Having just seen Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, I’m reminded of the high ideal our 16th President invoked in his immortal Gettysburg Address when he said that, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.” It’s a beautiful tribute to the wonderful experiment called democracy, which was America’s great gift to the world, a gift that inspired revolutions that toppled kings throughout Europe within half a century of its formation on our shores.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence that set our 13 colonies free and ignited the five-year Revolutionary War with England that sealed that freedom, is credited with saying, “The government is best which governs least.”
Boy, we sure could use a Founding Father like that in the power corridors of Washington now! As I write this column during the lame duck session of 2012, the people of our nation watch as the clock ticks, and our elected officials are playing chicken with each other, threatening to drive our economy perilously off a fiscal cliff. We are seeing far too much of the machinations of our government, indicating a dysfunction that hasn’t stopped with the presidential re-election of 2012.
Jefferson’s quote reminds me of something I learned from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the great guru who taught me how to teach meditation to others. He said that the governments of the world should model themselves on the government of Nature. He added that the Universe is governed by Laws of Nature that are so well conceived, and so well executed that human beings don’t even know that there is a government operating.
The sun rises each dawn and sets each dusk. The moon governs the tides of the four oceans. We see the force of gravitation at work in our world. We see the effects of all these laws of the Universe that great scientific minds have penetrated, and yet we don’t see the government that’s carrying out such laws. That, Maharishi said, is what makes the government of Nature so efficient; it governs so effectively we don’t even know that we’re being governed.
Contrast that with what’s happening in Washington D.C., a festering district that would make the Father of our Country turn over in his grave to know that it was named for him. These days, the U.S.A. is more like the D.S.A. the Divided States of America. In the summer of 2012, a Gallup Poll found that the approval rating of the 112th Congress had sunk to a pitiful 10 percent. This disapproval is greater than Americans’ dislike for the IRS, President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, British Petroleum during its catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, telemarketers, lawyers, HMOs, and bankers.
Maharishi said that people get the political representation they deserve, that they reflect our consciousness. There’s gridlock in the House and Senate, but ask yourself: Are these stalemates, game-playing, off-the-chart filibustering rates that different from the procrastination that stalls the personal development of the 300 million people they represent? The U.S. behaves like a “Procrasti- Nation” in tens of millions of American households and in the House of Representatives that’s supposed to serve all those households. President Obama echoed these sentiments about the recalcitrant Congress, when he said of their heel-dragging as they sputtered over the fiscal cliff! “One thing we can count on with respect to this Congress is that if there is even one second left before you have to do what you´re supposed to do, they will use that last second."
Albert Einstein was famously quoted as saying, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” We must think outside the envelope, therefore, to solve this problem. The solution lays in getting to the source of thinking itself—in other words, to expanding consciousness. The good news is that the meditation that Maharishi taught, (Transcendental Meditation), and the Higher Self Healing Meditation that I teach that was inspired by decades of teaching the former, can bring human awareness to the unbounded state of pure consciousness at the deepest level of the mind, a source from where all thought itself springs, at the transcendental level of the mind that’s also the home of all of Nature’s laws. As more people meditate, more people will live their lives in tune with such laws, making it harder to have congressional representatives out of touch with such a consciousness. In summary, the more out of touch we, as Americans, are with Nature, the more our representatives will be, as well, while the more in tune we are with Nature and her laws, the more our representatives will quietly behave in a way that serves that consciousness. As a result, the greater the chances will be that we send to Washington a new breed of public servant who lives in such harmony with Nature.
