EWS #61 Questions from viewers (12)
Dec 25, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:01:00):
Namaste and welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. We've some questions which we have discussed briefly, but they need a little bit more looking into, especially these binaural beats. There's an awful lot these days on vibration and the levels of vibration and healing. If you could cover that.
Sraddhalu (0:01:29):
We can look at the question itself?
Narad (0:01:33):
Yes, he says, what are your thoughts on binaural beats, their utility and effectiveness compared to normal meditation which we do. Many people upload videos on YouTube claiming that different waves, if listened to in a quiet room with headphones, can help in DNA repair, whole body regeneration, curing illnesses, etc. Is it true?
Sraddhalu (0:02:00):
So this is a technology which has been experimented upon for the last, let's say, about 50 years. And it started because in the early studies of the brain waves, they discovered that the entire brain has a kind of a resonance. Each cell is sending out its own signals, clusters of cells have their own signals, portions of the brain light up another portion, then another portion and they seem to coordinate sometimes but the brain as a whole seems to send out an electrical rhythmic pulsation which is the normal state of our waking consciousness. But when we enter a sleep state the frequency of the pulsation shifts and when we enter into state of deep sleep, it shifts to something else. So there are three categories of brain waves and I don't remember unfortunately which one is which there's beta alpha and theta. So the idea was that the brain resonance is somehow leading to your state of waking or sleep or trance because the whole science at that time was based on the idea that consciousness is a result of the brain so the logical thing to do was to induce the brain to enter those rhythmic states and that would put you into certain states of consciousness. That was the idea. Of course from a yogic perspective, we will put it this way that the state of consciousness, which is independent of the brain, compels the brain into a certain way of working. And so you can choose to shift your state of consciousness, the brain will follow. But it's not true that if you force your brain into a particular rhythm that your consciousness will change necessarily. Yes it might influence because there is a two-way connection, but it's not enough to put you into a state of, for example, deep trance. So the logic of this you have to understand comes from a Western reductionist physical model of consciousness which says that the brain produces your consciousness, so by tweaking brainwaves you will get your state of consciousness. Now what they found was a meditator, especially deep meditator could enter into the state of, with the brain waves at the equivalent of deep sleep while being fully conscious. So he would have eyes open, he could be in conversation if he needed but the brain was pulsating at the state associated with deep trance or deep sleep. And so they said, okay, in that case if we trigger the brain to go into these states, then we will be like the meditator. You will have attained the result of the meditation. Because meditation is nothing but a product of brain waves.
Again, the logic goes the other way. How do you do that? How do you force the brain into those states? Again this completely bypasses the point that even what's happening in the brain is distributed in different specialised parts. We are only looking at the overall rhythm and that's all you're playing with. So one way they found was that you could artificially trigger the brain to enter that state by creating sound or sound pulsating at that frequency which tends to pull the wave, the brain into that rhythm. It's as if you're sitting in a room and there's a piece of music that has a certain pace of rhythm, after a while you'll find you will start in your body moving slightly to that beat or if you're speaking, your speech speed will tend to align to that beat. If the beat is slow you'll start speaking slower, if the beat is fast you'll start speaking faster. If you're eating food, your rhythm of eating will also match the music. So if you go to a fast food joint, you want to eat fast and the joint wants you to eat fast and get out so that others can come in and take your place. So they have a table without chairs so that you eat standing and they have music which is fast paced. It goes did did did did and you eat did did did did and you get out did did did did. What you're doing is so natural to the human body to align itself to a rhythm of something outside, because well that's how we are. Let's do that to the brain, that was the logic of it. So you can pulse music at the brain frequency- eight times per second or whatever the frequency required for that particular state you want. Or the problem with eight times per second is it's too low for you to be able to hear the lowest sound you can hear and a young person can hear is 20 pulses per second, 20 Hertz and your brain is pulsating at 8 Hertz or 6 Hertz or 10 Hertz depending on states. So you can't hear it, how do you get the brain to hear it? The trick they use was this, you play a piece of music on the right ear and the same music on the left ear but you process the sound waves of the music to be off in frequency by 8 Hertz. So the result is the two sounds going in creates inside the brain which is listening, a combination that pulses at 8 Hertz. So the brain can physically hear the sound because it's coming in at a frequency that your ears can absorb, but in the brain when it tries to align the left and right ear signals, it finds itself pulsing in 8 Hertz. That's called binaural beat. That's a binaural, two ears and the beat produced by the combination of two ears.
Sraddhalu (0:07:57):
So this is, then there are variations to this instead of having a frequency change, they will make a change in the phase of the wave. So the sound, because it can sound odd, if you hear music with a different frequency, it sounds odd. So what they do is they take the same frequency, but they shift the wave of what comes in the left ear and right ear by a slight shift of the phase, which makes for a combination which is 8 Hertz again. Now when it comes in at 8 Hertz, you can do more things and interesting things also. All this which is being done you cannot hear consciously, that is your conscious part of the mind is only hearing the music or it's a beautiful orchestral piece. But in the brain which is processing the sounds and trying to align the two to figure out where the sound is coming from, for the 3d effect, the brain ends up hearing the 8 pulse beat and tends then to synchronise to this 8 beats per second and tends to put you into a state corresponding to what it's used to in terms of consciousness. So if it's a frequency associated with sleep, then you tend to get sleepy. If it's a frequency associated with deep sleep or trance state or deep meditation then you tend to become as if interiorized but because you're listening to the music you're also awake so they say ah we have now got your brain to the state of the meditator now. If meditation was only as the an issue of slight shift of awareness or slight deepening of awareness it would be true, but what the brain is registering is only the most superficial effect of the meditative shift. In the meditation, you could go into much deeper or higher or altered states altogether which will not reflect on the brain. All that the brain will reflect is, oh this is deep state and so the brain slows down or goes into a semi-trans like state. The rest of course is inaccessible. So what you can do with this binaural beat is to put your brain into that state to a certain degree. Again to a degree you can of course will it away and reverse that effect consciously because consciousness comes first, brain is second. So your state and your intention when you use binaural beats makes a big difference.
But having said that the effect of binaural beats is very superficial and stops at that level. At best, it gets into a relaxed state conducive to deeper practice, which you still have to do. It doesn't get you anywhere there, by itself. But because it can get you into that state, it can make you very suggestible, it is a semi hypnotic state. So in the binaural beats, now you can introduce speech which is a suggestion given. You are feeling relaxed or now you're feeling happy or your fear for heights will go away, things like that. And so in the binaural beat music at that subliminal level which you cannot hear, one can introduce a lot of things and that's the tricky part. You don't know what you're being exposed to. It's all subliminal. So you download a binaural beat, you play it, you might not know that the man says buy more of my products, right? And suddenly you have this craving to buy more of binaural beats and you make a big fetish around it, when in fact all it's done is to program you to buy more.
Narad (0:11:36):
And Coca-Cola was caught doing this. They had the whole theatre and at the intermission, very, very rapidly, they would pulse this and everyone would go and buy a Coke and popcorn or candy. The whole audience cleared out to buy it. And they were caught at it and of course they had to stop.
Sraddhalu (0:11:59):
So in the cinema, the film frame is changing 24 times per second. So it's flashing 24 times per second. Why is that important? Because up to 10 pulses per second you can make out the flicker. Once it crosses the threshold of 10 pulses, it goes to 11, 12, 13, 14, you can barely see the flicker. Some more sensitive people will still feel uncomfortable or nauseated by the way if the flicker is obvious. But once it crosses a threshold of 18 you begin to not notice it. When it hits 24, it looks as if it's a smooth movement but in the brain there are a series of images coming which are being replaced one after the other and the brain has to process it to create for us the illusion of a smooth movement, instead of seeing the hand go tut tut tut tut, it gives you the illusion of a smooth movement. At that point it's picking up each frame's content and so it is subliminal. You are not conscious of what is projected. If a single frame in that 24 is replaced, which says eat more popcorn, buy more soft drink, it flashes one twenty-fourth of a second, you do not notice it, but the brain notices it and obeys it. It's a hypnotic suggestion. Now the same thing can be introduced in your binaural beats and you wouldn't know the difference. So basically binaural beats is no different from a good session of hypnosis. But with the difference that your state can make a difference. If you're going for a hypnosis session, you know you're going for it, the hypnotist will tell you relax and take you through certain states, whereas here you think you're listening to music and it's going to do something to your brain so you may not participate actively. The result may be that much weaker but if you choose actively to participate, you will still have the effect of a good hypnosis session but with the difference that you are not conscious of what the hypnotist suggestions were. If you trust the source you may do things but beyond that again, I don't give to it so much value.
The idea that it will heal your body, it will regenerate your DNA and all that, comes from the medical studies that show in deep sleep, there is a DNA repair or the cellular repair that takes place. In states of deep meditation, similarly, you can have some rejuvenation at the level of cells or in the brain. So what they're saying is since through binaural beats we will get you to that state, you will get that result, which is a fallacy, because the binaural beat doesn't get you to that state as the deep meditation did. It just gets your brain waving at the same frequency as the deep meditator, but it's not the state of consciousness that has changed. You've not gone deep into meditation. You have not entered closeness to the self, for example, which is what would do the regeneration, the influence of the self or the psychic presence filling you. Just because your brain waves at the same frequency of someone in trance, it doesn't do much. Of course, if you did it with that intention, now I'm going to listen to binaural beats, I'm going to enter into deep relaxation with the intention that it's going to do something good for my cells and you slide into sleep with that, you just happen to have good sleep because you were relaxed and you did it well, you might just get a refreshing sleep and maybe some cellular regeneration, but how much was the binaural beat helpful to that? Maybe, maybe nominally, maybe it helped you to go to sleep by the suggestions or making you relax on some physical level, all of which can be had directly by conscious intention. So I personally don't give too much value to these things.
Narad (0:15:46):
Is it still as important as it, I mean, a bigger thing as it was in the 90s? We used to get cassettes offered, free cassettes to try this, try that.
Sraddhalu (0:15:57):
So it was one of the fads during that period. And so it had a big thing. Obviously the fads don't last when the results are not so effective. If they had been effective, many more people would have been doing it. Certainly they have an effect, but they are not as effective as the promise was. For example, you could use it as a post-hypnotics training for learning a new language. So through binaural beats, if you have instructions for learning a new language, it would be helpful. But then you still have to complement it with an outer study to bridge the outer and inner layers and that may be useful. The US military does use these binaural beats but in combination with other consciousness changing technologies including isolation pods and use of certain chemicals and drugs etc. But the idea again there is that somehow from outside you can influence the brain and program it and that to me is inherently a dangerous approach because you don't know what the programmer is doing to you. There are many experiments that the US military did. One of the most well-known institutions which worked on the binaural beats is this Monroe Institute and they're still the producers of some of the best of this material.
[Narad] We used to get them.
[Sraddhalu] Yes, exactly. And it still is the hub for a lot of the deep training that the military uses which involves these hypnotic and post hypnotic So they use them for example for veterans who have some trauma and they can use combinations of these to help them adapt to the trauma and change them. But my simple solution there would be, teach them practice of deep meditation, you will get far better results. But in the absence of that, this is certainly a much better way than taking them through psychotherapy which may be Freudian based and therefore not very helpful. This would be perhaps more effective than that but less effective than a direct practice of deep meditation. Since it was also an institution that was used by some of the military intelligence and the CIA we don't know what else they put into their tapes and the technology they put out in the tapes of course is the most rudimentary. The more advanced things they keep for their own internal uses. This is just to give you a background of the technology itself but once you understand what it does you can do much more by conscious deepening of your state through concentration and meditation
Narad (0:18:51):
Sugar and its alternatives.
[Sraddhalu]So please read the question.
[Narad] ‘In one of the discussions you mentioned that white sugar is very harmful for our body, but you did not tell us what could be the healthy alternative of sugar, like jaggery or honey. Or sugar coming from Jaggery or honey will also be harmful to the body’?
Sraddhalu (0:19:19):
So we recognize different categories of sugar and the most damaging is the white sugar, brown sugar having at least some elements of minerals and vitamins having even more jaggery also better close enough to honey but all of these still don't address the question of why do you need so much sugar. Do you actually need so much sugar. And we can we realize that this excessive use of sugar is a documentation which you will find online. The use of sugar per decade has been dramatically increasing in the last 50 years and it's in a large part because of the propaganda of the sugar industry, the sugar lobby which needs you to buy more and more. And you just think about this. Every child, let's say a child is visiting you. What are you going to give him as a gift, a toy or sweets? Why? Because that's done. There's even a song which is in a children's book in India, in Tamil which says to, it's a song to a child, little girl, ‘can I give you a balloon or sweets?’. And somehow it's programmed to children early on that this is what you should like, this is what you should crave. You go to a children's party, full of sugary sweets. You go on the beach with a family, let's say, and for the children you have the balloon and then a whole range of sweets and the adults don't eat so much sweet but the children are made to, that's all you're given and so you've been programmed early on, not recognizing that pure form of sugar is actually more addictive than cocaine.
Getting into the human body, it creates and triggers the addiction response and after a while the child craves it, the child demands it and if you refuse it, the child goes through withdrawal symptoms which involve a lot of psychological problems. The child suddenly becomes extremely anxious, angry and the parents say but why would I do that? I just give the child more sugar, finished. Not realising that you've just programmed an addictive behaviour in the child which is damaging to the health for the rest of your life. In the 70s when heart disease began to increase dramatically every evidence, every study showed that it was linked to sugar. The sugar lobby paid the doctors and paid for studies that linked heart disease to fat and created a new parameter of cholesterol control which is completely fake, totally unnecessary. And that's why, you know, even cholesterol, it shoots up, modifies in your blood all the time according to what you eat. None of it causes heart disease. It's the sugar inside which triggers a response inside the veins, which is an irritation, and the irritation response makes for cholesterol to latch on to the irritated part and build that layer which causes the hardening of the arteries and so on. But the trigger is the sugar and the inflammation it produces and so they buried that evidence which more recently came out but it appeared in a few select articles, in a few select journals and then is quietly suppressed. It does not appear in popular newspapers, it does not come into your doctor's orders telling everybody stop this excess sugar.
So I'm going back to the starting point somewhere along the way 50 years ago we were all taught to eat more sugar and then we were taught to crave sugar and become addicted to sugar. So the question really avoids that point. Do you really need so much sugar? So I'm going to start by saying start cutting back sugar, dramatically. If you find it too strong, if there is too strong of a reaction of the addiction, well taper it off, but start tapering it off. And one of the ways that you should do is not just reduce actual sugar content, but even other variations of sugar, but also reduce carbohydrates. Because the carbohydrates in your food are converted into sugar in your body. Shift to what the body knows as its normal rhythm to convert fat into the sugar it needs, that is called the ketosis mode, where it converts fat into energy rather than sugar into energy. If you eat too much sugar the body says oh there's so much sugar what do I do I should store it and it stores it as fat. But if you don't have sugar the body says okay I need energy where do I draw it from and it takes the fat and converts it to sugar that's called ketosis. So people have been told and it sounds sensible if you eat fat, you'll grow fat. Not true. If you eat sugar, you will grow fat. So if you have a problem of weight cut back on sugar you'll find the weight drops, not just sugar but also high carbohydrates.
Narad (0:24:56):
So we're speaking of bread, pasta, rice.
Sraddhalu (0:25:02):
Anything packaged anything packaged if you look at the quantum of sugar and quantum of salt it's extremely high you may not taste it they even introduce chemicals that prevent you from tasting the sugar but they push sugar because that's what makes you crave and addicts you to that food. It's interesting how it the whole thing, the whole thing is turned into a science of how to get people addicted to the food you make. So you take any plastic packaged food, look at carbohydrate content, sugar content, salt content and because now they are required by law to mention it and in proportion to daily serving, recommended serving, you will find for a bag of chips for example, the salt level will be 20% of your daily input or 50% of your daily salt content. So if you eat a bag of chips that's already 50% of your daily salt. If you now eat normal food your total has gone way beyond recommended levels. So when you look at those numbers they seem to be well within daily consumption but what you don't see is the full picture of the day's food where everything now becomes excess and if you take two packets of chips you've already crossed your day's limit in terms of salt alone. Don't eat any more salt rest of the day. Can you do that? You can't. It's already part of the food and the same for sugars and carbohydrates. People don't realise how much carbohydrates are actually going inside their system and again especially with packaged foods where these are increased deliberately.
Narad (0:26:36):
In the ashram dining room a lot of sugar is consumed.
[Sraddhalu] How much is it?
[Narad] I don't know.
[Sraddhalu] So earlier you would have one spoon which was put, one spoonful of sugar. Is it still the same? So one spoonful of sugar in your milk or in your yoghourt and that's already high. Do you actually need so much? And maybe you just stop taking it for a few days, allow for the craving to subside and then you will just find that your body is quite happy with it. It doesn't need it. But you will have to start reviewing the whole relationship with sugar all the way from childhood onward. So do not make the mistake of replacing sugar by jaggery or honey of the same proportion or quantity. You are just falling into the same trap.
Narad (0:27:40):
The next question, as the mother earth is being polluted by fertilisers, chemicals and industrial waste, what about the Ayurvedic medicines, herbal powders etc. which Patanjali, Himalaya and Dabur like companies are producing? Are they organic and effective or due to pollution the herbs have also lost their potency?
Sraddhalu (0:28:07):
So first of all most of these are not organic. If they are then they will state them. If they don't state them then they are not and you should know that. Patanjali Ayurveda, Swami Ramdev’s industry was highly respected or trusted because he was trusted and respected and as a teacher of Yogasanas and for his health, for the benefits of health that he brought through his teaching but once he moved to the industry, the industry itself was led by people who came from an industry background and they had to process it within the industrial framework and when the demand, because people trusted him, the demand shot up. He was providing the same products that multinationals provided at one third the cost of him. And so demand shot up every day, every year he was growing in such large numbers. Today he is competing with the biggest multinationals with plans to double his capacity in another year or two and so on. At that point you have to ask where do you get the resources to be able to overnight double your production. Eventually it's going to overlap with the existing resources which are supplying to the other multinationals. It's a shift within the market. So then I came to know that for example for him to provide the necessary milk or butter, he had to outsource the production because his own cows cannot produce so much. So he had to outsource it to other cooperatives all over the country. And they were manufacturing and selling to him and it was branding. And so you cannot say that what he started with is the same as what you have today. Then they began to get a lot of legal challenges, so they had to put up the standard of manufacturing, cleanliness etc. So you can certainly be assured that it would be as good as any other multinational. It's much cheaper etc.
But does it follow the process necessary in the way an Ayurvedic product would need to be made? I don't know because certain standards of modern hygiene require that anything that you sell has to be pasteurised for example. Milk has to be pasteurised. That means you heat it to kill all the bacteria and with it all the hormones in the milk will die, all the other living elements will die and so on. Is the pasteurised milk the same as milk which you would have taken from a cow in a village setting a hundred years ago? No. Are these products now by these multinationals or national groups equal to the same product made in a traditional way in an Ayurvedic home? No. Do they retain the same benefits? I don't know. Do the herbs have the same benefits? Perhaps, but they also have a lot of the chemicals and pesticides. Would that maintain the same benefit? I don't know. I would think not. But they certainly do introduce poisons, which come with the pesticides. So unfortunately, we are in a very strange passage where we want to rely on these medicines, but we do not really know what goes on behind the scenes. And the standards required for them to sell in a big way, required them to compromise and in a manner that goes against the traditional way of making those medicines or processing those herbs. For example, certain herbs you were required to pluck at certain times of the day. It had to be early morning. You can't do that in an industrial manufacturing plant. Ideally certain products even were made from milk that came from a cow which had just been given birth to a calf, and in the first three days there's a particular content in the milk which has immense value. The colostrum is called and some other variants up to that which would be there only in the first few days. You cannot have in a product that is being sold in millions coming from cows which have given birth within the first three days. It's not possible so they probably go through a similar process but taking milk from conventional cows and then they take milk from Jersey cows, because they give five times more milk but the Jersey cow has a protein which is fundamentally different from the Indian cow and so we'll have a very different effect from an Ayurvedic point of view and so on. So I'm not sure whether we can say all the medicines are as good as they should have been, but in the absence of anything else, well you take what you can get.
Narad (0:33:04):
We have a mutual friend who tells us that he has to source herbs from all over the world and find the right place, elevation and everything to make it work.
Sraddhalu (0:33:17):
And they are more expensive as a result. And so they can't be available to everybody. There are, though, in reaction to the situation, where quality and then traditional standards are not being met. You've met international production standards, but not traditional production standards. So in response to this situation, a lot of people are turning to the more conventional approach. I recently for example mentioned this before in a discussion on milk but to repeat that there are farms which are coming out with A2 milk, that is milk made from traditional Indian cows, which are free-roaming, grazing grass traditionally and they're happy. They've not been pumped with hormones, they've given birth naturally to the calf, calf has drunk milk before they have extracted the rest of the milk for the purpose and then the milk is churned and made in the traditional way. Yes, it is more expensive, twice as expensive, sometimes three times as expensive. But for people who are particular about that and who consider it important enough and can afford it, that is the way it is going. So what I do see and I am hoping it will catch on in a big way is farms coming back to their old traditional way of milk production as well as food production and if there is sufficient demand, prices will go up but with it your health will also go up and illnesses will go down. Is it worthwhile? So you may save money on the food and take pesticide ridden low nutrition food, fall sick and then pay large sums for your cancer treatment or you may pay a little more to get healthy food and not fall sick and have a healthy life and it's a balance that you have to choose in some way.
But I do believe that if this can work out, we can get even lower cost for these foods. It used to be a sustainable agriculture, isn't it? Going back 5,000 years. The system didn't collapse and yet everybody was happy and everybody had enough. So it should be doable.
[Narad] People are also choosing alternatives like almond milk and other milks.
[Sraddhalu] Yes, when the milk
[Narad]Do you think it’s a good idea?
Yes,when the milk has too much poison but I still ask the question why milk? hmm because since childhood you were told, drink a glass of milk every morning. Because it was healthy then and now you have cows which give ten times more milk but which have one-tenth of the nutrition, is that glass of milk still relevant? So you buy a milk carton which is fortified with calcium, which means they just added chemicals for the calcium, which you were getting earlier in a glass of real milk from the cow. And if finally what you're getting is fake milk, coloured water with chemicals in it, will drop the idea of milk completely. Do you need to drink the milk? So one of the things which this whole situation has done is to make us question the value of certain traditional habits. Yes, they were valuable in the way they were done but if you're not doing them the same way, is it worth it? So why do you want almond milk? well if you need a white coloured nutritional liquid, yes, almond milk is your replacement. But if you don't need it white colored eat fruit, eat vegetables, eat something which is healthy in any case you don't need to drink just because it's white.
Audience (0:36:54):
The logic is protein and calcium
Sraddhalu (0:36:57):
Protein and calcium, ah. So you could have protein and calcium by other means also it should be there in your food. If it's not there in your food then certainly almond would be a way. But my question again will be, if you're going to take almond milk, why can't you eat almond? Chew it well, it creates the milk internally just because the milk is concentrated from almond but there's a benefit to the pulp also which you'd throw out in the milk. So with the cow it made sense, because it had protein, it had calcium, it had also B12 which vegetarians don't get easily from other sources. So it made sense there. Once you've dropped that milk you may have to review but anything from scratch you may end up with almond milk, but not soy milk. Soy milk is another of those replacements. You want a white coloured liquid, so you put soy. Very dangerous. 94% of soya in the world is genetically modified to grow faster and give more bulk, to be used as cow feed. So to get real soya which is originally healthy with high proteins and not GM modified is very difficult. If you're lucky enough to have that, soya has a very strong hormonal mimic which matches oestrogen. So with women it's fine, but even to them it might overload the oestrogen content. With young boys it can create excess of estrogen and create imbalances of at a hormonal level. So I don't recommend soya because of its hormonal effects, almond milk is fine.
Narad (0:38:44):
We've covered all those questions. Do we have any questions from the audience?
Audience (0:38:54):
Tofu is very popular in the Southeastern countries. So tofu is made from soya there. So what do you say about that?
Sraddhalu (0:39:05):
So if tofu was made from a traditional soya, it would be fine. If it is from GM modified soya, I would not recommend it. Still it is coming largely from the Japanese space, I believe. I do think from there it has spread everywhere else. In the way they prepare the tofu they also pass it through a fermentation process which changes completely its nutritional content. I don't know what it does to the element of the hormone mimic, the oestrogen content. I don't know what it does. I cannot really comment. But the general observation I would make is go with what your body has adapted to in heredity. So if you're in Japan as a Japanese body who is used to having soya and tofu for generations, the body has adapted, it's fine but in India perhaps I may not recommend that or if you have a major problem with enough nutrition take a little bit take many other things there are many sources to get whatever you need nutritionally. We have a lot of millets for example which are very high in protein and other components and you need not have any sense of lack in nutrition if you go with those traditional grains.
Sraddhalu (0:40:33):
What I find though if you go to a hotel, you will see this every hotel has exactly the same standard breakfast spread. If you go to any house, you find the same hotel culture spreading in- cornflakes with milk. Why? You were programmed through your advertisements, through whatever culture and in the US now it's already gone down two generations called cornflakes, right? At least two generations, maybe more. In India it's become now, it's become the first or second generation and I was surprised when I saw this first happening in 1991-92 with television you had these advertisements for noodles and there was a brand which came from from the US, I believe, Maggie noodles. And they were aiming straight at children. Those children are now the parents who are feeding what they ate to their children. So they have got into the system. But if you ask yourself why should you have noodles for breakfast? When we had already a traditional breakfast spread and you threw that out for these cornflakes which you have to buy and they soak up in the milk to become large so that you feel a soggy mask if you actually see the actual weight of food you ate, it was very little for which you paid so much. It's actually five times more expensive for nutritional value which is relatively poor and unreliable. So it's useful to review what our traditional foods were for breakfast or for other things. Most of them relied on many of these millets, which are now considered poor man's food. Poor man's food because it's nutritious. With less quantum you get more nutrition. Please make it part of your rich man's food also.
[Narad] Corn has been highly genetically modified also.
Corn unfortunately has been highly modified genetically and particularly what comes from the US and it comes inside your chips or other processed foods and they're all genetically modified. If they are locally grown they may not be so modified and they don't make for good popcorn by the way. It's the GM modified ones which have been modified for high starch which make good popcorn which pops nicely.
Narad (0:42:55):
I'd like to ask a final question outside of the food section. The importance or value of satsang in the integral yoga.
[Sraddhalu] She also has another question.
Audience (0:43:04):
I see that in Norway, the parents don't allow to eat children's special diet rice, because they have heavy metals absorbed.
Sraddhalu (0:43:25):
Yes, rice absorbs heavy metals. There are many plants which are very good for chelating metals, that is they absorb the metal out of the soil, purifying the soil. But if as a result you eat the plant, then you're eating the heavy metals. It's not very helpful for us and Rice has been associated also with arsenic. It absorbs arsenic and a lot of people in India who eat rice have arsenic poisoning. I found I had high levels of ice arsenic for example and my entire rice supply was from the ashram dining room only. And I had high levels of arsenic. I wonder what it is for the rest of the ashram. Nobody tests us. So until you have an illness, nobody tests you. And even if you have an illness, they test you for the things associated with the illness, not for the heavy metal poisoning or arsenic poisoning, which might be the root cause of the illness, right?. So you have to check. And I would want this to be done ideally by the government. The government should be setting these standards and verifying the food supplies and demanding that people in their production should maintain this. The common man cannot be checking. It is too expensive. There was one question earlier which you had raised also about, regarding the climate. In fact we started with this about climate changing. Remember the first question and whether there is any hope and the person had asked that he had faith in the supramental action. So I want to conclude with this question.
The supramental force is inherently a force of oneness, which is the origin of all this multiplicity that is the cosmos. And so everything that exists is an aspect of itself, everything that appears in contradiction is also an aspect of itself. Even the poisons are an aspect of itself. And so the action of the supramental force can use anything and everything including the poisons to its use for hastening evolution. So it's not to say that the poisoning should be ignored or encouraged. But it is to say that in spite of the poisoning, what the supramental consciousness has to do, it will use it. For example, the poisoning can be used to trigger people to wake up sooner. Isn't it? The fact that we see sickness increasing so dramatically and it happens so dramatically that within five years, you find many of your relatives fall sick is enough to provoke a reaction to say enough, we put a stop here. And maybe that's what we need or even the poison entering the biology may be used if the body is already under influence of the supramental may be used to its benefit. Unfortunately right now the bodies are not under influence of the supramental. At best our minds are under influence and that too indirectly. And so at that level it will only help to change thought patterns and help people wake up at least in knowledge and in awareness.
Sraddhalu (0:46:47):
But Mother spoke of the effect of the supramental on the physical, in physical matter. She was asked specifically this question, what will be the first signs that the supramental is working in matter? Because it starts working top down, working upon that which is most plastic, most responsive to it. It will act in the mind first and then the vital and then the physical eventually, or through the mind reach into the physical. So what are the first signs? And she spoke of two things. First, the change in weather patterns and the second, the change in the human body. And in the weather patterns, she said that the earth will generally become more temperate. The extremes of heat and the extremes of cold will both move towards something more temperate, they will reduce from the extremes. And obviously when this happens, we can expect that there will be a period of adaptation. So we see hot places becoming cooler, cold places becoming warmer, and that's part of that overall turn. Now this change does not depend on us. It's an action of the supermind working in matter on a global scale through the weather patterns. Again it will use human processes, excess production of whatever heat or cold or carbon dioxide etc. It will use all these but it doesn't depend on them, it doesn't need them. But it can use them to hasten that transition. So what we are seeing is a change in weather patterns for sure. Even if human activity is one of the major causes, there is also this other action which is working to modify or use even that cause to correct for things. But the biggest problem even with carbon dioxide which is a big thing now, is the trees we are cutting. If you plant more trees, all your carbon dioxide problems should reduce and all your weather will become more temperate. So maybe that may be one of the agencies in which even the supermind will work in matter to bring back a even weather, which will lead to one of the very surprising results that the Mother spoke of, even snow in Pondicherry and in Auroville at some point in the future.
I have mentioned before, the United States military had developed the remote viewing program and one of the things they were doing was to remote view the future and to anticipate certain trends and then correct for them in their own planning. When they looked far enough, all of them, all the views, all the viewers came up with something so strong as to be a major event, so significant that it was overwhelming for the whole earth. But they couldn't describe what it was. They had scenes or glimpses of it, but they couldn't specify what it was. But after that event, when they looked further, they found all over the earth, the weather patterns being more temperate, and people living in greater harmony with nature and even scenes where human beings and animals were friendly, rather than hunting animals. So some kind of a sudden shift which gives a glimpse to another age which matches much closer to what the Mother describes of the Supramental Age. So yes, we are right in holding that hope because it will happen inevitably. When it happens, what the nature of the transition will be, that is left to us and the actions we choose individually and collectively.
Sraddhalu (0:50:35):
So this brings me to the second change which she spoke of, which is the change in the human body where the body itself she said will change in appearance, that the difference between the male and the female will become less. The body becoming more androgynous because the supramental body does not have sexual organs. So in appearance more androgynous. In terms of consciousness of course the masculine and feminine will be there but the form of body tends to become more androgynous. And so she said the difference between the male and female form will be less. We have in the ashram the records of all the past students, since the physical education program started. Let's say about 1945 to 50 and so 1950 onwards now 70 years of medical records of all the children from age 5 to 95 as long as they were in the program. We put all that data on the computer and then they did a study of trends. What they found was the average age of all the children is growing. Straight line. It's not sudden bursts. Straight line. Decade to decade it is growing, the average height of all the children is growing in a straight line. Boys are growing taller, girls are growing taller. So the line of boys growing taller, line of girls growing taller, both are straight line, but the gap between the two is narrowing, interesting, very interesting. So girls are growing taller, faster than boys catching up as if in the trend line, approaching something which will join at some point. Sometime now, sometime in the next decade, if you see the projection. It's a very interesting idea. And nothing has changed fundamentally in the food. If anything, nutrition quality has dropped because the food has less nutrition. Otherwise we are eating the same food in the dining room and in the children's kitchen, corner house, pretty much the same going back 50 years. So it is independent of nutrition. Exercise program is exactly the same. It has not changed in the last 50 years. So independent of exercise. What is controlling this growth? Interesting. Now you could say some of it would be tied to food and hormones in the food but it wouldn't match in the 1950s and 60s because most of these hormones came after the 70s or in India at least in the 90s. So what would explain that steady height and that can only be explained by an action which is dependent on nothing else and that is the supramental force and its action in the world. So we are in a very interesting phase where with or without our awareness, things are changing at a material level and of course at a psychological level much more rapidly and profoundly. But when we become aware and when we put ourselves in alignment at least in aspiration to that higher consciousness, then its action enormously accelerates within us. And things can happen which we could not imagine and we are in for a very interesting phase in evolution. That's all we can say.
Narad (0:54:11):
Longevity of life?
Sraddhalu (0:54:12):
Longevity has to increase which has also increased the medical science will claim it is the result of its efforts. Certainly what medicine did was to prevent premature deaths from illnesses which were curable. But having done that, it doesn't in itself offer anything for longevity. Longevity could come from better lifestyle, better nutrition, but both of these have dropped. In fact, we have more sicknesses than ever before. And yet longevity has increased. So I would say it is not because of the medicines, it is because of the action of this force. And one simple evidence for that, again going back to our database, the average lifespan in the ashram is well above the average lifespan in India or the rest of the world. And the only reason you can give to that, with food which is relatively simpler, the only explanation you can give is less stressful life, maybe, but again we have people living elsewhere with a less stressful life doesn't mean they live longer. And so we will say this being a focal point for the supramental force, it would be because of the supramental action, however indirect, but it is working on the biology in a way as to extend the lifespan. We had two people in a community of a thousand five hundred, we had two people who hit hundred and seven, isn't it? And for most people to pass away before 80 we say well that was early, we would expect them to hit about 90 at least. It shows that something is happening but it happens everywhere because the action of the supplemental force is everywhere. The difference is only here is a community where the action was amplified because of the conscious aspiration of the people. And you can do that wherever you are in your individual life.
[Narad] Namaste.
[Sraddhalu] Namaste.