Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentfunctioning as measured by EEG activity (Dillbeck & Bronson, 1981;Orme-Johnson & Haynes, 1981). Maharishi explains that the coherenceproduced in individual consciousness by the practice of this technologyspontaneously extends to collective consciousness, purifying collectiveconsciousness and enlivening natural law in society (Maharishi EuropeanResearch University, 1982b, p. 13).There are many examples of physical systems in which the morecoherent and orderly functioning of even a small proportion of theunits of the system will induce a transition to more orderly behaviorof the system as a whole. In a laser, for example, quantum-mechanicalcoherence between a number of individual photons proportionalto the square root of the total causes the entire system to undergo aphase transition in which all the photons begin to interact coherently,thus generating laser light. Analogous to principles of quantum fieldtheory in physics, physicist John Hagelin (1987, p. 65) suggests thatthe spreading of coherence from the TM-Sidhi group to the whole ofsociety through the Maharishi Effect is consistent with a field-theoreticmodel of consciousness in which constructive interference due to thecoherent superposition of wave amplitudes generates a field effect withintensity proportional to the square of the number of participants.How the influence of coherence travels throughout society. The processwhereby increased coherence in individual consciousness leads toincreased coherence throughout society corresponds to the property of“infinite correlation” in quantum fields. Infinite correlation means that the“correlation range” becomes infinite—an impulse anywhere in the quantumfield instantaneously influences all other points in the omnipresentfield (Maharishi European Research University, 1982b). The purificationof national consciousness through the group practice of the TranscendentalMeditation and TM-Sidhi programs simultaneously purifies worldconsciousness of which it is a part (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1986, pp.73–74). This influence of positivity travels, Maharishi adds,...through the same channels used by the evolutionary power of nature.From the most quiet, transcendental level, nature performs, and it performswithin itself. It is the self-referral activity of natural law that isresponsible for absolute order in creation . . . . It transcends all activityof natural law in the relative field, but yet is always lively as the basis406