Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentpracticing the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program ingroups twice daily:This will produce that influence of coherence and harmony in the nationwhich will keep all its cultural values fully alert and enlivened. The qualityof national consciousness will be so very coherent, so wide awake andinfused with unbounded awareness, that the nation will radiate love,affluence, and friendliness. It will radiate no destructive influences atall. Therefore, no enemies will be created. The chance of conflict escalatingto the breaking point will never arise. (1996, p. 61–62)By enlivening the total potential of natural law through the grouppractice of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program,coherence creating groups have averted war in areas where it isabout to erupt, and diminished or even eliminated war in areas whereit is already in progress (Orme-Johnson et al., 1988; Orme-Johnson etal., 1989).In his Vedic Science, Maharishi has thus introduced powerful technologiesfor collective action at the level of the unified field of naturallaw to neutralize negativity in society. Nevertheless, in his Gita commentaryMaharishi (1967) derives from his analysis of dharma highlypractical and timely advice concerning the prevention of war at its basis:Therefore it is wise for people of every generation to be cautious and notto tolerate an increase of wrong-doing in their surroundings, but to nipit in the bud. For it is the cumulative influence of these small wrongsdone by individuals in their own little spheres of activity that producesnational and international tensions and leads to catastrophe. (p. 44)We may notice here Maharishi’s phrasing: “small wrongs done byindividuals in their own little spheres of activity.” To use the language ofthe modern social sciences, the macrosocial is rooted in the microsocial,through the collective, cumulative influence created in the whole socialand physical environment by every individual action, however small.As to the nature of those individual acts, those “small wrongs,” wehave seen their basis: Actions that violate the evolutionary value of naturallaw, Maharishi (1967) points out, are those that are not in accordwith dharma. Wherever such actions occur, a negative influence is createdin the environment. For example, we saw, deviating from one’sown dharma produces “a struggle which is experienced as sorrow and126