From: David Orme-Johnson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 12:08 PM To: David Orme-Johnson Subject: Rationale for the Maharishi Effect
Dear Colleagues, The rationale for the Maharishi Effect, which holds that we exist in a field of consciousness through which everyone is connected, is a very old idea with a high pedigree. Even more exciting is that the modern seers who know natural law the best, the greatest physicists of our time, have been lead by their discoveries to the realization that consciousness is the most fundamental level of natural law. I just added a rationale section to TruthAboutTM.com, snappily entitled “HYPERLINK "http://www.truthabouttm.org/truth/SocietalEffects/Rationale-Research/index. cfm#rationale"Some Conceptual Precedents for a Field Theoretic View of Consciousness from the Perennial Philosophy, Social Sciences, and Quantum Physics.” You can go to the link above to view the whole thing, and/or here are some excerpts. Perennial Philosophy. The suggestion that individuals interact directly at a distance through an underlying common field of consciousness has a long history. Indeed, it is embedded in the “perennial philosophy,” the term Aldous Huxley (1945) first applied to the universal system of thought that has persisted throughout history in all parts of the world and which continues to be seriously discussed by major thinkers, as documented by Sheer (1994). The key tenets of the perennial philosophy can be stated as: (1) the phenomenal world is a manifestation of an unmanifest transcendental ground, a field of consciousness or Being, which is the infinite organizing power structuring all forms and phenomena in the universe; (2) the human mind also has a transcendental ground, which is the silent level of transcendental consciousness at the basis of all thought and perception; (3) transcendental consciousness is the direct experience by the individual of the transcendental ground of the universe; and (4), this experience organizes individual and collective life to be fully evolutionary, creative, harmonious, and problem-free. From this perspective, the key to creating an ideal society is a technology that promotes transcending from the waking state mind to experience transcendental consciousness (Maharishi, 1977). The physiological correlates of transcendental consciousness through Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique have been extensively studied (e.g., Wallace, 1970; Travis & Pearson, 1999; Travis, Tecce, Arenander, & Wallace, 2002). The transcendental ground of the universe is conceived of in terms of a God concept in many cultures. In others, like Taoism and Vedanta, it is simply regarded as an abstract field of pure consciousness. Social Sciences. Concepts of collective consciousness have been proposed by some of the founders of the social sciences, such as Fechner’s transcendental basis of perception, Durkheim's conscience collective, and Jung’s collective unconscious. Gustav Fechner is best known for developing methods of measuring sensory thresholds, which are the least amounts of energy that the senses can detect. What motivated his studies of thresholds was his experience of a single transcendental continuum of “general consciousness” underlying the discontinuities of numerous localized individual minds associated with different people. He illustrated the idea with a model in which individual minds were likened to separate islands in the water. But if the level of the water were lowered sufficiently, the “islands” would be seen to actually be mountains that are connected at their base by the ground. Like that, if the perceptual threshold were insensitive, as is usually the case, then each individual mind would experience itself as isolated from other minds. But if the sensory threshold were sufficiently refined, Fechner believed, the individual would experience the continuity of consciousness at the basis of all minds. Fechner felt that such a lowering of the sensory threshold was what happened to him when he himself had a direct experience of what he called the general consciousness. Physics. Many of the founders of modern physics have expressed their insights that, like the perennial philosophy, the ultimate reality is a field of consciousness. Although the remarks of great scientists are not formally a part of science, it is significant that those who understand the scientific paradigm most clearly have made such statements. For example, Sir James Jeans (1932), the eminent British physicist and mathematician who was the first to propose that matter is continuously created throughout the universe, said: “Thirty years ago, we thought, or assumed that we were heading towards an ultimate reality of a mechanical kind .... Into this wholly mechanical world .... life had stumbled by accident .... Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimously, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter—not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms of which our individual minds have grown exist.....” (pp. 185-186). All the best, David David W. Orme-Johnson, Ph.D. HYPERLINK "mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]"[EMAIL PROTECTED] HYPERLINK "http://www.truthabouttm.com/"www.TruthAboutTM.com HYPERLINK "http://www.seagroveartist.com/"www.SeagroveArtist.com 191 Dalton Dr. Seagrove Beach, FL 32459 850-231-2866 850-231-5012 Fax No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. 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