The Foundations of Maharishi's Science of Creative Intelligence—Chapter Six: The Sixth State of Consciousness, Refined Cosmic Consciousness

Abstract

We come now to the final steps in Maharishi’s supreme vision of the possibilities open to human life: the sixth and seventh states of consciousness. Here, Maharishi teaches, is found the pinnacle of human development, the state of glorified life that the human mind and body are designed to live, which, through his simple technologies of consciousness, is open to anyone. Maharishi’s published writings about these higher states of consciousness are fewer than for Transcendental Consciousness and Cosmic Consciousness. The reason for this seems to be linked to an important historical dimension of Maharishi’s teaching: systematic understanding of higher states of consciousness has been given out byMaharishi as the experiences characteristic of them have become more common in the world. Nevertheless, in his published works, Maharishi has clearly laid out the nature of these sixth and seventh states and the means by which they are gained. These descriptions are so concentrated and so rich that they provide profound insights and deserve the most careful attention. Such accounts of the highest levels of human life are extraordinarily rare in human history, and the experiences unique to these levels do not seem at any time to have been described with the clarity, precision, and completeness that Maharishi brings to them.