International Peace Project in the Middle East

Abstract

This prospective social experiment tests a new theory and technology for alleviating violent conflict through reducing societal stress in an underlying field of “collective consciousness.” It was predicted that group practice of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field (the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program) during August and September, 1983, in Jerusalem, would reduce stress in the collective consciousness and behavior of Israel and Lebanon. Box-Jenkins Arima impact assessment, cross-correlation, and transfer function analyses were used to study the effects of changes in the size of the group on several variables and composite indices reflecting (a) the quality of life in Jerusalem (automobile accidents, fires, and crime), (b) the quality of life in Israel (crime, stock market, and national mood, derived from news content analysis), and (c) the war in Lebanon (war deaths of all factions and war intensity, derived from news content analysis). Increases in the size of the group had a statistically significant effect in the predicted direction on the individual variables and on all composite quality-of-life indices. The effects of holidays, temperature, weekends, and other forms of seasonality were explicitly controlled and could not account for these results. Cross-correlations and transfer functions indicated that the group had a leading relationship to change on the quality-of-life indicators, supporting a causal interpretation.