Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the Indian guru known for developing and popularizing meditation and bringing it to the west. He toured the world teaching meditation, and amongst other famous claims he was known as the spiritual advisor of The Beatles, credited with inspiring their White Album. He taught approximately five million people to meditate and initiated 40,000 teachers. In 1960, Maharishi predicted that one percent of a population practicing an automatic self-transcendence meditation technique would produce measurable improvements in the quality of life for the whole population; this became known as The Maharishi Effect.

Generally, The Maharishi Effect can be defined as the influence of coherence and positivity in the social and natural environment generated by the practice of the deep transcendent meditation. Further, just as there is an individual consciousness there is a collective consciousness. Just as the quality of an individual consciousness can be improved, so can the collective consciousness.

Maharishi believed accumulated stress causes tension, frustration, ill health and unhappiness, and that all violence, negativity and conflict, crises, and problems in any society are the expression of growth of stress in collective consciousness. He taught that the physical influence of harmony and coherence produced by collective practice of meditation removes negative, chaotic, and violent trends in society, and thereby promotes peace. There are 30 key documented studies involving the Maharishi Effect. A small selection follows…

Rhode Island, 1978 - A group of three hundred teachers of the TM program went to the state of Rhode Island with the goal to teach to one percent of the population. Time series analysis found that the experiment improved quality of life, on all measures with a statistical probability of ninety-nine percent that the outcomes were caused by the intervention. Findings were published in The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 1987 

Washington D.C., 1993 - In this carefully controlled experiment four thousand meditators created coherence in Washington D.C for two months. There was a decrease of twenty-three percent soon after the start of the study, as soon as the study finished crime rates started to rise again. Published in Social Indicators Research, 1999.

Israel, 1983 - A day-by-day study of a two-month TM coherence-creating assembly in Israel in 1983 during the First Lebanon War showed that, on days when the number of participants in the assembly was high, war deaths in neighboring Lebanon dropped by 76%. During these two months, crime, traffic accidents, and fires all declined in Israel. Published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1988