The Maharishi effect

BEING AND BECOMING

DR. TONY NADER, neuroscientist, author, and leader of the Transcendental Meditation® movement, shares some insights on consciousness, and the research findings of TM that highlight the Maharishi Effect as a way of raising the consciousness of humanity.

All spiritual leaders emphasize the importance of attending to an aspect of life that is beyond matter and physical energy, a reality transcendental to surface sensory perception.

The relationship between the physical and this non-physical reality has inspired great debates in philosophy and religion for millennia, and those debates continue among today’s scientists.

On one extreme are the physicalists, who propose that there is nothing spiritual, that consciousness and awareness are not real but only illusory byproducts—epiphenomena of the physical activity of the human nervous system. At best, physicalists see consciousness as a conundrum and call the mind-body relationship a “hard problem” because they cannot see how mechanical objective reality leads to subjective personal experience.

Then there are the dualists, who propose two different and separate fundamental realities, one objective and material and the other subjective and non-material. This begs the same question: how can two fundamentally different entities, one natural and obeying strict laws and the other seemingly supernatural, possibly interact and influence each other?

Scientists look at explanations asserting anything supernatural with skepticism. They shy away from explanations that do not conform to objective laws. Anything supernatural poses a problem for science, not only in the unexplainable mechanisms by which the non-physical interacts with the physical, but also in the potential “apparent moodiness” and “unreasonable decisions” of such supernatural actors.

The Advaita Vedanta perspective, brought to light by Adi Shankara, proclaimed by Swami Vivekananda, and more recently emphasized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, presents consciousness as primary and all there is. Consciousness is all there is!

We propose that this Vedic perspective solves all the problems and conundrums of philosophy and science. There is no hard problem of consciousness because consciousness is all there is; it is both natural and fundamental, both immanent and transcendental.

To exist is to be conscious. To be is to be conscious. Pure existence is pure consciousness. Becoming is the process by which consciousness knows itself, appearing as many but remaining one. In the upcoming book, entitled, Consciousness Is All There Is, both logic and empirical evidence provide support for how the one unbounded ocean of consciousness manifests as multiplicity. There is only one ocean of pure Being appearing on the surface to become an endless number of waves.

The latest discoveries of modern physics in supergravity and M-theory point to a similar, unified reality at the basis of all diversity. Instantaneous infinite correlation appearing as action at a distance much faster than the speed of light has been shown scientifically, a phenomenon called entanglement. The phenomenon of being in many places at the same time is now understood as natural and described by wave functions on the quantum levels. Uncertainty and randomness in the behavior of elementary particles open the possibility of freedom even within the constraints of very strict, deterministic laws. These and other discoveries of modern science baffle scientists, who often describe them as weird. Most significantly, these phenomena beg for explanations that can only come with a fundamental paradigm shift from the materialist and physicalist perspective to a consciousness-based worldview.

Just as the coherence of an individual’s consciousness
determines their behavior, so the coherence of the collective consciousness 
of many individuals influences social behavior. 

What appears as supernatural or magical is simply due to a limited understanding of the fundamental laws of nature. The Vedic tradition has technologies that utilize such fundamental aspects of consciousness to create effects that might seem supernatural to those who are ignorant of ultimate reality. But these technologies and phenomena are nonetheless natural, obeying strict laws. If, two hundred years ago, someone had said that it is possible for two people to talk to each other and even to see each other across vast distances, this would have been considered magical and supernatural. Today, video conferencing is an entirely natural way to communicate aurally and visually across the globe and beyond.

The supportive evidence for a consciousness-based Vedantic worldview is not just theoretical; there are reliable empirical findings and considerations. We live in a realm of constantly changing physical manifestations, and when we examine this carefully, we find that consciousness is the one aspect we can be one hundred percent sure about.

Most importantly, hundreds of scientific research studies on the technologies of consciousness, as demonstrated by Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation® (TM) program, have shown profound benefits in individual and social life. These improvements come on many levels of mental and physical health, behavior, and social, national, and international well-being. Applying these consciousness-based Vedic technologies has clearly demonstrated how achieving inner peace can create world peace.

Just as the coherence of an individual’s consciousness determines their behavior, so the coherence of the collective consciousness of many individuals influences social behavior. Practice of the advanced Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi® programs, as brought to light by Maharishi from the Vedic tradition, produces a powerful coherence in both individual and collective consciousness, reducing both individual and social stress.

Most significantly, to achieve world peace, it is not necessary for all individuals everywhere to be developing their inner peace. There is a shortcut: it is called the Maharishi Effect.

The Maharishi Effect is the positive result when one percent of a population practices the Transcendental Meditation technique or the square root of one percent of a population practices the TM and TM-Sidhi programs together in one place. It is characterized by significant improvements in societal trends, decreasing negative factors such as crime, accidents, hospital admissions, and indicators of conflict and violence, including war deaths, and increasing positive economic and social tendencies.

The usual methods of crime prevention, such as policing and corrections, and of conflict resolution, such as military presence and diplomacy, have shown minimal and temporary results. They rely on coercion or negotiation, while the underlying problems of high stress levels with limited consciousness and narrow awareness remain. Reduced vision and creativity manifest as economic and social turmoil. These problems cannot be resolved by force and compromise.

A worldview that considers physicality and material possession as primary, even all there is, will always lead to conflict and opportunism with short term, narrow, and limited perspectives.

Today, leaders turn to science for guidance, and science is finally embracing consciousness. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering promise great benefits but also pose tremendous risks and dangers, and this has made raising human consciousness to its highest potential absolutely necessary.

Besides the hundreds of research studies on the benefits of Transcendental Meditation for individuals, there have been 116 scientific papers documenting the improvements that the Maharishi Effect brings to social life. Of these, 54 empirical studies were published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals or professional conference proceedings. Another 38 papers were published in research anthologies. Many studies had project review boards of independent scientists. Statistical analysis of the results yielded very small probabilities (p-values), indicating to a near certainty that the results were not due to chance or other factors. The studies routinely used publicly available statistics anyone could confirm. Nearly all studies first appeared in publications independent of the Maharishi Foundation and its affiliates. There was no “cherry-picking” of data to support the hypothesis.

The Maharishi Effect was found to be causal, not merely correlational: during periods when it was predicted, trends in diverse social indicators that previously were moving randomly with respect to each other all began to move in the same positive directions. Moreover, the Maharishi Effect scales: Eighteen studies found improvements in small towns, five in entire states, thirty-two in culturally and ethnically diverse nations, and five worldwide. Twenty theoretical papers have closely examined how the Maharishi Effect works. And today, ongoing genetic investigations and brain-to-brain synchrony research are probing the details of how a meditating TM group affects the behavior of people at a distance who are not meditating.

In short, the Maharishi Effect is a phenomenon operating in the consciousness field, at the unified field level of natural law. For a world population surpassing eight billion, 10,000 people applying these technologies together in one place would be enough to create the Maharishi Effect and accelerate progress toward world peace.

We look forward to seeing this great assembly lead to important decisions and actions from this land of the Vedas, offering and implementing the Vedic technologies of consciousness as a perfect science for happiness, health, prosperity, and world peace.

From a talk given at the Global Spirituality Mahotsav, March 14 to 17, 2024.

Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL