The Great Work: Healing the World with Collective Meditation

November 23rd, 2015

Awake Goy

23rd November 2015

By Roger Taylor BSc, BVSc, PhD

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

Collective meditation does have effects in the ‘real world’.

We are living now in the age of Kali Yuga. According to Indo-Tibetan mythology, this is a time when iron birds fly in the air, and the life of the spirit falls to its nadir. The evidence for this can be seen all around us: terrorism, alienation, crime, drugs, degradation of the environment. It is not hard to see how the age of Kali Yuga has arisen necessarily along with the rise of the predominant materialist world-view. This view, of the world being made up of particles, which we envisage as material, could in principle be overturned if we would really take on the implications of quantum theory, which sees the world as made up of insubstantial inter-penetrating waves.

It is now often stated that the basic tenets of quantum theory have never come under serious question. Thus we must accept one of these: that, at some level, faster than-light, or non-local connections can exist. Further, there is much recent evidence that this can be true not only for the particles studied by physicists but for human minds. Further to the thousands of anecdotes of telepathy there are now two very convincing lines of objective evidence. The first concerns brain waves: at least three groups of scientists have shown first (and as expected) there is usually a degree of synchrony between the two halves of a single person’s brain. But what is new and exciting is the finding of synchrony between separate individuals. This occurs principally where there is a close relationship, as with lovers, or mother and child — e.g. [1][2]. Synchrony may also occur between brain waves and other physiological rhythms, such as heart-beat and breathing. This becomes much more marked during meditation — as if this activity serves to harmonise bodily functions. In addition, studies on long-term meditators have shown that the brain does undergo real permanent change as a result [3].

The second line of evidence concerns a much more general phenomenon whereby the minds of millions of people all over the world can be seen to be linked together. This work began some 30 years ago, at Princeton University, with the finding that people could, with their minds, influence (albeit to a very small degree) the behaviour of a simple electronic device called a random event generator (REG) [4]. Unavoidably, all electronic components generate noise. This noise is generally thought to be completely random, but obviously a mental influence means a departure from randomness. Later experiments led the researchers to believe that conscious intention was not necessary, since the REG was responding to large groups of people who did not even know the device was in the room with them. Working with situations such as theatres or religious meetings, observers were sent in to record the times when there was simultaneous focus of emotion, such as when the audience laughed together, or held their breath at some dramatic scene. When later these records were compared with the record of noise from the REG, significant correlations were often found.

Thinking already that this effect might be non-local, they set up the Global Consciousness Project, whose objective was to look for correlations between REG behaviour and major world events which would be likely to focus the emotions of millions of people. The procedure now is, whenever a major world event takes place, to make a “formal prediction” that it will significantly affect the REGs. (There are now over 50 of these operating in various parts of the world). Then, whether the result is, or is not significant, it is still included in the calculation of overall significance. These results are available for anyone to see on the inspiring website [5]). A particularly large deviation was found in response to the events of 9/11 (Fig. 1).

The Great Work - Healing the World with Collective Meditation - Figure 1 — Figure 1

Figure 1: The combined statistical significance of all the results accumulated over several years is now extremely high. Have these subtle connections among human beings been increasing in recent years – perhaps with the help of the rapidly increasing network of communications by radio, telephone and the internet? It is too early to say. But the scientists running the Global Consciousness Project suggest that they have, and that they are leading us towards the “Omega Point,” as foreseen by Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, when the human race becomes in effect a single organism [6]. In this case, it might be suggested, a high proportion of people’s brain waves might come into synch with the Schumann resonance much of the time, and perhaps lead them to identify with Gaia and the natural world.

Collective meditation and prayer have effects in the real world.

If this is so, then we already have a basis for belief that prayer might, after all, be effective. Indeed a number of scientific studies have been carried out to test the efficacy of prayer in aiding the recovery of patients in hospital. Some of these have achieved a modest degree of statistical significance. Much more impressive, however, are the results obtained by scientists at the Maharishi International University’s Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy. Based on his theory of the unified field, the Maharishi advanced the hypothesis that meditation itself, and especially the transcendental meditation he was teaching, should have an effect in the real world, and that this effect might be greatly magnified when large numbers meditate together. This hypothesis has been tested now in over 40 studies on a variety of social indicators, with violent crime rates showing the biggest effect. Many of these have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

The Experiment and Studies:

A very large and well-planned experiment took place in Washington in 1993 [7]. Every stage of the experiment was overseen by a 27-member review board including sociologists, criminologists, and representatives from the Police and Local Government. It was decided, as the dependent variable, to monitor figures for violent crime. Over a period of two months, TM practitioners gathered at several locations in the city, and practised the TM-Sidhi programme together twice daily at pre-arranged times.

The Great Work - Healing the World with Collective Meditation - Figure 2 — Figure 2

The result (Figure 2) shows that, as the number of meditators rose to reach eventually about 4,000, the violent crime figure dropped progressively by 23%. The statistical significance of this correlation was astronomic. No significant decreases in crime were found for similar periods during the previous five years. On consideration of a great number of other possible causes for this result, such as unusual weather conditions, etc., none was found to be remotely answerable.

Another study centred on the war in Lebanon in 1988 [8]. Over a two-year period, seven TM groups met at various times totalling 93 days — not only in Lebanon and Israel, but further afield in Holland, Yugoslavia and the US. Their influence, assessed by a composite peace/war index, during these 93 days reached enormous significance by comparison with the intervening periods, totalling 748 days, when no such groups were meeting. The authors comment that these results make this peace-creating effect of group meditations the most rigorously established phenomenon in the history of social science.

These results should be taken seriously.

To see the graphs gives us exactly the kind of visual, quantitative evidence that our scientifically-encultured minds now demand. Some would object that people have been praying for peace from the beginning, and look how much war we still have. But petitionary prayer still has an element of ego, in that it is asking for something “I” want. The trick may be to stand aside and allow the greater universe to take whatever form it will; to allow the Tao to flow freely. Thus the TM meditators in the experiments were not consciously praying for anything, but rather could be said to be merely aligning themselves with the universe. At the same time, they could hardly escape knowing that an experiment was under way, and what was being measured; and those in the Washington experiment would have known that they were in Washington. This kind of link, held in the background of the mind, is what is usually employed for distant healing, and can focus an essentially non-local effect onto a specific target.

Since we know with such certainty now that we are all connected at this subtle level, we must allow for the possibility that we are having an influence all the time; not only during set times for spiritual practise. It may be that we are never “off duty,” but are on the stage all the time. This influence would come not from any kind of activity, not by any doing, but by the quality of our being.

The Great Work - Healing the World with Collective Meditation 3

Possible further evolution of the human race:

The above findings clearly reveal a tremendous potential, which could, in principle, heal the world. But they are only the beginnings of what many authors are now seeing as a great further stride in evolution. Indeed, such a stride was seen many years ago by Theilhard de Chardin, when he envisaged a linkage of human minds into a coherent whole, termed by him the noosphere [6]. While evolution is popularly thought to be a gradual process, with any significant change taking millions of years, many big changes have in fact taken place relatively rapidly: so-called punctate evolution. The rate of change in these, however, is nothing to the kind of rapid change in the human psyche, which now seems necessary if we are to transform our world and set it on a more healthy course.