The Maharishi Effect

Just after my father's death, in July of '99, I was going through his library to take what books I thought I might use when I came across a little book called "The Maharishi Effect" with the sub title "A Revolution Through Meditation." I was interested in meditation, and I knew that Maharishi taught a form of meditation called Transcendental Meditation or TM. It then wound up sitting on a shelf in my library. Then about a month ago I was reading a book by Larry Dossey, M.D. called "Recovering the Soul" when I came across a reference to the Maharishi Effect. "Interesting" I thought and continued to read. As I read I almost could not believe what I was reading!

It appears that, in the early seventies, Maharishi was at a meeting with a group of scientists, and made the following pronouncement: if 1% of a town or community were to practice deep meditation for 20 minutes, twice a day, the quality of life for everyone in that community would go up, and the crime rate would go down.

"That is hard to believe" said one scientist, "and I will test it." The scientist, sociologist Garland Landrith, found 11 U.S. cities that had 25,000 people or more that also had 1% of the population that practiced TM daily. He then found 11 more cities to match the first 11 cities, and that did not have 1% of the people practicing TM. Sure enough the TM cities had a crime rate that was down by an average of 8.2% while the non-TM cities had a crime rate that was up by 8.3%!
"Astonishing" I thought, if this is right, this is the answer to world peace, but it didn't end there. Over the past 20 years there have been over 400 studies that confirm that this is true! Four hundred studies that say all we have to do is teach people meditation and we would have world peace, and yet no one seems to know about it or care! There is even more, in 1976 Maharishi introduced a new way to teach TM called TM-Sidhi. Using this new system it only required the square root of 1% of the population of a city practicing TM for the crime rate to go down! So most of the studies are based on the square root of 1% rule!

In 1983 they held a world TM conference which had 7,000 people in attendance. Seven thousand people are close to the square root of 1% of the worlds population. The scientist then looked at world statistics for three weeks prior to the conference, the three-weeks of the conference, and three weeks after. Sure enough, the number of positive events worldwide were up, and the Negative Events were down worldwide! Strong positive events before and after were 1.1% but jumped to 4.5% in the three weeks of the conference. Just think what would happen if 10% of the world mediated.

What's going on? Why does it work? According to Vedic teaching, (which is a philosophy not a religion) there is only one mind that is shared by everyone. So all minds belong to one system. According to physics, if the square root of 1% of a system is coherent it will increase the coherence of the whole system, but all incoherence in a system has a 1 to 1 relationship. This is how a laser beam works. A small percent of light is made coherent. This creates a cascading effect towards coherence until the whole beam is coherent. Does meditation create coherence in the unified field from which our all our minds come?
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