World Peace – A Call to Action
On July 18, 1993, a bemused reporter for the Washington Post wrote: “Somehow, as if magically from Heaven a calm has descended on this city”. Not only had Washington DC relaxed. The crime rate had dropped dramatically. Although inexplicable to most observers, this phenomenon was confirmation for a group of scientists studying consciousness. They had predicted it.
Evidence that Consciousness is a Field
Consciousness is now a hot topic in many disciplines including neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. An insight that has emerged is that because consciousness is nonmaterial, we have no reason to believe that it ends at our skin. It is more consistent with the facts to regard consciousness as a field which connects us all.
Fields imply action at a distance. A magnet attracts iron filings at a distance. The scientists hypothesised that a “coherence creating group,” a group of 4000 practitioners of an advanced technique of Transcendental Meditation known as the TM-Sidhi programme, would create a field of intense calm. Those in the vicinity would feel more settled even if they were not meditating. This has been called the Maharishi Effect after the founder of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The scientists predicted a drop in crime of 20 percent. They asked an independent panel of scientists to check their experimental method for scientific rigour. They approached the police for independent data, and made their prediction known to the media.
In fact, crime dropped by 23 percent from the predicted value, a statistically significant result. I was lucky enough to be among the 4000.
A Peaceful, Crime-free World?
Studies confirm this is possible. References are available at https://research.miu.edu/maharishi-effect/summary-of-13-published-studies. In the late 1970s scientists used independent data from the Conflict and Peace Data Bank and showed that group practice of the TM-Sidhi programme reduced conflict when practised near war zones in Nicaragua, Lebanon, Rhodesia-Zimbabwe and Cambodia. In 1983 during the war in Lebanon, improvements in a composite index that included war deaths, war intensity, traffic accidents and crime rate closely tracked numbers in a nearby coherence creating group. These results were then replicated by measuring the index while large assemblies of up to 8,000 participants met at distances far from Lebanon. During seven coherence creating assemblies large enough to have a predicted impact on the war, war fatalities decreased by an average of 71%, war injuries decreased by 68%, and cooperation among antagonists increased by 66%, with a statistical probability of less than 10-19 that the results were due to chance. What this means is that although New Zealand is far away from trouble spots, we could create World Peace from afar.
A Bold New Experiment
In late December 2023, 40 New Zealanders travelled to India to take part in the largest group of TM-Sidhi practitioners ever.
It was a grand demonstration and attracted interest from a number of influential Indian people. However, we need permanent coherence creating groups in all parts of the world. A group of 400 established in New Zealand would lower our crime rate, turn our economy around and create a dramatically better life for us all.
A group of 10,000 permanently established in New Zealand would take care of the entire world. It would cost a fraction of what we spend to maintain our defence force.
Find out how you can help make it happen.
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Author David Lovell-Smith has been a Christchurch medical practitioner for 40 years. He gained his PhD from Auckland University in 2010. He has published on food intake regulation and is the author of a book on hypertension (Penguin 2001)
