[00:45] Formulae for Self-Improvement
Jai Guru Deva. Let’s talk about discipline. Discipline is the thing that a disciple does. They’re spelled the same way: disciple, someone who is devoted, and discipline, the thing that a disciple does.
A disciple of what? What is it that we’ve decided to be disciplined about? One of the things that is very convincing when we’re indoctrinated is that all good information comes from other sources. The only good information is through objective learning.
You read encyclopedias, or you read on Wikipedia, or you do your own homework, go through the World Wide Web, read books, listen to professors and doctors, and so on and so forth, and you formulate a view about what needs to be done. To what end? To improve my status—self-improvement.
Self-improvement has become a huge fad in recent decades, and the idea that if I click into a formula… maybe the formula is given to me by a fad book that came out, a bestseller, 10 million copies sold.
I can remember once, in the 1970s, I believe it was, Dr. James Fixx—where Fixx was spelled F for Freddy, I, double X—was a doctor who advocated that everybody do a thing, which in the 70s was referred to as jogging. Jogging has lost its currency as a word, and now people simply call it what it is: running.
Run, run, run, run, run, and when you’re tired of running, run some more. One day, after having sold millions of copies of his book, Dr. James Fixx fell over on his face while running and died of a coronary artery spasm. Suddenly, everybody began questioning, “Is running for absolutely everybody under all conditions the answer to everything? Just run, and the world will become an ideal society. Everybody just needs to get on with running.”
The point I’m making in this—and my condolences to the family of Dr. Fixx; it’s been decades, but I don’t want to just make a joke about someone passing away, it was actually very sad—is that we have a tendency, when we don’t have a regular daily experience of taking our individuality into Unified Field Consciousness…
[03:49] The Evolutionary Storyline
What does that mean? Practicing Vedic Meditation is taking the individual mind into direct, twice-a-day, 20 minutes per sitting, direct contact with the Unbounded Unified Field of Consciousness. That Unified Field of Consciousness is bringing into being all that is needed for the storyline of The Universe to be evolutionary—the evolutionary storyline.
Unified Field is the source of all forms and functions, all phenomena, all particles, and all relationships between particles, beings, and their relationships. Unified Field comes from its unmanifest status into the manifest to bring forth a story. It’s the story of moving from less sophisticated to more sophisticated.
By sophisticated, I don’t mean someone putting on sunglasses and smoking a cigarette with a cigarette holder—that kind of hokey idea of sophistication that people might have as a fashion statement. Sophistication here is actually a scientific term. It means elegant complexity.
My favorite example, which is still somewhat relevant because people still wear these anachronisms, is wristwatches. A wristwatch. Inside the wristwatch are many dozens of moving parts that move together in a highly complex way that, when properly placed together in sequence, produce an extremely accurate outcome.
What is that outcome? The minute hand, the hour hand, and the seconds hand on the wristwatch essentially tell you where the sun is. It’s a sundial. You look at your wristwatch in winter in Newfoundland, Canada, and you have an idea based on the Earth’s movement of when the sun will rise, when it will set, when it will be dark, when it will be light, and where it is dark or light everywhere else on Earth.
All of this information is put together in a tiny little packet hanging on a strap on your arm by a watchmaker. This is sophistication.
A sophisticated thing brings about an elegant outcome. Here, “elegant” is also a scientific term, meaning an outcome derived from integrated, compactified complexity.
So, what is the storyline coming forth from the Unified Field? Unified Field brings about an evolutionary story. It meets the demand for progressive change.
[07:37] Forgetting to Think
Change is happening anyway. You can change in one of two ways: you can either deteriorate and fall into decay, or you can lean into progressive change and evolve. Non-change is not an option. Change is the reality of the relative world, and Unified Field issues forth all the material, structural, and phenomenological components needed to meet the demand of the time.
One way Unified Field processes what’s needed into the relative world is through the individuality it created: a human being. You are a human being. You are an outlet for Unified Field Consciousness, bringing into the world what’s needed to lubricate the wheels of evolution.
What is the best thing for you to be doing? I’m putting it to you that you don’t actually know unless you are daily reaffirming and grounding yourself in that Unified Field Consciousness. Meditating—not just any old kind of meditation.
People sometimes say to me, “Oh, you’re a meditation teacher. I meditate.”
I go, “Oh, really? What kind of meditation do you do?”
“Oh, I dive into the swimming pool, and while I’m swimming laps, I look at that black line. As I’m swimming over the black line, that’s my meditation—doing laps.”
Well, I guess that does satisfy a definition of meditation because when I look in Oxford or Webster’s at the word meditation, I see it’s defined as “a thought process.”
In a certain sense, meditation is not the proper name for what we in Vedic Meditation actually do. We’re not engaging in a thought process. We trigger a process that allows us to stay conscious while we forget to think.
In Vedic Meditation, we practice a technique where we forget to think, and when we forget to think but stay conscious, consciousness experiences consciousness. It’s a statement of quantum physics—quantum mechanics—the most successful theory of modern science, that the least excited state of any system is the Unified Field. I’ll repeat that: the least excited state of any system is the Unified Field itself.
[10:51] Vedic Meditation – The Ultimate Discipline
This includes the human mind. When the human mind reaches its least excited state, transcending thought, human mind becomes one with that field which is bringing into being everything, and is also bringing into being everything that is new, that is needed to make the story evolutionary: progressive change.
And so then, if I’m going to have a discipline, should I not have the discipline of making sure that twice every day… this is the program of Vedic Meditation. Once in the morning, before you commence the day, you become the Unified Field for 20 minutes.
Sit in that least excited state. Rest the mind and body. Get rid of all the accumulated stress. The accumulated stress is the irrelevant rubbish left over from previous days. It’s like having a great big stack of yesterday’s newspapers somewhere, maybe on your car seat or something like that, you’ve got a big stack of yesterday’s newspapers with all kinds of news that no longer is news, all kinds of news that no longer is true, it’s all outdated and obsolete, accumulated stress.
We sit and meditate, we get rid of the accumulated stress, the now useless information about overloads of experience we had in our past, whether it’s our recent past like yesterday or our ancient past like decades ago.
These layers of accumulated stress are peeled away and what is revealed instead is the deep inner truth of your individual connectedness, your pre existing connectedness. with Totality Consciousness. Vedic Meditation, the ultimate discipline.
[12:54] A Non-Negotiable Phenomenon
You get that done and become the Unified Field in the morning before you commence your day, and then commence your day and get on with it, do whatever you have to do.
Watch what happens when you identify with that Unified Field value in the morning, you’ll find that your activity is such that spontaneously you will challenge assumptions that you may have made which are no longer true, assumptions that have become obsolete. Maybe they were absolutely relevant yesterday but they may not be relevant today.
You get on with your day, continue to engage with the world of demands, continue to interact with ever-increasing effectiveness with the world of demands, taking in the joy that comes from successful interaction with demands, and then by late afternoon, early evening, the effect of having been the Unified Field in the morning is beginning to wear off a bit, so we make time, find a spot, sit down upright, eyes closed, relaxedly, effortlessly transcend thought and become the Unified Field again.
20 minutes of that, come out, engage the world, deal with all of the challenges, whatever they may be, and watch what happens. A theme begins.
From this discipline which, as Vedic meditators, we know if we make this phenomenon non-negotiable it’s the ultimate discipline, and it may cause us to challenge whatever other formulas, formulaic living, we have become rigidly attached to.
There’s undoubtedly some things that you are doing that you are disciplined about, which actually aren’t really all that effective in terms of making you evolutionary or making your lifestyle sustainable.
[15:09] Control States
Sometimes people are like, “Oh, I’ve got to have 5,000 units of vitamin C every day.”
Vitamin C was a huge thing back in the early 1970s. Just guzzle that vitamin C, tablets and tablets and tablets of it, because Dr. Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize, had been able—not for his Nobel Prize, he won that for other things, his body of work—but one of the things that Linus Pauling was fascinated by was research that showed that you can ameliorate a cold by making sure that you have plenty of calcium ascorbate in your body. So people began buying up citric acid things, and ascorbic acid, and so on, and guzzling it. And what ended up happening was so interesting.
There’s a condition which is a pathological disease condition that can kill you called scurvy. Scurvy used to be had by sailors who spent so many weeks at sea during ancient times. They had no access to fresh vegetables and fruits, and they didn’t get vitamin C, and so they would end up with scurvy.
And, interestingly, what happened when people were taking these overloads of vitamin C in a disciplined fashion, with their urine becoming bright yellow, when they—if they didn’t take the thousands of units of vitamin C—their bodies ended up showing signs of having scurvy, because they’d given their body the expectation that a proper normal daily intake should be thousands of units, the equivalent of hundreds and hundreds of oranges eaten in one day. And when you give the body that level of expectation and then you withdraw it, the body’s reaction may well be to produce a disease called scurvy, which is vitamin C deficiency.
The point I’m making is, what basis are we using, what information base are we using to make a decision about what is good for you? What is going to turn you into an effective person who at the end of your life you look back and all the memories that you wish to have had were had by you? Where your life was a magnificent story.
In our desperation, we decide to get into these control states. “I’ll run this amount of time, for X number of minutes, and then I’ll guzzle down some vitamin C, and then I’ll do this, and then I’ll do that, and I’ll have so many units of protein, and then I’ll have so many units of concentrated, focused activity, and then I’ll read the dictionary for 10 minutes, and then I’ll do this and then I’ll do that.” And we make up these lists of things and crack the whip and make ourselves do it because we have to have a formula to go by that’s going to give us a life story that’s really worth something remembering at the end of the life.
[18:37] Stop What You’re Doing
Well, it’s okay to want that. It’s natural to want that, to have the life story that’s really something worth remembering. If you actually truly want it, the best discipline—the discipline above all disciplines—is to stop doing what you’re doing for 20 minutes twice a day.
Stop doing. Stop thinking. Go beyond thought. Become one with the Totality Field, and then become, by doing that, an outlet for what the Totality Field is bringing into manifestation. And that Totality Field, that inner Totality Field, may have you doing things that appear to others to be very disciplined, or that Totality Field may have you behaving in ways that you can’t predict, in all kinds of ways that bring about progressive change that is going to be for the betterment of you, your lifestyle, is going to have the best possible effect on your family, and through your family, on the community. And you will become an exemplar, someone who is an example of radiant happiness, someone who is a fountainhead of wisdom and who radiates life on a daily basis for all to enjoy.
And so then, I’m not saying to you, get rid of all your lists of things about which you wish to be disciplined—getting up at 3 in the morning or 4 in the morning, and to do that, you’ve got to go to bed at sunset on the previous day after taking your fish oil and doing your 5BX before sleep or whatever it is you’re doing, having your cold plunge followed by this, followed by that. And if you don’t stick to your routine, you turn yourself into a stress bag.
I’ve seen a lot of people who are highly disciplined, who are some of the most stressed people I’ve ever met, and stress and accumulation of stress is the number one killer. It’s the starting point for the killing of every human nervous system.
Human nervous systems cascade from unsustainable behaviors into death, and if we follow the cascade backward, we reverse engineer, we’re going to find that the commencement point out of which all the unsustainable behaviors came was accumulated stress.
[21:31] Become an Invincible Human Being with a Fabulous Storyline
When you accumulate stress, it causes you to make decisions that are not based on Nature’s intelligence. When you transcend thought every day and you experience oneness with Nature’s intelligence, then your actions, your behaviors, your doings, and your non-doings—that means resting—are all based in Nature’s intelligence and Nature’s timing. This is how to become an invincible human being with a fabulous storyline.
And so discipline, yes, beautiful, is what disciples do. Be a disciple of your twice daily practice of Vedic Meditation. That’s your discipline, disciple. That’s what you’re disciplining about.
And make sure that practice is non-negotiable. And for those of you who have not yet given yourself the opportunity to learn Vedic Meditation properly, look at my website, thomknoles.com. Make any inquiry on that website, and my team will guide you to the nearest qualified instructor of Vedic Meditation, who will be sure that you are practicing the technique that causes Unified Field Consciousness to awaken inside you.
This is the ultimate discipline, my friends.
Jai Guru Deva.
