A Proposed New Formula to Create the Maharishi Effect

A Proposed New Formula to Create the Maharishi Effect

Since the beginning of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s global effort to end human suffering and to change the course of time for everyone on earth, the intimate relationship between individual and collective—between his technologies of consciousness for the individual on the one hand and their social impacts on the other—has been a subject of considerable theoretical and empirical interest. Central to Maharishi’s effort is what scientists have called the Maharishi Effect, “the phenomenon of the rise of coherence in the collective consciousness of any community”.
Such an effect is founded on Maharishi’s conclusion that “If the world is to change, individuals must change”. Maharishi even predicted that, on the basis of a numeric formula, a salutary change in individual consciousness would result in a comparable change in society. His predications were based on the discovery that: A) Maharishi’s technologies of consciousness, when practised individually or in a group, generate acute orderliness in the brain physiology of participants, as recorded in the electroencephalographic (EEG) signature; and B) this acute brainwave orderliness simultaneously creates orderliness, harmony, peacefulness and relief from tension in society. ‘Orderliness’ in human brain physiology has been referred to by Maharishi and others as brainwave coherence and electroencephalic ordering.
Several different formulas which predict the Maharishi Effect have been advanced, with the 1% effect of practitioners of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation and the √1% effect of the group practise of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program being principal among them. The purpose of the present discussion paper is to consider these various formulas and to propose a new formula which will predict the Maharishi Effect when groups of meditators come together for social benefit. Data, evidence and experience from Perú will serve as the context for this discussion.