Fairfield as an example that the Maharishi Effect doesn’t work?

To give a complete picture on the research on the Maharishi Effect, we should also mention the cases where the Maharishi Effect doesn’t work. Or, at least, where it appears not to work.

After 40 years of research the critics have so far found only one case where they could raise questions: the fact that Fairfield still has crime at all. If the group of Yogic Flyers is so large compared to the population of Fairfield, shouldn’t crime rate be zero?

It isn’t, critics say. They even claim that the crime rate in Fairfield is higher than in Iowa as a whole.

This, however, is a good example of finding creative ways to dismiss new data that contracts old beliefs. In this case they were taking selective data to make a point.

Again, I did some quick research myself and found that, if we take all data into account, quite a different picture emerges. If we take the example of small crimes, like property crimes, for some bizarre reason the crime rate in Fairfield is indeed higher than the Iowa average, as shown in this chart from https://www.instantcheckmate.com/criminal-records/iowa/fairfield

 

From this chart alone, which more or less matches the time when the large group of Yogic Flyers was doing their thing, we would conclude that the Maharishi Effect doesn’t work (other than in 2007 where zero property crimes were reported). It’s lower than the US average, but higher than the Iowa average.

But what if we take a more serious crime, like murder?
In this case the Maharishi Effect does appear to work, as the murder rate in Fairfield has been zero over the same six-year period.

So how can this be explained? It doesn’t appear to work according to one chart, but does appear to work according to another chart.

This could be compared to a Harvard study that was done to measure drug use with 1800 students who learned TM. When they looked at the percentage of students that were light soft drug users, they found that this increased by 45% in the first three months.

If we took that number in isolation we’d conclude that TM has a negative effect on drug use. But if we look at the whole picture we see that the amount of heavy and medium soft drug users decreased by 89% and 69% respectively. This means that during the first three months after learning TM, not everybody may have stopped using drugs altogether, but rather they switched category, from a heavy or medium user to a light user. (In the longer term and with all other forms of substance abuse all three categories decreased in favor of nonuser within the first 3 months.)

Perhaps it’s similar with the Fairfield crime rate. People who are so stressed out that they’d be able to commit murder, now commit a property crime instead. It’s still a crime, but of a completely different category. The cost of taking a human life (calculated at $7M in our previous study) is, after all, still 10,000 times higher than the cost of stealing a $700 flat screen television during a burglary.

So the Fairfield crime statistics should not be used too quickly to dismiss the Maharishi Effect just from one graph alone – there are many factors to consider.

One of the explanations of why there still is crime in Fairfield at all, is that from a consciousness point of view we can’t isolate Fairfield from the rest of the world. As long as there is still stress in the collective consciousness anywhere, it will influence everyone.

That’s why Maharishi always said that we need groups that are big enough to influence the whole world. Fairfield would still be the ideal location to maintain such a group.

This video shows a real-time recording of EEG changes during Transcendental Meditation.

The Field Paradigm

50 experiments

that can change the world

Download the FREE e-book!

• has been thoroughly tested through 50 experiments over 40 years
• is 100 times cheaper than other methods,
• can be implemented in a matter of weeks.

BUT…to understand it requires a complete paradigm shift where we’ll have to change the way we see ourselves and our connection to each other.

The Field paradigm is, in essence, a rediscovery of a truth we once new, but have forgotten over time.

Chapters in this book

The biggest paradigm shift in history… is happening right now
Everything connected
Field Paradigm technologies
Meeting the president
The only proven effective way to create world peace… and reduce our taxes
Will you keep this a secret?

The biggest paradigm shift in history… is happening right now

A paradigm is like a pair of glasses. If the glasses are pink, the world is pink. If somebody would try to convince a person with pink glasses he’s wrong, and hold a color chart in front of his nose as ‘scientific evidence’ to prove it, all the person would see is different shades of pink, confirming his belief, and confirming that the other person has lost his mind. It is our belief system that defines how we see the world.

Sometimes we discover that our glasses are the wrong ones, and we get a new pair of glasses. This is called a paradigm shift. Once upon a time people believed that the earth was a flat disk, and that the sun was revolving around the earth. This was what they saw, (they saw a flat earth, and they saw the sun circling around our planet every day) so it was natural to assume this was the reality.

Likewise, sometime in the not-so-distant future, people will think the same about us. How could we have such misguided views of our reality, being deceived by what we see, rather than how it really is. We see ourselves as separate from each other, (I am here, you are there, there is nothing in between) while in reality we are all connected by invisible fields.

We use this invisible connection to communicate with each other. For example, our mobile phone will create a vibration on the Electromagnetic field that will travel to another mobile phone.

Now it’s being discovered that we are connected to each other in a far more fundamental way, at the source of our thoughts, and that we influence each other with every thought we have. Based on this new discovery, there are now technologies to use this connection to create a positive influence, so that negative thoughts simply don’t come up anymore. People simply won’t be able to harm or kill fellow human beings anymore. They can’t explain why they changed their minds, they just did. It simply doesn’t feel right anymore.

Sometime, in the not-so-distant future, people will laugh at the fact that we think of ourselves as being advanced in terms of technology, because most of us today don’t even have a clue about the one technology that really matters in life, the technology to bring human beings back in touch with their own humanity. We’ll also discover that this technology will be so cheap to implement (100 times cheaper than our current methods of trying to influence human behaviour) that our governments will save so much money they’ll even be able to reduce our taxes. Sounds too good to be true? Wait and see.

When will that ‘not-so-distant future’ come? Who can say? The technology that we will discuss has already been around for 40 years, and has more scientific proof that it works than anything other method in the entire history of social sciences (50 experiments that will change the world)… and still very few people are aware of its potential. This could all change tomorrow, and the technologies could be implemented in a matter of weeks… or it could take another 40 years. It will mainly depend on what YOU will decide to do after you read the next few pages. Will you keep it a secret, or will you make sure everybody knows about it?

A brief history of paradigms

Before we can discuss the new technology, we first have to give you the right glasses. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see it, any less than the guy with the pink glasses would be able to see that there are other colours. (that’s the reason why the technologies we’re about to discuss still haven’t been implemented, even after 40 years of scientific proof).

This new paradigm of a field that connects us at the source of our thoughts is actually not a new paradigm at all. It is the oldest paradigm in history, but somehow we have forgotten about it.

Through the current glasses we’re wearing we’re seeing a number of material objects, a chair, a table, you, me, all separated by empty space.

A long time ago people had a different set of glasses. They believed that all of life was part of one big whole. They believed that our individual life, and our individual consciousness, was like a wave on a universal ocean of life. Oceans have the rather cool ability that they can rise up in many different waves at the same time. Each wave is unique, different from all the other waves, but still they are all a part of the same ocean.

The texts from the oldest tradition in the world, the Vedic tradition (Veda means knowledge in Sanskrit), describe this ocean as the source of both our subjective mental world and our objective physical world. At that source everything, all living beings and all material things are connected to each other. The ancient texts describe the ocean itself as an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent power, much like the powers we commonly associate with a divine being, only they didn’t see this higher being as an individual person that was separate from us, but as a field of which we were all part.

From this perspective, Yoda’s description of ‘the Force’ in my favorite movie of all times, The Empire Strikes Back, is a lot closer to this divine reality than any attempt from our religions:

“For my ally… is the Force
Life creates it… makes it grow
Its energy surrounds us…and binds us
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter
You must feel the force, around you
Between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere”

People in ancient times could indeed ‘feel the Force’ (and even ‘use the Force’, but we’ll come back to that one later). They clearly felt they were part of it.

This was just a matter of training. People had techniques to bring their minds to a state of complete inner silence, so that their wave would merge with its universal source. Like this they actually experienced their connection to this field, and trough this to everybody else.

Over time they lost the techniques to do this, however, and so their experience changed. They no longer had a way to develop the deeper layers of their mental potential, and could only experience the top part of the wave, the most superficial level of the mind, as. So we started speaking about a conscious and a subconscious mind.

The area where the wave merges with the ocean was later described by Carl Jung as the ‘collective unconscious’: the part of our consciousness that we share with each other, but which is hiding in the subconscious mind.

As a result our glasses also started to change. We started to see ourselves as separate from that higher divine consciousness. This created a paradigm shift to what I will call the God Paradigm: People still believed there was a higher divine being that controlled the whole universe, but they saw themselves as separate from this being. They were told that they could only reach this divine being through its ‘representatives’ the religions, and that their main purpose in life was to make sure that this higher being was pleased with them. The technologies of the God Paradigm mainly revolved around praying, going to confessions (in the case of our western religions), etc.

These technologies didn’t seem to work all that well, however. Praying to some distant god didn’t have nearly the same effect as experiencing, and enlivening unity within themselves. They were told that ‘God is love’ but they no longer displayed a very loving behaviour towards each other. The age of the God Paradigm was a time of an enormous power concentration for our religions, but it wasn’t exactly a happy time for the rest of the population. There’s probably a reason why we call it the Dark Ages.

Eventually a group of people came to spoil the party: the scientists.

Scientists knew for a while that our entire universe was made up of different combinations of tiny little balls called atoms, but around the 17th century Newton discovered that other than the material things we can see, there were also invisible force fields in nature that regulated how these tiny material balls interacted with each other. By understanding how these forces worked, scientists could suddenly start to explain a lot of the phenomena that were previously only explained through this higher being. The sun was coming up every morning not because of God, but because of simple laws of gravity that kept the earth circling around the sun.

The more scientists started to discover how nature worked, the more they could create practical technologies to start to control nature. It soon became obvious that these technologies worked a lot better than the God Paradigm technologies. No matter how much they prayed, millions of people were dying of diseases like the Black Death, but as soon as scientists discovered that the disease had nothing to do with a displeased God, but simply with some virus, and could eventually find the anti-virus, suddenly they could cure people.

The more these material technologies were successful the more firmly our belief system became established that the material reality was the true reality. Everything could be explained, everything made sense, and the technologies worked. We started to see the universe as one big material entity, like one giant machine, nothing less, nothing more. This is what we will call the Machine Paradigm. There was no more need for any divine being whatsoever. People could finally take matters into their own hands.

Our mechanical glasses became so firmly attached that eventually we even started to see the mysteries of life as purely mechanical events.

We started to think of the relationship between body and mind in terms of a computer. You have the hardware (brain) that creates the software (mind). This analogy sounds completely logical. If we put the computer in sleep mode, the software tops working. If the hardware is damaged (brain damage), it will have a clear influence on the quality of the software, and if the hardware is permanently broken, it’s ‘game over’.

In essence, this reduced us to very sophisticated walking robots. It wasn’t very romantic, but at least the technologies worked. If we knew how the hardware worked, we could also fix it if it was broken.

So in the end there was nothing mystical, nothing spiritual left. Although the technologies worked (most of the time), the Machine Paradigm didn’t really improve our behavior towards each other. In fact it often had the opposite effect. When people started to believe that the material reality was the only true reality, then naturally the complete fulfillment of life consisted of gathering as many material things as they could.

In the God Paradigm people were at least a bit conscious about screwing over their fellow human beings in order to get more stuff for themselves, because, oh boy, were they going to pay for that one in the afterlife. In the Machine Paradigm there was no more god, no more afterlife, just the not-so-pleasant smell of our decaying bodies. The computer broke down and the game is over. It’s as simple as that. So it doesn’t matter if you hurt others. Just get as much stuff as you can for yourself. Enjoy the game while you can.

But something wasn’t quite right with this picture. How many people can you imagine saying on their deathbed: ‘You know, I really wish I could have gotten a bigger car’? How many super-wealthy people are there who still have to deal with depressions? At some point in our lives we all realize that life has to be more than just material things.

At the height of the Machine Paradigm (early twentieth century) the predictions were that soon all religions and all spirituality would be exposed for what they really were, figments of our imagination, and would soon disappear altogether. But that’s not quite what happened.

Again somebody came to spoil the party, and his name was Albert Einstein.

Einstein is generally considered the embodiment of the word ‘genius’ and was voted by Time magazine as the most important person of the twentieth century. From this perspective it surprises me all the more how few people are actually aware of what was by far his most important contribution to mankind. It was not so much about what he finished, but rather what he started.

When Einstein received his Noble Prize it wasn’t because of his famous E=MC2 formula (which led to atomic energy) or his General Theory of Relativity, but because of a paper he wrote in 1908, giving some new interpretations to earlier discoveries of his colleague physicist Max Planck. This paper led to the start of the quantum physics revolution.

Quantum physics revealed that our view of the universe as a collection of material things was one big illusion. The smallest building blocks of our material universe, such as electrons, actually weren’t material at all, they were waves in an electron field that appeared as local material entities. The idea that there were material objects with invisible immaterial force fields in between them was completely wrong. There were only fields, some of which appeared as visible localized material things, while others were invisible forces that kept the material things together.

Let’s take a simple concept to illustrate this. If you have two rooms, and in one room the light is on, while in the other room it’s dark, what’s the difference? The electromagnetic field is just the same in the two rooms, only in one room the light bulb is stirring it, creating vibrations in the field that we perceive as light; the field is enlivened. In the other room there are no vibrations, and as such no light.

Likewise physicists now know that the electrons that make up the atoms in our bodies are vibrations of the same field as the electrons in the atoms of the bodies of our neighbors. In between the two bodies, the electron field is simply silent, and as such there are no material things.

Ultimately the quantum physics that Einstein launched revealed that everything is energy, the vibration of different fields. The view of the universe as one big material machine turned out to be as big an illusion as the God Paradigm.

‘If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.’
Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize Physicist

But Einstein wasn’t done yet. He took it a step further. He predicted that one day physicists would find formulas that would demonstrate that all the different fields themselves (all the particle fields and all the force fields) were just different kinds of vibrations of one single underlying Unified Field.

With this it appears he was trying to intellectually confirm a spiritual belief he had all his life. When Einstein was asked about his religion
he said that he believed in ‘Spinoza’s God’. Spinoza, a famous Dutch philosopher of the 17th century, described God not as an individual being, with likes and dislikes, but as an impersonal omnipresent force (or a field) in Nature, equally nourishing and equally supporting to everyone. He just referred to it as ‘Nature’. Spinoza’s beliefs were not very popular with the religious authorities, to put it mildly (he was ex-communicated), but Einstein, it seems, wanted to prove that he may have been on the right track.

Before we go into Einstein’s Unified Field theories, I have to explain another concept, as it requires a completely new way of thinking to understand it.

When we think of material things, we know that a thing can only be one thing at the time. A table is a table, a chair is a chair; it can’t be both. Fields, on the other hand, can manifest themselves as many different things at the same time.

Let’s take the electromagnetic field as an example. The electromagnetic (EM) field can manifest itself as many different phenomena in nature. Depending on the wavelength and frequency at which it vibrates it manifests as radio waves, microwaves, light waves, X-rays, etc.

Now here’s an interesting experiment you can do. Turn on the light, your radio, and your microwave oven. They will all work perfectly fine. You can even put 20 different radios in the room, and each let them play their own music. It would get a bit noisy but it would work, and it illustrates our point very clearly: One field can create many different expressions, all at the same time, because all these expressions are at different wavelengths/frequencies, and the individual amplitudes of the waves just add up to each other.

If we for example turn on both the light (small wave) and the radio (big wave) the EM field vibration will look something like this.

The new complex wave has the memory of both simple waves, it is both light and radio at the same time. This is how one field can manifest itself as many different phenomena in nature.

What Einstein predicted, and what became the project on which he spent almost the entire second half of his life, was that scientists would one day be able to mathematically describe how all the different matter and force fields are expressions of one single underlying field. If this field would vibrate in a certain way, we’d get electrons, if it would vibrate in another way we’d get quarks (which combine to make protons and neutrons), in yet another we’d get gravity, etc.

Einstein didn’t fulfill this quest in his lifetime, but he did set the stage for countless other scientists who finished the job in 1983 when the first superstring theories were formulated. These theories could indeed explain everything in the universe as vibrations of one underlying field. Currently, one of the aims of the experiments that are running in CERN’s $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, (the most expensive experiment in the history of Physics), is to provide scientific evidence for this theory. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson was an important step in this direction. Currently they are looking for a phenomenon called super-symmetry, as this phenomenon is predicted by the theory. If scientists do find it in practice, this would be an experimental verification of the theory. A lot of prominent physicists are convinced it’s no longer a matter of ‘if’, only ‘when’.

And this will force us to adopt a completely new worldview, because the very fact that this unified field would exist would imply that this field must be a field of consciousness, exactly as the ancient texts described it.

Let’s take our EM field as an example again. We know that the EM field can vibrate in many different ways at the same time, but it can’t do that by itself. There must be an external force creating this vibration, like a light bulb or a radio broadcaster. But if there is only one field at the basis of all the other forces then there can’t be an external force acting upon it. By definition a unified field must create these vibrations from itself. This means it must have creativity, it means it must have awareness (you can’t create if you’re not aware) it must have intelligence (there’s a lot of intelligence in nature, things don’t happen at random). Awareness, creativity, and intelligence, these are the fundamental qualities of consciousness.

This would mean that our universe is not one giant machine, but one giant conscious being. All of life is part of one big whole.

To change our glasses to this new way of looking at things is uncomfortable at first, because we have been so used to our old glasses. But once we start to view the world from this perspective, we start to see this unity and interconnectedness everywhere around us, and our universe just becomes infinitely more magical and beautiful. Actually, we have already been seeing this interconnectedness our whole lives, but because we weren’t able to fit what we saw into our framework of understanding, we mostly ignored it, like the person with his pink glasses wasn’t able to see the different other colours.

So the first thing that we have to do now is make you more comfortable with your new glasses, by giving you some examples of how everything actually makes a lot more sense. (We’ll see many more examples later in this book, this is just a small appetizer).

Let’s see some examples of how everything is connected, and part of one single field of consciousness, on all levels of nature, from the subatomic particle level to the level of plants, animals and humans.

Next chapter
Everything connected

The Field Paradigm

50 experiments

that can change the world

Everything connected

On September 22, 2010, the BBC News website reported on a discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that some leading physicists feel will someday be regarded as far more important than the discovery of the Higgs boson. At the time, however, it didn’t receive much attention, because it was so strange that nobody knew what to do with it.

Experiments in the LHC accelerate subatomic particles around a ring to insanely high speeds, close to the speed of light of 300,000 km per second, and then smash them into each other. This releases an enormous amount of energy, enough to breaks up the particles into even smaller particles that fly off in all directions, a bit like the debris that flies off when you crash a car into a wall. By measuring these smaller particles scientists can then see if they find the particles the physics models would predict, like the Higgs boson, which is a particle that gives all the other particles mass.

CERN researchers, however, had noticed that these smaller particles don’t just fly off in random directions, but behaved ‘as if they were talking to each other’, as if the particles say: ‘Okay I’ll fly this way, and you fly that way’. There were patterns in their flight path that could not be explained just by random behaviour.

The data was solid, but the scientists just didn’t know what to do with it, so they were very careful in their announcement, just calling it ‘new and interesting effects’, without any further interpretations.

Actually the CERN scientists were not the first ones to notice this strange behaviour at the subatomic level. The BBC article mentioned that another research lab in the U.S. had already noticed similar results.

When we think of subatomic particles as dead material balls, this just doesn’t make sense. We tend to think that consciousness comes from the functioning of our brains, and obviously these subatomic particles don’t have brains, and yet they are fully aware of what the other particles are doing. But if we change our glasses and start to think of consciousness as a field, and these particles as waves on this field, suddenly it starts to make a lot more sense.

This is where the qualities of omnipresence and omniscience come in. Omnipresence means that the field is everywhere and, as such, that through this field every point in creation is connected to every other point. Just think of a radio broadcaster. It will create a vibration in the electromagnetic field at one point, but the radio signal can then be picked up at any other point around it, because every point is connected to every other point.

Omniscience implies that, as everything is connected by a conscious field, at the level of that field everything is known. So one part of the field (a subatomic particle) can know what is going on with another part of the field.

Similar phenomena have been seen in plants for over 40 years. The classic book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins lists many examples of how plants are fully conscious of what is going on in their surroundings and how they react to this.

For example they found that it’s possible to measure a stress reaction with plants by measuring galvanic skin resistance (GSR), the technology often used on humans with lie detectors. If there is some stress reaction, we start sweating, and then the electrical conductivity between two points on the skin increases (or the skin resistance decreases). Plants show a similar reaction.

So researchers put two plants next to each other and set the leaves of one of the plant on fire, and saw a clear stress reaction with the plant, as expected. What they didn’t expect was that when they measured the GSR of the plant next to it, it showed the same stress reaction. It reacted in just the same way when the leaves of its neighbour were set on fire as when its own leaves were burned.

The scientists considered that perhaps this was because the second plant registered some danger through heat or smoke or something. So they did another experiment. They had two plants standing next to each other for some time and then the moved one of the plants to the other side of town and set its leaves on fire… and the other plant registered exactly the same stress reaction. One way or other these plants appeared to be communicating ‘telepathically’.

This is very difficult to explain if plants are just material things, but if they form a part of a larger whole, a field of consciousness, it starts to make a lot more sense. The Secret Life of Plants is filled with dozens of experiments like this. It was published in 1973 and was a massive best-seller, but other than raise curiosity it didn’t do much. People felt intrigued but they couldn’t explain it. They simply didn’t have the right glasses on for it to make sense.

In the animal world there are several beautiful examples of interconnectedness as well, but none more striking than watching a flock of many thousands of little birds called starlings fly together, forming one clearly visible whole, as you can see in this video.

If these were inanimate objects, whose motion is somehow controlled by a central computer, can you imagine the processing power that would be required to perfectly align all these thousands of objects to each other, and make them move together like a unified whole, with none of the objects ever colliding with another object? Do birds have that kind of processing power? Obviously not; their brains are primitive compared to human beings.

The other interesting observation is that researchers measured the visual reaction time of birds and found that the birds reacted far more quickly than they ever could if they would first have to visually observe the flight of the other birds, and then adjust their own flight trajectory. It was as if the birds were communicating telepathically.

So something more is going on, something that scientists were never able to explain, until they started literally seeing these individual birds as part of one big whole, one group consciousness. If birds, like plants, and like everything in nature, are part of a larger whole, it starts to make a lot more sense.

Throughout this book we’ll see many more clear examples of how everything in nature is interconnected, part of one larger whole. We’ve seen these examples everywhere, all our lives, but we never really saw them, as we didn’t have the right glasses on, like the person with pink glasses not being able to see the other colours.

What about examples of interconnectedness of human beings? Can we observe those as well? Yes, we can, every single day. It’s been right in front of our noses, and they’re so obvious that everyone can see them, but it’s the same story as with other examples: because we didn’t properly understand what we saw, we actually never were able to see them properly.

But before we get into these examples we first have to solve a little problem. When we claim that the ocean analogy applies equally to human beings as to everything else in Nature, how does our computer analogy fit into this?

We saw that the computer analogy makes perfect sense, the software (mind) is clearly linked to the hardware (brain) and brain scientists can now accurately demonstrate how some problem in some part of the brain will have a clear predictable effect on our experience of consciousness. We can’t just disregard 300 years of scientific progress, especially when we see that the whole thing just works.

So can we find another analogy that acknowledges the clear connection between body and mind, but that would still allow us to claim that consciousness expressed through the body, but not created by the body.

Yes, we can, and it’s very simple. All we have to do is use the analogy of the radio. We see that, actually, this analogy works equally well as the computer analogy. If we put the radio to sleep, the music stops playing. If we start messing around with the hardware of the radio, it will clearly influence the quality of the music, and if the radio is broken, the music stops playing.

All the discoveries of the past 300 years of science of the relationship between body and mind can be perfectly explained, as the music is still clearly linked with the functioning of the hardware, but at the same time the music is not coming from the hardware. Rather the hardware is giving a local expression to a vibration on an omnipresent field.

And we all know that this field can vibrate in many different ways at the same time, and create many different kinds of music at the same time.

98.7 FM Classical
101.3 FM Pop
103.4 FM rock
104.7 FM dance

Likewise individual consciousness-es are seen as waves on an ocean, part of a larger whole. (Ever wondered why the word consciousness doesn’t have a plural form in almost all languages around the world? This is an ancient secret truth, hidden in our language for thousands of years: There is no plural form of consciousness, there is only one) Each human body is then like a radio that is tuned to one particular frequency, so that each has their own music (thoughts) but at the source of our thoughts we are all connected to each other.

These 2 analogies, the radio analogy and the ocean analogy, form the essence of the Field Paradigm that we’ll explore throughout this book

So now let’s look at some human experience, both ordinary and extraordinary, and see if we can better explain them through the Field Paradigm (ocean/radio analogy) than through the Machine paradigm (computer analogy).

love? Why do humans feel love while computers will never feel it? Love is an experience of feeling connected to someone. It is, in essence, and experience of our true nature of interconnectedness.

We’ve seen that we can only experience the top part of the wave as our conscious minds, while the rest, including the part where we are connected to each other, is hidden in our subconscious mind.

Sometimes, with some people, we feel such a strong connection that the experience of connectedness will shoot right through our subconscious minds and we can consciously experience it anyway. We love them.

At other times the experience is more subtle, but it is still there. Why do we send money to help people at the other side of the world after a natural disaster? We don’t know these people. We never met them and will probably never meet them, but still we want to help. We want to help because we feel, somehow, connected to them. We feel this because we are connected to them. This is why computers or robots would never do this, but we would.

The Bible says: ‘God is love’. The Field Paradigm says the same, but in different words. We are all connected through a universal field of consciousness at the basis of our own consciousness, and love is the experience of that connection.

People who would be able to develop their full mental potential would love everybody equally, because they would feel fully connected to everyone. They would talk about unconditional love, not as a state of mind but as a reality of life. They will say: ‘this and more you will do as well’. In the past such people were actually nailed to a cross… let’s hope it will be different in the future.

So we’ve seen the most obvious example of our connection to each other every day, but at the same time we’ve never really seen it, because from our Machine Paradigm glasses love was essentially an anomaly, something that couldn’t be explained and was therefor better ignored. There’s probably a reason why at the height of the Machine Paradigm, more people died in wars than in any other time in history. Humanity had the technology to kill people by the millions, and had lost enough of its heart to actually do it.

So this was a normal everyday experience. Now let’s look at some paranormal ones, the kind of experiences that really get most scientists riled up, because they’re obviously impossible.

How about intuition? Intuition, or a gut feeling, is knowing something you’re not supposed to know just based on the information you receive through your senses. We can’t explain intuition if we’re all just walking computers, yet a lot of people use it everyday to guide their decisions.

If our consciousness is a wave on the ocean this implies that the source of our consciousness is a field that connects everything where everything is known (quality of omniscience). If a thought would come up from there, then it seems perfectly possible to know things we’re not supposed to know. If we would be more in touch with our own source of thinking, every thought we’d have would always be the perfectly right thought at the perfectly right time. The only reason why we have thoughts that are not always right is because we lost this connection.

Likewise we’ll discuss a lot of other experiences, like feeling when something happened to a loved one, or thinking about someone you haven’t met in years, and then suddenly have this person call or email you out of the blue. Because we can’t explain these phenomena we often label them as ‘coincidences’. They’re not. Researchers have been researching them for over 100 years, and found these experiences are consistent and reliable. But their research has been largely ignored for over 100 years, because they didn’t have the right framework, the right set of glasses, to explain them. They just didn’t make sense.

Once you start to properly understand these phenomena for what they really are, glimpses of our true nature of interconnectedness, you’ll see that you’ll actually start to experience them a lot more. In a way the old saying: ‘I believe it when I see it’ is inaccurate because as long as we are wearing the wrong glasses, we’ll never be able to see. ‘I see it when I believe it’ is generally more true in this situation.

And that takes us to the experiences that make the Machine Paradigm proponents more nervous than anything else: Near Death Experiences and experiences of reincarnation (memories of past life times). According to the Machine Paradigm such experiences are utterly impossible. When the computer is broken, it’s game over. It’s as simple as that. Trying to prove otherwise is like trying to prove a person with pink glasses that there are many different colors.

Yet the proof is out there, and it is now so well documented that one can only wonder how long it will still be ignored. There are thousands of records of Near Death Experiences, people who were clinically dead (the hardware of the computer stopped working) but who came back to life, only to tell of the experiences that their consciousness continued.

Likewise there are thousands of records from children who have clear memories of past lives, so clear that in many cases scientists were able to verify the past existence and verify that what the children remembered actually happened. We’ll look into some of these experiences in detail, but here’s the spookiest example I ever read. A child, who had clear birthmarks on the front and back of his head, could give such accurate descriptions of his past life that they could trace back his previous identity. They found that this previous person had killed himself by shooting himself in the head. The places where the bullet entered and left exactly matched the birthmarks.

From the perspective of the computer analogy such experiences are impossible, but from the perspective of the radio analogy they make perfect sense. If the radio breaks down, this doesn’t mean the music stops playing. It stops being expressed locally in the place where the radio was, but if somewhere else a new radio tunes in to the same frequency (new birth) the music simply continues. If more people would understand life properly there would be a lot less suffering when a loved one dies. If life is properly understood, we’d understand that there is no such thing as death, only changing forms. This is why most people who had Near Death Experiences no longer have any fear of death.

So these are some of the experiences, ordinary and extraordinary, viewed from the perspective of the Field Paradigm. We’ll see many more, and we’ll see that the radio/ocean analogy may feel counterintuitive at first, but that after you start to analyze things properly from this perspective, a lot of things just start to make a lot more sense. Life is far more magical, and far more beautiful, than we can imagine. Prepare for your imagination to be stretched quite a bit.

Actually we’ll see that for a paradigm shift to take place, there are generally 2 conditions:

1. The new paradigm has to provide a more logical and a more consistent explanation of events, both the ordinary events and the anomalies
2. The new paradigm opens the possibility for new technologies that can solve problems the old paradigm can’t solve.

When the Paradigm shift happened from the God Paradigm to the Machine Paradigm, it was clear that these 2 conditions were fulfilled. The mechanical way of explaining things was far more logical than just saying everything happened because of some higher being’s interference, and its technologies were far more efficient to solve problems.

Now a new shift is taking place and we’ll see in more detail how the view where everything is connected can provide a much better explanation for both ordinary and extraordinary events than the view where everything is separate, whether it’s in physics, religion or in ordinary (or extraordinary) life experiences.

Now the question is whether there are field paradigm technologies that can solve problems that our current technologies can’t solve?

This is actually where it gets really exciting.

Next chapter
Field Paradigm technologies

 

 

Field Paradigm technologies

We already hinted at the main Field Paradigm technology earlier. If we really are a wave on an ocean of consciousness (we might as well call it ‘divine consciousness’) then the most important practical application of this would be a way to come back in touch with this higher source of ourselves.

As we said earlier, in ancient times people had completely natural techniques to get there but teaching this technique required a specific formula, and this formula got lost over time.

Actually, it’s better to say it almost got lost over time. There was a secluded group of teachers in the Himalayan mountains, far away from society, where they still had this knowledge, but it was only passed on from teacher to student through a very personal relationship. The only way to get this technique was to give up your life and go live in a cave in service to your teacher.

Sometime in the early 20th century an Indian physics student decided to do just that. He met one of the last remaining teachers from this tradition, Brahmananda Saraswati, someone who was widely recognized by Indian society as the prime exponent of Vedic knowledge, and one of the very few who had reached the highest state of Unity consciousness. Even the president of India regularly went to see him for council. When the student met him he decided on the spot that all he wanted to do was to learn from him. The teacher told him to finish his studies first, which the student did, but after this he left everything behind and spent 13 years serving his teacher, learning his techniques and absorbing both his knowledge and his state of consciousness like a sponge.

After all this time the student became a great exponent of knowledge himself and got the title of Maharishi, which is literally translated as: ‘Great seer’, somebody who could see the reality of life, but could also teach it to others. His full title was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

A few years after his teacher had passed away, Maharishi ended up back in society, almost by coincidence, and was asked to give a lecture on what he had learned from his Guru Dev (as Maharishi called him). His message was simple: Mankind had completely misunderstood what meditation was all about. By interpreting meditation as a form of trying to control the mind, usually through some form of concentration, they were making it a lot more difficult than it really was. This could bring some relaxation at best, but would actually prevent the mind from reaching that state of unity with the ocean, the higher consciousness of which we are all a part. This experience, rather than some relaxation, was the true goal of meditation.

The experience of the wave settling with the ocean is an experience of coming home for the mind, he explained, and the mind wants nothing more than to go there. Actually, the mind is already genetically programmed to go there, and will do so by itself. All we have to do is activate this natural process and allow it to happen.

Naturally people were curious to learn this natural process, and so Maharishi started teaching them. To differentiate his technique from other forms of meditation he called it ‘Transcendental Meditation’, a natural effortless form of meditation that will cause the mind to spontaneously transcend (go beyond) thought and activity and reach that state of pure inner silence. Transcending, Maharishi explained, can only happen naturally. If you try to control the mind in any way, or make any kind of effort, you only keep the mind active, and an active wave cannot merge with the ocean. Transcendental Meditation had nothing to do with ‘meditation’ as it was commonly understood, in fact it was almost the opposite.

Maharishi’s message was quite strong:

“I call my method meditation, but it is, in fact, a technique of self-exploration; it enables a man to dive into the innermost reaches of his being, in which dwell the essence of life and the source of all wisdom, all creativity, all peace, and all happiness… The word meditation is not new, nor are the benefits of meditation new… But for centuries the technique of meditation of this kind has been forgotten. This is why man suffers, or seems to suffer. This is why suffering has become so universal, so much an inescapable part of life.”

When people learned the technique they found, indeed, that this effortless process was far easier and far more enjoyable than the techniques they had been trying before. Most importantly, they found it was far more effective. Most people had this experience of transcending from their very first sitting, and also started noticing profound changes in their lives from the first few days of practice. It didn’t require much practice to create these changes, just 20 minutes twice a day was sufficient.

Maharishi’s message and technique spread like wildfire, first around India, then around the world. He made several tours around the world and taught tens of thousands of people. He didn’t have any costs and as such didn’t charge anything, just relied on some donations to keep him going. However, tens of thousands of people was not enough to really make a difference in the world. He decided that if he really wanted to bring the experience of people’s true nature to the entire population, he’d have to ‘multiply himself’.

So he started developing a course to train other Transcendental Meditation teachers. This was a big step, as it would be the first time in history that people outside of the tradition of masters in the Himalayas would be able to teach this technique to others, bit time required it. Having the experience of tens of thousands of people who learned the technique, and having witnessed every possible reaction people could have, he developed a course to prepare other teachers to teach the technique properly, and also guide people through all possible experiences. It took Maharishi more than 10 years to develop and refine this training, and it turned out to be quite an extensive course, requiring 5-6 months of full time in-residence training, but after this a TM teacher would be properly trained to pass on the technique. Thanks to modern technology, the course was recorded on video, so that every teacher in the world would get exactly the same training.

More than 40.000 people took the training to become Transcendental Meditation teachers, and then the TM technique really started to take off. The first wave came in the 60’s, largely because several celebrities, including the Beatles, were practicing it.

Maharishi, however, was a scientist, and felt most comfortable amongst other scientists. So he started inspiring scientists to do research on the TM technique. ‘This is a great thing’, he said, ‘but don’t take my word for it, investigate it for yourself’.

Many scientists were definitely curious. If this experience of transcending was what it was always claimed to be, a unique 4th state of consciousness where the mind gets a direct experience of a higher universal consciousness, it must have quite some special effects on the physiology.

Could those effects be measurable?

They were measurable, even beyond anyone’s imagination. Here are some of the most important things they found:

During TM practice:

• A very deep state of rest, often deeper than deep sleep, allowing the body to heal deep-rooted stresses
• Hormonal changes: Decrease of Stress hormones, increase of happiness hormones
• Restructuring the brain: reversing the damaging effects of stress on the brain
• Development of our full brain potential

Long-term effects:

• Significant reduction of stress, anxiety, depressions, insomnia, addictions, PTSD etc.
• Improved health, decreased blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, asthma and many other health problems.
• 50 to 70% reduction in healthcare expenses
• Increased self-actualization (self-confidence, self-acceptance, being in the now)
• Decreased impulsiveness, healing ADHD, increased concentration
• Improved brain functioning, measured through improved IQ, creativity, memory, reflex time etc.

Since the first research on TM was published in 1971, 250 universities have conducted more than 600 studies, resulting in 350 scientific publications. This is an extraordinary volume of research, meaning that most of the effects described above were confirmed by several (sometimes up to 50) studies, all independent from each other. The U.S. National Institutes of Health even spent $25 Million on 20 years of TM research, with spectacular results. The story of transcending quickly became a story of extraordinary effects, confirmed by an extraordinary quality of research.

We’ll discuss these effects later in the book in detail, but now we just wanted to touch upon a few of them, as they gradually lead us to the most extraordinary effect of all.

Deep rest

In one the very first researches was ever done on TM, researchers at Harvard Medical School looked at the state of rest in the body during TM practice, as compared to sleep. They measured oxygen consumption, as it was generally known that if the body is in a deeper state of rest, it consumes less oxygen. They found that after less than one minute of TM practice the rest goes far deeper than even during deep sleep, generally only achieved after 5-6 hours.

Over 30 studies have since confirmed the deep state of rest during TM, whether it is measured by oxygen consumption, Galvanic Skin Resistance, breath rate, heart rate or stress hormones in the blood.

Why is this deep rest important? Because it allows the body to remove deep stress.

Stress is like a backpack full of rocks. Every experience we go through leaves an impression that is stored somewhere in the body. If the experience is very intense we can feel this clearly. For example, that feeling of a knot around your heart after you have had a fight with someone. If you collect too many rocks like this, sooner or later the weight of stress will start to disrupt the normal functioning of your nervous system; resulting in health problems, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, burnouts etc.

Fortunately we have a way to remove these rocks again… and we don’t even have to do anything. The body will do so automatically, when it is at rest. Rest is the antidote to stress. When we sleep during the night, the body will remove all the rocks we accumulate during the day, so the next day we can start a fresh… in theory.

The problem is: the rest during sleep is not enough. Have you ever felt how that knot around the heart may hurt a bit less after a good night sleep, but it hasn’t gone completely? The sleep was not deep enough to remove it. This will probably become a rock that you’ll have to carry with you for the rest of your life… unless you learn to transcend.

To test how effective transcending really is to remove deep rooted stress researchers did a test on people who are carrying a bigger backpack full of rocks than just about anybody else: Vietnam War Veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is considered incurable, and nobody knows this better than the army. In the US, for example, since the start of the Iraq war, more soldiers have died at home due to suicide as a result of PTSD than on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. There is nothing anyone can do, and the soldiers simply didn’t see any other way out anymore.

Researchers randomly divided a group of war veterans suffering from PTSD into a TM group and a control group that received psychotherapy treatments, and measured their state of mental health on 9 different variables, each with a scale from a moderate problem to a severe problem. After 3 months the psychotherapy group didn’t see any improvements, as predicted by the psychotherapists themselves. PTSD is incurable after all. The TM group, on the other hand saw such significant improvements on almost all the variables, that after 3 months 70% of the veterans could already go home. They needed no further treatment.

You would think that a study like this would turn the world upside down. If transcending can help such people, where nothing else works, you can imagine it can probably help just about anyone. How many people are out there walking around with stress related problems, not knowing that there actually is a solution to their problem? (By now more than 150 studies have found significant improvements on stress and stress related problems with TM practice.)

The problem was that it sounded too good to be true. Scientists just couldn’t believe that a simple meditation technique would succeed where all their methods have failed. The problem was that they still saw TM as a relaxation technique, instead of what it really was, a technique to bring the human mind back in touch with it’s divine source. The above study was done in 1985. Only 30 years later, after several more studies had confirmed the effect of TM on PTSD, did people start to take action. CNN did a report on TM for war veterans on veteran’s day 2012 (watch the CNN video) and the US army now supports TM for it’s veterans.

Change in happiness hormones

Happiness is like gravity for the mind. We are all drawn to it over and above anything else. The ancient texts described the experience of coming home for the mind, the experience of transcending, as the most enjoyable and blissful experience the mind can have. This is why the mind will be drawn to it and will automatically go there, if it only has the chance. The Transcendental Meditation technique is a way to simply allow the mind to go where it most likes to go. This is why it’s easy and why everyone can practice it. (unless you’d be the only person in the world who wakes up with the thought ‘I hope I’ll be really unhappy today’).

Serotonin is known as our ‘happiness hormone’. The state of inner happiness during the experience of transcending can actually be objectively verified. A 1978 study in Vienna found that after TM practice the concentration of the 5-HIAA serotonin metabolite had increased by 50% compared to before the practice, while there was no difference with the control group over the same time span.

What was even more remarkable was that even before their TM practice, serotonin concentrations in the TM group were on average already more than twice as high as in the control group. This indicates a long-term permanent growth in serotonin.

When the brain is under stress serotonin levels go down. (Ever noticed feeling not all that happy when you’re stressed?) Insufficient serotonin has been linked to a wide variety of problems including depression, emotional instability, migraines, insomnia, addictions, Alzheimer’s, eating disorders, etc.

People collectively spend billions every year on drugs that aim to artificially regulate serotonin, but which often have side effects that are just about
as bad as the problem they are trying to solve (not to say that drugs are not necessary sometimes). If now it turns out there’s a way to naturally increase your serotonin, how do you think that would change things?

Everybody is looking for happiness. Almost everybody has forgotten that we have an infinite source of it, inside ourselves.

Brain development

As spectacular as the effects of transcending are in terms of activating our healing power or increasing our happiness, it’s on the brain that the effects of transcending (and the difference between TM and other meditation techniques) really become clearly visible.

Neuroscientists know that the brain is like a muscle: If we exercise it, it will grow, if we neglect it, it will shrivel. If we lie in bed for a long time after an accident and our leg muscles aren’t stimulated, it will take quite some time before they grow to their normal strength again. Likewise if somebody is blindfolded for a long time, so that the neurons in the visual cortex part of his brain are not stimulated, it takes some time before he is able to see normally again.

Every experience that we have essentially exercises our brain, but local experiences only exercise local parts. If we see we exercise our visual cortex, if we learn to play the violin we exercise the part of our motor cortex that controls our fingers develops (they make millions of new connections, even after only a few days of practice), etc.

The problem is, that until recently there has not been any experience that exercises the total brain. As a result it is generally known that we only use a small fraction of our total brain potential.

So if we only consciously experience a small part of our total mental potential, like the top part of the wave, could this be because our ‘radio’ is basically not functioning properly?

Here’s an even more interesting question: Could it be that through the experience of transcending, we develop more of our brain potential, even our full potential?

Transcending, as we have already seen, is the experience where the wave settles down into the ocean. It is the experience of complete inner silence, of nothingness, but that nothingness is at the same time the source of everything in the universe, so it’s the experience of unity with everything.

It was only a matter of time before a researcher wanted to see how this would impact our brain development. Dr. Lyubimov from the Brain Research Institute in Moscow was the first to research this. He had the most advance MRI brain imaging technology at his disposal to research how different experiences stimulate the brain.

When he put TM practitioners under his MRI scanner he saw something he had never seen before in his life. He exposed his subjects to a stimulus before and during TM, and saw that before TM the local part of the brain that was connected to that stimulus reacted as expected, whereas during TM a much larger part reacted, (indicated by dark blue on the graph) including so called dormant reserves of the brain.

When Dr. Lyubimov saw these results the first thing he did was write a recommendation to the ministry of education that TM should immediately become a part of the school curriculum in every part of the country. His research was published in the journal human physiology Ref. Human physiology, 25: 171–180, 1999

There is a far simpler way, and perhaps an even more impressive way, to measure what is going on in the brain during transcending, which doesn’t require million dollar MRI scanners, but which can be done with a simple laptop or even a smartphone, by measuring EEG coherence.

When parts of the brain are active, there is electrical activity that can be measured with an electroencephalogram, or EEG machine, that creates a visual representation of this activity in terms of waves.

Next, a computer can mathematically analyze those waves and calculate to what degree the waves of one part are similar (the technical term is ‘in phase’) to waves of another part. If they are perfectly similar, or coherent, this is an indication that those parts of the brain are working together as a unified whole.

During the waking state this coherence between the different parts of the brain is generally low. This is logical because different parts of the brain are usually involved in different things. We see, hear, touch, smell, think about the 500 emails we still have to answer, etc.

When the mind transcends, what happens? The mind becomes quiet, so there is no more particular focus on attention on something, yet it still remains conscious and alert. This results in the entire brain becoming coherent, as visualized below (a line between 2 parts of the brain indicates coherence, the thicker the line, the higher the coherence).

As with everything, the more we expose the brain to a particular experience the more the brain will habituate to this experience. In other words, transcending will train our brain to be coherent all the time.

Is brain coherence important? It’s actually probably one of the most important things we can do. EEG coherence has been researched for over 30 years, and scientists have found it is correlated with our creativity, IQ, emotional stability, moral reasoning—everything that is good about the brain becomes better when it can function as one coherent whole.

Over 80 studies have confirmed increased EEG coherence during TM and the consequences in terms of improved brain functioning, but the most spectacular experiment has been a small school in Midwest USA, the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, or MSAE for short, where most of the children learn the TM technique at a young age and practice it together in the classroom as part of their daily school curriculum.

When children arrive in this school, they have an ordinary IQ and creativity. When they graduate they score in the top 1% of the country on standardized academic tests, and 95% of them continue their studies at university.

Other than just academic results, the MSAE students beat just about all the other students in things they put their attention to. They have won more theatre competitions than any other school in their state, and are regularly beating dedicated sports schools in sport competitions. Overall they have already won more than 100 regional, national and international competitions in anything from poetry to science—not bad for a school with only 200 students.

The most impressive results, however, are seen in creativity competitions. Over 100,000 of the most creative students in the world
participate in international creative problem solving competitions like Destination Imagination every year, yet MSAE students have won the world championships four times already.

Basically these young people have what I would call an unfair advantage over all the others. They just found a way to train their brains.

When educators visit this school they feel this must be the best-kept secret ever, although this is changing rapidly.

• Oprah Winfrey did a documentary about the school (and was so impressed she learned TM herself, and later paid for all her 400 employees to learn it).
• In 2005 the New York Times listed the idea of ‘TM in schools’ at the top of their annual ‘best ideas of the year’ list. Since then over 450 schools in 60 countries have already started using the technique, often with government support, as is the case in San Francisco, the UK, Australia, and in a number of Latin American countries.
• When Hollywood director David Lynch visited the school and watched the children perform a theatre play he was so impressed that he created the David Lynch Foundation to bring TM to every other school in the world. This foundation later got the support of companies like Microsoft and dozens of celebrities, who are all enthusiastic TM practitioners themselves, including Katy Perry, Sting, Paul McCartney (yes, he’s still meditating after forty-eight years, and calls it a ‘lifelong gift’), Ellen DeGeneres, Clint Eastwood, Jerry Seinfeld, etc. The David Lynch Foundation has already brought TM to 500,000 children.
• This is just the beginning. Several Governments are already supporting TM in education, leading to hundreds of thousands of children learning the technique as part of the school curriculum in England, dozens of schools in the US, and hundreds of schools in Latin America. In Brazil the government even made it clear they’d like to have TM in all their 48.000 public schools.

These success stories are remarkable, but at the same time still modest given the potential that transcending has to change everything.

It’s great that so far six million people have already learned the technique, but given what transcending is and what it can do, why only six million, not six billion?

A large part of this has to do with the fact that people simply don’t understand what TM is yet. They still think it’s a ‘meditation’ technique and simply find it hard to believe that ‘meditation’ could produce all these benefits, and they’re right, it doesn’t. Only transcending does. And when they even find it hard to understand how meditation can create these personal benefits, it’s going to be especially hard to understand how it can create the most spectacular benefit of all: world peace.

Everything we’ve seen until now already has the potential to change the destiny of mankind, but it would still take many years before everybody in the world would learn this technique. The good news is that this is not even necessary. There’s a shortcut, through which we can ‘radiate the experience of unity to others’ and thereby eradicate all wars, terrorism, corruption, etc., in the whole world in a matter of months, if not weeks. It sounds incredible but it’s been done before, several times, and it works.

This is the real technology we’ll be discussing in this book. Everything else so far was just preparation. This technology forms not only the first indisputable proof that the Field Paradigm is real (as this technology would only be possible if we are indeed all connected at the source of our thoughts by a field of consciousness) but also forms its most powerful practical application, something that can change, and actually has already changed, the entire course of history.

Next chapter
Meeting the president

The Field Paradigm

50 experiments

that can change the world

Meeting the president

It’s 7 p.m. on a dark January night in 2006. ‘Why me?’ That’s the only thought that races through my mind as my car is racing down the highway.

An hour ago I received a call. ‘We’re flying to Africa to meet the president of Guinea-Bissau, and present our technologies to end the civil conflict there. We chartered a private jet, which is leaving in two hours. Maharishi said you should come, if you like.’

‘Would I like? Sure, private jets and meeting presidents always sound like fun.’ But I still couldn’t help but wonder, ‘Why me?’. Several the top managers and scientists of the TM organization would be there, but I’m not a scientist and definitely not a top manager. I don’t even have any kind of official position. I only did some volunteer work now and then.

8.15 p.m. When I arrive the plane’s already on the runway, engines running, but the rest of the group hasn’t arrived yet. The airport’s closing in a few minutes. If the others don’t arrive soon we won’t be able to take off.

8.30 p.m. The limo arrives, at the last possible moment. Eight people jump out and we offload the luggage. When I ask what’s in the big reinforced suitcases, one of the assistants casually says, ‘It’s a satellite uplink video conferencing set. There’s probably no internet where we’re going.’

We all get into the plane and I’m surprised how relaxed they all seem. For most of them meeting a president is far from their biggest adventure. They’re all very warm, welcoming me as part of their delegation, even if some, like me, are probably wondering what I’m doing here.

8.40 p.m. The plane takes off. I’m sitting in a rather comfortable seat in the back, thinking how surreal this all feels. Are these people even still aware of the role they’re playing in the history of mankind?

They’re probably so used to it that they stopped thinking about it. They know they have the technology that can change everything, and they just go to present it to another head of state, and see if he’s open to listen.

I’m curious whether he will listen, because the idea, at surface value, sounds so crazy: A small group of people who are trained in an advanced Transcendental Meditation technique called Yogic Flying will be able to ‘radiate peace’ into the environment, so that all conflicts will come to an end.

They do have one advantage, though. It’s already been tested in another country in Africa, with phenomenal success.

Some fifteen years earlier a similar delegation was on a similar journey to meet the president of another African country: President Joaquin Alberto Chissano of Mozambique. They promised that they would stop the civil war that had been going on for the past seventeen years. President Chissano personally took the time to read over more than 5,000 pages of scientific research that confirmed what happens when people learn to transcend, and took time to study the new paradigm in detail. In the end he was utterly convinced that this would help his country, and he implemented the programs.

Everything happened exactly as promised. In a matter of weeks the civil war came to a miraculous end and the country could start to rebuild. A few years later the New York Times and Time Magazine summarized how Mozambique, for some mysterious reason, had become Africa’s success story. When the project started, in 1993, Mozambique was the poorest country in the world. By the year 2000 it had the world’s fastest growing economy.

And this was only one of more than fifty similar experiments that have taken place over the past forty years—the 50 experiments that will change our world. They have demonstrated that we can stop wars anywhere we want, prevent terrorism, reduce crime and car accidents, improve public health, and give a noticeable boost to the economy, even influence the stock markets. They have also demonstrated that these programs would be able to save governments so much money that they would very quickly be able to reduce taxes, as the programs themselves cost virtually nothing.

So how exactly does it work?

We’ve seen that transcending is like taking a dive into the ocean. When we dive we enliven the surface of the water. In terms of the field of consciousness this means we enliven the qualities of the field in our awareness, qualities which we’ll later analyze as intelligence, creativity, happiness, unity (which we experience as love) and many others. Essentially we can summarize these qualities as: ‘everything that is positive in life’. The Vedic texts summarize it as the ‘pure good’. This would mean that everybody is pure good, pure love, in the deepest part of his soul, but if we lose connection with that deepest part, and allow stress to accumulate in our nervous system, we become capable of some rather inhumane behavior. History is full of examples of one group of people behaving inhumanely towards another group.

When we do experience this source, its qualities automatically start to grow. This is most easily visible in the brain, which starts to function
as one unified whole. Accumulated negativity (stress) spontaneously disappears when we enliven positivity, just like darkness disappears
when we introduce light, or ice melts when we introduce warmth. This spontaneously influences our behavior. We become more loving. Negative thoughts (the basis of all negative action) simply don’t come up anymore.

If this makes sense, then here’s the really cool thing. When we dive into the ocean, we don’t just enliven the water where we dive in, but we also create waves all around us, enlivening the entire surface of the water. If we transcend, we don’t just enliven the qualities of unity within ourselves, but in the people around us as well.

It works just like a light bulb. How can a small light bulb light up an entire big room? Because the light bulb is connected to the whole room through an invisible field called the electromagnetic field. It will stir this field and its vibrations, light waves, will spread in all directions and light up the whole room. What
happens if we turn off the light? The field of light didn’t disappear, it’s still there, but it’s no longer enlivened. Darkness is only the absence of light.

Likewise, there is a field that connects all of us, whose qualities we experience as life, love, peace, etc. Without this field there would not be any life. However, when humans forgot to transcend, it’s like they forgot how to turn on the light. The resulting darkness we experience as negative thoughts, which will lead to negative actions: crime, corruption, conflicts, even wars.

Just like it only takes a few streetlights here and there to light up a whole city, it’s not necessary for everyone to transcend to remove the darkness in everybody’s minds. As such, already in the 1960s, Maharishi predicted that if only 1% of the population of a city learns to transcend, this will be sufficient to create an effect for the entire city.

In the early 1970s, after the first scientific studies appeared, Transcendental Meditation really took off, and millions of people were lining up to learn. In 1974, over 500,000 people learned in one year in the US alone. This meant that suddenly there actually were quite a few cities where 1% of the population had learned TM.

So a few brave scientists decided to put Maharishi’s hypothesis to the test. Would there be a measurable effect in those cities, which would not be there in other cities? They were fully aware that this was going to be an extremely controversial study, that would probably be ridiculed or even attacked from all sides, so they had to make it bulletproof.

First of all they decided to base their study on publicly available FBI crime statistics, so there would be no question about the data. They were pretty confident that nobody would assume that the FBI would distort their data to do them a favour. Next they examined three different ways to compare the data, the previous crime trends in the cities themselves, the crime trends in carefully matched control cities (cities with similar demographics, selected by an independent party), and the crime trends in the US as a whole.

The results? A decrease in crime of more than 15% in twelve cities where 1% had learned TM, compared to both the cities own previous trends, the crime rates in the control cities and the crime rates in the US as a whole. They could statistically calculate what would be the chance such a significant decrease in crime rate could have happened by coincidence. The chance was smaller than one in a thousand. In other words, they could say with 99,9% certainty that this was not a coincidence. This is fifty times better than the ‘probability’ standard in science, where scientists can speak of a statistically significant result if the chance of coincidence is lower than one in twenty, (five in a hundred, or a 95% certainty, indicated by p<.05, which means that the probability that the result could be due to some other cause is less than .05). This study was later expanded to hundreds more cities, and the effects remained consistent. When Maharishi heard about these studies in early 1975 he declared that through the window of science we now have a technology to create a new destiny for the world, and declared that a new age for mankind had started, the age of enlightenment. Just like new technologies created new ages for mankind in the past (the industrial age, the information age) so would this new technology create an age where the inner light would always be lit, and darkness (negativity) would simply disappear. The non-meditating world was a little bit less excited about it. They were happy to accept that meditation could create some personal benefits, but the idea of ‘radiating peace’ was a bit too much for most people, who were all educated in the belief that the Machine Paradigm was the one and only reality. The only way this technology could work was if their entire belief system would be completely wrong—and people don’t like to be told they’re wrong, especially when it comes to their core beliefs. From the moment that Maharishi announced the 1% researches to the world, TM instructions actually started declining rapidly, and countless other forms of meditation appeared to fill the gap. They claimed to offer the same benefits as TM, but without all the weird world peace stuff around it. Of course there was no truth in this, as both the most profound personal benefits and the social benefits came from the experience of transcending, and were only possible if people truly transcended (experiencing the ocean). Ordinary relaxation is not going to create any noticeable effect on society. People within the TM organization were all too aware of this, and they started asking Maharishi whether it wouldn’t be better to not mention the TM field effects, and just talk about the personal benefits. But Maharishi wouldn’t even consider it. The TM field effects were not only the first major scientific proof that the Field Paradigm was a true reality, and that we were in fact connected to each other, but it was also a practical technology to create a better world. Maharishi didn’t care if fewer people learned TM in the short term, he was in it for the long run. He was sure someday the circumstances would be right for people to understand, and was going to speak about it until people would be ready to listen. So he did the opposite, rather than toning down his claims, Maharishi took them a step further. In 1976 Maharishi introduced an even more powerful technique, which allowed the mind to stay in transcendental consciousness much longer, and even create specific beneficial effects from that level of the mind where everything in nature is interconnected. It is called the TM-Sidhi programme. The Sanskrit word ‘siddhi’ means ‘perfection’. One part of this technique was what Maharishi called Yogic Flying, where the body starts making small hops while the mind stays in transcendental consciousness. This looked a bit strange from the outside, but for those who were doing it, it was the most enjoyable thing ever. It was a far more powerful experience of diving into the ocean, and people could feel waves of inner bliss and happiness being enlivened, even far more strongly than during TM practice. An even more important effect was that now the brain was able to reach a state of even far higher EEG coherence than during TM, but while the body was in physical activity, as a research published in the International Journal of Neuroscience showed. This proved to be a far faster way to train the brain to permanently remain this higher state of coherence.

Just like the TM-Sidhi programme had a more powerful personal effect, it also had a far more powerful effect on society. Pretty soon it was found that when many people started practicing this technique together in a group the Field effect became much stronger, even growing with the square of the number of people who are participating.

This is based on a simple law of nature, but it requires a little bit more explanation.

We could use a simple analogy to illustrate it. Imagine three people are jumping into a lake one after another. They will each create a wave that will have a certain height and power, depending on how much they weigh and how big they are. The power of the wave will be how far it will travel before it dies out, and as such it will define the circle of influence, the area on the lake it will enliven.

Simple enough, right? Now imagine that instead of these three people jumping into the lake separately, they hold hands and jump in together. The wave they create will become three times more powerful, and will travel three times further. But this means that the area of the circle of influence will increase with the square of the radius, or nine times.

This is just a basic example to give you some feeling for how it works, without going into too many complicated formulas of physics. The principle is the same everywhere, and it also applies to the waves that are created with Yogic Flyers.

If 1% of the population practices TM in their own homes at their own time, the waves they create, one by one, are sufficient to create a measurable effect on the behaviour of the entire society. If, however, they practice the advanced Yogic Flying technique together in a group, it would be as if they all jump in the lake together, and the effect increases with the square of the number of participants. This means that:

• 20 Yogic Flyers practicing together in one place will have the same effect as 400 individual TM meditators, creating a positive influence for a population of 40,000
• 200 Yogic Flyers will have the same effect as 40,000 TM meditators, creating a positive influence for a population of 4,000,000
• 2.000 Yogic Flyers will have the same effect as 4,000,000 TM meditators, creating a positive influence for a population of 400,000,000
• 9.000 Yogic Flyers together in one place will have the same effect as 81.000.000 individual TM meditators, creating a positive influence for a population of 8,1 billion.

This calculation was the basis of what must have been the most surprising prediction ever made in the history of science (surprising from the Machine Paradigm point of view, at least). That a small group of people hopping around on mattresses can positively influence the way millions of people think and behave.

Bizarre as it may seem, this new Field Paradigm technology did have one major advantage: It was much easier to create research of a very high quality.

The 1% studies were impressive, but they had one major downside. For practical reasons it was only possible to measure the effect after 1% of the population happened to have learned TM. With this new advanced technique it was possible to predict the effect they would create in advance.

The typical Yogic Flying experiment would look something like this:

1. Researchers find a place where there are obvious symptoms of high social stress, like a city with a high crime rate, or even a country at war, and where all the trends show stable or worsening trends, so nobody in their right mind would predict an improvement.
2. They predict a significant improvement, with a specific start and end date, and log the predictions in advance with the press, a board of scientists, national governments, or all of these. They also predict exactly how they were going to measure the improvement, through government statistics, articles from prestigious newspapers (like the New York Times), etc
3. On the exact start date of the experiment the Yogic Flyers arrive at the location and stay in hotels. They have as little interaction with the local population as possible, but just dive deep in their meditation and Yogic Flying practice. On the exact end date, the Yogic Flyers leave.
4. The scientists examine the data and see if a measurable improvement could be found when they arrived, and whether the situation deteriorated again when they left.

These kind of experiments have been performed not only once or twice, but more than 50 times over the last 40 years. Sometimes they involved a few hundred Yogic Flyers to create an effect for a particular city or country, at other times several thousand came together to create an effect for the entire world. Every time such an experiment was organized the effects have happened, exactly as predicted.

Twenty of these studies have been published by top scientific journals on social sciences. A journal links its reputation to what it publishes, and will not publish anything unless it thoroughly reviews the research.

The hypothesis might have sounded strange, but the body of research that has been collected is in fact the most impressive, and most successful, research in the entire history of social sciences.

I always felt that if these experiments were really true, it’s safe to say that this would be the best-kept secret in modern history.

I was curious how the president of Guinea Bissau was going to react to it.

With that thought I put my comfy chair in the back of the private plane in sleep position, and tried to get a bit of rest before the next day.

6 a.m. the next day. The plane lands in Guinea Bissau. A motorcade comes to pick us up and bring us to the hotel, (there’s only one hotel in the entire country that is somewhat suitable for international guests), so we can rest and freshen up a bit—and meditate, of course.

11 a.m. The motorcade drives us to the presidential palace. This is supposed to be the nicest neighborhood in the country, but still there’s poverty everywhere we look. The presidential palace is surrounded by guards with machine guns. They look menacing, but I guess that is their job. After years of violence and civil war they’ve gotten pretty good at it.

We are invited into the presidential suite, everybody sits down and the scientists start making their presentations, while I am asked to take pictures and a video recording. I feel happy to make myself useful.

I was impressed by the dignified manner in which the scientists make their presentation, making it clear that they were here to offer something rather than to ask for anything. The president seems to enjoy this, I’m sure he isn’t used to this.

After explaining some of the basics of how the Yogic Flying technology worked, they showed some of the other experiments that had been done. Here were some of the most impressive ones they presented:

1. The UK study (long term effect and cost-efficiency study)

In the early 1980s a group of Yogic Flyers decided to find a location to permanently live together, and they settled in a small town called Skelmersdale, near Merseyside, so they could do their group meditations together every day.

By March 1988, the group was about to grow to 150 Yogic Flyers, which was sufficient to theoretically create an effect for the whole Merseyside population of over two million. The group of Yogic Flyers and the scientists who conducted the experiment went on television to predict that from the moment they reached this number, there would be a significant drop in crime in the whole region. Nobody took their prediction very seriously.

But the crime dropped exactly as predicted. The numbers were so obvious that you didn’t need any statistical analysis, you could just see them plotted on a chart. (The TM field effects are often called the Maharishi effect, in honor of Maharishi who first predicted them).

Later analysis showed that, over a 4-year period, crime dropped by 45% compared to previous trends in Merseyside, the decrease compared to the trends for England as a whole was 60%. Before the experiment started Merseyside had the second highest crime rate in England, 4 years later it had the lowest.

The scientists were able to calculate that this resulted in 225,000 fewer crimes and close to $2 billion in savings for the Merseyside government. This translated into $6000 in savings for every hour one Yogic Flyer was creating the influence. Even if the Yogic Flyers had been paid a generous $30 per hour (they weren’t, they were doing this as volunteers over the four years), it would still be 99,5% cheaper than conventional methods, while at the same time it’s far more effective. The research was accepted for publication in the scientific journal Psychology, Crime & Law.

2. The Jerusalem experiment

This was an ambitious experiment where the scientists predicted in advance that eight different variables would improve at the same time when the Yogic Flyers started doing their thing:

• Crime rate, car accidents, and numbers of reported fires in Jerusalem
• National crime rate, national mood (based on newspaper analysis), and stock market performance
• War deaths and war intensity scale in neighbouring Lebanon.

The researchers created a composite quality of life index from these eight variables, and then wanted to measure how each of the eight variables and the index of all eight together was influenced by the Yogic Flyers.

Their purpose was to get one big group of 200 Yogic Flyers together for
a period of two months. With the 40,000 individual TM meditators that were already practicing Transcendental Meditation in the area, this would theoretically give an effect that would be big enough to influence the entire populations of both Israel and Lebanon.

In reality, however, the number of Yogic flyers that participated in the experiment never stayed stable at 200, but constantly fluctuated. All the Yogic Flyers were volunteers and some could only stay for a few weeks, others only for a few days. In the end the chart with daily fluctuations looked like this.

This, however turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise for the researchers, as it made the research MUCH more impressive. Rather than taking the average numbers of the eight variables for the two month period as a whole, and make a before and after experiment, they compiled the index of the eight variables on a daily basis.

With normal random fluctuations these eight variables should cancel each other out. Some days the stock market will go up, but car accidents will go down, etc. There is not supposed to be any correlation between crime or car accidents in Jeruzalem and the stock market in Israel as a whole. So the averaged quality of life index should fluctuate very little.

But that is not what happened. During the two month period there were actually significant fluctuations in the index, up to three standard deviations. This means that something was having an effect on all these eight variables at the same time. When the quality of life index was plotted over the number of Yogic Flyers it became obvious what that influence was:

The index followed the group of Yogic Flyers so perfectly that it was virtually impossible this could have been a coincidence. The chance it was a coincidence was smaller than one in 10,000 (500 times better than the norm in science to indicate a significant result)

We have made the analogy of turning on the light earlier. Here you can almost imagine somebody turning up the dimmer, and suddenly the thoughts and behaviour of eight million people starts improving, and this manifested as fewer crimes on the street in Jerusalem, an improvement in the stockmarket in Tel-Aviv, and fewer war deaths in Lebanon.

This study was published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals on conflict sciences in the world, the Journal of Conflict Resolution of Yale University. However, the study was so controversial that it took the journal three years to publish it, and even then it was published with a note from the editor saying basically something along the lines of: ‘Hey, I know this sounds crazy, but the data is solid, so we felt we had to publish’.

3. The Lebanon experiments

In the 1980s Lebanon was probably the most stressed place in the world, with a civil war ranging for over 20 years. As unfortunate as the situation was, it was the perfect place to hold experiments with the Yogic Flyers. Reducing crime was one thing, but could this technology be used to stop actual wars?

On seven different occasions between 1981 and 1983 the TM Movement organized experiments with groups of Yogic Flyers that were big enough to theoretically create a significant change in the situation in Lebanon. Sometimes this was a small group of a few dozen people in Lebanon itself, at other times this was a large group of a several thousand people on the other side of the world, but where the group was so big that the radius of influence should theoretically reach Lebanon. The Jerusalem experiment was one of the seven experiments. On each of the seven occasions it was publicly predicted in advance, either with scientists or with the press, or both, that the war would come to a halt, or that there would at least be a significant reduction in intensity.

Later on a group of scientists did a daily war-intensity analysis over the entire period. Of the 841 days under consideration (2,5 years) the experiments took place over a total of 93 days (when the groups of Yogic Flyers were together). The days in between served as a control period.

The overal analysis showed that during these 93 days there was an average:

• 71% reduction in war fatalities
• 68% reduction in war injuries
• 66% mean increase in the level of cooperation between conflicting parties
• 48% reduction in level of conflict

The chance that such significant reductions could happen by coincidence over so many data points (seven experiments in a row) was extremely small. The scientists were able to calculate exactly how small: less than one chance in ten million trillion. (p=.00000000000000000009).

Is it possible that theses changes in war intensity could still happen due to coincidence? Sure it’s possible. Is it possible that you could win the lottery this week? Sure it’s possible, but the chances are not very big. For most national lotteries the chances of winning the maximum amount ranges between 1 in 5 million and 1 in 50 million. To put this in perspective, the chance that the Maharishi Effect in Lebanon could be due to coincidence is anywhere between 200 billion and 2 trillion times smaller. If I were you I’d run out and buy that lottery ticket, because your chances seem astronomically high this week.

The Lebanon study was accepted for publication in the respected Journal of Social Behaviour and Personality.

4. Terrorism

Of the 50 experiments that were done on the Maharishi Effect, four were large enough to theoretically influence the whole world. So scientists investigated whether during these experiments the terrorists felt less of a desire to bomb things to oblivion (or whatever they enjoy doing). They found a 72% reduction in casualties and injuries due to terrorist acts while the assemblies were going on. When Yogic Flyers were flying, somehow terrorists were creating a whole lot less terror.

5. The Washington DC experiment

After more than fifty experiments over twenty years ,a group of scientists led by quantum physicist Dr. John Hagelin designed what was going to be the ultimate demonstration. They inspired a total of 4000 Yogic Flyers to travel to Washington, D.C., for an 8 week period, and predicted that they would be able to reduce violent crime by 20%.

To make sure there was no doubt about any factor of the research, an independent review board of twenty four members was organized; several of the top scientists in the field of sociology and criminology in the US, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, and local government and civic leaders. None of the board’s members were connected to the TM movement in any way, and most were rather skeptical before the project began.

The predictions were then faxed (The fax was a machine that sent a message by phone line before the Internet…) to 1900 different fax numbers in Washington; each and every senator and congressman, several other senior Government officials, and 375 different media offices. CNN, The Washington Post and several others mentioned it in their news reports.

At that time the chief of the Washington Police department came on television to ridicule the predictions. Washington was one of the most violent capital cities in the world, with crime rates going up by 10% per year. Nothing they did could make any difference. The chief said that the only thing that was going to decrease crime by 20% was 20 inches/ half a meter of snow, ‘mental harmony’ alone won’t do it. The experiment was taking place in the summer, so basically this was his way of saying ‘impossible’.

When the experiment started it went along the same lines as the Jerusalem experiment. The 4000 volunteers didn’t all came at once, but the group started gradually building up over the eight week period. This again made the experiment all the more interesting, as there was a much clearer correlation between the size of the group of Yogic Flyers and the decrease in crime rate.

By the end of the experiment violent crimes went down 23%. The chance that the close relation between the increasing group size and the decreasing crime rate could have been a coincidence was less than 1 in 500 million (p=.0000000002). Statistical analysis had shown that if those 4000 Yogic Flyers had stayed permanently, crime would have gone down by 48%.

The cost to maintain these 4000 Yogic Flyers for two months was $8 million, all paid for by the Yogic Flyers themselves, some generous donors, and the TM organization. Contrast this with the $1 billion the Washington D.C. police was spending on fighting crime every year ($166 million during the same two month period), only to lose the fight, as crime was rising by 10% per year.

Insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ – Einstein

The study was accepted for publication in Social Indicators Research, considered one of the most prestigious journals on social sciences in the world. The review process took three years. The Washington D.C. police, after being extremely skeptical before, became a co-author of the study.

5. The Mozambique experiment

All these experiments had a limited duration, simply because they were mostly done by volunteers, ordinary people who wanted to help the world, and get some really awesome spiritual experiences themselves, because the bigger the group of Yogic Flyers the stronger the experiences the Yogic Flyers had themselves. Still these people could only commit for a few weeks maximum, and then they had to go back home to their regular jobs as bankers, doctors, plumbers, etc. Research was showing that just as the negative effects of stress on society accumulate over time, so would the positive effects accumulate if only the group of Yogic Flyers could stay together longer. This is obviously the ultimate goal, not just a decrease in war or terrorism acts, but to make them permanently a thing of the past.

This is exactly what happened in Mozambique. The president simply ordered the army to learn TM and the Yogic Flying technique and become ‘professional peacekeepers’. As soon as this happened, in 1994, the civil war that had been raging for seventeen years came to an abrupt end, and since then the country has remained at peace.

In 1999 the New York Times wrote:

Seven years after the guns fell silent, jackhammers are ringing, new hotels are rising, new schools are opening, and newly paved roads are rolling across the land.

The war-torn, once ravaged countryside is now lush with corn, cashews and mangoes. Inflation has dropped to 2%, from 70% in 1994. The economy has grown an average 10% a year since 1996. After years of relying on donated food, Mozambique now grows nearly enough to feed itself.

Once a symbol of Africa’s calamitous wars, Mozambique is now a success story.

These were some of the fifty experiments, fifty experiments that can change our world. When they were presented to the president of Guinea Bissau you could see from his expressions that he was interested. So were all the other ministers with whom the scientists and TM leaders met.

Eventually, however, the answer to the proposal was that, while everybody is excited, no final decision can be made to implement these technologies before it had been discussed in parliament. There was a visible disappointment among the delegates who traveled with us, as if everybody already knew what that meant; that very likely nothing was going to happen.

The difference with Mozambique was that President Chissano was in a position to decide on his own, and just make it happen. This means only one person had to be educated in the Field Paradigm. But as soon as politicians and the public opinion get involved, then the entire population would have to be re-educated before they’d be able to understand how this technology could work. Otherwise they won’t support it. And if public opinion doesn’t support it, then generally neither will the politicians.

In the end nothing did happen in Guinea Bissau.

In 2007 Dr. Chissano received the African Leadership award, just about the highest award an African leader could get, coupled with a $5 million prize (even if few believed the reasons that he claimed, and up until today still claims, were behind his incredible success in Mozambique). Around the same time the president of Guinea Bissau was assassinated by his own military.

Let’s hope in the future more countries can go in the direction of Mozambique, rather than Guinea Bissau.

Next chapter
The only proven effective way to create world peace… and reduce our taxes

The Field Paradigm

50 experiments

that can change the world

The only proven effective way to create world peace… and reduce our taxes

‘You can’t fight the darkness, you can only turn on the light’– Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

War seems like a distant memory for most people in the western world. We see it on our televisions, perhaps, but are not confronted with it in real life.

But this is changing. Now there’s a new type of war from which nobody is safe: terrorism. Today the enemy is not some superpower at the other side of the world, but an unknown guy with dark shades in your city or village who can strike any moment. It is not possible to defend yourself against somebody who really is determined to hurt you; sooner or later he will find a way.

The only defense is to take away his determination, and that can only be done at the source of his thinking. This is what the Field Paradigm technologies can do: radiate positivity so that negative thoughts disappear, just like darkness disappears in the presence of light. People will simply change their minds. They won’t know why they changed their minds, they just will. Other thoughts will come in, like ‘Let’s play football’. Even the thought of harming another human being may not feel right any more, although they may not be able to explain why.

In the Machine Paradigm, the only way to change the behaviour was to push rules of behaviour on every person externally, and constantly police people to make sure they followed them. This is extremely expensive, and practically impossible. We can’t survey every single person for 24/7. You’d need three full time jobs for every person that is out there.

In the Field Paradigm, the way to change the behaviour is internally. We create the effect in one location by creating a large group of Yogic Flyers, and radiate the effect to every single person around through the field, enabling people to feel and think in a happier way. It is not only far cheaper than external policing (99,5% cheaper, according to the UK study) but also far more effective.

The really good news is that this group of Yogic Flyers doesn’t even have to cost anything. It could be implemented in schools, prisons, businesses, as part of the military or the police force (as is already being done in Latin America), as part of unemployment programmes, etc. The effect can be created if the Yogic Flyers only do their advanced meditation practice for about an hour twice a day. That is all that is required. The rest of the day they can do what they normally do—study, go to work, etc.

We’ll look at the fifty research studies in a lot more detail throughout this book, but the eventual picture that will emerge is that it’s not only possible to create world peace, but that in doing so our governments will save so much money that they’ll very soon be able to significantly reduce our taxes.

Now wouldn’t that be something worth fighting for.

Will you keep this a secret?

So now you have a pretty good idea of what the Field Paradigm is all about, and what the new technologies that are related to it can do. The question now is what will you do about it. These technologies have remained the world’s best-kept secret for forty years. Do you want to wait another forty years, or would you like to see them implemented in forty days? It’s certainly possible.

Here are a few things you can do:

1. Share this. Flood the internet, let everyone know about it.

2. Be the light yourself. Learn to transcend as soon as possible, and don’t stop there. Learn to become a Yogic Flyer. The training is a significant investment in both time and money but based on the statistics I can promise you it will be a very good investment. (A pan-European survey of 500 TM practitioners found that 97% thought it was a good investment, and 35% thought it was the best investment they’ve ever made*).

The first step to learn TM is to simply attend an info seminar, where you can meet your local teacher, hear what TM can do for you, and ask him/her any questions you want. These info seminars are free, and without any obligation to take the rest of the course. Find your local TM center.

3. If you don’t have time to create the effect yourself, why not outsource your meditation? Help to Fund a group of professional Yogic Flyers. Maharishi’s goal was always to create a permanent group of professional peacemakers that was big enough to create an influence for the whole world. According to the square root of 1% formula this group would need about 9,000 Yogic Flyers. Towards the end of the 80s, thanks to one donor, the TM organization was actually able to maintain such a group in India for four years, from 1987 to 1991. This was the time when the Berlin wall fell, and the Cold War came to an end. The Soviet army, the largest in the world with twelve million soldiers, spontaneously dissolved without firing a single shot. Could be a coincidence—we’ll see later in this book that it’s not. The title of this book shouldn’t be ‘50 Experiments that can change the world’, but ‘50 Experiments that have already changed the world’.

Currently a renewed effort is taking place to again create such a group, again in India, as labour costs are far lower there than in the west. The total cost for a professional peacemaker there is only $250/month (salary plus living expenses). So far a group of 3,000 professional Yogic Flyers has already been created, largely sponsored by the TM movement and several hundred private donors. The goal is to expand this group to 16,000. Basically this means that with this technology, one government, or even one single billionaire, can create permanent peace for the whole world.

But you don’t have to be a billionaire to create the change. Even just sponsoring one of these professional Yogic Flyers can already make a huge difference. As a result of the square root of 1% formula, the positive effect you can create for the world by sponsoring one additional Yogic Flyer is simply mind-blowing. If they have 3000 Yogic Flyers already, this means they can already create an effect for 900 million people (3000 yogic Flyers create the same effect as 9 million individual TM meditators, for 900 million people). So what happens if we would ad one additional Yogic Flyer? This one additional Yogic Flyer could create an additional effect for (3001*3001*100)-(3000*3000*100) = 600100 people. Six hundred thousand people positively influenced for one full month… That’s a lot of karmic brownie points for a meager $250 investment. And of course the curve of quadratic growth goes up very quickly. If we’d be able to grow the group to 5000, an additional Yogic Flyer would already create the effect for more than 1 million extra people. Tell me honestly, have you ever found a more cost-effective way to make a difference in the world.

Thank you for taking the time to understand this new paradigm and its new technologies. We are living at the time of ‘phase transition’, when the old system is rapidly changing to a new system. With all the new evidence showing that the Field Paradigm is real it will no longer be a question of whether this transition will happen, but rather how quickly we can make it happen.

Jai Guru Dev,
Joachim

* of those who could answer the question how they would rank TM as an investment (90% of all respondents, 10% felt it was too soon to answer as they didn’t practice TM long enough)

Thank you for your interest in the Field Paradigm. You will receive an email with the link to download your free e-book soon, but you can already start reading below.

The Field Paradigm

50 experiments

that can change the world

• has been thoroughly tested through 50 experiments over 40 years
• is 100 times cheaper than other methods,
• can be implemented in a matter of weeks.

BUT…to understand it requires a complete paradigm shift. We have to change the way we see ourselves and our connection to each other. We will discover we are far bigger, and far more beautiful, than we could have ever imagined.

The Field paradigm is only a rediscovery of a truth we once new, but have forgotten over time.

Chapters in this book

The biggest paradigm shift in history… is happening right now
Everything connected
Field Paradigm technologies
Meeting the president
The only proven effective way to create world peace… and reduce our taxes
Will you keep this a secret?

The biggest paradigm shift in history… is happening right now

A paradigm is like a pair of glasses. If the glasses are pink, the world is pink. If somebody would try to convince a person with pink glasses he’s wrong, and hold a color chart in front of his nose as ‘scientific evidence’ to prove it, all the person would see is different shades of pink, confirming his belief, and confirming that the other person has lost his mind. It is our belief system that defines how we see the world.

Sometimes we discover that our glasses are the wrong ones, and we get a new pair of glasses. This is called a paradigm shift. Once upon a time people believed that the earth was a flat disk, and that the sun was revolving around the earth. This was what they saw, (they saw a flat earth, and they saw the sun circling around our planet every day) so it was natural to assume this was the reality.

Likewise, sometime in the not-so-distant future, people will think the same about us. How could we have such misguided views of our reality, being deceived by what we see, rather than how it really is. We see ourselves as separate from each other, (I am here, you are there, there is nothing in between) while in reality we are all connected by invisible fields.

We use this invisible connection to communicate with each other. For example, our mobile phone will create a vibration on the Electromagnetic field that will travel to another mobile phone.

Now it’s being discovered that we are connected to each other in a far more fundamental way, at the source of our thoughts, and that we influence each other with every thought we have. Based on this new discovery, there are now technologies to use this connection to create a positive influence, so that negative thoughts simply don’t come up anymore. People simply won’t be able to harm or kill fellow human beings anymore. They can’t explain why they changed their minds, they just did. It simply doesn’t feel right anymore.

Sometime, in the not-so-distant future, people will laugh at the fact that we think of ourselves as being advanced in terms of technology, because most of us today don’t even have a clue about the one technology that really matters in life, the technology to bring human beings back in touch with their own humanity. We’ll also discover that this technology will be so cheap to implement (100 times cheaper than our current methods of trying to influence human behaviour) that our governments will save so much money they’ll even be able to reduce our taxes. Sounds too good to be true? Wait and see.

When will that ‘not-so-distant future’ come? Who can say? The technology that we will discuss has already been around for 40 years, and has more scientific proof that it works than anything other method in the entire history of social sciences (50 experiments that will change the world)… and still very few people are aware of its potential. This could all change tomorrow, and the technologies could be implemented in a matter of weeks… or it could take another 40 years. It will mainly depend on what YOU will decide to do after you read the next few pages. Will you keep it a secret, or will you make sure everybody knows about it?

A brief history of paradigms

Before we can discuss the new technology, we first have to give you the right glasses. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see it, any less than the guy with the pink glasses would be able to see that there are other colours. (that’s the reason why the technologies we’re about to discuss still haven’t been implemented, even after 40 years of scientific proof).

This new paradigm of a field that connects us at the source of our thoughts is actually not a new paradigm at all. It is the oldest paradigm in history, but somehow we have forgotten about it.

Through the current glasses we’re wearing we’re seeing a number of material objects, a chair, a table, you, me, all separated by empty space.

A long time ago people had a different set of glasses. They believed that all of life was part of one big whole. They believed that our individual life, and our individual consciousness, was like a wave on a universal ocean of life. Oceans have the rather cool ability that they can rise up in many different waves at the same time. Each wave is unique, different from all the other waves, but still they are all a part of the same ocean.

The texts from the oldest tradition in the world, the Vedic tradition (Veda means knowledge in Sanskrit), describe this ocean as the source of both our subjective mental world and our objective physical world. At that source everything, all living beings and all material things are connected to each other. The ancient texts describe the ocean itself as an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent power, much like the powers we commonly associate with a divine being, only they didn’t see this higher being as an individual person that was separate from us, but as a field of which we were all part.

From this perspective, Yoda’s description of ‘the Force’ in my favorite movie of all times, The Empire Strikes Back, is a lot closer to this divine reality than any attempt from our religions:

“For my ally… is the Force
Life creates it… makes it grow
Its energy surrounds us…and binds us
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter
You must feel the force, around you
Between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere”

People in ancient times could indeed ‘feel the Force’ (and even ‘use the Force’, but we’ll come back to that one later). They clearly felt they were part of it.

This was just a matter of training. People had techniques to bring their minds to a state of complete inner silence, so that their wave would merge with its universal source. Like this they actually experienced their connection to this field, and trough this to everybody else.

Over time they lost the techniques to do this, however, and so their experience changed. They no longer had a way to develop the deeper layers of their mental potential, and could only experience the top part of the wave, the most superficial level of the mind, as. So we started speaking about a conscious and a subconscious mind.

The area where the wave merges with the ocean was later described by Carl Jung as the ‘collective unconscious’: the part of our consciousness that we share with each other, but which is hiding in the subconscious mind.

As a result our glasses also started to change. We started to see ourselves as separate from that higher divine consciousness. This created a paradigm shift to what I will call the God Paradigm: People still believed there was a higher divine being that controlled the whole universe, but they saw themselves as separate from this being. They were told that they could only reach this divine being through its ‘representatives’ the religions, and that their main purpose in life was to make sure that this higher being was pleased with them. The technologies of the God Paradigm mainly revolved around praying, going to confessions (in the case of our western religions), etc.

These technologies didn’t seem to work all that well, however. Praying to some distant god didn’t have nearly the same effect as experiencing, and enlivening unity within themselves. They were told that ‘God is love’ but they no longer displayed a very loving behaviour towards each other. The age of the God Paradigm was a time of an enormous power concentration for our religions, but it wasn’t exactly a happy time for the rest of the population. There’s probably a reason why we call it the Dark Ages.

Eventually a group of people came to spoil the party: the scientists.

Scientists knew for a while that our entire universe was made up of different combinations of tiny little balls called atoms, but around the 17th century Newton discovered that other than the material things we can see, there were also invisible force fields in nature that regulated how these tiny material balls interacted with each other. By understanding how these forces worked, scientists could suddenly start to explain a lot of the phenomena that were previously only explained through this higher being. The sun was coming up every morning not because of God, but because of simple laws of gravity that kept the earth circling around the sun.

The more scientists started to discover how nature worked, the more they could create practical technologies to start to control nature. It soon became obvious that these technologies worked a lot better than the God Paradigm technologies. No matter how much they prayed, millions of people were dying of diseases like the Black Death, but as soon as scientists discovered that the disease had nothing to do with a displeased God, but simply with some virus, and could eventually find the anti-virus, suddenly they could cure people.

The more these material technologies were successful the more firmly our belief system became established that the material reality was the true reality. Everything could be explained, everything made sense, and the technologies worked. We started to see the universe as one big material entity, like one giant machine, nothing less, nothing more. This is what we will call the Machine Paradigm. There was no more need for any divine being whatsoever. People could finally take matters into their own hands.

Our mechanical glasses became so firmly attached that eventually we even started to see the mysteries of life as purely mechanical events.

We started to think of the relationship between body and mind in terms of a computer. You have the hardware (brain) that creates the software (mind). This analogy sounds completely logical. If we put the computer in sleep mode, the software tops working. If the hardware is damaged (brain damage), it will have a clear influence on the quality of the software, and if the hardware is permanently broken, it’s ‘game over’.

In essence, this reduced us to very sophisticated walking robots. It wasn’t very romantic, but at least the technologies worked. If we knew how the hardware worked, we could also fix it if it was broken.

So in the end there was nothing mystical, nothing spiritual left. Although the technologies worked (most of the time), the Machine Paradigm didn’t really improve our behavior towards each other. In fact it often had the opposite effect. When people started to believe that the material reality was the only true reality, then naturally the complete fulfillment of life consisted of gathering as many material things as they could.

In the God Paradigm people were at least a bit conscious about screwing over their fellow human beings in order to get more stuff for themselves, because, oh boy, were they going to pay for that one in the afterlife. In the Machine Paradigm there was no more god, no more afterlife, just the not-so-pleasant smell of our decaying bodies. The computer broke down and the game is over. It’s as simple as that. So it doesn’t matter if you hurt others. Just get as much stuff as you can for yourself. Enjoy the game while you can.

But something wasn’t quite right with this picture. How many people can you imagine saying on their deathbed: ‘You know, I really wish I could have gotten a bigger car’? How many super-wealthy people are there who still have to deal with depressions? At some point in our lives we all realize that life has to be more than just material things.

At the height of the Machine Paradigm (early twentieth century) the predictions were that soon all religions and all spirituality would be exposed for what they really were, figments of our imagination, and would soon disappear altogether. But that’s not quite what happened.

Again somebody came to spoil the party, and his name was Albert Einstein.

Einstein is generally considered the embodiment of the word ‘genius’ and was voted by Time magazine as the most important person of the twentieth century. From this perspective it surprises me all the more how few people are actually aware of what was by far his most important contribution to mankind. It was not so much about what he finished, but rather what he started.

When Einstein received his Noble Prize it wasn’t because of his famous E=MC2 formula (which led to atomic energy) or his General Theory of Relativity, but because of a paper he wrote in 1908, giving some new interpretations to earlier discoveries of his colleague physicist Max Planck. This paper led to the start of the quantum physics revolution.

Quantum physics revealed that our view of the universe as a collection of material things was one big illusion. The smallest building blocks of our material universe, such as electrons, actually weren’t material at all, they were waves in an electron field that appeared as local material entities. The idea that there were material objects with invisible immaterial force fields in between them was completely wrong. There were only fields, some of which appeared as visible localized material things, while others were invisible forces that kept the material things together.

Let’s take a simple concept to illustrate this. If you have two rooms, and in one room the light is on, while in the other room it’s dark, what’s the difference? The electromagnetic field is just the same in the two rooms, only in one room the light bulb is stirring it, creating vibrations in the field that we perceive as light; the field is enlivened. In the other room there are no vibrations, and as such no light.

Likewise physicists now know that the electrons that make up the atoms in our bodies are vibrations of the same field as the electrons in the atoms of the bodies of our neighbors. In between the two bodies, the electron field is simply silent, and as such there are no material things.

Ultimately the quantum physics that Einstein launched revealed that everything is energy, the vibration of different fields. The view of the universe as one big material machine turned out to be as big an illusion as the God Paradigm.

‘If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.’
Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize Physicist

But Einstein wasn’t done yet. He took it a step further. He predicted that one day physicists would find formulas that would demonstrate that all the different fields themselves (all the particle fields and all the force fields) were just different kinds of vibrations of one single underlying Unified Field.

With this it appears he was trying to intellectually confirm a spiritual belief he had all his life. When Einstein was asked about his religion
he said that he believed in ‘Spinoza’s God’. Spinoza, a famous Dutch philosopher of the 17th century, described God not as an individual being, with likes and dislikes, but as an impersonal omnipresent force (or a field) in Nature, equally nourishing and equally supporting to everyone. He just referred to it as ‘Nature’. Spinoza’s beliefs were not very popular with the religious authorities, to put it mildly (he was ex-communicated), but Einstein, it seems, wanted to prove that he may have been on the right track.

Before we go into Einstein’s Unified Field theories, I have to explain another concept, as it requires a completely new way of thinking to understand it.

When we think of material things, we know that a thing can only be one thing at the time. A table is a table, a chair is a chair; it can’t be both. Fields, on the other hand, can manifest themselves as many different things at the same time.

Let’s take the electromagnetic field as an example. The electromagnetic (EM) field can manifest itself as many different phenomena in nature. Depending on the wavelength and frequency at which it vibrates it manifests as radio waves, microwaves, light waves, X-rays, etc.

Now here’s an interesting experiment you can do. Turn on the light, your radio, and your microwave oven. They will all work perfectly fine. You can even put 20 different radios in the room, and each let them play their own music. It would get a bit noisy but it would work, and it illustrates our point very clearly: One field can create many different expressions, all at the same time, because all these expressions are at different wavelengths/frequencies, and the individual amplitudes of the waves just add up to each other.

If we for example turn on both the light (small wave) and the radio (big wave) the EM field vibration will look something like this.

The new complex wave has the memory of both simple waves, it is both light and radio at the same time. This is how one field can manifest itself as many different phenomena in nature.

What Einstein predicted, and what became the project on which he spent almost the entire second half of his life, was that scientists would one day be able to mathematically describe how all the different matter and force fields are expressions of one single underlying field. If this field would vibrate in a certain way, we’d get electrons, if it would vibrate in another way we’d get quarks (which combine to make protons and neutrons), in yet another we’d get gravity, etc.

Einstein didn’t fulfill this quest in his lifetime, but he did set the stage for countless other scientists who finished the job in 1983 when the first superstring theories were formulated. These theories could indeed explain everything in the universe as vibrations of one underlying field. Currently, one of the aims of the experiments that are running in CERN’s $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, (the most expensive experiment in the history of Physics), is to provide scientific evidence for this theory. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson was an important step in this direction. Currently they are looking for a phenomenon called super-symmetry, as this phenomenon is predicted by the theory. If scientists do find it in practice, this would be an experimental verification of the theory. A lot of prominent physicists are convinced it’s no longer a matter of ‘if’, only ‘when’.

And this will force us to adopt a completely new worldview, because the very fact that this unified field would exist would imply that this field must be a field of consciousness, exactly as the ancient texts described it.

Let’s take our EM field as an example again. We know that the EM field can vibrate in many different ways at the same time, but it can’t do that by itself. There must be an external force creating this vibration, like a light bulb or a radio broadcaster. But if there is only one field at the basis of all the other forces then there can’t be an external force acting upon it. By definition a unified field must create these vibrations from itself. This means it must have creativity, it means it must have awareness (you can’t create if you’re not aware) it must have intelligence (there’s a lot of intelligence in nature, things don’t happen at random). Awareness, creativity, and intelligence, these are the fundamental qualities of consciousness.

This would mean that our universe is not one giant machine, but one giant conscious being. All of life is part of one big whole.

To change our glasses to this new way of looking at things is uncomfortable at first, because we have been so used to our old glasses. But once we start to view the world from this perspective, we start to see this unity and interconnectedness everywhere around us, and our universe just becomes infinitely more magical and beautiful. Actually, we have already been seeing this interconnectedness our whole lives, but because we weren’t able to fit what we saw into our framework of understanding, we mostly ignored it, like the person with his pink glasses wasn’t able to see the different other colours.

So the first thing that we have to do now is make you more comfortable with your new glasses, by giving you some examples of how everything actually makes a lot more sense. (We’ll see many more examples later in this book, this is just a small appetizer).

Let’s see some examples of how everything is connected, and part of one single field of consciousness, on all levels of nature, from the subatomic particle level to the level of plants, animals and humans.

Next chapter
Everything connected