elevated

In this episode we talk about the practices and benefits of minimalism. We touch on the ideas of why minimalism is beneficial within the design space as well as why it is helpful in our health long term. 

Meditation is not the absence of thought, but the power to focus on a specific thought long enough for it to become realized within.

For this week's 1-Minute Meditation, we are focusing on Higher.

Breathe with me and be open to the new.

Voice/Words © Tashima Jones / Tashima Jones Media, LLC

Music: Spring

This is the third episode about Walter Russell, one of the most accomplished people in American history. Episode 40, called Self-Bestowed Genius, gave an overview of Russell’s life including some of his major accomplishments. It also described the incredible claim that Russel made that he was in touch with an infinite fountain of wisdom within himself that was the source of all his success in life. He also said that the same intelligence is within every human being.

The episode that followed, called the Five Laws of Success, presented Russell’s five key elements on how we can tap into that intelligence to help elevate our lives. Those five elements were humility, reverence, inspiration, deep purpose and joy.

Now, although his accomplishments were remarkable in their own right, this multi-millionaire, internationally acknowledged master of drawing, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, business and philosophy had dropped out of school after the fourth grade, and had accomplished all of it with no real education, just by tapping into this source of inner wisdom. It was hard to believe, but as he always said, his life spoke for itself.  

Following his death in 1962, he left behind teachings on many different topics. As I researched them, much of it was over my head. But there are three key points that I found particularly fascinating and I thought I’d pass them along so you can give them some consideration and see if they do anything for you.

The first one concerns an ability we have in our consciousness that I had never considered before. Russell was very fond of the idea of something he called decentration which, he taught, was the opposite of concentration.

Now, we all know what it means to concentrate on something. You focus your attention on it and the more you concentrate on it, the more it gets into your mentality. And importantly, a lot of times, we have problems letting go of it, especially if it’s charged troubling emotions like anger, guilt and fear.  

Holding on to negativity is far more prevalent than it may seem. According to current research, we each think about 50,000 thoughts a day, with a large percentage of them being negative and recurring, which means that we keep churning over the same negative thoughts and feelings again and again.  

But Russell said we have the power to decentrate them. This power is a natural part of our mind, but we haven’t been taught to develop it. With concentration, you focus your attention on something and give it your inner energy. With decentration, you just do the opposite. You dissipate your energy and remove your attention from the object.

He said you don’t have to try to change the thoughts and emotions. If we have nothing further to gain from examining them, we can just choose to remove our energy from them and they will disappear on their own. After all, the only reason these things exist in our mind is because we are giving them energy. It’s a very simple fact, but it can be easily missed.

He said it takes some practice, like anything else, if we keep trying, we can get good at it. To start with, if a thought or idea is bothering you, just give yourself a verbal command like, “I decentrate that thought.” Or “I decentrate that feeling.” And then let your mind picture withdrawing your energy from it and see it dissipating, like mist in the sunlight.    

It seemed like Russell had mastered the process.  He said he could decentrate to zero while he was in the middle of Grand Central Station, meaning he could give zero attention to thought and feeling while being in the middle of a crowd. 

It may appear to be a tall order, but another thing Russell always said was, “If I can do it, you can.” You may want to give it a try. After many years, I think I may be starting to get the hang of it.

So that’s the first point from Russell that I wanted to bring up. The second one is about this inner intelligence that Russell claimed was the source of all his incredible accomplishments.

He said it is within each one of us, and it isn’t the higher side of our intelligence, or the part of us that is in touch with the higher spheres or some angelic realm of wisdom. It’s not genius part of ourselves or  anything like that. He said that what is inside of us is God Almighty. Period. Full-blast, full-power. God.

At first, I found it surprising, then I realized that the idea forms the basis of most religions in the world. Many traditions speak of the Indwelling God Presence. For instance, the 15th century Indian poet Kabir used the image of the ocean and a drop of water to illustrate the point.  God would be the ocean, and each individual would be a drop. Kabir said that the drop is in the ocean, everyone knows this. But the ocean is also in the drop and very few know this.

So, we all have God within. But according to Russell, as well as a myriad of other teachers and masters over the ages, if you want to get close to it, you have to surrender to it. And according to them, the more you do, you start to realize you can merge with it, which, they say, is kind of the point of the whole thing.

In his first law of success, humility, Russell put it this way, “I found that to achieve greatness one had to go only one inch beyond mediocrity. But that one inch is so hard to go, that only those who become aware of God in them can make the grade, for no one can achieve that one inch alone.” And he added, “The ‘I’ must be forgotten, one must not be the part; he must be the whole. Until one learns to lose oneself, he cannot find himself.”

In that vein, when someone asked him, “Why can’t I do the things that you can do?” He replied, “The only difference is that I do everything for God and you do everything for your body.”

It reminds me of something I once read about Parmahansa Yogananda, the great yogi from India who took spent many years in the west, elevating the lives of millions of people. until he passed away in Los Angeles in 1952.

In response to someone who kept questioning him about his personal life, he once said, “Oh, I killed Yogananda long ago. Only God dwells in this temple now.”

It’s always humbling for me whenever I run across expressions like these. The idea of only God dwelling in my temple seems almost unimaginable. With my relentless mind generating a constant stream of random thoughts, I have so much garbage in there, I feel like the line in one of Bob Dylan’s songs, “If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”

With that summary of the state of my inner world, that ends the second point of Russell’s that I wanted to bring up. The last one is pretty incredible. It’s about his vision of our future and it runs pretty deep.  

In 1921, he coined the term, “The New Age.”  Apparently, he was the first person to use it. He said that we were now moving into the next stage of our evolution, a new age which he called, “Epoch Three of Humanity.”

So, what were Epoch One and Epoch Two? According to certain theories of brain evolution, our brain didn’t start out the way it is now. In the beginning, it was much smaller and we didn’t have the ability to think rational thoughts or create language. We had instincts, we had emotional feelings, we were bonded to our family and our tribe, but we couldn’t think. According to Russell, this state of being was Epoch One.

Then, for reasons that remain unknown, some major evolutionary changes took place and our brain radically transformed. It got about a third larger with much more fat, and could begin to think rationally. We could think If-Then.  If I do this, then that will happen. Like I know that the sun comes up on this side of the cave. If I sleep here, then I’ll be warmer in the morning. Soon after, language began to develop, eventually followed by writing. Before this evolutionary change, the only form of communication we had was just glorified grunting.

This ability to think rational thought began Epoch Two of humanity, which went from pre-historic caveman days until now. Of course, rational thought changed our whole world and our lives in it. Every advancement from the wheel to the computer came from it. But critically, one primary factor hasn’t changed at all, and that is, survival. We’re still struggling to survive, living by the law of the jungle to a large degree. Kill or be killed. Winner takes all.

Although it may not be clearly apparent, this fear-based concept of life is at the root of all the greed and lust for power that has dominated human history for all this time. All of this misery, generated by all of our conflicted concepts, theories and opinions, is all based on fear.

But, according to Russell, in Epoch Three of humanity, it is all going to change. It’s probably not going to be an overnight transition. It may take some time, maybe even a century or two, and even though it may seem quite dark, supposedly, this is just the darkness before the dawn.  

So, what are the implications of this new epoch? What does it mean? According to Russell, it means nothing less than a new kind of human being living a new kind of life on earth.

Humans will eventually be liberated from a life of drudgery. With the right intentions, technology will evolve to the point where all of the great resources of planet earth will be properly harvested for the benefit of all.

          It might be hard to understand how bountiful the earth really is, but here are a few quick facts to consider. As far as overcrowding is concerned, if you took every single human being on the planet and put them all together with one yard between them, they wouldn’t even fill up the state of Rhode Island. So, the entire population of the world could fit into the smallest state in America.   

As far as hunger is concerned, more than 50 percent of all the food presently harvested on earth is thrown out every year, which means that human hunger isn’t the result of there not being enough food for everyone. It’s the result of mis-directed and poorly coordinated human activity.

And when it comes to energy, it is estimated that there is enough power in the amount of sunlight that hits one acre of land in one hour to provide all the electricity to the city of Chicago for a whole year.

So, enough said about enlightened technology, what about the human? This is where it gets really encouraging. Russell said our destiny is to emerge from this fear-based, survival-oriented, dog-eat-dog existence into a much higher level of intelligence, whose foundations will be based on each individual’s constant, conscious relationship with that divine energy that is within each one of us or God Almighty, as Russell called it.  

Life will be like heaven on earth and if we could see the humans of 100 or 200 years from now, they would appear God-like to us, manifesting all the highest human characteristics. Wisdom, love, compassion and kindness, along with all the other better angels of our nature, would be part of our everyday way of life.  

          Okay, maybe it sounds too good to be true. But hey, I didn’t come up with this stuff, Russell did. And supposedly he was getting it from the source of wisdom within him that was the source of all his amazing achievements. So even though it may sound like a great big piece of pie in the sky, I’m sticking with it.

I’d love to imagine that 200 years from now, someone may be reading or listening to this information that came from this primitive man who was living in these primitive times. And that person would be thinking how obvious all of it was. Of course, all of these great things were going to come true. It had to happen and couldn’t have been any other way. How obvious!

Wishful thinking? Who knows? But no matter what may be happening in the world around us, we’re still entitled to our hopes and dreams and as the saying goes, “It takes a dreamer to make a dream come true.”

Well, that’s the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open and let’s get together in the next one.

Virgil and Drew talk all things consistency.

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Virgil and Drew dive into the subject of legacy.

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Virgil and Drew dive into happiness.

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Virgil and Drew dive into the subject of poise.

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Virgil and Drew dive into the subject of self-control; both on and off the court, and what it means for us as athletes and people.

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Virgil and Drew dive into the subject of loyalty, and how it affects us.

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Virgil and Drew dive in to the dynamic subject of forgiveness.

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Virgil and Drew dive deep into the idea of destiny.

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Virgil and Drew discuss what failure can teach us on this week's episode of The Elevated Podcast.

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