Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentspace and time we may all be members of one body. (1932, c.f. Dossey,1989, p. 125)Eugene Wigner, Nobel laureate and pioneer of measurement theory,explains this change in science’s perspective on consciousness as follows:When the province of physical theory was extended to encompassmicroscopic phenomena, through the creation of quantum mechanics,the concept of consciousness came to the fore again: it was not possibleto formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent waywithout reference to consciousness . . . . (1967, pp. 172, 186)Max Planck, the first physicist to discern the quantized nature of theapparently physical world, was led by the implications of his studies tostate, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivativefrom consciousness” (Klein, 1984). More recently, H.P. Stapp, aphysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, long acknowledged forhis contributions to the S matrix approach to quantum mechanics, concludedhis book, Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, by saying thatquantum “particles” and their interactions are “idea-like” rather than“matter-like” (Stapp, 1993).This view has been similarly expressed by other eminent physicalscientists, for example, Sir Arthur Eddington’s “mind stuff” and WolfgangPauli’s “unity of all being” (cited in Dossey, 1989, p. 124). In anarticle on quantum mechanics appearing in Scientific American, Frenchphysicist Bernard d’Espagnat summarized the field by stating,The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence isindependent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict withquantum mechanics and with the facts established by experiment.(1979, p. 158)Quantum mechanics recognizes that the nervous system of theobserver, the observed, and the measuring device all form a single quantummechanical system (Farwell, 1996). The question is, at what pointdoes the system become a classical, discrete Newtonian observation withthe definite attributes and locations of our ordinary world of appearances?At what point does the abstract wave function of probabilitiescollapse into a single result? One of the world’s foremost mathemati-516