BEING AND BE(OMING: The Maharishi Effect

DR. TONY NADER, neuroscientist, author, and leader of the Transcendental Meditation® movement, shares some insights on consciousness, and the research findings of TM that highlight the Maharishi Effect as a way of raising the consciousness of humanity.

- DR. TONY NADER, ANANYA PATEL

All spiritual leaders emphasize the importance of attending to an aspect of life that is beyond matter and physical energy, a reality transcendental to surface sensory perception.

The relationship between the physical and this non-physical reality has inspired great debates in philosophy and religion for millennia, and those debates continue among today’s scientists.

On one extreme are the physicalists, who propose that there is nothing spiritual, that consciousness and awareness are not real but only illusory byproducts—epiphenomena of the physical activity of the human nervous system. At best, physicalists see consciousness as a conundrum and call the mind-body relationship a “hard problem” because they cannot see how mechanical objective reality leads to subjective personal experience.

Then there are the dualists, who propose two different and separate fundamental realities, one objective and material and the other subjective and non-material. This begs the same question: how can two fundamentally different entities, one natural and obeying strict laws and the other seemingly supernatural, possibly interact and influence each other?

Scientists look at explanations asserting anything supernatural with skepticism. They shy away from explanations that do not conform to objective laws. Anything supernatural poses a problem for science, not only in the unexplainable mechanisms by which the non-physical interacts with the physical, but also in the potential “apparent moodiness” and “unreasonable decisions” of such supernatural actors.

The Advaita Vedanta perspective, brought to light by Adi Shankara, proclaimed by Swami Vivekananda, and more recently emphasized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, presents consciousness as primary and all there is. Consciousness is all there is!