The Process is the Outcome

the process is the outcome

Did I Make a Difference?

Today, we’re going to talk about fulfillment. We’re going to talk about the ideas of thinking and achievement, action. We’re going to talk about processes and outcomes. We’re going to talk about goal setting and revolutionize your thinking on these subjects.

[00:01:13] It’s a very popular thing and always has been for people to refer to various means of organizing themselves towards a specific outcome. Sometimes we call these things goals. Sometimes we call them simply outcomes. These are the ways in which we imagine that we’re able to make a significant impact on the experience of our life having been significant.

[00:01:41] One of the most dreadful things that we literally have dread about, is the possibility that we might have lived a long life, at the end of which we look back and think, “I wonder how significant my existence was. Did I make a difference? Did I make a difference? What kind of contribution did I make to the group effort of civilization.”

[00:02:06] Mark Twain, when asked what [thought] about civilization, quipped, “I think it is a very good idea.”

[00:02:13] So each one of us, whether we know it or not, are making some kind of contribution on a daily basis. Either we are adding to the problems that our generation and future generations have to correct and to fix up, either we are making the world a more difficult place to live in, or we are making a personal contribution to the group effort of ever-increasing evolution. And really we are going to have to look at all of this over a period of years and, even in the later years of our life, make some kind of an assessment about to what extent did we make a difference? And so to that end people get a little panicky.

How Do You Get What (You Think) You Want?

[00:03:02] And if you look at a traditional corporate model, missions and mission statements, goal setting, these are corporate words and, if you look at New Age mentality, that try to bring a little bit more consciousness into this, we have visions and vision quests and vision boards, and “There’s a vision board that has all the things on it that I want to achieve.”

[00:03:25] We have all kinds of people who from so many different angles have attempted to address the question of basically, “How do you get what, and I’m going to put in parentheses here, (you think) you want? How do you get what you want or what it is you think you want?”

[00:03:44] So we have an idea about what we want. We have an idea about what would be desirable and we have some kind of a concept about this that has to do, in many cases, with attempting to compensate for a variety of what we might perceive as personal shortcomings. And then perhaps through some kind of achievement, or making a great contribution, we will have, whether in the best sense of this word or in not as good a sense of the word, we will have aggrandised our individuality in some way, made it grander.

[00:04:20] So then let’s look at this whole concept of looking at what you think you need, what you think you want, how that you think is going to fulfill you. Or if we’re looking at collectives of people, organizations, companies, and whatnot, looking at missions, same thing, really just different words and how we think things are going to get a lot better if we achieve certain goals.

Creativity and Action

[00:04:49] Behind all of this is partly sound assessment. First of all, we have the idea that thinking is the basis of action.

[00:05:00] If I think very clearly, if I discriminate very well, intellectually discriminate, by that I mean, we differentiate between things that might look like what we want and things that actually are what we want. So through thinking, through the process of intellectual discrimination, through the processes of creativity, coming up with “aha!” phenomena, Eureka, the idea that I’m going to be inventive, I’m going to be improvisational, or I might gain new insights into the existing potential between existing things.

[00:05:42] So we may not have made a connection between one thing that exists that may have a particular use and another thing that exists that has a completely different use, but then to connect those two things could be a very big aha moment. So although we’re not creating anything new, we’re simply discovering a new connection between existing elements.

[00:06:03] This is also considered to be creativity. So through my thinking, my intellectual discrimination, my creativity, my creative intelligence if you like, I then make a decision about what actions I’m going to engage in. Thought then goes into action.

[00:06:21] And if I stayed disciplined about my action, and this is the conventional thinking about these things, if I stayed disciplined about my actions, if I keep on referring back to my mission or my vision or my vision quest or my vision board, whatever words you want to use for these things, they’re all the same really, then I’ll begin being able to do an inventory and say, “I have some achievements. One achievement, two achievements, three achievements, four achievements,” like that.

Achievement… Then What?

[00:06:51] The idea behind all this is that if I amass a great enough cluster of achievements, if I achieve the specific idea, going into manifestation, if I bring about a particular outcome and so on, then what?

[00:07:10] I’ll arrive somehow, and this is the part that’s not discussed, I’ll arrive somehow at this nebulous state of fulfillment. I’ll be fulfilled and everybody wants to be fulfilled. Everyone wants to experience the peace of mind that, “I’m making a difference. And I’m completely at peace now because I’ve made my contribution to the collective of people on earth, to my family, to myself. Made my contribution. I’ve done it. I’ve arrived.”

[00:07:44] And the end part, the fulfillment part, is almost never discussed. Achievements are discussed a lot. Achieve your goals, attain your goals. The question that’s not asked is, and then what? Achieve your goal, attain your goal, and then what? Would be the question I would like to ask.

[00:08:03] Do you arrive in a beatific state of complete fulfillment? That’s a rhetorical question, I’ll answer it in a moment.

What is the Source of Thought?

[00:08:12] Then the very beginning point also is not discussed. We have thought, we have action, we have achievements. Where does thought come from? What is the source of thought? Very often when I ask audiences that rhetorical question, they look at me as if they want to say, “Huh? What are you talking about? The source of thought, you just have thoughts don’t you?”

[00:08:37] Well, let’s look at it this way. There have been studies in cognitive science that demonstrate that the average person produces somewhere between 60,000 and a 100,000 cognitive processes in a day.

[00:08:54] What’s a cognitive process? Well, it’s a fancy word for the word thought, a memory, a desire, a recognition, perhaps just a musing, a daydream, and all of these individual packets of thought subject, we can call these cognitive processes, and, in a given waking day, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 of these phenomena occur in the human mind.

[00:09:22] And by the way, volume is not the important thing here. You could have a hundred thousand very stupid thoughts. You could have a hundred thousand genius thoughts. You could have 60,000 genius thoughts or 60,000 thoughts that were very dull. And so volume’s not the important thing, however, volume does speak to another matter.

Thought Has Energy

[00:09:47] We know that thought, and we can tell that thought is made up of at least two components. The two major components of thought are first, thinking a thought has energy in it. We can measure the packets of energy that come with thought, even through a rather crude device known as an electroencephalograph, EEG, that measures the product of thinking processes in the form of electrical waves that are occur on the surface of the brain and which penetrate the cranium, that’s the hard bone, skull bone around your brain, sufficiently that if you have a silver-chloride electrode and you place it on the subject’s scalp on the skin of their scalp, you can detect the electrical activity going on on the surface of the brain.

[00:10:39] And a lot of hours, millions of hours, of study have occurred over the last 80 years since EEG was first discovered and employed, demonstrating that different styles of thinking, different mood states, different qualitative, creative thinking, and so on, have measurable patterns in the electrical functioning that appears through the EEG machine.

[00:11:08] And the EEG machine typically will have what is referred to as a polygraph. Everyone’s heard the word polygraph because we associate it with lie detector machines, poly means many, graph means pens or to write.

Thought Has Measurable Energy

[00:11:22] So a polygraph has many pens writing on something. There’s a rolling sheet of paper and these many pens that each of which is driven by the electrical functioning on one of, typically when we measure the human brain function electrically, we measure about 16 classic points right around the head of the person, driven by the electrical functioning coming out of one of these silver-chloride electrodes.

[00:11:51] So we can see different parts of the brain behaving differently. Different levels of voltage output. Different styles of how much the vacillation is occurring, the oscillating of the electricity, which we call wavelengths.

[00:12:06] And so the words brainwave were born looking at an EEG pattern and looking at the various wiggly lines that come out of the electrical activity of the brain printed on a polygraph.

[00:12:20] And we can analyze based on what we know the subject has told us about what they were experiencing or what they were doing, or ways in which we can measure their body and sense, are they very stressed? Are they relaxed? Are they drowsy? Are they asleep? Are they dreaming? We can see what these various brainwaves tell us about the electrical arrangement and organization in the human brain.

[00:12:46] So we know that thought has energy. Thought has measurable energy. Different styles of thought have differing levels of measurable energy.

Thought Has Intelligence

[00:12:55] So let’s fall down on this assumption that thought has energy. But thought is not just a random explosion of energy. Every thought is specifically about a thing, so thought has embedded in it, intelligence.

[00:13:10] Intelligence means, in this case, discriminating capability. A thought is about a specific thing. And we produce somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 of these streams of energy and intelligence in a given day.

[00:13:30] Where is all of that coming from? That thinking power. We’re not talking about the power of the brain to generate thought. No. We know that the brain can reflect thinking activity, but consciousness is what drives thinking activity.

[00:13:50] Someone once argued with me, failingly, that it’s the environment that causes thinking, that we can make a distinction here between the cause of a thought and the source of thought. Cause, and source are not the same thing.

[00:14:07] Certainly our environment does stimulate us. Stimulated by the environment the brain responds, of course, but thinking is something that we can consciously decide to do more of or less of.

Consciousness Has Thought

[00:14:24] And so consciousness is the source of thought. What kind of consciousness? There is a layer in the human mind that is not the conscious thinking layer, not the layer from where we do all of our conscious thinking. That layer is an underlying layer of consciousness sitting still in its own pure, quiet state.

[00:14:53] In the Vedic terminology we refer to this layer of consciousness, the deepest layer of the mind, somewhat akin to the silent bed of the ocean, as pure consciousness. By pure, we don’t mean in any kind of puritanical way pure. What we mean is consciousness that is unadulterated by the thinking process. Just pure Being. Consciousness, standing alone.

[00:15:20] That field of pure consciousness is rarely experienced by most people. And that field of pure consciousness is the field that is the source of all of the tens of thousands of streams of energy and intelligence that rise in our mind every day in the form of thought.

[00:15:41] So Being, source of thought. How is Being described by ancients and moderns who have experienced it? If you can let your awareness quieten down, settle down to its own least-excited state, then the mind will experience Being, and Being is thought free for a very interesting reason.

[00:16:06] We are conscious, we’re capable of thinking, when we are settled down into that least-excited state of Being, and yet the mind evidently chooses not to think.

The Purpose of Thinking

[00:16:20] Let’s just take a little diversion for a moment and say that the purpose of thinking, evidently, is to improve upon the experience that you’re having right now. “If I’m completely content, I will generally have less thoughts than if I am not contented, if I am discontented. When I’m completely content I have fewer thoughts. When I’m less contented I do lots of thinking. I’m thinking because I want to experience something better than this.”

[00:16:56] Even if the mind engages, once again, in the attempt to resolve problems, the untying or untangling of the knot, as it were, has a promise on the yonder side of it, that fulfillment, that satisfaction that I solved it. And so the mind may even engage in the relatively onerous tasks of disentanglement or attempting to arrive at a solution to a problem. But there is a trend in all of this.

[00:17:30] The trend of thinking, the tendency to do thinking, is inspired by the potential to become happier. The mind thinks in order to become happier. A discontented mind does lots of thinking because it really wants to become happier. It’s so discontented. A very contented mind does less thinking because it’s enjoying the simple sensations of freedom of problem.

Self-Generating Charm Through Vedic Meditation

[00:18:02] Now, when our mind settles down into the least-excited state, and this is a classic way of describing what happens during Vedic Meditation, the attention or the awareness settles down using a particular impulse of thought.

[00:18:18] The mantra, personalized mantra, that we have been instructed in from the ancient tradition of Vedic Meditation that we use has a pulsation of sound. The mantra that we use in Vedic Meditation has no intended meaning. It is learned as a word, but that word rapidly just becomes a sound in the mind because it has no intended meaning.

[00:18:43] That doesn’t mean that the mind might not associate the sound with other things that you’ve heard in your lifetime. That’s a natural thing that may occur, but one can easily transcend that because the mantra, when you think it effortlessly, which is the proper way to think it, has its own very particular property and characteristic.

[00:19:04] It begins quietly to settle down to become less clear. It starts to become, as a pulsation of sound, less and less well pronounced, faint, vague, softer, subtler. As it does so, the mantra begins to self-generate charm. The mind’s natural tendency is, spontaneously, to follow charm, to move in the direction of greater happiness.

Nothing Gets Better Than This

[00:19:36] As that mellifluous pulsing sound becomes more and more fascinating to the mind, the subtler it gets, the more fascinating it gets. The mind spontaneously follows it and moves through layer after layer of ever-increasing subtlety of the thought process. After a few minutes of this, the mind may touch, for a moment, on a state that is 100% supreme, inner contentedness.

[00:20:09] When the mind touches on that supreme, inner contentedness, this is Being, the least-excited state, the mind stops thinking willingly. Why? It is so content that it cannot conceive of, “it” is the mind, it is so content that it cannot conceive of an experience, a sensation, a phenomenon, that would be better than what it’s currently experiencing.

[00:20:38] Currently it’s experiencing something which is so fulfilling that the mind willingly surrenders its prerogative to think. And so in that state of bliss, and here we have to re-emphasize bliss is not blissful, bliss is not ecstasy, bliss is pure supreme, silent contentedness. This is what this kind of bliss means.

Being – Complete Fulfillment

[00:21:06] In that least-excited condition, that moment of pure consciousness, the individual mind has allowed itself to absorb into the underlying field, Being, Being itself, which now we’re going to say, the source of all of the energy and intelligence that ends up driving the entire thinking process of a whole day, 60,000 to 100,000, however many tens of thousands of thoughts we have in a day.

[00:21:39] All right so now we have established, there is something that exists prior to thinking, Being. And we’re establishing that Being is a state of complete and utter fulfillment where thinking simply subsides due to the degree of contentedness that the person is experiencing. So we have complete fulfillment there.

[00:22:08] Now most people do not experience Being on anything like a regular basis. Occasionally they may have a glimpse of it, perhaps when they’re falling asleep, not quite yet asleep, almost asleep, where they’re awake inside and mental activity is subsiding, there may be a moment in sleep onset of a state of Being, but it passes very quickly because it’s replaced by blacking out into sleep and going into the unconscious state.

AKA Samadhi

[00:22:38] In Vedic Meditation we suspend, we sit upright in a wakeful position and we suspend action, the prerogative to action, and we trigger a phenomenon in the mind, using the mantra and the effortless technique of using it, to take the mind into, intentionally, that quiet state that also lies in the gap between waking and sleeping.

[00:23:03] It is not wakefulness, cause it’s not thinking, and it’s not sleep, because you’re awake inside. You’re awake and conscious and yet not thinking. It’s a fourth state. Sleeping, dreaming, waking, these are the three common states that rotate, and then the fourth state, the state of inner fulfillment, pure, serene contentedness, which, even if touched on only for a second, the mind becomes aware and it awakens to the fact that underneath all of this thinking is that natural condition.

[00:23:38] In the ancient Vedic language of India it’s referred to, samadhi. Samadhi is the Sanskrit word for that state. Samadhi, the pure contentedness state. And it is ultimately the true Self. And here in our philosophical drive to make terms very exact, we’re going to have to spell this word Self with a capital S.

[00:24:04] This is the true Self inside. This is the ultimate “Knower.” This is the Knower. The “knowing” is the thinking and the “known” are the objects about which we think. So the objective world about which we think, the known.

[00:24:24] The phenomenology of thinking is the knowing, and that inner, quiet state of complete fulfillment, the true Self, is the Knower. Knower, knowing and known.

How Desperate Are You?

[00:24:39] All right. So now we are stepping right outside the boundaries of the regular analysis of, how do you get what you want? How do you live a significant life? Do you create a vision board? Do you create a mission statement? Do you set up goals and, how dedicated are you, how motivated are you, or indeed somebody who is perhaps putting a more cynical edge on this might say, “How desperate are you?”

[00:25:04] How panicked are you to actually have the self-assessment of having lived a significant life? What does it mean to you? Well, if you haven’t got, in your life, that much fulfillment, if you haven’t enjoyed the ability simply to “Be,” then it’s likely that the desperation factor is rather high and we may become “driven” to achieve. Driven to achieve. Set up the goals and think, think, think, think, think, and act, act, act, act, and achieve.

[00:25:44] There’s a problem inherent in all this though. All of us have either read about, heard of, or know people who have achieved their goals, and interestingly, we do not find a fulfilled person.

The Fulfillment Fallacy

[00:26:00] The idea that this amorphous state of fulfillment lies on the yonder side of a cluster of achievements is a fallacy. It’s a fallacy. We do not gain fulfillment after achieving. There may be a brief moment of, “Ah, I did it,” but this is also famously accompanied by another thought this succeeds, “Is this all there is? This feels like an anti-climax. I achieved it. I got the thing done. I earned the specific number of dollars.” Or, “I achieved the project that I wished to achieve, the charitable project I wished to achieve. I did the thing. Is this all there is? I wonder if there’s anything beyond this.”

[00:26:55] And then once again, the quest. The quest for what? The fulfillment, the fallacy, the fulfillment that lies beyond the next set of achievements. “Let me begin thinking about what more I could achieve. What more can I achieve?”

[00:27:13] The greater the desperation to have the ever-elusive fulfillment state, the greater the desperation, the greater is the willingness to cut right across the interests of other people.

[00:27:28] The greater the desperation, the greater the willingness to cut right across the way the laws of Nature work in aid of, somehow, my individuality getting what it wants.

Collateral Damage

[00:27:41] “I have to get what I want. And I may have upset people on the way. I may have stopped other people from getting what they want. I may have violated the laws of Nature in ways that this generation and future generations are going to have to pay the cost of that. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going to get what I want.”

[00:28:05] Desperation. And it’s this kind of desperation that is driving the agendas and the motives of an entire world right now.

[00:28:17] If you want to know why things look as bad as they look when you read the newspapers and listen to the news and whatnot, it’s because of this. This drive to gain fulfillment by achieving stuff. And it doesn’t matter if you’re all kind of spiritual and new agey and you have a vision board and you got your stuff done from your vision board, or you’re just simply a business person and you use different language for the same thing; you had a mission statement and you acquired and achieved your mission.

[00:28:51] There is no end to it. And the reason there’s no end to it is because there’s no fulfillment in it. Fulfillment doesn’t exist at the end of achievement.

What Needs to be Done?

[00:29:02] So where does fulfillment lie? We’ve already analyzed it. It lies in the source of thought itself. The place from which the thoughts come is the state of supreme fulfillment.

[00:29:17] “Does that mean I don’t act?” No, it doesn’t mean that at all. What it means is, “I want to settle down into my least-excited state in a systematic strategic fashion…”

[00:29:29] This is why we practice Vedic Meditation for about 20 minutes, twice each day, once in the morning, before the day begins, and another time late afternoon, early evening, before we commence our evening activities. We want to take our individuality into that supremely-contented state, which is the home of all the creative intelligence that drives all the thinking processes. But it’s a silent state. It’s an unmanifest state. It is a state that lies beyond conscious thinking.

[00:30:03] The mind touches the state of Being and becomes one with that state, and from that least-excited state, and equipped with, and this is a very important thing to call it, it’s equipment, equipped with a condition of great fulfillment and great contentedness.

[00:30:22] One opens one’s eyes at the end of the practice session and reassesses, “What is it that needs to be done? I was thinking of going off doing this. I was thinking of going off and doing that. Now I’ve meditated. Do I still want to do this? Do I still want to do that?”

Let It Go

[00:30:36] And interestingly, what happens in the lives of meditators is that very often there’s an adjustment. “Do I really need to do that? Do I really need to do this? Do I really need to continue engaging in the things I’m engaging in that seem to be the fruitless expressions of desperation? Or what elements of what it is I’m doing every day are valuable, sustainable, and have legitimate longevity with reference to evolution, and what elements of what I’m aspiring to and doing lack all of those qualities?”

[00:31:09] The ease with which one can let go of useless and unsustainable thinking, with useless and unsustainable aspiration and desperation to achieve certain targets, which actually won’t make a difference to you or anybody else anyway, the ease is amazing.

[00:31:27] When you practice Vedic Meditation, you let go of rigid attachment to specific timings and outcomes, trusting that in the larger picture, you’re going to be guided by your inner intelligence, which is growing every day, to engage in those actions and those activities that are in fact, part of the evolution agenda of Nature itself.

An Evolutionary Agenda

[00:31:55] Nature itself, according to the Vedic worldview, has an evolutionary agenda. There is an underlying consciousness field in the human, we call that Being, but Being, capital B, is not just, not merely, the state of least-excited consciousness of an individual human. It is the least-excited state, it is the Unified Field of the entire universe.

[00:32:22] Each individual human has a place deep inside herself where she can go and experience that complete fulfillment, but at the same time, aligning oneself with the intentionality of Nature itself. Aligning itself, aligning herself with the underlying field that is the basis on which all of the evolutionary expressions of Nature are occurring on the earth, getting with the bio-friendly agenda of the Universe.

[00:33:01] So meditators begin to discover that there is a change in what it is they aspire to. They do find that they can more easily achieve things. And the reason they can more easily achieve things is because their own thinking is now starting to be guided by the processes, the evolutionary processes of Nature itself. You come out of a meditation and your thoughts are surcharged with that infinite power of the source of thought, the fountainhead of creative intelligence, driving you into actions, which seem to move frictionlessly toward a particular outcome.

Exporting Fulfillment

[00:33:46] Now we have to talk about outcome and process, process, and outcome. Fulfillment begins to become the baseline of all thinking and action and achievements in a meditator.

[00:34:03] “I’m already fulfilled. Since already I am fulfilled, and this is growing, growing, growing, more and more every day as a meditator, since already I’m fulfilled, on what basis am I thinking, acting and achieving? The basis is that I’m already fulfilled. I want to deliver and export my fulfillment to the world. I want to think and act and achieve in a way that, through my thinking, through my actions, through my achievements, I am exporting my inner fulfillment to the world.”

[00:34:46] Rather than the agenda being, “I’m a desperate bag of neediness and through my thinking, through my actions, through my achievements, I’m trying to import into myself, fulfillment from the outside world, the idea that fulfillment is out there and I have to think and act, and achieve so I can get it from where it is and bring it in here inside me, where it is not. Fulfilment is not inside me, I have to bring it from the outside and put it in here.”

[00:35:18] This idea that drives the whole of the endeavors of humanity is a faulty idea. It’s an idea that has a fundamental flaw in it. Fulfillment cannot be gained through achieving things. But fulfillment exported through thought, fulfillment exported through thoughts into action, will go into achievements, which, if they’re brought about, could make a big difference to all who are surrounding us and who are engaged in our daily lives.

The Need of the Time

[00:35:55] A meditator has a greater and greater tendency to think and achieve not based on individual need, or neediness is a better way of putting it, but to think and achieve on the basis of the need of the time.

[00:36:12] “Let me identify the need of the time. What is the greatest evolutionary need around me right now? Let me put my thinking, my excellent multi-billion neuron brain, into action to bring about, to allow myself to be an agent of evolutionary change, progressive change. My thinking, my action and my achievements are not about addressing my neediness. My thinking, my actions and achievements are all about addressing the need of the time.”

[00:36:51] When this realization, through daily practice of Vedic Meditation, dawns on us, then we have a completely new paradigm. “I’m taking my fulfillment on an excursion. I am already fulfilled. If a particular project, a particular desirable outcome, doesn’t come to pass, it wasn’t going to make me if it did come to pass. I’m already made. It’s not going to break me. If it doesn’t come to pass, I can’t be broken. I’m invincible. Because I’m fulfilled already.

[00:37:26] “And so then I’m not going to become a desperado, violating laws of Nature in order to get what I want, or violating the interests of others in order to get what I want, only for the fruitless experience of achieving something and finding it didn’t make any difference to my fulfillment anyway. But I’m going to use my inner talents, my creative intelligence, my energy, to be an agent of progressive change.”

[00:37:52] When this dawns on us fully, a completely new paradigm drives life and living. The process of engaging in action, thinking, action and achievement, is the outcome. The process and the outcome are the same thing.

[00:38:13] The process is that of living fulfillment, engaging in thinking while fulfilled, acting while fulfilled, and achieving while fulfilled, but fulfillment is there at all times. The phenomenology of thinking tickles the underlying fulfillment.

Stirring the Warm Bath

[00:38:36] You know, if you’re sitting in a bath after a while, if it’s a hot bath, then you don’t feel the water hot anymore? It’s like you’re sitting there and you think, ” This bath is losing its temperature, losing its heat.” So before you turn on the hot water tap, maybe you stir around a little bit inside the bath, do a little bit of stirring inside there, and then suddenly the waves of heat come. “Gosh, this was actually a hotter bath than I had realized.” So even sitting in hot water, we don’t feel the water hot unless we stir it.

[00:39:09] In that state of fulfillment, which grows and grows and grows through regular daily practice, systematic practice, that underlying baseline of fulfillment, that baseline happiness, begins to become, you cannot overshadow it, it becomes invulnerable.

[00:39:27] It’s not vulnerable to anything in the outside world anymore, but that state gets stirred like you stirring the bathwater. That state gets stirred and the waves and splashes of blissfulness come because you’ve awakened the bliss-based underlying field.

[00:39:47] The phenomenon of thinking about what the need of the time is, is incredibly enjoyable. The phenomenology of acting in aid of the evolutionary need is incredibly enjoyable. And the phenomenon of achieving is incredibly enjoyable, not because it brings fulfillment, but because you’re already fulfilled and it tickles you. 

You Won’t Get Fulfillment From That

And so you’re living a life, which is driven by, its motivation is a hundred percent different to the motivation of the average person in the world, who believes that, “Oh, I’m going to really make a difference. I’m going to feel satisfied with myself if I make a difference in this way, that way or that way. Or if I get stuff, if I add items to my life, whatever those items may be, let’s look online and see what we can find, and add it to my life and see if that’s going to bring me fulfillment.” It won’t.

[00:40:44] “Let me get a new set of body sensations. I want these body sensations. I want those body sensations. I want the kinds of body sensations that only other human beings can create for me. And so let me convince another human being to participate with me in getting a whole bunch of body sensations and we both do that together. We’re going to get fulfillment.” No, you won’t. You won’t get fulfillment from that.

[00:41:11] “Oh, well then let me get in a fabulous relationship, and love and family, and then I’ll go out and I’ll get stuff and we’ll build a fence around it all and have lots of conveyances to take us around everywhere when we get bored with being in the place. Then we’ll be fulfilled.” No, you won’t. You will not be fulfilled from that. You’ll continue to look for where fulfillment isn’t where you think it might be.

Scaling New Heights

[00:41:41] To me, it’s the equivalent of climbing a mountain, thinking that when you get to the summit and you look out… I experienced this when I crossed the Himalayas on foot twice in the early 1980s, once going North all the way up to the border of Tibet and Nepal, and then coming back in the opposite direction. 

I spent eight weeks trekking across the Himalayas, and you get to the top of a peak and you think, “This is it. This is the summit. I’m at the 18,000 foot pass with a 25,000 foot peak on my left and a 28,000 foot peak on my right. And here I am crunching through the snow. I’m going to look over the pass and that’ll be, it there’ll be some golden valley or something over there,” and you look on the other side of that, and what you see is astonishing, another 200 miles of hundreds of other peaks that were all the same size as the ones that I had just gone over.

[00:42:41] And so then this is like achievements. You get the achievements and you think, “Well when I get this, this is going to be it. I’ll have everything I want.” And what you do is you get there and you realize it’s not fulfilling.

Baseline Happiness First

[00:42:56] It may be everybody’s cheering you on and you get the little party and you get all the little cards in the mail and whatever, people telling you how happy you should be. And through the din of all the noise and everything, you think to yourself, “Is this actually what I wanted? Let me see what else there is.”

[00:43:16] And what you do is you look and you see mountain range after mountain range of those things which are yet to be acquired, yet to be achieved. Things that you could have that you don’t yet have. Why is that the reality? It’s because you’re not fulfilled, you’re not fulfilled.

[00:43:39] You may summit anything you wish to summit, if you have fulfillment first. Fulfillment first, baseline happiness first, and then we engage. When we start to experience that the process of thinking, the process of action, and the experience of achievements, all of them are permeated with fulfillment all the way along, then we’re also easily able to adjust our agendas.

Stop Seeking It Where It is Not

[00:44:12] If things don’t seem to be supported by Nature, if a particular line of action to a particular achievement doesn’t seem to be going in a particular way, it’s very easy for us to change course, change our mind, change tack, continue progressing, but in a different way, without rigid attachment.

[00:44:31] But with somebody who does not have fulfillment, who has really hypnotized themselves into the idea that, “It’s only when I get that thing, that experience that I’m going to be fulfilled,” then, in that desperation, they’re unwilling to let go of anything except that goal, except that goal. And even if the cost is the happiness of others, perhaps even the lives of others, perhaps even the whole functioning, smooth functioning of Nature, they’ll go ahead anyway and continue to do that. And then if ever they achieve the thing only to discover it didn’t actually bring fulfillment, what was that all about?

[00:45:25] So we must, it is imperative that we find fulfillment where it is and stop seeking it where it is not. Find it where it is means go deep inside, have a direct, conscious experience of the fulfillment of that underlying field of Being, awaken that layer of the mind and allow it to be the new Self, the big Self inside, the big Self inside experiences itself as totality.

[00:45:58] Then unleash that. Let that go into thinking, let that go into action, let that go into achievements. Then the process of thinking, action and achievement is the outcome. It’s already the outcome. The starting place is fulfillment rather than waiting for fulfillment to arrive.

One Percent

[00:46:21] Just a little bit of this thinking by a sufficient number of people in the world, it doesn’t even need to be everybody, it’ll never be everybody, maybe one in a hundred, that’s all we can have. We can afford to have 99% of the people ignore this message. If one person out of every hundred who hears it says, “I’ll try that,” then we can make a very significant steering difference in the phenomenology of the world, in the behavior of the world.

[00:46:51] We can make a very distinct difference. Once a marine engineer showed me something. He said when they build a giant ship, seagoing ship, that sits down deep in the water, the ship may be 12 stories high from the water up, and it’s probably eight stories deep down into the sea. It has a big rudder at the back of it, the big fin that is supposed to turn the ship.

[00:47:24] When the ship is massive, the length of three football fields or more, then getting that ship to change direction when it’s moving through the water is a massive engineering challenge. There are no hydraulics that exist that can take a ship of that size and actually make the rudder turn in order to change the direction of the ship.

An Ingenious Thing

[00:47:52] And so marine engineers created a little thing, an ingenious thing. Along the vertical trailing edge of that big rudder at the back of the ship is another rudder, very, very small, that is to say not very wide, but it runs the entire vertical length of the rudder, and that is referred to as a trim tab.

[00:48:17] The trim tab only has itself to be steered. When the ship is moving through the water, you turn the trim tab in one direction and the trim tab pushes the rudder in the other direction. And this causes the entire massive ship to change direction.

[00:48:35] If we want to change the direction of the entire world we’re not going to do it by getting everybody to change overnight because that won’t be happening. What we need is a trim tab. What’s the trim tab? One in a hundred people, just one in a hundred, that’s all. 99% of everyone can ignore us and think that we’re kind of fanciful idiots who talk about weird things.

[00:49:01] As long as one out of a hundred thinks that something that we’re saying has some value and they practice it, those members of society that practice Vedic Meditation will become the trim tabs. They will be the ones who steer the steering mechanisms that steer the whole of the collective. The whole collective, you can’t steer it just, watch what happens when governments, governments try to steer an entire collective. They can’t do it. The collective breaks the government.

Living the Outcome While Engaged in the Process

[00:49:36] This is what happens regularly, everywhere. But if we have a sufficient number of people in a heightened consciousness state, living their daily lives, just living their daily lives, doing whatever it is they do, but with that connection, with that totality of Natural Law at the baseline of their consciousness, those people whose lives are, you know, “I’m living the outcome while I’m engaged in the process. 

The process is the outcome. In action, the outcome, fulfillment, is in action now,” enough of those, it has that effect of being able to steer all the steering mechanisms of society and create directional change in the massive collective.

[00:50:23] And this is our strategy. Our strategy is simply to bring this knowledge to a sufficient percentage of the population that it will have the effect that naturally it’s going to have, and that it has in the daily lives of all of those who practice it every day.

[00:50:42] So I’ll leave you with that thought process is outcome. Fulfillment is at the basis of your thinking, it’s not on the other side of achievements. And this you’ll contemplate and live it and hopefully practice your Vedic Meditation twice every day with this in mind, that this is making you into an agent of evolutionary change.

[00:51:05] Jai Guru Deva.