Creating Coherence in Collective Consciousness for Universal Flourishing: Automatic Self-Transcending for Reducing Conflicts and Improving the Quality of Life in Society

Abstract

This chapter reports on the paradigm of influencing the collective consciousness to create beneficial effects for societies. It presents this using three large public well-controlled published studies that document that when a group of the square root of 1% or more of a population practices a specific form of automatic self-transcending meditation (the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi techniques) simultaneous holistic positive effects are produced in society. It addresses two fundamental issues about this research. The first issue is empirical, is it true? The second is theoretical, i.e. if it is true, how does one explain the effect and its possible mechanisms? The three major projects all measured multiple social indicators, e.g., war deaths, traffic fatalities, violent crime, drug-related deaths, and infant mortality. The experimental protocols specifying the research hypotheses, methodologies, and timing of the interventions were posited in advance and the data were official government statistics. All three studies found that varying the magnitude of the independent variable (meditator group size) created corresponding predicted changes in the dependent variables (social indicators), providing a strong case for causality. Social, political, cultural, or climatic events could not explain the results nor could autocorrelations or prior trends in the data. The holistic simultaneity of the effect on multiple diverse social indicators suggests that the effect is mediated by a common holistic influence, the transcendental field of universal consciousness at the basis of every mind and of natural law. We conclude that this technology of collective consciousness is an evidence-based approach to mitigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous nature of the world today. These should encourage citizens and leadership to make use of these evidence-based technologies to improve their lives.