come spontaneously from inside me.

[00:23:15] And so when the next suggestion comes along, which is, do the opposite of that, the same gullibility, that’s the cruel word for suggestibility, the same suggestibility, the same availability of being field dependent is going to cause me to switch my behaviors and begin behaving in ways that are utterly different to the way that I’d previously had suggested to me.

Self-Hypnosis

[00:23:42] Self-hypnosis, ” I want to begin feeling like a rich person. I’m wealthy, I’m wealthy. I deserve, I deserve. I’ll write myself a check for a million dollars and stick it up on my mirror and everyday I’ll look at that and think this is what I deserve, this is what I want,” and so on.

[00:23:58] But the real question is are you expanding your baseline of consciousness that gives you the capacity to take in a vast variety of inputs that will make you someone who is an exemplar of change, a change agent, someone who spontaneously is changing from within, someone who is making themselves more and more relevant to the need of the time?

[00:24:24] Whether or not you get a million is not that important. In fact, it’s a very convenient idea that if you had more money, you’d just be a better person all around than somebody who has less money. Or if you had a great relationship that you’d be a better person all around than someone who didn’t have that same great relationship. Or if you were more attractive to others that somehow that’s going to make you a better person than someone who is less attractive to others.

Creating Psyche On The Basis Of Suggestibility

[00:24:56] And so all of these concepts about, “I’m going to make myself better by suggesting something to myself.” It really amounts to, “I’m willing to take something I know is not true right now and I’m going to cause my psyche, based on its suggestibility, I’m going to cause my psyche to adopt this idea that I know is not true, and I want my psyche to begin believing that it is true.”

[00:25:25] And of course it works. It works but, is it in fact, the best thing for you to be rigidly attached to a particular view that has come from the outside or come from some relatively shallow examination of what it is you should be experiencing?

[00:25:45] In Vedic Meditation, we do not agree with the philosophy that there is one way that you should behave that is always the evolutionary way. In fact, evolution will demand of us a vast variety of behaviors and different individuals will have their own unique combination of behaviors, experiences, thoughts, creativity, and overall state of consciousness that will be the most productive contribution they can make to the group effort of having an evolving society.

Suggestibility and Terrible Behaviors

[00:26:24] So in Vedic Meditation, we don’t agree with the ideas of hypnosis. Hypnosis relies upon a concept, an ethical structure, about what it is that it’s good to be hypnotized to do, what it is that it’s good to be hypnotized not to do.

[00:26:43] So, when we look at what it is that causes people to engage in terrible behaviors, what we’re looking at is their ability to have terrible behavior suggested to them. There’s certainly almost nobody who has smoked a cigarette, for example, because when they first smoked a cigarette, it tasted really fantastic, and they’d found the elixir to life.

[00:27:12] Generally, some young person who smokes a cigarette for the first time is doing so, because they’re convinced that it really looks cool and that it’s a kind of a cool thing to do and that if they continue to violate the preferences of their mouth, their throat and their lungs, which caused them to cough and splutter each time they draw in the tobacco smoke, that eventually they’re going to love it, and of course, that’s true.

[00:27:41] They do because they become addicted, but they’re not doing it because in the first instance, it’s just the most absolutely wonderful tactile and fragrant experience. It’s absolutely shocking to everybody who’s ever done it for the first time. But then you get to hang out with the people who do it, and there’s different ways of smoking that look really cool. There’s different brands you can buy that look really cool.

Hypnosis for Addiction

[00:28:07] And of course, once addiction takes over, then one is made choiceless about the phenomenology of smoking and, you can continue to smoke even if you see images of what happens when people die of tobacco and nicotine addiction. Irrespective of what it’s doing, one is addicted to the entire process.

[00:28:31] So supposing you could then become hypnotized not to smoke, supposing, and I’m just going to make this a very simple proposition, you could be hypnotized, “I don’t like smoke. I don’t like smoke. I don’t like cigarettes. I don’t like cigarettes. I don’t like the feeling. I don’t like the feeling,” and through repetition, and through various kinds of hypnotic and known techniques of suggestion, you could be hypnotized not to smoke. Is this a good thing?

[00:29:00] Well, you know, perhaps in the short term it is. But then what’s the next thought you’re going to have? “Well, I stopped smoking and now I hate cigarettes. So I believe…” actually your body loved the cigarettes once it was addicted to them but, “now I hate cigarettes. What else can I suggest to myself? Maybe I need a different kind of persona. Maybe I need a different kind of car. Maybe I need a different kind of behavior. Maybe I need certain assertive behaviors at work.” Well, do you really?

The Inexperienced Gardener

[00:29:31] On what basis are we making a decision about the ethics of what it is we suggest to ourselves next? And taking these individuals shots at our individual behaviors brings to mind a great analogy that was used by my master Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. And I’ll cite this analogy to you right now.

[00:29:55] There’s a tree and there’s an inexperienced gardener who’s been assigned to the tree and this vast tree has beautiful leaves, green leaves and produces beautiful flowers in season and then after the flowers, it produces great fruits.

[00:30:12] And the gardener who’s inexperienced, sees the tree and has the job of maintaining its health and harvesting the fruits and the flowers and whatnot. But to his great chagrin he notices that the leaves are beginning to get a little limp and turn brown. He notices that the flowers are not really blossoming the way they should. He notices that the fruits are getting a little lacklustre and a bit shrivelled.

Fixing the Symptoms

[00:30:41] And so in his ignorance, he climbs into the tree with his ladder and with him he has a bits of equipment. He has some green paint for painting the leaves green because leaves are supposed to be green on a tree. And the leaves that are remaining on the tree should be green, so let’s just paint them green.

[00:31:01] Fruits should be plump. They’re not plump, but maybe we can inject them with a syringe of fruit plump in there, and make those fruits a little more plump and fruity. Maybe we can use a bit of paint on them, too.

[00:31:16] What about the flowers? Well, the flowers seemed to be falling away, but you can always buy flowers from the florist shop and take them up there and tape them on or staple them in place. Now there may be a hundred thousand leaves on this tree. And so you’re going to have to be up in the tree, addressing each individual leaf, painting it green and plumping up the fruits and trying to fix the flowers and all of that.

The Role of Vedic Meditation

[00:31:42] But actually the experienced gardener knows something. If you take a bucket of water and began watering the root of the tree, the root is transcendent to view, it is under the ground, watering the root of the tree spontaneously, one action will cause the entire tree to begin to flourish. The green will become greener by itself without any painting.

[00:32:08] All the leaves simultaneously will become greener and fresher without having to address individual leaves one at a time. The fruit spontaneously will become plumper and more juicy. The flowers will be more florid and, everything about the tree will become very delightful.

[00:32:26] One action, going to the transcendent root of the tree, nourishing the colorless sap from within the tree, causes the entire tree to flourish.

[00:32:37] This is the analogy that depicts the role of Vedic Meditation.

Experiencing The Inner Potentiality

[00:32:42] Instead of racing around trying to address, “What am I thinking? How should I think differently? Let me hypnotize myself to think differently. What am I eating? I should be eating this. I don’t feel like eating it, but I’m going to make myself like it and, see what happens.”

[00:32:56] Rather than making all these individual decisions about this aspect of life and that aspect of life and compartmentalizing everything and having to deal one at a time with each one of these things, through one action, which is actually a non-action, by closing one’s eyes and settling into the state that’s beyond action, settling into the state that is beyond thought, experiencing Being, one awakens the inner potentiality of life, that inner connectedness with the totality of all the laws of Nature and brings that into one’s individual experience.

[00:33:37] It’s not an indoctrination process. It’s not a process of going into that meditation state with a specific desire. People will often say to me, ” If I want to be wealthy, could I go into meditation and request wealth and get more wealth?” And I just laugh. “No, that’s not what we do.” We can’t go into meditation wanting to make a bad thing happen to somebody who we feel vengeful about. Or go into meditation, wanting to hoard a larger amount of the community’s resources as money.

[00:34:13] We can’t go into meditation, desiring a thing. That’s our individuality attempting to run the show. Our individuality attempting to run the show is what has caused us to ignore and violate all the laws of Nature before and has brought about all of our greatest problems, because our individuality in fact can’t be credited with knowing everything we should be experiencing at a given time.

Becoming More Ideal Citizens

[00:34:43] And so we need to learn transcendence. How to step beyond our individuality and have that experience of uniting our awareness with that one indivisible whole place. That’s a place beyond thought, beyond suggestion, beyond desire, to experience that one indivisible wholeness as our baseline, awaken that inside of ourselves.

[00:35:08] When we do that, what happens is our internal locus of control become stronger. Our field independence becomes stronger. We become more self-sufficient. We become less reliant upon the world out there and the variety of experiences that it might produce for us or not, to be our sources of happiness or, in the case of things not suiting you, to be our sources of unhappiness.

[00:35:36] So we start to become more ideal citizens in the sense of being that self-sufficiency. That self-sufficiency begins to determine our inner character. And when self-sufficiency determines the inner character of a larger percentage of people, this creates social change.

[00:35:58] Social change is not going to be based upon getting people to do things, making people do things because they’re afraid of repercussions or getting people to do things because, they are guilted into doing them, but they can’t come up with those thoughts regularly themselves and they rely upon others to come up with those thoughts for them.

Creating Social Change

[00:36:21] We cannot create sustained social change through anything except expanding the immunity to suggestibility, from within, by strengthening inner consciousness by strengthening field independence, by strengthening the internal locus, by giving the deep inner self that plays that Unified Field value precedence in our life.

[00:36:47] We end up creating a life that is free from suffering. And we end up not having to ask others to adapt for us or others to think for us. We end up being able to be a self-sufficient citizen whose access to happiness is deep, beyond the control of others, and is being driven from that deep inner place, which is the Unified Field of all the laws of Nature.

[00:37:16] This is the whole concept that we’re wanting to popularize in the world, enough that at least 1% of the world’s population would look at it and say, I’ll take an interest in that. Let me try it out and see if it works for me. And this is our great hope. This is what we’re trying to provide. This is our information base and our offer to a world that is deeply engaged today in the deepest darkest kind of suffering possible. Let’s have that, that hope fulfilled.

[00:37:52] And again, as I’ve stated in other episodes, we don’t require a hundred percent of the people to practice Vedic Meditation. A small number, a tiny percentage, 1% or so, will be enough to create the social change that’s required to steer the whole of society away from collective violation of laws of Nature.

Buckminster Fuller and the Analogy of the Trim Tab

[00:38:18] There is a wonderful analogy that was used by another contact and friend of mine, who was a devotee of my teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and this famous person’s name was Buckminster Fuller and Bucky, as people who knew him well called him, I was fortunate enough to be one of those, sat on several occasions in the waiting room to see Maharishi, back in the 1970s when I was, one of those people who also sat in those waiting rooms and he gave me a wonderful analogy for the effect that a few people can have on the many.

[00:38:58] And the analogy is that of the trim tab. A trim tab is a term given by maritime engineers to a small rudder, a tab, a small rudder that runs the length, the vertical length of the rudder of a large ship, very large ships, big tankers, for example, when they’re moving through the ocean water are something akin to being a skyscraper lying on its side, sitting in the water, and the amount of water that they’re sitting in, and water when is moving around those ships, when they’re propelled through the water, the water causes an effect that the ship is almost as if set in concrete.

[00:39:45] To get that ship to change direction or to steer it, requires a level of hydraulics into a rudder that has not yet been devised or invented by humans. So no amount of hydraulics are able to cause a rudder to move in that moving water with the ship as big as that ahead of it being propelled by those giant propellers. And so maritime engineers came up with another idea.

[00:40:16] They took the main rudder of the ship and on the trailing edge of it, they affixed a smaller rudder, a tiny little trim tab that runs the length, the vertical length of the main rudder.

[00:40:28] If you turn the steering mechanism on the ship, it simply turns the trim tab. The trim tab, it being very small, relative to the main rudder, pushes the main rudder in the correct direction that hydraulics wouldn’t be able to do, and that rudder then pushes the entire ship and causes this massive ship to steer.

The Consciousness-Spreader Effect

[00:40:51] Buckminster Fuller’s idea was that it doesn’t take a massive number of people to meditate in order to create social change. It takes the equivalent of a trim tab. The few who lead the many.

[00:41:07] That the few who practice meditation, and hopefully you listeners will be among those, the few who practice Vedic Meditation will cause an effect on everybody that they meet, everyone with, whom they come in contact, plus there is a consciousness-spreader effect that will cause people to become less suggestible and less hypnotizable.

[00:41:30] Collectively that then will steer entire societies away from negative behaviors and into those behaviors that are mutually progressive and evolutionary and helpful. And so it’s not through proselytizing, it’s not through taking this knowledge and trying to convince people of it, that’s just hypnotic. It is through a few people, practicing the technique on a regular basis and creating the ground for collective change.

[00:42:04] Thank you very much for listening.

[00:42:06] Jai Guru Deva.