Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentdemonstrate positive changes on specific social indicators predicted inadvance, and controlled for other social, political, and climatic eventsthat might pose an alternative hypothesis. In the absence of a viablealternative hypothesis, the most parsimonious explanation for theMaharishi Effect is that it operates on the level of the unified field.In addition to these controls for alternative explanations, severalaspects of the data accord with the interpretation that it operates at thelevel of the unified field. For example, the finding that the effect is verygeneral, affecting a broad range of indicators, for example economicindicators, crime and accident rates, presidential statements, war variables,and health-related variables, suggest causation from a common,unified level. Second, several experiments have found that the effectis stronger when measured by composite indices of several variablesthat by any of the individual component variables. This suggest signalaveraging of a common underlying influence. Third, the observedaction-at-a-distance effects cannot be explained by any of four knownfundamental quantum fields—electromagnetism, gravity, strong interactionor weak interaction, but can be explained by the unified field(Hagelin, 1987; Orme-Johnson,Alexander, Davies, Chandler, & Larimore,1988).If, as Schrödinger has so eloquently reasoned, the human mind, orthat which is universal to all minds, constructs physical reality, then itis only a small extension of his reasoning to think that collectively wecan alter natural disasters. It may be inconceivable on the level of classicalphysics in which we live to think that humans minds can in any wayalter the motion of tectonic plates that give rise to such natural disastersand earthquakes and tsunamis, or that we can alter the ocean currents,sun spots, and other natural forces that determine hurricanes, and otherweather disasters. But from a fundamental quantum mechanical perspective,the world, and indeed, the whole universe is a wave function,a unified matrix of interconnected resonant energies. In principle, sinceeverything is interconnected on that level, change in one part of thesystem could cause change in the system as a whole, especially if itinduced coherent effects at the most fundamental level. The researchon the Maharishi Effect suggests that humans, perhaps uniquely inthe animal kingdom, have the ability by virtue of the complexity anddesign of our nervous systems, to function on that fundamental level of520