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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. It is good to remember that Maharishi developed his teaching, practices, and organizations after many other very influential saints and spiritual teachers, organizations, and movements before him, all with their significant accomplishments. 1. Maharishi was the world’s first major global meditation teacher of modern times. Maharishi made ‘meditation’ a household word in the West. He 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), and made his meditation the most widely practiced, globally accessible meditation system in history. 2. After ground-breaking but comparatively limited teaching of meditation in the West before him by other saints and teachers from India, Maharishi made 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. Cosmic transcendental reality was no longer just an idea or philosophy anymore. And in America and the West, ‘practical’ is of the utmost importance. 3. Maharishi was the main teacher who widely de-mystified meditation to the world, 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. From tangled irrational confusion to simple clear accurate instructions. Otherworldliness, concentration, creating intellectual moods and attitudes, all were left to the eclectic fringe and the past. Out of the forest of uncountable misconceptions and infinite variety of possible spiritual experiences, Transcendental Consciousness zoomed forth, sprouting in world consciousness. After preparatory forays throughout the history of the West, and gradually building in cycles and waves, the perennial High Road of Spirituality was reborn on Earth. 4. 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 to a much higher and more established level. 5. The natural ease of meditation is so important that it deserves its own independent point. 6. 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 charming experience, 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. 7. 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. 8. 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 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. 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. 9. 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 building of 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 wave of gender balance. 10. Maharishi’s teachings on higher states of consciousness added clarity about their nature, and the several basic types or components of experience of higher states (witnessing, God, and Union, and other less general phenomena and capabilities). Before Maharishi, clear knowledge of enlightenment, its nature, was more vague, more of a guessing game, more misty. The clearer definitional statements in the Upanishads about discrete higher states were obscure and not widely known. 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. 11. 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. 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. 12. When the famous Indian spiritual teachers Yogi Bhajan and Swami Satchidananda were independently told that Maharishi taught the siddhis to 20,000 people, they were taken aback and bowed down on the floor and said that Brahmananda Saraswati, Maharishi’s teacher, was their own teacher of the siddhis. Maharishi’s introduction of his TM-Sidhi program to large numbers of people, especially Westerners, was unprecedented in its scope, the siddhis having been before Maharishi rather strictly and secretly limited to very small numbers of qualified spiritual aspirants. 13. Maharishi knew and mentioned that the use of group meditation and the group practice of the siddhis was hinted at in the Patanjali Yoga Sutra, and contained quite fully in an important Vedic text called the Yoga Vasishtha, attributed to one of the most famous and respected sages and masters of the Vedic tradition. But as far as current historical record goes, Maharishi was the first spiritual teacher in thousands of years to apply this knowledge 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. 14. Philosophically, 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 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 original self-referral subject-object relationship within the singularity of consciousness. For this two-part realization, Maharishi may eventually be seen as an important mind in the history of planetary thought. 15. Although Maharishi was not the first to realize and express that the Veda is the story of 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). 16. 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 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 would be a marvelous lifetime achievement for any one person. 17. 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. 18. Maharishi was also the driving force for the popularity of many other Vedic systems as well. Several people high up in the New Age movements have credited Maharishi for the popularity of ayurveda, vastu, jyotish, etc. They existed before Maharishi but usually in out-dated, corrupted and less interesting forms, or were only known about 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 one of the top people asked a friend who had a booth for his non-TM 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. 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. 20. The number of institutions, websites, books and buildings founded and built by Maharishi and in his name around the world is staggering and virtually beyond cataloguing. 21. Maharishi was well-known for his 21 or 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 - his 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.
