Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

Modern science and vedic science: an introductionMaharishi describes the experience of this unified field of consciousnessas an experience of a completely unchanging, unbounded unity ofconsciousness, silently awake within itself. Gaining intimate familiaritywith the silence of pure consciousness, Maharishi holds, one gainsthe ability to experience within that silence an eternal “fabric” or “blueprint”of all laws of nature that govern the universe, existing at theunmanifest basis of all existence. This unmanifest basis of life, whereall laws of nature eternally reside in a collected unity, is experiencedas the fabric of the silent field of consciousness itself, which is not inspace and time, but lies at the unmanifest basis of all manifest activityin space and time. Through Maharishi’s work, this experience comes tobe understood (as we see below) as a normal state of consciousness thatarises in the natural course of human development.Glimpses of this universal domain of experience, where all possibilitiesreside together in an eternally unified state, have been reported inalmost every culture and historical epoch, from Plato to Plotinus andAugustine, and from Leibniz to Hegel and Whitehead. Scientists likeKepler, Descartes, Cantor, and Einstein also appear to have written ofit and seemingly drew their insights into the laws of nature from thisexperience. Descartes (1908) writes, for example, of an experience thathe had as a young man of “penetrating to the very heart of the kingdomof knowledge” and there comprehending all the sciences, not insequence, but “all at once.” Scientists and writers from many traditionshave described this experience of unity, which confirms that it is completelyuniversal, and not a product of a particular cultural tradition.Just as the Vedic tradition has been misunderstood, however, so havethose descriptions of consciousness found in these different culturaltraditions; for without a technique that makes the experience systematicallyaccessible to everyone, the understanding that this is a universalexperience of the most fundamental level of nature’s activity has beenobscured, and has not before now emerged into the light of universalscience.According to Maharishi Vedic Science, it is not only possible togain direct experience of the unity of natural law at the basis of themanifest universe, but one can also directly experience the unity ofnature sequentially giving rise to the diversity of natural law throughits own self-interacting dynamics. Maharishi’s most recent research has577