An Introduction to the Maharishi Effect

The Maharishi Effect describes the influence of Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Sidhi Programme, including Yogic Flying, on the collective consciousness of a community, city, nation or the whole world.

Read about Research on the Maharishi Effect

TM News article Feb 1994

How do you decrease world terrorism by 72 per cent overnight? According to statistics provided by the Rand Corporation, this has happened three times-when the three largest TM-Sidhi World Peace Assemblies (approaching or exceeding 7,000 participants) were taking place.

How do you increase friendliness between rival nations? Also by a large group practising the TM-Sidhi programme. Statistics from the independent Zurich Project on East-West relations monitored US and Soviet actions towards each other during an eight year period. They revealed significant improvements whenever attendance at the permanent TM-Sidhi assembly at Maharishi International University in Iowa reached the square root of one per cent of America's population.

Over forty studies, many published in leading scientific journals, have now confirmed this trend of increased positivity and decreased negativity correlating with a threshold number-the square root of one per cent practising the Transcendental Meditation and TM­Sidhi programme. And, as much as the individual results, the sheer volume of evidence is now beginning to compel attention.

"If it only happened once or twice, you could argue coincidence," says Dr Mark Novak, a University of Winnipeg sociologist. "In these studies it's the continual correlation, replicated many times over a long period, that gets your attention."

Dr David Edwards, Professor of Government at the University of Texas, Austin, agrees. "I think it's important that we take this research seriously," he says. "These studies are based on sophisticated statistical analysis, and it is impressive to see how consistently the data is all in one direction."

The phenomenon is known as the 'Maharishi Effect' in recognition of Maharishi's prediction of it as long ago as 1960. Its mechanics are described in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, origin of Maharishi's TM­Sidhi Programme, which state, 'Tat sannidhau vairatyagah'-'In the vicinity of coherence (yoga), hostile tendencies are eliminated.'

For the Maharishi Effect to work, it means that consciousness itself, the most settled state of the mind we experience during TM, must be a field, like electromagnetism or gravity. According to Maharishi's Vedic Science, that's exactly what it is, and with quantum physics now describing the most basic level of nature as a 'unified field', many modern-day scientists are coming to identify them as one and the same.

"Like a wave coming in from the ocean on which everything bobs up and down together, the coherence generated from the level of the unified field by a few people enriches the lives of all, and of the population as a whole. This is the Maharishi Effect."
-Dr David Orme-Johnson

Much of the story of technological progress this century is the story of the harnessing of field effects. Radio, television, even telephones and fax machines, all function via the electromagnetic field; yet there was an occasion when Marconi was obliged to take his newfangled radio equipment miles out to sea on a ship, well away from any possible electrical wiring, before sceptics would believe that it could actually radiate waves through thin air.

Consciousness, experienced and enlivened through the TM and the TM-Sidhi programme, appears to work like every other fundamental field in nature. Just as a radio station radiates waves through the underlying electromagnetic field, so the human mind can radiate waves through an underlying field-increasing coherence in collective consciousness. For MIU Professor Charles Alexander, the concept is totally logical, indeed inevitable. "The idea of gravity no longer upsets us. We know that every tiny lump of matter exerts its influence on every other tiny lump, even millions of light years away. So how implausible is it, really, that the human brain, the most exquisite product of evolution in the known universe, can also generate such field effects? The statistical evidence for the Maharishi Effect is clear. Only our theoretical picture of human consciousness is out of date".

In recent years, Maharishi has strongly and repeatedly emphasised the vital need of applying this knowledge as widely as possible, as quickly as possible, by establishing a permanent coherence-creating 'Group for a Government' in every country.

"There does not exist, nor will there ever be, a more powerful or proven technology to transform the trends of life in society. No government worthy of the name could deprive its citizens of the immense practical benefits of this most advanced knowledge of our scientific age. Through my Vedic Science and Technology-the science and technology of the unified field-any government leader can have easy access to the unified field and raise the administration of his government to be in perfect alliance with the administration of nature's government." -Maharishi