Coping with Negativity: Content, Context and Consciousness

Coping with Negativity: Content, Context and Consciousness

[00:45] Q – How Can My Thoughts Be Negative?

I had an experience when you were lecturing earlier and you were talking about the wave getting so small it’s barely a wave, and you were talking about thoughts and thoughts not being the enemy or how we sometimes make them like bad.

So what happened was, while you were speaking, it was kind of like my thinking was overturned on something that I’d been wanting to ask a question of, which is, sometimes I go, “Oh, I’ve been meditating for so long. Why do I have negative thoughts? Or why do I have self-deprecating thoughts?” as an example.

Well, while I was listening to you, I kind of thought, “Well, are they really negative thoughts or am I just labeling them as negative?” Because you were talking about if there’s only one, if there’s only one, then how can my thoughts be negative?

Or am I just looking at them that way? That was what I wanted to see if you could speak to.

[01:44] A – I’m a Strange Guy

It’s a really good point, and we can expand it. How can anything be negative? And so then, looking at a process of evolution, negativity means I don’t yet have context. I don’t have context.

And so I used this example with somebody today and I’ve kind of told the story so many times it sounds almost like a hackneyed tale.

But when I was nine, I was hit by an ambulance, believe it or not, and I got tangled up and went underneath with a bicycle and everything smashed up my whole right side of my body. Fractured my skull and I was knocked off the family conveyor belt, which was headed somewhere.

I had three siblings. They are fabulous and I absolutely adore them, but they’re not this [points to himself]. So they were on the conveyor belt, and I got knocked off the conveyor belt. Spent a year in a hospital. No parents. My parents had to go to Southeast Asia. My father was in the war, and my siblings all went.

So I was in an army hospital. Nobody would ever want that for their child. I spent a year having my body put back together and rehabilitated. You’d never know.

But it wasn’t really about that. It was about turning me into a strange guy. I really was strange because I couldn’t relate to anybody in school, and so I got kind of frowned upon by the teachers after I got back. I’d been a year out of school and the schools that were there, we lived in Vietnam during the war, they were Defense Department, US Defense Department schools, and it was like 15 kids of all ages in a classroom with one teacher, that kind of thing.

[03:38] Learning My ABCs

And the teacher didn’t really take a shine to me, and I didn’t either. So my father brought me home and said, “Open up this crate.” A great big crate had arrived. “World Book Encyclopedia. Start with A, this is going to be your education program.”

So I would read, read, read, read A. All the A things. Places and people and anything that started with A, from atoms to Alberta.

And then he would come home once a week from flying combat missions. He was a fighter pilot. And I can remember very clearly he’d come, walking in the room, he had a 45 caliber gun in his shoulder pack and his flight suit on and his combat boots. And he would sit straight down and make a martini and light up a cigarette and he’d get the encyclopedia out.

And while he was puffing away, he’d be asking me questions that started with A. Then I graduated to B and graduated to C and graduated to… M is always the biggest, in case you ever wanted to know. It’s got the largest fattest spine on it, in the whole encyclopedia world.

After a year of World Book, another crate arrived. Britannica. “I want you to understand what the Brits version of all of this is. Get started on A.” It was a bit easier because I’d already done a year of World Book, US angle, and US spellings and things. Two years. No school, just encyclopedias, and lots of exams and things. What a weird education.

Meanwhile, my siblings were all going to school, and, you know, playing with Bobby and Scooter and getting to know American culture and things like that. Other little American kids. And then we returned finally to USA and I was only in high school for one year, and I met Maharishi.

So to be that strange child, something had to knock me off the conveyor belt. So if you take a snapshot of me lying around in a hospital looking all, with my legs in traction and my head wrapped up like a mummy. “Terrible. Oh, so terrible. Oh, poor kid. Boo hoo hoo!” And then you look at me now, “Hey, it all turned out okay.”

[06:33] Nothing Negates the Forward Movement of Evolution

So what a guru is supposed to do, you bring content, and the guru is supposed to provide context. Content, context, and with sufficient amount of context, you begin to see there’s a pattern.

Evolution, which gets disrupted, and this is basic biology 101. You have steady state of evolution, you have disruption, and the system that’s evolving, whatever it may be, the system, it could be an organism or it could be anything, begins to produce adaptive forms and functions. Adaptation rises out of disruption of the steady state.

And so then, I have negative thoughts or I have whatever thoughts they are. What is it that’s actually negative?

There’s actually nothing that can negate the fundamental forward movement of evolution. Nothing can negate it. It just appears that way when you don’t have sufficient time context.

[07:48] Going Back in Time

Now in Vedic, we don’t think in terms of one lifetime, we think in terms of eons and millennia. And I mean, when we say something like, “Oh, this is a body of knowledge that’s 5,000 years old,” we just have to put a five on it because it’s probably more like 10. But you know, five’s at least bite size and a bit more believable. Very easy glib thing to say 5,000.

Well, it was a little more than a thousand that William the Conqueror came to England and took over the place. 1066. And go back a thousand from there and you have that period of time where the rabbi from Nazareth was killed by the Romans and we started numbering our years.

It doesn’t matter what culture you’re in, you might even be in a culture that either doesn’t believe in that guy or hates that guy, or you might be in a culture that loves that guy. It doesn’t matter. This is 2025. Doesn’t matter who you are, everybody numbers their years from that same person. That’s only two thousand.

Let’s go back another thousand, and another thousand and a half, and we’re in the construction of The Pyramids. Another thousand and a half, we’re in Babylonia, Mesopotamia. And in India, we’re in the Indus Valley civilization. Go back another thousand. Now we’ve hit 5,000.

You see how old this thing is? Massive civilizations have come and gone. Civilizations most people have never even heard of that lasted 800 years, like the Parthian Empire. Hardly anybody even knows who that is anymore. 800 years the Parthians, the inventors of the Parthian shot, which has been kind of bastardized into the parting shot.

That they could ride on horseback, and they would feign a retreat and they’d get their enemies all chasing them, and then they would turn in their saddles with their bows and fire the arrows into the pursuing army and decimate them. The Parthians and entire multi-hundred year civilizations, and this knowledge was still there.

Think the mantra easily, effortlessly, take it as it comes. Perhaps in Sanskrit instead of in English. Definitely in Sanskrit, it’s been here for so long and empires have come and gone. It’s just astonishing.

And so, when we’re starting to look at that size of context, you take things in large, large context.

[10:48] A Little Snapshot of Time Is Never Pretty

People often say to me, “Oh, it’s going to be happening. Oh, the politics of this, that and the other.” I just think, “When was the last time you heard anybody whinging and whining about Atilla the Hun, who stacked 3 million heads, severed heads, to prove his point? Or his great imitator, Genghis Khan, who came 800 years later?”

“That’s all gone.”

“Yeah. All this is going to go too.”

So what’s not going to go? Consciousness is not going to go. Have things got better since those days? Definitely.

People will often say, “Oh no! There’s a big setback. Everything’s so terrible now. If you look at infant mortality, if you look at how many people are in absolute abject poverty and not eating every day. All of those numbers that are negative indicators go down, down, down, down every decade.

And people are going, “Yeah, but you know, the state of politics…” Whatever. It doesn’t really, in the largest context, we are evolving and we are evolving palpably. If we look at the right measures and we don’t get too confused about snapshots, a little snapshot of time is never very pretty.

Somebody did an Instagram of you sitting on the toilet and said, “This is what her life’s all about.” How embarrassing? Well, it was, there was an epoch of toilet sitting. Does it… to what extent does it actually define you? You know, that’s not descriptive, although it’s factual.

[12:43] Consciousness Contextualizes Content

So what we have to learn to do is step out of our slavery to content. We’re slaves to content. It’s like, and where’s that content coming from? Those little devices [indicates smartphone].

Slaves to content. And content is not contextual. It doesn’t have its own ability to place things in context, and so there’s only one thing that can do that, and that is vast consciousness. When you have vast consciousness, all content is contextualized, all content is contextualized.

So somebody might come running up to me and go, “Bad news. Bad news.”

And I’ll say, “That’s one perspective.”

Information. Information about what is happening, and information about what’s not happening anymore. That’s what it is. It’s information. Bad and good and all that, it’s all a contextual framework. It’s contextual.

So you know, we don’t have to pretend as though nothing’s happening, but we do have to find balance. And currently our population is grossly imbalanced by content only. Grossly imbalanced.

What’s the content? What’s the content? What’s the…? And the content’s changing every few minutes, and there’s no context in which to see all of this change. So we get all [twirls hands and wobbles head], like that.

[14:22] The Dangers of Irrelevancy

And being like that is not what the big brain was created for. This giant brain that we have with, just in your prefrontal cortex you have 10 billion neurons. And if you take the whole brain, the cranial brain and the extra-cranial brain, the central nervous system, 100 billion neurons.

And strangely enough, 98% of it, this is according to one of my tutors, who was a Nobel Prize winner in neurology, Sir John Eccles, from Australia, 98% of people’s central nervous system and brain’s computing power is used up in storing stress memories. 98%.

There’s about a 2% originality factor. And this shows up in repetitious thinking. The bean counters in the cognitive sciences can demonstrate to you that you have 60,000 to 100,000 thoughts every day.

If you count a thought as being any cognitive process, like a desire, a memory, a recognition of a sensation. 60,000 to 100,000 of these events, the waves on the ocean. That’s not so hard to swallow as an idea, but what’s disconcerting is that the same studies show that in the high nineties, a percentage of the content is the same content that was in there yesterday. The same thoughts. The same thoughts. The same thoughts. The same thoughts.

And yet time is changing, and time is requesting or requiring of us a different physiology. Thinking causes biochemistry. So if you think a sad thought, you get sad chemicals, you think an angry thought, you get angry chemicals, you think a frightening thought, you get fear chemicals, and you think a manic thought, you get manic chemistry and if you have bliss, you get bliss chemistry.

What’s being demanded on us day after day is that we are adaptive, nimble, agile, and we are interacting with change effectively. But how can that happen if the brain and the mind keep producing the same thought patterns day after day?

It’s the same physiological chemistry as yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before. And the evolutionary demand is not the ever repeating known. The evolutionary demand is progressive change, and if we don’t have the physiological structures, then we’re beginning to build up a very dangerous thing in the context of evolution, and that dangerous thing is irrelevancy.

It’s dangerous to be irrelevant to evolution. It is safe to be relevant to evolution. To be relevant to evolution, we have to move through progressive change. And without progressive change, there’s no safety. It feels as though the ever repeating known is safe, but in fact it is stagnating and it’s going to attract disruptors. Scavengers and predators and all that hang around stagnation.

[18:02] Recycling Stress

So if we design the change, cause change to occur and be designers of it, when you meditate regularly, you are regularly breaking up all of the chemical structure of yesterday. And sometimes stuff surfaces when we have irrelevant chemistry being disintegrated. It also recirculates for a little while and it might cause a thought to appear, which is a thought about what you just lost.

So a stress unwinds first in the body, and then a thought appears next. The thought is an artifact of whatever you just lost. And so if you have a negative thought, you’re a meditator and you have a negative thought, something going past the window of perception, that is some leftover from a chemical substrate that just got dissolved, and so you let it go.

If you think to yourself, “Oh, I mustn’t think that,” now it’s back. You just retrieved that thing, which escaped. The chemicals for it escaped, and the artifact, the epiphenomenon, which is the thought, came past the window of perception. That’s the bye-bye. You’re saying goodbye to it.

But if you grab it and ruminate in it, including, “I don’t wish to have this thought. There’s a negative thought and I don’t wish to have this thought,” now you’re reconstructing the chemicals that had already been dissolved in your body and you are recycling it. You’re putting it back in the body again.

You have a meditator body, and the meditator body is not tolerant of stress chemistry. So, out goes the stress chemistry again, and here comes the epiphenomenon again. The so-called negative thought, which is the… it should be the bye-bye thought.

But you grab it again. “Why am I thinking this thought? Why am I thinking this thought? Why, why, why, why?” And then it goes back in again, because once again, you’re creating the chemistry for it. And so the shortcut is, don’t recycle. Negative thought comes, that’s what you just lost. That’s what you just lost.

How much of that stuff is in there? Well, it could be a lot of it, and it just passes by the window. That’s all. It doesn’t mean that you’ve gone negative. You’ve gone negative if you dive into it and entertain it. Is there entertaining it supposedly in aid of not doing it again? This is very paradoxical, having to have the thought about the thing, you don’t want to think in order not to have the thought about the thing you don’t want to think.

It’s just some kind of wispy smoke that goes by the window and, “Interesting. What’s next?” That’s all you do, dive into whatever’s next. There’s gotta be some next right thing to be doing, right?

[21:28] Let It Go and Move On

And so, we don’t give any attention to this kind of stuff that goes past the window. It had some use once. If we got stressed about something once upon a time, then maybe it was useful to have a fight or flight reaction once upon a time. Now the epiphenomenon, the artifact of that is being dissolved. Let it go. This is how we let it go. Let it go and attend to whatever needs to be done next.

So this is the meditator way of… and then these events will begin to become less and less because we are depleting the inventory of stress chemicals. Every day less and less and less and less, less stress chemicals.

And so these thought events of stress release artifacts, you’re going to run out of them, and it’s a happy thing to have zero in your inventory in that area. And so, this is what we’re doing every day, we’re depleting the inventory.

So, we’re okay with it all. Negativity, something historic from the past that if it’s not relevant right now, then it’s what you’re losing. Just let it go. It’s all okay. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t have to mean anything. We don’t want to get out the psychiatry book and start looking up, what does it all mean?

Psychoanalyze the negativity. That’s the recycling thing. Just let it go. Let it go and move on.

Good. Jai Guru Deva.