Some have been started by the recent claims that levitation by mere intention, disappearing from sight without actually going anywhere, supernormal compassion, and other unusual abilities are being experienced by growing numbers of participants in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation program.

As both a scientist and a long-term participant in the program, I have publicly expressed the opinion that the claims are true. I would like to clarify my intellectual understanding of how such effects of the T.M. program are possible, especially since I feel that these developments hold considerable importance for the world. The key to this understanding is "direct experience."

Direct experience is the basis of any science. This is a strong statement, but true in more ways than one. First, if a person is to do science, he must hold the assumption that the phenomena he wishes to study are orderly, behaving according to certain principles or laws. If this could not be assumed, what would be the point of studying anything?

Now, the source of the scientist's faith in this assumption deserves investigation. Can his faith in the orderliness of nature derive solely from the word of authorities in his field, or is there something more? Direct experience, it seems, is that something more.

Take the following example. An infant, perhaps not yet verbal, sits in a highchair attempting to eat with a fork. The fork suddenly gets out of his hand, falling to the floor. Someone kindly hands him another and shortly it too falls to the floor. The third time we are all watching. The child slowly leans toward the side on his chair and intently follows the fork as he again drops it to the floor. Has he experienced directly some order in the world? He is no Newton. He cannot write it down. He may not even be able to think it. But has he not just discovered, in a practical sense, a property of the law of gravity?

This is not an isolated example. A child soon learns from direct experience that gravity is predictable. By behaving in a certain way he can turn over, sit up, crawl on all fours, and so on. All this is preverbal, deeply ingrained in his awareness. Is it not probably that this and other such direct experiences of the world are the main sources of the scientist's faith that the universe is orderly and lawful? This is one way in which direct experience may be said to be the basis of science. There is another, more obvious, way.

When we think of science as an activity, we think of a process involving the steps of observation, interpretation, formulation of an hypothesis (and a means of testing it), further observation and so forth. If successful, the end result is an expanded understanding of some principle or law governing the area under investigation. Occasionally even a new law is discovered. In this sequence it is ultimately individual scientists who make the steps, and the degree of objectivity is judged from the extent to which other scientists can repeat the process to arrive at the same conclusion or understanding.

Direct experience, I would argue, is the very basis of each of the above steps. This direct experience includes components gathered from the senses (and their mechanical or statistical extensions), from the intellect (the conceptual framework), and very often, in spite of frequent denial, from the emotions. Thus, the scientist's direct experience as observer, interpreter, hypothesizer and tester of the phenomenon under investigation, along with the accumulated direct experience of his scientific and personal past, are not only inseparable from his work, but absolute requirements for it.

It should be understood that when a person says direct experience has led him to pronounce something true or untrue, he is being neither irrational nor unscientific. He is simply making a statement about his experiences. Now I should like to summarize some of mine with the T.M. program.

Seven years ago, when curiosity attracted me to an introductory lecture describing the program, two things stuck in my mind. One was the central objective, to develop the full potential of the individual, a reasonable goal. The other was the description of the simple, effortless technique that was supposed to accomplish this. The description of the thinking process and how transcending it could produce positive results on all levels of life was new to me, and I had little basis on which to judge its plausibility. However, the word "effortless" was especially meaningful.

As a biologist, I was quick to recognize that although effortlessness is unusual in "self-help" techniques, it is very common in nature. In fact, our physical growth from fertilized egg to 60- or 70-kilo, highly differentiated, adult requires little if any conscious effort on our part. This whole immensely complicated process is automatic. Thus, a simple, effortless technique said to be merely a way to optimize nature's own fundamental laws of progress did not seem to contradict anything in the biological world, so I decided to give T.M. a try.

Immediately upon beginning the practice I noticed improvements on the subjective level. Life was generally more fun. There was less of the strain and exhaustion I had often felt previously, and more energy, clarity and creativity. On a more objective level, my productivity at work took a jump, largely, it seemed, because of an improved ability to see the broad context as well as to concentrate on the details, both necessary to produce the maximum result. This being my experience, I naturally wanted to understand more about how such a simple procedure practiced two brief periods daily could have such profound effects.

Piecing together these experiences with the direct experience of the T.M. technique itself, the explanation given by the T.M. teachers now began to seem plausible. During the practice, my awareness did seem to pass, as was later explained to me, through "deeper, more subtle, levels of thought until thinking itself was transcended." The experience was so easy and natural, however, that I had difficulty seeing, at first, how it could be important.

But the explanation offered was that repeated direct experience of these more subtle levels of the though process and, most important, direct experience of the very source of thought, consciousness itself, improve one's ability for effective action in the world. This seemed fully rational to me only when I began to think of examples such as the child's mute experiences with gravity improving his ability to move about in the world.

I see the T.M. technique as a completely natural way to gain the direct experience of the laws that structure our thoughts as well as the laws governing basic states of human consciousness itself. Furthermore, as I have shown with the example of the child and gravity, it is not necessary to be able to verbalize or even think about the laws in order to make effective use of them. They become structured in one's awareness so that one can automatically take full advantage of them at any time. Just like riding a bicycle, once an ability is gained on this level and stabilized through practice it is not lost.

In this framework, then, the ability to levitate by mere intention comes from an intimate awareness of some-law or laws by which one is able to counter, negate or otherwise control the effects of gravity on oneself. The process is not so different from crawling or walking.

Even though in this case the laws may not all have been recognized yet by modern science, they are available in the T.M. practice just as other physical laws are available, by direct experience. Likewise, all the other unusual abilities enlivened though the T.M. program are based on the apprehension of definite laws of nature, not the contradiction of them.

The words "supernatural" and "mystical" have no place in this understanding. In fact, some prominent physicists are seriously attempting to understand the laws involved and consult Maharishi frequently. One of these is Brian Josephson of Cambridge University, who received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on the theory of quantum mechanical "tunneling."

Josephson has practiced the T.M. technique since 1971 and has been increasingly impressed, both with his own new experiences and with the wealth of knowledge that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi exemplifies in his teachings. Conferences on "Consciousness and Natural Law," several of which have been held on the main campus of Maharishi International University in Iowa and at Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland, have attracted Josephson, I. Prigogine, E.C.G. Sudarshan, K.P. Sinha, C. Piron and other leading physicists.

The understanding of human potential that I have elaborated above has made the direct subjective means of gaining knowledge of the physical world more acceptable to scientists than it was. The careful study of the parallels between the results of materialistic science and the results of direct subjective experience may yet accomplish the long-sought synthesis of intellectual knowledge and direct experience.

An example might be useful. In quantum electrodynamics there exists a theory of how electrons become manifest from an absolute field called the "quantum vacuum state." This state is unmanifest, that is, can only be inferred from indirect evidence. Yet the theory is perhaps the most successful in all of science, as measured by the numerical accuracy of its predictions.

In subjective experience, the T.M. technique provides a natural means of arriving at "transcendental" or "pure" consciousness. This field also is called absolute, is unmanifest like the vacuum state, yet can be directly experienced. The following list of expressions have all been used by physicists in describing the quantum vacuum state and by T.M. practitioners in describing their experience of pure consciousness: perfectly orderly; perfectly stable; nonchanging; the source of all change; unbounded; the basis of natural laws; the state of least excitation; the field of all possibilities.

It is this absolute field of pure consciousness that is discussed by Maharishi as not only the source of thought, but the source of the entire relative (that is, manifest) world. I suspect it is more than coincidence that this understanding gained from subjective experience bears such a great resemblance to the understanding of a very basic aspect of nature gained through the methods of physical science.

According to the records of the T.M. movement, levitation and other unusual abilities are now being experienced daily by more than 4000 people in the T.M. program. These abilities appear to grow naturally out of an increased harmony with the basic laws of nature. In the past only a handful of people around the world were known to exhibit abilities of this sort.

We are living in a unique time in that this knowledge is now available to virtually anyone who wants it. A completely new understanding of human potential is rapidly becoming established. I would also like to point out that there is a very reasonable intellectual understanding of how the realization of the full potential of the individuals of society would automatically transform the whole of society into an unprecedented era of peace and progress, a true "age of enlightenment."

Many today think they see the beginnings of such a transformation.

Kenneth G. Walton is an instructor in psychobiology at Harvard Medical School.