Research on the Maharishi Effect

by Lizzie Lines, from TM News Feb 1994

My daughter Emily, aged eight, and I were driving to the shops-she wanted to make a phone call and I told her that we only used the car phone for important calls because it was expensive. "Do you have to pay for phone calls made from the car, Mummy?" "You certainly do," I told her. "How do they know you're making the call, to charge you," she asked. "Well," I said, "how do they know to charge you when you call from an ordinary phone?" "Oh, that's easy," she said, "with an ordinary phone it goes down a wire."

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing us when we try to understand the Maharishi Effect-there are no wires. There is nothing concrete, nothing to touch. Just a group of people in one place and an effect on a complex society somewhere else. Marconi apparently had this problem too. No-one believed that he could send a message across empty space. When I receive a fax from Australia, it comes via a mirror on a satellite hundreds of miles above the earth, and somehow gets into my telephone line, and thence to my computer screen. I still think it's magic.

The scientists who study the Maharishi Effect have had no shortage of raw data-large groups practising TM and the TM-Sidhi programme together, statistics of social indicators: war casualties, stock exchange indices, crime figures, accident rates, no difficulty in reaching the conclusion that, time after time, the Maharishi Effect works. Like Marconi they have found that the most challenging part of their work has been to get the established scientific community to accept that what is happening is really science: and to have their studies published in reputable journals, read out at symposia, and discussed by other researchers.

The first Maharishi Effect study to catch my imagination was the one shown below. Here is the story behind the statistics.

Dramatic Experiment

Dr David Orme-Johnson and Dr Charles Alexander, two MIU psychologists, planned an experiment to demonstrate that a group of people who practised both TM and the TM-Sidhi programme (TM-Sidhas) can neutralise open war. Their aim was to significantly reduce the nearly non-stop fighting in war-torn Lebanon. The project was called the International Peace Project and it was designed to bring together in Jerusalem 200 TM-Sidhas. There were already 30,000 meditators and several hundred TM-Sidhas in Israel. Precise predictions of the results were made in advance and lodged with leading scientists in the USA and Israel months before the experiment took place.

In due course, in the summer of 1983, the TM-Sidhas began to assemble. It was planned that there should be 200 together for two months, but it didn't work out that way. Hotels were busy, students had to go back to college, and the numbers assembled fluctuated during the two months These unplanned fluctuations had an extraordinary effect. The statistics would have to go up and down with the numbers in the assembly. They did, as the chart shows. In the two weeks when the assembly was full, events were dramatically more positive than when numbers were low.

How can you be sure that such a result wasn't going to happen anyway? Drs Orme-Johnson and Alexander used time series analysis, a statistical method which meant that they could take into account the other variables which would cause fluctuations in the frequency of events. For example, there are more fires when the weather is hot and dry. This meant that they could more correctly assess the impact of the assembly.

The chart above estimates the daily level of a composite Peace/War Index for the Lebanon War for each of the seven experimental periods between June 1983 and August 1985. Time series intervention analysis indicates significant progress towards peace during each experimental period for all seven combined.

Every one of the predictions made before the assembly started was confirmed in reality. The number of accidents, fires, war deaths and crimes went down, the stock exchange index went up and the number of war deaths dropped by an average of 76% when attendance at the assembly was high. The different figures were combined into one Composite Index of Quality of Life and compared with the number of assembly participants.

Increasing numbers of participants in Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programme led to improved quality of life in Israel. The chart above shows the strong correspondence between the numbers of TM-Sidhi participants and a composite quality of life index comprising many variables, including war intensity and war deaths in Lebanon, Israeli national stock market prices and national mood, and car accident rates, number of fires, and crime rates in Jerusalem and Israel.

Publication

Despite the statistical rigours of the study and the fact that all alternate explanations for the improvements, such as the weather and holidays, had been ruled out, it took three years before the study was published in one of the most prestigious and conservative journals in its field, the Journal of Conflict Resolution. The study was referred, by the journal, to four eminent scientists, one of whom raised an objection which took months of painstaking work to nullify. The journal's editor, Dr Bruce Russett, professor of political science at Yale, eventually decided to publish because, as he said in an 'Editor's Comment', although the theory seems impossible, the study met the stringent scientific standards needed for inclusion in the journal.

"My first reaction to work in this tradition was one of total disbelief. However, its proponents have shown themselves prepared to subject programmes to empirical test, and the technique already has a sounder basis than many less exotic approaches. At the minimum, courtesy and humility demand interest and attention to its progress and testing. If favourable results keep coming, we should not shrink from using them, or from seeking to understand them."
Ken Pease, PhD., Professor of Criminology, School of Social Policy, University of Manchester. Board Member, Home Office National Crime Prevention Board.

Much of this article was taken from Creating Heaven On Earth-The Mechanics of the Impossible, by Robert Oates, available from TM NCO Bookshop, Beacon House, Woodley Park, Skelmersdale, Lancs WN8 6UR, UK Tel 01695 727499 price £9.75 plus 15% postage.

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