June 2000 How Understanding Opens the Door to Reality: Part Two of an Interview with Professor Tony Nader

Professor Tony Nader is President of Maharishi Open University, which broadcasts courses to every continent via a global network of eight satellites. Under Maharishi’s guidance, Professor Nader has discovered Veda and the Vedic Literature within the human physiology.

In the last issue of Enlightenment, Professor Nader discussed the importance of both intellectual understanding and direct experience for gaining enlightenment. He said, "Understanding opens up the door, and experience invites the reality in."

Here he describes how everything we experience profoundly influences our ability to perceive the totality of life.

Enlightenment: How is it possible that simply hearing and thinking can change the structure of the brain?

Professor Nader: Everything we experience— we hear, we smell, we understand— has an effect on us. We metabolize it. We digest everything that we experience through the senses, similar to the way we digest food.

When we eat food that is nourishing and healthy, it will find its way to the cells, to the different organs and organ systems, structuring a healthy and well- nourished body. But if we take something damaging into our body, it will have an unhealthy influence, damaging the physiology. In the same way, if we hear something damaging, it will damage our feelings and even the way our brain works.

Enlightenment: Could you give an example of this?

Professor Nader: When little children are playing on their own, they are full of creative intelligence—they discover their world, they structure it, they learn from it—they are constantly creating things.

But when they go to school, as schools are set up today, research has shown that their intelligence and creativity drop, from perhaps 90 percent to as little as 15 percent. And as they continue in school it drops to seven percent, then to five percent, and so on.

Now why is that? It’s because of the inability of current education to develop the student’s full potential, the inability to really nourish the whole physiology.

W hat we are doing in school is creating rigid structures, which is good for discipline. But unfortunately the student is not exposed at the same time to the nourishing intelligence of Natural Law, which is the basis of the whole physiology. That's why creativity can be diminished through today's system of education.

Enlightenment: What specifically causes this decrease in creativity?

Professor Nader: Think of how many times people are told negative things as they’re growing up. Even in disciplining the little children, we tell them "Don’t do this, don’t do that." Discipline is all right , it’s fine, but we also impart on them the feeling of their limitations, their weaknesses, their inabilities. We constantly repeat to them their mistakes.

Parents say these things to their children, and then children begin to repeat them to each other. School teachers say them when they’re upset, because they’re living within their own limitations. All this imposes these limitations of what a human being is and can do onto the brain of the little children, and therefore the brain simply shuts down these potentials.

We’re not told when we are growing up: "You can fly, you can do anything, you can be the whole world, you can achieve your dreams, you are great." Instead, children digest so many negative things that people tell them, until they begin to say, "We cannot fly." It becomes impossible for them to imagine whether we can fly or not.

Enlightenment: And these limitations in thinking actually change the development of the brain?

Professor Nader: Yes. There are experiments with animals that are raised in limited environments. As a result, their brain interconnections are built in such a way that they’re not able to recognize many things in a normal environment, simply because they didn’t experience them when their brain was developing.

We know that the brain is very sensitive at an early age to the experiences that one has. That’s when it builds its limitations, it builds its prejudices.

There are so many people from different cultures, political systems or religions, and each person believes he is the only one who is right. They are even willing to kill each other on the basis of this great devotion to their culture or nation or God. And the other person also thinks he is the only one who is right.

Now Maharishi’s programs and knowledge are removing all the different shades of prejudice, intolerance and wrong thinking that are based on improper education and improper understanding of life. Maharishi’s knowledge is bringing the nature of life back to its totality.

Enlightenment: In the "Creating a Perfect Man" course, you present in detail how Veda and the Vedic Literature structure the human physiology. Can this knowledge reverse the limiting influence of our education and upbringing?

Professor Nader: Definitely. Listening to the knowledge in this course can actually change the physiology because we metabolize that knowledge. The course is constantly describing how our physical body is truly established on the basis of the intelligence of Natural Law, which is non-physical, non-material; which is the Laws of Nature and their dynamics.

Our brain physiology is changed just by listening to this course—soaking in that knowledge repeatedly— hearing the fact that we are wholeness, we are totality, the body is made out of Veda. By looking at this in a serious intellectual way—hearing that the structure of the Veda is the structure of the body, we are transformed.

Even when we look at it from every side, we find exactly the same reality: We are the Veda. As we hear this over and over again, we are really discovering ourselves again on the basis of the intelligence that has built us.

During the course we are also hearing Vedic recitations, the sounds of the Veda and Vedic Literature. This is a constant feedback on the direct sensory level of sound, on the feeling level and the understanding level, which awakens within us that wholeness.

The dynamic nature of Natural Law and its silent value—dynamism and silence—both have an internal structure, which is found in the Veda. That is what becomes our body.

So our vision of what we are is awakened to the realization that we are totality, we are wholeness, that embodied within us is the total power of Natural Law. And that immediately starts awakening the fine feeling, the fine thoughts, and the fine experience of that reality in our daily life.

Maharishi Open University courses include: Certificate of Total Knowledge and Creating a Perfect Man. For more information, visit the Maharishi Open University Web site: www.MOU.org; email: MOU@Maharishi.net; or fax: 828-265-1421.

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