The Relationship Between Buddhism and the Vedic Worldview – Part Two – Questions Arising

The Relationship Between Buddhism and the Vedic Worldview – Part Two – Questions Arising

[00:45] Q – How Does the Worldview of a Buddhist Affect How They Engage in the World vs a Vedantist?

Welcome back to the Vedic Worldview. This episode is a questions arising episode where listeners pose questions to Thom arising from the previous episode. If you haven’t yet listened or watched that episode, we encourage you to do so before listening or watching this one.

You’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes or description attached to this one. Jai Guru Deva.

We observe many Buddhists who seem deep in their practice and their study, quite stoic and quiet and reserved. Could you talk about the implications of holding a worldview of anatma and what implications that worldview would have on how an individual engages in everyday life, versus how a sanatani who experiences that lively Beingness would approach their everyday life and some differences in that.

[01:44] A – Proximity Effects Quieting the Ocean of Consciousness

See the thing is, if there’s no underlying field that… the Vedic worldview says when you transcend as you’re on your way in, you touch the surface, not the total deep Absolute of unmanifest.

You touch the surface of it and it creates a wave function that goes right through the field and affects all things. Of course, there’s a proximity. So very like models that Einstein used in his teaching in Princeton, if you take a pebble and you throw it out into a very quiet lake, then, you know, a pebble makes a little wave and it creates rings out, and those rings go right out across the placid lake and strike all of the little coves and everything in the lake.

But if prior to that you were to throw three or four giant boulders into the lake and create destructive interference, then when you throw a pebble into the middle of the lake, the rings only go out a certain distance and then stop because of the destructive interference of all of the other waves.

So we live in a field of consciousness where there’s a lot of destructive interference, hot wars, cold wars, angry people, kitchen arguments, all of it. It’s all happening all over the world all the time, a lot of stress in the collective. And so we have a proximity effect.

When we strike the Unified Field it creates a wave function, a proximity effect. We have an event horizon around us, but it gets eaten up eventually by the destructive interference of all the other consciousnesses that are making waves in the ocean of consciousness. And so if we have a larger number of individuals transcending, there is a greater and greater influence, all of the combined proximity effects end up having a greater quietening effect on the entire ocean of consciousness.

[03:58] Compassion Viewed Differently

This is our view and our way of looking at it. If there is nothing connecting anyone, then there’s only one thing left, and this is what my friend Dalai Lama said to me. He asks Tara, the goddess of Tibetan Buddhism, to forgive him and to grant him karuna. Karuna in Sanskrit means compassion, kindness, empathy with another human being.

He said, “We can’t influence anybody, except we can be kind, we can be empathetic, we can be compassionate.”

And I said, “So, what kind of things would make you do this?”

He said, “Well, I cried one night recently because I still have thoughts of what the Chinese Communist Party did to my people when they came into Tibet.” He said, “They did heinous things.” And by the way, we know some of those things. They forced monks to shoot each other. They forced people to commit all kinds of violent acts.

And he said, “My memory of that sometimes makes me angry with the Chinese, and I feel very guilty because I’m supposed to be a Buddhist and I should be completely compassionate. So I pray for Tara to help me think of those Chinese people who did that, that they were also just human beings like me, who happened to be indoctrinated in a way that was different to me, and it was their indoctrination that made them behave that way, that they thought they were doing good. And so I have to have compassion about that.”

And they said, “This is, from our perspective, this is the only solution for the world is for people to develop greater compassion.”

And I said, “Well, from our perspective, in the Vedic worldview, we agree, but that compassion is going to come about by discovering extended Self in the others, discovering from your own direct experience that others are actually not separate to you. They are part and parcel of the same one underlying Unified Field.”

And he looked at me and smiled and said, “I’ll have to think about that.” He’s a very kind old man. I really like him.

[06:30] A Desire to Be Free of Desires

So when you’re left with there’s no connectivity, what’s left?

Well, I have to stay calm because, really the world is full of jerks. That’s the truth of it. A lot of stressed people, a lot of stress bags, a lot of people who are very, very stressed. So I have to stay calm. I have not to arrive at any judgment, unlike what I just now did. I have to not arrive at any judgmental attitude about anybody.

I have to maintain my quietness, and here’s the peculiar paradox. Evidently it is desirable not to have desires. I find that a paradox because if I’m supposed to not have desires, then surely from a spiritual perspective of that practice, that’s a desirable state.

Is that not also a desire? That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is yes. It actually is a desire. I have a desire to be desire free is a paradox.

And so then living in this paradoxical state of the desirability of being desire free, of never arriving at anything conclusive about the truth of another human being. In other words, non-assessing… non-judgmental might mean non-judgmental, but it’s based in you not arriving at an assessment about them being anything other than what they might have been once when they were a baby.

[08:12] An Almost Impossible Brief

Not judging them in any way by their actions that came from indoctrination. All of this requires, I don’t even like using the word stoic, because there’s a misunderstanding about what stoicism means too in the world today, and stoic doesn’t actually mean what everybody thinks it means. But, we will use the word just because people do use it. It’s become a popular misconception that to be stoic is to be someone who just watches and doesn’t act, even though that’s not actually what it means philosophically.

But the idea that you’re to be a non-attached, a detached, “detached,” you are to be a detached… attempt not to have thoughts, attempt not to make assessments, attempt particularly not to arrive at conclusions, attempt not to have desires or to be seduced by the possibility of joy coming from desires. All of this amounts to an almost impossible briefing or brief on you as to how to be.

And from this we can see a sort of, what I consider to be an artificialness. I don’t think it’s sustainable. It’s not natural. It’s not Nature’s way. Nature’s way is you have desires appear in your awareness, and naturally you want to lean into your preferences and move in that direction. And when you’re purified of stress… when you have stress, your desires are misinterpreted, and so you think you’re desiring one thing, but your stresses filter that and pollute it and turn it into some other egregious behavior.

[10:01] Trustworthy Desires and Spontaneous Right Action

When you’re purified of stress, you can trust your desires. When you meditate twice every day with Vedic Meditation, you become purified of stress, and when you can trust your desires, it is very relaxing, very, very relaxing. I’m having a desire I can move toward that without feelings of guilt, without feelings of having to double check and triple check and try to impose some kind of jello mold on my mind and thinking, I can be… I can be natural, spontaneous.

What we teach in the Vedic worldview is that regular practice of Vedic Meditation causes spontaneous right action to be conceptualized at all times. One finds oneself moving in the direction of spontaneous right action. And so, one doesn’t have to take great philosophical care. “Hang on. What kind of a thought am I having? What are the implications of this about me?” And, “Am I being compassionate or not?”

This is all, although I take my hat off to people who are attempting every day to be as compassionate as possible so that they barely even are capable of engagement or activity. I do think that there is a failure to see the totality of compassion because is it not compassionate to be, to also be engaging and to be fully involved in the emotions and experiences? And to be a relatable person who has desires and who fulfills those desires? These are all rhetorical questions. I’ll leave you to contemplate.

[12:07] Q – Is There a Worldview of Evolution Within Buddhism?

As a follow up to the answer that you gave us. In the Vedic worldview, a key axiom is that evolution is all that’s ever happening. If there is that sense of anatma, then do the Buddhists of 1000 years ago believe in evolution, or is there a worldview of evolution within Buddhism?

[12:46] A – Everything’s in Decline

I’ve asked my friend the Dalai Lama about the Buddhist idea of evolution, and he says, “No. The world is anti-evolutionary. It’s in decline. Everything is in decline and everything’s going to end in fire.”

My friend who was visiting me with him is a philanthropist who’s deeply engaged in activities to deal with global climate change, from the philanthropic perspective. And when she asked him about that, he said, “It’s futile. According to the Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist doctrine the world’s going to end in flames, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And so the best thing we can do is to be compassionate. We have to learn how to be nicer to each other before it all burns up.”

And I just find that so defeatist and also rather nihilistic. In the Vedic worldview there’s only one thing happening and that is evolution. And yes, there will be peaks and valleys of evolution. There’ll be moving forward, and then the collective thinks maybe we’ve moved too far forward, so let’s move back a few notches. But then, after being back a few notches, they don’t like the way that it’s looking, like they’re going back to the 1950s or something, so let’s move forward again.

And then, you move forward five or 10 notches and then you move back three or four or five notches like that. And this is the way evolution happens. It is tidal. The waves come up a little bit and then they recede back, and then they come up a bit more and they recede back on the way to high tide, and so we see the evolution as happening in fits and starts, and some movement and some retraction, some movement, some retraction.

But there’s more as an average, more overall progressive change, and that as a whole, there’s no regressive change. And best I can interpret Tibetan Buddhism the whole thing’s in regression, we better just learn how to be detached and compassionate.

Now compared with doing nothing, compared with sitting around at home watching YouTube all day, or going to work and then coming home watching YouTube, paying your rent and getting ready to die from an early age, compared with that, practicing these various forms of philosophical approaches to dealing with what looks like catastrophic change, is better than nothing.

It’s much better than nothing, but I don’t think it’s everything and the evidence that I have, not only in my own life, but in the teaching of tens of thousands of people and also in my observations of the world as a whole, I’m rather, and you can discount 30 or 40% from my obvious bias, I’m rather persuaded by the Vedic worldview. Evolution.

[16:16] Q – Would an Experience of Transcendence Change the Worldview of a Buddhist?

 And this ties into the next question, which is, if the Buddhists had a transcendence technique where they could have that direct experience of Unified Field, do you feel that the worldview they would espouse would have to change?

How would a change in their direct experience begin to shape their worldview?

[16:46] A – Experience Makes the Difference

First of all, we have to acknowledge that the current worldview is based on experience. In the absence of an experience of Totality Consciousness, in the absence of any experience that transcends sensory perception, we’re stuck with developing a philosophy based on what we see.

And I tell the story in my course, Exploring the Veda, about meeting, and it’s interesting because it was the 50th anniversary or something just recently of the launching of Skylab, NASA’s first experimental space station, which was manned by Colonel Rusty Schweickart, a man that I knew very well because he was a good friend of my father’s, and Rusty Schweickart was a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, as taught by Maharishi, my master.

And we were having a barbecue in the backyard of my father’s house when I was a very, very young man, and I looked over at the Sun and I said, which was setting beautifully in the west, and it was casting out golden, reddish beams of light that were just being reflected by all the tremulous leaves of the trees all around us.

And there was that moment of all the birds doing their last swan song of the night and everything was so delightful, and he was there flipping the tofu burgers, he was a vegetarian, and I said, “Colonel Schweickart isn’t it a beautiful sunset?”

And he pointed the barbecue fork at me and he goes, “You see, that’s the thing. I can’t see sunsets anymore.”

And I said, “Why?”

He said, “Because I spent X number of days, weeks and weeks and weeks hovering in space, looking at what’s actually happening. The Sun isn’t going anywhere. The Earth is turning. So what you’re seeing young man is the western horizon rise. The western horizon is rising up and the Earth is turning away from the Sun, and so that’s what I see, because that’s what I saw from space for so many weeks looking down.

“And so, my worldview’s changed. I don’t use the word sunset anymore and I don’t use the word sunrise anymore. I use the word ‘Earth-turning.’ It is a beautiful Earth-turning, as we’re turning away from the Sun, we’re turning away from the Sun. I agree. It makes the light refract around very beautifully.”

And I thought, “Well, gosh, that’s very involved, but based on his direct experience, he had a completely different philosophy.” The direct experience of most humans is that the Sun is westering all the time. Once it rises in the east, it’s headed towards the west.

And we do talk about sunrise and sunset and all that. Even though intellectually we know the Sun isn’t moving, we behave as if it is, and it’s functional to a certain extent. It is functional to behave as if the Sun’s crawling across the sky.

[20:03] Direct Evidence of the Unified Field

If you are somebody who, because of the long lapse of time, the techniques, the specific Buddhist Shakya Muni techniques of transcending have been forgotten, and then all you’re left with is a memory of people reporting on, “Shave your head. Don’t have a girlfriend. Eat only this much. This is what he was purported to have eaten. You know, the amount of food that could be held in two cupped hands in a bowl once a day.

“So if you eat, if you do what the Buddha did, don’t have a girlfriend, shave your head and face, wear saffron color, some kind of saffron, some variant of saffron, and then try to be detached and try to be as compassionate as you can be because there’s no technique of transcending anymore.”

So then you’re like that teenage kid that I was, saying, “Sunset, sunrise,” and the Colonel saying, “No sunset, no sunrise, the Earth-turning, the Earth-turning away from the Sun.”

The Vedic worldview is transcendence is an expression of and direct experiential proof of Unified Field. You can see the effect of it because it doesn’t just affect you.

Every meditator can describe how they went off to do their meditation in a rather raucous and noisy house, maybe at a Christmas gathering or something, and while the meditation was happening, after they came out, everything quietened down.

In other words, they splashed down on the Unified Field, it had its wave propagation effect inside their event horizon, and it cooled everybody off. People who were promising to write mean letters to each other after Christmas, or were swearing off ever coming back to one of these things again, were now starting to hug and unify and be nice again.

Meditators, as meditators we see the external effect of our practice. We see it. We can see it’s tangible. Palpable is the best word for it. It’s not just that you get peaceful and it has no effect on anybody else. It has effect on people you can’t even see.

Somebody who’s standing outside there thinking of stealing your car and you sit and meditate, that person at the end of your meditation starts thinking, “Maybe I should call my mom instead, and not risk going back into the jail.” And who knows what’s caused that effect inside the would-be thief.

We do see that in towns where there’s a large percentage of people meditating, as much as 1% or more of the population meditating, when that 1% watermark is reached, it’s a saturation effect that’s great enough, a tipping point is reached. A phase transition occurs, and we see crime rates drop.

And crime rates aren’t dropping because meditators are walking around, talking people out of stealing cars. Crime rates are dropping because the collective is a collective consciousness and it’s being impacted by the wave functions propagating through it from people transcending.

So, we have direct evidence of a Unified Field existing. And by the way, science insists on there being fields. There are fields, there aren’t… there’s not just this individuality thing. Even the electromagnetic field is almost a Unified Field, and we listen to the radio through it every day, or do our Instagramming through the electromagnetic field.

[24:19] Q – Why Was the Technique of Transcendence Lost in Buddhism?

Thom, why do you think it is that the technique of transcendence was lost within the Buddhist teaching and lineage, and yet the technique of transcendence has been so well preserved in the Vedic lineage?

[24:35] A – Luck of the Draw

Somebody had to preserve it, somebody had to lose. You could look at it as luck of the draw, but generally speaking, the loss of this knowledge occurs when there is saturation of this knowledge.

It’s very ironic. The more you have this body of knowledge, the more eminently forgettable it becomes, because a generation in which this practice is very, very popular, grows into the next generation where enlightenment is arrived at spontaneously by, say, the age of 18 or so.

One more generation of that and people are being born practically enlightened.

And then by the time that’s happened, there’s no more need for a technique. People are experiencing spontaneous nirvana. And when there’s enough of that that goes on, then nobody’s practicing anymore. Then gradually, gradually, gradually, that state deteriorates and the need for technique is there again.

You only have to have one generation born in ignorance for all generations after that also to be born in ignorance. And so then it has to be rediscovered.

And I think that the Buddhist tradition is in fact the Vedic tradition, and this is in fact the revival of what Buddha was teaching.

We don’t refer to ourselves merely as Buddhist, because we’re not the ists and the isms.

We consider, and Buddha himself, the Shakya Muni as I prefer to call him, the Shakya Muni himself considered himself to be a member of the Vedic tradition. He was a teacher of Vedic knowledge, and so the loss of it came through oversaturation of it.

India itself became saturated by it, and then as it spread out further and further afield to the west, Buddhism went as far as Greece. There was a Hellenistic Buddhism that occurred probably 500 years after the death of Shakya Muni. And we can see statuary all over Greece of Buddha. And a very popular Buddhist practice, but many, many generations and iterations moving from India all the way over to the Hellenistic Empire as it was at the time.

You know that old thing of, you say something here and you say it to another person and they whisper it to the next person and they whisper it to the next person, and then, 10 people down, you get what it was that people think they heard, and it’s completely different? Like that, the long passage of time and the knowledge moving from one state of consciousness to another state of consciousness, from there to another state of consciousness, and in the end, the loss of knowledge and technique.

[27:58] Expert Memorizers

And in the Vedic? Veda stayed in one place. And it’s not that it wasn’t lost. There’ve been… it’s been almost lost. I would say that prior to Guru Deva arriving on the scene, Vedic knowledge was almost completely lost. During the time of the… toward the very last chapter of the British Rule of India, the British did a very good job of practically stamping out whatever was left of Vedic practice.

They stamped out and made it illegal, the practice of Ayurvedic medicine. Nobody could call themselves Shankaracharya because it has with it an epithet of Maharaj, which means great king. And to call oneself a king or to be called a king, was an act of sedition against the crown in England. And so no one could be declared Shankaracharya.

There was a very effective stamping out and that, hot on the heels of hundreds of years of India being ruled by the Moguls. The Moguls who came, they were the descendants of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, and they finally made their way down through Afghanistan and into India, invaded the country, and eventually were assimilated.

But the last traces of them were defeated by the British. The British in about the late 1770s, around the time that United States was rebelling against England, the British managed to get all the most important kings of India to sign on to be vassal kings of the throne in London.

And so, United Kingdom wasn’t called that then. England, as it was called then, lost United States effectively and was fighting a war to regain it at the same time as England gained India. And by fighting off the last of the Mogul people and restoring India, but now restoring it under the aegis of British rule. And it stayed that way for 240 years plus until independence.

So, India managing somehow to have a cadre of people who were the reclusive monks who mostly lived in the mountains or in the deep forests, and who passed the knowledge on heart to heart. They didn’t write it down. It was intentional. They memorized the Vedic knowledge because if you write something down and you become dependent on the written version of it, you can burn books and book burners have been around since a long time before Adolf Hitler.

The burning of the Library of Alexandria, for example, during the time of Cleopatra. One of the greatest travesties of loss of knowledge ever in history. For political reasons the library was burnt to the ground. It had in it all the accrued knowledge of the entire western and eastern world there in Egypt, in the city of Alexandria.

So, when you rely upon books and you rely upon shastras, written things, whether they’re written in Pali or Sanskrit, then you have only writing.

One of the great things about our tradition is that our teachers are expert memorizers and they’ve memorized the methodology. And so all written and electronic references to it could be erased on the Earth, and the knowledge is still extant in the hundreds and thousands of teachers who know how to teach this.