Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentA subsequent re-analysis of this study in Israel examined cultural/political events as alternative explanations for the results (Orme-Johnson& Oates, 2009). The events were the resignation of the prime minister,redeployment of the Israeli troops in Lebanon, religious holidays,and summer heat. The study found that these events could not explainthe results, as indicated by (1) simple inspection of the published data;(2) statistical analyses controlling for these events; (3) analyses ofreduced data sets that completely eliminated the days of the events fromthe analyses; and (4) analyses of six random samples of 50% of the data.Some of these cultural/political events did have a significant effect on aquality of life index of crime, traffic accidents, fires, war intensity, stockmarket, and national mood. The quality of life increased during holidaysand decreased during the period between when the prime ministerannounced he would resign and when he did resign. It also decreased onthe hottest summer days. This finding validated the index by showingthat it was sensitive to major events in a society in an interpretable way.However, these effects were independent of the effect of the meditatorsand could not explain it. The paper made a case that Maharishi’s theoryof collective consciousness provides a unifying framework that explainsthese results through a logical structure of clearly defined, operationalizedterms, grounded in physiological and behavioral research, whichmakes specific quantifiable and socially important predictions that havebeen extensively replicated.In a study which replicated the above findings, results indicated adramatic reduction in war deaths in Lebanon on seven other occasionsover a 2 1/4 year period each time an assembly of TM-Sidhi programparticipants was sufficiently large to have a predicted impact on the war.Daily data from nine international and regional news sources were codedusing a reliable standard scoring system by a Lebanese professional raterwho was blind to the experimental hypothesis, thus making the ratingshighly objective. The study found that during the seven assemblies, warfatalities decreased by an average of 71%, war injuries decreased by 68%,and cooperation among antagonists increased by 66%. The combinedprobability that these results were due to chance was extremely small—less than 10 –19 (Davies & Alexander, 2005).Similar striking results were found on the global level during thethree major assemblies attended by approximately 7000 practitioners of512