My first homework assignment in 3 years!

How is Maharishi's understanding of meditation and consciousness different from the view that was standard in the West in 1958?

When the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived on the scene with his revolutionary rethinking of ancient mediation techniques rooted in the Vedas and Upanishads, he forced the Western world of 1958 to rethink their definitions of meditation of consciousness. In many ways he taught us that the absolute converse of our thoughts on these matters was closer to the truth. The general thoughts toward meditative techniques and the nature of consciousness in and before this time, as well as in the public eye today, were largely the result of thousands of years of separation between the time these books were written and the time these practices were “perfected”, leaving ample time for reinterpretation and misunderstanding. By closely re-examining these ancient texts and the conclusions that had been drawn since, he was able to form what has come to be known as Transcendental Meditation- a return to a purer more effective form of meditation than the arduous, exclusive, and often mystic forms that had formed throughout history.

In a time when meditation was an esoteric tradition reserved for practitioners of foreign, generally Eastern, religions to transcend the physical world or empty the mind of all content and emotion, Maharishi proved that in actuality meditation is a natural tendency of the mind that may be perfected with minimum effort and requires no subscription to any one religion or belief system. Meditation had gone from a harnessing of an already present mental process to promote full functioning of the brain and nervous system to a rigorous, often self-depriving, system of mind reprogramming entailing years of pain-staking practice, and even then results were not guaranteed. Rather, Maharishi taught us that the task is effortless and fail-safe. Its very effortlessness is what guarantees its results.

The results of these meditation techniques at the time, given their metaphysical or supernatural nature, were also considered to be beyond the realms of scientific and mathematical quantification. On the contrary, because the results of Maharishi’s meditation, Transcendental Meditation, are natural in every sense of the word and happen on a conscious and subconscious level (to a large degree the desire of meditation is a better cohesion between the two,) the results can and have been proven in more than anecdotal form with the advent of brain-monitoring technology. Therefore, the idea of meditation as a form of access to altered states of conscious has given way to meditation as access to healthier more aware states of what could be called normal, or control, consciousness rather than entirely new forms thereof.

...I hate writing conclusions. Seriously, if your memory is so bad you need a recap of what you just read, re-read it! Luckily it's not technically an essay question so I think I'll be okay.