Laws of Nature – How to Align with Evolution and Avoid Suffering

Laws of Nature – How to Align with Evolution and Avoid Suffering

[00:45] Q – What Are the Laws of Nature?

What are the laws of Nature? Where can I find them, and how do I know if I’m abiding by them?

[00:51] A – Patterns of Cause and Effect

Jai Guru Deva.

The laws of Nature. Laws of Nature are those cognizable patterns of cause and effect. Cognizable means you’re able to detect them with your human awareness. Patterns of cause and effect that have a theme, and the theme of these patterns of cause and effect is the theme of movement from less sophisticated to more sophisticated.

Now, let’s use that. I’ve done this elsewhere, but it won’t harm you to hear me do it a second time. Sophistication here is not some kind of term that has to do with, “Oh, there’s somebody who looks sophisticated, because they’re wearing certain kinds of clothes and smoke a pipe or something.”

Sophistication is more a scientific term of art that refers to much complexity integrated into function. My favorite example of this is a wristwatch. You have a wristwatch, which is basically a sundial, it’s telling you where the sun happens to be at any given time.Has the sun recently risen? Or is it about the middle of the day of its having risen? Or is it toward the end of the daylight or in commencement of the night? Is it the middle of the night? Or somewhere between the middle of the night and the next dawn?

[02:25] Elegance – The Pinnacle of Sophistication

That’s what basically your wristwatch is telling you, it’s a sundial. And it is filled with—I’m not 100 percent sure about the number, but at least dozens, if not hundreds, of moving parts, all moving in a highly complex—and let’s not confuse that word with the word that sounds similar to it, complicated. It’s not complicated. It’s just complex—integrated, meaning they all fit together, all those parts, into a relatively small packet of successful interaction with each other, all the parts, yielding a sophisticated instrument that, properly made, can tell you where the sun is, day or night, to within an accuracy of one or two seconds in an entire year. What an astonishing device. That’s sophisticated.

And when sophistication reaches its peak, there’s another term of art that is used in science—not to be confused with fashion magazine uses of this word—and that word is, pinnacle of sophistication, is elegance.

It is elegant. An elegant, highly sophisticated complexity of moving parts that yield a particular desirable outcome. This is the thematic behavior of those patterns, those cascading patterns of cause and effect, which we refer to as, “The Laws of Nature.”

[04:12] Science’s Evolving View of Nature

Where do you find them? Well, don’t look in a book because you might have noticed that the laws of Nature as described by, let’s say, Galileo or Copernicus changed somewhat dramatically in the time between them and Isaac Newton.

And Newton’s description of the laws of Nature changed very radically by the time of Albert Einstein. And Einstein’s view of the cascades of cause and effect, the laws of Nature, was forced into change with the discoveries of Schrodinger, of Niels Bohr, and other great masters of quantum physics.

And quantum physics today appears to be the pinnacle of the way of explaining the mechanisms of cause and effect that explain to us how our universe behaves. These are the laws of Nature.

But if you look in a book, whatever book you read, then you’re reading obsolescence in progression. Anything you read today will be obsolete within six months, especially now with the advent of technologies that can think millions of times faster than a human can think.

The capacity to arrive at conclusions from already existing knowledge, to take all the existing human knowledge, and to reconfigure and reanalyze, and to reexamine it, and to arrive at new conclusions that have never been arrived at before, it is estimated that something like a hundred thousand years worth of human conceptualization will occur in the next one year.

It’s 2024 now. By this time in 2025, 100,000 years worth of re-examination of the total accrued knowledge of humanity will have been assessed by artificial intelligence and new conclusions will be arrived at.

[06:31] Laws that Change With the Need of the Time

So, where do you find these laws of Nature? Is there a book that says, “These are the laws of Nature and if you violate these 10 commandments, then you’re running into trouble”? It’s not as mundane as that, because the laws of Nature change according to the need of the time. Let me give you an example.

Water, typically at sea level pressure on the planet Earth—we have to make all those little caveats and sidebars just to really establish what we’re talking about—water will boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit if you put it in a kettle over the hot plate of your stove, after a few minutes of it heating, water boils at about 212 Fahrenheit, which is 100 Celsius, or the other C word, which is Centigrade—same thing. Celsius and Centigrade are the same thing—100.

 But let’s go to the elevation from which I’m speaking right now, 7,800 feet elevation, where water boils in the low 90s of Celsius and boils in Fahrenheit degrees considerably colder.

That means liquid water turns into gas at a lower temperature where I’m sitting right now, meaning that literally boiling water that made my cup of tea, that I had prior to recording this, is colder than boiling water would be at sea level. Now, let’s go to 30,000 feet, which is about 100 feet higher than the top of Mount Everest.

[08:25] Boiling Water in Your Hand

The heat of the human hand, which is about 37 degrees Celsius or about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, is enough heat to cause liquid water to boil to turn from liquid into gas. So, if you hold a very thin cup of water in your hand on the top of Mount Everest in Nepal, the water will start boiling just from your hand, but it won’t be hot. It’ll be about the same temperature as your hand. Relatively cold water changing from liquid into gas at higher elevation.

So, what’s the law of Nature? Well, the textbook tells you 100° Celsius is the boiling point of water. But it’s not. It’s different at different air pressures. Where air pressure is sea level pressure, then water boils at 100° C.

But, it doesn’t boil at 100° C. On top of Everest, it boils at 37° C. So, what’s the law of Nature? Well, it depends on who’s asking and where you are. Laws of Nature are variable depending on circumstances and conditions. What is it that is attuned with the law of Nature that you might be doing at a given time?

[09:52] A Universe Becoming Conscious of Itself

There are so many different laws of Nature that govern the processes of evolution, infinite numbers of laws of Nature that govern the processes of evolution. What is it evolutionary to be doing at any given moment? Or to refrain from doing? For how long is it evolutionary to be doing a particular thing? And for how long is it evolutionary not to be doing another particular thing?

The variability of answer in all of this is equally infinite. In other words, it’s beyond you being able to write it down or to turn it into an index.What behavior, at what time, for how long, and with what intensity is relevant to evolution? Well, who’s asking? What state of consciousness are you in? And so on and so forth.

So you can see the infinite complexity of coming up with an answer, but there are certain patterns that we can identify. So for example, there is a trend of matter floating in spaceto congeal into molecular structures that look spherical, we’ll call those things planets, and for things to happen on those planets that cause atoms and molecules to make a jump into being living things, and for living things to progress into being highly conscious living things that can sit around having conversations like the ones we’re having now about the nature of the universe. We live in a universe that, apparently, is bio-friendly.

But beyond bio-friendly, it is bio-friendly with reference to becoming conscious of itself. It appears that our Universe wants to create nervous systems through which Universe can see and comment upon Universe. This is the Vedic worldview. What is it that’s going to cause repertoire of function?

[12:15] Your Role in the Evolutionary Flow

Repertoire means how many things you can do. What’s your capability base? “What is your repertoire?” means how many things can you do? What is it you’re capable of? What can you think of? What can you be aware of? What is the periphery, the event horizon of your awareness? And how much complexity can you envelop in that awareness, whatever its periphery may be, and have it all integrated and functioning with reference to meeting the need of the time?

And so there’s a movement, there’s a trend, there’s a pattern of movement from less complex and less sophisticated to more complex and more sophisticated, in the direction of elegance. And this is a relative term. So yesterday’s elegance would be relatively crude compared with tomorrow’s elegance. Ever-increasing capability of all-inclusive awareness and all capability, this is the direction things are moving in.

And so then, to what extent are you an active participant, wherever you happen to be, in whatever situation you are, under whatever circumstances you find yourself, at whatever elevation you happen to be, on whichever planet you find yourself?

To what extent are you, in this moment, in the mainstream of this progressive change, this evolutionary flow? Or to what extent are you over on the sides of the river of evolution, banging up against the rocks? Are you in the mainstream, or are you marginal? If you stay marginal for very long, then you lose your relevance to the overall trend.

[14:15] Survival Through Evolution

The overall trend of the laws of Nature is one towards ever-increasing sophistication, capability, interactivity, and that kind of relevance. If you lose your relevance to the phenomenon of evolution, then you don’t get to exist. That’s when we can say this Darwinistic concept of the survival of the fittest comes into play.

This is what’s been seen in biological evolutionary models, that adaptation, stability is one thing. Too much stability without adaptation is fatal. And so when, the impact of a massive meteor in the Yucatan Peninsula, in what we call Mexico today caused a mass extinction event, on the Earth, and we say, “Well, the dinosaurs disappeared,” or did they?

Most paleontological ornithologists—people who study dinosaur segueing into birds (ornithology is bird study)—agree that the dinosaurs that did survive are the ones who maintained a certain degree of integrity of the look of a dinosaur, but became warm-blooded, feathered animals known as birds.

So, the next time you look at a bird and you think it might look like a velociraptor that you saw in the Jurassic Park movies, you’re right. They’re like feathered little dinosaurs that are flapping about, and who progressed through certain kinds of dinosaurs that had adapted and grown the ability to have little feather-like projections on their otherwise leathery wings.

These are the archaeopteryx, and matrixing through those kinds of dinosaurs, eventually there was successful adaptation to the new environments.

And now the beautiful little birdies that are out there drinking in my birdbath right now, or the great big crows and ravens that swoop over them from time to time and make squawking noises, are basically… I’m living in a world of dinosaurs that can fly around now.

[16:41] Survival is a Product

Evolution. So what is it that allows not just survivability, but evolution? The law of Nature is, no form, feature, or phenomenon has an intrinsic right simply to survive.

Survival is a product. Survival is a product. Survival is not the thing. The thing is progress. Progress is the basis on which you get to survive. You get to survive if you evolve. You get to survive if you evolve.

And so, what is it that allows you to evolve? What is it that allows you to be progressive? The engagement in progressive change. It is a talent of being able spontaneously to cognize the patterns of cascades of cause and effect that are going on right now in your environment, right now, where you are. Right now, wherever you are.

You might be sitting on a little boat in Tahiti, listening to me in this podcast, or you might be in a skyscraper in Wall Street, or you might be scratching your head sitting on a beach in Byron Bay in New South Wales, or you might be in Patagonia, not the shop, but the actual geographic place on the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego in South America.

What is it, which doing, which action you engage in, what is it that will be in tune with the need of the time right where you are? What is that?

[18:37] Reduce Suffering – Act in Tune with Nature

Don’t look for a book. It’s not going to be in a book. Your human consciousness has the capacity to attune itself to the need of the moment and to spontaneously come up with those impulses of creative intelligence that will allow you to be stable and adaptable simultaneously, to move spontaneously in the direction of evolution, making you highly relevant to the theme of progressive change.

And when you make yourself highly relevant to the theme of progressive change, how do you know? Well, you suffer less or not at all, suffer not at all.

How do you get to that state of spontaneous right action where your ability to compute, without having to engage in great intellectual pros and cons arguments, how do you get to that state where, spontaneously, your mind computes only those thoughts which, when acted upon, will be in attunement with the actual need of the time?

In the geographic settings, at the elevation, and the place that you are in the social setting, the level of humidity that happens to be there, etc., etc., etc., thousands of variables that will yield you being in perfect attunement with the need of the moment, where you don’t bring harm to the interest of others, where you don’t bring any slowing effect upon the evolutionary process.

[20:23] Vedic Meditation and Laws of Nature

How do you do it? You have to allow your individual awareness, twice every day, to settle down to its own least-excited state, in which state your individual mind has become one with the Totality of the Unified Field, the home of all the laws of Nature. 

There’s an unmanifest element, layer of the Unified Field, everything is Unified Field, but there’s an unmanifest, least-excited condition of the Unified Field in which all of the laws of Nature exist in simultaneity in seed form.

When your mind settles down to its own least-excited state, your individuality is becoming one. with that Totality of unmanifest Unified Field. When your individuality becomes one with that during meditation—during the practice of Vedic Meditation, sitting comfortably in your chair each morning and each evening—when you emerge from that state, then your individual awareness has a sense of what the Unified Field is up to, in exactly the settings in which you find your body, and you’re going to find whatever it is that requires doing to be a charming prospect.

It’ll be charming to do whatever is evolutionary. So you’ll discover what’s evolutionary by discovering what’s charming.

And, whatever it is that shouldn’t be done in this given moment, at this elevation, with this humidity, and in this social setting, and etc., etc., etc, that thing will feel to you like aversion. You won’t feel charmed.

[22:25] Be The Universe

And so then, how do we know what the laws of Nature are? Well, I’ve described all that.All those cascades of patterns of cause and effect that are thematic in bringing about the phenomenon of evolution, which is the movement from less sophisticated, lower repertoire of capability to greater sophistication, higher repertoire of capability. That movement, how do you get attuned with that? Stop being merely an individual.

Be the Universe. Become one with the universal unbounded consciousness field that is revealed to you by the practice of Vedic Meditation. It’s revealed. Meditation does not create the field. Meditation is the technique of revelation of the pre-existing truth that down deep inside you are that field.

And then, experiencing that on a regular basis, strategically, systematically, you’ll find that your awareness, your thoughts, your trends, your tendencies of thought, spontaneously reflect whatever that Unified Field value is up to in your area, and you will be able to cognize that and act spontaneously, accordingly, just based on following charm.

This is how we attune our awareness with all the laws of Nature. This is how we bring about progressive change. This is how we have greater survivability because we’re evolving, because we’re progressing.

I want to come back to that point just for a moment. Most people think, “Well, if I get all of the basics in place, like shelter, water, food, and then add to those few things, sufficient sunshine and exercise, and then add to those things baseline education, reading and writing and arithmetic, I’ve got the basics. Now I can progress.” Wrong. Wrong. Progress will attract those things to you.

[25:01] Survival is a Product of Evolution

You have first to progress. You have first to evolve. When you are evolving, when you are progressing, then spontaneously, survival is granted. It’s not that if you get survival first, then you can progress. There’s no system in Nature or in botanical or zoological or science that validates the idea that you survive first and then you get to evolve or progress. No, no species, no individual member of a species gets to survive without being adaptive.

Adaptation. Adaptation provides you with the capacity to survive. Survival is a product of evolution. Evolution is not a product of survival. So if we care to survive—and most of us do care to survive—then in order to survive, we have to be sure that progressive evolutionary behavior is in place. And then how do we do that?

Transcend all the relativity twice every day by sitting in your chair and practicing Vedic Meditation. If you haven’t yet learned it, go to my website, thomknoles.com, t-h-o-m-k-n-o-l-e-s.com, and find a teacher and get instructed in Vedic Meditation. And then practice it twice every day. And then when you listen to lectures like this one, what you’re learning through these lectures is one of the two components of maximum speed of progress.

[26:58] Theory + Practice = Science

Maximum speed of progress is contingent upon two aspects. It’s bipedal. That means it has two feet. The first is direct experience of your deep inner Nature as the one indivisible, whole consciousness field.

Your deep inner Nature is the Unified Field in its unmanifest state, and it’s constantly manifesting or issuing forth all the laws of Nature that guide evolution from within you, and you can pick it up, cognize it, and act accordingly. This is direct experience.

The second foot of all of this is good intellectual understanding. When you have good intellectual understanding, then what you do is you minimize inadvertently resisting the progressive change that meditation is bringing to you.

It is possible, as a meditator, for our meditation to be delivering to us good, powerful results, which, if we don’t understand that they’re in fact beneficial results, we might resist them. We might actually take two steps forward and one step back, which means that on average, we’re going one step forward instead of two.

We need to go two steps forward and keep it at two, and then two and three and four and five steps forward, instead of taking a few steps forward and a few steps back and then a few steps forward, which is a slower way to walk.

So, in aid of not inadvertently resisting the effect of our meditation, we need to have good intellectual understanding. It helps us to embrace our existing practice.

So, direct experience through the existing practice and good intellectual understanding, when we have the direct experience, which in science we call empiricism—that’s the empirical, that’s the part which you’re having direct experience. That’s empiricism—and, brought together with conceptual delineation. Conceptual delineation means a good solid theory that testably provides an explanation for observations. Theory and practice, these two things together equal science.

[29:31] Practice Vedic Meditation and Become an Effective Agent of Evolution

And, so we have a scientific approach to engaging in the process of evolution, minimizing or even eliminating suffering, making ourselves highly relevant, eminently survivable features of the progressive change that’s going on all around us, inexorably anyway.

Progressive change is going on all around us all the time anyway. To what extent can you make yourself relevant to it? If you can maximize your relevance to the pre-existing already progressive change that’s occurring all around you, then you get to survive with all kinds of benefits.

And if you cannot make yourself relevant to the progressive change, which is uncompromising, progressive change that’s happening all around you all the time, what it feels like is suffering. It feels like suffering.

Suffering is caused by inadvertent tendency to drag against the evolutionary trend, which is actually all that’s happening within you and all around you. So one needs to stop resisting it and go with the flow of it and be a relevant agent of that progressive change. We do this by practicing Vedic Meditation twice every day and getting knowledgeable on the subject. This is how we do it all.

Jai Guru Deva.