Boundaries vs Boundlessness: From Repetitive Thinking to True Freedom

Boundaries vs Boundlessness: From Repetitive Thinking to True Freedom

[00:45] The Problem With Sharp Boundaries

We need to look at the subject of boundaries versus boundlessness. And boundlessness sounds so lovely when you’ve been living life inside of sharp boundaries.

Let’s look at the boundaries of the need for everyday routine work, where you rise in the morning, and there are sets of tasks through which you have to progress, starting with what’s your little routine for, getting your feet on the floor, out of the bed? What do you do next? You walk to the bathroom and freshen up in some way or another.

And there’s routines that you have to participate in before you can walk out the door of your home, if indeed you ever walk out the door of your home, before you begin interacting with the world that expects something of you. And the world is constantly expecting things of you. And one of the ways that we deal with these expectations is to have routines in place.

So we have to have certain routines. There are certain things that we allow ourselves to engage in, and there are other things that we don’t allow ourselves to engage in. It’s all about time. What is the right time for sitting down and watching streaming television? For most people, that’s not 9:30am because the world is saying, “How are you going to make yourself relevant to the demand for progress that’s all around you. What are you doing that’s going to make it possible for you to continue to enjoy your lifestyle? How are you making yourself relevant to the demand that’s all around you?”

And the answer to that question is, “I have a set of routines. I have a set of routines. I have boundaries. I have certain things I do at certain times of the day, and I don’t do absolutely everything at any time of the day.” And so routines are boundaries.

But then if we live our life according only to routines, then we don’t have any unboundedness. We don’t have any freedom in which we can explore getting outside the boundaries of routine. So what do we do about that? We have, first of all, to look at the classic approaches to getting a little bit of unboundedness going. “I’ll go on a holiday,” says somebody, “I’ll go on a vacation.” Americans call it a vacation. Everybody else calls it a holiday. “I’ll go away and do something completely different.” And how different will that be?

And so if we go off on our vacation, we rise in the morning and we think to ourselves, “Alright, well, maybe I won’t brush my teeth today.” That’s going to be a little uncomfortable. By about lunchtime, you’re going to feel a little bit furry on the teeth and wonder why you opted not to brush them.

“So maybe I’ll keep the tooth brushing involved here. Maybe I’ll… maybe there’s certain things I will do that are part of my home routine, even though here I am the island of Vatulele in Fiji. I’ll still brush my teeth, I’ll still do this, I’ll still do that.” So that there got to be other things that I do that are not part of my daily routine in order for me to engage in the freedom of boundlessness, I’m getting outside the boundaries now.

[04:19] Why Classic Approaches To Freedom Fail

And most of these things are a bit of a failure. This is what people report who, they go away for a vacation and they come back and you say, “What did you experience?” And they go, “Well, it was kind of all just the same, really, except I was in a different place. I just went to a different place and did all the same things and spent all my money. I probably could have had a staycation and stayed home, but we wanted to get outside the boundaries.”

There’s only one place where we can actually get outside the boundaries, and that is to sit down, close our eyes, and go beyond the entire thinking process. Going beyond the entire thinking process is the absolute irregular, non-routine experience, where you can just experience something that is absolutely beyond the ordinary.

It’s a very interesting thing when we study cognitive neuroscience, which I did for a few years and was given a doctorate in that. Whether I deserved it or not, it’s another question. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I remembered a very important few facts, and one of those facts is that in studies on cognitive processes, and that’s, you know, a fancy word for thoughts. You have a thought, you have a memory, you have a desire, you have a recognition, you have a sensation and a cognitive process. That means you think about that sensation. That we produce an enormous number of these cognitive processes, let’s just call them thoughts, in a given day.

And the number is astonishing, astonishingly high, ranging between 60,000 to 100,000 discrete thought events in a waking day for the average person. And by the way, if you have 100,000 cognitive processes or thoughts in a given day, it doesn’t mean you’re more intelligent. As well you know, you could have 100,000 very stupid thoughts in a day, or you could have 60,000 very genius thoughts, or the other way around.

You know, volume doesn’t necessarily equate with quality of thinking. The volume is a very interesting thing to contemplate, and it’s not really, when you consider it, not all that astonishing to look at what the sheer number of thoughts are that arise in a given day and come up with that large, large number.

[07:34] The Amazing Truth About Repetitive Thinking

What’s really amazing is in further analysis of the content of these thoughts, and studies have shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that upwards of 90% of all the thoughts you had yesterday are the same thoughts that you had today. 90% of the ever repeating known, the same thoughts. You might have those thoughts at your home in Chicago, and you go to Vatulele in Fiji and have those same thoughts while you’re waking up at the beach.

90% repetition of the known, and this ever-repeating known, these boundaries are dangerous to your evolution, and I’d like to explain to you why. Because the world around you is changing all the time, and that ever-changing world is going to make an evolutionary demand on you to come up with styles of thinking that are relevant to the change.

And if you continue thinking the same thoughts every day, virtually the same, like 90% is virtually the same, and yet the world around you is changing, the need of the time is changing, and yet you’re thinking the same way that you were thinking three years ago today, largely thinking the same way you were thinking three years ago. World has changed. You’re thinking the same way you were thinking three years ago.

You’ve met people who are like this. They tend to be the elders of our society who are thinking the same way today that they were thinking 50 years ago or 60 years ago, today’s thinking the same way. And what it does is it puts them in a category of being sociologically irrelevant people.

What do we do with sociologically-irrelevant people? We avoid them. Either that or we pander to them. You know, we go to the elderly person and we say, “Oh, I know you like these particular kinds of cookies, and you don’t ever like to hear anything about change. And I know you don’t like tattoos, so I’m going to cover up my tattoos, because back in your day, only criminals and sailors had tattoos. But that’s changed.”

You have to be, you have to tiptoe around them very carefully, because they’re stuck in 50 years ago, right? And what happens when we do not have the capacity for adapting to the force of change, the force of evolution, because our mind is continuously producing the same thoughts over and over and over and over again, we start to lose our capacity to be relevant to the process of evolution, and moving into irrelevancy is a grave danger for any member of any society.

[10:56] How To Break Free From Boundaries

So coming out of the boundaries. How do we come out of the boundaries? We have to learn how to stay conscious and go beyond thought, and that’s meditation, Vedic Meditation specifically. In our practice of Vedic Meditation, we sit comfortably in a chair. We have a technique that involves certain mechanisms that we explore and exploit that are part of the nature of the mind, and effortlessly, we step beyond the thinking process and we experience the source of thought, the place from which all the thoughts are coming.

When the mind does that, it has reached its least-excited state, and that least-excited state translates as a least-excited body. The body in its least-excited state is resting with unprecedented restfulness, that deep and profound restfulness allows the body to trigger its own inbuilt self-repair mechanisms. It begins to scavenge the old neurochemicals, biological chemicals that are left over from maladaptive responses, that’s stress reactions of the past.

Instead of a body that is constantly generating irrelevant boundaries of behavior, irrelevant capabilities and old styles of thinking and repetitive thinking, the body itself begins to clean itself up and to become a body which is fresh and capable of renewed responses, renewed reactivity, renewed responsiveness, adaptive capability.

And so the experience of unboundedness has the effect, basically, of laundering the nervous system of all the stress chemicals that reinforce repetitive thinking. Repetitive thinking styles is one of the plagues that comes from accumulated stress. Having no mercy, from no ability to move away from daily stress accumulation

Without the practice of Vedic Meditation, it is inevitable that anyone will wake up every day with more stress than they had in their body the previous day. And as this ossifying effect, this effect of paralyzing the nervous system, causes the brain to keep on generating the same old, the same old, the same old, day after day after day after day. This is boundaries.

And so then we have to add into our routines, the routines that we have, brushing the teeth, then getting into some water and bathing the skin, and eating degrees of nourishing food at various times of the day and hydrating our bodies. These habits and routines, we have to add another routine, and that routine is the routine of stepping beyond boundaries, stepping into the unboundedness.

And the unboundedness gives us the capacity for a refreshing and renewing response, capability to make ourselves relevant to the need of the time. Need of the time is constantly changing. What is the world requiring of you right now? And if you have the capacity of adaptive behavior, if you have an ever-evolving nervous system, you are going to meet the need of the time in such a way that is relevant. You’re going to have the capacity to generate adaptive behavior.

[15:10] Making Unboundedness A Daily Routine

If you don’t meet the need of the time, you’re going to descend into an ever-increasing irrelevancy. Ossified behavior means behavior where you become petrified into certain kinds of reactions and responses and so on, which are out-of-date, obsolete behaviors.

So to avoid obsolescence, we have to introduce unboundedness into our life. And you can’t get unboundedness by going to Vatulele, and hanging out on a beach in Fiji. There’s a certain degree of, “Oh, that’s different to staring at my computer screen inside my little cubicle here at my job at the insurance company. At least I’m on a beach in Fiji, fantastic.”

But you’re going to be bound by the same 90% of the thoughts you had yesterday, you’re going to have today, except you’re having them on the beach in Fiji. The same reactions, the same thoughts, the same fears, the same concerns, the same unfulfilled desires, the same whatever, it’s just you’ve transported it all to a different environment.

So to really break the boundaries, we have to have a technique that takes us beyond thought. And interestingly, practicing Vedic Meditation is ridiculously simple. You find the local teacher, very easy to do by going to my website, who is authorized to teach you Vedic Meditation. You learn the technique and then you just introduce it into your daily routines. You turn the unboundedness into a routine. You take unboundedness into the boundaries and experience it on a regular basis.

As you continue to experience it again and again, you’re peeling away the layer after layer after layer of the ever-repeating known, and you are truly becoming a totally refreshed individual who has a set of refreshed responses at the ready anytime the environment demands that of you.

So unboundedness is a very, very important thing to introduce into our daily routines. And in Vedic Meditation, it’s interesting that we actually make a routine out of unboundedness. We make a routine out of it. Every morning, sometime before the day begins, we sit quietly and let our consciousness expand into complete unboundedness.

This is restoration of homeostasis. Homeostasis is a word we use in medicine for restoration of the entire repertoire of the human physiology and brain. That happens during meditation, 20 minutes, and then you come out of the meditation and engage.

And now you’re engaging in a way where you’ve been liberated from the ever-repeating known. Some elements of that which already you know are still valuable, but you’re not stuck, you’re not bound by irrelevant behaviors. And then late afternoon, early evening, the effect of that morning meditation wears off, and it’s time to sit in the chair and once again, experience unboundedness. And you then come out of that meditation session, 20 minutes, and engage in your evening activity now completely refreshed.

It’s like you’ve, a thing that you do on your computer or on your phone, you press the factory-reset button where everything goes back to the factory settings. That’s what meditation is. The equivalent of taking your whole brain and body back to the factory settings,. Complete capability, all possibilities, and then engage. And so unboundedness and boundaries.

[19:17] The Goal Is Not Permanent Meditation

Living a life inside of unboundedness alone is not the goal of Vedic Meditation. People have this idea that, “Oh, in meditation, you’re going to go off into a cave and do your fingers like this and sit around singing Om all day and everything, and that’s going to be your life of unboundedness.” That’s not what Vedic Meditation or the Vedic worldview advocates.

You have doses, a dose of unboundedness in the morning for 20 minutes, and a second dose of it in the afternoon or early evening for 20 minutes, and then you spend the rest of your time engaging, taking that unboundedness into the boundaries and refreshing your interaction with boundaries through regular activity, making yourself relevant to the need of the time. So that’s my talk on boundaries and boundlessness. Very important thing to understand

[20:11] Q – How do we show up differently in relationships as we expand consciousness?

The topic of boundaries, I hear all the time, especially as you know, like a mother, and as we’re expanding our consciousness with twice-daily meditations, we often see changes within relationships on expectations of how we show up. So what would your spin be on how we’re going to show up differently for a boss, or boundaries in that regard, as far as like when your kid is very demanding of you, or different relationships like that?

[20:45] A – Meeting The Conscious Receptivity Of Others

Yeah, we have to be capable of being the right parent or the right employee or the right business person if we’re interacting with customers or whatever, according to the need of the time. And nimbleness and agility are an inbuilt capacity that we have, but they tend to become restricted when stress forces us into repetitive behaviors, repetitive reactivity.

We’re not able to take into account the full spectrum of the actual need of the child or the actual need of the employer, or the actual need of the moment. And so then that capacity to properly assess what’s needed here, and part of this is going to be then our capacity accurately to assess the conscious receptivity of the moment.

“I said the right things to my child.” I hear this from so many people. “I said all the right things, and they went off and did this thing anyway.” It’s not a question of whether or not you said the right things. It’s a question of whether or not you met the conscious receptivity with that child. And so they have a certain degree of conscious receptivity. If you don’t meet their conscious receptivity, you fail to make yourself relevant no matter how beautifully you phrased a thing.

So you might have a beautiful way of phrasing it, but if it doesn’t meet that child’s conscious receptivity, it means nothing to the child. And so then, how do we meet the conscious receptivity and get maximum traction in that moment? Now that might be a similar thing we would say about working with a co worker, or working with a supervisor at work, or whatever, or working with customers or clients at work.

Are we actually able and capable of assessing accurately conscious receptivity? Because no matter how well you think you’re behaving, if your behavior is formulaic, you think you’re saying something that’s really brilliant and genius, but the dummy over there, the kid or the employer or the customer or whoever it is, just doesn’t get it, and you go home frustrated because you said all the right things, you did all the right things, you were the ideal person. The bad news is you weren’t the ideal person, because the ideal person is the one who can assess accurately how much this person can receive, how much they can receive in that given moment.

[24:48] The Illusion Of Control In Relationships

And we can’t control conscious receptivity of another. The idea that I’ll control them into being more receptive is a complete illusion. One of the tenets of Vedic worldview is that control is opposed to evolution.

So controlling somebody is an illusion, because even if we use considerable force or surprise attack or all kinds of little tactics that we might have to get compliance from somebody, it’s an illusion, because the moment they’re out of your sight, they’re going to revert back to their state of consciousness and do exactly what their state of consciousness tells them to do.

And so the illusion of compliance is only while you’re watching. And this is the illusion of control. “I have a sense that I controlled them into behaving the way that I want. I want to get compliance out of them.” Well, it only worked to the extent that you actually met their conscious receptivity. Doesn’t work beyond that.

And so it’s incumbent on us then to be really capable of simply intuitively assessing conscious receptivity. If we don’t get that right, we’re not going to get anything right. How geniusly you put a thing, how much you pleased yourself by how genius you were in phrasing a thing, doing a thing or not doing a thing, whatever it might be, if you missed that little thing of the conscious receptivity of another, you missed the whole thing. You’ve not behaved in a way that’s relevant to the actual need of the time.

So how do we get that, that capacity to interact with whatever degree of conscious receptivity is there? For that, we have to have that broad consciousness whereby we can sense from within the other. This is that word empathy, which people frequently conflate with the word sympathy. It’s not sympathy at all. It’s the raw capacity to sense what the other person is experiencing and to actually have an interest in what they’re experiencing.

So frequently, we have our own agenda. “I’m going to say the right thing, I’m going to set a boundary, I’m going to talk about what I’m going to do. I’m going to make sure that they know what they can expect of me and what they can’t expect of me, what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.” It’s all me, me, me, and we have almost zero interest in discovering what the other person’s experiencing.

If we have zero interest in it, and if we have very little capacity to assess their conscious receptivity, it doesn’t matter how masterfully you state things, you failed, because they’ll walk away from there and they’ll simply do what their state of consciousness dictates to them. There’s been no change.

And so this I hear all the time, people coming to me in my consulting rooms and going, “I said, all the right things I did all the right things. I stated the case, I made it clear. I even wrote it. They even signed at the bottom and said they agree, and then they went ahead and did all these things that they were going to do anyway. And what kind of world is this?”

Well, it’s the world that you didn’t actually react, you didn’t respond relevantly to, that’s the world. You failed to respond in a relevant fashion because you failed to meet the conscious receptivity.

So having that ability for Unity Consciousness, to be able to sense, “What’s the conscious receptivity here? And let me engage that.” That’s all there is, that’s all there is.

And it may be that you had an entire speech prepared that was going to take you five minutes to deliver, but actually there was three words that you spoke that they were going to pick up, and no more than that, we have to be happy to work with the increments that we’re working with.

The idea that we can overpower somebody and get compliance is a very out-of-date idea and has been proven wrong. Any follow up from where you got compliance by fear-based administration, or you got compliance by being super assertive. In a follow up of that, that compliance only lasts while the person who’s afraid of you is in the room. The moment they leave the room, or you leave the room, there’s no compliance anymore. So the idea that you felt like, “I checked that box…”

So being able to detect conscious receptivity is the gift, and we all have it, but we have to learn how to explore it and make it work. And for that, we have to experience that deep inner consciousness that we have, which, according to the Vedic worldview, is also the underlying field of their consciousness.

[29:19] Using The Inner-net For True Connection

You can feel from within you. I call this the inner-net. Use the inner-net. I-N-N-E-R, inner-net. Get it? This is the consciousness field that is in you is also in them. And from that, you can experience what they’re experiencing, and you can get done what’s possible to get done through empathy, through being able to experience what they’re experiencing.

Maybe they’re hoping for boundaries and discipline. Maybe they’re only hoping for you to listen, and more than that they’re not going to do. Maybe their capability is X, Y, Z. Maybe their capability is from A all the way to Z, but we’re not going to know unless we can explore from within the subject with whom we’re interacting.

And that’s where effective communing, which is communication, effective communing, can happen. It can only happen there in that consciousness, experiencing consciousness, that reality. And so having a big plan about what you’re going to say, having a big plan about what boundaries you’re going to set, having a big plan about how you’re really going to get their attention this time. So frequently we find failure in that, and that’s because of a failure to skillfully interact. We might be talking, but we may not be interacting, so we need to learn how to interact.

This is a gift that comes from just regular practice of Vedic meditation, the capacity to get that right. .

[31:14] Q – How do you explain boundaries in toxic relationships?

Beautiful, thank you. One tiny nuance, because even the word boundary doesn’t sit well, I think, in the Vedic Meditation context. So we’re talking say, soma bandit, narcissist, something, some guilt exchange relationship that you have where it’s clear that you’ve outgrown it, and we’re hearing the word, “Oh, set boundaries.” How would you explain what a boundary is in a scenario like that?

[31:42] A – Sharing Accurate Expectations With Others

I would explain it as you understanding what they’re capable of, and them having at least a degree of understanding of what they can expect from you. So it’s the sharing of accurate expectations. So getting expectations accurate.

There’s a fundamental tenet here, which is that all suffering emerges from inaccurate expectations. Anytime you suffer, if you trace the suffering back to its source, there’s an inaccurate expectation somewhere. Somewhere somebody was expecting something that wasn’t actually accurate, and so then getting those things accurate, and then developing an understanding whereby both parties, or all parties, there might not just be two, there might be many, have a sense of accurate expectation. Then when we have accurate expectation, we minimize suffering.

[32:54] Q – What about when there’s resistance to clear expectations?

This is just a bit of a follow up from Jill’s question, what about when there’s a clear call to action to, as you beautifully put it, set expectations for all parties involved, there is an accurate evaluation of conscious receptivity from the other person, but there is something that is still making that expectation difficult. There’s a clear call to action, but there’s some resistance to fulfill that call to action…

[33:29] A – When To Use Dhanurveda Principles

That’s when we have to start studying Dhanurveda. Dhanurveda, D-H-A-N-U-R veda is one of the four aspects of the Veda that deals with warfare. How to how to make a point in appointed fashion, where all other adaptive responses have failed.

And warfare doesn’t necessarily mean To kill somebody or harm their physiology. There are ways of becoming pointed. I mean, my master exercised this on me frequently. I’d be rabbiting on about something that was irrelevant, and he would just hold his hand up and say, “Stop talking.” Because of my relationship with him, in which I had such enormous respect for him, I would immediately stop. But that was Dhanurveda. Stop talking, or his other favorite, which was not much of a variation, was, “Don’t talk.” It would stop me in my tracks.

Now, we may not be able to use that kind of powerful acts in every situation, but we can start moving in that direction. And one of the ways we can move in the direction is to buy time. We can say something like, “I’ve heard you and you’ve heard me, and I don’t think we need to arrive at any conclusion right now. Let’s both of us sleep on it. Raise the subject again at another time tomorrow, or how’s Wednesday at three o’clock?”

What you’ve done is you’ve effectively brought an end to non productive communing. You’re communing, but it’s being non productive for the moment, and you’ve bought time. One of the mistakes most of us make is, “I have to clarify everything right now in this situation where we are here,” and in fact, you don’t, you can always buy time.

And I’ve frequently found somebody who really obviously got what it was I was saying and adjusting their expectations, but they gave me pushback and wanted things to go a particular way, and wanting to know right now what my decision was, and I found myself saying, “I’m not going to give you my reaction right now. I want to give you my considered response. I’ll have my considered response by about this time tomorrow. Let’s talk again,” and then you end it, you know, like that.

Saying to somebody that you’re not going to give a reaction right now, but you’d like to give them your considered response, and then a gentler way of putting it is, “Let’s both sleep on it.” What a fantastic thing to say, “Let’s sleep on it.” It’s very kind, very giving. But if you have a more masterful relationship with the person, you can just say, “Don’t talk.”

And I’ve used that. I have private consultations with people, and I want them to get the most out of their hour with me. They have an hour. Sometimes they have more than an hour, but the situation is just the same, and I’ll hear them, they’ll start on a subject where all I’m hearing is rattling and rattling and rattling. And at a certain point, I’ll put my hand up like this, and I’ll just say, “I just want to let you know something.” And they’ll go, “Oh, what’s that?” And I say, “I’m waiting for you to stop talking, because I want you to get maximum value from this session, and you’ve been talking now for 18 minutes and so I’m waiting. I just wanted you to know I’m waiting for you to stop talking.”

And it is almost as good as don’t talk, but a little kinder. It’s just a little more kind, because they don’t yet have that master-disciple relationship with me. Maharishi, could my teacher, Maharishi could say to me, don’t talk or stop talking, and I was okay. I loved it, actually, because I knew that relevant behavior was just about to, I was about to get some really relevant information.

But there’s a, you know, there are a variety of gentle ways with ever increasing force. So we put all this under the heading of Dhanurveda. Dhanurveda is all about supreme political science and what to do in case it doesn’t work. Yeah, it’s an entire subject.