Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

Modern science and vedic science: an introductiondevelopment of human consciousness. These states of consciousness areuniversal stages of human development accessible to everyone throughthe practice of Maharishi’s technologies of consciousness. What beforewas shrouded in the veil of mysticism is now scientifically understoodas a normal, natural stage of human life available to anyone.An article in the first issue of Modern Science and Vedic Science, byDr. Charles Alexander and others (1987) examined the empirical evidence,drawn from behavioral and neurophysiological research, for theexistence of these higher stages of human development. This articleunfolded the scientific basis for understanding and verifying higherstates of consciousness from the standpoint of a developmental psychologist,and laid the basis for a new paradigm of human development.Research on the Relationbetween Modern Science and Maharishi Vedic ScienceEach individual nervous system, when refined through Maharishi’stechnolgies of consciousness, is an instrument through which the silentfield of pure unbounded consciousness becomes accessible as a field ofinquiry. Since the unified field is all-pervading and everywhere thesame, a nervous system finely enough attuned in its functioning cangain the ability, according to Maharishi, to experience and identifyitself with that unbounded, undifferentiated, and unified field underlyingall activity in nature. By taking one’s awareness from the grosslevel of sensory objects to perception of finer levels of activity, one gainsthe ability to experience that level of nature’s functioning at which theunity of pure consciousness gives rise to diversity. Gaining this unifiedstate of consciousness is the means by which anyone can experience andconfirm the structure of knowledge and reality described in MaharishiVedic Science. This is partly what makes Maharishi Vedic Science aprecise, verifiable science: All theoretical structures of the science canbe verified through a reliable, systematic, effective technology. Otherfoundational aspects of this science will be considered below.Maharishi’s technologies of consciousness become, in the modernworld, a method for the investigation of the unified field and the mostrefined level of nature’s activity through direct experience. Modernphysics, through its objective method of inquiry, has glimpsed a unifiedfield underlying all of nature, but physics has reached a fundamental585