terça-feira, novembro 09, 2010

GUARDIAN EXTRA

GUARDIAN EXTRA

Friday January 19 1973


The US Army has just put its first teacher of transcendental meditation on its payroll; in Saskatchewan Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's technique is to be offered in schools and in Manitoba it is to be used as part of a Civil Service training programme. These developments follow studies which show that TM is the opposite of the process by which a nervous system accumulates stress. John Windsor, himself a meditator, reports on the research and spread of TM

Photo of Maharishi at the Houston Skylab
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, complete with flower, at the Skylab space capsule.
He was invited to Houston recently by Russell Schweikart, the spacewalker.

The most inscrutable problems sometimes have the most simple solutions. The problem of the nervous system's susceptibility to stress has been exhaustively charted and analysed but the knowledge gained has yielded no effective and easily applied remedy.

Over half the deaths in England and Wales are from heart and other circulatory diseases which have stress as a common factor: of every 100 middle-aged men, two are suffering from untreated hypertension. And so on.

What seems to be happening is that as the proverbial pace of life increases the pressure of everyday experience is becoming so intense that the repairs and adjustments which the nervous system carries out during deep sleep and dreaming cannot always keep pace with the input of stress.

The overload causes physiological abnormalities to develop on the structural and material level of the nervous system, hindering its normal functioning and reducing still further its ability to cope with stress. If this vicious circle cannot be broken it results in psychosomatic disorders such as hypertension and circulatory disease.

The need to cultivate greater resilience to stress is not just an individual problem. Those who experience the most acute stressful stimuli are often those entrusted with the safety and well-being of others - statesmen, businessmen, teachers, airline pilots.

Recent studies of the transcendental meditation (TM) of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi have stirred the American academic world because they have shown that TM is the exact opposite of the process by which the nervous system accumulates stress. The technique works on the material sand structural level of the nervous system, neutralising stress as automatically as the nervous system accumulates it.

Whereas stress tends to cause excitement, hyperactivity, TM is a form of rest deeper than sleep. Stress raises the oxygen intake: TM lowers it to a level below that of sleep. Stress constricts the arteries: TM expands them. And, interestingly, during meditation the mind is not held rigid as it is in panic situations, nor dulled as it is in sleep, but becomes increasingly alert.

These findings indicate that deep sleep and dreaming can no longer be regarded as the nervous system's only means of carrying out repairs and adjustments. They show TM as an innate but hitherto untapped ability to neutralise stress effortlessly and at will. It therefore has exciting potential as an effective and easily applied solution to the problem of stress.

Maharishi, the monk and teacher who brought the ancient Vedic technique to the west from North India 14 years ago, explains: "there is nothing that can be said so certainly about stress except that the amount of rest produced will neutralise the corresponding intensity of stress."

Meditators claim that the benefits of meditating for the recommended 20 minutes twice a day are cumulative because the amount of rest produced is almost always greater than the intensity of the daily dose of stress. This means that by tipping the balance against stress the style of functioning of the nervous system becomes progressively more refined and even the most deeply rooted stresses can be eradicated.

Sleep, by comparison, lacks M's quality of alertness and the quality of stress which it dissolves is that of physical fatigue. Maharishi, who uses little physical energy, sleeps for two hours a night.

When he refers to the normal functioning of the nervous system he does so with a smile because he is referring to that state in which the last stress, the last obstacle to the unfoldment of maximum energy, intelligence and creativity, has fallen away. He teaches that stresses alone are the obstacles to such full development. Which implies that man's "normal" state is way below his potential.

The physiological tests, notably those by Benson and Wallace at the Harvard Medical School, established that during meditation a complex of changes takes place indicating an integrated combination of rest and alertness which can be found only in practitioners of TM. The nervous system functions in a way quite different from that of waking, dreaming, and sleeping: the changes are also clearly distinguishable from those occurring during hypnosis and operant conditioning.

There are difficulties in quantifying the effects of regular meditation on everyday life. But studies of psychological stability and perceptual ability have added weight to meditators' claims that they experience a cumulative growth in calmness and alertness as co-existent qualities.

Five of the research reports have shown that meditation greatly reduces the craving for drugs - even hard drugs - and for alcohol and tobacco.

The bulk of the research and the fact that the standardised technique can be learned in 2 1/2 minutes followed by three hour long "checks" on consecutive days have made TM an irresistible lure for American Businessmen, students, and educators. There are about 10,000 new meditators a month in the US and the total there has just topped 200,000.

TM's potential as an anti-drugs device made the breakthrough in winning Maharishi official support in America. A resolution passed by the general assembly of Illinois in May not only approved the use of TM in schools but asked the drug abuse section of the state's Department of Mental Health to consider incorporating TM in its rehabilitation programme.

The technique, the resolution said: "Shows promise of being the most positive and effective drugs prevention programme being presented in the world today."

The first teacher of meditation to be put on the US Army's payroll at Fort Lewis, Washington, last October, is working with the base's alcohol and drug council. (The contract stipulates that the army will not interfere with the way the technique is taught.) All army bases have received an official army circular recommending TM as a useful self-help device for dealing with drug and alcohol abuse. It was drug addiction among the Eskimos which prompted the US Health Service to send a TM teacher to Point Barrow, Alaska, in October and pay him scholarship money.

The weightiest government support for TM in America came last August when the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare paid $21,540 to send 125 high school teachers on a four-week course in the theory and practice of meditation at California State University.

This tear marks the beginning of a big drive for Government support as part of Maharishi's World Plan - first objective: set up 3,600 teacher training centres, one for each million of world population.

But up to now, TM's biggest successes have come as a result of informal contacts by individual meditators. major General Franklin Davis, the commandant of the US Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, began promoting TM in the army after his daughter persuaded him to learn the technique. Walter Robbins, the staff development officer for the Cabinet of Manitoba, Canada, began promoting TM as a Civil Service management training aid after only three month's meditation. Emperor Hailie Selassie, who has approved the introduction of TM into Ethiopia's secondary schools and is to set up a meditation academy for students from OAU countries, learned about TM from Kibre Dawitt, a girl member of his court circle. The Illinois resolution was piloted by W. J. Murphy, majority leader of the general assembly and a meditator.

Britain's 20,000 meditators have kept a low profile since the Beatles episode. Interest in TM has spread by word of mouth and in October the monthly total of new meditators passed the 500 mark for the first time.

American college students treat their 45 dollar fee for learning TM as an investment and hope to get better grades. In Britain, where education is free, the 8 pound student rate seems a small fortune and the 15 pound adult rate is beyond the pocket of many working men. No TM teacher has so far been able to support himself on a commission basis and in the last financial year, the London-based headquarters of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, a charity, was in the red.

The low profile looks like ending pretty soon. Vesey Crichton, an Old Etonian, aged 23, will be landing in Britain this weekend as one of 108 volunteers trained by Maharishi to promote TM at Government level. One wonders what Mrs Thatcher and non-meditators as a whole are going to make of TM.

HOW TO MEDITATE? The delicate technique is taught individually: it involves an intimate interchange of knowledge and experience between teacher and would-be meditator. Although everyone has an innate ability to meditate it still has to be taught, for much the same reason that a child's innate ability to speak will remain latent unless it is spoken to. The technique cannot be learned from books because the concentration that would involve would hold the mind on the conscious level of thinking and prevent it from experiencing the refinement of thought which occurs spontaneously during meditation.

Nevertheless, TM's principles can be outlined. The broad principle is one which applies to all living things - they grow and progress through alternate steps of rest and activity. By incorporating TM's deep rest into this cycle everyday activity is enlivened. The meditator can achieve more by doing less.

What is temporarily "transcended" during meditation is simply activity - the interdependent activity of the mind and nervous system. The innate ability of the mind which TM has rediscovered is its natural tendency to diminish thinking activity and flow towards more subtle and powerful aspects of thought. As mental activity is refined and therefore diminished, so is physical activity. Deeper and deeper rest is gained and stresses begin to dissolve.

When the mind finally transcends thought it reaches its maximum alertness. The entire physiological condition is described by Benson and Wallace as a state of "restful alertness."

It is a fundamental principle that during meditation everything goes by itself, automatically and effortlessly. Maharishi says "Effort should be left in the hands of the basic force of life." The effortlessness of the technique is the basis of his claim that the release of stress is a natural function of the nervous system.

To create the conditions for the mind to experience subtler aspects of thought and finally transcend thought, the would-be meditator is given a mantra by his teacher. A mantra is the thought of a sound, a delicate impulse which is soothing to the nervous system. Each mantra is individually chosen by the teacher and the technique lies in the way of using it. Maharishi describes the mantra as a comfortable vehicle for the natural tendency of the mind to ride on.

In order to stress - sorry, emphasise - that TM functions in harmony with natural laws, Maharishi has framed the expression "creative intelligence." Creative intelligence is the basic force of life which conducts all the diverse forms and phenomena in creation. It has an infinitely wide range - from its unmanifest phase to the activities of fine energy particles, the individual and "the extragalactic processions which articulate the pulse of the universe." Creative intelligence naturally also conducts the process of meditation.

By the unmanifest phase of creative intelligence, Maharishi means its inactive, non-expressed, non-changing phase. Just as the ability to rest is contained in the ability to be active, so the unmanifest aspect of creative intelligence is at the basis of all the different forms and phenomena of manifest creation.

He teaches that during the deep rest of TM, meditators open their awareness to creative intelligence in its unmanifest phase. As a result, he says, they find that the nervous system becomes capable of incorporating the whole range of creative intelligence, making it possible to live its full value in daily life. The qualities of creative intelligence spontaneously emerge into the field of activity.

Maharishi uses the flowers which meditators give him to illustrate this principle. The colourlessness of the sap represents the unmanifest quality of creative intelligence. "What we find is that the colourless sap forms the basis for all the different aspects of the plant - the red petal, the green leaves.

The test of other systems of development, says Maharishi, is: do they transcend activity? For only by naturally transcending activity and gaining deep rest by contacting the unmanifest aspect of creative intelligence will the stress release mechanism be brought into play. Any system which does this will simple be - TM.

The best known record of the physiological changes which occur while the "unmanifest aspect of creative intelligence" is being contacted is by Dr Herbert Benson, assistant professor of medicine and Dr Keith Wallace, an independent researcher, at the Harvard Medical School. Their research was published in the Scientific American, February 1972.

They confirmed the lessening of physical activity during meditation by establishing that the metabolic rate falls to a lower level than during sleep. The most convenient measure of metabolic rate is oxygen consumption. They found that this fell by up to 20 per cent, about twice the usual reduction during sleep. The heart rate fell by 25 per cent compared with 20 per cent during sleep.

Apart from the intriguing discovery that the autonomic (involuntary) nervous system - that is, heart, lungs - can be varied at will, they also found a fall in the concentration of blood lactate four times faster than its rate of fall during the period of rest prior to meditation.

Research into the biochemistry of anxiety by Ferris Pitts at Washington University had previously established that infusions of blood lactate produced anxiety symptoms in patients. lactate is the end product of the process by which muscle cells starved of oxygen break down glucose and extract energy from it. Hypertensive patients have high concentrations of blood lactate.

So, far from starving the muscle cells of oxygen because of reduced oxygen consumption, the process of meditation has actually increased it. The reason, they found, was that the flow of blood (carrying oxygen to the muscles) had actually increased. The forearm blood flow was up 32 per cent. They took the view that meditation reduced the activity of the major part of the sympathetic nerve network so that it secretes less norepinephrine, a biochemical which causes the blood vessels to constrict.

The combination of a decrease in respiration and heart rate and an increase in blood flow corresponds well with Maharishi's claim that during TM activity is both reduced and refined. In his terminology "The integrative quality of creative intelligence unites the opposite values of rest and activity."

Benson and Wallace also recorded a fivefold rise in electrical skin resistance - which declines in anxiety states. They concluded that the "wakeful hypometabolic state" of TM was unique.

Dr Peter Fenwick, a psychiatrist at the Maudsley hospital, London, has for five years been using an electroencephalograph to study the effect of TM on the brainwaves of a group of volunteer meditators.

He found marked changes in the brainwave patterns which could be picked out at a statistically significant level by a group of "blind" raters. His researches have shown that during meditation the dominant rhythm at the back of the head - the alpha rhythm - tends to slow slightly and spread forward but never disappears. So long as the alpha rhythm is present, the subject is alert and not asleep.

He also found that in the temple area, which deals with the memory and the synthesis of emotion, and also in the frontal area which deals with personality and the control of basic autonomic functions, theta waves appeared. Theta waves are usually seen during sleep and are always spread across the hemispheres.

From this he concluded that some of the changes which we expect during sleep were occurring in the presence of alertness. By studying heart rate and indirect measure s of the level of arousal he showed that the meditator's nervous system was more relaxed during meditation than that of his control subjects.

He concluded that the patterns were unique to transcendental meditation. There was no other technique known which could produce these two apparently contradictory states at the same time.

Maharishi's familiarity with the unmanifest aspect of creative intelligence has led him inexorably into the realm of atomic physics. He looks to the principles of physics - such as the law of least action - to provide objective validation of the experience of the mental technique of TM.

He draws a parallel between the principle located in the third law of thermodynamics - that as activity decreases, order increases - and the practice of TM. "As the stresses dissolve, what is happening is that order is increasing. As the metabolic rate is being reduced, orderliness is being increased and with this, whatever disorder has been existing must naturally dissolve."

The benefits of stress release have been monitored by Dr David Orme-Johnson of the University of Texas department of psychology (1972), who reported that meditators appeared to have more stable nervous systems. He measured the ups and downs in anxiety by recording the changes in galvanic skin resistance (GSR). For every 10 changes observed in meditators during a 10-minute period of rest with eyes open, non-meditators showed 34. There were only 2.6 changes for every 10 minutes of meditation. His subjects had an average of two years experience of TM.

Meditators recover more quickly from stress, Orme-Johnson found. He blasted meditators and a control group with a "stressful tone" of 100 decibels through earphones at irregular intervals. The meditators GSR responses showed that they got used to them after only 11 blasts compared with the non-meditators' 28. Graphs of the responses showed that the meditators produced smooth curves and the non-meditators wobbly curves, indicating that the meditators nervous systems functioned in a more stable way.

At the University of Sussex, John Graham, an undergraduate thesis, investigated the effect of meditation on perceptual ability. He found that although meditators' ability to discriminate between different frequencies of a warble tone deteriorated by 15 per cent after 20 minutes spent reading a book it improved by 37 per cent after 20 minutes meditation. Amplitude discrimination showed the same pattern.

Karen Blasdell of the University of California (1971) tested the speed and accuracy of meditators and non-meditators in a hand-eye co-ordination test - tracing a start shape by looking at its mirror image so that a visual motor conflict had to be resolved. Meditators made nearly three times fewer errors per second.

The best known research into the effect of meditation on drug abuse is still Benson and Wallace's questionnaire survey of 1,862 subjects, mostly college students and graduates. These are the percentage falls recorded in heavy use of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco before learning to meditate and after 22-33 months of meditation. Marijuana: 22.4 to 01.. LSD: 7.1 to nil. Narcotics: 0.6 to nil. Amphetamines: 1.0 to nil. Hard liquor: 2.7 to 0.4. Cigarettes: 27 to 5.7.

Among a sample of 570 meditators in a controlled research project by Dr Leon Otis of the Stanford Research Institute (1972) were 49 opiate users, 35 of whom gave it up after six months of meditation. Dr Otis considers this result noteworthy since the prognosis for successful treatment and rehabilitation of opiate users is poor.

A pilot study by Allan Abrams of the University of California has shown a trend towards a cumulative improvement in meditators learning ability. Meditators with two years' experience performed short and long-term recall tests better than meditators with a year's experience, who performed better than non-meditators.

It is in education that TM has spread fastest. Courses in the "science of creative intelligence" qualify for degree credit at seven American universities including Yale and Harvard. Maharishi is booked to appear before 3,500 educators at America's National Conference on Higher Education, the major higher education conference, in March. His academic symposiums - eight so far held - have attracted some of America's best known brains.

The application of TM to education is summed up in the motto of Maharishi International University which has 205 World Plan centres in the US. It says "Knowledge is structured in consciousness." Which means roughly that you can throw as much information at a pupil as you like: whether he makes use of it, or even remembers it, depends on his level of consciousness. Traditionally, education has been communicative rather than creative. Which is where creative intelligence comes in as the direct means by which intelligence and creativity themselves can be developed. The missing subjective element.

Maharishi's critique of consciousness is of equal interest to psychology and philosophy. His basic postulate is that existence - which conducts the objective phase of life - and intelligence - which conducts the subjective phase - are the same at their most fundamental level. And that during TM this integration of opposites is directly experienced.

This experience - elemental, omnipresent, and the same for everybody - is the ultimate stable basis for the philosopher's affirmation: "I am." It is hardly surprising that in their search for an objective expression of the nature of life, both Maharishi and Western philosophers have been drawn towards physics and its investigation of the subtle states of matter and energy.

The irony is that Maharishi needs objective evidence only as a means of illustrating that the basic nature of the life - the philosopher's Absolute - can be cognised subjectively during TM. For generations, both philosophers and scientists have clung to objectivity as the only invariable means of gaining knowledge. (The fact that the philosophers in particular have never been able to agree amongst themselves shows that in a way they were right.) What Maharishi is now offering is a subjective invariable as a means of gaining knowledge.

He says "Knowledge gained by objective means will always be specific and not total. The abstract, unmanifest value of the pure field of creative intelligence can never be determined by the objective means of gaining knowledge. But until knowledge of that is gained, knowledge will remain incomplete."

The prospect of gaining complete knowledge, in Maharishi's teaching, lies in the ability of the nervous system to incorporate the full range of creative intelligence. On our part, we just meditate regularly, watching the benefits as the knots of stress are untied and wondering what it would be like to have no knots.

Maharishi, with his two hours' sleep a night and his silence every Thursday morning, has said that his wakefulness is more restful than other people's sleep. Since he came to the West 14 years ago he has personally instructed 4,500 teachers of meditation on ten-week courses and the world total of meditators has grown to 350,000. It is no exaggeration to say that no businessman or statesman could equal his energy.

One of his prime concerns is to keep the teaching and the technique pure and unmixed. He will not have it taught as part of any system of belief, religious or otherwise.

His direct predecessor in the vedic tradition of masters through which the technique has been preserved was Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, who innovated a spiritual renaissance in Northern India. He died aged 84 in 1953. Meditators refer to him as Guru Dev and at the traditional ceremony during which TM is taught, flowers and fruit are offered in thanksgiving.

It is the triumph of these two masters that they have been instrumental in bringing out the teaching and the technique in a form untainted by corrupted Yogic practices of concentration and coercion and which can be practised by everyone. They have restored the basic knowledge that fulfilment is not achieved by strain and suffering but by the natural tendency of life to grow and to progress.

Photo of Maharishi with the Beatles
Britain's 20,000 meditators have kept a low profile since the Beatles episode.
Interest in TM has spread by word of mouth...



Copyright © John Windsor, Guardian Newspapers Limited (UK).

HELLO JOHN, GOT A NEW MANTRA?

The Sunday Times Magazine
London, December 11 1988

'IT CHANGED MY LIFE'

HEALTH

Continuing our occasional series in which people describe how an illness, operation or revelation has given them a new outlook, the journalist John Harding describes the benefits of meditation.
Photography by Sandy Porter

John Harding Meditating.

HELLO JOHN, GOT A NEW MANTRA?

It was a Saturday. A fine day; the sun was shining, the birds were singing. I was floating across Eaton Square, my feet barely touching the ground. And I had arrived at this state simply be sitting in a chair doing next to nothing.

It lasted all day. Normally a reluctant shopper, I dazzled my girlfriend with my willingness to browse and buy. I positively enjoyed driving through West End traffic, opening doors for others, giving way to them in queues and apologising when they trod on my toes.

Some time before, while researching an article, I had found myself increasingly interested in transcendental meditation, the technique based upon ancient teachings, introduced to the West from India in 1958 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

TM, Associated with the sixties when the Beatles embraced it, has outlasted the trappings of kaftans and beads. Today some three million people practise it worldwide, 140,000 in this country [the UK].

It entails sitting quietly with eyes closed for 20 minutes twice a day, and mentally repeating a single word, or "mantra". I was originally intrigued by some of the claims made for it. It is said not only to reduce stress, but actually to help with a whole host of stress-related illnesses from allergies, asthma, migraine, and pre-menstrual tension, through to high blood pressure, heart disorders and cancer. One American study of 2,000 meditators over five years found that they were half as likely to fall ill as non-meditators. They spent 70 per cent fewer days in hospital, had an 87 per cent lower incidence of heart disease and 55 per cent fewer tumours.

Professionally I treated such statistics with caution, but I was impressed by the fact that some 600 British GP's who practice TM had written to the government urging that it be made available on the NHS. One doctor told me how she had prescribed TM for her patients over several years and had found it efficacious for a range of persistent problems. But what most impressed me were the interviews I conducted with a number of meditators, who had in common an enviable exuberance. They cited benefits including the ability to handle stress, feelings of calm, relaxation and general well-being, resistance to colds and flu, and the ability to think more clearly, to get down to things and accomplish more.

For some time I had been finding it hard to motivate myself to work. I was frittering away my time, neither earning money nor enjoying myself. I often felt engulfed by the stress of meeting deadlines and, on top of everything, I had developed allergy problems in the form of year-round hay fever induced by anything from pollen or dust to stroking my cat. On the face of it, TM seemed to have all the answers. What did I have to lose?

What I had to lose was 145 pounds. That is what the World Council of the Age of Enlightenment, the Maharishi's outfit, charges for tuition in the technique. [That was back then, rates have since been hiked to aim TM at successful people. For those wil less cash and strong motivation, doctors now sometimes prescribe TM - DS] Moreover, you are expected to buy a panacea in a poke, because no one will actually tell you exactly what it consists of until you sign up to learn.

Then you must undertake not to reveal it to others, which limits what I can tell you about it.

If that kind of secrecy is not enough to put you off, the introductory talk which you have to attend certainly could be. The presentation was painfully naive, delivered by two blandly smiling people who failed to reveal any more facts than those in the organisation's literature.

I signed on regardless, though with some misgivings that this is how people became Moonies. Such fears were groundless. TM is not a religion; people of all persuasions practise it.

Tuition comprised an hour-long session during which I was taught to meditate, followed by three further sessions on consecutive days to fine-tune the technique.

It is completely effortless. You are given a mantra which remains your secret. Twice a day you sit down, close your eyes and repeat it mentally. During that time, thoughts come, and when you become aware of them you simply return to the mantra. Sometimes there are periods when you are neither repeating the mantra nor thinking anything, so-called "Pure consciousness", accompanied by a feeling of great happiness. During meditation I am aware that I am in an altered state of consciousness quite unlike anything else. It is blissful. Breathing becomes shallow and slows along with the metabolism.

While meditation is itself enjoyable, the real benefits come afterwards. Some people feel them immediately, others over a period of months. The euphoria of my first week soon levelled out, but since that time I have not for one moment felt depressed, nor have I suffered negative thoughts. My partner noticed immediately that I had become happier, more thoughtful, calmer. My concentration has improved, I have amazing energy and am capable of long hours of physical work without fatigue. After a fortnight I realised that I had stopped biting my fingernails, a lifelong nervous habit. Meditators usually report a decrease in tobacco and alcohol consumption, often to nil. I sailed through the hay fever season on reduced medication with practically no reaction.

Often I feel a surge of energy sweep through my whole body. I can be walking along the street and be overwhelmed by a spontaneous burst of happiness. I have a sense of organisation which I have lacked all my life. I feel more patient and tolerant. At the same time I have all the normal emotions. The difference is that I am now able to control my anger and frustration, to resolve them in a rational manner.

Meditation is said to slow the ageing process. That I cannot assess, but after a couple of weeks I met an acquaintance of 15 years. "You look well," she said. A pause while she studied me intently. "I haven't seen you looking so well in ages." Another pause. "In fact, I've never seen you look this well before."

Settled Mind, Silent Mind

Settled Mind, Silent Mind


This interview with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is from Science of Mind Journal, Vol. 66 No. 11, Nov. 1993, pages 32-38. Science of Mind Journal is published by the Church of Religious Science, 3251 W. 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90020. Phone (213) 388-2181 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (213) 388-2181 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

You developed Transcendental Meditation. What is it, exactly?
What are some of its practical benefits?
Can other kinds of meditation produce similar results?
What gives TM such great potential for positive change?
How is TM different from the various other forms of meditation?
Can you offer us more understanding of the "settled state"?
Being in the "settled state," is equivalent to transcendence?
TM takes the mind from an active, "unsettled" state to the settled state?
What is the nature of transcendental consciousness?
Is the state of unbounded awareness maintained during the day?
How does a person learn to practice Transcendental Meditation?
When people begin to practice TM, does it involve a painful period?
If TM is a program for the mind, what is its relationship to the intellect?
What new applications are you currently exploring for TM?
What recent successes have you had in applying TM to achieve this goal?


Science of Mind: Transcendental Meditation, which you developed, has enjoyed phenomenal international success. What is it, exactly?

Maharishi: Transcendental Meditation is a simple, natural program for the mind, a spontaneous, effortless march of the mind to its own unbounded essence. Through Transcendental Meditation the mind unfolds its potential for unlimited awareness, transcendental awareness. Unity Consciousness - a lively field of all potential, where every possibility is naturally available to the conscious mind. The conscious mind becomes aware of its own unbounded essence, its infinite potential. Transcendental Meditation provides a way for the conscious mind to fathom the whole range of its existence - active and silent, point and infinity. It is not a set of beliefs, a philosophy, a lifestyle, or a religion. It's an experience, a mental technique one practices every day for 15-20 minutes.

Science of Mind: What are some of its practical benefits?

Maharishi: Scientific experiments with people who practice Transcendental Meditation indicate that it tends to produce normalization in all areas of life. It reduces stress, improves health, enriches mental functioning, enhances personal relationships, and increases job productivity and job satisfaction.

Science of Mind: Can other kinds of meditation produce similar results?

Maharishi: They can, of course. However, one advantage of Transcendental Meditation is its extreme simplicity. It is very simple for anyone to learn. In addition, it has been the object of scientific research for over 30 years, and its beneficial effects are well-documented.

Science of Mind: What gives Transcendental Meditation such great potential for positive change?

Maharishi: To answer that, we must look at the nature of creation itself. Creation has two sides: intelligence, which is the cause of everything, and the manifestations of intelligence, which are the physical and psychological features of the everyday world. Because Transcendental Meditation directly approaches intelligence, rather than the manifestations of intelligence, it solves problems by introducing harmony and well-being at the most basic level, and not by dealing with problems themselves. That's why it is so effective.

Consider this example: The gardener supplies water to the root of a tree. That water, that nourishment, then reaches all parts of the tree - leaves, branches, flowers, fruit - through the sap. We can think of the sap as analogous to intelligence and the green leaves or yellow flowers as analogous to the manifestations of the intelligence. The leaves and flowers are the intelligence of the sap, after it has been transformed. So intelligence - like the leaves and flowers of a tree - appears as the many different forms of manifest life. Those manifestations include every aspect of existence, from the material and physiological, through the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual. All of those features of life come from transformations of intelligence. In meditation, we directly meet this essential intelligence. Therefore, we have the possibility of nourishing all of its other levels, and thus all levels of manifestation, in a way that is harmoniously related to the whole universe.

Science of Mind: How is Transcendental Meditation different from the various other forms of meditation?

Maharishi: The basic difference is that Transcendental Meditation, in addition to its simplicity, concerns itself only with the mind. Other systems often involve some additional aspects with which the mind is associated, such as breathing or physical exercises. They can be a little complicated because they deal with so many things. But with Transcendental Meditation there is no possibility of any interference. So we say this is the all-simple program, enabling the conscious mind to fathom the whole range of its existence.

Transcendental Meditation ranges from active mind - or performing mind - to quiet mind - or resting mind. In this resting mind, one has purity and simplicity, uninvolved with anything other than the mind, uninvolved with any other practice. In Transcendental Meditation, because we deal only with the mind, we nourish all expressions of intelligence. The mind meditates, gains Transcendental Consciousness and brings about transformation in different fields of manifestation. All fields of life, which are the expression of intelligence, are nourished or transformed and made better through experiencing Transcendental Consciousness.

The mind, of course, is always concerned with other aspects, such as the physiology of the body, the environment, and the whole universe for that matter. But since Transcendental Meditation deals only with the performance of the mind, from its active states to its settled state, it remains unconcerned with those other aspects, though it deals with them all, because intelligence deals with them all.

Science of Mind: Can you offer us more understanding of the "settled state"? Why is it so important?

Maharishi: The settled state, as we know from physics, is the state of being from which nature's intelligence functions and administers the whole universe. The settled state is where we find the principle of least action, through which natural law operates. It is important because it is the fundamental level of life.

Science of Mind: And being in the "settled state," or the state of least action, is equivalent to transcendence?

Maharishi: Yes. Transcendence is the state where the mind has moved beyond everything other than itself. That means it has transcended all kinds of activity, small and big, and it has settled down in its own authority, in its own sovereignty, into the unbounded dignity of its own intelligence. And in this state, Transcendental Consciousness turns out to be a lively field of all possibilities.

Science of Mind: So, while the mind usually operates in an active, or "unsettled" state, Transcendental Meditation takes it to the settled state?

Maharishi: Exactly! To understand this process, we must ask: how does the mind work? What does it do? We know the mind is always subject to its own nature, which is to evolve. Evolution is the essential nature of existence. The mind is always searching for more and more and more - more knowledge, more happiness. The mind moves on, always toward more and more.

But the mind has two sides. One side is in the direction of diversity, in the direction of many, many. The other is in the direction of unity, the unified state. Gaining unity means rising to Transcendental Consciousness, the settled state, while gaining diversity means moving toward more and more activity. Unity is on one side, diversity is on the other side. Both sides belong to the nature of the mind.

The mind moves to diversity in search of more and more, and it moves in the direction of unity - a quiet state of unbounded awareness, unbounded consciousness, unbounded intelligence - in search of less and less. The move of the mind from its active state to its quiet state is part of nature. Its potential is unbounded, infinite; it enters the field of all possibilities. When the mind gains its unified state, that is Transcendental Meditation.

Science of Mind: What is the nature of transcendental consciousness?

Maharishi: It is unity consciousness, an encounter with the field of unified consciousness. In Transcendental Consciousness, the mind experiences itself, intelligence experiences itself. The mind is the observer of its own reality. In that state, the mind is Transcendental Consciousness.

Just as the quiet surface of the ocean is the source from which all waves arise, so the self-fulfilled state of mind, which we call Transcendental Consciousness, is the unified field of natural law, from which all the different laws of nature emerge and conduct their specific activities in the relative world.

Science of Mind: Is the state of unbounded awareness maintained during the day, even after the formal meditation period ends?

Maharishi: As a result of regular practice, it is maintained more and more, The situation is as though we were to take a white cloth and dip it in yellow dye. We bring the cloth out and put in the sun and the yellow fades away. Then we put it back again and again into the color and back again and again into the sun. It keeps on becoming yellow and yellow and yellow, then fading, fading, fading. But over time the color becomes permanent. That happens to the mind through regular practice. That unbounded awareness, that pure consciousness, the field of all the laws of nature, becomes ingrained in all activities of the mind. Then the mind begins to live in Unity Consciousness. That's how Unity Consciousness becomes a living reality.

Science of Mind: How does a person learn to practice Transcendental Meditation?

Maharishi: Through instruction. What happens is that the mind, in its active state, learns to experience its own less active states, experience its progressively minimized active states, until eventually it cognizes the transcendental state of consciousness.

But in learning to do this, we must remember that the mind has usually been allowed to wander around so long in the realm of knowledge or power or the pursuit of happiness that it must be taught how to know itself again. That's why teaching becomes necessary. After learning Transcendental Meditation one knows what the natural state is. But to realize this, one has to be liberated from unnatural programs, performances and experiences.

Most people have no experience with Transcendental Consciousness, pure consciousness, the pure nature of the mind. They are aware of active mind, which is the waking state of consciousness. They are also aware of the complete forgetfulness of the mind, the sleep state, And they are aware of the middle stage, the dreaming mind. But they are not aware of pure or Transcendental Consciousness. So the experience of that consciousness is taught in Transcendental Meditation, though it's nothing other that the very nature of the mind.

Science of Mind: When people begin to practice Transcendental Meditation, do they experience purging or cleansing effects, when negative things come up? Does moving into the unified state of consciousness involve a painful period?

Maharishi: We think about the cloth again. When the cloth is very, very dirty, you begin to rinse it in soap. You rinse it once and then twice. But as it gets cleaner, soiled patches which didn't seem to be there before begin to appear. However, if you keep on washing and washing, those patches start to fade away and fade away completely. Similarly, when old habits of stress and straining begin to be neutralized through Transcendental Meditation, a person may feel discomfort as other, more subtle habits of stress come up, but only because the natural state is returning and the stress is leaving, This is part of gaining normality and natural status.

For example, some people may say, "I don't worry about things like I used to. Does this mean I am losing myself, my identity?" To them, this normalization of the mind feels strange, They have been behaving with boundaries, in space and time, and now they wake up to unbounded awareness. So there is often a feeling of difference and strangeness at first.

Science of Mind: You say that Transcendental Meditation is a program for the mind. What is its relationship to the intellect?

Maharishi: Transcendental Meditation does not involve intellect. Transcendental Meditation is an experience of the mind, from the active levels to the unified level. It's just an innocent experience of active mind and an innocent experience of settled mind, silent mind.

Through certain other meditation practices, however, particularly those in which the intellect seeks God through recalling the qualities or names or virtues of God, the intellect is stimulated and begins to thrive, It does so increasingly in the presence of God in the glory of God, in the dignity of God, in the grace of God, in the merciful nature of God. There may then come a point where intellect is in its natural state and comprehends the unbounded awareness of God, the merciful nature of God, the presence of God. The intellect, through pursuing God intellectually, can recognize its natural status as the mind wakes up to its unboundedness.

The intellect thus leads one to the settled state, a non-intellectual experience of pure being. The intellect can finally be enveloped by all the exalted qualities of God as it arrives at its natural state, the level of fundamental intelligence. That will be the same as Transcendental Consciousness, the union which recognizes the unbounded dignity of the light of God, the feeling of God, the experience of unboundedness, pure intelligence. But such is not the approach of Transcendental Meditation, which does not operate through the intellect.

Science of Mind: What new applications are you currently exploring for Transcendental Meditation?

Maharishi: We are working in many directions - dealing with education, community planning, prison rehabilitation, and so on - but our primary focus is on promoting what we call "irreversible world peace." We are seeking to establish several permanent groups of 7000 advanced Transcendental Meditators in various places around the planet. Their meditations will create a powerful coherent influence in the collective consciousness and neutralize built-up stress and tension in the world, creating an environment of progress and peace.

Our goal is to create Heaven on Earth, and we are taking practical steps to accomplish it.

Science of Mind: What recent successes have you had in applying Transcendental Meditation to achieve this goal?

Maharishi: There have been many scientific studies validating the effectiveness of this program. Just now I could mention two recent demonstrations - one from the poorest country in the world and one from the richest.

For the last year, the president of Mozambique, His Excellency Joachim Alberto Chissano, has been organizing instruction in Transcendental Meditation for large numbers of his people. Recently, he credited their practice of this discipline with keeping the peace in Mozambique after many years of civil war.

During June and July of 1993, in Washington DC, about 4,000 experts in Transcendental Meditation demonstrated the power of this technology to eliminate stress and create more coherence and harmony throughout a society. Scientists now report preliminary statistics from the Washington police showing 13% drop in total violent crime during the demonstration compared to the same period in 1992. New reports show that President Clinton and Congress enjoyed much greater success and appreciation during the demonstration than either before or after it.

We feel very fulfilled by these results, and wish to invite every government to establish a coherence-creating group in its capital city. This step will ensure that every government has a neat, clean, pure atmosphere in which to make decisions.


Copyright © 1993 Science of Mind Journal.