shift-power of the collective-hagelin

7/31/2019 Shift-Power of the Collective-Hagelin

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ere living in an epidemic of stress.

Doctors report an alarming rise of stroke,hypertension, and heart diseasenow called

metabolic syndromeall of which are diseases of stress.Asa result,we would expect to see stressed behavior in society,and it turns out there is plenty of it: crime, domestic

violence, terrorism, and war.Since meditation provides an effective, scientically

proven way to dissolve individual stress, and if society iscomposed of individuals, then it seems like common senseto use meditation to similarly defuse societal stress. A

Wreduction in crime and stress-related behavior would thenbe expected to follow.

Nobody would have ever guessed I wouldnt haveguessedthe extraordinary degree to which you can reducesocial violence through meditation, because it doesnt takeeveryone meditating to generate profound effects.A relatively

small number of people meditating together has a powerfulspillover effect, reducing stress throughout a surrounding areain a measurable way.Thats the phenomenon I want to focuson.Thats where the really interesting physics and metaphysicscan be found.

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A study I conducted in the summer of 1993 in Washington,DC,shows rising crime levels over a period of six months,which take place every year as the temperature gets hotter between the winter and the summer.People stay out later,they are more aggravated and agitated, they get into moreghts, and the crime rate goes up. This is an absolutelyknown annual trend.From June through July of that summer,we brought to the area a large number of practicing meditatorsand trained quite a few others.When the group reached aparticular size2,500 (ultimately reaching 4,000)whichwas about halfway through the period, there was a distinctand highly statistically signicant drop in crime compared toexpected rates based on previous data, weather conditions,and a variety of other factors.

We collaborated with the local police department,the FBI,and 24 leading, independent criminologists and socialscientists from major institutions, including the Universityof Maryland, the University of Texas, and Temple University,who used highly sophisticated research tools to control for

variables such as weather. Everyone ended up agreeing onthe language, the analysis, and the results, and those resultswere quite astonishing.We predicted a 20 percent drop incrime, and we achieved a 25 percent drop. Just before thestudy, the Washington,DC,chief of police went on televisionand said something like,Its gonna take a foot of snow in

June to reduce crime by 20 percent. But he allowed his

S H I F T : AT T H E F RO N T I E R S O F C O N S C I OU S N E S S # 1 5 J U N E A U G U S T 2 0 0 7

department to participate in the experiment by collectingand analyzing the data. In the end, the police departmentsigned on as one of the authors of a published paper (see Social Indicators Research 47:153201, June 1999).

In this case it was only a few thousand people in a cityof about a million and a half.So a relatively small group wasinuencing a much larger group.This is what is so fascinating.And it has implications for more than just crime. In myopinion the most immediate implications today in theworld are stopping ethnic wars, the conict in the MiddleEast, and so on.And in fact a similar experiment was doneduring the peak of the Israel-Lebanon war in the 1980s.Wefound that on days when the numbers of meditators werelargest (and also on the subsequent day), levels of conictwere markedly reducedby about 80 percent overall.Thisturned out to be a statistically signicant effect and also a

surprising one,because there were only about 600 to 800people meditating in the midst of this entire conict and thehighly stressed surrounding population.

The results were published in Yale Universitys Journal of Conict Resolution (32:776812, December 1988), which alsopublished a letter urging other universities,collaborators,andgroups to repeat this study. The editors felt that theimplications of this were so far reaching, so fundamentallyimportant, that it must be repeated to test the likelihood thatthe results were a statistical uke.And thats exactly whathappened over the next two and a quarter years.During this

821-day period, seven subsequent experiments wereperformed to examine the effects of group meditation onthe Israel-Lebanon war.These groups gathered in Israel, inLebanon itself in the actual conicted neighborhoods, andat locations throughout the Middle East,Europe,and other parts of the world.

In each case, when the size of the group reached thethreshold that was predicted (based on previous research) tohave an effect,there was a marked and statistically signicantreduction of violence.We have also found in other studiesthat in the geographic vicinity of such a meditating group,

people experienced physiological changesincreased EEGcoherence,reduced plasma cortisol, increased blood levels of serotonin, biochemical changes, and neurophysiologicalchangesas if they were meditating.

When you put all these studies together,the likelihood that

Week Number of Assembly

P e r c e n

t C h a n g e

i n H o m

i c i d e s ,

R a p e s ,

a n

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l t s

C o h e r e n c e - C r e a

t i n g

G r o u p

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1

0%4,000

3,500

3,000

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500

0

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Reduced Violent Crimein Washington, DC

Source:Social Indicators Research 47:153201,June 1999

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TM and Intention As Shift and the team at the Maharishi University of Managementcollaborated on this article, a conversation ensued on the role of

intention and location. Here is part of that thread:

* * * *

Matthew Gilbert: In thinking about this phenomenon andrelated research,would you say that intention is an aspect of it?It occurred to me that intention may have nothing to do with theseeffects, that they are the result of a general, undifferentiatedresonance shift without specic purpose.Ken Chawkin: You raise a very interesting point.The Demon-stration Project that John Hagelin led in Washington, DC, in1993 had an associated prediction: that meditation would lowerthe severe crime rate. Same thing with the Israel-Lebanon war

in 1987. Would you call each of those an intention?The only role that intention plays in Transcendental Meditation

(TM) is that one does the specic technique; participants dontintend anything in the outside environment. If anything, they aretold to mind your own business, which means focusing inwardand on the practice.The outward effect is a lessening of negativityin the surrounding environment; the larger the group,the greaterthe extent of their inuence.David Orme-Johnson: Just to reinforce what Ken said:DuringTM there are no specic intentions for any specic effect, onlythe intention to do the simple procedure.The TM-Sidhi program

does entail specific intentions related to specific predictedoutcomesfor example, to gain some perceptual abilities or toy [an advanced TM-Sidhi technique].But these are all personalresults that the person wants to have.There is no intention toachieve a specic collective effect.

In contradistinction to techniques that have an intention toproduce some specic effect (such as healing a particular personor praying for world peace), the intention of TM and TM-Sidhi isto simply get to pure consciousness and to leave the outcometo that level. Its akin to Let Thy Will be done as opposed toPlease God, I would like such and such. Unlike prayer,

there is no God concept or intentional verbal thought involved.Having said that here, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi [who brought

TM to the West] once commented that we call our gatheringsWorld Peace Assemblies and that people come to them withthat outcome in mind.And there are large banners in the med-itation halls that say World Peace Assembly or InvincibleAmerica Assembly as a kind of reminder of why we are there.

And there are predicted outcomes about such things as crimerates that some or perhaps most of the course participants haveheard. But its not something that one thinks much about, andcertainly it isnt a part of the techniques themselves. Maharishi

explains that it is like going to the store.You have that initial inten-tion, but you dont think at each step of the way, I am going tothe store . . . I am going to the store . . . You put it on automatic.

The mechanics of it are very subtle. There are no specicintentions about specic impacts on society in any part of theprogram,but the overall intention of being in these assemblies isto make things better in a somewhat specic way,such as worldpeace.We are hoping for the best but leaving it to God, if youwill, to dene what is best and to work out how to accomplishit.What we have to do is raise our own level of consciousness.MG: The other question I have is whether violence-reduction

measurements are taken in a particular place (for example,Washington,DC) because its more conducive to these techniquesor whether in theory the same effect would be found everywhere.DOJ: In theory the effect would be found everywhere. Thelimitation is available variables. Crime is one variable that issystematically kept. Additionally,since our primary goal is worldpeace, we focus on stopping violence as a rst step. Obviously,we also want economic prosperity, equity, justice, and areduction in racial and cultural tensionsthe (Maharishi Effect)theory predicts that everything will improve globally. Thechallenge is how to measure it.

KC: We also noticed that once our groups were pulled out of an area, the violence would return to historical levels.We wantto create permanent world peace and not just a momentaryquelling of violence in a specic area.To that end, large groupsare being set up in many countries, especially in India and theUnited States. An added feature is to have these groupsfunctioning from the geographical brahmasthan (in Vedictradition, the central point) of each country because the effectthen becomes that much more powerful.

* * * *

Ken Chawkin is media relations ofcer at the Maharishi

University of Management.David Orme-Johnson, PhD, is one of the worlds mostpublished researchers on the Transcendental Meditation technique.

Research Links

www.permanentpeace.org www.invincibility.org


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a distance? There are no clear answers yet, but I believethat the clue lies in the notion that beneath the physical levelsof human existenceour bodies and the quantum realmof molecules, atoms,quarks, and leptonsis a unied eldof pure, abstract, universal consciousness. Its at this level of reality, this level of nonlocal mind,where you discover thatthe qualities of space are, at least in theory, capable of accommodating extraordinary experiences. As you getway down there, space starts to change. It starts to roil andboil in whats called space-time foam. And in thisspace-time foam, this continual frothing and upheavalof space-time geometry, wormholes get created. These

wormholes do not obeyEinsteinian causality.Youreable to inuence things in thepast as well as the future.

In addition to theparticles and forces weknow and lovegravity,electromagnetism, and soforththere are additionalforces and particles that wedont see, but they ll theroom. It was once thoughtthat these were irrelevant tohuman life because they onlyinteracted with us gravita-

tionally,which is too weak tobe of any interest.But if youdo the calculations properlyin the context of the super-string, you nd that they alsointeract with us electro-magnetically, even if rather weakly. This means thatsurrounding us in this roomis a dimly lit worlddimly

lit from our perspective,not dimly lit from its perspective.

We are dimly lit from its perspective.And in that dimly litworld there may be, and probably are, bodies and objectsand thingsand some very interesting mechanismsthatwe dont have in our observable-sector world and yet arevery effective radiators or communicators over vast distances.

This is not science ction; it is demonstrable using themathematics of superstring theory. A physics of subtle

the reductions of violence were simply coincidental a statistical ukewas less than one part in 10 millionmillion million (10 19 ).An overwhelming number of papersdocumenting more than sixty different experiments of group meditations effect on conict have been publishedin peer-reviewed scientic journals that have the moststringent standards for research.I believe it is the most rig-orously established and thoroughly tested phenomenon inthe history of the social sciences.

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S PA C E - T I M E

There is a fundamental princi-

ple called constructive interference.It has to do with the coherentinuence of multiple radiators,such as when more than oneloudspeaker or radio antenna isplaying the same music. Theindividual sound waves fromeach source combine to make abigger wave; the power isproportional to the square of the height of that combined

wave. Therefore, the radiatedpower when you move loud-speakers together grows inproportion to the square of thenumber of loudspeakersinthis case, you get the power of nine loudspeakers by movingthree of them together. Thesame will be true with anygroup of coherent radiators,whether loudspeakers, antennas, or number of people

meditating,which helps explain why only the square root of a certain percentage (1 percent) of a population is enough tohave a repeatable and demonstrably measurable effect on, inthe case of our meditation assemblies,rates of violence.In theUnited States, the square root of 1 percent of 300 millioncitizens is only 1,732 people.

But how we do have such an inuence on one another at

I think the claim can beplausibly made that the

potential impact of thisresearch exceeds that of any other ongoing socialor psychological researchprogram. It has survived abroader array of statisticaltests than most researchin the eld of conict

resolution.This work andthe theory that informs itdeserve the most seriousconsideration by academicsand policy makers alike.

David Edwards, PhD nProfessor of Government n

University of Texas at Austin n

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bodiesof thoughtis emerging that is very new, veryexciting, and suggests additional mechanisms for long-range interactions between people. It suggests that welive in predominantly at space, and that this space iscrisscrossed by shortcuts that provide paths of instantaneouscommunication across vast distances,even into the past or

the future. If we assume that at our core level of being weare all intimately connected in a unied eld where we areall one, it becomes very easy to understand how weinfluence one another.And when we contact this uniedfield of being, we enliven that unity, that harmony,and that coherence in the collective consciousness of

society. And by doing so,everybody seems to ow moreharmoniously together.

* * * * The preceding was excerpted, abridged,and edited from a given by Dr. Hagelin in Holland and videocast at an IONS regional conference on February 18, 2007, in Tucson,Arizona

JOHN HAGELIN, PhD, is a quantum physicist,

educator,public policy expert, and one of the worlds foremost

proponents of peace.He is director of the Institute of Science,

Technology, and Public Policy, and international director

of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace. For more

information, go to http://hagelin.org.

shift-power of the collective-hagelin

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