Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and GovernmentBy providing a technology that allows individuals to contact thesource of natural law within themselves, Maharishi Vedic Science offersfulfillment to the vision of the founding fathers that this new countrycould provide an opportunity for all citizens to realize their full potentialand live life in accord with natural law, the “will of God.”What was the understanding of natural law theoryat the time of the American revolution?To discover how the founding fathers understood natural law wemust turn to the legal authorities of the time. All colonial lawyers studiedthe common law cases collected and reported by Sir Edward Coke,a seventeenth century jurist and legal scholar, and William Blackstone,who continued Coke’s work a century later (Bailyn, 1992, p. 30). Alleducated men were familiar with Coke and Blackstone as the foremostauthorities on the common law.Dean Roscoe Pound, a noted American jurist asserts that,So steeped were the eighteenth century colonial lawyers in Coke’s teachings,for Coke’s Institutes were the most authoritative law books availableto them, and they were dealing with a tradition and not a code,that the controversial literature of the era of the Revolution, if it is to beunderstood, must be read or interpreted by a common law lawyer. Indeedhe must be a common law lawyer, . . . brought up to read and reread Cokeand Blackstone until he got the whole feeling and atmosphere of thosewho led resistance to the home government. (Pound, 1945, p. 348)The following quotation from Coke’s notes in the well-known Calvin’scase describes the universally acknowledged understanding ofnatural law at that time. According to Coke, natural law precedes manmadelaw and is unchanging and eternal. It is the same for all meneverywhere. The ability to know natural law, to know right from wrong,was given to man by the Creator to guide and protect him. It was naturallaw that guided legal decisions before any laws were written.The law of nature was before any judicial or municipal law (and) is immutable.The law of nature is that which God at the time of creation of thenature of man infused into his heart for his preservation and direction;and this is the eternal law, the moral law, called also the law of nature.And by this law, written with the finger of God in the heart of man80