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BARRON'S Magazine

Monday October 27, 2003

Peace Dividend? Meditate on This: If Volatility Ends, Maybe We All Go Home

Why does misery love company? Why do markets sometimes follow the herd mentality? Why does prayer help sick people?

The answers to these questions may not be immediately evident, but as any market technician or miserable or sick person can tell you, the behavior is certainly observable.

To demonstrate their belief that Transcendental Meditation can reduce urban stress and foster world peace, practitioners and big-time supporters of TM, among them film director David Lynch and former Ziff-Davis executive Robert Brown, are proposing to raise $1 billion to build meditation centers. The business and arts representatives were in New York to launch the effort, featuring satellite participation from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the former physicist who introduced Transcendental Meditation in the U.S. 44 years ago.

Though a direct causality between meditation and peace has not and probably can't be proven, Lynch observes that in no fewer than 52 published studies, the so-called technology of consciousness, has been shown to reduce crime and war casualties. The National Institutes of Health has granted more than $20 million to study TM's effect on heart disease.

Lest anyone think there is no correlation between meditation and the economy, researchers at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, have demonstrated a connection between large numbers of people meditating together and a reduction in the "misery index," the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates.

"The Maharishi Effect has validity," asserts Arch Crawford, whose planetary-minded newsletter Crawford Perspectives predicted the day of the top in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1987, among other things. Crawford, who started his career as an assistant to former Merrill Lynch technical guru Robert Farrell, says the TM research methods are good and can be used cautiously, when applied to economics.

Given the markets' discomfort with uncertainty, TM might be used to bring an end to volatility and help markets function more efficiently. Would you believe?

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© 2002 Wall Street Journal
All rights reserved.

 

 

^{500 Pandit project in America – An audio postcard from Steven Collins}

This study indicates that group practice of the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program improved the quality of life in Israel as measured by improvement on an index comprising crime rate, traffic accidents, fires, and the number of war deaths in Lebanon, and by increases in the national stock market and improvements in national mood. The chart above shows the strong correspondence between the number of Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi program participants in the group in Jerusalem and a composite index of all the above variables.

Reference: International peace project in the Middle East: Effects of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field, Journal of Conflict Resolution 32: 776­812, 1988.

 

Click to enlarge graph.