Question: Some thinkers do not understand how continuous peace can coexist with progress. Could you please explain whether peace can also be dynamic?
Maharishi: Just take the word “progress.” Now think what is the basis of progress. Progress is activity. What is the source of activity? It must be silence. The source of activity has to be silence. If you cater for silence, if you stabilize silence as a conscious experience of your awareness, then you have a springboard for progress.
If you are not established in silence, then you have no basis to progress. You may be floundering around, but without the basis of progress. Even if you take the word progress, what is the basis of progress? Silence is the basis of progress.
Infinite Creativity Is the Basis of Progress
Those who do not understand silence as infinite creativity, which is the basis of all progress, what they know is progress from hard work. How much progress can one make through hard work? Hard work has a limitation. So many hours, and you must stop.
So this Vedic wisdom for progress does not advocate hard work for progress. What it advocates is silence for progress. It’s a different way.
If you know how to throw an arrow from the bow, the technique is to draw it to yourself. And the more you draw it to yourself, the faster you can send it forward. So activity in the direction of the Self means activity in the direction of silence.
TM Brings the Mind to Silence
That is what Transcendental Meditation is. Silence. Bring the mind back to silence, and from there release the thought. Bring the mind back to silence, and then you have a lively basis for the projection of a thought, lively basis for the sprouting of a thought.
Then the thought will be promoted by the infinite creative intelligence of Natural Law. That is the theme. Let the thought be promoted from a lively field at the basis of all evolutionary processes, which is the field of silence.
“That is what Transcendental Meditation is. Silence. Bring the mind back to silence, and from there release the thought.” —Maharishi
Total Dynamism Rests in Silence
The silence of the Self is the silence of dynamism—it’s the dynamism that is silence. That means total dynamism is resting in silence. And from there you can release total dynamism, the Almighty force of Natural Law—the whole will of God that is expressed as infinite variety in the whole unbounded and ever-expanding universe.
It’s a very beautiful, complete theme of life. Those who don’t know will know now that the world consciousness is going to be so coherent, and that will awaken the people to the reality of life, total reality of life.
All those misconceptions that are floating around as the knowledge of life, they’ll all disappear as the darkness disappears with the onset of light.
Thank you for enlightening me on Silence as being the projection of progress. …So, that’s why my ‘hard work’ would often times sabotage some, if not all, the successive stages of my ‘progress.’ And, when seeing the ‘unfinished’ end, I would often wonder and ask my Self, “How did I get here as it’s not how I started.” After listening to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi explain the dynamism of silence in a 1/15/2003 press conference, I am realizing that it WAS how I started…. as SILENCE was absent and uninvited. I am feeling the Joy of Welcoming SILENCE and the Gratitude of TM.