Book Description

In this classic book, Maharishi unfolds his vision for "a new humanity developed in all life's values - physical, mental, material, spiritual." Not long after Maharishi began his world tours, his students urged him to commit this great teaching to paper. In 1963 Maharishi offered to the world the Science of Being and Art of Living, which systematically unfolds for our scientific age the wisdom of the Veda and Vedic Literature taught to Maharishi by Guru Dev. In this volume Maharishi presents the Science of Being as the systematic investigation into the ultimate reality of the universe. Like other sciences it begins its investigation from the gross, obvious level of life, and delves more deeply into the subtle levels of the experience of Nature. The Science of Being, however, eventually transcends these subtle regions, and reaches the transcendental field of eternal Being. At the time this volume was written, modern science had not yet glimpsed the existence of a single universal field at the basis of all natural phenomena, even though the discovery of this Unified Field of Natural Law had been Einstein's final scientific quest some decades before. By the 1990s, however, the Unified Field of Natural Law had become the greatest focus of theoretical physics, and modern science may now be said to have glimpsed the field of transcendental pure Being. But this book is still far ahead of the objective traditions of modern scientific inquiry in one crucial sense: to modern science, the theory of the Unified Field of Natural Law is a mathematical abstraction--beautiful and profound, but irrelevant to practical life. To Maharishi and the Vedic Tradition, the experience of Being, Pure Consciousness--the Unified Field of Natural Law--is the most practical and useful experience in daily life that one can have. It is relevant to practical life because it is completely easy for any human being anywhere in the world to have access to pure Being, and utilize the unlimited potential of Being to make daily life joyful and successful. This is achieved effortlessly through the twice-daily practice of Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation technique.