Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentioral and sensory interactions among individuals who are otherwisenot connected. In contrast, according to the new paradigm, everythingin nature, including individuals in society, are fundamentally interconnectedby, and are expressions of unbounded universal quantumfields. Hagelin (1992) explains that the history of the last 30 years ofphysics has been the progressive unification of the four fundamentalforces of nature: electro-magnetism, the weak force, the strong forceand gravity via electroweak unification, grand unification, and finallysuper-unification, in which individual objects, including people are notfundamentally distinct, but are “various modes of vibration of a single,underlying unified field” (p. 50).How does this quantum mechanical paradigm interface withhuman awareness? Hagelin (1992) enumerates the remarkable parallelsbetween the attributes of the unified field discovered in quantumphysics and the qualities of consciousness specified by ancient VedicScience recently brought to light by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, theforemost Vedic scholar. This view that the nature of nature and thenature of mind are essentially the same reality at fundamental levelshas a long history in both the East and West, ancient and modern.A founder of modern psychology, William James (1892), described astate of consciousness which is transcendent to thinking activity, butwhich provides the basis for thought and action. Max Planck, one ofthe fathers of quantum theory remarked “I regard consciousness as fundamental.I regard matter as derivative from consciousness” (quoted inKlein, 1984). Quantum physicist Bernard D’Espagnat (1979) wrote ina Scientific American article that “The doctrine that the world is madeup of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousnessturns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with the factsestablished by experiment”(p. 158).What makes Maharishi’s formulation of this view most interestingto political science is that it provides a theoretical understanding of thesignificance of the unified field of consciousness for government thatis empirically testable. The theory, known as “Maharishi’s AbsoluteTheory of Government” (1995), holds that the transcendental field ofpure consciousness, identical with the unified field glimpsed by modernphysics, is a field of ‘infinite correlation’ that underlies and connects allhuman activities and institutions.230