Papageno, a former player of magic bells and bird-catcher (see Mozart’s Magic Flute) is wandering in the forest in pursuit of his new occupation of tree- catcher (This occupation he took up because it was easier than bird catching – trees don’t move about so much.) In his wandering he arrives at a wish-yielding tree or ‘Kalp Vriksh’ and starts to dig him up. This meets with many protests from the tree who points out that there is a sign saying ‘Do not disturb by order’, just in front of him.
This Papageno agrees to, as he has always wanted to be enlightened and thinks
this will help him on his way. So first they return to a time not far in the
past when a teacher of Transcendental Meditation to business people was visiting a friend
who was a physics professor. The physicist was saying that he thought if you just knew the unified field ofphysics you would know everything as all the
other fields and particles are made from that. The teacher on the other hand thought that if you just knew pure consciousness you would know everything because that had been his experience and because great saints and sages had also had that experience.
They discuss the difference in these two ideas and find that they are not so great. After all physics, the professor says, recognizes that the observer and the observed are very intimately connected especially when you approach finer and finer distance scales. So the observer at the most basic level of his pure consciousness should be the same as the finest most fundamental level of the observed world– the unified field. They go through different things and decide that both the concept of pure consciousness (or the unified field), as well as Maharishi’s technology for experiencing it (the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi Programme) have the effect of integrating: integrating all of objective knowledge, all of subjective knowledge, all of objective knowledge with subjective knowledge, all the organising power of knowledge and integrating knowledge with its organising power on the silent ground of pure awareness. This integrating or harmonizing effect of Maharishi’s technology they conclude is the cause of it being so effective in changing the trends of society so that all good comes to everyone and no good comes to no one.
Papageno sees the teacher visiting his friend the professor
The tree's commentary:
Papageno after hearing this discussion
asks the tree how it can possibly be that such a simple thing, done by so few, effects millions of people in society. The tree with the aid of his friend the grapevine, does some research in the world-wide-wood. And as a result they discover that there is a principle that orderly things that are in phase or in harmony with each other, have an effect in proportion to the square
of their number while disorderly things don't. So they suggest that as the meditators are all in harmony with each other, then they must be having an effect according to the square of their
number. Also after further research by the tree they discover that there are a lot of cases
where just one percent of a population of say cells, are able to affect the whole organism. So going by this the tree and vine think it is quite natural that only the square root of one percent of a population doing Maharishi’s technology together change the trends of a society in a positive way.
This ends this book and leads to the
next book in which Papageno has another wish that allows him to see the ancient
Greeks who started much of modern science but viewed things more in terms of
consciousness.
|