Hopping for tranquility

Press, 28 July 1987, Page 20

Hopping for tranquility

How can a few thousand people hopping like frogs bring peace and prosperity to the world? Washingtonians had the chance to find out when a team of “yogic flyers” showed off their art, first at an athletic competition and later outside the World Bank and on Capitol Hill. Hopping is the first yogic stage (hovering and flying will follow one day, maybe). The winning hoppers, their legs and arms folded, bounced happily and effortlessly along a foam-rubber hurdle course, the champions rising 67.5 cm for the high jump, clearing 150 cm for the long jump. Do not' dismiss this as a gymnastic display: it is the outward and visible sign of an intense form of transcendental meditation, of mind and body coordination, as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. And the aim is not self-improvement but world peace, no less. The enlightenment that comes to an individual through medita-

tion can, teaches the maharishi, be radiated outwards to ease the stress and violence of the collective consciousness.

He and his disciples have gathered evidence and explain it by the laws of nature and of physics, to show that when a few meditators are gathered together, the quality of life — measured by such variables as crime, jobs, infant mortality, car accidents, divorce, drinking and smoking — improves, at least for a bit, at least in the vicinity. Why stop there if the effect could be permanent and worldwide? Maharishi Mahesh Yogi calculated that one meditator can affect 99 non-meditators. But with a world population of 5 billion, that would still need 50 million meditators. So he recalculated and discovered that if the meditation were sufficiently pure and concentrated (including yogic flying), all that was needed was the square root of 1 per cent, or a reasonable 7000 (10,000 to be on the safe side). It

is best — amplifying the waves of creativity, coherence and orderliness — if all 10,000 meditate, and fly, together in the same place at the same time.

At present, there are some 2000 practitioners at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, lowa, and about the same number in New Delhi.

The Fairfield faculty, softvoiced and wondrously harmonious, have charts galore to prove how selectively better things were' during the two or three earlier mass-meditation occasions: people started to think of solving international disputes by talk rather than by war, world stockmarkets were buoyant. For a short while, after some local experiments, rather fewer people were killed in Lebanon. The specific aim now — though meditators cannot by definition focus their minds — is to end the Iran-Iraq war.

Copyright — The Economist.