Intervention, Evolution, Contribution, Equilibrium

Intervention, Evolution, Contribution, Equilibrium

[00:45] Q – How to Deal with Loved Ones Causing Suffering?

Hi, Thom. This is Ted from Arlington, Virginia. My question is, how can I best deal with loved ones that do things that I can see will cause suffering, especially when the loved ones are parents of innocent babies?

How do I blend or synthesize two ideas you’ve recently spoken about? The first idea is we have no control over anything. And the second idea you’ve talked about is, we can design well-deserved, good, self-created fortune.

Thank you very much for your answer, Jai Guru Deva.

[01:18] A – Become an Inspiration

Jai Guru Deva, Ted.

Well, you find yourself in the same situation and with the same kind of quandaries that almost every Vedic meditator finds themself in, although you have described it with great clarity. The important thing to realize is that we’re going to get nowhere by asserting a point of view on loved ones and their way of dealing with children. We do have to work in one particular area that we do have access to, and over which we do have control, and that is on ourselves being an inspiration, though we cannot transcend the need for there to be worthy inquiry before we give knowledge.

This is a fundamental axiom of Vedic knowledge that if you try to give someone advice that they have not sought, if you try to give someone wise-and-trusted counsel that they’re not seeking from you, then irrespective of your motives, the effect that you’ll have will be for them to not listen to you any further.

And it seems to be a quandary. What do I do? Well, there is one thing we can do. And that is to become a greater and greater inspiration ourselves for them to ask the proper question at the proper time. This will create the teachable moments that we’re looking for.

[02:57] Silence for Wise Influence

We’re looking for teachable moments. Those teachable moments are the moments where somebody actually asks you a question, and they’re hoping that you’re going to give them an answer that’s based in your own wisdom. Wisdom which they themselves have perceived because you evince it.

And so, evincing greater wisdom may very often come in the form of you having control over your silence. Sometimes, people can sense that you know more and are worth asking something of simply because you are capable of being silently knowing without comment.

When certain ideas are put forward, or certain behaviors are engaged in in your presence, you have the strategic capability in a knowing fashion to remain silent. And that silence of yours is, in many cases, the greatest weapon against the ignorance of others.

The ability to hold your tongue when some who are less well trained than you might be blurting out their opinion about a behavior or a neglect or a lack of behavior, an omission of behavior, you instead have the ability simply to be an innocent witness. So frequently, this will bring about that inquiry that we’re looking for, someone saying, “What do you think, Ted?”

And, “What do you think, Ted?” is going to be the magical moment, the teachable moment. We also have to take great care, Ted, that when someone says, “What do you think?” we don’t try to give them the entirety of the Vedic base of knowledge.

[04:44] Align Knowledge with Inquiry Levels

If somebody is inquiring with a thimble full of conscious receptivity, then we give them a thimble full of knowledge in return. If somebody comes to us with perhaps one quart of worthy inquiry, we give them one quart of knowledge in return. If they come to us with an empty swimming pool of worthy inquiry, then we can give them a whole swimming pool of knowledge.

But if they come to us with a thimble full of inquiry, and we give them a swimming pool of knowledge, then we’ve overdone it by just about a swimming pool worth.

So, we have to also be more masterful in that question of, are we in charge of what we’re experiencing when there is a degree of worthy inquiry? Are we in charge of what we’re experiencing? Or are we taken over by our enthusiasm to just tell them everything? Since we may not get another chance, which might completely spoil the moment, the teachable moment. So great care, attention.

Now, I want to deal with the idea that you raised in your question of people dealing with innocent children . I agree that most children are best perceived as being innocent. You know, we don’t know what karma those children may have kind of signed up for by having those particular parents.

And since there is no way that we can effectively, sociologically effectively, intervene… Now I mean, of course, if there were egregious behaviors occurring right before your eyes and children were being either neglected egregiously or being abused egregiously, naturally, we would intervene.

[06:40] Responsible Intervention in Egregious Situations

And intervene in all kinds of ways, whatever the most effective way is, either on our own or by bringing to bear the authority of society. Because if there is behavior being engaged in which violates the social sense of what is right, then it is incumbent upon us to intervene.

Having said that, it may be that children find themselves being the children of parents who are not egregiously, or in some way that is socially agreed upon, abusing them. They may simply be the children of imperfect parents. How many of us grew up in that way anyway? And where you’re not being invited in to intervene or give greater wisdom, or there doesn’t seem to be any entry point, then there’s nothing for us to do except to arrive at the conclusion that maybe this is part of that child’s spiritual training inside themselves, to have to deal with an imperfect parent, or an imperfect people who deal with them.

We can’t create a perfect world for every child that’s on earth. None of us had a perfect world; even the greatest masters of our tradition had, famously, in many cases, imperfect parenting that led them to go off and become seekers.

So, if we’re witnessing abuse that’s egregious or socially unacceptable, or we’re witnessing neglect, which is the same egregious or socially unacceptable, it is incumbent upon us to intervene. This is part of our social contract as being a member of a civilization.

[08:27] Foster Inspiration for Societal Change

If on the other hand, it is debatable whether or not you have the right to intervene and if it could be sociologically controversial for you to intervene because it’s just a matter of parents having the right to raise their children the way they see them, then you need to work on how inspiring you are. Are those parents, those family members, those other people, whoever they may be, associates, or people with whom you have alliances of other kinds. We need to ask the question, why aren’t they coming to you and asking, “Hey Ted, you’re the wise one around here. How do you think we should treat our children?”

So we need to work on ourselves more, too. And when we work on ourselves, then we’ll have more opportunities to affect sociological change, because there’ll be more inquiry. I think that just about covers everything, Ted.

 Jai Guru Deva .

[09:27] Q – Will Enlightenment for All End Humanity?

Hi Thom, this is Marlin recording from Stockholm, Sweden. My understanding from listening to your previous podcast episodes is that the purpose of human life is to get enlightened and that the reason our jiva keeps seeking new bodies is because the jiva has unfinished business.

My understanding is also that once we reach full enlightenment, our jiva won’t have any reason to reincarnate anymore. In theory, would this mean that if all humans become enlightened that, all humans wouldn’t exist anymore? And if this is the case, what would happen to all other living things on earth, such as plants, animals, etc.

Jai Guru Deva.

[10:08] A – The Cycle of Evolution and Reincarnation

See, the thing is, all lower evolutionary forms are graduating lifetime after lifetime into more and more sophisticated, more evolutionary forms. And ultimately, at the top layer of sophistication of the animal world is the line between the animal kingdom and becoming a first-time human.

Right now, with more than 8 billion people on earth, with the population increasing at a rate of half a million every day, an astonishing number when you consider it, the reason why we have such a vast population is because the humans keep coming back, as you mentioned.

The jiva, not having reached the state of fulfillment, has the seeds of desire remaining at the time of body death that are the seeds of reincarnation. And so humans keep coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back.

Meanwhile, members of the plant kingdom evolving into the animal kingdom, and animal kingdom evolving into the human kingdom, continue evolving upward and issuing forth onto the human plane. And so we see right now an overload of humans on the face of the earth because there’s a traffic jam here.

The animal kingdom continues to make the transition into the human, and the humans keep coming back and coming back and coming back.

[11:51] Impact of Human Enlightenment on Reincarnation Patterns

And so then what happens as a result of greater enlightenment at the human level is that fewer and fewer humans come back, though this happens, and there’s a natural reduction of the load of population at the human level, there is still the rising up into the human plane from the animal kingdom.

And so, it’s not as if we’re going to run out of jivas, because they are all the time appearing from the fundamental baseline of creation, the Unified Field, unmanifest, it’s constantly manifesting new jivas in the form of very elementary life forms. And those elementary life forms then growing and graduating into secondary life forms and then tertiary life forms and eventually graduating into the life form that we know as human.

And so the funding of the human level with new jivas always will occur from the animal kingdom, though the population, the traffic jam at the human level which currently we’re seeing will become much alleviated by greater and greater amounts of enlightenment occurring. People not returning again and again and again to the human plane.

This is how the whole thing works. Jai Guru Deva.

[13:26] Q – How to Discover My Purpose and Contribution?

Hi there, I’m Annie from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I just listened to your Memory and Dementia recording. It was excellent.

My question is deciding how to meet the demands of the moment. What am I doing right now to contribute to the need of the time? What is my highest and best purpose right now?

How do I discern what that is? Is it what brings me bliss? Is there just one thing that I could be doing right now? So I’m curious about how to figure that out. Thank you very much.

[14:06] A – Spontaneous Right Action

Jai Guru Deva.

Greetings from Arizona to Cambridge. Such a joy to hear your voice and a beautiful question. And this is really the question that comes under the heading of “spontaneous right action.”

What is it that is our highest and best use? The highest and best use of the nervous system, the brain, the mind, the emotions, and everything.

And in order to arrive at that wonderful realization, our methodology is, first of all, to settle down into your least-excited state. That which you are ” supposed to be doing” may change hour by hour or day by day, or you may embark on what seems like a consistent strategy or project, but the way that you do it might also change a little.

It reminds me a bit of sailing. You know, you go across the sea, and you’ve plotted a course. Perhaps you’re sailing from Sydney, Australia, to San Francisco. And you can draw a direct line on the map, a straight line, but you won’t be following that straight line.

Overall, the average of tacking back and forth, blowing with the wind, and taking advantage of the power of the wind, if it’s not blowing in the particular exact direction you want to go, zig-zagging your way across the ocean is what you actually end up doing and yet you get from Sydney to San Francisco.

[15:48] In the Zone with Vedic Meditation

Like that, on a daily basis, we practice Vedic Meditation. And at the end of our meditation, we have that two minutes of silence and in that two minutes of silence, we’re not intentionally calling upon the mantra.

We’re just sitting relaxedly, easily, and letting the mind be easy. And we may float a kind of thought that is askance, which might be, ” Show me the way. I want to follow it in the direction of charm, the right way to be going,” and you struck on it in your question: should I follow my bliss?

The answer is yes, but bliss may be a little of a strong statement. Let’s just say it feels charming. It feels charming to move in a particular direction, engage in a particular action, and lean into that, and for as long as it’s charming, we continue with it.

Very often, that which is charming may, in fact, involve a lot of hard work. What somebody from the outside would look at you and say, “Well, that’s a lot of work.”

But from inside you, because there’s charm in it, it feels like frictionless flow. It doesn’t feel like hard work. You can certainly feel the effect on your body, and the opportunity to rest into the next meditation at the end of the day is very welcome, but you may not feel like you’re really doing very hard work. Others may assess you as doing such.

Like that, we know we’re in the right zone when we’re able, innocently, to follow charm.

[17:32] Changing Course to Stay on Course

We’re able to tweak it, just as a sailor, who is perhaps sailing across the ocean, had a beautiful following breeze that was driving him right along the direct straight line from Sydney to San Francisco, and now the breeze has changed.

And instead of coming from that direct, exact direction from behind his sailboat, he’s being blown a little from the right. So he needs to adjust his sails, and he’s going to move off of the direct line and begin moving at an angle to that line.

After a certain amount of movement across the water, he has to switch the sails and zig-zag back and make his way back across the line again using the same breeze. So, crossing the line, and crossing the line, and crossing the line, zig-zagging, the overall heading is true.

And, so, we want to be somewhat akin to a sailor. Our overall heading is true, our overall heading guided by the charm, perhaps, on a daily basis, if things don’t go a particular way, then, instead of pushing hard, we de-excite.

We go into our least-excited state of consciousness and sit quietly in that.

This could be one of our formal twice-a-day meditation sessions, or it may be that just as a tactic, we close our eyes and just sit comfortably for a few minutes, and just sit in that least-excited state, and then you’ll pick it up. You’ll feel which way the wind is blowing now.

And you’ll get an understanding about how to very slightly change course in order to stay on course. And this is the way we tend to move. We don’t need to be in a big hurry because Nature is organizing.

[19:35] Strategy, Tactics, and Frictionless Flow

When Nature is organizing, we’re moving as fast as it’s natural to move. There’s no use trying to move faster than what is natural because we don’t want to show up in the wrong place at the wrong time. We want to show up in the right place at the right time.

So this is our particular way of looking at it. Strategy, which means the heading, and we find that from deep inside of ourself. And then tactic, which means whatever marginal changes of course we need to take, in order for our overall heading to be true.

And then one of the ways of measuring, like taking the temperature of how we’re going, is to check in on that quality of frictionless flow.

Frictionless flow doesn’t mean you’re not busy. You might be extraordinarily busy or somewhere up to extraordinary, but it doesn’t feel like hard work to you. Though it may be assessed as such by any outside observer. Rather than going by the reckonings of those who are not engaged in what we’re doing we go by our own reckoning, the frictionless flow of feeling.

We can’t say it’s effortless. Meditation is effortless. Activity always involves some effort, but effort can be of two kinds. The kind where you feel as though you’re pushing against a natural tendency or the kind where you’re moving with the natural tendency. And when we’re on track, it will feel like we’re moving with the natural tendency. That’s the frictionless flow to which I’m referring.

So let’s try that and see, and I’d like to hear back from you at any time you’d like to post another question and hear how that’s been going.

Jai Guru Deva.

[21:41] Q – How to Balance Masculine and Feminine Energies to Counteract Toxic Masculinity?

Hi, Thom. It’s Tobie from Cairns. My question relates to masculine and feminine energies.

Namely, in our society, I feel like there seems to be quite a lot of emphasis on feminine energy with a lot of negative connotations to toxic masculinity. If we were to focus on the balance between the two, would that help with toxic masculinity?

Thanks, and Jai Guru Deva.

[22:07] A – Masculine and Feminine Archetypes

Yes, Toby, thank you for your inquiry and greetings from Arizona to Cairns. I love Cairns. What a beautiful place. I spent six months once a long, long time ago, lifetimes ago, it seems, living in Kuranda, just north of Cairns.

Let’s look at femininity and masculinity, not as body types but as trends in consciousness and you referred to it as energies, feminine energy, masculine energy.

That’s as good a way of putting it as any. But I would, I would tend to call it trends or archetypes. I think archetypes is probably a better word, Toby. Masculine archetype, feminine archetype of consciousness.

Now, let me say, and this is going to sound like a sales pitch, so please forgive me, but it really is the best way to go that I have, in fact, created a course on this subject, the course entitled Omnisexuality.

And Omnisexuality goes into a great depth of explanation of these various traits and archetypes of consciousness. But a few highlights from there that might help you. When there’s, imagine a super symmetric plane. We could think of just a straight line, but let’s turn it into a three-dimensional plane like a flat floor, as it were.

And this plane is infinite. It goes in every direction infinitely. This is going to be akin to the unmanifest Unified Field, the Unified Field of all forms and all phenomena, the Unified Field of Consciousness itself. And there is a phenomenon that takes place from inside the self-interacting dynamics of the Unified Field, which causes the Unified Field to break its symmetry.

[24:08] Break the Symmetry

What do we mean by break the symmetry? Instead of it all being flat, it starts the process of curving. What we are doing here is we’re creating in our imagination, this curvature on an infinitely flat plane is a wave appearing in the plane, a curve.

Anytime there is a wave, anytime there is a curve, there is a pinnacle, that is to say, the absolute crest of the wave, which is neither on this side nor on that side of the wave, and then there is two faces of the wave. These two faces of the wave are opposite to each other. These two faces of the wave, when symmetry breaks, are masculine trait and feminine trait.

Feminine and masculine archetypes exist in every broken symmetry. And what is a broken symmetry? That is to say when the Unified Field moves from being unmanifest, it breaks its symmetry, and Being, pure Being, Being starts becoming something. What is it becoming? A form or a phenomena. That covers everything, forms, and phenomena.

All forms and all phenomena, therefore, have an equal amount of masculine and feminine in them. One wave has masculine and feminine in it. And so we can find the masculine in anything, any form, any function, any phenomenon. We can find the feminine in any form, in any function, in any phenomenon.

[25:53] Avoid Lopsided Perspectives Through Transcendence

If we can’t find both of these in forms, functions, and phenomena, then we’re going to end up with a lopsided view of what the function is of that form. What the function is of that phenomenon. We get a lopsided view.

We’re only experiencing it from the perspective of one face of a wave, and every wave has two faces, masculine and feminine.

And so what we need to do is to broaden our awareness. By broadening our awareness through the process of transcendence, we start to become more and more aware of the dual nature of every form and every phenomenon. And the dual nature of every form and every phenomenon is masculine and feminine.

There is a point, to satisfy those who are politically active for there being a third thing, which is neither masculine nor feminine. Our concession to that point is the absolute peak of the wave. The crest of the wave, which sits right on the line between masculine and feminine, can be said to be neither this nor that, capable of becoming this or that but not yet having become it. So there’s where the third thing exists.

But for the most part, we find the face of the waves making up the largest percentage of every wave function. That means masculine and feminine tendencies, archetypal phenomena, make up the maximum percentage of any form or phenomenon.

[27:39] The Secret to Removing Toxicity

Now, what happens when we practice Vedic Meditation? We take all the waves, all the forms, and all the phenomena, and as our consciousness settles down into its own least excited state, we collapse all the waves. We take everything back to the flat plane again.

And then when we come out of that state, as we become more adept, more experienced in Vedic Meditation, we can actually experience the process of these waves once again, zooming forth from, issuing forth from the flat plane, and then there’s no mistake at all. There are two faces to every form, every function, every phenomenon.

So, the secret to being able to remove the lopsidedness, people call it toxicity. I think that’s a little dramatic myself, but the lopsided view of the purpose of a wave, purpose of a form, purpose of a phenomenon, is to collapse the form, collapse the phenomenon, back into the supersymmetry, the unboundedness. During meditation, this happens spontaneously.

And then to be able to witness the full enlivenment of the unmanifest manifesting. When the unmanifest is manifesting, one can see very clearly the totality, the entirety of every wave function.

And so, in this way, just by practicing Vedic Meditation twice every day, innocently, one might not have learned Vedic Meditation for this purpose, or one might have. But whether you have or you have not, you might have learned Vedic Meditation because it sounds like a really nifty stress management technique.

You close your eyes twice a day and rest the body incredibly deeply, and then stresses get released, accumulated stresses, and you become more adaptive, more adaptable so that you don’t get stressed so easily tomorrow.

[29:43] Achieving Balance with Regular Meditation Practice

All right, we can look at it that way. It’s a very simplistic view of what Vedic Meditation is and what it can do, but it’s a good enough excuse if somebody wants to learn it for that reason. It’ll certainly do that.

However, something much greater is happening as we become more and more experienced in our witnessing of the phenomena that occur when we practice Vedic Meditation to be able to witness the entirety of the relative world collapsing back into its supersymmetric state and then re-emerging out of its supersymmetric state so we begin to see with regularity systematically strategically, we begin seeing how things form.

And when we can see how a thing forms, we can get a bigger picture of its purpose, its function, and what it is that makes it functional for the process of evolution.

So, to take your question and say, well, more Vedic Meditation practice. By more, I don’t mean longer number of minutes or more times a day, just 20 minutes twice a day should do the trick, and, over a longer period of time, one year, two years, three years, four years, any lopsidedness in our view about what’s going on in the dynamic between the masculine and the feminine, this confusion or bewilderment or lopsidedness tends to vanish. One finds everything far more balanced. To use your word, very good word, balanced.

 Jai Guru Deva.