It is entirely possible that we are literally bathed and surrounded by the transcen-dent and yet have not tuned it in. In this light, Veda is like the whole radio band. But over time its significance became distorted as people lost contact with pure awareness.
In place of Vedic consciousness, India was left with Vedic books, the books declare that Veda is Supreme and universal, but as is obvious by the state of India today, the actual power of Veda has ceased to exist, leaving only the form.
It is like knowing that the cosmic computer exists, having complete instruction manuals for it, but not remembering to plug it in. In order to direct people toward pure awareness, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi needed to point them away from the surface of life.
Eastern masters who had done this previously, as they all have, made it seem that turning inward meant a sacrifice of worldly values and objective reality. Maharishi took exactly the opposite position, saying that the whole purpose of transcending was to expand the mind. If subjectivity expands, then its reflection-the visible world-must expand with it.
The long degeneration of Indian wisdom has led to the misunderstanding that renunciation is the path to turiya and detachment the goal of life: "Life on the basis of detachment! This is a complete distortion of Indian philosophy. It has not only destroyed the path of realization but led the seekers of Truth continuously astray.
Indeed it has left them without the possibility of ever finding the goal." Maharishi wrote this in 1967, when his landmark commentary on the Bhagavad Gita was published. His words blow like a strong wind through the torpor of Eastern doctrine. In every tradition, not just the Indian, the grip of detachment and renunciation has had its withering effect.
The opinion prevails that the mind must be forced out of activity if it is to reach silence. A vivid image from the Veda says that meditation is like taming a wild elephant. The animal must be tied to a stake and allowed to shriek and trample until it is totally exhausted. Then the taming can begin. Maharishi contends that this is a fatal error.
The truth is that the mind wants to find the fourth state and will seek it if left to its natural tendencies. Meditation, then, is only a vehicle (Maharishi calls it an "effortless effort") to point the mind in the right direction. The most obvious evidence that he is right comes from the silent gap that naturally appears in the space between thoughts.
But the Veda gives a supporting analogy: thoughts are like ocean waves. Rising and falling, they see only their own motion. They say, "I am a wave," but the greater truth, which they do not see, is, "I am ocean." There is no separation between the two, whatever the wave might suppose.
When a wave settles down, then it instantly recognizes that its source in ocean -infinite, silent, and unchanging - was always there. The same holds true for the mind. When it is thinking, it is all activity; when it stops thinking, it returns to its source in silence.
Only then, when the mind touches pure awareness, will the real storehouse of Veda be located. The experience of Veda therefore is not ancient or even particularly Indian. It is universal and can be had at any moment by any person. The whole trick is not to move horizontally, which is how the stream of consciousness normally moves, but to sink vertically.
This vertical descent is transcending, meditation, dhyan, "going beyond" - all manifestations of a mind that ceases to identify with waves and begins to identify with ocean. If this argument is right, then the nature of the mind and the mind-body connection have to be reconsidered.
The point that Archimedes was looking for - a place to stand on and move the world - actually exists. It is inside us, covered up by the fascinating but misleading moving-picture show of the waking state.
This may explain why mind-body medicine has proved so inconsistent. We casually assume that a person who survives cancer or can cure himself of a fatal disease operates with the same mental machinery as anyone else, but this is not true: mental processes can be deep or shallow.
To go deep means to contact the hidden blueprint of intelligence and change it--only then can visualization of fighting cancer, for example, be strong enough to defeat the disease. But most people cannot do that; their thought power is too weak to trigger the appropriate mechanisms.
The practical question is whether meditation is strong enough to radically improve our thought power. Several studies conducted by scientists associated with Maharishi have shown that meditation may in fact induce profound change, far beyond the simple relaxation that most people use it for in the West, even beyond the medical applications of relieving stress, reducing blood pressure, and so on.
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