“Go Greyhound, and leave the driving to us.”
—Greyhound advertising campaign launched in 1956
Greyhound’s advertising campaign is still widely known after more than half a century. “Go mantra, and leave the transcending to us,” which is the slogan I created for the Higher Self Healing Meditation that I launched in 2010, is less widely known. That’s too bad, but then again, I don’t have the ad budget that the nation’s leading bus company has. It’s also ironic because Nature always accomplishes everything with as little effort as possible.
“See how the lilies of the field grow; they do not labor or spin,” Christ told his followers (Matthew 6:28) about nineteen hundred and twenty-five years before Greyhound hit our airwaves with their message. Not only do “fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly," as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, II so eloquently wrote in “Showboat,” but they do so effortlessly. While birds certainly have bird brains, they’re not stupid: they know not to freeze in the frigid winters of the north when they can take to the skies and spend several months on tropical beaches. And when those fish gotta swim, they do so with the current, instead of against it.
Maharishi, with whom I studied for years, put it eloquently when he said, “Do less and accomplish more.” In other words, when we behave in accordance with Nature, we are in the flow, and don’t waste our energy.
In geometry, we learn that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. In other words, there’s no dillydallying between getting from points A to B. Going any other way would waste energy, and because Nature doesn’t do that, it goes straight to the point—B, in this case.
The 18th century French mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis, who formulated the principle of least action, wrote, “Nature is thrifty in all its actions.” He applied the principle broadly, stating that animals move, and vegetables grow in such a manner.
The century before, the Frenchman Pierre de Fermat, credited with planting the seeds that led to infinitesimal calculus, discovered that “light travels between two given points along the path of shortest time.” This is known as the principle of least time, or Fermat’s principle.
The good news about the mind is that, beneath the surface conscious thinking level lays quieter, more peaceful areas that are heretofore not experienced. Beyond that, at the deepest level of the mind—to quote the old Coca-Cola television advertising campaign—is something really quite special. As Coke put it: “In the back of your mind, what you’re hoping to find…it’s the real thing.” And that real thing—which I’ve been referring to as your higher Self—is not only unbounded as described above, but blissful in its nature—sweeter even than the heavily sugared soft drink. If the mind is given a whiff of this delight, it will head for it in a New York minute, a San Francisco second, or a Ft. Lauderdale fraction of a second. And it will do so without a bit of effort.
