Do We Need a Scientific Revolution in Order to Create World Peace?
The following is a talk I gave at my undergraduate alma mater, Kalamazoo College, on September 30, 2002. The first paragraphs give some sense of my peace background.
I attended K College from 1967 to 1971. Those were turbulent years in the country and the turbulence was manifest on campus as well. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated during those years and the campus shut down both times to deal with issues of racism and violence. Revolution was the watchword of the day.
I grew up in an all white suburb of Boston, watching the bussing issue on TV. In the summer of 1964 I had traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi with a church group and learned about the de-segregation efforts of SNCC firsthand, but the south was like a foreign country to someone from Massachusetts.
I spent my career-service project in the spring of 1969 in Germantown, PA, a section of Philadelphia. Part of my service job was attending hearings being held by the Germantown Community Council on police brutality. This experience of racism was much closer to my home and it made a bigger impact on me than my time in Mississippi. This was when Frank Rizzo was still chief of police and in those days wearing a dashiki seemed to be grounds for being harassed by the police. I heard lots of horror stories and became increasingly politically radicalized by the experience on the one hand, but also increasingly concerned about the violent solutions to problems that were being proposed from all sides.
When I returned to the campus I decided to take a weekend workshop in non-violent resistance offered through the local Quaker meeting. It was, as they say, an important milestone in my life. Shortly after I helped organize an on-going weekly protest to the war in southeast Asia in front of the post office that continued for the rest of my K College career.
While on foreign study in Strasbourg I found that the lottery had turned up a draft number of 5 for me and knew I was going to have to deal with the issue of military service when I graduated a couple of years later. Upon graduation I took a job working for the Quaker meeting in Pittsburgh. It was a large enough meeting to operate what they named the “Friends Peace Center” which provided draft counseling services and actively opposed the continuing war in Southeast Asia. My jobs there included running my own weekend workshops on non-violent resistance and traveling around the metropolitan area showing a slide show developed by the American Friends Service Committee on the air war in Cambodia. The purpose of the show was to inspire people to protest the war by refusing to pay the Federal tax on their telephone bills.
During that year I applied for and was granted a conscientious objector status, but by the time it was granted I had become so politically radicalized that I decided to turn down this status and become a draft resistor, liable for imprisonment. In preparation for doing time I read a book entitled In the Service of their Country about the experiences of draft resistors then in prison. One paragraph particularly impressed me where it said that individuals who were highly religious or had some kind of meditation made it through the prison experience best.
At that time in my life politics had superseded religious orientation and so I looked around for a meditation. I soon attended a large lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on Transcendental Meditation, that was being brought to the west by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I was impressed by the speaker and by the research showing that one spontaneously enjoyed a level of rest deeper than the deepest portion of sleep during the practice and decided to learn in May of 1972. It turned out to be an even bigger milestone than the non-violent workshop.
That summer I hitchhiked 5000 miles from coast to coast and back again. (Yes, it was entirely different country in 1972). First stop was New Jersey to take part in a protest against the war that involved trying to blockade air craft carriers with canoes. We were very idealistic. The majority of the summer was spent in the Los Altos Hills at a conference run by Joan Baez’s non-violence institute in Palo Alto, which culminated in the same effort at a canoe blockade in the SF harbor.
Throughout the summer I enjoyed my twice daily meditations, I didn’t noticed anything particularly startling about the experience. It was a refreshing break twice a day and that was about it. However, I was having some good luck because for some reason the draft board seemed to be ignoring the fact that I had returned by draft cards to them the previous spring and I was still a free soul.
Returning to Pittsburgh I took a new job working with emotionally disturbed children in a local hospital and I continued to actively promote various forms of protest against the war. These protest were always non-violent on the physical level, but they were also almost always confrontational in some form or other. As such they were almost always emotionally draining and didn’t seem to be making that much difference.
During that fall of 72 and moving through the spring of 73 I attended occasional meetings of TM meditators hosted by a student group at the University of Pittsburgh and began to get a sense of the theory behind the practice. I still wasn’t noticing all that much of an inner change in me (although looking back I now see that I was moving away from a life-style of strained discipline to something more spontaneous and natural). However in the spring of that year I attended a 3-day meditation retreat held on the campus of Johnson State University where we had longer periods of meditation under a supervised routine. The introductory lecture for TM had talked about increased energy from the practice. Being young I didn’t really notice it, because I had a lot of energy anyway. But after that retreat I noticed an amazing increase in clarity and a special kind of energy that was distinct from anything I had experienced before. It sparked my curiosity in understanding what was going on even more and so I enrolled in a course at the TM center, taught a couple of evenings a week, that had been recently video-taped by Maharishi in Italy. It was called The Science of Creative Intelligence. It quickly became known by its acronym: SCI. Milestone number three.
To say this course changed my life is an understatement. As you heard from my introduction I presently hold the position of Dean of Faculty at Maharishi University of Management, originally founded in 1972 as Maharishi International University in Santa Barbara, CA before it moved to its present location in Fairfield, IA in 1974. This is a university where everyone: faculty, staff, and students practice TM twice daily as part of their academic program. From its inception the school was founded with the goal not only individual student development, but the promotion of world peace. And I’ve been with the University for 22 years.
As I hope was evident from the preceding autobiographic narrative I had a natural interest in issues of non-violent social change that began during the formative years of my time at Kand evolved during the first couple of years after graduation. That evolution took a dramatic jump as a result of the SCI course, analogous to the sudden changes that characterize the punctuated equilibria theory of the earth’s evolution popularized by Stephen Jay Gould and others. What was it in that course that made such a big impression on me. It was a completely changed view of what consciousness is.
Kuhnian Scientific Revolutions
The premises of this change are relatively simple, but really quite radical. They constitute what I believe, in the area of theories of consciousness, falls within the category of a scientific revolution as described by Thomas Kuhn. Many of you are likely familiar with Kuhn, a historian, who examined science, not from a purely philosophical perspective, but by reviewing the actual practice of science and the accumulation of scientific knowledge over the past four hundred years. Kuhn was not looking at science a whole, but at specific fields of knowledge like astronomy, physics, biology or chemistry, and even specific areas of research within each, like the theory of electricity in physics.
In his influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn noted that some historical periods are characterized by general adherence to definable beliefs, values, symbolic generalizations, and experimental models. Taken together, all these components constitute what he termed a ‘paradigm.’ In these periods, which he termed ‘normal science,’ scientists apply the same background information (or world view) to their observations and their main activity is ‘puzzle-solving.’ They construct experiments and even specific experimental apparatus in order to verify the currently accepted theories in their area. During periods of normal science, scientists do not ask fundamental questions about the nature of the universe: Answers to these questions are provided by the prevailing paradigm. Rather, scientists focus on filling in the details of the paradigm, for example, how broad formulations of natural law function in particular instances.
Kuhn noted that other historical periods lack uniform adherence to a particular paradigm. During these periods, which he terms, ‘abnormal science,’ the activity of puzzle solving reveals anomalies within the paradigm. Kuhn uses the word ‘anomaly’ to refer to discrepancies between what the paradigm predicts should be observed, and what is actually observed by scientists. When the anomalies become acute enough to raise questions in (particularly young and bright) scientists’ minds, competing schools arise which begin investigating fundamental premises of the paradigm. Generally, a genius like Newton or Einstein presents a completely fresh approach in some fundamental area which captivates the younger generation, and as older scientists committed to the previous paradigm pass away, the new paradigm displaces the old and the puzzle-solving activity of normal science begins and continues for the new paradigm. This displacement of one paradigm by another constitutes a scientific revolution. Examples of such revolutions are the displacement of the geocentric astronomy of Ptolemy with the sun centered solar system of Copernicus, or replacement of the phlogiston explanation of why substances burn, with the theory of oxidation, an example I will explain more fully in a minute for those of you who haven’t read Kuhn’s book or aren’t familiar with all the ins and outs of the history of science.
Kuhn was particularly struck by the fact that during periods of normal science, scientists learn their profession by virtue of mastering material in widely used textbooks, and in particular, by working in laboratories. These texts and labs teach and illustrate the knowledge fundamental to the prevailing paradigm through classic experiments. Experience in these labs also develops belief in particular models and approaches to problem-solving.
Among other things they supply the group with preferred or permissible analogies and metaphors. By doing so they help to determine what will be accepted as an explanation and as a puzzle-solution; conversely, they assist in the determination of the roster of unsolved puzzles and in the evaluation of the importance of each (p. 184).
I’ll come back to this idea of preferred analogies and metaphors when we apply Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions to prevailing theories of consciousness today.
Kuhn argues that the background knowledge brought to the verification procedures in science, built on tacit knowledge gained in labs, therefore restricts investigation of the fundamental premises about the nature of the world, and influences the way in which observations are made and interpreted. He emphasizes that the world is interpreted by the mind and interpretation depends upon “...education, language, experience, and culture” (p. 193). Recognition of confirming instances in experiments may therefore “...be involuntary, a process over which we have no control. If it is, then we may not properly conceive it as something we manage by applying rules and criteria” (p. 194). That is, it is not properly conceived of as a purely objective process.
This reliance on tacit, or that is to say so deeply engrained as to be almost subconscious, knowledge in interpreting experiments has important implications for Kuhn’s most influential criticism of science, the incommensurability of paradigms and the futility of paradigm debates. As noted earlier, Kuhn describes the process of the displacement of paradigms as primarily a psychological phenomenon in which key scientists (usually young, and therefore less committed to the prevailing paradigm) are converted to the new perspective, often by the brilliant founder.
Paradigm shifts are more accurately described as conversions than reasoned persuasion because “...one must go native, discover that one is thinking and working in, not simply translating out of, a language that was previously foreign” (p. 203). What is accepted as scientific knowledge is historically determined by the reigning paradigm. When anomalies overburden a particular paradigm a scientific revolution occurs in which a new paradigm displaces, rather than builds upon, the preceding paradigm. This displacement is best explained in psychological or sociological rather than philosophical terms, even though, under criticism Kuhn has admitted that basic features of the paradigm, like its values and even its language, can be logically analyzed and reasonably supported with reference to evidence. But, for Kuhn, science is therefore basically a subjective enterprise based upon schooling, experience, and cultural norms, that gains its objective reputation due to inter-subjective agreement in any historical epoch.
Here I would like to introduce a term from the Science of Creative Intelligence that helps us understand the sociological phenomenon to which Kuhn is referring. The term is ‘collective consciousness.’ Maharishi defines collective consciousness a wholeness of consciousness which is the collection of all the individual consciousnesses which constitute a group. He generally organizes these groups in term of geographical areas like cities, states, or countries. But he also uses the term to refer to collections of individuals like a company, a university, or in this case, all the scientists who have gone through the same schooling, attend the same conferences, read the same journals, and collectively have their attention on discovering knowledge in a particular area of science.
Maharishi indicates that the collective consciousness of any organization strongly influences the actions and understandings of individuals within that group. He also describes the collective consciousness of a group as either more or less coherent. In coherent collective consciousness the thoughts and activities of all the individuals in the group are well coordinated and harmoniously integrated with each other. Incoherent collective consciousness is characterized by disharmony and chaotic interactions within the group.
Understanding Kuhn’s description of the history of science in this context, there is a collective consciousness of groups of scientists who are studying any particular area and this collective consciousness determines to a great extent what is accepted as scientific knowledge during any particular scientific period. Also, Maharishi’s concept of coherent collective consciousness likely describes the functioning of normal science periods within a particular period and incoherent collective consciousness describes periods of abnormal science. We’ll return to these ideas later.
How do these ideas of paradigms, normal and abnormal science, and scientific revolutions apply to the current understanding of consciousness in science and the radically different understanding I learned about in SCI?
A Brief Overview of Competing Theories of Consciousness
During the past century, a new interdisciplinary science has emerged whose focus is the understanding of human consciousness. Termed ‘cognitive science’ it consists of researchers from such diverse areas as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and artificial intelligence researchers in computer science.
One of the key components of Kuhn’s scientific paradigms is the dominance of particular metaphors or analogies that guide research programs. In cognitive science, the current dominant analogy for the brain is the computer. There is constant reference in the literature to information processing, neural networks, the hardware and software of the brain, and so forth. In general cognitive scientists subscribe to a theory that subjective experiences can be completely explained as by-products of physiological activity, in the same way that all outputs on a computer screen can ultimately be explained by the activity of the logic gates on a computer chip. In this theory people do not have minds as such; they only have brains. What we experience subjectively as thoughts and the sensation of being in control of our actions, can be completely reduced, and therefore explained, in terms of the functioning of brain cells. Paul Churchland, a prominent researcher in this area, summarizes this understanding as follows:
Mental states are physical states of the brain....each type of mental state or process is numerically identical with (is one and the very same thing as) some type of physical state or process within the brain or central nervous system.
In contrast to the common understanding that consciousness is created by the activity of the brain, in the SCI course, Maharishi proposes that the individualized qualities of waking state experience is actually a partial reflection of a field of pure consciousness—pure in the sense of unmixed with any content like sensations, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. It consists solely of awareness itself. He further explains that the reason only a partial reflection of this field is experienced normally is because of chemical and structural abnormalities in the nervous system and physiology as a whole, created by the stress of life experiences. Without a completely normal or pure functioning of the nervous system, the experience of pure consciousness is hidden or lost.
In the SCI course, Maharishi described Transcendental Meditation as a technique which, in this context, serves as a method to both give a deep level of rest that allows the body to repair deep-rooted chemical and structural abnormalities and, at the same time, allow the mind to conduct systematic research in consciousness to verify which of these two explanations of consciousness seems to be correct. Is consciousness a field, an underlying reality of the universe as basic as, for example, the electromagnetic or gravitational fields? Or is it an epiphenomenon unique only to human beings, manufactured by their complicated brains? Twenty-five years of research in consciousness at M.U.M., using the TM technique as our primary experimental method, seems to confirm the former explanation. During TM many individuals have reported experiencing pure consciousness, that is, consciousness devoid of any particular thoughts, feelings or sensations, but experienced as an unbounded field of awareness or knowingness.
Is this a delusion, a kind of collective dream or collective expectation effect? To answer this question we have also created a number of ongoing objective research programs to complement the subjective research during TM. One example: In the past several decades, physiological research on waking, dreaming, and sleep has demonstrated that each of these unique states of consciousness has correspondingly unique physiological parameters, such as EEG, biochemistry, etc. One approach we have taken at M.U.M. to verify claims about the existence of pure consciousness (which Maharishi indicates is a state of consciousness as unique as waking, dreaming, or sleeping) is to predict that individuals claiming to experience pure consciousness will have corresponding physiological parameters accompanying the experience that are quite different from those observed accompanying waking, dreaming, or sleep.
There have been many studies in this area which verify this hypothesis and document the unique EEG and biochemistry associated with this. Studies on meditators who signaled just after they had clear experiences of transcendental consciousness show, for example, a unique suspension of breath during those periods. These physiological studies add to our confidence that the experiences of pure consciousness reported during TM practice are not illusory psychological experiences; they reflect a universally available experience that is supported by a unique functioning of the human nervous system, but in patterns that are different from the common experience of waking state.
This research may give us confidence that the experience of pure consciousness is as real as waking, dreaming, or sleep states, but does it help us decide whether the experience of pure consciousness is created by the brain, or whether pure consciousness has its own independent reality? Not really. We would expect that unique experiences even of a field nature of consciousness would be associated with unique physiological parameters in both theories. Evidence from some other area of objective research would be needed to decide this question.
In the Kuhnian model of scientific revolutions, crucial experiments play a critical role in deciding which paradigm to accept. For example Lavoisier’s experiment in which he roasted a metal in a sealed jar and then measured the weight of the residue, confirming many other experiments of gain in weight when burning a substance, is often cited as the discovery of oxidation and the downfall of the theory of phlogiston—the theory that dominated chemistry during the early 18th century which claimed that all matter that could be burned contained a ‘burnable’ substance called phlogiston, which was released by the burning process. Because releasing substances should lighten the metal’s residue, Lavosier’s experiment, which demonstrated that a burned substance gains, rather than loses weight, played a crucial role in popularizing the theory of oxidation over the phlogiston theory.
Are there such crucial experiments in the science of consciousness?
Let’s call the current prevailing cognitive science paradigm of waking state consciousness created by brain activity the ‘local production’ model and the SCI paradigm of waking state consciousness as a partial reflection of the field of pure consciousness the ‘field reflection’ model. Is there some research on the brain that could help decide between these two models?. I don’t think so because in both models the activity of the brain is critical. Cognitive scientists rely heavily on brain research and much of this research has helped us understand how the different parts of the brain are related to different kinds of thoughts, perceptions, and actions. SCI also acknowledges that every unique mental state has a correspondingly unique physiological state. The brain plays a critical role in the field reflection theory and that is why we have done a lot of research on EEG coherence in TM meditators. So studying brain physiology will not help determine which of these two models is correct. We need a crucial test independent of physiological study to decide the question.
Scientists trying to validate the reflection model reason as follows: If our waking state experiences are the result of a partial reflection of a field of pure consciousness, rather than phenomena created by individual nervous systems, then it should be possible to create field effects through contact with this field during the practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique. Field effects are the accepted explanation in modern science for phenomena of action at a distance, that is, phenomena like gravity where the bodies affected are not in physical contact with each other.
In SCI, the field nature of consciousness has been objectively investigated by research on what is termed the Maharishi Effect. The Maharishi Effect is the name given to trends in various measurable societal activities—such as crime rate, hospital admissions, automobile accidents, the activity of the stock markets—being positively affected by sufficiently large numbers of individuals practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique and, in particular, the advanced practice that Maharishi has been teaching since 1975 termed the TM-Sidhi program, in groups. Both these techniques are designed to allow individuals to systematically experience pure consciousness. If pure consciousness is an independent field, then these experiences should be stimulating that field in some way. Maharishi sometimes explains this stimulation in terms of an analogy of waves settling down into an ocean. The ocean is the field. The waves are the partial reflection of the field, analogous to the sense of individuality we experience in the waking state. When the wave settles down, it’s last ‘flop’ sends a ripple throughout the surface of the ocean. This is analogous to an influence of coherence predicted to be enlivened throughout the field of pure consciousness as individuals meditate.
In the context of the field nature of consciousness hypothesis, the positive social trends associated with groups of individuals transcending, are understood to be the result of an increase of creativity and other life-supporting qualities in the collective consciousness of the area affected. Maharishi explains that the experience of pure consciousness during practice of the TM and TM-Sidhi program stimulates or “enlivens” its inherent creative, and therefore life-supporting, qualities. Being a field that underlies and permeates all expressions of individual consciousness, when the creative qualities of pure consciousness are enlivened at the level of the field, they are enlivened in all members who are connected, either consciously or unconsciously, to the field. Because in SCI all subjectivity is explained as a reflection of the field of pure consciousness, all individuals will be affected in a positive way when the life-supporting qualities of this field are enlivened.
Empirical data indicates that the Maharishi Effect is particularly evident when pure consciousness is enlivened by large assemblies of individuals practicing Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program. To date over 50 studies, many of which have been published in top refereed journals, have confirmed the Maharishi Effect as created by such large assemblies. As this effect cannot be explained by production theory of consciousness (consciousness as created by the brain), it provides substantial confirmation of the field theory of consciousness given in SCI.
This research should create an anomaly in the field of cognitive science. If consciousness is created by the brain, then each individual is entirely separate from all other individuals on the level of consciousness. All changes in the actions of other individuals based on input from others should be restricted at minimum to some kind of verbal interactions. Certainly, a group of individuals sitting entirely isolated from the rest of a city, engaging solely in non-verbal activity in which they practice a mental technique that turns their attention inward, should not be affecting the trends of activity in the rest of the city. However, affecting the trends of activity in the rest of the city is exactly what the Maharishi Effect research demonstrates.
So is there a scientific revolution occurring in the field of cognitive science as a result of our publishing these studies in scientific journals and speaking about them at many scientific conferences? I guess only history will really be able to answer this question. From the point of view of the scientists currently engaged in this research, there doesn’t seem to be anything happening on a large scale. The history of what these scientists had to go through in order to even get their research published is instructive here.
The first studies on the Maharishi Effect were retrospective studies. That means, they looked at statistics on crime rate, hospital admissions, etc. for periods of time in the past, after the date at which our records indicated that the critical mark of 1% of the city or region’s population had been instructed in TM. Scientists prefer prospective rather than retrospective studies, where you state a hypothesis, make a prediction and test whether or not the prediction is observed. In September of 1983, two scientists from our University organized a study in Jerusalem to study the effect a group of TM-Sidhi practitioners would have on the war in Lebanon and also on the quality of life in Israel. The project was highly successful. For example, highly sophisticated statistical analysis showed that during the periods of the experiment when the number of advanced meditators was large enough, war deaths in Lebanon dropped an average of 76%. There were many other intriguing outcomes of the study, for instance the fact that the effect was stronger closer to the area where the advanced meditators were practicing and a whole constellation of quality of life variables, that would normally vary independently of each other, were simultaneously affected in the predicted direction.
The results of this study were striking enough so that the scientists decided to submit it for publication in the premier journal in the discipline, the Journal of Conflict Resolution published at Yale University. The editor of the journal, confronted with a theory outside of the normal paradigm of consciousness, decided to send the paper to be reviewed by twice as many referees as usual. He received varied responses from the referees. One referee voted against publication, even though he felt it was methodologically and logically sound, because the idea on its face seemed impossible. Another voted in the opposite direction, saying that even though it seemed implausible, the experiment was carried out according to traditional scientific standards and therefore should be published.
One referee thought he had found a flaw in the statistical analysis and suggested looking at the data again. Our scientists didn’t feel his objection was reasonable, but nevertheless took months to do a more refined statistical analysis on the data and on that basis found even stronger evidence of a causal connection between the group of advanced meditators and the changes in Lebanon and Israel. That referee gave in and finally the editor was faced with the decision of whether or not to publish. After a lot of thought he decided to publish it, but with the unusual addition of an “Editor’s Comment” that he published with the paper in which he noted how unusual the hypothesis was but indicated that it had been very carefully scrutinized before publication, met all the standards of the scientific method, and therefore deserved to be published.
One might argue that the fact it was published at all is somewhat amazing and shows the integrity of the scientific community. However, I’ve spent the time to go over this example to illustrate two points. The first is the fact that it took much longer, and the scientists had to go through many more revisions to publish this research than it likely would have if the hypothesis being tested fell within the current paradigm of consciousness. The second is that even though the study was published in such a prestigious journal, its impact on both the conflict resolution community and the cognitive science community was negligible. We didn’t receive calls from scientists asking to collaborate on larger studies that would confirm the Maharishi Effect. We didn’t receive invitations from prestigious conferences or universities to speak on the new paradigm of consciousness as a field.
For several years leading researchers from MUM have been attending a conference at the University of Arizona on consciousness studies and presenting their research both on the physiological correlates of higher states of consciousness, and also the field effects of consciousness. This year Dr. Fred Travis, the head of our EEG lab, presented a plenary session on the EEG of a completely new state of consciousness called cosmic consciousness predicted to result from long-term practice of TM. The audience was enthusiastic about the findings, but the larger collective consciousness of cognitive science does not seem to change.
Why not? I think both Maharishi’s concept of collective consciousness and Kuhn’s explanation of paradigm change help explain why not. Successful cognitive scientists have gone through a long schooling in which the ‘local production’ theory of consciousness was assumed to be correct. Their schooling and subsequent research efforts have solved a lot of the ‘puzzles’ connected with that theory. That is, the research has filled in huge amounts of useful and interesting detail about the functioning of the brain and the nervous system.
If their research had uncovered anomalies in the local production theory of consciousness, I suspect the larger community of cognitive scientists would be much more interested in research on the Maharishi Effect. But because the Maharishi Effect research has been conducted not in response to anomalies occurring with the field of cognitive science, but by a small group of scientists whose main interest was in objectively understanding what happens during Transcendental Meditation, and in verifying predictions that Maharishi has made about the individual and social effects of the technologies of consciousness he has been teaching, there is little reason for mainstream cognitive scientists to be interested in this research unless they are already interested in meditation practices. That is, cognitive scientists are experiencing success in their puzzle solving activities. They are not running across anomalies in the course of their research. And without themselves experiencing anomalies in their research, they have little motivation to take seriously anomalies of an entirely different magnitude that are being discovered by a very small group in the field. From Maharishi’s perspective, the collective consciousness of the group, due to the influence of education, training, and where they place the bulk of their everyday attention, does not support a paradigm shift.
Maharishi’s theory of collective consciousness however suggests a modification to the Kuhnian model of scientific revolutions. It suggests that collective consciousness can be profoundly affected by more than just education or everyday activity. It can be affected from the level of the pure consciousness itself, through small groups of individuals practicing his technologies of consciousness. It takes time for the effect generated from the depth of life to penetrate to the surface of life. And even though the size of the groups needed are relatively miniscule, they are still of a specific size a size which we have been unable to maintain for more than a decade now in order to affect the entire US, for example. However, once groups of the sufficient size are maintained, Maharishi’s theory predicts that all areas of life and knowledge will undergo profound changes. Unlike many of the scientific revolutions Kuhn describes in this book, however, that were characterized by bitter debates, the revolution in collective consciousness created by the Maharishi Effect is predicted to be so gradual and natural, that it is more appropriately described as evolution than revolution. Like the fall of the Berlin wall.
If scientists are not clamoring to change their understanding of the nature of consciousness and the potential role the field effect of consciousness can play in improving our world, aretheir any other trends occurring in society that would warrant hope for old peaceniks like myself? Actually, the fact that I have been allowed to speak with you today I think is a good sign. I had to solicit the invitation myself, of course. But I think it was accepted because of the situation with terrorism in the world, that I believe all reasonable individuals understand cannot be really be solved by military, political or even humanitarian means. So called military solutions only create new generations of terrorists as witnessed in Ireland and the Middle East. The history of political solutions like peace treaties demonstrates their long-term failure, probably because they don’t address the fundamental issues of human nature and belief systems that lie at the basis of terrorist acts. And terrorism is so diametrically opposite to humanitarianism that there isn’t even a common ground for interaction.
Kuhn argued that a key variable to changing paradigms or worldviews is the flexibility of youth. Young people are not so invested in one particular worldview. They’re still trying to figure out what they believe, especially during their college years. They’re open to new ideas and the more so when there is good evidence and logic to support the newideas. My generation had great promise in the field of peace. We stopped a terrible war, although not soon enough. And some of us have continued seriously researching how to create world peace. But the majority of my generation is sold out to a particular worldview in which creating world peace through large groups of meditation experts creating an influence at the level of a field of pure consciousness sounds like a fairy tale.
My hope is that your generation is still open-minded enough, and maybe scared enough by the current situation in the world, to look into new ideas like I’ve described today. If so, I’d be happy to speak with you after. And I’ve left a copy of this talk with a web site to visit if you want to look into it further.
Thanks.
For more information please visit permanentpeace.org or for a summary of great book on this topic: createpermanentpeace.com (downloadable).