Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought together all the fragments of ayurveda and vedic knowlegde to create a totally holistic system. The knowledge had become fragmented in the sense that there were experts in different areas of vedic knowledge but they were not working together. There was an expert in pulse assesment here and an expert in diet over there and an expert in herbs somewhere else. Sounds more like Old Mcdonalds farm than a holistic health care system!
What Maharishi did was to bring all the parts together and to re-enliven the value of consciousness. Consciousness can be understood as pure awareness. Experience becomes subtler and subtler as you begin clearing the stresses from your physiology. When you are tired and fed up you do not experience the beautiful patterns in the clouds or the exsquisite fragrance of a rose. You are distracted by the tension in your body and the constant stream of thoughts whirling around your mind. However, as you begin to reduce stress you experience greater levels of awareness, your senses become heightened and you are more in tune with what is going on in your body.
Through the technique of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi taught people to go beyond the outside world and reconnect with their inner source of wisdom. The knowledge is no longer relegated to books. People are able to recognise the knowledge for themselves and spontaneously act in a more health promoting and life supporting manner. By bringing back the value of consciousness to vedic knowledge, Maharishi re-enlivened the level of experience. It is the difference between reading about the beauty of a tropical island and diving beneath the waves and feeling the sand between your toes.
Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health provides both the understanding of the total picture and the key with which to decipher the code. No longer are you lost in a maze of opportunities. As you grow in awareness you are able to detect on a more subtle level the techniques, foods and activities which are right for you, without wasting a lot of time or money. So you can really feel the difference between a technique that is just mildly relaxing and one that can re-enliven the physiology, or a herb that provides a boost and one that actually heals.
Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health embraces the totality of life with total understanding. Life in its many manifestations may appear an unfathomable web of bits and pieces, but like a jigsaw when put together can create a coherent whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Although on the surface it may appear that there is no logic to life, underlying all of creation there are patterns of intelligence or laws of nature. We may not identify them but they are still there and we experience them. For example, we all experience that law of nature that makes us feel drowsy before 10pm but if we stay up we get a second wind. It doesn't have a name or a scientific equation but, like gravity, it existed before Newton identified it. Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health understands the diversity of the universe from the perspective of unity. It would not be possible to learn all the laws of nature by going out and studying each one. It would be like studying every leaf on a tree to learn how they grow instead of looking at the tree as a whole and accepting that what is true for one leaf is true for all of them.
