Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

Consciousness-based education and governmentWith this knowledge as a foundation, teachers and students in alldisciplines enjoy a shared and comprehensive understanding of humandevelopment and a set of deep principles common to all academicdisciplines—a unified framework for knowledge. With this unifiedframework as a foundation, students can move from subject to subject,discipline to discipline, and readily understand the fundamentalprinciples of the discipline and recognize the principles the disciplineshares with the other disciplines they have studied. This approachmakes knowledge easy to grasp and personally relevant to the student.Pure consciousness and the unified fieldConsciousness has traditionally been understood as the continuous fluxof thoughts and perceptions that engages the mind. Thoughts and perceptions,in turn, are widely understood to be merely the by-product ofthe brain’s electrochemical functioning.Maharishi has put forward a radically new understanding of humanconsciousness. In Consciousness-Based education, pure consciousnessis understood as the foundation and source of all mental activity, themost silent, creative, and blissful level of the mind—the field of one’stotal inner intelligence, one’s innermost Self. (This unbounded value ofthe Self is written with an uppercase “S” to distinguish it from the ordinary,localized self we typically experience.) Direct experience of thisinner field of consciousness awakens it, enlivens its intrinsic propertiesof creativity and intelligence. Regular experience of pure consciousnessthrough the Transcendental Meditation technique leads to rapidgrowth of one’s potential, to the development of higher states of humanconsciousness—to enlightenment.But consciousness is more, even, than this.Throughout the twentieth century, leading physicists conjecturedupon the relation between mind and matter, between consciousnessand the physical world; many expressed the conviction that mind is,somehow, the essential ingredient of the universe. But Maharishi goesfurther. He has asserted that mind and matter have a common source,and that this source is pure consciousness. Consciousness in its pure,silent state is identical with the most fundamental level of nature’sfunctioning, the unified field of natural law that has been identifiedand described by quantum theoretical physicists over the past several6