Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentfor the U.S. as a whole, and it continued to improve at a higher rate(t (7) = 1.954, one-tailed, p = .046). The only variable that developedin an unpredicted direction was suicide rate, but the rate in Iowa wasstill lower than the U.S. rate in 1984. These results tend to support thehypothesis that Iowa would enjoy a more rapid improvement in qualityof life because Maharishi University of Management is located there.DISCUSSIONThe results support the hypothesis that the practice of the TranscendentalMeditation program throughout the U.S. and the collectivepractice of the TM-Sidhi program at Maharishi University of Management,Fairfield, Iowa may have contributed strongly to the improvementin the quality of life in the nation. The empirical finding that thequality of life in the country began to rise in 1976 when the MaharishiEffect Index reached .4% suggests that for very large populations, evenless than one percent of the population practicing the TranscendentalMeditation program may produce a noticeable improvement in society.The unprecedented acceleration of quality of life from 1982 to 1984 isconsistent with the hypothesis that when the number of participants inthe collective practice of the TM-Sidhi program became sufficient toproduce the Extended Maharishi Effect, a phase transition in the qualityof national life would occur.Alternative explanations have been put forth for the improvementon some of the individual social indicators that went into the Qualityof Life Change Index. For example, it has been argued that the recentunprecedented downward trend in crime was caused by a change inthe population distribution. Specifically, it has been pointed out thatthe coming of age of the baby-boom generation produced a relativedecrease in the number of 18–25-year-olds, the age bracket with therelatively highest criminal acts record. However, the LISREL analysisshowed that the demographic changes in the proportion of population18–25 years old was unrelated to the influence of the Maharishi EffectIndex.An alternative explanation is that many of these changes are due totechnical development and progress. Technological improvements canbe expected to have increased linearly over the period of the experi-558