Dr. John Hagelin is a Harvard-trained quantum physicist, life-long educator and inventor and leading researcher on higher states of consciousness. He is the recipient of the prestigious Kilby award in physics, and is renowned for developing a highly successful grand unified field theory based on the Superstring. He is currently President, Maharishi University of Management and the Director of Maharishi University of Management’s Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy. A physicist by training, Hagelin was a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the early 1980s. Hagelin stood as a candidate for President of the United States for the Natural Law Party. H Dr. Hagelin has been published extensively in the area of supersymmetric unified quantum field. He has appeared many times on news shows such as ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Meet the Press and in major metropolitan newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is International Director of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace.
Contact Info
Email: President@mum.edu
Most Influential Person
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Effect on Emotions
Emotions are generally more joyful. A lot of the negative emotions of anxiety and depression are stress driven, so if you have a powerful stress buster, and meditation generally is meant to be a stressful.
Remember, mindfulness based stress reduction is meant to be a stress buster. The very, very deep rest that comes with tm is an even more powerful stress buster. That completely changes the complexion of one's emotions.
So also because meditation takes your awareness deep to very fine, fine levels of feeling one's emotions, tend to get more deeply appreciated. They become richer. You start to feel more like a fine artist who has a very deep kind of feeling for things.
I didn't have that kind of refinement growing up. So that's a nice side effect of meditation.
Thoughts on Breathing
That's very interesting. In the TM technique, you don't really worry about your breath. You just follow the mind as it flows into this state of deep silence and inner unboundedness and your breath goes with it in the sense that as the mind gets deeply rested and settled, the breath gets deeply rested and settled.
In the meditative state, the deepest points of meditation, I'd swear I wasn't breathing. Now, if you really pay attention to it, you'll notice that there is a puff of breath coming up the nose and a just a puff of breath coming out, but it doesn't even really get past your head and you're living on that. The requirement for oxygen goes way down.
When the body is deeply rested and the cells inside the body aren't burning as much oxygen, aren't burning as much fuel. So a very deep state of rest will soften the breath and my breath is soft even an activity as a consequence of that regular practice.
Suggested Resources
Book: Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation by Bob Roth
Book: Transcendence: Healing and Transformation Through Transcendental Meditation by Norman E. Rosenthal
Bullying Story
I don't think I've been myself participating in bullying activity. I tend to always stand up for the underdog, whoever might be getting bullied to within the limits of my own strength and of course as a younger person, I was as vulnerable as anybody and I didn't have as much strength as I would've wanted to stand up more forcefully for people who were being misused.
But as a physicist who is willing to talk about consciousness and is dedicated to researching consciousness, that makes me a little bit of an outlier in the physics community because physical scientists don't talk about consciousness.
It's like, real men don't do ballet because for a physicist, we study the physical world, we're meat and potatoes people. If we can see it, we can touch it, we can taste it, it's real. This consciousness stuff, what is that, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus