Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Bonshek, Anna. Mirror of Consciousness: Art, Creativity and Veda. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001. ISBN 81-208-1774-5. pp. 494. Hbk,, Rs 595
Reviewd by
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and William S. Haney II
University of Wales Aberystwyth and American University of Sharjah, UAE
When I first read Anna Bonshek’s Mirror of Consciousness, I expected the reaction to the book to be mixed. The reviews I have seen so far confirm my impression—they range from mild approval to confused rejection. Why should this be so? Bonshek’s book, based on her Ph.D. thesis at Maharishi University of Management, USA, is radical in at least one way: it presents material that is literally new to academia and scholarship in much the same, and equally seminal ways that Freud, or Jung, or any other figurehead of a new approach to any given field of knowledge was new when Freud, or Jung, or others first developed and published it. In our time, the claim to genuine innovation tends to be deplorably suspect, let alone actually delivering the goods.
What Bonshek does is in fact provide the most detailed and lucid account of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Vedic Science available in the public domain today. Up to now, little snippets only of this vast body of knowledge have been published. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has developed his Vedic Science since the late 1950s, a process documented in a collection of video- and audiotapes which kept on record every word Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said in public. Anna Bonshek had access to this material and to the academics who, at Maharishi University of Management, specialise in researching the relationship between their respective disciplines to Maharishi’s Vedic Science. Bonshek’s book focuses on the loss of universality in the arts in the wake of developments in critical theory. The first section of the book describes both that potential and its decline. The second part of the book discusses the details of Maharishi’s Vedic Science. Here, Bonshek maintains the focus she developed in the first section, demonstrating with reference to Maharishi’s Vedic Science that, and how precisely, consciousness is relevant to universality. Most important, Bonshek’s argument does not only provide a new theoretical view: rather, she explores in detail that this particular theory has a distinct practice associated with it, in the forms of the Transcendental Meditation technique and advanced programs. Bonshek explains how that practice works and what we may expect from it in general and, specifically, in relation to the arts.
Any genuinely new approach, as I would argue Bonshek’s is, represents a challenge to the reader confronted with it. That challenge is to be at least open and unbiased in reading the material and taking it at face value, at least initially, and judging its merit on the basis of its own, new claims, possibly paradigms, rather than applying “old” criteria which are bound to confuse and irritate.
I would encourage anyone interested in the potential of art, in the relationship between consciousness and art, both in theory and in practice, anyone who is interested in Maharishi’s Vedic Science, or in a substantial intellectual challenge generally, to read this book—I boldly predict that as a compendium to Maharishi’s Vedic Science alone it will prove most useful in future research into the nature of the relationship between consciousness and the arts. (DMD)
In Mirror of Consciousness, Anna Bonshek not only explicates Maharishi Vedic Science as a new approach to universality in the arts and in the philosophy of mind, but also contrasts this approach to those of modernist and postmodernist critics who celebrate relativity and malign the possibility of experiencing unity on the level of consciousness. On the one hand, Bonshek’s method critiques the relativism of postmodernist thought, while on the other hand it distinguishes Maharishi Vedic Science from ostensibly similar theories developed by scholars such as D. Kuspit. For example, in defining aesthetic “hyperalertness,” Kuspit discusses the “real possibility of achieving a new sense of self” through art, but as Bonshek observes, he defines the self as a relative concept and not the Cosmic Self based on pure consciousness as identified in Maharishi Vedic Science (323). This brief but indispensable comparative analysis occurs mainly in parts I and V, while parts II to IV center on an objective, in-depth presentation of the knowledge embodied in the multiple aspects of Maharishi Vedic Science.
As a visual artist herself, Bonsheks draws examples mainly from the visual arts; however, throughout the book she implies that this approach, which is based on the eternal presence of pure consciousness, also applies to music, literature, and drama. “Art,” she says, “can capture the unsayable, the indescribable infinite, absolute, within the finite value of an object/expression/performance” (317). The basic message of Maharishi Vedic Science is that aesthetic beauty, in whatever form, is an expression of the higher Self. Beauty in the arts stems not from culture-specific criteria—or absolute concept promoted to university—but rather from the Self as a field of all possibilities. Bonshek repeatedly demonstrates that culturally specific definitions of art fail to account for the “universality imbibed within its individual content” (Maharishi). In a section on “Art, Beauty and Knowledge,” she notes that “only in higher states of consciousness can the Transcendental value of beauty be appreciated; then an unchanging basis for the appreciation of beauty is established. The basis for aesthetic emotion is bliss. Beauty helps to enliven bliss and mirrors one’s own unified, self-referral consciousness as the subtle values of the object. In a sense, beauty would create or reflect a holistic sense of self, indicating the possibility of unifying apparently separate or contradictory elements” (317). As emphasized throughout Mirror of Consciousness, the ultimate practical benefit of the arts is to enhance our ability to think, act, and create from the level of pure, bliss consciousness.
Bonshek’s book succeeds in concisely rendering the vast body of Vedic knowledge, of which Maharishi is widely regarded as the foremost modern proponent, as well as in illustrating the wealth of practical benefits this knowledge can provide the arts and society in general. Bonshek’s work, moreover, has set the stage for other artists and critics to apply this knowledge in the production and appreciation of the arts. As her books demonstrates, an original grasp or clear understanding of Vedic wisdom depends not on how you intellectually interpret pure consciousness—as the history of Vedic scholarship attests, critical interpretation usually leads to distortion, with unfortunate social consequences—but rather on how you embody it. Bonshek’s title tells it best: it depends not on waving the colors of the small self, but on mirroring pure consciousness. (WSH)