Once Maharishi had pointed this out, it was completely obvious to all of us that respiratory suspension marked isolated periods of clear transcending. We knew this from our own twice-daily meditation practice. But how could we convey this to the world? A skeptic might ask, “How do you know that a subject was transcending when his or her breath became suspended?” Good question.

Dr. John T. Farrow, a biochemist trained at Brandeis University, and Russell Hebert came up with a clever series of experiments to show just this. They had subjects press a button after they had a subjective experience of transcending. Sure enough, periods of respiratory suspension preceded each button signal (see Chart 3). This established that a clear experience of Transcendental Consciousness had occurred at that time.

In four different experiments, with 565 criterion-meeting episodes of breath suspension observed in 40 subjects practicing TM, John and Russell established that the moments of TC are associated with breath suspension. Respiratory suspension was now a clear “bio-marker” for Transcendental Consciousness. The suspensions of breath during the TM technique occur spontaneously and naturally as part of a very comfortable experience of deep rest, and there is no shortage of oxygen during this time or of compensatory breathing afterwards.