Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmenttable population such as maximum security prisoners, the TranscendentalMeditation program has been shown to markedly reduce anger,anxiety, hostility and other indicators of personal difficulties, leadingto 40-50% lower return rates up to 15 years after release from prison(Alexander, Rainforth, Frank, Grant, Von Stade, et al., 2003; Bleick& Abrams, 1987; Rainforth, Bleick, Alexander, & Cavanaugh, 2003).In a randomized, controlled study of posttraumatic stress disorder inVietnam veterans, another disorder for which effective treatments havebeen difficult to find, the Transcendental Meditation technique significantlyreduced multiple indicators of psychopathology compared to thepsychotherapy control group (Brooks & Scarano, 1985).Offering evidence of effectiveness on a large scale, an epidemiologicstudy by the Swedish National Health Board found that the rate of psychiatrichospital admissions for the 35,000 practitioners of the TranscendentalMeditation program in Sweden was less than 1% of the nationalrate (Ottoson, 1977; Suurkula, 1989), and a study of 2,000 TranscendentalMeditation practitioners in the U.S. showed 50% lower rates ofinpatient and outpatient medical use over a 5-year period compared to acontrol group matched on demographic vari ables (Orme-Johnson, 1987).In addition, a national case-study of 34,000 survivors instructed in theTranscendental Meditation program after the major 1988 earthquakein Armenia found both psychological and physiological bene fits of theprogram. Before this program was introduced, there had been no way toalleviate the enormous psychological trauma and its expression in variousphysiological disorders.Effects of group practice of the Transcendental Meditation andTM-Sidhi program on societal problems and disasters: The ancientVedic text, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, proclaims that, “In the vicinity ofyoga (coherence and union) hostile tendencies do not arise”(MaharishiMahesh Yogi, 1986, 1996). Maharishi has proposed that TranscendentalConsciousness (yoga) is the direct experience of a unified field of consciousnessat the basis of subjective and objective existence. He also hassaid that the unified field as recently described by quantum field theoristsprovides a glimpse of this same underly ing universal field from the objectiveperspective of modern physics. This proposal is discussed at length byHagelin, a leading unified field theorist ( J.S. Hagelin, 1987, 1989).506