In this article we will continue our discussion of consciousness effects of a non-local mind. In the previous article we looked at scientific experiments that sought to prove that consciousness has an effect on matter. We will now look at experiments designed to prove that consciousness can have a healing effect on yourself and others.
We will then take a brief look at the concept of telepathy before we close out this article.
Transcendental Meditation Organization – The Meditation Effect
The founder of the Transcendental Meditation Organization was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Since 1960, he systematically tested, through dozens and dozens of studies, whether group meditation could reduce violence and discord in the world.
Over thirty different studies were carried out about the meditation effect.
It was shown that 7000 people meditating caused a 72% reduction in terrorism.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1967
National Demonstration Project in Washington DC
The National Demonstration Project was conducted over two months (June-July) in 1993 in Washington DC.
It showed that when the local Super Radiance group increased to 4000, violent crime, which had been steadily increasing during the first five months of the year, began to fall, to 23.3 %, and continued to drop until the end of the experiment.
Violent crime included homicide, rape, aggravated assault and robbery.
The effect was found to continue for some time after the group disbanded, before the crime rate rose again.
“The statistical probability that this result could reflect chance variation in crime levels was less than 2 in one billion.”1
The study demonstrated that the effect couldn’t have been due to such variables as weather, the police or any special anti-crime campaign.
“A 27-member independent Project Review Board consisting of sociologists and criminologists from leading universities, representatives from the police department and government of the District of Columbia, and civic leaders approved, in advance, the research protocol for the project and monitored its progress.”2
Some Other Studies Included:3
- Twenty-four U.S. cities – A Restrospective Study: In 1973 there was a significant decrease in crime rate by 24% relative to controls.
- 160 U.S. cities – A Causal Analysis: A stable causal structure was found that supported the hypothesis that the Maharishi Effect reduced crime rate equivalent to an improvement of 17.6%.
- Union Territory of Delhi – Decreased Crime (1980-1981) by 11%
- Metro Manila Region – Decreased Crime and Death (1979-1981)
- Metro Manila – Decreased Crime (1984-1985) by 12.1%
- Merseyside, England – Decreased Crime (1978-1991) by 16%
- Puerto Rico – Decreased Crime (1984) decrease of 543.1 crimes per month
- Israel & Lebanon – Decreased Crime and Improved Quality of Life (1983)
“Not surprisingly, since the theory and the phenomenon are so new to modern science, the methodology of a study is subjected to rigorous analysis by the journal review boards before a paper on the Maharishi Effect is accepted for publication. As a result, the research is really a gem of social science, not only on account of its significance, but also for the quality of its methodology.”4
Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, David Edwards, PhD says of this research, “I think the claim can be plausibly made that the potential impact of this research exceeds that of any other ongoing social or psychological research program. It has survived a broader array of statistical tests than most research in the field of conflict resolution. This work and the theory that informs it deserve the most serious consideration by academics and policy makers alike.”
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi believed that individual stress led to world stress and group calm led to world calm. His work shows the power of the individual consciousness and the idea that we are sharing the same ‘global’ or even ‘cosmic’ mind.
At the core of our human experience, the way we think and feel is a voting of the reality we live in.
The Law of Attraction
Idealism, or the idea that consciousness creates reality, is related to the Law of Attraction.
The basic concept is that you attract what you focus upon, or “You Create Your Own Reality” with your thoughts, beliefs, expectations and emotions.
In a universe of infinite possibilities, our thoughts, beliefs, and expectations act like magnets, drawing situations, people or objects into our reality that “match” what we put out into the universe.
For instance, if we have a fear and a belief that humans are greedy and selfish by nature, then we are attracting greedy and selfish people into our reality. If we believe we are unworthy, sinful and degraded beings then we will attract people and experiences into our lives that back up that belief.
In essence, we are attracting situations into our lives that will back up our belief system, whatever that belief system is, positive or negative.
If we believe that humans are innately good and loving, then those are the people and situations we will meet with in our reality.
As Ken Keyes Jr. wrote, “A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.”
Dr. John Hagelin writes, “During the past 20 years, extensive scientific research, along with the direct personal experience of millions of individuals practicing a simple, subjective technology called the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field, has shown that human intelligence, like nature’s intelligence, has at its basis a unified field of intelligence.
In this most fundamental state of awareness, known as transcendental consciousness or pure consciousness, the knower, the known, and the process of knowing are united in a single, self-interacting structure of experience.
The defining characteristics of this unified field of consciousness…are identical to the essential characteristics of the unified field of modern physics…
The most natural conclusion is that the most fundamental level of human intelligence (pure consciousness) and the most fundamental level of nature’s intelligence (the unified field) are not independent, but one and the same, providing a profound unification of objective and subjective realms of existence at the level of the unified field.
This fundamental identity between the unified field of physics and the unified field of pure consciousness at the basis of the mind is confirmed through detailed analysis of their quantitative structure and dynamics. The vibrational spectrum of the excitations of the unified field, i.e., its resonant modes or “energy eigenstates” which comprise all the various particles and forces in the universe, are identical in structure to the fundamental modes of consciousness open to direct experience through the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field. In other words, not only do these two fields possess identical qualities and characteristics, but they share the same quantitative spectrum of excitations.”5
Dr. Daniel Benor – Spiritual Healing
Dr. Daniel Benor (1941-present) is a holistic psychiatrist who blends elements from intuitive and spiritual awareness.6
Dr. Daniel Benor, M.D.
“Studying the power of prayer for years, Daniel Benor, medical doctor, psychiatrist, and author of Spiritual Healing, proves the validity of healing via scientific research. Dr. Benor asserts that people have the ability to heal themselves from almost anything and proposes that healers not be categorized as alternative therapists, but work directly with doctors in an integrative therapy.”
Dr. Benor did a meta-analysis, a statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies over a broad range of time.
He looked at 191 spiritual healing studies.
Some of the people being healed were not even aware they were part of a study. Other healing work was conducted at a distance, sometimes all the way from coast to coast.
Fully 64% of the 191 studies demonstrated a profound healing result.
Apparently, if you don’t believe you have the power to heal, it is because you have been conditioned to believe you can’t. With the power of your belief, you get an amplification of your abilities.
Dr. Bernard Grad
Dr. Bernard Grad, PhD (1920-2010) was a biologist at McGill University in Montreal and considered one of the foremost researchers of laying-on-of-hands energy healing.
Dr. Bernard Grad, PhD
Dr. Grad was a pioneer in the field of remote healing in the 1960s. However, he commented that his research on healing was “met with resistance.”
“He became concerned about letting people know he was doing non-conventional research. He was ‘afraid’ of losing his job.”7
Interestingly, Dr. Grad worked with Dr. Wilhelm Reich (see Article 137) at his lab in Maine from 1949 through the early 1950s and was able to successfully replicate Reich’s findings. Of course, knowing Reich in the fifties, Dr. Grad would have seen how ruthlessly Reich was treated by the scientific community and the United States government (not to mention the German and Norwegian governments). It is no wonder Grad was afraid of losing his job.
Dr. Wilhelm Reich
Despite the climate of resistance, he was passionate about healing research and interested in determining whether psychic healers transmit energy to patients.
In one experiment he soaked plant seeds in salty water, making them “ill”.
The seeds were soaked in two different containers. Before soaking, he had a healer lay hands on one container of salt water to be used.
The batch exposed to the water treated by the healer grew taller than the other batch.
In another experiment he had psychiatric patients hold ordinary water to be used for the seeds.
One man being treated for psychotic depression was noticeably more depressed than the others. The water he touched suppressed the seed’s growth most of all.
In later experiments, Grad chemically analyzed the water by infrared spectroscopy and discovered that the water treated by the healer had minor shifts in its molecular structure and decreased hydrogen bonding between the molecules, similar to what happens when water is exposed to magnets.
He later showed healers could reduce the growth of cancerous tumors in laboratory animals.
Animals with tumors which were not healed died more quickly
Elisabeth Targ
Elisabeth Targ (1961-2002) was an orthodox psychiatrist specializing in psychic phenomena and the role of spirituality in healing.
Dr. Elisabeth Targ, PhD
She was daughter of Russell Targ, Puthoff’s partner and successor in the SRI remote-viewing experiments at Stanford, and niece of chess world champion Bobby Fischer.
Her early studies showed group therapy was as good as Prozac for treating depression in AIDS patients.
She put distant healing to the test with patients with advanced AIDS.
She designed a double-blind trial using a homogeneous patient population with the same degree of illness, and similar personal habits: the amount they smoked, exercise they took, their religious beliefs, even their use of recreational drugs.
She used healers from diverse backgrounds:
- Several Christian healers
- A handful of evangelicals
- One Jewish Kabbalist healer
- A few Buddhists
- A number of others were trained in non-religious healing schools, such as the Barbara Brennan School of Healing Light, or worked with complex energy fields, attempting to change colors or vibrations in a patient’s aura.
Some healers used contemplative healing or visualizations.
Others worked with tones and planned to sing or ring bells on behalf of the patient, the purpose of which, they claimed, was to re-attune their chakras, or energy centers.
A few worked with crystals.
One healer, who’d been trained as a Lakota Sioux shaman, intended to use the Native American pipe ceremony. Drumming and chanting would enable him to go into a trance during which he would contact spirits on the patient’s behalf.
They also enlisted a Qigong master from China, who said that he would be sending harmonizing qi energy to the patients.
All information was kept sealed in envelops and handled individually through each step of the study.
The healers had no contact with the patients – they only got a photo, name and T-cell count.
Each healer held a healing intention for 1 hour a day, 6 days a week, for 10 weeks.
Each healer was assigned a new patient each week to remove any individual biases.
During the 6 months of the study, 40% of the control population died.
All 10 in the healing group were alive and had become healthier.
The treatment worked – it was inescapable.
She decided to repeat the experiment to control for age and any other factors they overlooked.
This larger study included 40 patients.
After 6 months the treated group was healthier on every parameter – significantly fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, fewer days in hospital, fewer new AIDS-defining illnesses and significantly lower severity of disease, as well as improved moods.
It did not matter which method you used or what spiritual or religious background you came from – so long as you held an intention for a patient to heal.
Telepathy
“Telepathy is the basis for your languages, without which their symbolism would be meaningless. The hidden cues are the symbols that make language intelligible.
“Your consciousness is telepathic and clairvoyant even though you may not realize it. You therefore shut these out of our conscious experience.
Most beliefs you receive are your parents’ conceptions of the nature of reality. They are given to you through example, verbal communication, and constant telepathic reinforcement. You receive ideas about the world in general and your relationship to it; and from your parents you are also given concepts of what you are. You pick up their ideas of your own reality.
“You operate if your thoughts were secret, though you should know by now that they are not. Not only are your thoughts apparent through telepathic communications, but without your conscious awareness they also form what you may call pseudo-images “beneath” the range of physical matter as you normally perceive it in some cases, or “above” the same range.
“Portions of the self on the other side of the conscious mind constantly receive telepathic data. The telepathic information comes through deeper portions of the self.
“You are a sender and a receiver. Because ideas have an electromagnetic reality, beliefs, because of their intensity, radiate strongly. Due to the organizing structure of your own psychological nature, similar beliefs congregate, and you will readily accept those with which you already agree.
“There is a constant interplay between yourself and others in the exchange of ideas, both telepathically and on a conscious level. The interchange follows your conscious beliefs. It is fashionable in some circles to believe that you react physically to telepathically received messages despite your conscious beliefs of ideas. This is not the case. You react only to those telepathic messages that fit in with your conscious ideas about yourself and your reality.
“Telepathic communication is constant. This is usually at an unconscious level merely because your conscious mind is in a state of becoming.”8
Famous Russian psychic Wolf Messing states, “Science must take telepathy away from mysticism and find out how it works. Because it does work. Some years ago nothing was done about radio waves. Why can’t telepathy bring us similar miracles? It surprises me that scientists don’t realize, or don’t want to realize, that telepathy happens all the time in their own lives. Isn’t this like the savants of the Middle Ages…refusing to admit that electricity exists although they saw lightning all the time.’
Further Studies on Telepathy
Joseph Rhine and Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell – ESP and telepathy experiments between the Earth and Moon. Results were inconclusive.
Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn – Dream Research Laboratory. Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner studied if thoughts could be sent and incorporated into dreams.
“Our review has shown that dream ESP remains a promising, if somewhat neglected, area for parapsychological research. Combined effect sizes for both Maimonides and post-Maimonides studies suggest that judges may be able to correctly identify target materials more often than would be expected by chance using dream mentation. There is evidence of conceptual replication within both sets of studies, although this seems to be concentrated within certain research teams. Overall, the Maimonides studies were more successful than the post- Maimonides studies but this may be due to procedural differences. There is a need for a meta-analysis of the experimental dream ESP literature, not only to provide an estimate of the overall effect size but also to identify process-oriented factors that might influence study outcomes. We hope that future researchers will also note some of the methodological shortcomings we have identified and address these in their study designs. Home dream ESP research is a less expensive and less labor-intensive alternative to sleep-laboratory-based research and merits further investigation. We hope that this review will help re-awaken interest in this neglected but promising paradigm.”9
Dr. Charles Tart (1937-present) is a psychologist who worked at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the University of California–Davis, the Monroe Institute, the University of Nevada, the California Institute of Integral Studies and Stanford Research Institute.
Dr. Tart “believes that the evidence of the paranormal is bringing science and spirit together. His primary goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities, and to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for knowing the world and for personal and social growth.”10
He completed many experiments on precognition, lucid dreaming, telepathy, out-of-body experiences, altered states of consciousness, hypnosis and whether people can empathetically feel another’s pain.11
Conclusion
In this article we have explored more evidence of how consciousness affects physical reality. In the next article we will look at our telepathic connection with nature then we will switch gears once again towards the metaphysical to explore in detail just what it means to ‘create your own reality.’
For balance let us note here a critique of the idea that beliefs affect reality. Maureen O’Hara, a humanistic psychologist asserts that “the conviction of beliefs alone can affect social change provides a perfect excuse for complacency. Why bother to engage in political activism when it’s just as effective to sit comfortably at home and believe things?”
We ask readers to please recognize that beliefs are different than opinions. Beliefs are not only the foundation of our moral, ethical, scientific and spiritual worldview, but beliefs have a direct effect on our behaviors and actions in every aspect of our life. The point is: beliefs spur action, and not just in a political activist way, but in every single way possible.
No one is suggesting that a person sit at home and “believe things”. That is akin to sitting at home and just wishing (or praying) for something without actually doing anything to make it happen. Beliefs aren’t wishes. They aren’t wishy-washy nebulous desires or vague hopes. Beliefs are core concepts that each person recognizes as true and infallible, whatever they are true or not. Our beliefs affect how we treat other people, animals and the environment on a daily basis. They affect how we spend our time, what our thoughts, words and actions are and how we treat ourselves. All our actions are guided by our beliefs.
How we treat people (and ourselves!) on a daily basis has a far more profound effect than if we decide to join a protest one day, or sign a petition another. Beliefs and actions go hand in hand and one cannot be separated from the other. Beliefs affect what we eat, what we buy, what we listen to. Beliefs affect all our actions every single day.
O’Hara’s outlook is fragmented and reductionist and does not take into account the complex interactions between beliefs, thoughts, words and actions that take place each and every day.
People are complacent when they believe they are powerless. When people become empowered, they are no longer complacent. They work to change the world in their own individual way, whether that way involves protests, petitions, speeches and activism, or whether that involves supporting only ethical companies and products, or whether that involves being kind and uplifting to friends, family members, acquaintances and strangers.
Whether it is a small way, or large way, affecting a handful of people or millions of people, each person’s beliefs affect their actions, and those beliefs and actions are important and they always make a difference, however small or large, positive or negative those differences may be.
Not everyone is meant to be a political activist, or a doctor, or a writer or a CEO, or what have you. Each person works from their individual place, in their individual way to bring about positive change, and their beliefs direct how they do so.
It is ignorant and judgmental to think that each person should be a political activist or else they are “complacent”. That is ignoring the brilliance of each person’s unique potential. It pigeonholes and insults the idea that humans should be true to themselves and work from where they are to effect change.
These topics and more will be discussed in great detail in Articles 145-165, 172 and 197-249.
- Hagelin, J. S., Orme-Johnson, D. W., Rainforth, M., Cavanaugh, K., & Alexander, C. N. (1999). Results of the National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness in Washington, D.C. Social Indicators Research, 47, 153–201. https://www.mum.edu/about-mum/consciousness-based-education/tm-research/maharishi-effect/reduced-violent-crime-in-washington-dc
- ibid.
- https://www.mum.edu/about-mum/consciousness-based-education/tm-research/maharishi-effect/Summary-of-13-Published-Studies
- https://www.mum.edu/tm-research-overview/maharishi-effect/
- Hagelin, John, Achieving World Peace: Theory and Research, https://www.mum.edu/tm-research-overview/maharishi-effect/achieving-world-peace-theory-and-research/
- https://danielbenor.com/
- Wiand, Lenore PhD, Bernard Grad: The Legacy Lives On, Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine, Volume 21, Number 2, Page 9
- Roberts, Jane , Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul
- Sherwood, Simon J. and Roe, Chris A. A Review of Dream ESP Studies Conducted Since the Maimonides Dream ESP Programme, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, No. 6-7, 2003
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Tart
- http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/articles-library/
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