JMVRI Issue No. 28 features three studies: “Quantification of the Global Maharishi Effect: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Three Most Violent Countries in the World”, by Kenneth L. Cavanaugh and Lee Fergusson (pp. 11–53); “Harmony, Vāstu Architecture and Contemporary Living”, by Aparna Datey and Anna Bonshek (pp. 55–75); and “Jyoti: A Large-Scale, Architectural, Sculpture Installation” by Anna Bonshek (pp. 77–92).
JMVRI Issue Number 28
JMVRI Paper 28.1
Quantification of the Global Maharishi Effect: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Three Most Violent Countries in the World
Authors: Kenneth L. Cavanaugh and Lee Fergusson
This paper can be downloaded via the following link:
Citation: Cavanaugh, K. L., & Fergusson, L. (2025). Quantification of the Global Maharishi Effect: A quasi-experimental study of the three most violent countries in the world. Journal of Maharishi Vedic Research Institute, 28, 11–53.
Summary (excerpt):
This study investigates the sociological impact of the Assembly of 10,000 for World Peace held in India from December 2023 to January 2024. According to the authors, in the last 30 years the most prevalent and deadly form of armed conflict in the world has been violent conflict within states. However, the continued prevalence of so-called ‘intrastate’ violence suggests standard approaches to its prevention—such as mediation, negotiated settlements and peacekeeping operations—often provide little more than temporary mitigation.
The authors suggest these approaches have failed to effectively address the fundamental cause of collective violence: accumulated stress and tension in the individual and in the collective consciousness of society. They outline a comprehensive ‘consciousness-based approach’ advanced by Maharishi for reducing intrastate collective violence, called the Global Maharishi Effect, and present empirical evidence from the Assembly of 10,000 for World Peace to evaluate its impact on the three most violent countries in the world—Palestine, Myanmar and Syria.
The ‘treatment’ for this quasi-experiment was a theoretically predicted group size of at least 10,000 people engaged in practice of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation and TM–Sidhi program during the Assembly. Time series impact-assessment analysis was used to evaluate data on political violence obtained from the Armed Conflict and Location Event Data (ACLED) project, an independent and impartial conflict monitor that collects, analyses, and maps data on conflict and protest, providing detailed information to help identify, understand, and track patterns and trends in conflict and crisis situations around the world. The data used in this study was derived from the three countries at the time of the Assembly experiencing the most extreme levels of intrastate violence.
Empirical support was found for the hypothesis that the Assembly was associated with a significantly reduced trend of violence, as measured by the total combined number of violent events in the world’s then three most violent and unstable countries, a finding consistent with previous studies on the Maharishi Effect. A photographic image of the assembled 10,000 participants at Kanha Shanti Vanam, near Hyderabad in India, is shown below.