September 2023 AOM: Missing Knowledge: a prelude to ‘Yoga Beyond the Thinking Mind’

We warmly welcome Simon Mundy, author of Yoga Beyond the Thinking Mind, as our featured author for September. In his book, Simon, who has over 50 years of experience in yoga and meditation, re-examines the ancient yogic teachings of Mahavira, Buddha and Patanjali in the light of the ‘missing science’ of psychemechanics, wherein ‘the Code’ plays a hitherto unrecognized vital role. In so doing, the book brings a new understanding of the meaning of awareness, mind and Consciousness. In his article, Simon invites the reader to reflect deeply on the nature of existence, human behaviour, and the laws underpinning and shaping life’s push and pull through conflict and harmony.

Interact with Simon on our AoM forum here.

Questions to the author about the book can be posted on the Yoga Engineering platform.

The Spanish Edition – because it has the Spanish title “Yoga, más allá de la mente pensante”– needs to be searched for under its own Amazon link.

Yoga beyond the thinking mind– presents a new perspective on the Nature of Reality, Mind and Consciousness based on a reappraisal of the ancient yogas of Mahavir and Buddha– brings Jainism to the forefront of relevance as earliest known teaching on Relativity; confirms ahimsaas the sole (soul) foundation for harmonious co-existence– shows the code & decoding as key to Buddha’s core practice of satipatthana– takes the ancient darshana of Samkhya as best guess so far on the fundamental structure of the Universe putting to the sword mainstream science’s colossal blunder in banishing the ether since 1900s.  

 

Yoga and understanding has been a dilemma for the time since Patanjali. You rewrote it to modern times. That’s a great endeavour!”    Wim Hof

“Because science tends to be so compartmentalized – with scientists concentrating the focus of attention on single areas, even single aspects, of research – it remains fragmentary and unconnected lacking the wider connections to the big picture. If enough people get hold of a half dozen assumptions not yet connected in sciences—the whole world could change!”

Dimovic 1990 London

I was blessed to have the most brilliant godfather—and the most innovative and witty. He was affectionately called ‘Dimmy’ by his family and close friends.

He devoted 67 years of his adult working life to tirelessly researching physics, mathematics, life sciences, philosophy and psychology, while never losing his passion for art, music, enjoyable conversation and good jokes. After a meal with friends at the Dimovic home in Serbia – after the guest’s departure – he would sit around relaxing with family members and jokingly review together which of the dear guests qualified for a ‘holiday’ on one of the 3 islands visible from the dining room across the Adriatic sea.

The first island was called the ‘island of the emotionals’’—that is to say, all those kinds of people in the habit of continuously getting worked up and upset about things—whose emotional disturbances cloud their ability to think clearly and objectively.

The second island was called the ‘island of the ‘shoulds’—all those kinds of people in the habit of telling other people “you should do this” or “you should do that”. This island included the fault-finders and nit-pickers.

The third island – indeed the most peaceful – was the ‘island of the lazies’—for all those people who are unmotivated, fritter away their time, are incapable of getting round to anything creative, and instead are quite content to let others row the boat of life along.

Also, further away and out of sight – implying a greater degree of banishment from the mainland – was a fourth island specially reserved for the argument-winners—those intractable personalities from all walks of life and professions not interested in finding out about things but solely bent upon winning the argument and promoting their own agenda and views.

To each of these islands, these four personality types were figuratively ‘sent’ to have fun interacting with each other while those on the re-mainland got on with the serious business of ‘finding out about things as far as this can go’.

Anybody free from these four character traits, who thinks deeply about things, sooner or later comes to the inescapable conviction that the human being – at least as far as is known from past and present records – is lacking several vitally important pieces of the self-understanding puzzle. There appears to be some forgotten knowledge or missing understanding that, despite all cleverness, all technological and scientific wizardry, is keeping the overwhelming majority of people locked into repetitive bouts of delusion and misbehaviour. By misbehaviour is meant misuse and abuse of ourselves, of other people, of the Natural World of plants, animals, insects and all other living beings with whom we share the planet and interact. The consequences of such widespread misbehaviour extend even to the air we breathe, the water we drink, the rivers and the great oceans.

Anybody who reflects seriously about the behaviour of humans on this planet – both their own from direct subjective experience as well as from objective knowledge obtained from other people’s past and present recordings – must see there is a glaring contradiction and ongoing incoherence between what we repeatedly advertise to be in our best collective interests—order, peace and harmony—and what is actually all-to-often happening—disorder, conflict and disharmony.

By way of justification or explanation, some thinkers point out that competition and conflict are the norm in human interaction – not intervals of ‘peace’, which are all too often used as pauses to prepare for the next conflict.

There have in the past been a number of enlightened men and women who dedicated their lives to showing what we could be doing instead of what we are doing. But as a group, these exceptionally wise people seem to have been mistakenly banished to the island of the shoulds.

To justify perpetual cycles of conflict, such thinkers say, “Well, it’s the Law of the Jungle— it’s either them or us—we are descended from primates anyway, aren’t we? Look! see how everything in the Natural world preys on and feeds on the other!”

In fact, in the Natural World as well as in the human world (at least at the ordinary individual level), cooperation and harmony are far more the norm, far more prevalent, than competition and conflict.

In the animal kingdom, it seems that—if left un-interfered with by humans—the entirety of Nature gets along just fine and flourishes in a complex, constantly adjusting yet perfect dynamic equilibrium. The recent lockdowns in different parts of the world showed unequivocally just how resilient Nature is if left to itself, un-interfered with by human activities, even for relatively short spans of time:

• Dolphins swimming in placid harbours

• Wild boars roaming casually through silent city streets

• Exotic birds landing on quiet suburban balconies

• Eagles and buzzards overflying city parks empty of humans feeding the ducks and swans

From a longer several-years-view rather than months, wildlife is seen to have flourished to an astonishing extent in the Fukushima off-limits zone following the tsunami nuclear disaster in Japan. This delightful flourishing of un-interfered-with Nature is even more evident in the longer time period at the no-mans-land between the two Koreas, called the Korean Demilitarized Zone (KDZ). This is a strip of land across from one side of the Korean Peninsula near the 38th parallel to the other side. This buffer zone between the two countries has unwittingly served as a showcase for what happens when Nature is left to herself for over 5 decades. The KDZ is 250 kilometres long (160 miles) and roughly 4 kilometres wide (2.5 miles). Despite occasional incidents and incursions, this substantial area has remained undisturbed—free to evolve according to Nature’s innate intelligent impulse to optimize. It has been unofficially whispered as ‘on the way to becoming a Garden of Eden’.

The DIM and the Dim tendency

There exists in Nature – from the largest to the minutest size things – an ordering principle which, in terms of mechanics, is pointed to in Newton’s three laws of motion. These laws are most important in practical physics and foundational for understanding classical mechanics. To call them laws of ‘motion’ is somewhat confusing for students because what these laws actually describe is the behaviour of things either in-between collision or in-collision. In Reality, all things are always in motion, even when they are said to be relatively still or at rest. The presence of oscillation, vibration and spin is often ignored – as well as the medium in which all this takes place – but they don’t tell us that. Neither is the operation of Newton’s 2^nd and 3^rd laws discussed in psychology or physiology, yet the ancient Indian concept of karma – the basis of all morality and ethics – seems to originate precisely from such understanding and knowledge.

The innate intelligent impulse of Nature to optimize has been given the name DIM because it is a dimensionless ordering principle that maintains or tends towards the dimension of harmony. This ordering principle in Nature has been spotted and studied by both ancient and modern researchers. It has been given many names. In some sciences, the name given to it is homeostasis. However homeostasis is not confined to physiological situations and equilibrium mechanics (Newton’s laws). Its action is basic, fundamental, all-pervasive and everywhere. The force of its action, its intelligence, its influence, its push, as far as we can determine, is as constant and relentless as the force of gravity or the tides of the oceans. In fact, gravity is one of its most obvious manifestations.

It is that force in the Natural World that tends to guide things into the best position, to the position of least conflict, to what we call ‘normal’ or ‘correct’—to a position of optimum ‘balance’ within prevailing circumstances and conditions. And then maintains this best position.

Bear in mind, though, that what this “best” or “optimum” really is may have little or nothing to do with human value judgements or concepts about what is “best”.

The DIM is a dynamic and qualitative dimensionless dimension. It can be measured as in the case of our body temperature. Or as in the case of gravity. The Dim tendency actively corrects imbalances and disturbances unless prevented by a superior force. The DIM can be seen to operate throughout Nature at every level – vibrational, elastic, mechanical, chemical, electrical, electromagnetic, nuclear, gravitational – and is therefore also observable at the psychological, biological, neurological and organic levels.

The Chinese word and concept tao comes close, but it became too vague, and the writers who use it seem to overlook that yin and yang are no more than deformations of tao.

Aligning with DIM is the essence of all yoga

If not interfered with, if allowed to, this inbuilt Dim tendency will tend to settle conflict and disturbance. It will tend to cool conditions of ‘excitement’ down—this aspect is seen for example in the laws relating to thermodynamics. Its tendency is to calm things down, to settle them into an optimal state, guiding them towards harmony, non-conflict, ease, tranquillity, stillness, nirvana.

Yoga beyond the Thinking Mind points to a lost knowledge of psychemechanics, the ignorance of which incapacitates human beings internally from seeing ourselves as we truly are and hampers us externally from fulfilling our role in the scheme of Nature—the Natural World—and therefore from realizing our full potential.

Animals do not appear to have this problem; humans do.

“The omnipresence of Code – its everywhereness – has not been spotted by sciences; therefore, its central importance has been missed. Psychology hardly mentions the code and coding.”

“If enough people get hold of a few simple assumptions not yet connected in sciences, psychemechanics will emerge as a ‘new science’ where the code – so far playing no role in mechanics – will play a top role.”

Dr Nebosja Dimovic

The thinking mind has shown itself throughout known history incapable of resolving the problems of its own making, keeping us individually and collectively trapped in repetitive cycles of disharmonious behaviour, abuse and misuse of Nature, whose consequences are self-evident. The cleverer the thinking mind has become – and the harder it tries to resolve the conundrum by forcefully attempting to control and impose a mind-made order – the more deeply enmeshed and entangled it becomes in a self-concocted web of delusion, remaining completely unaware that language—its very own cherished tool for communication—has its origination in self-deception and in deformation of the Natural Order of Things.

At the time of Mahavir and the Buddha about 2500 years ago in the North Eastern region of India called Magadha, good men and women of all walks of life and professions – deeply concerned about this very issue – abandoned their ordinary ways of the householder life and became yogis and ascetics in search of the missing knowledge which would set their hearts and minds free. This movement became known as the sramana or Renouncer Movement. It followed a tradition in ancient India since time immemorial and endures even to this day.

Remarkable is the fact that of all the known ancient cultures of the world, only that of ancient India endures to this day in parallel to that of modern-day India. All the world’s other ancient cultures – save for a few remnants here and there – have long since passed away, leaving their traces to be found at archaeological sites and museums.

Both ancient Jain and Buddhist texts – as well as the Vedas – recount the prior existence of a lost knowledge pertaining to the direct path to enlightenment, re-discovered by Mahavir and the Buddha. Both teachers stated that what they had discovered had already been known to men and women of former times who had lived in a state of harmony endowed with perfect knowledge and all manner of psychic attributes and paranormal powers.

In fact, CYCLICAL AGES – somewhat like the 4 seasons of a solar year – are referred to by many ancient cultures, even down to the more recent Greek and Roman mythologies. Thus, the linear Evolution Theory of mainstream modern sciences – with straight line Cartesian beginnings and endings – stands in complete contrast to an abundance of ancient myth, legend and culture recounting repeating cycles of Gold, Silver, Copper (bronze*) and Iron* Ages.

*not to be confused with the named bronze and iron ages of archaeology

During the Golden Age, humans endowed with a full panoply of paranormal powers (siddhis) roamed the Earth effectively as gods and goddesses and, to a lesser extent, in the Silver Age during ‘the decline of shine’.

In the early period of the last Copper Age, gods and goddesses are still recounted as interacting with humans, most of whom by then seem to have lost the vestiges of psychic powers.

There is no reference whatsoever in ancient literature to any linear bodily evolution or direct descendance from earlier ‘primitive’ humans or from any prior primitive life-form, although accounts of gods in animal form are frequent, as are accounts of half-human, half-animal forms of life. But these lifeforms are possessed of formidable powers and knowledge—there is nothing primitive or purely animalistic about them. Quite the contrary, past accounts and references invariably hark back with veneration and nostalgia to a former state of humanity as quasi-divine, as of belonging to a ‘higher order’, and all ancient cultures of the world seem to acknowledge in their drawings, paintings, monuments and writings a process of degeneration from nobler to baser mettle (metal).

So instead of emphasizing a mind-body evolution, ancient texts point to repetitive cycles of evolution and involution of intelligent awareness. Differences in intelligence and capacity are understood as dependent upon the varying degrees of coherence and alignment with the Natural Ordering Principle. The repetitive cycles are not circular but spiral, tending qualitatively ‘higher’—despite involutions—to ever more perfect expressions and manifestations.

Joseph Campbell’s Hero with 1000 Faces gives detailed descriptions of numerous legends and myths where the central theme is the search for ‘lost knowledge’ recoverable by a hero or heroine risking life to bring it back to the human realm for the welfare and benefit of all.

The jury is therefore ‘out’ on whether the cyclical ‘decline of shine’ is a true reflection of the past unfolding of events on Earth, but it is certainly too-much-of-a coincidence that all the efforts of modern technology seem to be hell-bent (no pun intended) on restoring exactly those same lost psychic and paranormal powers through the symbiosis of the human with ever more sophisticated tools and machines …

From this very first reflection of the Buddha after enlightenment, we can only guess at the extent of the atrophy of faculties over the millennia:

“This truth I have attained to is profound, difficult to see and difficult to comprehend, peaceful and sublime, unapproachable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be grasped by the wise. But this generation delights in identification, revels in identification, loves identification.

“It is difficult for such a generation to recognize the truth of the conditional origination (of suffering). And difficult to realize this truth, namely – the stilling of all codes (sankhara), the renunciation of identification, the destruction of compulsiveness – detachment, cessation and Nibbana.”

Majjhima Nikaya 26

It is said the Buddha hesitated for weeks before teaching while he pondered the realization that most people of his time were ‘attached to worldly pleasures’ and ‘over-fond of superficial distractions’.

Extrapolating from ancient accounts – especially ancient Indian accounts, which are so detailed and precise in their recording of time periods and cycles – the human species is very likely far, far older than modern science is currently willing to admit. Paleo-anthropology, which studies the evolution of the human species and archaeology, which studies its traces, keep on revising their estimations of Time, time-lines and relationships but seem to fail to consider the cyclical, spiral pattern of how everything in Nature unfolds and evolves.

Life on this planet Earth in its myriad forms and expressions – including human – has likely arisen, endured for a span of time and then succumbed multiple times in its outer forms to destruction and renewal:

• through disturbances of the great EARTH element (earthquakes, seismic shifts, comet/asteroid impacts …)

• through disturbances of the great WATER element (floods, inundations, incessant rain …)

• through alterations of Temperature: FIRE (sun flare-ups, extremes of heat and drought …) and COLD (climate switching from temperate to cold; Ice ages)

• through movements and alterations of the great AIR element (changes in composition, pressure, extreme winds, dryness/humidity …)

There are some studies documenting traces of the first two kinds of destruction (Earth/Water) but hardly a mention of the second two (Fire/Air), these being perhaps too far back in Time or less susceptible to leaving enduring traces.

Evolution is unlikely to be in straight lines with Cartesian beginnings and endings. It is far more likely to follow a cyclical, spiral pathway, whose passage through Time ascends and descends as it evolves qualitatively, its contents arising from seed-like residues—imprints from previous manifestations.

Talking of seed-like residues… Interestingly, Plato’s hypothesis relating to pattern, form and concept is that the designs for myriad forms (structure in general) are preserved in seed-like states on the ether. Plato referred to these as ‘moulds’ underlying re-manifestation whenever prevailing conditions are favourable/ripe. We can understand such a notion in the growth of a mighty oak tree arising out of a tiny seed when conditions for such growth are favourable.

In fact, the whole notion of straight line evolution, of beginnings and endings, seems fundamentally flawed and more a question of language generating incorrect notions than reflecting Reality as it actually happened. It is as flawed as the notion of empty space and the colossal blunder of banishing the ether from mainstream science since around the 1900s.

The Buddha declared there were 4 ‘imponderables’ which are a waste of time and energy to ponder over. The foremost among these being the enquiry into a ‘first beginning’. Search for an absolute beginning is merely a mental tennis game in which the thinking mind indulges in wrong guesses and distracts itself from the vital task of understanding itself along with its repetitive mechanisms, which keep it in the throes of unrealistic beliefs, hopes and doubts.

In Reality, there seem to be no beginnings which cannot equally well be described as endings of something else previous. Likewise, there are no endings which are not beginnings of something else to follow. Change and transformation are the essence of Life, and the ancient Indian view of evolution in wave-like spirals of continuously changing outward appearances and characteristics seems to be the more accurate notion. In fact, as mentioned above, almost all the world’s old mythologies have a view of repeating Ages of vast time spans.

Even a first-grade science student might recognize that for there to have been a Big Bang, there must have been in existence something beforehand – at least two prior ‘things’ – that collide in a medium. So, the Big Bang cannot be an absolute beginning, only a beginning in name. Neither can it occur in an absolute void or empty space.

In fact, since the late 1970s, ultra-sensitive scientific instruments began to be capable of detecting a part of the ‘carrier disturbance’ of the ether but instead of saying “Sorry children, we were wrong about space being empty and the non-existence of the ether!’, they refused to admit to the blunder of banishing prakriti (conceptually only of course!) and thus resorted to bringing her back surreptitiously under the guise—or should we say disguise—of complex names like Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Thirty-four letters, where five were thought sufficient by giants of science, including Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Faraday, Lorentz, Poincaré, Tesla and even Einstein!

The lifetime of Krishna (c.3200-3100 BC) – the avatar in human form of the great god Vishnu – is considered a transition period between dwapara yuga and kali yuga (ancient Indian copper and iron ages). The dating has been confirmed thanks to precise astronomical data given in ancient texts and recalculated using computer programs retracing the positioning of the planets and stars.

Likewise, the epic battle in the Mahabharata during the Kurukshetra war is given as 3076 BC. Thus Krishna, who acted as Arjuna’s charioteer, was 76 at the time.

The twenty-third Tirthankara of Jainism by the name of Parsvanatha is recorded in Jain texts as born 273 years before Mahavira in Benares (Varanasi) c. 872 BCE and passed away c. 772 BCE in Shikharji at the age of one hundred. Neminatha, also called Arishtanemi – the twenty-second Tirthankara of Jainism of the present yuga cycle – is recorded as having lived 81,000 years before Parsvanatha, thus 84,000 years ago.

The avatar of Vishnu prior to Krishna was Rama – hero of the Hindu Ramayana epic – who belongs to an altogether earlier yuga cycle – 4 entire cycles (Ages) earlier, to be precise – to a time estimated at around 18 million years ago due to the active participation in the story of 4-tusk mastodons, whose time of existence upon the Earth matches this dating!

Moreover, in the Ramayana, flying machines are also described along with a race of simians living in South India possessing equivalent intelligence to the wisest humans of that time and even greater physical abilities.

Such mind-boggling time spans are indeed hard to fathom, considering mainstream archaeology has only just recently begun to revise its long-held best guess of when modern human civilization got underway—from around 5-6000 years ago to the current admission of at least 11,000 to 13,000 years ago (Gobekli Tepe).

Yoga Beyond the Thinking Mind shows that both Mahavir – the great Jain Tirthankara – and the Buddha re-discovered that key element of knowledge which in their day among the community of sadhus and yogis was recognized as “lost”.

Mahavir – in addition to re-establishing unconditional respect for all Life as the foundation for right attitude and right behaviour – was the earliest known exponent of Relativity.

Buddha re-discovered the role of the code in the psychemechanics of mindbody, a knowledge seemingly lost again quite soon after his passing. A knowledge subtle and difficult to grasp for the people of his time who had no inkling of encoding and programming.

By the time 300 years later, Patanjali made his adaptation of the Buddha’s eightfold noble path to his eightfold yoga path (Yoga Sutras), he already writes of an “untraceable step” which again points to the by-then-again missing knowledge.

J. Krishnamurti, in 1981, at his 85^th birthday breakfast with intimate friends, declared that if he knew the Buddha would give a discourse the next morning, nothing in the world would prevent him from attending and that he would “follow it to the end! …”

What does that tell us? That’s an astonishing admission in his 85^th year from a world-renowned teacher in his own right who throughout his life had ardently discouraged ‘following’ anybody and instead advocated ‘finding out the truth directly for oneself!’

Both collectively and individually, it looks like the human species is right now in the midst of a major crisis in the understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. This situation of crisis – of impasse – is potentially capable of inducing a quantum shift to something qualitatively much better or much worse, depending on the choices made.

The habit of sacrificing the real on the altar of the abstract – which, as far as we can see, has been going on for at least six thousand years – has got to stop, come to an end and be replaced by an era of authenticity and honesty wherein the first thing to be universally recognized is respect for all Life, which means acknowledging our togetherness/non-separateness from Mother Nature.

Equally important – and connected to respect for all Life – is to recognize and address the colossal problem of language and the dire consequences of its use, misuse and abuse.

All language – including scientific language – needs to be used carefully and precisely, establishing clear connections to the Real World of Nature; otherwise, there is the everpresent danger of missing the point and losing touch with Reality.

Nowadays many concerned researchers, scientists, doctors, athletes, wellness coaches and therapists such as Gregg Braden, Jordan Petersen, Andrew Huberman, Russell Brand, Gabor Maté, Randolph Carlson, Graham Hancock, Nole Djokovic, Wim Hof, Joe Rogan and a host of others – each in their own way and from their unique perspectives – are questioning the knowledge taught as fact by the mainstream establishment, which as Dimmy already pointed out in 1993 “will not remain established or mainstream for much longer unless they start talking sense!”

Yoga beyond the thinking mind questions the narrative of the thinking mind from within – from inside the mindbody of the human being – and re-describes the path to synchronizing with the Real World of Nature as taught by Mahavir and the Buddha around 2500 years ago.

Both the outer and the inner approaches to a new paradigm—a radically new attitude towards Nature/Life—are complementary, and both equally necessary to bring about qualitative, meaningful changes and transformation. What has to be done – and there is so little time! – is to drop all pretence, become totally honest and recognize what is Real and of Real Value.

Whatever is not Okay, stop pretending it is Okay. By continuing to go along with pretence, by acquiescing, we are doing a tremendous disservice to ourselves, to others and to Nature.

The time is now ripe to usher in an age of authenticity, of fearless integrity and honesty. How it will all play out depends on each one of us—our thoughts, our language, our decision-making, and our actions.