The Relevance of the 25 Qualities of the Unified Field

The Relevance of the 25 Qualities of the Unified Field

[00:45] Sankhya – The Cosmic Story Line

Jai Guru Deva. Thank you for listening to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles. There’s a concept that comes out of the six systems of Indian philosophy, six different ways of looking at any subject.

For example, like looking at a rose. If you see the rose from the front, from the back, from the left, from the right, from above, and from below, you’ve looked at it from six directions. It gives you a fairly good perspective on what that rose is.

There are six systems of Indian philosophy, and they are Niyaya, Vaisheshika, Yoga, Karma Mimamsa, Sankhya, and Vedanta. Today we’re going to spend a few moments on Sankhya.

Sankhya is one of the ways of looking at any form or any phenomenon, and today is the phenomenon of how the Unified Field in its unmanifest form comes into manifestation in aid of two things. 

First, to bring all of the qualities of the Unified Field into manifestation to create form and function phenomenology. All the relationships between forms and function, how The Absolute, capital A Absolute, unmanifest aspect of the Unified Field, the one indivisible whole conscious field, causes itself to come into Being, first to set up the sequential elaboration of evolution.

If we want to use a more common way of describing this, we would call it the storyline. What is the story? The whole purpose of The Absolute, the unchanging, unmanifest, total potential of the laws of Nature coming into manifestation, where Being, capital B, comes into becoming, the whole purpose of it is to break the symmetry of the unmanifest and to cause it to come into a sequential elaboration of story. 

And this is all for the purpose of creating variety. So out of the one indivisible whole comes the many. The breaking of the symmetry begins with looking at how The Absolute underlying field, the unmanifest field, starts the process of warming up, as it were, to becoming manifest.

[04:21] Is-ness, Am-ness, I-ness, My-ness

We start with the concept of what’s called Brahmani. Brahmani means pure existence. Is-ness. Is-ness, Brahmani, makes a move into Am-ness. Am-ness is also known in Sanskrit as Amritam. Amritam. Brahmani becomes Amritam when existence becomes conscious, when Is-ness becomes Am-ness.

Am-ness then begins to develop a sense of individuated identity, I. Is-ness, Am-ness, I-ness. I-ness. And so I am the I am, not just am, conscious, but I am. 

I-ness then moves into the My-ness. In Sanskrit, this is called Parameshwar. Parameshwar, My-ness, what are my qualities?

And according to Sankhya, Sankhya spelled S-A-N-K-H-Y-A, it’s a philosophy that was elaborated by a great Rishi, a seer of the Vedic tradition by the name of Kapila, K-A-P-I-L-A, Rishi Kapila.

Kapila enumerated in the My-ness just before the breaking of the symmetry, that Unified Field can be understood to have 25 qualities, and I’m going to enumerate and name these qualities one at a time, so those of you with a pencil or a laptop who would like to write these things down as I enumerate them, you’re welcome to do so.

[06:45] The 25 Qualities of the Unified Field of Consciousness

The 25 qualities of the Unified Field of Consciousness are:

1. Total potential of Natural Law.
2. Infinite organizing power.
3. Fully awake within itself.
4. Infinite correlation.
5. Perfect orderliness.
6. Infinite dynamism.
7. Infinite creativity.
8. Pure knowledge.
9. Unboundedness.
10. Perfect balance.
11. Self-sufficiency.
12. All Possibilities.
13. Infinite silence.
14. Harmonizing.
15. Evolutionary.
16. Self-referral.
17. Invincibility.
18. Immortality.
19. Unmanifest.
20. Nourishing.
21. Integrating.
22. Simplicity.
23. Purifying.
24. Freedom.
25. Bliss.

All of these 25 qualities according to Rishi Kapila, the cognizer of the system of Indian philosophy known as Sankhya.

[08:54] Breaking of Symmetry

All these 25 qualities in the My-ness. So, once again, a review. Within the unmanifest, there’s a tendency, a trend in the direction of manifestation. It starts with Is-ness, pure existence, Brahmani. It moves to Am-ness, Amritam. It moves to I-ness, which then moves to My-ness, Parameshwar.

The 25 qualities in the My-ness are all there in absolutely equal quantity. That is to say, no one of them stands out above the others. There’s no sequence in them. Once My-ness begins a process of, as it were, trembling, that is to say, it has a propensity to break its symmetry and come into becoming, to move from Being to becoming, it is about to cause itself to come into an individual characteristic, a form, or a phenomenon.

The breaking of the symmetry can be thought of as being the Big Bang. The Big Bang, meaning that layer, not once-upon-a-time Big Bang. 13 billion years ago, according to astrophysicists, there was a Big Bang.

This has to be thought of more on a vertical scale than a horizontal linear time scale. At all times, there are two aspects of Unified Field, unmanifest and manifest, and in between the two, the manifesting, and that’s where we are right now.

That which already has come into being is sequentially elaborating all of the relativity, the ever-changing, evolving, relative world of forms and phenomena, and presenting through all of its appendages, presenting back to the unmanifest, that which is needed to bring about this agenda of evolutionary change, progressive change.

What is it that’s needed now for The Absolute to bring into being in aid of the continuation of progressive change? What happens in the breaking of the symmetry moment where the My-ness comes into the first elements of the subtlest layer of creation is an alignment of the 25 qualities into a sequential elaboration.

So, for example, quality number 13, infinite silence, may come out as the lead ingredient in a form or a phenomenon that is coming into being. That same form or phenomenon that is coming into being might have quality 23 as its second most dominant feature or ingredient. It might have quality 2, infinite organizing power, as its third most dominant ingredient. It might have quality 15, evolutionary, as its fourth most dominant element and so on and so on all the way up to 25 combinations and permutations.

[13:09] Sequential Elaboration

The idea that Rishi Kapila puts to us is that every form and every phenomenon is comprised of these 25 qualities emerging out of the Unified Field with a combination or permutation of the 25 that is unique to that form or unique to that quality.

That uniqueness is gained through two things. One is the sequence: which of the 25 is first? Dominant. Which of the 25 is second? Secondary. Which of the 25 is third most dominant? Tertiary. And so on. And then, degrees of intensity. And so it’s considered that there are 25 degrees of intensity of each of the 25. We can think of these qualities as ingredients that make up any form or phenomenon.

And this is the way of understanding how things are coming into being and what is their particular role in the evolution of things, their dharma. D-H-A-R-M-A, dharma is the Sanskrit term, which refers to a thing, a person, a bug, an atom, a relationship between objects like the four fundamental forces, electromagnetism, gravitation, strong nuclear interaction, weak nuclear interaction.

Relationships between things, or actual things, are each of them imbued with a dharma. This is both phenomena and forms imbued with a dharma. And that dharma, that role in the evolution of the storyline, is made up of an ingredients list of these 25 qualities, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, all the way up to 25, with 25 degrees of intensity of each of the 25, giving us virtually an infinite spectral array of these 25 qualities. At any given moment all things that are existing in the relative world, all forms, all phenomena, are being renewed and refreshed, as it were, from underneath.

There is continuously the unmanifest, the Is-ness, Am-ness, I-ness, My-ness, The Absolute, coming into being, breaking its asymmetry, the Big Bang, is continuously refreshing and adding into the relative world a varying degree of these 25 qualities in sequential elaboration. Varying degrees of saturation of each of the 25 qualities, upholding the entire process of evolution and keeping the story going.

And so, in the Vedic view, in the view of Sankhya in particular, one of the six systems of Indian philosophy, the relative world is continuously changing and continuously being refreshed from deep within itself by a continuous underlying field of non-change, Being, unmanifest, breaking its symmetry, coming into being and rising into the various combinations and permutations of the 25 qualities and their intensities. This is a way of understanding what’s going on at any given time.

[17:45] Dharma – What is the Most Relevant Thing for You to Be?

So, the Vedic masters were real thinkers and they had the gift of both kinds of thinking, from both sides of the human brain. The human brain has, notoriously, its left cerebral hemisphere, the analytic, linear, mathematical thinker, and the right cerebral hemisphere, the synthetic, artistic, aesthetic thinker, and these two working together globally as one gives us the homogenization of analysis and synthesis.

Analytic and linear, and synthetic meaning bringing together all the disparate parts into one. That which brings the disparate into wholeness is the synthetic. That which looks at all the differences between the parts is the analytic. Bringing them both together into one global function is the job of the human brain. And we can see here in Rishi Kapila the distinction of having left-right global coherence in a brain that is able to look at the whole of the process of Beingness, unmanifest, coming into being, breaking its symmetry in a systematic, sequential way.

So then people sometimes say to me, “Alright, does that mean that I,” you know, Sally from Nebraska, “am a sequential elaboration of the 25 qualities?” And the answer is yes. 

But hold on, you are not continuously the same you in your relative composition at any given moment. It could be that in epochs of a few seconds at a time, there is a rearrangement of the 25 qualities of the Unified Field causing you to be, that means, that form, that function that brings about life-supporting change in the progressive change theme of evolution.

And so, what is it that is the most relevant thing for you to be? What is your dharma? What is your dharma? And here we put it parenthetically, your dharma for the moment, for this moment. What is the highest and best use of the fact of your individuation of your existence? This Unified Field continuously is refreshing what it is that you need to be in aid of, in order to meet the need of the time, the evolutionary need of the time.

[21:07] Refreshing Our Relevance Through Vedic Meditation

When we practice Vedic Meditation twice every day, our individual mind, and the body that goes with it, both settle down and step out of the relative world of form and function of phenomenology, and one becomes one with the underlying field of pure unmanifest Being, unmanifest Unified Field.

Coming out of the meditation session, one comes up through the layers from unmanifest back into manifestation, and the entire Individuality, the psycho-neuro physiology of the individual mind, psycho-neuro brain physiology, the integrated functioning of the anatomy, go through a refreshment with regard to what is it that’s needed in the relative world in order for you to be the purveyor of life-supporting effect?

This changes and causes your personal sequential elaboration of the 25 qualities to go through whatever subtle change it needs to go through in order for you to be the ideal answer to the need of the time.

We practice Vedic Meditation twice every day. By settling down into that unboundedness twice every day, there’s a continuous refreshment of our relevance. And so then relevance has to do with longevity. There are two ways in which things can change. One is through deterioration or disintegration, which means that that form, that phenomenon, no longer is relevant to the evolutionary process.

This is not some human decision being made. This is just an assessment from our deep innermost Beingness, right up to the surface of our skin. And so, degrees of relevance to the evolutionary process. If we have daily, twice a day, refreshed relevance to the evolutionary process, what happens is, aging happens more slowly.

There’s a greater relevance of one’s existence and individuality to the progressive evolutionary storyline. Where do you fit in? What is the value of your individuality with reference to the overall? And to have that refreshed on a twice-daily basis is done by the removal of the accumulation of past storyline.

[24:27] Removing Identities of the Past

So, “I got all angry and hurty poos about something that somebody said to me over the ice cream counter 15 days ago, and I’m still wounded about it because I’ve put it on my Instagram account and my TikTok account and I have a little video of the encounter and oh boy am I ever angry.” 

Accumulated stress from 15 days ago causing my individuality to take over the sequence, the ingredients list, which is the most dominant, which is first, which is second, which is third of the 25 qualities.

My individuality takes it over and my individuality, this is what accumulated stress is, my individuality hangs on to a rage into which I went after somebody was rude to me at the ice cream counter 15 days ago. And I’ve built a bit of a reputation on it because now it’s all over my social media. And so I am that person. That’s who I am. That’s what I am. I identify with that.

There’s no agility there, there’s no nimbleness there, there’s no continuous refreshing of one’s Beingness, one’s existence. We add into this rigidity the twice daily practice of Vedic Meditation and what happens is there’s the release of, the removal of, the accumulation of identities of the past which may have had a few seconds or a few minutes of relevance but no longer are relevant.

What is the most relevant thing for you to be 10 minutes later, 10 days later, 10 years later? When we have accumulated stress, we have accumulated a lot of irrelevancy in our mind, in our brain and in our physiology, in our anatomy, and it’s this that is the cause of dis-ease because it’s not relevant for us to continue being something that’s gone past its use-by date.

In order to have a refreshing of our sequential ingredients list of the 25 qualities of the Unified Field, we have to practice meditation twice every day.

[27:03] Not Just Any Meditation

And by meditation, I don’t mean, you know, sitting and contemplating the nature of things. By meditation, I don’t mean, trying to use your individuality to decide what to suggest to yourself through hypnotic techniques. By meditation I do not mean concentrating, focusing, and excluding stuff, candle flames or whatever, focusing.

By meditation I mean Vedic Meditation, which means the practice of transcendence. To step beyond thought entirely, in order for my individuality to identify entirely with the unmanifest Unified Field, and as it’s coming back into Being at the end of meditation, there’s a spontaneous getting with the program.

The refreshing, the renewal of the 25 ingredients of Unified Field qualities, and coming back into being as a highly relevant agent of progressive change in the scheme of things. So we get a capital R, relevant, onto us rather than having a dangerously high degree of irrelevancy.

When we make ourselves irrelevant to the life-supporting tendency of natural laws, then what happens is we become a drag on the evolutionary process and that attracts destruction operators, meaning those elements of Nature which bring an end to the existence of anything that is not part of the program of evolution. This is what we call aging.

Rapid aging occurs when we have a high degree of accumulation of stress. That’s why rapid aging is occurring, because the relevance of continuing to be around is questioned.

We remove that question by learning how to transcend, how to step beyond, how to become one with That, capital T, which is the baseline that motivates the entire process. of evolutionary change in the world around us.

So this is all from the point of view of Sankhya, which is one of the six systems of Indian philosophy as expounded by Rishi Kapila, and now you know about the 25 qualities of the Unified Field and their relevance.

Jai Guru Deva.