Commandments, Charm vs Intuition, Déjà vu

Commandments, Charm vs Intuition, Déjà vu

[00:45] Q – Why are there no commandments or a rule book for life within the Veda?

Why are there no commandments or a rule book for life within the Veda?

[00:53] A – There is One Commandment

Why are there no ten commandments of the Veda? Why are there no commandments telling us, “thou shalt do this and thou shalt not do that”? But we do have one commandment.

It is very simple. I put it into just a few words, VM, that’s Vedic Meditation, a.m. & p.m. VM, and if I make an elaborate version of it, Vedic Meditation in the morning and in the evening. VM in the a.m. and p.m. If you forget everything else I’ve ever taught you, this is the one commandment.

And you know, it’s also obedient to the one commandment that my master’s master, Guru Deva, taught, which was, in Sanskrit, Nivar Tatvam. Nivar Tatvam means transcend where you are.

You find yourself caught up in the relative world of ever-repeating thoughts, the ever-repeating known, and you find that life is unsatisfactory, transcend that. Go into The Absolute. You find yourself in The Absolute, transcend that, go back into the relative world.

You find yourself in the relative world, transcend that, go into The Absolute. You find yourself in The Absolute, transcend that, come back into the relative world.

If you keep on alternating back and forth like this, you cause those two states to become homogenized, and then you transcend that. You’ve transcended the transcending. To transcend the transcending is the ultimate use of the words Nivartatvam, transcend where you are. Step beyond whatever it is you’re experiencing, step beyond it, and integrate.

By stepping beyond, you spontaneously integrate. So you step beyond, and then you step beyond that by coming here, and then you step beyond here and go back to there, and you step beyond there and come back to here and, like that, the two states become integrated.

So this is the one commandment. And since, you know, the Vedic worldview is all about oneness, we don’t need ten or five or even two. All we need is transcend where you are. Go where you are not. Go where you are not. This is the ultimate commandment.

Why is that? Because, by doing this, then spontaneously we awaken in ourselves Unified Field consciousness, which itself generates spontaneous right action. Whenever we go into commandments (and I love to use the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments that were given in mythos by Jehovah to Rebbe Moshe, Rabbi Moses), there’s a conundrum. There’s always a conundrum because there’s always exceptions. 

“Thou shalt not kill,” says the divine consciousness, and yet we read in another part of the Bible that God loved Saul because he killed the Philistines in the thousands. But he really loved David because David killed the Philistines in their hundreds of thousands. “Love, love the killin’. I just love that killin’.” Thou shalt not kill.

And so then you have to come up with some kind of interpretation of this. Don’t kill. Is it really killing? Are they humans? Are they non-humans? Are you able to kill if God says you should kill? Adolf Hitler was convinced God was on his side, and the entire Axis of World War II were convinced of that, except for the Russians who were atheists, supposedly, and were convinced God was on their side.

Everybody thinks God’s on their side. Everyone thinks they’re doing good. And so, do you kill or do you don’t kill? Well, under what conditions can you kill? Can you kill in self-defense?

[05:19] Nivar Tatvam – Transcend Where You Are

The moment you start saying, “You shall,” or “You shan’t,” do any of this, you end up with contrast and conflict and paradox, but not in the Vedic one-word commandment, Nivartatvam. Transcend where you are.

VM, a.m. p.m. Go beyond the individual limitations of your current consciousness state, and drop into The Absolute field. When you do that, you refresh your dharma. Dharma means spontaneous right action. Dharma, D-H-A-R-M-A. That which doing is your most relevant gift to all of the relative world.

What is it that by doing, you’re bringing about the greatest impact, your greatest individual contribution to the evolutionary process? That thing is dharma. And whatever the dharma was fifteen minutes ago, or maybe even fifteen seconds ago, is not the dharma of right now, because the world and its needs base are changing every few seconds.

Therefore, what is it that an agent of progressive change—that’s you—should be up to? Should be doing, should be spontaneously acting on? When you are obedient to the one commandment of the Vedic worldview, transcend where you are, then what happens is you go back into The Absolute field and your capacity to be dharmic, to be in spontaneous right action, is refreshed every time you meditate.

As you become more adept at meditation, your mind and brain together begin to learn how to transcend in between thoughts. One thought occurs, and this is in the eyes-open state, in Cosmic Consciousness, one thought occurs and action may come from it, and then, before the next thought occurs, there’s a moment of transcendence, dharma reset.

And now what’s relevant to be doing? At the end of that dharma reset, what is it relevant to be doing? So we reset our dharma every time we transcend where we are. We reset what it is that Universe having a human experience, whatever it is that Universe wants its human experience to be doing: thinking, doing, desiring, acting, whatever.

And so the dharma reset happens, in the beginning days of Vedic Meditation, every time you meditate. As a more advanced meditator, it happens in between thoughts. You get dharma reset.

What is it which doing is your maximum and best contribution to the Cosmic law? The Cosmic law is evolve. Full stop. One word. Evolve. If we wanted to elaborate on it, we’d say engage in progressive change, be an agent of progressive change. And then to be obedient to the Cosmic law, we follow the one commandment, Nivartatvam, transcend where you are.

And we don’t need ten because the others are all basically iterations and they’re very culturally oriented, and the times have changed. So this thing that we say is immune to the changing times: it’s not stuck in the morality of any particular epoch of time.

[09:30] Q – Is Charm the Same as Intuition?

Is charm the same as intuition?

[09:33] A – The Fine Level of Feeling

Is charm the same as intuition? It all depends on your definition of intuition and whether it’s the same as mine. To intuit for most people means they get this kind of gut, little fine feeling and, you know, the “I’ve got an intuition,” and how is it we know that’s really their intuition or just their stress? We just don’t really know.

People often say, “I did something intuitively, and it ended up burning down the house and killing three of the pets, but it was intuition.” Intuition is a bit of a foggy term, and so I don’t really like to say charm is the same as intuition. It’s the same as intuition as we know intuition should be, and so we can think of it that way. 

Our capacity on the fine level of feeling, this is one of the great expressions of Vedic meditators, the fine level of feeling, sometimes abbreviated in texts as “the FLF,” fine level of feeling.Deep inside on that fine level of feeling, if we are regular transcenders, if we are practitioners of Vedic Meditation, if by regular we mean every day twice, then you’ve cleared off the stresses, and so the stresses aren’t working their way into your intuition. 

You actually have the ability to feel what it is that your big Self, which we often refer to as Nature, capital N, what is it that Nature is intending for its individuality? That’s me.

And the answer is going to appear in the form of charm. Charm will mean that you either feel the charm in a particular direction or you feel an aversion to that direction, in which case charm is in the opposite direction. Sometimes people say, “I can’t feel any charm. I don’t know what to do.”

And I’ll say to them, “Do you feel an aversion to anything?”

“Yes, I do.” Charm’s in the opposite direction to that. Whatever that is, go in the opposite direction, you’re on the charm trail. You move away from a version, you’re moving towards charm by default. Charm is Nature’s way of gold-dusting a proposition to action. It gold-dusts a proposition to action by making that proposition to action feel charming. It wants you to move, not so that you can gain fulfillment; you are the fulfillment. So that you can move the fulfillment field, which you are, from where it is to where it’s not.

The fulfillment field, the creative intelligence that you embody, needs to get moved somewhere. So big Self deep inside you will cause a proposition to action to become charming so that you get moving from A to B. This doesn’t work if you don’t meditate. 

If there’s some heroin addict sitting on the street corner with his little sign up saying, “Anything helps, God bless,” and all he really wants is more money for his next smack fix, you know he’s following charm. Right? But this is not Universe talking. This is charm all mixed up with all kinds of polluting effects of stress and everything. 

If we practice Vedic Meditation twice a day, even for six weeks, we can begin doing the grand experiment, and the grand experiment is take a certain number of hours, maybe five hours, six hours or something, and say, “For the next five or six hours, I’m only going to do that which I find charming, and I’m not going to do that which I don’t find charming.”

And just do it as an experiment. Pay attention to your research outcomes. If that works out, which I’m going to predict that it does, very nicely, then you move into a larger experiment. Let’s try a few days of this, and if that works out, try a few weeks of it and, if that works out, it’s going to become your habit very quickly.

[13:56] A – A Window of Opportunity

We can trust our innermost sense of what it feels charming either to do or that which it doesn’t feel charming to do, which is aversion. We can trust it, and we mustn’t use our intellect to override the charm.

Overriding the charm means, “Oh, well intellectually, I don’t know if it makes any sense.” And one of the grievous faults that meditators who are doing the experiment, doing the research as I call it, might engage in is to say, “Well, you know, I’ll put together a pros and cons list. Here are all the pros of following the charm, and here are all the cons of following the charm.”

And now you’re just taking that raw charm, which has a window, it’s an opportunistic window, a window of opportunity. You can either move within that window of time during which it is spontaneous right action, or you can sit around contemplating it for days or weeks or whatever, and see if it’s obedient to your intellectual pros and cons list.

And by the time you act, it’s highly likely that that opportunity window has closed and you’re going to smack into a closed window, even if you do decide to act. And so this is not spontaneous right action. This is that bizarre combination of words, that tautology “calculated spontaneity.”

Calculated spontaneity doesn’t count. It’s either spontaneous or it’s not. Spontaneous right action comes from a thought that appears, it’s charming, and then you make the move unhesitatingly.

Now, are you going to get exactly what it is that you found charming? You know, supposing you just got some strange idea to get a soft serve of ice cream around the corner, and you start heading off in that direction and you discover there’s a roadblock, and you weren’t able to move towards the soft ice cream place because it got washed away in a flash flood. 

Why did Nature send me over there? Quieten down, de-excite, transcend where you are, Nivartatvam, Sanskrit for go where you are not. You’re in an excited state, go into a less excited state and figure out why you’re standing at point B.

You moved from point A to point B. Now you’re at point B. The thing you thought was there wasn’t there. Nature may be using a bait and switch. Now you quieten down and you discover door C. And door C is right over there, and what is it?

Some old friend of yours that you would never have run into if you hadn’t moved away from point A is just walking down the street, and Nature used whatever device it needed to use to get you to move from A to B.

And so moving toward charm may be a dynamical phenomenon, that is to say, it can change as we’re moving, but something has to provide the initial impetus to get us up out of the chair and move in a different direction, or to break the symmetry, and that’s charm that does it.

And so, following charm is advice for all regular practitioners of Vedic Meditation. Not once-a-year practitioners, not fifty-times-a-year practitioners, regular practitioners, people who do it every morning, every evening in the proper way as instructed, follow charm.

[17:43] Q – Is there a Vedic explanation for déjà vu?

Is there a Vedic explanation for déjà vu?

[17:43] A – The Beginning Days of Cosmic Consciousness

Déjà vu is a very commonly cited experience where people will say, “I just had that experience. I think I dreamed that. That thing you just said and those things that just happened… I feel like I dreamed of that. I’ve been here before. I experienced this before. I knew what you were going to say,” or “I knew what was going to happen.” 

This has been referred to for decades as déjà vu, and I’m not even sure of the etymology of the words déjà vu, but wherever it comes from, it’s not regular English. It’s entered into the common parlance: déjà vu. “I had a déjà vu experience.”

And déjà vu actually reflects, when people describe it, a very common experience in the beginning days of Cosmic Consciousness. So let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of what Cosmic Consciousness is. 

When someone learns Vedic Meditation, they learn how to step beyond thought, and in that moment they become one with that underlying Unified Field of consciousness. After the twenty minutes of meditation, you come back to ordinary everyday life and engage in all the things in which one engages. And then again, in the afternoon or early evening, one practices it again.

What’s happening is that there is the gradual addition of Unified Field consciousness to the individual status and structure. As we continue practicing our meditation, our character and personality begin to be shaped by something new appearing on a daily basis, regularly, systematically and, most importantly, consistently, which is that vast, unbounded Unified Field that has in it all potential evolution, all features of evolution, everything that can happen. Everything that can happen, all possibilities.

As that consciousness state begins to become more and more a regular feature of one’s everyday experience, then just regular twice-a-day meditation isn’t the sole place where one experiences that familiarity, that feeling of being completely at home. That being completely at home begins to percolate into everyday conscious waking state experience.

[20:29] The Future in the Making

And one of the ways it does that is through our sensory perception becoming so acute that we begin to be able to see the cascades of change, and the character of those cascades of change in their very subtle beginnings. This is what we refer to in the vernacular of Vedic Meditation as “the future in the making.”

The future in the making means you can sense the cascades of change occurring and they become thematic, and you start getting less and less surprised. As you become less and less surprised, you also feel more and more at home with change as it arrives, and then there can be these moments of “I knew this was going to happen. I sensed this was…” one gets into that very much: of course, of course, of course.

Now in déjà vu, when you interview people who’ve had this experience, and there have been thousands of such interviews with psychologists and people who studied the phenomenon, it turns out that there is a deep, deep familiarity with what’s going on, not actually that one was able to predict what somebody was going to say or what events were going to cascade or what circumstances. 

The actual sense that “I knew that was going to happen”? Well, you didn’t actually know it was going to happen. You just felt extremely familiar with what happened. You felt absolutely at home with what happened.

[22:12] From Deja Vu to De Rigueur

In Cosmic Consciousness, because this starts to become a feature of regular everyday life, it fails to be a novel experience anymore. When it’s no longer a novel experience, it doesn’t stand out. And when it doesn’t stand out, it no longer has a name.

We refer to it in basic meditation as feeling at home with everything. You feel at home with all of the cascades of change. You feel at home with knowledge. You can sense, “Well of course, these laws of Nature were triggered by these actions and behaviors, and they cascaded into those laws of Nature, and they cascaded into those others.”

You can see the cascades and it all makes such sense that one is no longer amazed or surprised or whatever. It just seems to be regular, normal, everyday life. The test of it, though, is someone who is becoming grounded in Cosmic Consciousness naturally has an opportunity from time to time to compare their experience with the experience of others who are in the same circumstances.

Somebody else who’s in the same set of circumstances as the one who is entering Cosmic Consciousness is amazed or bewildered or shocked or whatever, continuously. One who’s in Cosmic Consciousness hears all around oneself all of this amazement and complete surprises going on every few minutes.

Whereas in Cosmic Consciousness there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary happening. There just seems to be a natural, cascading, unfolding scenario of what, in the largest picture, is evolutionary change. And so it fails to satisfy the novelty test, and when it’s not a novel experience anymore, there’s no name for it. There’s just naturalness going on. Naturalness is going on.

And so then, as Cosmic Consciousness develops, the incidences in which one would say, “I had a déjà vu experience,” begin to disappear and melt away. And why is that? Because everything is like that. It’s one continuous twenty-four hours a day; what once upon a time would’ve been referred to as déjà vu now is just de rigueur. That means what is to be expected.

Jai Guru Deva.