Latest / Sri Aurobindo Studies / Practical Applications for Solving the Existential Crisis of Humanity Through the Evolution of Consciousness

Transcript

Practical Applications for Solving the Existential Crisis of Humanity Through the Evolution of Consciousness · Sri Aurobindo Studies

0:00
Not on the cloud. OK, I guess we're ready to get
0:09
started. Yes, we are.
0:12
We are. So good morning, everyone.
0:16
Once again, welcome to the Cultural Integration Fellowship.
0:21
We were founded in 1951 by Doctor Haridas and Beena
0:24
Choudhury as a center of universal religion and spiritual
0:28
practice, and in keeping with the spirit of unity and
0:32
diversity, we honour the spiritual traditions of diverse
0:35
cultures and religions. Today's topic of the talk is
0:44
practical applications for solving the existential crisis
0:48
of humanity, the evolution of consciousness, and we are
0:56
delighted to have Santosh Krinsky giving this talk.
1:01
Santosh has a long relationship with the Cultural Integration
1:06
Fellowship. He was familiar to both Doctor
1:09
Haydash Chaudhary and Beena Chaudhary, and it was through my
1:13
conversations with Beena that I came to know about Santosh.
1:19
Santosh has been studying Shira Bindo's writing since 1971 and
1:23
has a daily blog at Shira Bindo Studies dot worldpress.com and
1:34
podcast at anchor dot FM forward slash Santosh Dash Krinsky.
1:48
He's the author of 16 books and his editor in chief at Lotus
1:52
Press. He is president of the Institute
1:56
for Holistic Education, a non profit focused on integrating
2:00
spirituality into daily life. He has spent more than 48 years
2:06
building and developing infrastructure for publishing,
2:09
distributing and educating about the spiritual part of Shore
2:14
Window, as well as developing and guiding companies at the
2:20
forefront of publishing books and distributing books and
2:25
products to support the natural market as well as the
2:29
metaphysical market in North America.
2:35
Now, before I hand over the screen to Santosh, I would like
2:41
to read a poem from Doctor Haydash Choudhury.
2:51
It's a short poem, but a beautiful one, and this is from
2:56
the collection. Once again, the rhythm of truth.
3:07
My name is Wisdom, O the supreme mystery, unfathomable in
3:15
essence. Thou art visible only to the
3:20
souls inward eye, for thy name is wisdom.
3:27
Thou art Wisdom in social development, wisdom in cultural
3:35
unfoldment, Wisdom that forgives the hand that crucifies, Wisdom
3:43
that tolerates the tongue that vilifies, Wisdom that reveals
3:52
the grandeur of truth. Wisdom that teaches the unity of
3:57
all beings, Wisdom that fights universal freedom to win, Wisdom
4:06
that sees pervading all existence one all fulfilling
4:15
spiritual essence. Let's take a moment of silence
4:23
to dwell on those beautiful words.
4:36
I welcome Kosh Krinsky back to the fellowship once again.
4:43
Thank you. Thank you.
4:46
Agreeing to give the talk, Santosh over to you.
4:50
Welcome to everybody. A couple of points real quick.
4:54
We've got a lot of ground to cover this morning, so I'm
4:58
hoping if you have any questions or notes or anything you want to
5:02
make, please mark them down and we'll cover them towards the
5:07
end. And in the meantime, we're going
5:10
to roll through this stuff here because there's a lot of
5:12
content. So the topic solving the
5:17
existential crisis of humanity through the evolution of
5:21
consciousness needs a little bit of parsing because people don't
5:28
always recognize what is this existential crisis.
5:34
You know, we talk about, oh, there's climate change and
5:38
there's various problems that are coming up and people are
5:42
fighting with each other, but we don't really put it all together
5:46
as an interrelated complex of symptoms of a larger issue that
5:56
we're trying to deal with here. Climate change is basically not
6:05
just global warming, but it's the impacts that take place with
6:12
global warming. You have as we see, we see the
6:17
forest fires, we see the increased intensity of the
6:20
storms, we see droughts, we see floods.
6:25
But what we're not recognizing is that the glacier melt that's
6:34
taking place in Greenland and elsewhere is driving a lot of
6:39
very cold freshwater into the oceans and changing the salinity
6:45
of the oceans with potentially catastrophic impacts.
6:50
We're not seeing that this same process is destroying the coral
6:58
reefs, which are the incubators of the food chain in the ocean,
7:04
if you will. And we don't see that the fresh
7:09
water supply of the earth is dwindling dramatically and that
7:16
places like Lake Mead are drying out.
7:20
The Colorado River, another major source of water for the
7:23
western US, is a drying up. And there are serious
7:29
implications of every one of these changes that lead to the
7:35
pressures that bring upon us, war, drought, famine, pandemics,
7:44
mass migrations, people fighting over basic resources.
7:50
So all of these things, they're, they're not separated symptoms.
7:54
They're actually part of a complex of the disease which I
7:59
call the evolutionary crisis of humanity.
8:02
According to scientists, we're in the midst of what we call the
8:05
sixth major planetary die off. They're calling it the Holocene
8:12
die off 'cause we're in the Holocene error.
8:16
And basically they're saying that the species die off that's
8:20
taking place today is 100 to 1000 times the background rate
8:27
of species die off that takes place on the planet.
8:31
Sort of naturally. This is at a level that equates
8:36
to the time of the destruction of the dinosaurs when the
8:41
asteroid hit and there was a global winter, you know, for
8:47
many, many, many years. And we're in the midst of that
8:52
process right now. What people don't recognize is
8:57
that part of this includes the die off of the pollinators.
9:04
We hear about the many species of bees that are disappearing,
9:08
and basically all of our fruits and vegetables depend on
9:13
pollinators. Now let's say this.
9:16
The mental approach of our scientists and engineers is
9:19
working hard to solve that one. They're designing little
9:23
miniature drone bees to pollinate things so that when
9:27
there are no real bees around anymore, we'll have these
9:30
buzzing little drones flying around pollinating things.
9:35
Great illustration of the mental approach to solving our
9:38
problems, but it doesn't get to the root of the issue.
9:43
We have an imbalance in access to resources.
9:47
Our economic and political systems are based in the mental
9:51
consciousness, and everybody has their own ideas.
9:55
The religions, the philosophies, the political systems, the
9:59
economic systems, everybody has their own sense of what it is it
10:07
takes to solve our problems. And unfortunately, they all
10:13
disagree with each other and therefore we wind up with what
10:17
we see today in the world, which is political gridlock and
10:23
controlled by certain individuals of mass amounts of
10:28
resources without the ability to distribute them equitably across
10:36
the planet, which accentuates the pain, the suffering, the
10:43
anger, the disruption and the wars, the fighting and the
10:48
migrations that take place. Albert Einstein had an
10:54
interesting statement that I always like to remind people of,
10:58
and that's that he said we cannot solve our problems with
11:03
the same thinking we used when we created them.
11:08
And so the existential crisis that we're facing cannot be
11:14
solved with the kind of political and economic and
11:19
societal solutions that the mind comes up with.
11:24
And that's why we have the the gridlock that we face today,
11:28
because nobody has an answer at that level.
11:32
Mental solutions have not worked and will not work.
11:37
We need a new paradigm. It's at this point that Shrioro
11:42
Bindo comes into the picture. And I have to say, back in 1971,
11:49
when I first came across three oral windows, The Life Divine, I
11:57
was struck by how prescient and how clear his view of the
12:04
process of what I would call the evolution of consciousness, or
12:10
what he calls the evolution of consciousness was.
12:15
If you look at evolution, Well, let let's step back one, one
12:19
step. The crisis we're facing today is
12:24
not an impossible challenge. It may seem impossible if you
12:31
really spend time focusing on all the things I just mentioned,
12:37
you'd say, how are we going to get out of this?
12:40
Some people want to just go to Mars and abandoned the the, the
12:44
world. Other people just hope that
12:48
somehow big tech is going to solve all these problems and
12:53
we're going to come out of it. But it's actually part of a
12:57
deeper process of nature. Nature creates a major crisis
13:05
for us to be able to thereby or or for all of existence to
13:13
thereby make the next evolutionary leap.
13:18
When we are happy, satisfied, contented, everything going
13:24
fine, we don't make the efforts to change things.
13:30
And as a result, we need and we see in humanity's history, we
13:36
need a major crisis to focus our attention.
13:40
And so nature presents this crisis to us and that gives us
13:46
the energy to move to the next cycle of evolution.
13:55
If we look at the evolution of forms and we go back to Darwin
14:00
and he said, oh, there's an evolution of forms and the
14:03
different beings evolve one from another.
14:08
He got the mechanism pretty much right.
14:12
What he didn't get to was the underlying impetus, the impulse
14:18
that creates the evolution of forms.
14:23
What is it that drives us from one level to the next?
14:32
And that is where Shiro Bindo comes in, by pointing out that
14:36
behind the evolution of forms is an evolution of consciousness.
14:43
You see, if you go back billions of years, you see purely
14:48
material forms, you see rocks, you see magma, you see volcanic
14:54
action, you see possibly solar energy and water and air.
15:01
And that's about it. You don't see any living forms
15:06
there. Somewhere, somehow, a
15:11
consciousness existed, was involved in the process.
15:18
And that consciousness, when the forms were prepared, when the
15:22
forms were ready to accept it, could bring forth life.
15:29
Now, Not every bit of matter is prepared to bring forth life.
15:35
You can sit on and hibernate with a rock, a piece of granite,
15:43
or a piece of volcanic magma for a billion years, and you're
15:51
never going to wind up with a living being coming out of it.
15:55
That's not how it works. What happens is that as the
16:00
material substance subtleizes, gets prepared to carry the spark
16:12
of life in those parts of matter, life begins to evolve.
16:18
We see the development of metals, we see the develop
16:21
development of crystals, and then we see the development of
16:28
material forms that can actually hold the life energy, at which
16:34
point life evolves. Similarly, if we move forward,
16:40
we see that you go from the one celled plants and the animals to
16:47
very rudimentary forms that have very rudimentary mental process.
16:53
Eventually the mental process develops.
16:58
When the forms are ready to hold them, they evolve.
17:02
But they were involved there and and we see that now with our
17:08
understanding of genetics and the function of DNA that encodes
17:16
what's what and what comes out of it.
17:19
You're not going to get a monkey out of an acorn, and you're not
17:26
going to get a human being out of the seed of a plant.
17:31
There's an encoding that takes place, a consciousness that is
17:36
involved that permits that evolution to take place.
17:43
The evolution of consciousness is not completed.
17:50
And Trior Bindo has mentioned that man as a human is a
17:56
transitional being. Basically, the mental being that
18:02
we embody in our most ideal form is basically not the end of
18:12
evolution. Just as life evolved out of
18:16
matter and mind evolves out of life.
18:22
He termed the next level of evolution to be beyond the mind,
18:26
which he called supra mental, literally beyond the mind.
18:32
It's a new form of consciousness that is taking birth within the
18:42
crisis of evolution, within the crisis that we're facing today.
18:50
And, and that is really the the secret of why we're struggling
18:55
with this. We start to see the signs of
19:02
this taking place, the development of new ways of
19:07
looking at things, new ways of addressing things.
19:13
The mind is extremely linear and blinkered and focused, and it
19:19
sees one line of approach and doesn't respond to the
19:28
completeness, the wholeness, the oneness of its life and its
19:34
environment, its circumstances and its surroundings.
19:39
So the Super mental evolution begins to see things as part of
19:47
a oneness where we take into account the cradle to grave
19:54
thinking, the symbiotic relationships.
20:01
You know, people say, oh, we need to plant trees because
20:05
we're deforesting trees and they they hold carbon dioxide and
20:11
they create oxygen. Well, we're actually one being
20:15
with the trees. We provide the carbon dioxide
20:21
that they need to survive. And the trees provide the oxygen
20:26
we need to survive. And, and not just the trees, all
20:29
the plants, actually the single cell plants in the ocean provide
20:35
more oxygen than trees do. And we're in the process right
20:39
now of destroying the ocean food chain and we're seeing the
20:46
collapse of the fisheries taking place.
20:50
These are these are the existential crisis we have
20:54
because without the oxygen that they create and without the food
20:58
chain that they nurture and supply, humanity is basically
21:05
going to go extinct. That is that is the nature of
21:09
our challenge. The Super mental consciousness
21:17
looks at things holistically, globally.
21:19
It sees that all of the different solutions and all of
21:24
the different viewpoints and all of the different philosophies
21:27
and all of the different economic systems and all of the
21:31
different political ideologies have some grain of the truth
21:38
within them, but not the entirety.
21:42
And it is time to have a new view of that.
21:47
And humanity is preparing. Just as matter was prepared so
21:55
that certain parts of it would hold life, and life was prepared
22:01
so that certain parts of it could hold the mental
22:03
consciousness. We see certain aspects and parts
22:07
of humanity that are developing in order to hold this new
22:14
paradigm and this new energy. And people who are motivated to
22:23
try to live a life that brings in contacts and retunes their
22:31
awareness towards this new status of consciousness.
22:38
So looking at that, we turn to the type of projects that are
22:44
taking place all over the world that are trying to embody the
22:52
new paradigm we see. First of all, let's let's look
22:59
at what the mental consciousness is trying to do because it
23:02
recognizes this problem that we're facing.
23:07
You look at big tech projects and they say, well, we need, we
23:12
need energy production, we need water production.
23:15
We're going to drop an enormous power plant of $10 billion into
23:20
the middle of some village in Africa, and that's going to
23:25
solve their problem. We're going to put in a borewell
23:30
project or water supply project with a huge water plant and it's
23:37
going to cost 5 or $10 billion and that'll solve that problem.
23:42
And what they're not seeing is that these enormous high tech,
23:49
high cost projects do not fit into the environment within
23:54
which they're being placed. And so they they find after some
24:00
years that these projects tend to fail and they don't
24:04
accomplish what they expected them to accomplish.
24:09
That is essentially a mental approach to things.
24:15
And it's not sufficient for where we are today and where we
24:21
need to be. So what a number of people are
24:25
starting to do is trying to look at the entirety of the
24:28
situation. And we come then to the project
24:33
of Oroville, which has some 55 or 60 projects going in
24:40
different fields in order to begin to apply a new paradigm to
24:47
many, many different fields of human endeavor.
24:51
Not that any one of them is going to solve the problem of
24:54
humanity, but that they can begin to integrate this new
25:01
comprehensive understanding into the way we address the issues
25:09
we're facing. One example is they have a
25:12
reforestation project. And when they went to do when,
25:17
when the normal mental solution to reforestation was illustrated
25:24
some years ago in the island of Haiti, they had they had a big
25:30
hurricane, they lost a lot of trees.
25:32
They needed to reforest. And the governments of the world
25:37
decided, OK, we're going to do that.
25:39
And so they took a lot of tree seedlings and they dropped them
25:43
from the sky and they got about a 15% uptake of surviving
25:50
seedlings and declared success. It just so happens that the
25:55
reforestation project that was successful in Oroville had an
26:02
experimental team in Haiti and they did their method of
26:08
reforestation with something on the order of an 80% success or
26:13
five times the success rate of trees surviving and thriving to
26:20
the normal process used by the mental consciousness.
26:26
How did they do it? What they did when they started
26:31
in Oroville, which was a denuded plane of eroded land, the first
26:38
thing they did was they said, well, what is the natural flora
26:45
and fauna in this area of India? And so they went and sent teams
26:52
around to study local areas of forest to see what type of
26:58
plants grew there, what the trees were, what the understory
27:04
was, what the symbiotic relationships were between the
27:09
plants in a successful, thriving forest area in that part of the
27:13
world. After doing that, they begin to
27:18
bring in the right type of trees, the right type of
27:23
supporting plants. And if you look at Oroville
27:27
today, it's amazing. I mean, it's like a an amazing
27:33
forested area that is rich and lush and beyond what they
27:40
brought in from the natural surroundings, the other plants
27:46
and the fauna, the animals, the insect, etcetera that belong in
27:51
that type of area. That type of forested area
27:58
basically joined of their own to create a diverse, rich, natural
28:08
thriving forested environment that is salvaging that eroded
28:15
land and turning it into what you might call a tropical
28:21
paradise. So the difference of the two
28:25
approaches in my mind represents the difference between the
28:30
mental linear blinkered approach and a more holistic approach
28:38
that looks at the entirety of the picture, the complete
28:44
relationship of oneness of all the beings that together make an
28:49
ecosphere. So in Oroville, they're doing
28:56
research on a number of areas, not just reforestation, but in
29:02
things like architecture. The Western approach to global
29:06
warming is, well, crank up the air conditioning.
29:11
And of course, cranking up the air conditioning simply makes it
29:15
worse. You feel better short term, but
29:18
you're using more hydrocarbons and you're putting more global
29:23
warming into the atmosphere by doing it.
29:25
So you haven't solved the problem.
29:29
You've put a Band-Aid over a symptom and you feel good about
29:33
it. The approach in Oroville is is
29:37
tremendously different. They look at it and say, well,
29:41
if we could design buildings that do not need as much energy
29:50
for heating or cooling, that could use natural materials and
29:57
natural design elements in order to optimize human comfort
30:03
without the input of extraneous energy, we could help to keep
30:11
people more comfortable and at the same time not further
30:16
contribute to climate change and global warming.
30:19
And so they've done a number of these types of experiments with
30:22
architecture and they found they can use less air conditioning.
30:28
Another experiment is to use hemp to make hempcrete bricks.
30:39
Now hempcrete is much more environmentally friendly than
30:45
using concrete. The Western approach, world
30:49
approach at this point is to use concrete, which is one of the
30:53
most intensive water and energy usage industries in the world.
31:02
Hempcrete, On the contrary, is much more energy friendly and it
31:09
has better survivability, It's stronger.
31:14
It's also got a better index for how it moderates and insulates
31:23
energy. So it's it's a better building
31:26
material, it's more durable and it costs a lot less in terms of
31:31
loss of water and energy. So it's a better solution.
31:36
And so they're experimenting with that.
31:40
I understand they're starting to work with the concept of 3D
31:44
printing of buildings. And if they develop that, and
31:48
that's just in its infancy right now, you take the Hemp Crete and
31:54
you take 3D printing and you can begin to design buildings using
31:59
these new architectural concepts that will be truly revolutionary
32:06
and uplifting. So this is a direction that we
32:11
see there. The other thing they're looking
32:13
at, for instance, is with the collapse of the ocean fisheries,
32:19
there's a billion or more people who are going to be starving on
32:22
this planet, and they're not going to like that.
32:24
They're going to fight for their survival.
32:28
They're going to migrate. And this is happening right now.
32:33
We're overfishing the oceans at a tremendous rate and we're
32:37
getting these huge trawling Nets out there and just scooping up
32:41
everything in the ocean. So in addition to climate change
32:46
destroying the food chain and the incubation through the coral
32:51
reefs, we're scooping up everything that's mature and
32:56
less mature in the entire ocean food chain and basically
33:02
denuding the oceans of the fish. Well, I'm a vegetarian.
33:07
That doesn't affect me. I'm actually a vegan.
33:09
So personally, I don't eat fish, but there are a billion people
33:14
on the planet who do. It's going to affect things, and
33:19
this isn't going to get solved unless we change that.
33:22
Well, how do we change that? We need to find alternative food
33:27
sources and protein sources. So in Oroville, they're working
33:31
on the idea of developing algae based foods and soy based foods
33:38
that can hopefully be developed as alternatives over time to
33:48
help replace the missing food items for a large segment of
33:53
humanity. You can see a theme here going
33:58
across each of these projects and there's some 50 plus
34:02
projects. One of them is called Ecofem.
34:05
It's basically to help empower women to play a more direct and
34:13
equal role in society. Whereas over history, they've
34:22
had a difficulty both with being the carriers of new birth and
34:29
the reproductive cycle and the menstrual cycle.
34:32
So Ecofem says instead of shutting women out, they're
34:38
developing reusable menstrual pads that are very low cost and
34:48
educating women on how to use them in places where they
34:52
haven't had it. So that they can have much more
34:57
involvement in their social lives in that society then they
35:02
have when they're basically kept out for 10 days or a third of
35:10
the month, you could say every month in addition to their
35:14
childbearing period and their child rearing period.
35:17
So Oroville has so many numerous projects that it's become a a
35:28
beacon for people who are interested in solving the
35:33
issues. Now, let's say this Oroville has
35:35
its own issues because just like everywhere in the world, there's
35:41
human beings living there, and the human beings are living
35:46
primarily in their mental consciousness and they have
35:50
different viewpoints about things.
35:52
And so they're also being confronted with the issues of
35:58
human unity at a much more intense level because they've
36:02
got people from many, many different cultures, backgrounds,
36:05
educations, languages, religions, etcetera, all trying
36:12
to find a way to live together there.
36:14
And I'm expecting that one of these days they will do that.
36:19
But in the meantime, they have to face these issues while they
36:24
work on the larger ecological and environmental and
36:31
existential issues that we all face as humanity.
36:36
One of the things that has come out of this in the last couple
36:39
years, Oroville International USA has developed a project
36:44
called Flourish and it's, you can look it up at AVIU
36:50
sa.org/flourish. And that project is there to
37:00
support the Oroville projects that are doing these various
37:04
things and to help them flourish with the idea that they should
37:08
be reproducible, scalable, and sustainable.
37:16
And so instead of dropping a large water plant or a large
37:22
electrical plant into a local community where the people
37:26
aren't prepared for it and aren't able to support it and
37:30
deal with it, they want to find projects that are low tech that
37:36
are suited to a local environment and that the local
37:41
people can apply themselves instead of someone coming in
37:46
from outside and doing it for them.
37:49
They want to provide projects and opportunities that people
37:54
can apply locally and grow with and live with using the
38:02
methodologies similar to what we spoke about with the
38:06
Reforestation program. There are also programs in waste
38:12
management. Pollution and waste management
38:16
is one of the largest problems we have as humanity because we
38:22
do not recognize what we call the cradle to grave of the
38:27
things we produce. And so we put large amounts of
38:33
plastic material into the oceans and we're creating a huge
38:40
garbage patch in the oceans, which complicates that problem
38:44
because we have no solutions. The solution we have as mental
38:50
beings is let's ban plastic straws.
38:53
And I guess that's fine, let's ban plastic straws.
38:57
But we haven't got to the root of the problem there.
39:01
So there's a group at Oroville working on how to deal with
39:07
waste management, really looking at the end products of what we
39:11
as humanity are creating in order to live on the planet.
39:16
How to make sure that we have a life cycle that incorporates the
39:22
death of our fixed finished goods and reincorporates them
39:28
in. And that project is called Waste
39:31
Less. Each of these steps is looking
39:34
at one aspect of the larger issues of humanity.
39:39
So I've become a big fan, if you will, of that Flourish project.
39:46
And I think it it's not that that project alone is a
39:52
solution, or that Oroville alone is the only place where these
39:55
things are happening. We see rising up all over the
40:01
world these ideas and these visions.
40:07
Oroville may be 1 concentrated beacon of experimentation in
40:14
these directions, but in reality there is one, as Tegard des
40:19
Chardin said, one neurosphere, one mental atmosphere that
40:25
permeates the entire planet. And as some individuals begin to
40:33
link to this new paradigm, this new consciousness, we find that
40:40
it's popping up everywhere in the world.
40:44
And whether people recognize and talk about Trioro Bindo or not,
40:50
or the mother is really not the relevant point.
40:55
The relevant point is, are people starting to recognize our
41:00
interdependence with each other and with the world we live in?
41:05
Are we looking at the oneness of the universe?
41:08
Are we recognizing that we need to be living in a harmonious way
41:16
to our environment and with others?
41:18
And are they starting to develop solutions that implement this
41:26
paradigm? And Oroville then becomes one
41:30
point of light, one example of what's happening and starting to
41:37
happen all over the world. And that is the sign to me that
41:44
the next phase of the evolutionary development of
41:50
consciousness is becoming active and is starting to address the
41:58
imbalances that our mental consciousness has inadvertently
42:04
created. What you may say are the
42:06
unintended consequences of the development of mind now have to
42:12
be addressed as the intended solutions of the Super mental
42:18
consciousness. And so I think that's basically
42:22
what I had to say today. I'm sure there are some
42:26
questions and some discussion. So let's open it up.
42:30
We have a few minutes left. Thank you.
42:36
Thank you very much, Santosh. That was absolutely wonderful.
42:41
A beautiful structure to your talk when you outlined the
42:48
nature of the problem of existential crisis and that we
42:52
as humanity are facing the cause of the problem, of course, the
42:58
mental and the solutions and or will as a case study.
43:04
So that was absolutely beautiful, very much in line
43:06
with what both mother and Shourabinda have emphasized,
43:10
that mind is certainly not the instrument for knowledge, but it
43:17
can be a wonderful instrument for conveying knowledge.
43:23
And I think that came out very, very beautifully.
43:26
Thank you once again. Let's let's open it up for
43:31
comments, questions, interactions and so on and so
43:33
forth. Hi.
43:42
Santosh, this is Mike Hebel. My reflections the the evolution
43:50
which we have seen since The Big Bang has been at least from the
43:55
perspective of the modern mind, extremely slow that it takes
43:59
millions and millions of years for these changes that you have
44:02
talked about to occur. What's the impetus now or the
44:06
propulsion now to speed that process up?
44:11
And it will have to be speed up at lightning speeds in order to
44:14
occur well. That's a wonderful question, and
44:20
it's something that Srioro Bindo and the Mother have actually
44:24
addressed, and that is that through the conscious
44:28
participation of the human being, the mental being, we are
44:39
able to do things that could not take place at the same speed
44:47
through the unconscious, slow evolutionary process of nature.
44:53
Now, this is an unproven concept for us, and we're either going
44:58
to survive or die whether this succeeds or not.
45:02
But Sri Robindo and the Mother felt that as human beings wake
45:09
up and become aware of this and start to consciously align
45:14
themselves with the need and the steps to develop a relationship
45:21
to this new consciousness, that it can take place much more
45:28
quickly than what we might call evolutionary time that you're
45:33
speaking about. And we'll see.
45:36
I mean, one of the concepts that that I've always enjoyed was the
45:42
idea of the 100th monkey. And that is that at a certain
45:46
point in time when enough beings of of a certain species learn
45:51
something that it quickly can promulgate across that entire
45:55
species. And so we don't need 8 billion
46:00
people all to evolve to a new understanding for that new
46:05
understanding to become operative.
46:09
We don't know how many it takes for that 100th monkey to
46:15
operate, but under the pressure that we're in right now, I'm
46:18
hoping that this process will in fact take place relatively
46:25
quickly. Thank you.
46:30
I I'd like to this is Ricky Poly Cove and on the heels of what my
46:36
cable just expressed, I've basically had a 41 year career
46:42
in medicine and have proposed to the women that see me and the
46:51
clinicians that I teach that there is biologic evolution,
46:56
which is what Santosh, you've so beautifully outlined, which is
47:00
that very slow in a certain sense, randomly selected
47:07
adaptive capacity for life. Darwin And then that healthy
47:14
biologic evolutionary being has this other opportunity, which is
47:20
super mind, but that awareness that I think Gregory Bateson
47:25
expressed, you know, in the anthropology literature many,
47:28
many years ago, that everything's connected to
47:31
everything. And so one of the joys I feel
47:36
presently, as discouraging as the science is, is that we have
47:42
a university, California Institute of Integral Studies,
47:46
founded on hard as Chowdary's teachings, timeless teachings,
47:51
that in the midst of everything, CIS is in better shape than
47:56
ever. And so I'm pretty optimistic
48:00
that with the kind of wrestling and entropy that we have with
48:06
our courageous students that we're we're sowing the seas in a
48:12
way, you know, that is in harmony with Oroville, but with
48:19
sort of tentacles that are far reaching because so many of our
48:24
students are international as well as zealot local, you know,
48:30
US based students to make the world a better place.
48:33
So I see signs that are actually optimistic in the midst of the
48:37
shadows. Well, that's great.
48:40
You know, a lot of people say that entropy or the dissolution
48:45
of systems, the the winding down of energy is inevitable.
48:52
And I actually see it in the opposite way.
48:55
I see that you have an increasing concentration of
48:59
consciousness through time, and therefore we're not in a phase
49:05
of entropy. We're in a phase of
49:09
concentration and increase of energy.
49:12
And if you look at it that way, eventually this next
49:17
transitional step will be completed and the new
49:21
consciousness will take its role in the universal creation.
49:28
There's no doubt in my mind. And I, I think at least, you
49:33
know, where science meets the ineffable is but one might call
49:40
simply the power of prayer. But this higher mind state that
49:44
actually exerts a force. And that's where I think it's
49:48
incumbent upon all of us who hold that wish and that ardent
49:53
loving light to invest in that. You know, and that again, I
49:58
don't say that at the end of it, continuing medical education
50:01
talk, but there's a lot of literature and medicine
50:05
published really since the 70s. But it's incredible showing the
50:09
effect of distance healing on biologic outcomes.
50:14
So I, we have many examples where it actually effects human
50:21
feelings and enlightenment that appears to come from nowhere.
50:26
Like I didn't even try that hard and didn't have to have
50:29
ayahuasca or LSD. But now I understand I'm at one
50:34
with everyone. So, you know, we have to beam
50:36
that a little bit more assiduously towards China, I
50:40
think. So we have a few billion people
50:44
to come on to the party. Thank you.
50:52
Thank you, Ricky, and thank you, Santosh so much for for your
50:57
talk. I appreciate it greatly.
50:59
Anton here, you commented earlier how we need a crisis to
51:06
focus attention. And it struck me, of course,
51:10
one, I, I, I see a yin Yang, you know, on that.
51:14
But I also can help feeling that the crises that we are facing as
51:21
a as a society, as a species, be the the pandemic, the global
51:29
warming, climate change, are all things that are intended to show
51:33
us that we have to recognize our oneness.
51:38
That we cannot solve them as an individual corporation, as an
51:43
individual nation, as an individual human beings without
51:48
realizing that as I often say we are not you know, we appear to
51:53
be separate leaves, but we are in effect one tree And I'm
51:59
wondering, you know, global climate change is not just
52:02
global warming, but a global warning as to what we have to do
52:07
and how we must get together and you know like your thoughts is
52:12
Earth. Therefore you would agree, I
52:15
guess would be conscious that is doing this for the good of
52:18
humanity, that you know coronavirus is not just a bad
52:22
thing when it comes to the long term picture.
52:25
Thousands of years from now, we will have taught humanity how to
52:28
work together, hopefully. Yes, well, it's a, it's a
52:34
symptom of the entire complex of pressure that nature is putting
52:42
on us to change, as you're, as you're pointing out.
52:44
And I, I think that if humanity learns how to work together and
52:52
how to appreciate the oneness of not only all people, but all
52:58
species and the entire environment of the planet, we
53:03
can live in a world that is harmonious, beautiful and
53:11
supportive of life and development in a, in a very
53:18
positive way without creating waste over on one side in order
53:24
to have our enjoyment on the other.
53:33
So I, I did want to conclude with a, a short quote from
53:37
Srioro Bindo. And that is, the most vital
53:42
issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is
53:47
to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind
53:52
of the West, or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and
54:00
enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge.
54:06
And that's really our challenge. Hi Santosh, Mike Hebel again,
54:13
before you go, I like the way you put your your talk together
54:17
today. And as I know you're the editor
54:19
in chief of Lotus. Is there one or two publications
54:23
that you have produced in the last several years that I could
54:27
follow up or others could follow up on as as a way to supplement
54:31
the the content of your talk today?
54:36
Not directly. What we publish at Lotus is
54:40
primarily the major writings of Sri Aurobindo in the US
54:44
editions. And I do a daily blog and I've
54:50
been doing that for over 12 years and systematically go page
54:54
by page through Sri Aurobindo's major writings and take up
55:00
whatever the topic of the day is that next page.
55:04
Today's topic actually was something about pain management
55:11
and you'd be surprised at how much is in there.
55:13
So you can look up any subject you want on the blog and there's
55:21
a search bar. It'll go through 12 years of
55:24
blog posts, I mean thousands of posts and give you the quotes
55:28
and the locations of any statements that relate to that,
55:32
whether it's super mental or whether it's evolution or
55:36
whether it's pain management. But we don't, we don't actually
55:42
have any books that directly address this topic.
55:49
I've, I've covered the topic a couple of times with a group
55:52
called selfgrowth.com and on the Lotus Press website, we have two
55:57
video interviews up there where they interviewed me on the
55:59
subject. 1 was the background interview and the other one was
56:04
the practical applications interview.
56:07
Covered a lot of the same ground as today, but in a question and
56:11
answer format. Thank you.
56:19
Thank you. Thank you very much and thirst
56:21
for this wonderful talk and beautiful interaction.
56:26
And thank you everyone for joining in.
56:31
I will be reaching out to Santosh more often than not in
56:37
the future so that we can have him consistently present at the
56:42
fellowship. These topics are extremely
56:45
important and I personally feel that both Mother and Sher Bindo
56:52
are as relevant today as they were when they were in their
56:56
respective bodies and and writing about these stuff.
57:02
So in fact, I would say that they have become even more
57:04
relevant, you know, in particular with respect to how
57:10
the mind works, you know how the mind needs to be transcended.
57:15
What happens when mine wine gets transcended?
57:20
You know, what are the sources of inspiration that we come in
57:24
contact with and so on and so forth.
57:28
At the fellowship, there has been a growing interest in
57:32
making sure Bindo more and more relevant and contemporary and
57:38
that is something that we are emphasizing on and we are going
57:42
to emphasize as time progresses. I also wanted to remind us all
57:48
that Sure, Bindo's 150th birth anniversary is approaching.
57:54
It is on 15th of August. I'll be giving a talk next
57:59
Sunday on that topic. So if you have some time, please
58:03
spare some time and and join us at the fellowship.
58:07
Thank you once again and thank you very much Satosh for your
58:11
talk and for your presentation. Bye, bye, bye.