Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and govermentcess of knowing itself, gives rise sequentially to the diversity of naturallaw and ultimately to the whole of nature.This experience was not, Maharishi asserts, on the level of thinking,or theoretical conjecture, or imagination, but on the level of directexperience, which is more vivid, distinct, clear, and orderly than sensoryexperience, perhaps much in the same way that Newton or Einstein,when they discovered the laws of universal gravitation or specialrelativity, enjoyed a vivid experience of sudden understanding or a kindof direct “insight” into these laws. The experience of the unified fieldof all the laws of nature appears to be a direct experience of this sort,except that it includes all laws of nature at one time as a unified totalityat the basis of all existence—an experience obviously far outside therange of average waking state experience.The ancient Vedic literature, as Maharishi interprets it, expresses,in the sequence of its flow and the structure of its organization, thesequence of the unfoldment of the diversity of all laws of nature out ofthe unified field of natural law. The Veda is thus to be understood as thesequential flow of this process of the oneness of pure consciousness givingrise to diversity; and Maharishi Vedic Science is to be understoodas a body of knowledge based on the direct experience of the sequentialunfoldment of the unified field into the diversity of nature. It is anaccount, according to Maharishi, of the origin of the universe fromthe unified field of natural law, an account that is open to verificationthrough direct experience, and is thus to be understood as a systematicscience.These ancient seers of the Vedic tradition developed techniques torefine the human physiology so that it can produce this level of experience,techniques that were passed on over many generations, but wereeventually lost. Maharishi’s revival and reinterpretation of ancientVedic science is based on his revival of these techniques which havenow been made widely accessible through the training of thousands ofteachers of the Transcendental Meditation program. He has thus provideda reliable method of access to this field of direct experience wherethe oneness of pure consciousness gives rise to the diversity of the lawsof nature; and he has also developed applications of this technologythat render it open to experimental testing. These applications will beconsidered below.576