Field Paradigm technologies
We already hinted at the main Field Paradigm technology earlier. If we really are a wave on an ocean of consciousness (we might as well call it ‘divine consciousness’) then the most important practical application of this would be a way to come back in touch with this higher source of ourselves.
As we said earlier, in ancient times people had completely natural techniques to get there but teaching this technique required a specific formula, and this formula got lost over time.
Actually, it’s better to say it almost got lost over time. There was a secluded group of teachers in the Himalayan mountains, far away from society, where they still had this knowledge, but it was only passed on from teacher to student through a very personal relationship. The only way to get this technique was to give up your life and go live in a cave in service to your teacher.
Sometime in the early 20th century an Indian physics student decided to do just that. He met one of the last remaining teachers from this tradition, Brahmananda Saraswati, someone who was widely recognized by Indian society as the prime exponent of Vedic knowledge, and one of the very few who had reached the highest state of Unity consciousness. Even the president of India regularly went to see him for council. When the student met him he decided on the spot that all he wanted to do was to learn from him. The teacher told him to finish his studies first, which the student did, but after this he left everything behind and spent 13 years serving his teacher, learning his techniques and absorbing both his knowledge and his state of consciousness like a sponge.
After all this time the student became a great exponent of knowledge himself and got the title of Maharishi, which is literally translated as: ‘Great seer’, somebody who could see the reality of life, but could also teach it to others. His full title was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
A few years after his teacher had passed away, Maharishi ended up back in society, almost by coincidence, and was asked to give a lecture on what he had learned from his Guru Dev (as Maharishi called him). His message was simple: Mankind had completely misunderstood what meditation was all about. By interpreting meditation as a form of trying to control the mind, usually through some form of concentration, they were making it a lot more difficult than it really was. This could bring some relaxation at best, but would actually prevent the mind from reaching that state of unity with the ocean, the higher consciousness of which we are all a part. This experience, rather than some relaxation, was the true goal of meditation.
The experience of the wave settling with the ocean is an experience of coming home for the mind, he explained, and the mind wants nothing more than to go there. Actually, the mind is already genetically programmed to go there, and will do so by itself. All we have to do is activate this natural process and allow it to happen.
Naturally people were curious to learn this natural process, and so Maharishi started teaching them. To differentiate his technique from other forms of meditation he called it ‘Transcendental Meditation’, a natural effortless form of meditation that will cause the mind to spontaneously transcend (go beyond) thought and activity and reach that state of pure inner silence. Transcending, Maharishi explained, can only happen naturally. If you try to control the mind in any way, or make any kind of effort, you only keep the mind active, and an active wave cannot merge with the ocean. Transcendental Meditation had nothing to do with ‘meditation’ as it was commonly understood, in fact it was almost the opposite.
Maharishi’s message was quite strong:
“I call my method meditation, but it is, in fact, a technique of self-exploration; it enables a man to dive into the innermost reaches of his being, in which dwell the essence of life and the source of all wisdom, all creativity, all peace, and all happiness… The word meditation is not new, nor are the benefits of meditation new… But for centuries the technique of meditation of this kind has been forgotten. This is why man suffers, or seems to suffer. This is why suffering has become so universal, so much an inescapable part of life.”
When people learned the technique they found, indeed, that this effortless process was far easier and far more enjoyable than the techniques they had been trying before. Most importantly, they found it was far more effective. Most people had this experience of transcending from their very first sitting, and also started noticing profound changes in their lives from the first few days of practice. It didn’t require much practice to create these changes, just 20 minutes twice a day was sufficient.
Maharishi’s message and technique spread like wildfire, first around India, then around the world. He made several tours around the world and taught tens of thousands of people. He didn’t have any costs and as such didn’t charge anything, just relied on some donations to keep him going. However, tens of thousands of people was not enough to really make a difference in the world. He decided that if he really wanted to bring the experience of people’s true nature to the entire population, he’d have to ‘multiply himself’.
So he started developing a course to train other Transcendental Meditation teachers. This was a big step, as it would be the first time in history that people outside of the tradition of masters in the Himalayas would be able to teach this technique to others, bit time required it. Having the experience of tens of thousands of people who learned the technique, and having witnessed every possible reaction people could have, he developed a course to prepare other teachers to teach the technique properly, and also guide people through all possible experiences. It took Maharishi more than 10 years to develop and refine this training, and it turned out to be quite an extensive course, requiring 5-6 months of full time in-residence training, but after this a TM teacher would be properly trained to pass on the technique. Thanks to modern technology, the course was recorded on video, so that every teacher in the world would get exactly the same training.
More than 40.000 people took the training to become Transcendental Meditation teachers, and then the TM technique really started to take off. The first wave came in the 60’s, largely because several celebrities, including the Beatles, were practicing it.
Maharishi, however, was a scientist, and felt most comfortable amongst other scientists. So he started inspiring scientists to do research on the TM technique. ‘This is a great thing’, he said, ‘but don’t take my word for it, investigate it for yourself’.
Many scientists were definitely curious. If this experience of transcending was what it was always claimed to be, a unique 4th state of consciousness where the mind gets a direct experience of a higher universal consciousness, it must have quite some special effects on the physiology.
Could those effects be measurable?
They were measurable, even beyond anyone’s imagination. Here are some of the most important things they found:
During TM practice:
- A very deep state of rest, often deeper than deep sleep, allowing the body to heal deep-rooted stresses
- Hormonal changes: Decrease of Stress hormones, increase of happiness hormones
- Restructuring the brain: reversing the damaging effects of stress on the brain
- Development of our full brain potential
Long-term effects:
- Significant reduction of stress, anxiety, depressions, insomnia, addictions, PTSD etc.
- Improved health, decreased blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, asthma and many other health problems.
- 50 to 70% reduction in healthcare expenses
- Increased self-actualization (self-confidence, self-acceptance, being in the now)
- Decreased impulsiveness, healing ADHD, increased concentration
- Improved brain functioning, measured through improved IQ, creativity, memory, reflex time etc.
Since the first research on TM was published in 1971, 250 universities have conducted more than 600 studies, resulting in 350 scientific publications. This is an extraordinary volume of research, meaning that most of the effects described above were confirmed by several (sometimes up to 50) studies, all independent from each other. The U.S. National Institutes of Health even spent $25 Million on 20 years of TM research, with spectacular results. The story of transcending quickly became a story of extraordinary effects, confirmed by an extraordinary quality of research.
We’ll discuss these effects later in the book in detail, but now we just wanted to touch upon a few of them, as they gradually lead us to the most extraordinary effect of all.
Deep rest
In one the very first researches was ever done on TM, researchers at Harvard Medical School looked at the state of rest in the body during TM practice, as compared to sleep. They measured oxygen consumption, as it was generally known that if the body is in a deeper state of rest, it consumes less oxygen. They found that after less than one minute of TM practice the rest goes far deeper than even during deep sleep, generally only achieved after 5-6 hours.
Over 30 studies have since confirmed the deep state of rest during TM, whether it is measured by oxygen consumption, Galvanic Skin Resistance, breath rate, heart rate or stress hormones in the blood.
Why is this deep rest important? Because it allows the body to remove deep stress.
Stress is like a backpack full of rocks. Every experience we go through leaves an impression that is stored somewhere in the body. If the experience is very intense we can feel this clearly. For example, that feeling of a knot around your heart after you have had a fight with someone. If you collect too many rocks like this, sooner or later the weight of stress will start to disrupt the normal functioning of your nervous system; resulting in health problems, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, burnouts etc.
Fortunately we have a way to remove these rocks again… and we don’t even have to do anything. The body will do so automatically, when it is at rest. Rest is the antidote to stress. When we sleep during the night, the body will remove all the rocks we accumulate during the day, so the next day we can start a fresh… in theory.
The problem is: the rest during sleep is not enough. Have you ever felt how that knot around the heart may hurt a bit less after a good night sleep, but it hasn’t gone completely? The sleep was not deep enough to remove it. This will probably become a rock that you’ll have to carry with you for the rest of your life… unless you learn to transcend.
To test how effective transcending really is to remove deep rooted stress researchers did a test on people who are carrying a bigger backpack full of rocks than just about anybody else: Vietnam War Veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is considered incurable, and nobody knows this better than the army. In the US, for example, since the start of the Iraq war, more soldiers have died at home due to suicide as a result of PTSD than on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. There is nothing anyone can do, and the soldiers simply didn’t see any other way out anymore.
Researchers randomly divided a group of war veterans suffering from PTSD into a TM group and a control group that received psychotherapy treatments, and measured their state of mental health on 9 different variables, each with a scale from a moderate problem to a severe problem. After 3 months the psychotherapy group didn’t see any improvements, as predicted by the psychotherapists themselves. PTSD is incurable after all. The TM group, on the other hand saw such significant improvements on almost all the variables, that after 3 months 70% of the veterans could already go home. They needed no further treatment.
You would think that a study like this would turn the world upside down. If transcending can help such people, where nothing else works, you can imagine it can probably help just about anyone. How many people are out there walking around with stress related problems, not knowing that there actually is a solution to their problem? (By now more than 150 studies have found significant improvements on stress and stress related problems with TM practice.)
The problem was that it sounded too good to be true. Scientists just couldn’t believe that a simple meditation technique would succeed where all their methods have failed. The problem was that they still saw TM as a relaxation technique, instead of what it really was, a technique to bring the human mind back in touch with it’s divine source. The above study was done in 1985. Only 30 years later, after several more studies had confirmed the effect of TM on PTSD, did people start to take action. CNN did a report on TM for war veterans on veteran’s day 2012 (watch the CNN video) and the US army now supports TM for it’s veterans.
Change in happiness hormones
Happiness is like gravity for the mind. We are all drawn to it over and above anything else. The ancient texts described the experience of coming home for the mind, the experience of transcending, as the most enjoyable and blissful experience the mind can have. This is why the mind will be drawn to it and will automatically go there, if it only has the chance. The Transcendental Meditation technique is a way to simply allow the mind to go where it most likes to go. This is why it’s easy and why everyone can practice it. (unless you’d be the only person in the world who wakes up with the thought ‘I hope I’ll be really unhappy today’).
Serotonin is known as our ‘happiness hormone’. The state of inner happiness during the experience of transcending can actually be objectively verified. A 1978 study in Vienna found that after TM practice the concentration of the 5-HIAA serotonin metabolite had increased by 50% compared to before the practice, while there was no difference with the control group over the same time span.
What was even more remarkable was that even before their TM practice, serotonin concentrations in the TM group were on average already more than twice as high as in the control group. This indicates a long-term permanent growth in serotonin.
When the brain is under stress serotonin levels go down. (Ever noticed feeling not all that happy when you’re stressed?) Insufficient serotonin has been linked to a wide variety of problems including depression, emotional instability, migraines, insomnia, addictions, Alzheimer’s, eating disorders, etc.
People collectively spend billions every year on drugs that aim to artificially regulate serotonin, but which often have side effects that are just about
as bad as the problem they are trying to solve (not to say that drugs are not necessary sometimes). If now it turns out there’s a way to naturally increase your serotonin, how do you think that would change things?
Everybody is looking for happiness. Almost everybody has forgotten that we have an infinite source of it, inside ourselves.
Brain development
As spectacular as the effects of transcending are in terms of activating our healing power or increasing our happiness, it’s on the brain that the effects of transcending (and the difference between TM and other meditation techniques) really become clearly visible.
Neuroscientists know that the brain is like a muscle: If we exercise it, it will grow, if we neglect it, it will shrivel. If we lie in bed for a long time after an accident and our leg muscles aren’t stimulated, it will take quite some time before they grow to their normal strength again. Likewise if somebody is blindfolded for a long time, so that the neurons in the visual cortex part of his brain are not stimulated, it takes some time before he is able to see normally again.
Every experience that we have essentially exercises our brain, but local experiences only exercise local parts. If we see we exercise our visual cortex, if we learn to play the violin we exercise the part of our motor cortex that controls our fingers develops (they make millions of new connections, even after only a few days of practice), etc.
The problem is, that until recently there has not been any experience that exercises the total brain. As a result it is generally known that we only use a small fraction of our total brain potential.
So if we only consciously experience a small part of our total mental potential, like the top part of the wave, could this be because our ‘radio’ is basically not functioning properly?
Here’s an even more interesting question: Could it be that through the experience of transcending, we develop more of our brain potential, even our full potential?
Transcending, as we have already seen, is the experience where the wave settles down into the ocean. It is the experience of complete inner silence, of nothingness, but that nothingness is at the same time the source of everything in the universe, so it’s the experience of unity with everything.
It was only a matter of time before a researcher wanted to see how this would impact our brain development. Dr. Lyubimov from the Brain Research Institute in Moscow was the first to research this. He had the most advance MRI brain imaging technology at his disposal to research how different experiences stimulate the brain.
When he put TM practitioners under his MRI scanner he saw something he had never seen before in his life. He exposed his subjects to a stimulus before and during TM, and saw that before TM the local part of the brain that was connected to that stimulus reacted as expected, whereas during TM a much larger part reacted, (indicated by dark blue on the graph) including so called dormant reserves of the brain.
When Dr. Lyubimov saw these results the first thing he did was write a recommendation to the ministry of education that TM should immediately become a part of the school curriculum in every part of the country. His research was published in the journal human physiology Ref. Human physiology, 25: 171–180, 1999
There is a far simpler way, and perhaps an even more impressive way, to measure what is going on in the brain during transcending, which doesn’t require million dollar MRI scanners, but which can be done with a simple laptop or even a smartphone, by measuring EEG coherence.
When parts of the brain are active, there is electrical activity that can be measured with an electroencephalogram, or EEG machine, that creates a visual representation of this activity in terms of waves.
Next, a computer can mathematically analyze those waves and calculate to what degree the waves of one part are similar (the technical term is ‘in phase’) to waves of another part. If they are perfectly similar, or coherent, this is an indication that those parts of the brain are working together as a unified whole.
During the waking state this coherence between the different parts of the brain is generally low. This is logical because different parts of the brain are usually involved in different things. We see, hear, touch, smell, think about the 500 emails we still have to answer, etc.
When the mind transcends, what happens? The mind becomes quiet, so there is no more particular focus on attention on something, yet it still remains conscious and alert. This results in the entire brain becoming coherent, as visualized below (a line between 2 parts of the brain indicates coherence, the thicker the line, the higher the coherence).
As with everything, the more we expose the brain to a particular experience the more the brain will habituate to this experience. In other words, transcending will train our brain to be coherent all the time.
Is brain coherence important? It’s actually probably one of the most important things we can do. EEG coherence has been researched for over 30 years, and scientists have found it is correlated with our creativity, IQ, emotional stability, moral reasoning—everything that is good about the brain becomes better when it can function as one coherent whole.
Over 80 studies have confirmed increased EEG coherence during TM and the consequences in terms of improved brain functioning, but the most spectacular experiment has been a small school in Midwest USA, the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, or MSAE for short, where most of the children learn the TM technique at a young age and practice it together in the classroom as part of their daily school curriculum.
When children arrive in this school, they have an ordinary IQ and creativity. When they graduate they score in the top 1% of the country on standardized academic tests, and 95% of them continue their studies at university.
Other than just academic results, the MSAE students beat just about all the other students in things they put their attention to. They have won more theatre competitions than any other school in their state, and are regularly beating dedicated sports schools in sport competitions. Overall they have already won more than 100 regional, national and international competitions in anything from poetry to science—not bad for a school with only 200 students.
The most impressive results, however, are seen in creativity competitions. Over 100,000 of the most creative students in the world
participate in international creative problem solving competitions like Destination Imagination every year, yet MSAE students have won the world championships four times already.
Basically these young people have what I would call an unfair advantage over all the others. They just found a way to train their brains.
When educators visit this school they feel this must be the best-kept secret ever, although this is changing rapidly.
- Oprah Winfrey did a documentary about the school (and was so impressed she learned TM herself, and later paid for all her 400 employees to learn it).
- In 2005 the New York Times listed the idea of ‘TM in schools’ at the top of their annual ‘best ideas of the year’ list. Since then over 450 schools in 60 countries have already started using the technique, often with government support, as is the case in San Francisco, the UK, Australia, and in a number of Latin American countries.
- When Hollywood director David Lynch visited the school and watched the children perform a theatre play he was so impressed that he created the David Lynch Foundation to bring TM to every other school in the world. This foundation later got the support of companies like Microsoft and dozens of celebrities, who are all enthusiastic TM practitioners themselves, including Katy Perry, Sting, Paul McCartney (yes, he’s still meditating after forty-eight years, and calls it a ‘lifelong gift’), Ellen DeGeneres, Clint Eastwood, Jerry Seinfeld, etc. The David Lynch Foundation has already brought TM to 500,000 children.
- This is just the beginning. Several Governments are already supporting TM in education, leading to hundreds of thousands of children learning the technique as part of the school curriculum in England, dozens of schools in the US, and hundreds of schools in Latin America. In Brazil the government even made it clear they’d like to have TM in all their 48.000 public schools.
These success stories are remarkable, but at the same time still modest given the potential that transcending has to change everything.
It’s great that so far six million people have already learned the technique, but given what transcending is and what it can do, why only six million, not six billion?
A large part of this has to do with the fact that people simply don’t understand what TM is yet. They still think it’s a ‘meditation’ technique and simply find it hard to believe that ‘meditation’ could produce all these benefits, and they’re right, it doesn’t. Only transcending does. And when they even find it hard to understand how meditation can create these personal benefits, it’s going to be especially hard to understand how it can create the most spectacular benefit of all: world peace.
Everything we’ve seen until now already has the potential to change the destiny of mankind, but it would still take many years before everybody in the world would learn this technique. The good news is that this is not even necessary. There’s a shortcut, through which we can ‘radiate the experience of unity to others’ and thereby eradicate all wars, terrorism, corruption, etc., in the whole world in a matter of months, if not weeks. It sounds incredible but it’s been done before, several times, and it works.
This is the real technology we’ll be discussing in this book. Everything else so far was just preparation. This technology forms not only the first indisputable proof that the Field Paradigm is real (as this technology would only be possible if we are indeed all connected at the source of our thoughts by a field of consciousness) but also forms its most powerful practical application, something that can change, and actually has already changed, the entire course of history.