By Christopher Ludgate
There’s a curiosity that often evokes a sense of mystique that radiates around the practice of Transcendental Meditation (TM). It’s no cult or religion. And it is not an ephemeral trend.
The intriguing concept of TM and its effects have been studied and proven in hundreds of scientific studies since the technique was developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and entered the spotlight back in the 1960s. So there isn’t any woo-woo. More accurately, TM is merely a practical enhancement of one’s own independent wellbeing and growth, whatever that might mean for an individual. It is fairly simple and requires just a little training and daily dedicated time all to one’s self.
Indeed, TM’s growing number of practitioners over the years has strengthened its reputation. And perhaps the many in the entertainment field from the Beatles to Oprah to Jerry Seinfeld, along with top CEOs around the world, may at times shroud it in some inaccessible realm. But the truth is that the practice is actually quite grounding. Whatever the case may be, with initiatives around the world from classrooms to boardrooms to recovery rooms, the technique is for just about anyone in the interest of promoting health, peace, and transcendence over that which may weigh heavy on us.
So what is it?
Transcendental Meditation is a daily practice done in two twenty-minute increments in which one sits with closed eyes in a quiet space and dives deep inside themselves with the help of a private mantra given to them by an official coach. The mystery of the mantra? It is meaningless. It is a tool, a conduit to facilitate a gentle focus as one goes inward, accessing a purer consciousness and stillness. And it is virtually effortless.
TM differs from other mindfulness techniques in that time is not spent struggling to quiet thoughts, but rather thoughts are acknowledged like floating driftwood while simply favouring the mantra. And that’s where the deep dives happen; transcendence above the muddled mundane noise and frenetic energy while creating a reset, a nurturing presence, and space for ourselves. And as a result, maybe we even cultivate the same for others.
I recently took a deep dive to explore what happens in the mind and body with TM practice chatting with the eloquent, the radiant Dr. Tony Nader. Nader became the successor to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi after his passing in 2008. Nader’s background as a child in a tumultuous Lebanon led to a yearning for a deeper understanding of human behaviour. His studies in Psychiatry and Neurology led to a focus on Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT while simultaneously studying Neurology at Harvard.
Dr. Nadar: While in school, I began practicing Transcendental Meditation, which gave me great insight into myself, great peace of mind, and wellbeing. I looked at its research and soon became a teacher of meditation. And when I completed my academic studies, I was invited to India by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I went there, thinking it was for a week. But then, he asked me to stay a little longer and then longer, and it became like a whole lifetime! And I began to do more research on the relationship between mind & body and consciousness.
Since then, Nader has written books about the subject and was named successor to the Worldwide Transcendental Meditation Program by the Maharishi himself. He is now the President of the non-profit Maharishi International University. His latest New York Times Best Seller is called “Consciousness is All There Is.”
Chris: I want to first express my condolences for the loss of a dear friend and colleague several days ago, Mr. David Lynch, who was a major proponent of Transcendental Meditation. He had such a way of emphasizing and articulating what profound beauty can come from a practice. A real beacon and inspiration for many.
Dr. Nadar: Thank you for expressing that. It weighs heavily on our hearts. He was so precious, so powerful …So dedicated to making the world better from every angle. (He was) A true, sincere, well-wisher of humanity. But we have his legacy that will always be shining on.
David Lynch credited his own long-established TM practice for bestowing him with “unlimited access to energy, creativity, and happiness deep within,” often referring to it as “pure consciousness.” In 2005, Lynch founded The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Its worldwide wellness mission continues to make the evidence-based TM technique accessible to all, especially in underserved areas and to those struggling.
Chris: David wrote the foreword for your new book, “Consciousness Is All There Is.” The book explores the seemingly elusive concept of consciousness. As something impossible to put in a nutshell yet at the same time so mind-blowingly simple, you dive into explaining the states of consciousness as being an individual’s interpretation of their reality or awareness of their experience. In relation to TM, there is an allegory likening consciousness to the sea. …The sea and the stillness. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Dr. Nadar: Yes, yes, of course. Thank you. So, we take the allegory of the ocean or the sea, and we say that on the surface, you have waves on the ocean, and if your vision is only limited to the expanse of one wave, so you just see the wave. And if you see other waves, they feel like, okay, there are separate waves, and they are, that’s all there is, the surface value, surface waves. And there are so many waves, and this wave can clash with me, and I can clash with the other wave, or, you know, there is this separation on the surface. Whereas the reality is that the wave is part of the ocean, part of the sea. It’s an expression of the sea, and there are many expressions of the same sea, the same ocean. And if you were to dive in deeper than the surface value of the wave, you would start finding that your mind settles down, and you will spontaneously start diving deeper and deeper until the bottom of the ocean, when it’s all calm and peaceful, and there you see that you are the ocean, not just a wave, that you can go back to being a wave if your attention goes to the surface, but your essence, your origin, your being is the entire ocean, and that same ocean is what’s creating all the waves. All the different waves. So when you come back to the surface, with that direct experience of unity of being, and as you dive in and go out, you start feeling and understanding that everything is myself. All these other waves are also the ocean. I am the ocean, you are the ocean, but we appear on a different level as different entities. And that gives huge peace and wellbeing and assuredness and confidence in life and opens that feeling that everything, myself, my environment, my world, my universe, is also myself.
Chris: (Pause.) Yes …A quiet stillness. And that helps to facilitate a bigger picture, as I call it, so it can affect a better perspective or a transcendent perspective. And… it’s feeling meta …so the bigger picture would be …consciousness. So exciting. Beautiful.
Dr. Nadar: Yes, and it’s not just on the mental experience level. What happens is as your mind settles down, your body settles down, and that is what clears up the strains, the stresses, the fatigue, the fears, on a physiological level. So it’s not just something happening in the mind and the body is just experiencing. It’s also refreshing, cleaning, clearing all that has been deposited on the body that is not healthy, you know, limiting beliefs, fears, anxieties, and stresses that express themselves as high blood pressure, as hormonal imbalance, as resistance in your hormones, you know. All of these get settled and go back to their original design. And even the DNA, if it has something imperfect, has been shown that its expressions change when you relax because we have shown that there is decreased inflammation, increased ability to fight disease, and the immune system is improved. And all of this is also evidence of the connectedness between mind and body that they are a continuum and not just two different separate things.
Chris: Got it. So you’re accessing clarity in a higher state of consciousness.
Dr. Nadar: Exactly. Clarity on the consciousness level and that clarity is reflected in the clarity of the body’s ability to balance itself. Yes.
Chris: It’s a gift for the self. I like the adage: “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” Some say they struggle to actually do meditation.
Dr. Nadar: The way we can look at it is like the bottom of the ocean is perfectly quiet and still and that’s the inner deeper self, which one accesses in Transcendental Meditation in a very simple, innocent, natural way. It’s not something you can force. It’s something that happens. So people might think, oh, that’s too complicated or say my mind is always jumping around. It’s not possible for me to calm down. But even those particularly who feel like that, if they follow the steps of learning, it’s so easy, so simple, and they find their mind settled down by itself completely. So once it settles down, then this is the inward direction, going inward. But we have to act, so we have to bring the thoughts from the inner value to the outer.
Chris: Is there a pure consciousness that you can attain or build up to or is it more of a fluid experience?
Dr. Nadar: Yeah, I mean …Pure consciousness is at the basis in that silent field. That’s why we call it transcending. To transcend means to go beyond. So we go beyond all the vibrations, all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the value of consideration, of specificity on the surface level, and we go to the generality, the wholeness of the inner level, which is totally silent. And then we experience the transcendental state, which we call pure consciousness, which means consciousness devoid of any specific value of thought or feeling or memory. So to be conscious of consciousness alone, people can’t imagine that because they think, oh, when I’m conscious, I’m always conscious of something. And so you have to, you know, you can’t experience it and you can’t know it until you experience it, that it’s possible to be conscious on consciousness alone. And that’s what we call pure consciousness. Now, higher states of consciousness is when this pure consciousness remains with you even when you are active. So there is a projection to the outside world through the senses. We experience, we hear, we think, we see, all of that. And there is the inside, pure being, pure consciousness. When you are always able to maintain pure consciousness, at the same time when you are acting on the surface, we call this a higher state of consciousness. Yes.
Chris: Hundreds of studies show the efficacy of TM. What are some of the consistent findings that show the effects to be substantial?
Dr. Nadar: Yeah, the first studies were done at UCLA by Dr. Kiswada where he showed that when you meditate, you get into a state of awareness, of consciousness, and of physiology that are different, a state that is different from dreaming, sleeping, and waking. And what characterizes that state is that you are very rested, as rested or even more than during sleep. So the body has a reduction in metabolism, cortisol, and blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen consumption. Various studies show greater coherence in the brain. So these are basic studies of what happens during meditation.
Chris: Yes, I watched the live EEG demonstration at MIT. It’s somewhere out there on the internet. Very cool.
Dr. Nadar: Yeah, and so all of these have powerful effects on the individual, but another level also is the effect on society, which we have seen that when a number of people practice this program and transcend, which means go beyond the surface to their inner self, which we call the unified field or pure consciousness, it actually enlivens the collective consciousness in the right direction. And so this was a phenomenon that was predicted by Maharishi and that’s why we call it the Maharishi effect because when a group of people settled in that state, we have seen changes in crime rates, in accidents of the roads, in hospital admissions, in infant mortality, and a number of other factors that are very powerful and systematically repeated to be true and to have a direct correlation with the number of people who meditate.
Chris: So, with respect to an individual’s health situation, TM can treat the global crisis of trauma, anxiety, PTSD, and even SAD. I am aware that with 9/11 responders like myself, and in other settings, TM trainings have been implemented as part of treatment and rehabilitation.
Dr. Nadar: Yes, for example, the Veteran’s Administration for those who come from war zones, you know, the military, they come back with a very big stress, and they have difficulty readjusting. And so, comparative studies between TM and other commonly used techniques of combating PTS have shown that TM is more effective. In the same way, we use it in schools, particularly when schools are in a situation where students are living in conditions that are not ideal. When we tried it in those schools, and the students were more coherent, they’re more harmonious; they have better grades. It’s not just a rehabilitation program, but it also increases the ability to think in a creative way. That’s why many artists, you know, many celebrities have adopted it.
Chris: You were a recent keynote speaker at the UN on World Meditation Day on December 21st you cited the constitution, which states, that since wars begin in minds of men, it is the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed. I found that very profound. How receptive was the room?
Dr. Nadar: So it was very interesting to see how the whole world kind of in a sense came together to say, yes, we have to recognize the importance of meditation and its effectiveness in solving important problems. My first feeling was of gratitude. And then my message is that this is not just some luxury that only people can do on the side, but my true conviction is that in the same way, as we go through the different states of consciousness of sleeping, dreaming, and waking, we have to go as humans in the state of transcending. What we’re lacking here is the combination of deep rest and wakefulness. And this is the state of consciousness that Transcendental Meditation gives, and it has a powerful influence on the ability to act from a restful state and maintain coherence within and clarity within.
Chris: I would imagine that state of consciousness is somewhere near where love resonates; that feeling of harmony, unity, and true peace. I guess that’s ultimate fulfillment is for TM; to achieve that clarity and have the ability to live a pure and more harmonious existence with each other in society.
Dr. Nadar: Yeah, yeah, beautiful. That’s beautifully put. Thank you. Love is that which connects, you know? Yes. We say, I love you. It means I connect to you. I feel you are a part of me. When you love somebody, you want to do to them only what you would do to yourself. You want to even give them more than you would give to yourself sometimes. And so that sense of unity is what love is. Bringing unified, unifying value, connecting the lover to their lover and being, feeling together, caring for others as if they are ourselves. And so that unified value is real and reaches its maximum value when you realize you are everything.
Chris: I love that.
Dr. Nadar: When you know you are the ocean and every wave is yourself, then that is maximum love, because how much more can you feel unified with anything or anyone than knowing them to be yourself, experiencing them to be yourself. So when you see the others, when you see the environment, when you see the universe as being yourself, that is the maximum love, the maximum potential even for love. Yeah.
Chris: Love that, too. Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Doc.
In this milestone book, Dr. Nader offers ideas that can change the world. He gives profound solutions to questions that have long fascinated and intrigued philosophers and scientists alike, covering fields as diverse as the purpose of life, good and evil, what consciousness is, and whether we have freedom.
Consciousness Is All There Is can be ordered through drtonynader.com
Chris is a writer, photographer, and award-winning filmmaker with a background in NYC’s indie scene. With tailor-made itineraries beyond the ordinary, his travel stories combine culture, wellness, the outdoors, luxury, and history. He’s a longtime advocate for holistic health and animal rights as well as an avid gardener, cook, and cat dad. Connect with Chris at wanderamatravel.com.
