Maharishi Effect
Reduced Conflict in Lebanon and Improved Quality of Life in Israel
Increasing numbers of participants in Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program led to improved quality of life in Israel. The chart 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 auto accident rates, number of fires, and crime rates in Jerusalem and Israel.
Reference: Orme-Johnson, Alexander, Davies, Chandler, & Larimore, 1988.
Population influenced: Israel and Lebanon.
Coherence group: World Peace Assembly of Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program participants fluctuating in size from 60 to 240 (200 is the square root of 1% Israeli population), during August and September 1983 in Jerusalem.
Dependent variables: Daily data on: war intensity in Lebanon; war deaths in Lebanon; Israeli national mood (based on newspaper content analysis); Israeli national stock index; auto accident rates, numbers of fires, and crime rates for both Jerusalem and Israel; and composite indices of all variables available for Jerusalem, Israel, and Lebanon.
Experimental design: Box-Jenkins time series analysis using impact assessment, cross-correlation, and transfer function analyses of the TM-Sidhi group size on all variables and indices.
Results: Increases in the size of the group had a statistically significant effect in the predicted direction on the individual variables and on all composite quality-of-life indices. The effects of holidays, temperature, weekends, and other forms of seasonality were explicitly controlled and could not account for these results. Cross-correlations and transfer functions indicated that the group had a leading relationship to change on the quality-of-life indicators, supporting a causal interpretation. There was some evidence that as the group size increased, it affected Jerusalem first (where the group was located), then Israel, then Lebanon.
Conclusions: The influence of the Maharishi Effect is even more evident when different variables are averaged together, indicating that the TM-Sidhi group produces a common influence on variables ranging from auto accidents to armed conflict.
Reference: Orme-Johnson, D.W., Alexander, C.N., Davies, J.L., Chandler, H.M., & Larimore, W.E. (1988). International peace project in the Middle East: The effects of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 32, 776–812. (Reprinted in Scientific Research on Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi Program: Collected Papers, Vol. 4, pp. 2653–2678.)
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