by Coach Cary Bayer
I just returned from teaching trips in Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, and New York, logging quite a few miles on I-95. Some of us probably take the Interstate Highway system for granted but it’s only a little more than half a century old, one of the great achievements of the Eisenhower administration. The technical name for the network is The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. I bring this up because, impressed by Germany’s connected Autobahn roads during World War II, General Eisenhower recognized America’s need to be able to transport military equipment and personnel easily and swiftly over smooth roads. He had such a system under construction by 1956, in the fourth year of his Presidency. As of 2012, this vast network included 47,714 miles of mostly free roads.
As I mused on networks and connections, I thought of the World Wide Web, more commonly known as the Internet, which is a much more abstract network, that also keeps us all connected. Email, websites, and social media are keeping us linked together in ways undreamed of in Eisenhower’s day. Consider this mind-expanding growth: the total number of websites on the Internet has grown from an August 1991 total of one to nearly 1 billion 200 million as of September 2014, according to NetCraft.
Internet usage has grown just as exponentially: As of December 1995 about 16 million people were using the Internet, about 0.4 percent of the world’s population. By June 2014, it had reached 2 billion 802 million people or 39 percent of the world’s people. In 2012, some $225 billion worth of business was done in cyberspace. According to eMarketer, that total could reach $434.2 billion by 2017, nearly doubling in just five short years.
Closer to home, there are stress management methods that keep you connected to your inner Self, your higher nature, deep within you. After many hours in the car last week, I pulled over at an Interstate rest area and practiced the Higher Self Healing Meditation that I had just taught on the Treasure Coast.
As I felt the fatigue from driving many hours and many more miles get expunged from my body, I felt the connection of my individual consciousness with the Universal Consciousness. As great as a connection as the Interstate highway system is, as astonishing a connection as the Internet is, neither are as profound as the connection to your inner Self—the truest Yoga—that serves as a foundation to everything else that you think, speak, and do in this life.
While my consciousness was hovering at the quietest level of thought deep within the mind near the Transcendent, it dawned on me that the Internet and the Interstate were both manifestations—one physical, the other cyber—of the Transcendent, the Universal Being itself within each of us and within all things, which pervades all of Life, and keeps all things connected.
With the advent of social networking sites like the very popular Facebook, for example, the thousand or so people who you are connected to can, theoretically, connect you to many hundreds of thousands of other people. The extraordinary speed by which a You Tube video can go viral, for example, demonstrates this truth quite regularly.
I know that the world will be moving in the right direction spiritually when the numbers of people who connect to their inner Self through meditation and Yoga have a similar exponential growth. According to the Huffington Post, as of December 2013, more than 20 million Americans were practicing Yoga, making it a $27-billion industry. The Transcendental Meditation organization claims to have singlehandedly taught TM to more than five million people.
So I raise my glass to connections—in whatever form you find it. In business, it’s said that you need connections to get ahead in your career. That may very well be the case. But when you have connection to your Inner Self, you are in tune with Nature’s flow, and She supports you as well as your desires, including your desires in business.