"Whenever I want to change the inner or outer quality of my life, I just spend a few minutes reading Vedic Literature," says Sheila Terry, a mother and business-woman. "Even on vacations with my family, if things become chaotic, I just recite the literature for a while and my inner happiness and evenness grow while, at the same time, outside things become more harmonious and orderly."

In 1990 Maharishi introduced a new program for enhancing and accelerating the growth of consciousness: reciting Vedic Literature daily in the original Sanskrit language. He expressed this as a formula in the book Vedic Knowledge for Everyone: "Close the eyes and ‘meditate’, and open the eyes and read the Vedic Literature." This program, he pointed out, would bring life more in accord with Natural Law—on the levels of mind, body, behavior, and even in our environment. Reciting the Vedic Literature daily he called a "secret path to perfection."

Over the years, this has become an increasingly popular and highly treasured program, especially in Maharishi Schools and Colleges around the world. In Fairfield, Iowa, for example, home of a large Maharishi School (K-12) as well as Maharishi University of Management, students from kindergarten through the Ph.D. levels learn the Sanskrit alphabet and engage in Vedic recitation every day. At the university level, morning classes begin with students throughout the university reciting Sanskrit together. Continuing Education classes in Sanskrit reading are also popular for the community at large.

Maharishi explains the principles underlying the benefits of reading the Vedic Literature: "The perfect orderliness of the Sanskrit language creates orderliness and balance in the brain physiology, expands the memory, and purifies the physiology. When reciting the Vedic language, the brain functions from more silent levels, increasing peace and harmony in the mind, and unfolding deeper levels of consciousness."

The Vedic sounds are the reverberations of the "self-interacting dynamics of consciousness," the sounds of Natural Law murmuring to itself. They are the primordial sounds of Nature. As the seed contains the whole tree, these sounds contain the totality of the whole field of diversity and, in the sequential unfoldment of Natural Law, they express them-selves as the entire material field of life. Therefore, the nature and quality of these sounds, and also their precise sequence, are of great significance. When we recite these Vedic sounds aloud with proper pronunciation and in proper sequence— not for the intellectual meaning of the sounds, but just for their vibrational quality—the effect is powerful and evolutionary for ourselves and our surroundings.

By reading the Vedic Literature, we enliven the holistic or integrated value of our brain physiology along with the specific values of specific brain fibers. Professor Tony Nader, M.D., Ph.D., author of Human Physiology: Expression of Veda and the Vedic Literature, points out that reading the Vedic sounds in their proper sequence "enlivens the anatomic structures to which they correspond," thus bringing the physiology back to its "original and perfect design."

The recitation also enlivens the fundamental qualities of consciousness embodied by specific aspects of the Vedic Literature. Reading the Brahma Sutras, for example, enlivens the Lively Absolute (Living Wholeness— I-ness or Being) quality of intelligence. Marci Freeman, one of the first two students to receive a Ph.D. in reading the Vedic Literature, recorded this experience while reading the Brahma Sutras: "My consciousness became huge, but everything around me seemed as much a part of me as my own hand. Everything became part of my Self and my Self was at the same time in everything."

Now scientific research is beginning to provide an objective foundation for understanding the subjective reports of those reading Vedic Literature: greater bliss and clarity, more support of Nature, greater enlivenment of wholeness and enhanced growth of other characteristics of enlightenment, even positive transformations of the environment.

As Director of the EEG and Psychophysiology lab at Maharishi University of Management, Dr. Fred Travis has measured brain wave patterns, heart and breath rate, and skin resistance during the recitation of Vedic Literature and found that the physiological patterns are similar to those seen during the practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique. This preliminary finding suggests that when Meditators read Vedic Literature, they experience pure consciousness, the deepest level of consciousness, even with eyes open, reading aloud.

This is a remarkable result, revealing an integration of the outer dynamism of life with the inner silence of pure consciousness—the hallmark of enlightenment. "The unbounded aspect of life is becoming a permanent experience even in all the boundaries of everyday life," says Jim French, an Iowa businessman who reads Vedic Literature every day. "Along with unbounded-ness and silence, reading often produces a great abundance of reverberating bliss."

Professor Nader summarizes the effects of this program as follows: "Anyone not living perfection in life can attain the high dignity of life for which his physiology was originally constructed by practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique and reading the Vedic Literature."

You can study Sanskrit at home by taking a 7-lesson videotaped home study course —Introduction to Sanskrit by Dr. Tom Egenes—from the Continuing Education Department of Maharishi University of Management. Call 515-472- 1135 for details. Maharishi University of Management also offers academic programs which include the reading of Vedic Literature, such as: MA in the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI); one- or two-year Certificate in Reading Vedic Literature program; and Ph.D. in SCI with a focus on Vedic Literature. To learn more, contact their Admissions Office at 515-472-1110.

Patricia Oates teaches Sanskrit at Maharishi University of Management, where she is a faculty member and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of The Science of Creative Intelligence.

Would you like to print this article? Click here for printer formatted text.