Brave Beacon of Bountiful Blessings Friend,

At Brilliance in Commerce, we celebrate freedom philosophy and freedom technology.  Freedom and liberty are words much over-used and under-lived . . . too many times people have used those words without any practical reality backing them.  At BIC, we provide actual technologies for directly experiencing freedom from the false debts and the enslaving taxes, but we go beyond that and show how to be free from the greatest bondage of all - - the bondage of the mind.

"You're out of your mind," some say, and we respond, "Thank you - - that's a great compliment."  Everyone should be blessed with the birthright of going out of the clouds of thought and resting in the blue sky of pure consciousness.   The mind is a wonderful tool, but a terrible master.  The way to tame it and turn it into one's greatest servant is by rising above it - - thus transcending it; going beyond it.  Deep within at the source of thought, one contacts the unbounded ocean of pure bliss consciousness - - the Unified Field.  That is the field of Self, the I Am Presence, the impersonal aspect of God.  It is your own Self. 

When attention has become seated here in the center of the cyclone, there is peace, stillness, and bliss.  This is the infinite space within which is beyond the mental dialog - - beyond the mind.  Seated on the throne of this majesty, one can make greatest use of the mind, without being enslaved by it. 

One of the greatest ways to experience this is the practical aspect of the Science of Creative Intelligence, known as Transcendental Meditation, as taught by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  The word "meditation" refers to quiet thinking, and the word "transcendental" means beyond.  So it is the practice of going beyond the field of thought.  It is the twice daily experience of effortlessly resting deeply in the "peace that passeth understanding", in the source of pure Being.

His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1918-2008, was one of the most blissful Enlightened Masters ever to have incarnated on this Earth.  What Saint Germain calls the I Am Presence, what Osho calls no-mind, what the Buddhists call nirvana, what the Christians call the Holy Spirit, what the Hindus call the Atma, experienced in samadhi, and what the scientists call the Unified Field, Maharishi simply called the Self . . . pure Being . . . or pure unbounded bliss consciousness . . . the basis of the ascent to the higher stages of the Seven States of Consciousness.

He created the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, the Transcendental Meditation Technique, the Science of Creative Intelligence, the Science of Being and Art of Living, International Meditation Society, the Council of Supreme Intelligence for the Creation of Heaven on Earth, the World Plan Executive Council, the Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, the World Government of the Age of Enlightenment, Maharishi European Research University (MERU), the Sidhis Courses (based on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras), Yogic Flying, the Superradiance Effect (also known as the "Maharishi Effect"), Creating Coherence Courses, Maharishi International University (MIU), Campaign for a Disease-free Society, the Global Country of World Peace, plans for a Vedaland theme park, plans for Cities of Immortality, Peace Palaces, Maharishi Ayurveda Spas, Maharishi Vedic City (Iowa), Thousand-Headed Purusha programs, Mother Divine programs, Heaven on Earth Development Corporation, Maharishi Open University, Maharishi Vedic Organic Farms, Maharishi United States Peace Government, Maharishi Vedic Foundation (providers of Vedic astrology and fire ceremonies), Maharishi Centers for World Peace and Perfect Health, Institute for World Leadership, and hundreds of other universities, colleges, institutes, academies, and projects worldwide.
 

Maharishi was here to fill the world with Love; to bring the complete elimination of war, poverty, and suffering from the whole world; the complete uprooting of ignorance from the human species; the permanent establishment of world peace; the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment; the descent and creation of Heaven on Earth, which is now "irreversible"; the harmonious recognition by mankind of a truly freedom-giving one world government; plans for the complete reconstruction of all the cities, towns, and villages in the world, through the science of Sthapatya-Veda; the arrival of Bliss 24 hours a day for everyone everywhere; and more.
 

He was born in 1918 in Allahabad, India, and enjoyed perfect health his entire life.  Though his hair became snow-white in his 80s, his skin was as smooth and wrinkle-free as a baby.  People close to him say that he never slept, that he only rested the body for two or three hours a night, and even then, he was able to listen to reviews of current projects and comment on them when he opened his eyes.   To be in his presence was to experience an indescribable Love, a powerful, blissful Silence and Peace which seems to come from nowhere and everywhere.  Time disappeared.  He was the classic archetype of saintly grandeur and majesty.
 

For all this he credited his Teacher, one of the highest, and least known, Incarnations of recent centuries.  Addressed as "Vedanta Incarnate" by the first President of free India, Nehru, this Being was also called His Divinity Swami Brahmananda Saraswati.  He had left his Brahmin home at the tender age of nine, travelled up the Ganges River on foot to the Himalayas, and found HIS Master deep in the Valley of the Saints, Uttar Kashi.  After stabilizing Unity Consciousness, he lived in wild places, almost completely unknown, for more than half a century.  Meanwhile, the highest seat of spiritual authority in India, the Shankaracharya seat of the North in Jyotir Math, near Rishikesh, had been vacant for 150 years, because no one had been found who was highly evolved enough to qualify for it.  

Apparently it is the only one of the four Shankaracharya seats to have such high requirements.  Some wandering yogis found Brahmananda deep in the forest, living in deep harmony with wild lions and tigers, and for twenty years tried to persuade him to accept the seat of the Shankaracharya.  Finally, just before he accepted it, Maharishi met him, and knew in a flash that this was his Master.  He advised Maharishi to go to college and get his degree, which Maharishi did.  He got a degree in physics from Allahabad University.  Meanwhile, his Master, affectionately called Guru Dev, accepted the Shankaracharya seat at Jyotir Math, in about 1940.  When Maharishi got out of college, he spent the remaining years full time with Guru Dev, and became his closest disciple.  In 1953, Guru Dev left the body, and made Maharishi the heir to all of the precious knowledge and wisdom that had been passed down through his great Holy Tradition, going back thousands of years.
 

Maharishi spent two years in silence and solitude in Uttar Kashi, the Valley of the Saints, in the Himalayas.  Then a thought started coming to him, "Rameshvaram".  It is the name of a town in south India.  Finally he travelled to that town, where someone noticed him and invited him to speak to an audience and share his wisdom.  This he did, and the next evening the audience was twice the size.  It kept doubling day after day, and that is how his teaching started.  Like a river flowing from the mountains, it started entirely innocently and effortlessly . . .  and continued throughout his life . . . entirely effortlessly.
 

The Holy Tradition of Vedic Science conferred upon Maharishi supreme knowledge of all techniques, methods, and paths; and all branches of education without exception . . . and then some.  When another famous saint, Swami Rama, was in the Himalayas, he once met Maharishi's teacher, Guru Dev.  Swami Rama calls the meeting "A Wave of Bliss".  He recognized that Guru Dev was some kind of a very rare Incarnation of Sri Vidya, "Supreme Wisdom".  And of all the paths, methodologies, and techniques available, the highest, most essential, most powerful and Divine, is the meditation method using the sacred science of sound from the Veda, for transcendence of attention into samadhi.  ("Veda" is a term for "infinitely complete knowledge").
 

Therefore Maharishi named the method Transcendental Meditation, and selecting this pearl from all his treasures, began sharing it with everyone he taught.    One of the typical misconceptions people have who have never learned Transcendental Meditation is that it involves repeating a mantra, like rosary, japa, or chanting.  It is not.  The sacred meaningless sound called the mantra in TM is used only as a device for inverting the attention, effortlessly.  There is a much expressed instruction right from the very beginning of every meditator's initiation NOT to mechanically repeat it, concentrate on it, or apply effort to it in any way.  That would be boring and obstructive to transcendence.  

How it does work has to be tutored one on one -- it cannot be learned from a book, because it is very delicate and precise, and slightly different for different kinds of people.  It is this policy of private tutoring which is one of the reasons for its great success.  Maharishi has structured a system for maintaining the purity of the teaching, because it was the loss of this purity in ages past that resulted in much of the ignorance, confusion, darkness, and suffering throughout the world.
 

Osho once said that he doesn't teach mantras because people tend to get attached to them, thus making the final liberation in cosmic consciousness difficult.  I think the real reason, though, was that different Masters have different areas of expertise and specialty.  Osho has a masterful expertise in Vipassana, witnessing, and many other kinds of meditation, numbering well over a hundred.  Maharishi's expertise may span many of the same areas as well, but it especially shines in the amazing precision in the use of mantras.  In Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation, the meditator is taught to let go, let go, let go . . . right from the very beginning.  If the mantra tends to slip away, let it slip away.  The disappearance of the mantra AND the disappearance of all thoughts occurring at the same time, while fully awake, is the goal of all meditation techniques -- the fourth state.  Pure Being, no-mind, no-self; the unbounded unified field of pure transcendental radiant bliss consciousness.
 

Therefore, when the final cosmic consciousness is approaching, one has no attachment to the mantra.  One has already long been in the habit of letting it go -- it is only a vehicle -- so the movement into Enlightenment is graceful and smooth.  It is a beautiful path.  It is called the "pathless path", because there is no distance to travel to that which is omnipresent, and even from the perspective of the unenlightened meditator, the end goal is glimpsed every day at every step of the way.
 

People's experiences with it were so successful that it spread very quickly.  By the late 1950s the possibility had been cognized to completely enlighten the whole world through this natural, Divine, and effortless, easy, blissful practice.  A "Spiritual Regeneration Movement" was formed around Maharishi.  In 1958 he began traveling to countries in the East, and in 1959 he landed in Hawaii, traveling alone.  A man met him at the airport, and was intrigued, because here was a Saint, long hair and beard, white silk robes, and not carrying any money, all alone.  How did he manage?  Maharishi was mysteriously provided for by Nature, wherever he went.  People were attracted to him at each location -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Geneva -- wherever.  

A worldwide International Meditation Society came into being.  He kept going around the world teaching full time, and in 1972 he founded the World Plan Executive Council and the Science of Creative Intelligence.  In 1971 Maharishi International University was born in Santa Barbara, California, which later moved to a nice larger campus in Fairfield, Iowa.  MIU quickly became officially fully accredited all the way through the Ph.D. level, and has established itself as a formidable force in education, with colleges and campuses all over the world, respected by many faculty at Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford.
 

In 1975 Maharishi inaugurated the Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment on all five continents, in the presence of heads of countries, scientists, educators, and the media; and held international conferences at his headquarters in Seelisberg, Switzerland.  Thus 1975 was the "First Year of the Age of Enlightenment", and he began re-numbering the years ever since then.  1976 was the "Second Year of the Age of Enlightenment", during which he founded the World Government of the Age of Enlightenment, "a non-political, non-religious, global organization with sovereignty in the domain of consciousness, authority in the invincible power of natural law, and activity in purifying world consciousness . . ."
 

Vast rivers of knowledge poured out of Maharishi to such an extent, that TV Guide magazine in the USA reported in 1977 that Maharishi's organization had "the largest collection of videotapes of any organization in the world" -- almost all of Maharishi speaking.   Name almost any conceivable subject, and he has probably given breathtakingly beautiful and unsurpassed discourses on it, with ingenious new enlightened ideas on it.  Programs, projects, colleges, universities, associations, institutions, and communities have sprung up all over the world in all the highest places around Maharishi's teachings.  In 1987, "13-AE" -- the 13th Year of the Age of Enlightenment, he established the "Council of Supreme Intelligence for the Creation of Heaven on Earth", and also the "Campaign to Create a Disease-free Society" worldwide through his Enlightened revival of the ancient, and previously lost, secrets of AyurVeda, the supreme knowledge of natural health care.
 

On any subject you can name, Maharishi introduced the ultimate insights -- the understanding and fulfillment of all the most advanced sciences and highest ideals of all the greatest philosophers throughout the history of the world.  Many of his students, disciples, and devotees are convinced that Maharishi has single-handedly changed the course of history.  Whatever one's path, and whoever is one's teacher, it must be the most effective for each individual in leading to the genuine and sustained experience of one's own center of consciousness within.
 

Maharishi’s worldwide movement has hundreds of websites.  The one that links to most of them, directly or indirectly, is www.tm.org