Understanding Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) Through the Vedic Worldview

Understanding Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) Through the Vedic Worldview

[00:45] Understanding Stress

Welcome to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles. Today, I’d like to address the question of post-traumatic stress syndrome, or disorder, as it’s sometimes called, PTSD.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a very serious state, and is caused by serious overloads of experience. Unfortunately, PTSD, as it’s abbreviated, has become a little bit of a buzz term, and so people will claim to have PTSD because they got caught in traffic, or, “I got PTSD because I had an argument with my lover,” and so on and so forth.

So post-traumatic stress disorder was first identified in post-combat participants. So people who came home from combat, and we’ve probably been looking at post-traumatic stress disorder for, in fact, probably a century, all the way back to World War One, when soldiers would come back with what was called then shell shock. Or in World War Two, coming back with what was then called combat fatigue, and a variety of symptoms that were relatively ill-defined.

It’s very good to understand what that is, but to do that, we need to really understand what the word stress means. Stress is a term of medical science today, which, up until the 1930s, was in fact only an engineering term. The word stress was first coined by Professor Hans Selye, one of my mentors from the 1970s. I studied under him, who was a Canadian diagnostician, and who went around all the different hospital rooms and noticed that whether you had a broken leg or you had a left lobe sarcoma or you had a brain tumor or any number of other ailments, or even a common cold, that there were certain things that all sick people had in common.

And it turns out that, as he put it, they all looked sick. That is to say, they all looked as though they were beleaguered in some way. And so he began to study what he later referred to as the General Adaptation Syndrome, and he came up with a seminal document on the General Adaptation Syndrome, in which document he first coined the word stress to describe the way in which the body stores information that comes from having had an overload of experience.

So Selye taught me the following, and I’d like to share it with you, so we can start getting a deeper understanding of things like post-traumatic stress disorder. Stress is the word that, if we don’t understand it, then we’re not going to understand the disorder at all.

[04:04] Adaptation Energy and Stress Reaction

Each of us has a propensity, a capability in our physiology, which is known as adaptation energy. This is the energy that we have to adapt to changes of expectation. So, let’s take what is a change of expectation. You thought you were getting married to somebody, and they told you the day before the wedding, it’s off. That was a change of expectation.

You were driving along, and there was suddenly a sudden loud noise that was the equivalent of a cannon going off, 200 decibels. That’s a change of expectation. You were expecting something to taste good, but it tasted absolutely god awful. That’s a change of expectation.

And so then we have this, if we think of it like a bank balance of adaptation energy that we draw upon to be adaptive in the face of changes of expectation, whether those are perceptual, emotional, intellectual. Any kind of change of expectation eats up our preexisting adaptation energy bank balance.

When we run out of adaptation energy, then a different kind of function occurs, and this is what Selye referred to as the stress reaction. Stress reaction is the thing the body does when it has no more adaptation energy to meet a demand interactively. You can’t interact with the demand any more, the demand being a demand to change your expectation. What you end up having to do is to react to the demand to save yourself from it.

And there are two. This is referred to as a binary response. Either you could fight the demand, make it go away, try to kill it, as it were. The thing that’s asking you to change, make it go away by assailing it. Or you can flee from it, and fleeing from it might mean literally you get up and run, but that’s generally not the case in modern context. It could mean even retreating or resiling, as we say in psychiatry, all the way into catatonia, which means you go into a state where you’re playing dead.

[06:33] When Adaptation Energy Runs Low

So stress reactivity is a consequence of running out of adaptation energy. And so when we run out of adaptation energy, let’s look at what might make us run out of it, or what bolsters it up, what gives us more of it.

So, if we have a large bank balance of adaptation energy, two people side by side, experiencing the same change of expectation, even an extreme event of some kind. Let’s say a lightning bolt blasts a pine tree apart right in front of both of you, and neither of you were expecting it. Of course, you wouldn’t be there if you were expecting it.

And so there’s the 200 decibels of sound blowing your ears off, practically, the flash of light, the noise, the fear, and all the rest of it. Two people experiencing the exact same stimulus, the exact same demand, each of them going to be eating up adaptation energy. One of them may have already had low adaptation energy.

Let’s just create a fake scenario, just to give us something to work with hypothetically. They had, you know, a bottle of Johnny Walker last night, and they’re recovering from that. And they woke up this morning and had an argument with their spouse. They’re recovering from that. Their adaptation energy levels are getting lower and lower. And then they made the mistake of having some Hong Kong fish or something for breakfast, and they’re recovering from having vomited that up, and they’re standing there with you.

And you, the other member of the hypothesis, are a Vedic meditator. You practiced your Vedic Meditation that morning. You probably let go of the alcohol habit some time ago. You haven’t had any arguments recently, and so your adaptation energy levels are rather, by comparison, fat. You’ve got a lot of adaptation energy fat inside your system, and then suddenly comes a lightning bolt. Boom.

The point that’s being made here, and this is one of Selye’s points, there is no event which is the same for everybody. And so the one who is bereft of thick and rich adaptation energy is going to have fight-flight reactivity when the lightning bolt hits the tree. You will also have fight-flight reactivity when the lightning bolt hits the tree, but your speed of recovery will be dramatically faster than that of the person who had virtually zero adaptation energy at the time of the demand.

And so stress reactivity is not based upon there being an absolute objective measure of what it is that is stressful. Something that is stressful for one person is not stressful for another person, or at a different time, different time of day, different season, different circumstances, somebody could get very, very stressed and stay stressed for a long time. So we call that accumulated stress. Or they could be relatively less stressed than somebody else who had the same experience. And so we have people in our hypothesis who are having different reactions to the exact same stimulus, standing right next to each other, elbow to elbow.

[10:15] Premature Cognitive Commitments

So let’s look at what happens when there is a non-adaptive reaction to a bolt of lightning or some demand for you to change your expectation, whatever that might be, loud noise, emotional, intellectual, or just raw expectations, and the one who has a major stress reaction and has very little adaptation energy for their body and mind to have a restorative impact within the minutes after the big demand is made, a thing known as premature cognitive commitment occurs.

And so it doesn’t matter what the thing is that stretched you, it might have been the lightning bolt. If, while walking through the field of daisies on your way to the tree that was struck by the lightning, while having a conversation with your friend, you were sniffing the flower air and looking at the yellow daisies and enjoying the blue sky behind you, behind this whole scenery, and there may have been a particular tune going in your head, let’s say Help by The Beatles or something, and then the lightning bolt hit.

Your brain is not going to simply remember the loud noise, the flash, and the tree disintegrating right in front of you as the stressor. This is referred to as the stressor, meaning the stimulus to which somebody had a stress reaction. This is the stressor. It’s going to remember everything that was within the perceptual range, the perceptible field.

And so the color yellow that came from the daisies, the blue cerulean sky, the cloud shape that was sitting behind it, that may have looked like an elephant, The Beatles’ music that was going through your head, because that was playing in the car before you stepped out into the lovely field, etc. etc. Premature cognitive commitment.

So, prematurely the brain makes a commitment to an otherwise innocent cognition. The yellow daisies had nothing to do with the stressor. They were not the stressor. The blue sky had nothing to the stressor. The elephant cloud had nothing to the stressor. The Beatles music had nothing to do with the stressor. It doesn’t matter. The brain is going to remember snapshot, memorize, and burn into its memory all of those elements.

[13:05] PTSD Is Not About Scale

And so when we have post-traumatic stress disorder, really, what’s happened is there’s been an extreme stressful reaction. It doesn’t matter what it was to. It could well have been that the last straw for you, after a whole lot of other things that ate up your adaptation energy, was you ran out of dishwashing liquid and it was just the last straw. That could be the major stressor for you. Or it could be that you’re in combat and your best friend got their arm blown off by an incendiary missile and you had to witness that major stressor.

Stress is not determined by the scale of the event, absolutely. Of course, you know, in those two extremes that I pointed out, we would naturally expect a higher ratio of stress reactions from combat situations than we would from running out of dishwashing liquid. But it is possible for somebody to go into a full-blown virtually psychotic stress reaction, even when they run out of dishwashing liquid, if their adaptation energy is absolutely gone at the moment, at that time.

And so then premature cognitive commitment occurs every time we get stressed. Premature cognitive commitment is sometimes abbreviated as PCC. It is the way in which our brain is holding on to information that was peripheral to, and prematurely holding on to, information that was peripheral to the stressor and memorizing it.

Now you’re not just stressed about the lightning bolt and the disintegrating tree and the 200 decibels of sound, you’re also stressed about the color yellow, the cerulean sky, the elephant-shaped cloud, and everything else that was around at the time, perhaps the ambient fragrances, and everything.

And here’s the catch: you don’t know. There’s no intellectual framework that’s going to tell you that those things, an elephant-shaped cloud, or that particular color of sky, or that particular color of yellow, or daisies, or the ambient fragrances are on the list of things to which you are now sensitive. Those things will be triggers for you, irrespective of whether or not you remember them, virtually for the rest of your life, unless you can take a technique of reversal of stress and premature cognitive commitment, which is also part of the accumulated stress regime, out of your nervous system.

[16:05] How Stress Leaves the Body

And so then how does stress go back out? Stress is stored, as all memories are stored, in a chemical format. There are parts of the brain that have secretion sites. There are parts of the brain, most notably the hippocampus and the hypothalamus, that store some of the chemistry of stress reactivity, but every cell of the body, every of the 70 trillion cells of the body, is equally stressed by every stress event. In case you thought that your pinky toe on your right foot at the very tip of it was somehow saved from the stress of the lightning bolt hitting the tree, it was not.

Every skin cell, every immune cell, every circulatory blood cell, there’s no part of the body that is not stressed when you have a stress reaction. The key is not, let’s get rid of stress reactivity, that’s not the key. The key is we have to begin a process of systematic and strategic removal of layers of these now-irrelevant chemicals.

And why do I say irrelevant? I’ll ask the rhetorical question: Is it relevant for you to get sweaty hands and get jumpy and not know why, because the sky is a certain color when you walk outside? Because that happens to be the color, and you don’t remember, but it happens to be the color that it was one day when a lightning bolt hit the tree. Is it relevant? And, of course, the answer to that is no.

Is it relevant for you to be jumpy about daisies because there happens to be daisies around? And you don’t know that you’re jumpy about daisies. You might think it’s something else. Someone gives you a daisy, a handful of flowers, and you start getting sweaty and feeling like you’re not digesting, and you think you’re coming down with a virus. In fact, you are having a premature cognitive commitment reaction to some daisies that somebody handed you, and you have no intellectual information about it, so it’s confusing.

Is it relevant for you to be stressed by a particular strain of some Beatles song? Of course, the answer is no, but this is what happens in post-traumatic stress syndrome. The patient, call them the patient for the moment, the subject who is subject to this condition, is having irrelevant reactivity almost constantly in situations that do not warrant fighting or fleeing.

Fight-flight reactivity is the stress reaction. It is something that might save you from death if, in fact, it’s appropriate for you to be having it. But you walk into a room and someone hands you daisies and you start having fight-flight reactivity and you don’t understand why, this is irrelevant behavior. Irrelevant thoughts, irrelevant behavior, basically irrelevant reactivity going on all the time.

So we call it post-traumatic stress disorder when there is a lot of this irrelevant pressure of thought, lots of irrelevant thoughts, lots of irrelevant physiological reactions, and no one consistent theme, because there are so many premature cognitive commitments that are associated with absolutely every major stress reaction.

[19:50] Vedic Meditation for PTSD

And so then, how do we reverse all of this? And the fact is, I don’t mean to make it sound trivial, but it’s ridiculously simple. You take a course in Vedic Meditation. Taking a course in Vedic Meditation means you get in contact with a qualified teacher of the Vedic Meditation technique that I have popularized in the world, that came from my teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

There are a lot of things around when you look up Vedic Meditation. There’s people who thought that was a cool buzz word, and decided I also teach Vedic Meditation, you listen to Beethoven and think of pretty pictures, and that’s Vedic Meditation. That’s not Vedic Meditation the way I teach it.

So, the way that I’ve been teaching it, and the way that my more than 200 trained instructors teach it all over the world, a systematic method where you learn a specific pulsation of sound. This is referred to as a bija mantra, a particular kind of mantra which has no intended meaning, but has a beautiful mellifluous sound, and there are different mantras that work best for different people. So a trained instructor will know which of these many mantras is going to be the one that will serve you best for the purpose of taking your mind to less and less excited states.

When the mind, during Vedic Meditation, goes to the least excited state, which it does absolutely effortlessly, there’s no concentration, there’s no control, there’s no forcing, there’s no straining, there’s no contemplating, there’s no mood making. There’s just a direct mechanical perceptual phenomenon going on. For 20 minutes, you’re making use effortlessly of a particular mantra, and there’s a technique for using it that keeps it effortless, that allows the mind to reach the least excited consciousness state.

As you may have figured out by now, mind and body are linked, and so as the mind decreases its excitation, the body goes to states of rest, which, in the case of Vedic Meditation, unprecedented states of rest, many times more restful than the deepest rest you can attain to at any point in a night’s sleep. Many times more restful than that. And this allows the body to go into what I call stay-and-play mode. Stay-and-play is the opposite of fight-and-flee.

So stress reactivity can be called fight-and-flee. Adaptive energy, increasing adaptation energy, I’m going to refer to as stay-and-play response, the response that you get when you practice Vedic Meditation accurately, as instructed by a qualified instructor of it.

You practice this as a strategy every morning, every evening. Wake up in the morning, practice the technique first thing out of the shower, or after you’ve used the bathroom, before you take your breakfast, because you can’t meditate effectively if you’re digesting your breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, or something. You have to have a relatively empty stomach in order to get the full physiological effect. And then sometime late afternoon or early evening, before you take your evening meal, anytime before, you practice the technique again for about 20 minutes.

And with this strategy, every morning and every evening, the mind and the body are regularly going into states of restfulness that are dramatic. And in that state of rest, the irrelevant chemistry of accumulated past stress reactions, the now irrelevant chemistry, it wasn’t irrelevant at the time, but is now irrelevant, because that stressor no longer is here.

So, what happens is this chemistry, as if, gets peeled away layer by layer. You deplete the inventory of stress-related chemicals that are keeping those premature cognitive commitments alive. The PCCs are getting less and less dominant, less and less prevalent, until eventually all of that stress reactivity just is depleted, and you’re liberated from accumulated stress.

[24:29] 24-Hour Bliss and Liberation

So, what’s a life like when you’re liberated from accumulated stress? If you haven’t ever experienced 24-hour bliss, then you don’t know, but it is 24-hour bliss. You have absolute freedom to respond relevantly to any demand and any situation in which you find yourself. No more irrelevant thoughts, no more irrelevant inner reactions, no more bondage, shackles, and fetters to past experiences that no longer are here.

You are liberated to experience present moment awareness 24 hours a day, and by comparison to the regular experience that people have when they are loaded up with accumulated stress, this is liberation. Nirvana is what it was referred to as. Forget about the rock group, just for the moment. They were good, but don’t limit your Nirvana concept of that.

Nirvana is a Sanskrit term that was used by the Buddha to mean the liberation from the shackles of past experience and the liberating of your potential. Two forms of liberation. Regular practice of Vedic Meditation.

Now, sometimes I’m asked, well, what about somebody who’s been to combat, either in an actual war, or been to combat with their spouse or been to combat with the dishwashing liquid, whatever it may be, whatever their level of combat was, what about somebody who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder: should they learn Vedic Meditation?

My answer is with the greatest speed possible. The average member of the population should also learn Vedic Meditation, but they might want to take a week or two to find a teacher and get along to a thing.

If you have PTSD, every day counts, because days and nights are passing irresistibly, and how long do we wish to continue being rattled by everyday demands, pressures, and stimuli, which are causing stressful reactions in us that are the equivalent of the reactions we would have if we were in fact in combat? Let’s get rid of that stuff and start quick.

Are there special considerations for people who’ve had PTSD in the process of learning? Let me say that there may be. It may be that the process of release of stress is rather more thoroughgoing and more perceptible during the meditation technique, during the time of meditation, but it is a little bit like saying, “Well, I’ve got cramped muscles in my arm, and there’s a massage therapist right over there who knows how to release those cramped muscles. Are there any special considerations?”

Yeah, you’re probably going to feel it when they’re releasing the cramped muscles. Is it urgent for you to release the cramped muscles? Absolutely urgent. And so we do urgently need, if we have PTSD, even if we only think we do because we’ve read about it, or we have been medically diagnosed as having it, we need to be learning Vedic Meditation as soon as possible to start the process of peeling away and depleting the inventory of stress-reactive chemistry in the body.

There is not only hope for you, there is absolutely every possibility awakening in your life if you learn this technique, and it’s highly recommended. All of the teachers of Vedic Meditation whom I have trained are more than capable of taking any level of stressed person through the process of learning Vedic Meditation.

And all of my teachers are also able to have instantaneous communication with me, anytime day or night, in case they need any additional wise-and-trusted counsel about any of their students, in case you’re one of those.

And so please don’t be afraid to lose your stress. We need to be afraid of, if we’re going to be afraid of anything, it’s more warranted to be afraid of continuing to be a stress bag. It’s far more pleasant to start the process right away of depleting this inventory of irrelevant stress chemistry.

Jai Guru Deva,

[29:22] Q – Do past lives affect PTSD?

Just to follow up to that, I’m just interested in past-life traumas and relevance to PTSD.

[29:34] A – Consciousness Carries Past Impressions

Consciousness is primary. Consciousness conceives and constructs, governs and becomes the body. And so I have a body and I have consciousness sitting in my body, and it is telling my body what to do.

What happens when, according to the Vedic worldview, when the body dies, then consciousness doesn’t die. The body is consciousness dependent, so when consciousness departs the body, this is why we say someone passed away, consciousness departs the body, the body dies.

That consciousness carries with it all unresolved issues that were still extant, having left that body behind. And so then when you, when there have been overloads of experience in a consciousness, and that consciousness enters into its next fetal body, it’s bringing with it all the unresolved conflicts of the past experiences, and so what happens is the new body simply gets imprinted with, and it is instructed to feed back to the consciousness all of the lack of resolution of the past, the unfinished business of the past.

So we come into this life, into this body life, we come into a new body, bringing with us, and this is what is referred to in Sanskrit as karma. Karma, K-A-R-M-A, “Good karma, bad karma…” We were just having coffee at the coffee shop, and there was a jar there that said the karma jar, like you put some coins or a dollar or three in there, and gives you good karma.

Karma doesn’t actually mean that. It means the tendency that you have to be unresolved with regard to the whole. So when you have particulate awareness, there’s fragmented consciousness is karma. And fragmented consciousness follows us into this new body, and this new body enshrines the unfinished business of the past lifetime.

So we are born not… cute little cherubic baby, it’s in the process, while they’re being all cherubic and looking at you and going looking at things on the ceiling and all that stuff, their consciousness is in the process of assigning the unfinished business of the last life into this body.

This is why we can have kids who are already troubled, even if they have been born into and raised in an ideal family situation, they could already be troubled and be showing signs of being troubled, even by the age of two or three. This is why we want children to learn to meditate too. It shouldn’t be just a wonderful thing for adults. If we can start removing stress reactivity from our body as a young person, then we’re, with each removal of stress, we’re expanding the adaptation energy that we have.

[33:10] Recovery Depends on Adaptation Energy

So adaptation energy is there in reverse proportion to stress. As we remove stress, adaptation energy increases. When we have a virtually infinite amount of adaptation energy, it’s not that we would not respond to a major life-changing change of expectation, but we would be able to respond to it adaptively, interact with it.

And if it was an overload, we would have the adaptation energy to recover rapidly. Rapid recovery is one of the one of the hallmarks of being a meditator. You can still get stressed. Getting stressed isn’t that bad for you. It is getting stressed and staying stressed, that’s what’s bad for you.

So, what’s bad for us is not you jumped and nearly jumped out of your skin when the lightning bolt hit the tree and disintegrated it. That’s not that bad for you. What’s bad for you is that rather than going off and laughing about it and dining out on the story to your friends over lunch, you’re having to see a psychiatrist for the next 10 years because the lightning bolt hit a tree and disintegrated it right in front of you, and you were in fear for your life.

So, the two people in our hypothesis, one of whom has both of whom have a major reaction to the event, one of whom has sufficient adaptation energy to absorb and to reverse and to resolve and to restore full homeostasis, full function, and is laughing about the story over lunch the same day, and somebody else is destroyed for 10 years. I mean, these are extremes, just to prove a point. Extremes of hypothesis, just to prove a point.

Somebody else’s life is made pivotal around an experience that somebody else right next to you had same experience, and their life is not in orbit around that experience. So one of you got PTSD, and one of you didn’t. So interesting.

[36:22] No Single Event Causes Breakdown

And this is really a very peculiar thing, because in extreme situations, for example, like combat, not the only extreme, we often use it as an extreme, because it’s such an easy thing to choose out of the air, combat. But there can be people who perform in a combat field with as many massive demands and changes of expectation, noise, fear, terror, watching people being killed, and even killing people, and come away from that relatively unscathed. And somebody else who goes through the exact same experience on the same day and the same battlefield is scarred for life by one afternoon of experience.

So the point that’s being made there is there are no absolutes. When I made the kind of trivializing remark that somebody who is ready to have a major psychotic break of loss of adaptation energy could have that triggered by there being no dishwashing liquid in the squeeze thing at a time when they expected there to be, well, it wasn’t really that event.

See, when we talk about the straw that breaks the camel’s back, maybe it takes 100,000 straws to break the camel’s back. The 99th straw… 99,000th straw doesn’t do it, it’s the straw that did it, the thing that broke the symmetry. But it wasn’t that straw. You can’t break a camel’s back with a straw.

You can’t cause somebody to have post-traumatic stress syndrome because they ran out of dishwashing liquid, but if it’s the last thing on the pile up, that may be the pivotal event. And so somebody else will look at that and go, “What the heck? That person went into a total psychotic break over dishwashing liquid.”

It wasn’t that, it was everything that came before it. It was the loss of adaptation energy brought about by years of accumulated stress. So someone could have post-traumatic stress disorder who’s living a domestic life of comfort if they have had accumulation of changes of expectation sufficient to rob them of adaptation energy, then that’s that triggering event.

So, getting back to past lives, we bring here everything from the past, and we don’t start off with a clean slate. We’re not starting off with a clean slate.