Welcome to the Meditation Podcast. The meditation for the elite. I'm Bealty. As we're on the subject of meditation, find a quiet place to sit with your eyes closed. Like on your veranda. The soft breeze will graze your skin and gently tap you by way of the flutter of your clothing. Through this immersive experience of meditation, you'll notice the finer details within this episode. I suggest sitting tall at the front of a firm armless chair without resting your shoulders on the back. Your new friend, who you met on the flight to Florence, has given you the opportunity to admire Michelangelo's David in the quiet of the museum before it's open to the public. You came in with your friend through the staff entrance, walked through the corridors of the back office, and led to the centralized control system where the lights are turned on. You then are led to a door to the museum. Your friend gives you directions, then you walk the galleries alone. The quiet makes you feel like you are a child who has gotten up early on Christmas morning. As you pass through the galleries, it's like you're in the 1400s and you want to marvel at every installation. You can't help but think of the time put into each work of art. Even the lighting in the museum is breathtaking as it emphasizes the features of the installations. Each salon tempts you to stay, but you'll never get to see David alone if you loiter. Yet, there is a part of you that wishes you came just after the museum was closed so that you could walk around aimlessly without a clear purpose or reason? As you walk, the sounds of your footsteps echo and greet your ears. Even these sounds have a richness. You take a deep breath as you have been transported to a different world. You wonder, was the Renaissance a time filled with an unnaturally high number of artists that, by their very volume, could only create a movement of inspiration that scaled each of their art forms to levels that have since been lost? You wonder, is the art of a generation a measure of their prosperity? Does prosperity itself create a movement that scales prosperity to higher levels that can also be lost? As you are absorbed in your reverie, letting your eyes wander aimlessly. You look down a hall and you slow to a stop as graceful as the setting sun. Over your shoulder are a number of Michelangelo sculptures, and at the end in another salon is David. You turn and appreciate it as you are drawn near, like you are pulled forward slowly over a pillow of air. Yes, David is a masterpiece. He's flawless anatomical precision. His furrowed brow, flexing thigh muscles, distended veins on the back of his hands. His muscles, held behind skin, hold his shifted weight onto one leg exactly the way our eyes accept how a living person would do so. When you look closely, his nose is flaring. This is the moment of David with heightened attention as he is calculating how Goliath crudely plans to bring an end to his life. He is thinking of launching a rock from his sling squarely through the weak parts of Goliath's face into the soft tissue of his brain. You breathe. Michelangelo intentionally made David's head, arms, and hands disproportionately larger. He did this because David was to be put on a rooftop eighty meters high. But it has always been on display at ground level. How Michelangelo managed to hide the disproportionately larger head, arms, and hands without turning him into a caricature is yet another expression of his talent. As a masterpiece, there are few equals The story of David from a moment ago is an example of a form of meditation called a visualization. Through a visualization, we go along for the ride. Embedded in the story, I ask the question, is the art of a generation a measure of their prosperity? If you pause the episode and reflected on this question, that's a form of meditation called contemplation. When you contemplate with your eyes closed, your skill with contemplation is far greater than having your eyes open. This is one reason why people meditate with their eyes closed. One of the greatest visualizations in history came from John F. Kennedy when he said we would land on the moon. Through sharing this bold idea, he got people the world over to contemplate in sync with each other for years. Giving people something to contemplate is something the elite have done for thousands of years. They do this because of the meaning contained in the following proverb. An idle mind is the devil's workshop. When John F. Kennedy said, We will land on the moon, the U.S. was in the middle of domestic struggles, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. Through his bold idea, he gave idle minds something to look forward to. All throughout history, the elite noticed this pattern and contemplated on how to give people a purpose, like moving rocks across great distances to construct Stonehenge. There was a time in our history when the elite deliberately gave people a purpose, not an extrinsic purpose like landing on the moon or constructing Stonehenge. It gave people an intrinsic purpose. No, not something like peace, love, and happiness from the 1960s. Peace, love, and happiness was extrinsically motivated. It's like me telling you to put a smile on your face. It's superficial. If I asked you to think of one of the most fulfilling experiences you have had in your life and you genuinely smiled, that was the result of me giving you an intrinsic purpose. The master of reconciliation motif discussed in the previous episode gave people an intrinsic purpose that being patient to have friendly conversations with others is to their benefit. There was another time in our history when our ancestors went to the very core of our intrinsic motivation and enabled people to embrace what they do day in and day out as an art form. Like me saying, if you're going to listen to this podcast, listen with your eyes closed and really listen. That's the art of listening. While this is still externally sparked, it sinks to the core like a rock sinks to the bottom of a pool. Extrinsic motivation, like peace, love, and happiness, is like a leaf that floats on the surface. We never fully comprehend it. We often find our intrinsic motivation when we are left to our own devices. For example, in the thirteen hundreds, Francesco Petrarch became curious about ancient Athenian and Roman literature. This inspired the same curiosity in others, and this sparked the Renaissance to peak one hundred and fifty years later. There was a time in our history when people were encouraged to be curious and meditate on what they did day in and day out to turn their livelihoods into an art form. It became such a widespread phenomenon that, by my calculation, has resulted in a combined sixty-five centuries of golden ages. I'll share this history through this episode, which will give you something to contemplate. For an extreme example, the book The Kama Sutra is often considered an ancient treatise of lovemaking. But this book only discusses love making in 5% of its content. The other ninety-five percent discusses interpersonal and social relationships. This misinterpretation happened because Sir Richard Burton translated and reduced the treatise into a strictly erotic manuscript, along with altering passages and changing the context into his own worldview. His changes put biases in motion that vandalize our history, particularly India's history. Sometimes, however, written history captures a bias immediately, and we only uncover the truth by studying the context of history. For example, written history tells us Socrates from ancient Athens was killed for corrupting youth. Specifically, he encouraged youth to have independent thought, which was perceived as destabilizing the social order and undermining the state's traditional values. But the context of history paints a different picture. A picture where Socrates is considered the father of critical thinking. Since the 1990s, I've been studying Eastern philosophy. I've struggled for years to understand the meaning behind the translations and interpretations. One frustrating day, I had enough. I started to translate the special words into their modern equivalents as I understood them. It was like I found a Rosetta Stone. Imagine finding a large collection of recordings of legends you admired, explaining their art form at depth through English as a second language. Now imagine these recordings are like iron filings randomly scattered across a surface. Then an electric current is turned on and all the iron filings turned into alignment. I made sense of what they were saying. It was like I solved an expert-level Sudoku puzzle. The results of my research is captured here in this podcast and through the resources at meditation.ca. I also uncovered something else incredibly important. When we look at our meditative history, it often appears to be an underground movement, similar to how meditation is exercised today. As an underground movement, people meditate for their own interests. But there were times in our history when meditation was promoted as a mainstream movement. Said another way, the elite encouraged meditation, like they encouraged the use of coins for trade. While it's written this way in slices of our history, it tends to be forgotten as we put our focus on the results instead, like the wheel, writing, the compass, and more. In this episode, I'll share 1,500 years of our meditative history when contemplative meditation was widespread. Through consolidating this period of our history in this episode, it'll act like a Rosetta Stone to enable us to unlock a depth of contemplation that awakens us to possibility. Through contemplating what our ancestors had done, we'll learn how to make contemplative meditation a widespread phenomenon for the third time in human history. Like they say, the third times the charm. I'll provide the basics so that anyone can fact check to their heart's content. The great place to start this story is with Siddhartha Gautama, who many call Buddha. Let's put our understanding of Buddhism as we know it off to the side to look at the nuts and bolts of what happened. History tells us that Gotama was groomed to be king by his father. He was given every luxury and was shielded from the harsh realities of the world. His story doesn't specify what the harsh realities were, but the context of history tells us that there was warfare, bureaucratic and military reform, and political consolidation from every direction across road networks like the Silk Road and those in the West. In the years before Gotama left home, the Persian Empire conquered Mesopotamia and ended its historical record. Think about this. Mesopotamia gave us writing, the wheel, mathematics, timekeeping, agriculture, irrigation, mass production of bricks, and the list continues. As the Persian Empire was connected to the Silk Road, were the harsh realities a worry that the Persian Empire or some other empire would come to their land. Legend has it that Gotama left his royal grounds never to return when he discovered he was living a sheltered life. His story says he did this to find a way to end the harsh realities in the world. After several years practicing an extreme form of meditation at a level Olympic athletes could appreciate, he abandoned these efforts and began meditating under his own terms. He contemplated. Through his contemplation, he created a few mnemonics, which are memory aids that help people remember something like FYI and bedmass. What made these mnemonics unique was that they were sequential, like bedmass and the hero's journey story template. The sequences gave people confidence to stop worrying about the harsh realities of the world and start contemplating on what really matters. Feel free to look up the hero's journey template to get a sense of the sequence he had created regarding his mnemonics. I'll modernize them in the next episode, as the English translation has been misinterpreted, much like Tiknat Han has indicated. After a few centuries in northeastern India, near Nepal, where Gotama was born, his mnemonics became valued by an emperor of the Moran Empire. This emperor built a few thousand places for people to go to learn the mnemonics. This was the first time the mnemonics went mainstream. After a century, this golden age collapsed, but the learning center it established continued. After many generations, golden ages emerged three thousand kilometers to the west, in the region of Pakistan, and three thousand kilometers to the south, in the southern region of India. Today we give credit to those two golden ages and the Mauran Empire, to Buddhism. But our ancestors gave credit to the role they call bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is a person who mentors others. For clarity, a mentor is a teacher, though not all teachers are mentors. I'll explain this in the next episode. These ancient mentors mentored others to turn their livelihoods into art forms, which contributed to the emergence of culture, intellectualism, and economic prosperity. This mentorship matured, came with certain techniques, and became the main concept of a new philosophy called Mahayana. A few centuries later, the Gupta Golden Age emerged in the same location as a Moran Golden Age. This Golden Age appeared because mentorship became mainstream again. If you fact check this, it's buried in the details. Remember, this is just mentorship, not the Buddhism religion. Mentorship can coexist with anything like Hinduism, which had its own golden age during the Gupta Empire. This is why we're looking at the nuts and bolts of what had happened. The fourth emperor of this empire decided to scale their good fortune. He turned the learning center into the world's first residential university, and it was called Nalanda. Let's make sure we understand the significance of this. A residential university is a learning center where people from outside of their region come to study. Admissions was highly competitive and based entirely on a rigorous oral examination. Interviews were performed by the university's most senior professors. For seven hundred and fifty years, Nalanda attracted the greatest minds from all across Asia. It was the place where the greatest minds, like professors, went to brush up their skills. And some stayed for around ten years. Nalanda is the greatest learning center of all time. If someone proves me otherwise, I'll update this episode. Its primary course of study was Mahayana, though scholars also studied logic, mathematics, linguistics, medical science, healing, epistemology, and more. The emperor sent emissaries to distant lands to invite scholars to attend, which they did. For scholars from Japan, the most distant Asian country that had scholars at Nalanda. It would take them one to three continuous perilous years for that journey. After many years of study, they returned to aid their emperors to create their own golden ages. In other words, Nalanda was a deliberate initiative to scale prosperity. Nalanda was entirely funded by the revenue of surrounding villages and kingdoms, allowing scholars to study without financial burden. They were given free room, board, tuition, and medical care. In exchange for this goodwill, scholars regularly visited the surrounding villages and kingdoms to share ethical understanding, encourage philosophical freedom, provide health care, and encourage local traditions. For fact checkers, China had a golden age influenced by Mahayana around the time when Gupta formed and it ended soon after Nalanda was formed. Sri Lanka and Nepal both had golden ages beginning in the decades before Nalanda was formed, with both influenced by Mahayana. Around the time India invented the game of chess, scholars created Vajrayana, an enhanced form of Mahayana, which became another subject at Nalanda. I'll call Vajrayana thunderbolt from this point forward, as it makes it easier to follow along. It happens to be a direct translation of Vajra. It also means diamond, though this meaning has drifted away from its original intent. In the decades that followed, golden ages appeared in China, Tibet, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Japan, all with Mahayana and Thunderbolt having a presence with the ruling class. Centuries later, Vietnam and Thailand also experienced golden ages, with Mahayana and Thunderbolt having a presence. Nalanda's ambition worked. They figured out how to start golden ages and how to nurture them to continue. I like to share with you the details of this history, and I might do so through a TED Talk. If there's no TED Talk titled Elite Meditation, have patience. After seven hundred and fifty years of its existence, something dramatic caused the end of Nalanda. The context of history tells us there was a substantial economic shift happening internationally. The Empire was invaded and rebuilt to this new economy. What happened to the Indian Empire coincided with the expansion of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous land empire in history. Without Nalanda maintaining cohesion of the whole, Mahayana and Thunderbolt became a summary of their parts, and their shared ambition was forgotten. Only the context of history remembers. When they conquered these fragmented regions, most of the kings were reinstated under the conditions that they receive mentorship to rule their regions and that they had to pay taxes to the Gupta Empire. Historians tell us that these taxes were at a mild level. This was most likely because the Gupta Empire enjoyed prosperity. Coincidentally, the Kama Sutra emerged at the start of the Gupta Golden Age, which adds an interesting consideration. Imagine you were a king of a fragmented region and you were given a second chance. When the Gupta representative said you also had to pay taxes, there's a good chance this would dampen your mood. Yet, they promised they'll send scholars to your region to engage with the people, turn their livelihoods into art forms, and make you more prosperous. You'd likely view this as an overpromise and begrudgingly play along as it was better than the alternative. Then you were given the book The Art of Living Well aka the Kama Sutra. They say it was a self-help book that covered the topics of interpersonal relationships and sexual positions. Would your mood change? Would you play along with a little more motivation? Would you pick up the book to learn about the sexual positions regularly? Then maybe check out the other parts of the book on occasion. The book had no illustrations, which is interesting. Why would they do that when it was far easier to draw a picture? Was it to encourage literacy so that the king would read other parts of the Kama Sutra? Could an expansion of an empire be orchestrated any better than this? If you ask me, this paints a completely different picture of India's history than what Burton painted with his version of the Kama Sutra. The next question we have is this. How do we scale it further? By creating a university that invites scholars and monks from distant lands to attend for free? As if. Yet that's what happened. Fact checked to your heart's content. Remember the Nalanda University taught Mahayana and Thunderbolt, and both philosophies have a quiet presence with the ruling class all across Asia, who had initiated and sustained golden ages. These meditative traditions get little fanfare because we're more interested in the ruler and what the empire had achieved. The purpose of Mahayana and Thunderbolt is to mentor local cultures to proliferate. It enabled Hinduism to proliferate in India. In China, it enabled Taoism to proliferate. In Sri Lanka, it enabled Theravada to proliferate. There is no better way to enable people than to respect what they value. Mahayana and Thunderbolt want people to value what they know, whether it's Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or anything else. They want to enable the people to look past their differences, to view those differences as strengths that make the whole greater than the sum of the parts of the children. Mahayana alone had limited success, however. It might be because an idle mind is the devil's workshop. Instead of sitting back and watching, the elite might begin dictating or micromanaging how prosperity unfolds, and they inadvertently bring the good times to an end. To help instead of hinder Mahayana, the emperor and ministers needed something to guide their contributions. This is where Thunderbolt fits into the equation. Through the disciplined meditative techniques from Thunderbolt, an emperor and ministers learned how to make subtle cues to guide the dynamics of the mentorship movement. Like a conductor waving a baton before a symphony orchestra. This interpretation isn't immediately apparent. I infer this conclusion because the pieces of the puzzle fall together neatly. Here are the two details that make this clear. Once Thunderbolt became formalized, golden ages appeared soon afterward in seven regions that are countries today. It also helped to sustain golden ages in all thirteen countries. Thunderbolt appears to be a great way to prevent an idle mind from becoming the devil's workshop. In other words, after successfully enabling mentorship to spread using Mahayana, the Emperor and ministers would then become skilled with Thunderbolt. In summary, Thunderbolt is an art form for the elite that enables mentorship to continue unencumbered. That's why they say Thunderbolt is an enhancement of Mahayana. They are, it was a place of intense religious rivalries. It was elitist. Its strict monastic rules led to expulsion on occasion. It struggled financially. Regarding the religious rivalries, let's put this in perspective. Nalanda appears to be the first time in history that people from distant lands came to study. Before this time, people in distant lands were viewed as the enemy. Naturally, when scholars from diverse backgrounds intermix, religious rivalries are inevitable. Let's put elitism in perspective. Nalanda attracted scholars from distant lands. Plus, scholars were members of the elite. Regarding the strict monastic rules, let's begin with the main rules. They were celibacy, no intoxicants, no stealing, no lying, no harming of animals, plus they had daily schedules for studying, bathing, and eating. Again, this is all to be expected as Nalanda was one of the world's greatest learning centers, not a vacation destination. Even modern universities expel students on occasion. Concerning the financial ebbs and flows of the university, this should be expected as scholars attended for free. It's only natural that the surrounding kingdoms that were responsible for the patronage would experience hardships at times. As the university lasted for 750 years. I have the impression Nalanda managed these difficulties in stride. Pause now and watch a video of one as it adds context to what I have to share. A starling murmuration exists because every single starling is making up their own minds. There is no single bird orchestrating the murmuration. This is what Mahayana puts in motion. A mentor enables people to collaborate, much like the master of reconciliation motif discussed in episode one had done. When people make up their own minds and coincidentally collaborate, that's a murmuration. That's a golden age. But even a starling murmuration needs to rest. But an intellectual murmuration, like discussed earlier, doesn't need to rest. It can find a way to keep it humming along. Maybe you're not convinced. Well, the Gupta Empire was a golden age, plus it enabled distant lands to experience their own golden ages. Instead of conquering distant lands to enforce their own ideology, they enabled distant lands to do whatever they wanted. When the rulers in distant lands chose to enable their people to embrace what makes them unique, they achieved their own golden age and shared their good fortune with the Gupta Empire through exchange. Let's put this in perspective. Around 1,000 years ago, the regions consisting of India, China, and South of China, which are thirteen countries today, were experiencing a golden age of golden ages. That's a murmuration of golden ages. That's stability between distant lands. It's the early signs of heaven on earth emerging. The concept of people working autonomously and forming a murmuration is a wild idea. Let's make this idea far more plausible. We understand how people can march together like in a parade. This is what we generally think is the way to get people to work together. Just get everyone to do what they are told. If you've ever been in a parade, you know it's mostly waiting. It pales in comparison to a murmuration that starts as quickly as the snap of our fingers. Golden ages naturally function like a murmuration, and we'll understand this through reflecting on one we admire. The Italian Renaissance. Because he did this and that this was the basis of the Italian Renaissance, the world calls him the father of the Italian Renaissance. Notice, no one coordinated what happened. People were enabled to follow their curiosity, and a murmuration we call a golden age was the result. There's our Rosetta Stone. That's the pattern to emulate. Let's take a deep breath. To successfully repeat what our ancestors have done and make it last to the end of time. Let's first summarize. Rome wasn't built in a day. The ruling class needs a methodology untainted by interpretation. They also need something to protect their social rank during this transition where, through many generations, the ruling class can reduce their fortifications of their glasshouses as everyone is working on a common goal. The people need to make up their own minds. That's all they've ever wanted. It enables them to find their art forms, which is where they find fulfillment and is where prosperity blossoms. Coincidentally, the ruling class also wants to find their art forms and fulfillment. We need mentors, skilled mentors, who learn wisdom through visualization. But what kind of wisdom? Who gets to define such wisdom? How do we know its wisdom and not dogma? Ah here's an important point. We found it through contemplation. When we have the patience to seriously contemplate, wisdom blossoms and achieves a life of its own. No one defines wisdom or oppresses people to possess wisdom. All we do is enable people to turn what they do into art forms. We do this through mentoring each other to unlock our potential. You know the saying, we learn from our mistakes. In the next episode, we'll look at what causes golden ages to come to an end. In this reflection, we'll gain some insights into what is wisdom and what is dogma. I have a request. Go to the person you have the most frequent heart to heart conversations with and ask this question. Have you heard of a meditation podcast? When they say no, reply with. Let me know when you've listened to an episode. I'd love to talk about it with you. Thank you for listening. Please also visit meditation.ca for programs for the elite and for the genuinely ambitious people who seek to serendipitously contribute to the whole, like those with an interest to lead our face-to-face meditation programs in cities near you. This will take time, but there is order here. Very faint, very human. Whatever you do, do it with compassion.