JMVRI Issue Number 8
JMVRI Issue Number Eight presents articles on the theme of world peace, with a paper on the global impact of the Maharishi Effect, an influence of coherence from 1974 to 2017, followed by an account of the World Peace Artists initiative to support Maharishi Vedic Pandits and a discussion of Vedic Defence, and, lastly, a paper on the impact of the group practice of Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi program on improved U.S.-Soviet relations.
JMVRI Paper 8.1
Global Impact of the Maharishi Effect from 1974 to 2017: Theory and Research
Authors: David W. Orme-Johnson and Lee Fergusson
This paper can be downloaded via the following link:
https://www.academia.edu/37249119/Global_Impact_of_the_Maharishi_Effect_from_1974_to_2017_Theory_and_Research
Citation: Orme-Johnson, D. W., & Fergusson, L. (2018). Global impact of the Maharishi Effect from 1974 to 2017: Theory and research. Journal of Maharishi Vedic Research Institute, 8, 13-79.
Summary
World peace is the urgent goal of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s revival of the consciousness-based technologies of ancient Vedic India. Towards this end, Maharishi created a worldwide organisation, founded universities in several countries, and trained over 20,000 teachers of the Transcendental Meditation technique who in turn have taught it to approximately ten million people, which for five decades has increasingly created an influence of harmony in the world. Maharishi’s approach to peace is through creating coherence in collective consciousness, which he holds to be the fundamental force governing the quality of life in society. The individual is the unit of collective consciousness, with each individual contributing to all collective levels—family, city, state, national, and world.
Reciprocally, each level of collective consciousness influences every individual’s mind and behaviour. Therefore, the quality of consciousness of the individuals in society is the grass roots cause of the quality of collective consciousness. Stressed and sleepy individuals not only have poor judgement, make mistakes, and cause suffering for themselves and family, friends, and associates, they also propagate an influence of stress into collective consciousness that affects everyone in society, inclusive of the entire world. Through Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique, the individual mind effortlessly transcends through increasingly subtle levels of thinking to arrive at the completely silent state of pure consciousness at the deepest level of the mind, which is unbounded awareness and infinite peace. Pure consciousness is held to be the direct experience of the transcendental unified field of Natural Law governing all forms and phenomena in the universe.
Extensive research shows that regular experience of it through Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique and his advanced Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi program, including Yogic Flying, creates an influence of harmony, not only throughout all levels of the individual’s physiology, mind, and social behaviour, but also throughout all levels of collective consciousness with which the individual is associated. The influence of the meditator on his or her family, community, nation, and world enhances lively, creative, and dynamic interactions among the different groups in society. Collective behaviour on every level becomes harmonious and mutually supportive, unifying society into one orderly, evolutionary, balanced structure of natural law. This is called coherence in collective consciousness. Maharishi identifies the basis of war and terrorism as stress in collective consciousness, which is the opposite of coherence. In this view, mistakes, problems, and difficulties within individual lives accumulate as collective stress. When stress in collective consciousness is left to increase unabated, it reaches a phase transition threshold at which point violence breaks out in society, such as in violent crimes, strikes, riots, terrorism, and war. The way to reduce stress in the individual and society and ultimately to end war is to transcend, which is to bring pure consciousness to the awareness of the individual mind and hence into collective consciousness.