YOGIC LIFE MEDITATION

Swami Shailendra Saraswati MASTER TEACHER & FOUNDER

Swami Shailendra Saraswati grew up with both eastern and western influences. For many years he shared a bedroom with his grandfather, a renowned Vedic scholar who taught him all he could. When Swamiji’s grandfather was close to dying, he lovingly blessed Swamiji and told the family that he had transferred all his spiritual wealth and knowledge to the young Shailendra. Swamiji absorbed Vedic knowledge, while loving science so much that he considered it his religion.

He was a brilliant student. Upon leaving high school, he took the entrance exam to the prestigious IIT University along with literally hundreds of thousands of aspirants and scored among the top one hundred students. But Swamiji chose not to follow this path because he believed modern Physics held the answers to questions about Life and the universe that he had been seeking for years, so he studied Physics honors for his Bachelor's degree and focused on elementary Particle Physics for his Masters at Delhi University. On completion of the degree, he was disappointed -- he realized that Physics had limitations, and that at the quantum level, it was essential to understand consciousness as the source and goal of the physical universe which was beyond the scope of science of the times.

Disillusioned, Swamiji briefly turned his attention to the questions of poverty in the world and mismanagement of resources and assets around him. He studied MBA at IIM Ahmedabad and started working as a vice president of a steel corporation, but he soon realized the futility of trying to change the world from such a superficial level.

To find a true solution to the world’s problems, Swamiji took leave from his job and embarked on an introspective journey through the length and breadth of India and then of Europe on a bicycle. In Finland he came across Transcendental Meditation at a small forest academy. Always sceptical of blind faith, he decided to study and evaluate it for himself, resolving to expose it if it turned out to be a hoax. After a thorough study of TM, he became convinced that it was not only a powerful tool for becoming one with universal consciousness, but also it was the surest and shortest way to reach world peace. Upon returning to India much to his family’s consternation, Swamiji resigned from his job and decided to become a monk and a teacher of TM. While he was taking the teacher training course in the Himalayas, he was chosen by the Maharishi to accompany him on a world tour. For the next 25 years, Swamiji travelled closely with the Maharishi, studying and teaching TM around the world and serving in various capacities such as the founding principal of Maharishi College of Management in Nairobi and Dean of faculty at Maharishi International University at Oslo, Norway. He taught Managerial Statistics and Physics at Maharishi University of Management at Fairfield, Iowa. While teaching Physics, Swamiji became convinced that the Unified Field of all the laws of nature which according to Physics is the source of all matter, energy and intelligence in the universe is none other than the field of consciousness itself -- which is experienced through Transcendental meditation and harnessed to produce any desired effect through the Siddhi program.

TM originates in Vedic literature. Hence to discover the full potential of additional Vedic technologies, under Maharishi’s guidance, Swamiji delved deep into a rigorous study of the entire Vedic literature in the original Sanskrit and further following Maharishi’s instructions, he moved to Amarkantak in the forests of central India which is a spiritually charged place because it is the origin of the holy river Narmada and Maharishis own guru Shri Brahmanand Saraswati had meditated there for forty years in a cave.

One day while Swamiji was meditating in the forest, he was spotted by a manager of a mining company who was concerned to see Swamiji meditating without any shelter in fervid heat and torrential rains. He led Swamiji to an abandoned ammunition depot which had been built to store gunpowder and other explosives for mining and offered it as a place of refuge. It had massively thick concrete walls and of course no windows, water or electricity. It was perfect for Swamiji's purpose. For the next ten years, it served as his cave as he went into a deep meditation to corroborate the knowledge from his research into Vedic texts with direct personal experience. Out of this inner immersion arose Yogic Life Meditation -- the simplest, most effective technique for integrating body mind and consciousness into One -- for realizing the full potential of human life. For the last ten years, Swamiji has travelled extensively and validated the power of this technique by teaching people from all strata of life.