Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

Ideal Government in the Vålm⁄ki RåmåyaÔThe Rāmāyaṇ has delighted and inspired the people of India formillennia, and has been a principle text underlying Indian ethics andmorality. Maharishi, however, describes the Rāmāyaṇ’s deeper significanceas the display of the fully awake, self-referral intelligence at theunmanifest basis of creation—it is the account of how the silent field ofpure intelligence, known in modern scientific terms as the unified fieldof all the laws of nature and in the Vedic Language as Yoga, operateswithin itself and assumes the role of dynamism; and how the balancedstate of silence and dynamism, which has administered all of creationsince the dawn of time, can be unfolded in individual and collective lifeto bring perfection to every level of society (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,personal communication, November 2001). Thus in Maharishi’s viewthe narrative not only recounts the delightful story of Rām and Sītāand their adventures, but more significantly it portrays through theirbehavior the dynamic structure of fully awake self-referral consciousness,and provides a vision of its application to all fields of life. And asdiscussed above, it is this field of pure intelligence that lies at the basisof Maharishi’s theory of government.Maharishi’s Absolute Theory of Government thus provides a conceptualframework that enables us to examine the Rāmāyaṇ from a freshand profound perspective. Contemporary theories of textual analysisrely on interdisciplinary approaches that explore cultural, historical,sociological, philosophical, and philological influences in a work.Maharishi, however, describes the Vedic literature as the eternal, absoluteexpression of self-referral consciousness, and therefore not subjectto the analyses developed for man-made literary works. He explainsthat in the dynamic process of unfolding the universe, self-referral consciousnessmoves within itself, and through its own dynamics bringsforth the diversified forms and phenomena in creation. In this process itexpresses its own structure in terms of unmanifest sound, Shruti, whichMaharishi (1995a) describes as intelligence in the form of sound producedby the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness (p. 352). Thesesounds, Maharishi explains, are the laws of nature that create andadminister the universe. Significantly, they are available as the forty147