Quantification of the Global Maharishi Effect: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Three Most Violent Countries in the World

Abstract

In the last 30 years, the most prevalent and deadly form of armed conflict in the world has been violent conflict within states. However, the continued prevalence of so-called ‘intrastate’ collective violence indicates standard approaches to the prevention of collective violence—such as mediation, negotiated settlements and peacekeeping operations—have often provided little more than temporary mitigation of conflict. Indeed, we suggest these approaches to reducing collective violence have failed to effectively address its fundamental cause: accumulated stress and tension in the individual and collective consciousness of society. We therefore outline a comprehensive ‘consciousness-based approach’ for reducing intrastate collective violence—the Global Maharishi Effect—and present preliminary empirical results from a prospective demonstration project in India to evaluate its effect. Specifically, the ‘treatment’ modality for this quasi-experiment was a large group of a theoretically predicted size engaged in group practice of the Transcendental Meditation and TM–Sidhi program during the Assembly of 10,000 for World Peace held in India from December 2023 to January 2024. Time series impact-assessment analysis based on state space-time series modelling was used to evaluate data on political violence from the Armed Conflict and Location Event Data project (ACLED) for countries experiencing the most extreme levels of violence. Empirical support was found for the hypothesis that the Assembly was associated with a significantly reduced trend (p < 0.001) of political violence as measured by the total combined number of violent events in the world’s then three most violent and unstable countries at the time of the Assembly—Palestine, Myanmar and Syria.