The techniques from the Vedic Tradition used at the Maharishi School are tools that help students connect with their own inner Self and systematically develop their consciousness, day after day.

Vedic knowledge tools for students at Maharishi School
by Dr. Richard Beall, TM Magazine, Issue 8
31 August 2012

What is Vedic knowledge and how do we see it expressed at Maharishi School?

The minute students arrive at Maharishi School each morning, the uniqueness of the school becomes evident. The Vedic technologies they practice yield the kind of practical results that schools across the country and around the world hope to achieve.

Rather than reporting to their classrooms, our students proceed up the stairs to their meditation rooms—the Halls of Bliss (one for boys, one for girls)—where they do Yoga postures, pranayam (a breathing technique that settles mind and body), and the Transcendental Meditation technique.

In the classroom, they utilize a kind of feedback loop for self-awareness from an ancient science of natural health care and prevention, by placing their fingers around their wrists and taking their pulse to monitor their physiological balance.

In a science class, students link their study of genetics to universal principles—the same principles they may find in their literature or math class.

After school, athletes will do a set of Yoga postures to loosen up for a soccer game.

What do all these techniques have in common? They are tools that help students connect with their own inner Self and systematically develop their consciousness, day after day. At Maharishi School, inner development is not left to chance.

Vedic Foundations

In many ways, Vedic knowledge is what sets Maharishi School apart from other successful college preparatory schools. It starts with an awareness that there are two fields of life. The first we know very well: the ever-changing “relative” world of diversity and concrete reality, the world of “stuff” and sensory input. The moment we open our eyes each morning, the flow begins: different thoughts, different images, different sounds.

Underlying the diverse, changing reality is a silent, unseen, non-changing field of life, less known but universally present: the “absolute.” I discovered this in college before I learned the TM technique, in the Aldous Huxley classic, The Perennial Philosophy. Huxley observed that in every culture and in every age, some fortunate few experience this innermost reality. It’s what Emerson called the “Over-Soul” and what some quantum physicists now call the Unified Field of Natural Law. They see this as the answer to the “theory of everything” that Einstein pursued: a single, silent underlying field from which all the forms and phenomena of the universe arise.

Another word for all that is Veda. Veda means “knowledge,” both relative and absolute.

At Maharishi School, we teach that Veda isn’t contained in books. Vedic texts are a superficial artifact of the actual reality. That reality is consciousness itself, in all its levels and permutations. We see consciousness in two ways: our degree of wakefulness to ourselves and to our environment, and as the fundamental reality of both mental and physical existence.

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The technologies from the Vedic Tradition that the Maharishi School uses are described in more detail in the next article.

© Copyright 2012, Maharishi Foundation USA, a non-profit educational organization