Transcendental News, Vol 24. No 2, September 2020

Dr Tony Nader give
at Westminster parliamentary cele
For the third year in succession,
Dr Tony Nader, leader of
Maharishi’s international
organisations, was invited
to give the keynote address at the
annual celebration of International
Yoga Day organised by the All Party
Parliamentary Group on Indian
Traditional Sciences (APPG).
This year, due to Covid-19
restrictions, the occasion was held
online, and this enabled more than
200 people to participate, the biggest
audience so far for the APPG's annual
Yoga Day event.
Dr Nader’s address emphasised
the role that all aspects of Yoga – in
particular Transcendental Meditation
– can play in creating and maintaining
health and immunity.
“Yoga is a science of wholeness, that
establishes fullness of life,” he said.
“And the key aspect in this value
that Yoga offers is knowledge, and
knowledge of oneself, experiencing
higher states of consciousness, and
therefore using one’s full potential to
have a life on the individual level and
social level that is most fulfilling for
the individual and for society.
“We have seen that this pandemic
that we are facing is a global
aspect of disease,” continued
Dr Nader. “It requires not only
treatment of individuals but also
behavioural adjustments, national
and international co-operation,
right decision-making, working with
scientists to discover preventative and
curative measures.
“And we should remember that
Yoga, in its essence, is of course unity.
But not only unity of mind and body
of an individual; but also unity on the
level of society, unity on the level of
nations, unity on the level of individual
and environment, and therefore it is
something that addresses all of these
values on the level of consciousness,
on the level of awareness.
“Yoga leads to that unbounded
knowledge – that the reality of
life is consciousness. And it’s from
consciousness that the physical
aspects of existence emerge.
Material values come from
consciousness
“It’s not the other way around. Modern
trends of science try to think that it’s
the material value, the physical, that
leads to the mental, that leads to
consciousness and awareness. In the
Vedic tradition, the Vedantic tradition
and the true Yoga tradition, it’s the
other way round. It is actually a field
of Being, which is consciousness,
that manifests itself in very specific
ways, as matter. Modern physics
has discovered that indeed, the
aspects of reality that we see on the
surface, which are objects made out
of molecules, which are themselves
made out of atoms, and atoms out
of elementary particles, elementary
particles made out of fields of energy,
and then these fields of energy
are then gradually unified through
quantum layers, from quantum
mechanics, to quantum field theories,
to Unified Field theories, that show
there is one unbounded field of Being.
This field manifests as these fields of
energy, particles, grouping together
to become atoms, molecules, and
then objects.”
Yoga allows the individual to
experience this Unified Field, he
explained.
“There are techniques of Yoga,
such as Transcendental Meditation,
which is the supreme level of Yoga,
which allow the mind to experience
that value. Hundreds of scientific
research studies have shown the
effect of that TM in integrating mind
and body, improving the immune
system, reducing inflammation, and so
balancing the physiology.
“What we are seeing in this Covid
problem that the world is still facing, is
there is the attack from a virus which is
an environmental factor, and that attack
has to be acted against by the body, so
the immune system has to be strong.
“But the immune system has to
be balanced also, and not over-react,
because most of the fatalities and
problems that have happened are
due to this over-reaction of the body
against the virus.
“What this means is there is lack
of integration between mind, body,
immune system, and reactions to this
aspect of the disease. So we have
seen that what happens in our mind is
reflected in our nervous system, what
happens in the nervous system is
reflected in the hormones, and the way
they are secreted, which influences the
immune system and the inflammatory
response of the body.
“That’s why we have what we call
psycho – on the mind level – neuro –
on the nervous level – endocrino – on
the endocrine and hormonal level
– immunology – on the immune level.
There is an axis, which connects mind,
nervous system, hormones, and then
6 • Transcendental Meditation News • September 2020 • Vol. 24 • No. 2