FW: ..The following was written during the recent TM Teachers' Reunion and Movement Archive Exhibition:
* Some of Maharishi’s Most Significant Contributions Maharishi made many contributions that were not only of great importance, but were also unique, unprecedented, or highly important historically in type or scale. Here is an initial list. Please let us know of any other contributions by Maharishi that you feel are a) unprecedented, and/or b) important in type or scale. In our enthusiasm to honor Maharishi, it is good to remember that Maharishi developed his teaching, practices, and organizations after other very influential spiritual teachers, organizations, and movements before him, all with their significant accomplishments. Meditation 1. Maharishi was the world’s most influential global meditation teacher. After significant ground-breaking beginnings by other meditation teachers, and a lot of help from modern communications and global awareness and interconnectedness, Maharishi made ‘meditation’ a so-far permanent household word in the West, and made his meditation the most widely practiced, globally accessible meditation system in history. Maharishi brought meditation solidly into society’s mainstream for the first time, making concrete and practical the theoretical philosophy of Vedanta, the Upanishads, and the Gita that had been floating around among Western intellectuals since the American Transcendentalists and their European counterparts, who spread them mainly as ideas and theories. Meditation was no longer just an idea or philosophy for open-minded intellectuals inclined to spirituality. And in America and the West, ‘practical’ is of the utmost importance. 2. Maharishi widely de-mystified meditation, taking it from the mountain cave to the subway and airport. From the monk to the commodities broker. From the pandit and obscure Raja library to the Scientific American. From folklore and rumor to the U.S. Senate. Otherworldliness, concentration, creating intellectual moods and attitudes, all have been dramatically lessened and marginalized. The general atmosphere of spiritual technique was deeply relaxed and a quantum shift in approach took place in the world of spirituality. Out of the forest of many misconceptions and the vast variety of possible spiritual experiences, Transcendental Consciousness zoomed forth, sprouting visibly in world consciousness. After preparatory partial penetration by others, the perennial High Road of Spirituality was reborn on Earth. 3. The further removal of meditation practice and theory from both Eastern and Western religion, faith, and belief was of the utmost importance in establishing meditation not only throughout the Western hemisphere, but in India and throughout Asia as well. Maharishi took this distinction between religion and spirituality much further than it had ever been taken. 4. The naturalness and ease of meditation is so important and fundamental that it deserves its own independent point. 5. The principle and experience described in the preparatory portion of the Introductory TM Talk (formerly called the Preparatory Lecture) in which the natural tendency of the mind to move toward more charm, and the most charming experience of bliss being the source of thought as the reason why effort is not needed in meditation, is a key, revolutionary understanding in the history of world spirituality. Without this knowledge, the ease of practice would be very problematic to convey and maintain, and it is unlikely that TM would have spread nearly as much as it has. 6. The same is the case with the knowledge given in the second day of checking during the four days of personal instruction - another revolutionary understanding in the history of world spirituality, without which the growth of TM in the world would probably have been nowhere near as large as it has been. Organization 7. Maharishi was the first to systemize and express meditation and its terminology for modern understanding and use, the first to train very large numbers of meditation teachers (over 25,000), The systematization of the teaching and checking of meditation practice was a major step and stage of its development not only in the West but also in India and globally. “To my mind, the checking notes and 7 steps are products of genius. Someday they’ll qualify as sacred texts.” - Expert author on Eastern spirituality in America 8. The number and size of institutions, websites, books and buildings founded and built by Maharishi and in his name around the world is staggering and virtually beyond cataloguing. Presentation 9. Although much of the metaphysical knowledge that Maharishi taught, such as the existence of Being and its character, was not new, Maharishi’s language was incredibly fresh, different, and engaging. He stepped out of the box of traditional spiritual expressions and customary stock phrases of India into a new world of clarity and precision of description, adapting his language to the West with incredible skill. Gender Balance 10. Continuing the trend begun several decades earlier by other Indian spiritual teachers in the West, Maharishi substantially stepped further out of the traditional Indian gender box, welcoming thousands of women on the same level as men to be meditation teachers and giving mantras. His Mother Divine program is unique in the history of the Vedic tradition, in which long periods of group meditation had been reserved for men. The Women’s Golden Dome on the campus of Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa and its use by thousands of women for extended periods of meditation is part of the same trend toward gender balance. Higher Consciousness 11. Before Maharishi, clear knowledge of enlightenment, its nature, its component experiential aspects, was more vague, misty, more of a guessing game. The clearer definitional statements in the Upanishads about discrete higher states were obscure and not widely known. Maharishi’s teachings on higher states of consciousness, beginning with Transcendental Consciousness, greatly clarified their nature, reducing widespread ambiguity and differences among views. The several basic types or components of experience of higher states were made more clear (witnessing, God, and Union, and other less general phenomena and capabilities). Although Maharishi eventually stopped using his “7 States” model, calling it “for the man on the street,” his description of discrete states and component experiences of enlightenment and higher states of consciousness was new and important. Modern Science 12. Maharishi was the first spiritual teacher to embrace modern scientific research and develop it as evidence for the efficacy of his methods and programs. This was not just a matter of getting deeply involved in research, but publication in peer-reviewed journals, which is a different, more publicly institutionalized matter with a far higher level of credibility. And, above and beyond that, his application of the scientific method to study and promote meditation practice was massive and unique in its development and scope. 13. Since early in the 20th century, many have written on the theme of the relationship between modern science, especially physics, and metaphysics. Maharishi may have been the first to introduce Asian traditional understanding into this field, to take theoretical East-West subjective-objective unification to another level by adding the element of predictable personal experience, as well as widespread and formalized education and promotion. In this, Maharishi has been a major figure of East-West integration, including many conferences, beginning in 1971, with leading scientists dialoguing with Maharishi about the relationship between modern science and the Vedic/Indian science of consciousness. TM-Sidhis & Group Practice 14. Indian spiritual masters and adepts were strongly taken aback when told of Maharishi’s unprecedented introduction of the siddhis to over 20,000 people, as the siddhis were before Maharishi rather strictly and secretly limited to very small numbers of highly qualified spiritual aspirants. 15. Maharishi was the first spiritual teacher in thousands of years to develop large groups of practitioners of the siddhis to powerfully accelerate and balance society and positive societal transformation, which he has done to a uniquely widespread, successful, and scientifically evidenced degree. Consciousness & Knowledge 16. Maharishi’s explanation of how the self-referral of consciousness creates or represents a virtual or unmanifest subject-object relationship within consciousness could be seen in the future to be of fundamental philosophical importance, even a turning point in the history of philosophy. This insight, in turn, he developed to explain the manifestation of the entire creation from the ‘self-interacting dynamics of consciousness,’ from that primordial self-referral subject-object relationship within the singularity of consciousness. For this two-part realization, Maharishi may eventually be seen as an important figure in the history of planetary thought. Veda 17. Although Maharishi was not the first to realize and express that the Veda is the story of higher consciousness, its development, and of human, divine, and cosmic evolution, and that the suktas of the Veda have different levels of meaning, and are not primitive in nature, the specificity he developed in this context, including the mathematical and logical structural sophistication of the Vedic Sanghita texts (which he termed his Apaurusheya Bhashya), and its potential relationship to modern physics, is of unique and monumental import. His analysis of the letter ‘a’ and the word ‘agni,’ the first word in the Rig Veda, and its logical-mathematical, sequential development to the rest of the Rig Veda (the Apaurusheya Bhashya), is a major achievement in the history of Vedic science and world literature and spirituality (since there is evidence that the Veda not only underpins India’s Vedic tradition, but many other cultural and knowledge traditions as well). 18. By the early 1970s, the precious and extremely important tradition of Vedic chanting, and the Pandits who could chant it, was almost extinct. Only one school of Rig Veda chanting (of 100 students) remained in India, and a few isolated other Pandits around India, whose sons were becoming medical doctors or IT professionals. Maharishi revived this tradition so dramatically that there are now hundreds of thousands of Vedic pandits all over India in hundreds of schools, producing a steady stream of well-trained and cultivated Pandits who are filling responsible positions in Vedic temples all over India and the world. This contribution alone is a spectacular lifetime achievement for any one person. 19. Maharishi said that the knowledge of Veda, Vedic Devata, and the physiology developed in detail by Dr. Tony Nader of Harvard and MIT was the most important scientific discovery in history. This discovery of precise structural and functional correlations between the Vedic knowledge structures and human body transcend cultural and religious tradition and indicate a profound and fundamental unmanifest (quantum mechanical?) blueprint or template of the human body and even creation itself. Dr. Nader routinely gives credit to Maharishi for first proposing this idea and research, and guiding him as a partner throughout the project. Other Vedic Sciences 20. Maharishi was also the driving force for the popularity of many other Vedic systems of knowledge and practice as well. Several New Age movement leaders have credited Maharishi for reviving ayurveda, vastu, jyotish, etc. They existed before Maharishi but usually in out-dated, corrupted and less interesting forms, or were only known obscurely. It is easy to forget this because many of these areas have since become very popular on their own and little mention is made by them about Maharishi. However, at a New Age conference, a leader asked a TM friend who had a booth for his Vedic-oriented business, "Where is the TM movement? You're the reason we all got into this." The number and variety of Vedic sciences that Maharishi carefully, thoughtfully, and successfully developed is also the beginning of an integrated, self-correlated Vedic Science of knowledge and technology. Personal 21. Maharishi was well-known for his 21-22-hour working days, maintaining innumerable contacts and projects, often quite large, all over the world simultaneously and keeping three teams of assistants going almost around the clock for over fifty years. 22. One of the primary attributes that kept all this going was Maharishi’s engaging, fun-loving personality and sense of humor, as well as his receptivity and solicitation of ideas from many others on an on-going basis throughout his life, and flexibility to change course, his often startling organizational and knowledge creativity, and his continual giving of credit to his teacher, the Vedic tradition of teachers, to the global times that are defined by these listed achievements, and to those who received them and those who will continue to receive and develop them. Jai Guru Dev
