Welcome, tranquil viewers, to Science and Spirituality on Supreme Master Television. On this episode, we share some scientific findings on the power of group meditation to promote world peace and the betterment of life for everyone.

The theory of the Maharishi Effect is one way of describing this phenomenon and it has been defined as “the influence of coherence and positivity in the social and natural environment generated by the practice of the Transcendental Meditation and Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi programs.” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of India first proposed this hypothesis.

He was a spiritual teacher, who during his lifetime taught a meditation technique called “Transcendental Meditation.” He started the Transcendental Meditation or Spiritual Regeneration Movement in 1957 in Chennai, India, after which his teachings began to spread to other parts of the world.

The Maharishi Effect says that when a certain number of people meditate together using the Transcendental Meditation technique, the coherence created in the energy field of the group is able to affect the collective consciousness of others in a constructive manner – at a local, national and worldwide level.

The Maharishi stated that if just one percent of a community’s population practiced Transcendental Meditation, the unified field or calming energy generated by that group would reach out and influence the rest of that community’s population, resulting in increased peace and harmony. He also stated that if a group practiced his more advanced Transcendental Meditation- Sidhi Program, only the square root of one percent of the population would be needed to participate to create the same effect.

According to the Maharishi, when people meditate together with unified good intentions, their alpha brain waves become synchronized or exhibit “coherence.” The coherence of brain waves causes others to receive the same properties in their subconscious mind.

One of the explanations for the Maharishi Effect is that because a meditating group’s alpha brain waves are functioning at a profound level, the waves permeate the atmosphere to reach those in the same geographical region, influencing their hearts, thoughts and actions. The brain wave pattern of an individual can be measured with an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine.

An EEG machine can detect different brain wave patterns known as beta, alpha, theta, and delta. Dr. Craig Pearson is the Vice President of the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, USA which was founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1971. Here he discusses the nature of consciousness.

Consciousness is something that is so intimate to us that we don’t normally think about it, just like fish swimming in the sea don’t think about the water that they swim in. But consciousness is what makes us awake, we can think of consciousness as wakefulness or alertness or even intelligence.

The fact that you and I are awake and able to speak to each other is due to the fact that we are conscious, that we have consciousness at the foundation of our mind. So consciousness is the most intimate value of human life. And deep within, there is a place deep inside the mind where all thoughts come, and that is a place of unlimited creativity, unlimited intelligence, the great religions have referred to it as the Kingdom of Heaven within.”

Dr. Fred Travis, the Chair of the Maharishi Vedic Science Department and Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at the Maharishi University of Management

For the past 20 years he has researched the evolution of the human brain and investigated the nature of consciousness. This Maharishi Effect has been documented in scientific experiments. There have been over 600 studies conducted at over 250 independent universities and research institutions in 30 countries. Dr. Travis now elaborates on one such study done in Washington DC, the capital of the United States, which was published in a leading sociology journal called Social Indicators Research.

And in 1993 we did a similar thing in Washington DC, where we ended up bringing over 4000 people to Washington DC. This was over a three week period. We were able to track 20 different indices that we had lodged previously with a group of scientists, so we weren't just finding the one that worked and that's the one we’re reporting.

We said, “These are the ones we're going to measure.” And then we just measured them through the time. We found that as the numbers went up, the quality of life again, went up.

The experiment set out to show that the meditation would measurably reduce violent crimes in the city. With other possible factors controlled for such as weather, amount of daylight hours, prior crime trends, etc., it was found that in the last week of the experiment where the number of people participating in the group meditation was at its maximum, such crimes dropped by nearly 25 percent. The statistical probability of getting this result was calculated to be less than 2 in 1 billion.

Carl Jung, a famous Swiss psychiatrist, introduced the concept of “collective subconscious” in 1916. He regarded the collective subconscious as representative of wisdom and self-knowledge at the deepest level.

The following is one of his famous quotes on the underlying connection between all of humanity: “Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, which moves according to laws entirely different from those of our [individual] consciousness.”

We will soon return with more regarding the power of group meditation and the Maharishi Effect. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Science and Spirituality on Supreme Master Television. In the 1960s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi put forward a theory called the Maharishi Effect regarding the constructive results seen after a proportion of a population comes together in meditation.

He stated that if one percent or more of a community’s population meditated together using his Transcendental Meditation technique, they could profoundly influence others in the vicinity, leading to more peace and happiness in the community. The influence of meditation can be much wider as well.

According to the Maharishi, combined consciousness of a group that is meditating can bring order to a society or even the entire planet. If enough people are meditating in unison, meaning a critical mass is reached, the collective consciousness of others will fall into place and they will become more loving in speech, thoughts and actions. Dr. Craig Pearson, Vice President of the Maharishi University of Management expounds once again on the nature of consciousness and its relation to the Maharishi Effect.

Pure consciousness is actually the field of creativity and intelligence that gives rise to and sustains the entire Earth, the entire cosmos. So that means that what we’re waking up in our awareness is that unified field of all the laws of nature. So this demonstrates it’s a discovery whose implications for human life are really unimaginable that deep within our own awareness we have access to nature’s unbounded intelligence.

This is the key to bringing life into harmony with natural law. And bringing life into harmony with natural law is really the only way that we’ll find solutions to problems of our planet. This is the towering discovery of our faculty. And there are many others in specific applications of this discovery of consciousness in the unified field in the different academic disciplines, but this is the great one.

And the one that stands alongside that is the discovery of what we call the Maharishi Effect. And the scientists here, our own faculty who discovered that, and who’ve continued researching that have called that the Maharishi Effect in honor of our founder who predicted it in the 1960s. And our faculty have led research projects demonstrating the effectiveness of this in reducing crime, even reducing warfare, reducing international terrorism.

So these two discoveries go hand in hand - the discovery of consciousness as the unified field of all the laws of nature, and the ability of groups to enliven that field and create peace in the world.

So for the first time in world history, thanks to these discoveries by our faculty, we actually have a technology of peace. We can create peace in the world. It’s just a matter of support to bring groups together, sufficiently large, to create this influence for the whole human race.

A study has been done regarding the Maharishi Effect and international relations. It was hypothesized that the Maharishi Effect could cause the United States and the former Soviet Union to have a more cooperative relationship. A group meditation was conducted at the Maharishi University of Management with the number of participants being at least the square root of one percent of the population of the United States at that time.

In the months following the gathering, the actions between the two nations became more constructive as benchmarked against their relations between 1979 and 1986. In 1990, the results of this experiment were published in the “In Proceedings of the American Statistical Association,” a compilation of papers presented during the annual meeting of the Association.

Dr. John Davies is currently Co-Director of the Partners in Conflict and Partners in Peacebuilding Projects, and Senior Associate with the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM) at the University of Maryland,USA. He has many years of experience in psychology, peace building, and conflict management.

Dr. Davies believes in the power of meditation. In an interview with the magazine Yoga International, he related a story of how an expert psychiatrist, Professor Tony Nader, taught a group of people to meditate in a Lebanese village in the Chouf Mountains in 1981. At the time, the area in which the village was located was highly unstable and was in a conflict zone.

When the number of people meditating reached a critical mass, which was about 1,200 people or one percent of the village population, bombs stopped falling around the village. In the mid-1980’s, in collaboration with the Maharishi University of Management, Dr. Davies and others conducted a study to show that the Maharishi Effect could bring peace to Lebanon which was still experiencing conflict at the time.

A group meditation was conducted in Jerusalem, Israel for two months. Group meditation was also conducted in Lebanon and in other nations for approximately two years, with several thousand persons participating. The researchers found that even when they controlled for other variables such as weather, religious holidays, the number of people meditating, and police activity, there was a 40 to 80 percent decline in violence in Lebanon during the periods of collective meditation.

The result was replicated seven times during a period between 1983 and 1985. The study was later published in the well-respected Journal of Conflict Resolution.

To close, the results from experiments testing the Maharishi Effect demonstrate that peace truly comes from within and that when we are all unified in purpose such as in desiring a loving world, global peace truly can be accomplished. Let us all work together, meditate and follow the compassionate lifestyle of an organic vegan diet so that we may quickly fulfill the promise of the Golden Age – a planet filled with tranquility, kindness and love for all beings.

Thank you, gracious viewers, for your company on today’s episode of Science and Spirituality. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom, right after Noteworthy News. May you enjoy everlasting peace of mind.