No matter how pure and refined our awareness is, we are also influenced by the collective consciousness. The collective consciousness is the sum total of all the individual people’s consciousness in a family, city or country.
Even without the understanding of the value of collective consciousness most people can relate to it; that experience of going into a city and feeling on edge and stressed, or spending time in a relaxing place and coming away feeling revived and refreshed. This experience is more pronounced from country to country. As a traveller it is easier to sit back and observe the qualities of the place you are in but when you live in a place all the time, you are subject to the particular laws of nature constantly and therefore don’t notice them as much.
The most powerful tool for clearing stress from the collective consciousness of a place is meditation. Maharishi predicted that when 1% of the population of a city or country practised Transcendental Meditation together it was enough to affect the collective consciousness. When this was achieved it was noted that the crime rate went down, traffic accidents decreased, and hospitalisations were lower. Events that indicated a rise in creativity and confidence were also evident such as a rise in the stock market and an increase in patent applications.
In 1993, Maharishi organised a large group of people to go and meditate in Washington with the intention to lower the crime rate. It actually doesn’t matter what the intention is when people come together and transcend because they go beyond thinking to experience a state of Being but it is a way to measure the coherence effect. When they achieved the Super radiance number, the crime rate dropped dramatically by 23%. After the group disbanded the crime rate gradually crept up to what it had been. The statistics that this was a coincidence was less than 2 in one billion. There are places around the world where big groups practice their TM together every day in order to stabilise the world consciousness.
The experience of transcending takes the awareness to that level of life where everything is connected. In the individual it gives the experience of holistic brain functioning, brain imaging shows that before meditation all the parts of the brain are like an incoherent orchestra where everyone is playing a different song, when the mind transcends it is like the conductor raising the baton and all the parts come together to produce a harmonious melody.
The same is true for the group. From quantum physics we know that at the subatomic level of life everything is connected. There is a Unified Field, where all the disparate laws of nature are found to be part of the same intelligence. When the individual mind transcends and experiences this state of awareness, it wakes it up in the collective consciousness of the society. When the 1% effect is attained, people in the immediate environment feel more coherent without doing anything themselves.
The meditating group acts like a washing machine for the collective stress. It is like cleaning the cloud of stress hanging over a city and enlivening the experience of unity in everyone’s awareness.
There are Advanced Techniques of Transcendental Meditation that only require the square root of 1% of the world’s population to achieve the same effect. This means that instead of needing 7 million people to be meditating together, which is 1% of the world’s population of around 7.8 billion, only 8366 are needed.
Dr Tony Nader, who is the current leader of the Transcendental Meditation organisation, is organising an event for 10,000 people to come together at the end of this year for up to 3 weeks to facilitate this coherence creating effect. The world is experiencing innumerable problems, many without any foreseeable solution. However the material world is just an expression of consciousness, so by going to the source and enlivening unity, solutions present themselves and enmity vanishes. Watch this space!
Wendy Rosenfeldt
Wendy.rosenfeldt@tm.org.au
www.ayurveda.org.au
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