Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentexpected level of satisfaction, happiness and well-being for individuals,but led rather, in spite of increased material comfort, leisure and easycommunication, to a life increasingly beset with problems (Liu, 1974).Social scientists have approached the concept of quality of life fromdifferent perspectives in an attempt to find its proper definition. Thetrend of consensus appears to be that quality of life is a unitary constructinvolving all of the conditions of a person’s life as a whole (Gitter& Mastofsky, 1973). There is general agreement that the quality of lifeis related to a number of different components—physical, biological,social, economic, cultural—all of which pertain to the individual/enviromentalinterface (Bunge, 1975).Two main streams of investigation developed in the attempt to measurequality of life: subjective social indicators and objective indicators.Subjective indicators reflect subjective evaluations derived fromrespondents’ own ratings of their lives, either as a whole or of someaspect of them. Objective indicators usually represent purely externalfactors such as factual information about the quality of life accumulatedin statistical data.Unexpectedly, a common research finding suggests thatimprovements in objective indicators are not necessarily correlated withimprovements in subjective indicators. Schneider (1975) concludesthat, “Despite the often found assumption that objective socialindicators data actually reflect the quality of life experienced by people,we have no reason to a priori assume that such a correlation exists.”Actual research findings indicate that there are very large differencesbetween experienced quality of life and the evaluation of objectivecriteria (Campbell, 1976; Duncan, 1975; Schneider, 1975, 1976). Thesefindings challenge the widespread assumption that the way to improvethe quality of life is to improve outer circumstances.This paper investigates an alternative approach to bringing aboutsocial change in the direction of a more harmonious, healthy functioningof the society as a whole while ensuring the optimal well-being ofits members. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1986) revived traditional Vedicknowledge by developing a set of practices, the Maharishi Technologyof the Unified Field (MTUF), consisting of the Transcendental Meditation(TM) and TM-Sidhi program, which are predicted to enliven anunderlying field of pure consciousness. In addition, he has articulated536