The Vyasanand Foundation: Expanding Human Consciousness Worldwide

The Vyasanand Foundation: Expanding Human Consciousness Worldwide

[00:45] Introduction

Jai Guru Deva. In this episode of The Vedic Worldview, we’re celebrating the recent launch of the Vyasanand Foundation, a nonprofit established by Thom Knoles, with a mission to expand human consciousness at scale by making Vedic Meditation more accessible worldwide.

Thom explains the inspiration for the foundation, including the role Maharishi Mahesh Yogi played in Thom’s evolution as a Maharishi, and he shares the current objectives of the foundation. 

If you’d like to make a contribution to the Vyasanand Foundation, please visit thomknoles.com/foundation or follow the link to the foundation website in the description accompanying this episode. 

[01:28] The Inspiration Behind the Vyasanand Foundation

People for years have been saying to me, “Where is the legacy foundation to look after future generations, the need of the time of successive generations?” And it’s all gone by in a big blur to me, the last almost 60 years of teaching that I’ve been doing.

And probably about once a decade I had a serious thought about it, but I didn’t feel like I could do anything just on my own to create such an organisation, a nonprofit educational organisation, and there’s a lot involved in that.

But now I have an absolutely magnificent team of people who look after everything that I don’t have time to. And I just discussed with them the possibility of a foundation moving forward.

Something to which people could make contributions, but also which would be given, mandated with the goal and mission of carrying out this teaching and providing it to anyone who seeks it worthily in the world, whether they have means or they don’t have means. And also to carry out important and publishable research specifically on the Vedic Meditation technique.

So the time was right. All the stars aligned. And the stars weren’t all in the heavens. Some of the stars were the stars of my team. All the stars aligned, and it came to a head just recently, and we were able to actually get this done.

[03:22] Why Now?

Right now there is a tremendous amount of knowledge coming out of the East in every kind of form. Some of it well-meaning and literally amateur, which means done with love, but perhaps not with such great precision. There’s a lot of knowledge coming out of the East into the West, and there’s a lot of knowledge in the East that people who live in the East don’t have access to.

One of the underrepresented communities for Vedic Meditation, ironically, is the 1.4 billion people of India. We actually need to create teachers, Indian teachers, who can provide knowledge that came from India to Indians. And people of India have been very vocal in letting me know this.

But in the West particularly, to be able to maintain a purity of the ancient teaching. You know how it is when somebody says something to someone, and then they say what they think was said to them, and they say what was said to them, and before you know it, ten people down, it’s something completely different.

There is a tendency for knowledge to get diluted over generations and for the purity of a teaching to disappear. And when the purity disappears, what disappears with it is the effectiveness.

So one of the mandates of the Vyasanand Foundation is going to be two things. Let’s get the knowledge out to the world. That’s one thing, because if it’s so pure that nobody knows about it, then it’s not relevant socially.

But while making it a socially relevant outreach to the population, let’s at the same time keep the teaching pure. Let’s keep that teaching pure so that someone who learns Vedic Meditation today, wherever they learn it, is learning the same methodology with all of its effectiveness that would have appended this body of knowledge, even, just to pick a number, thousands of years ago.

So we have a need of the time. And though I feel in pretty good health, I’m all hale and hearty here, I can see year after year this long beard of mine getting whiter and whiter, and I can count numbers. And now I’m in my eighth decade, it’s important for me to be responsible and really set up something which is designed to outlast me.

And so I don’t want anyone to think that the urgency of this has something to do with any medical report I got. I’m really doing very well. But things like this don’t last forever. And so a foundation can outlast me. And that’s a very important consideration in building it now and getting it up and running.

[06:47] Meeting the Demands of the Time

Looking at the demands of living and the time in which we’re living now in the 2020s, and sometime somebody’s going to be looking at this in the 2040s and say, “It’s just as demanding now,” and I’m sure people in 1940 would have thought it was just as demanding back then.

But let’s behave as if this is the most demanding time ever, which a lot of people think it is right now. A lot of distractibility. A lot of things that people are uncertain about, what their reliable sources of knowledge are.

Knowledge about what do you do, what do you think, and what do you do in order to ensure a life with minimal suffering. That’s really what it comes down to. Where you can make ends meet, but also be a conscious person.

Conscious of what? Conscious that you won’t be able to continue making ends meet unless you bring the many with you. Otherwise you might attain to individual peace because you’re okay, but your peacefulness will be kicked around like a football by the unrest and unhappiness of all of those around you.

So it’s clear that there’s one very important law. When I was studying in the mind and brain sciences decades ago, which a biologist taught me, an award-winning biologist, he said, “Thom, the few lead the many.”

It’s a fundamental biological tenet that there’s no model in Nature where the many get up and move at the same time. There’s always something. It might be an ant that leads all the other ants. It might be one bird leading the entire flock. It might be one neuron in the brain firing and then causing ten thousand neurons to fire, which then causes ten million neurons to fire, and so on.

There has to be something that leads the many, and the many are looking for answers. So it’s very important for those who are leading everyday lives and who want to meet demands with a greater degree of success, interact with this very demanding world successfully, to learn the practice of Vedic Meditation to awaken in themselves their brain’s full potential.

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist, and we teach that on average people use about two percent of the brain’s available computing power. That doesn’t mean they’re using two percent of their brain. The entire brain is active. But what is active doing mainly is storing irrelevant information that has to do with stress.

And so to awaken the brain’s full potential, to awaken its complete capability, and thereby make somebody into a responsive and responsible citizen who can, in their own lives, interact with speed and accuracy, and staying calm under pressure, interact with the demands of the time, reap the rewards of doing that and become an exemplar, and then for there to be an outlet that’s readily available for others who see that, know how to turn that experience on for themselves.

And so for the few to lead the many means that there’s always going to be someone who gets to this body of knowledge earlier than others. But once that’s done, it should be readily available at scale to as many people as would like to avail themselves of it. It will become tremendously popular once it gets a certain amount of traction in the world.

And it’s very important, when you have a body of knowledge that you talk about, that you’re kind of making a promise to the population. And there’s one basic principle, which is that you don’t want to promise high and deliver low.

You want to be able to make a promise that knowledge like Vedic Meditation is available, and to actually be able to fulfil that promise.

There are more people who want to learn this than we have teachers for. And to become a teacher is a detailed, lengthy, and involved process. It’s equivalent roughly to a master’s degree at university. So we have to speed up and expand our teacher training programmes and be able to fulfil the promise, because I don’t think you get very many chances.

When the public says, “Yes, we want it now,” for you to go, “Well, hang on. Can you wait ten years?” People don’t want to wait ten years. They want things now. And we should be able to meet that level of hunger for this knowledge, which is growing and growing day by day.

So in this particular time we see a lot of change. People have been seeing change forever. I’m sure paleontological humans were saying that they were seeing a lot of change. But we are seeing a lot of change relative to earlier stages of our own lives, and perhaps compared with a previous generation.

People are putting their faith in governments and in the leaders of governments to solve all their problems for them. We’ve got problems. We rely upon the big institutions of the world to solve our problems.

So, “Okay, we’re waiting. Solve the problems now. And if you don’t, you’re out. We’ll put somebody else in there to solve the problems.” And the problems range from everything from the one thing that everyone talks about that’s never been attained to by humanity, world peace. There’s never been world peace since the Stone Ages. It’s an idea. It’s a thing that’s never happened. There have been gaps between major world wars, but most of those were just preparation for the next war.

From world peace all the way down to, “How do I educate my children? How do I get food on the table every day?” Okay, governments, solve all that. And governments are not equipped to be able to do that.

People need to learn how to become increasingly innate and to help the governments to become increasingly self-sufficient. To wake up the full potential of the brain. To be less bound by past overloads of experience.

We call that in physiology stress. To be less bound by stress. To have and unleash the full creative intelligence of the mind. To make us stable and adaptive individual citizens.

And then when a larger number of people are doing that, the process of governance will be a much more easygoing and fruitful process. But when individuals have minimal self-sufficiency, the expectation for others to make arrangements for their life to be better is unrealistic, and it’s not working. And because of that, people are becoming anxious and depressed.

[14:51] What Would the World Look Like if More People Practised Vedic Meditation?

I’m asked often what would the world look like if more people practised this. I think that it’s kind of unimaginable. That’s a bit of a cop-out answer. But really, we can begin the process of imagining it by just looking at what happens to individuals when they learn this.

Individuals who come and learn Vedic Meditation report that prior to learning it, they gave a lot of priority to things that were actually not important in life. That their baseline of what they considered to be important changed and upgraded.

They found themselves being deeply bound by little overloads of experience, or frustrations, or social interactions that actually had little impact on their forward progress as a human, except that they gave it a lot of attention and made it impactful for them.

We see people who are suffering from illnesses and diseases that every doctor knows that eighty percent of people who present to a general practitioner are suffering from something that the general practitioner has no training in. And that is overload of stress. Stress, fatigue, tiredness, anxiety, depression, and so on.

So about eighty percent who meet with a general practitioner are told to go away and look after their diet and hopefully things will get better. And if they don’t, and if it turns into a disease that I can treat, come back and see me. This puts doctors in a bizarre position.

So more people practising Vedic Meditation is going to mean more smiling faces on the streets. It’s going to mean people who are more realistic in being able to solve their own problems. It’s going to mean people who have more creativity, tangible, palpable, in their lives.

We’ll see a lot more creativity in every area, in the arts, in the sciences, and in every area. We’ll see people less dependent on whatever news they happen to read on TikTok, or whatever their platform is that is their favourite go-to, and who are able to actually go to knowledge both externally and internally that has greater reliability and makes greater and deeper sense.

In other words, a world of people who are living deeper and deeper inner fulfilment. And as a consequence of that, less panicky about finding fulfilment out there.

The idea that, “There’s a thing out there, there’s a body of knowledge out there, there’s a place I could go, or whatever, that’s going to give me fulfilment.” And the truth of it is, what we teach in the ancient Vedic science, is that there is a place of fulfilment, but it lies deep inside you. It is, as it were, underneath all the thoughts.

When you practise Vedic Meditation, you let your awareness experience that place. And it is the fountainhead of knowledge. It’s the level of consciousness which allows you to connect all the dots.

You have a dot of knowledge here and another dot of knowledge there, and so on and so forth. And all these different dots of knowledge need to become interconnected. When you have a less excited consciousness state, a pattern emerges. And that’s a pattern of knowledge that you can draw upon that is embedded in your own consciousness field, if only you can awaken it.

And so Vedic Meditation, doing that for a larger number of people, is going to make that larger number of people blossom. Now people very often say to me, “Well, does it mean everybody’s going to become the same?”

I like to think of a gardener who goes out to the garden and waters all of the plants. The roses become better roses. The tulips become better tulips. The nasturtiums become better nasturtiums. The gladioli become better, and so on and so forth.

But a daisy doesn’t turn into a rose, and a rose doesn’t turn into a tulip. They don’t all become the same. If you water the root of all of them, their differences blossom. Life will become more colourful.

When people begin to tap into that deep, inner, Unified Field of consciousness, all the individualities will blossom even more. So we’ll have a much more beautiful, diverse garden of healthy individuals who are living lives in a more fulfilled way.

[19:57] What Will Vyasanand Foundation Funds Be Used For?

With regard to the contributions that are brought in, we’re going to have our attention floating about equally between two urgent projects.

The first of the urgent projects is the creation of a scholarship fund. And a scholarship fund for specifically needy people who are means-tested. Not just anybody who goes, “Well, I need money for teacher training,” can automatically receive a scholarship or a partial scholarship.

We will means-test it. And people who are worthy applicants, but who are in need of some help to be able to get on the teacher training programme, to fulfil their prerequisites before they go on the teacher training programme, and to enjoy three months of the final training that they do. This is priority one.

And priority two is to fund a process of putting together teams of scientists who objectively will create a research protocol. It’s going to be a workplace protocol in which we hope it will be demonstrated that Vedic Meditation makes a positive contribution to the workplace, by virtue of those who practise it.

Workplace satisfaction and productivity have so many different levels of consideration. Worker satisfaction, job satisfaction, relationships with co-workers, relationships with supervisors, absenteeism, individual health of the people who are at work, and so on.

And to be able to demonstrate that someone who practises Vedic Meditation is going to become a more fulfilled, more productive person in the workplace is also going to attract, hopefully, a large number of employers to potentially ask us to install a Vedic Meditation programme in the various workplaces, in government and in the private sector.

And so priority two is to fund a programme whereby scientists can carry out an objective process of measuring to what extent it is true, which we think will be true, but it has to be demonstrated scientifically and objectively, that Vedic Meditation makes a positive contribution to individual wellbeing in the workplace.

And so for people who are making a contribution in the first place, those are our two priorities. And your contributions will be assessed by the board of directors of the foundation as to which of the two areas need to have particular attention.

However, if you have a specific request as to how your contribution might be applied, then you can be in touch with the president of the foundation, Mike Avila, and let your interests and your particular expression of interest be known. And we will look at, I say we, the board of directors of the Vyasanand Foundation will have a look at your request and see in what way it can be most worthily honoured within the mission of the foundation.

[23:47] Multiplying Maharishi

Most of you know that I didn’t come up with all of this knowledge about the Vedas and the Vedic worldview and Vedic Meditation myself.

I’m a very, very good loudspeaker for a body of knowledge that was awakened in me and which was taught to me over a quarter of a century of time that I spent with my master, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

In the late 1950s, around ’58 or ’59, Maharishi had come from the East and landed in California for the first time and began teaching. And hundreds of people, particularly in Los Angeles, gathered around him and wanted to know how this knowledge was going to be propagated into the future.

A meeting was held in the great Sequoia forest of Southern California. A great blanket was spread out, and about fifty people sat and took notes while Maharishi sat there under the giant trees and founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as he called it in those days.

The goal of which was, as he put it, “I wish to multiply myself.” In other words, in order for there to be a continuation of the knowledge, those people who had learned to meditate mustn’t just be constantly looking to one person, him, Maharishi, as the only source of the knowledge. He wanted the Maharishis of the world to multiply.

And it’s evident now that I was one of those who got to be made into a Maharishi. My proper title in India, as ordained by the same tradition from which Maharishi comes, is a Maharishi. Mahā in Sanskrit means great. Ṛṣi means a seer, to be a great seer.

And what kind of seeing is this? It’s the ability to see the way in which the need of the time matches knowledge that you have embedded in your own consciousness field. When you allow the two to interact, you allow the inner consciousness field, which has all capability in it, to meet the question marks, as it were, of the need of the time, and to see an interaction between them causing specific knowledge to come out.

Knowledge about what, if anything, needs to be done. What action needs to take place in order for progress and evolution to be served. Life-supporting action. That is a Maharishi. Someone who lives that life and knows how to do that.

And the potential for being a Maharishi is there in every practitioner of Vedic Meditation. When I was a very young practitioner of Vedic Meditation, if anybody had said to me more than sixty years ago, “You’re going to be a Maharishi one day,” I would have laughed my head off. I would have thought that was a very funny, outlandish idea.

But that’s what happened. I continued on with the knowledge and continued on with it. And it has its own nectar-like draw to keep drawing you forward.

So for this to happen, there has to be a fountainhead. And that fountainhead can’t just be me personally. I’m not going to last forever. It has to be a body, an institution, that people can go to reliably and regularly.

And it’s in my vision that the Vyasanand Foundation will serve that particular purpose. To allow more Maharishis to be awakened in the consciousness of the individual meditators of the world. And for this to then be the means whereby the knowledge has its baseline of deeply knowledgeable people who will nurture the knowledge into its forward progression with each coming generation.

[28:13] Big, Important, Urgent

As I see it, the Vyasanand Foundation is deeply embedded with a particular stimulus to action. And that stimulus to action is something I learned from my Maharishi when he was training me to become what I’ve become.

He would say to me, “A thing is worth doing if its impact is going to be three things. Big, important, and urgent.”

Big has to do with expansive thinking. Will it have an impact on the largest number of people, if not necessarily today, then going into the future?

Important means significant. Is it actually something significant, something which is going to be pivotal knowledge to that large number of people?

And then urgent. Urgent has some interesting characteristics in it. Evolution is an ongoing process. Evolution moves on inexorably. It’s unconditional and uncompromising.

And so with evolution being a continuous forward thing, if you don’t respond to that demand to move forward, then you’re ignoring the message of Nature, which is, this is urgent. This is an urge coming from Nature itself.

Nature itself wants there to be progressive change. And so leaning into that which has the largest scope, has the most significant and pivotal impact for that large number of people, and is urgent because it’s fulfilling a need of the time.

Big, important, and urgent are really going to be some of the driving features of how the Vyasanand Foundation makes its decisions about what to do going forward.

And I would also suggest to you, to my dear contributors and well-wishers, that you would like to be part of something that is big, something that is important and pivotal, and something that addresses an urgent need of the time. I hope and I trust this will also attract you. So Maharishi was really onto something.

[30:57] Gratitude

I’d like sincerely and from my heart to express my gratitude to those of you who have gone to the trouble of making a contribution to the Vyasanand Foundation, to help us to awaken in the community the promise that Vedic Meditation makes of being able to create people who are more self-sufficient, happy, and more fulfilled.

To create more teachers to meet the need of the time, and to create a body of knowledge, a scientific body of knowledge, that will help society to grow in fulfilment generation after generation.

Thank you.