September/October 2005 Spirituality
Can Transcendental Meditation Reduce Terrorism?

by Bryan Cooley

The 9/11 attacks sparked anger, fear, and feelings of vulnerability in United States citizens. As a victim, the U.S. felt a moral and military justification for retaliation. However, three and a half years later, the U.S. has spent more than 200 billion dollars, hired 170,000 for the Department of Homeland Defense, and embraced preemptive warfare. Dr. Keith Wallace and Jay B. Marcus ask an important question: Has this methodology lessened the threat of terrorism in the U.S.? The former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted, "We have no way of telling whether we are winning or losing the war on terror". Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission noted that U.S. support in Muslim countries has plummeted since the preemptive attack on Iraq, thus greatly abetting recruitment efforts for terrorist groups. In all, the Commission found that while we may be safer today, "we still are not safe."

In their book Victory before War: Preventing Terrorism Through the Vedic peace Technologies, Wallace and Marcus offer an alternative to the preemptive war response to terrorism. They weave together many of more than 600 scientific studies in 27 countries on the Transcendental meditation technique and the more advanced TM Sidhi-Flying Technique to elucidate a comprehensive defense framework to prevent terror at its root. Terrorism, they suggest, is a result of abnormal human brain functioning and physiology. Through this simple but precise meditation technique, TM allows the brain to heal the body at the deepest level of peace and rest, known as the level of pure consciousness. In addition to a plethora of positive health benefits, a 20-minute TM session alleviates what many scientific studies have proven to be the physiology of the psychopath. TM increases basal skin conductance (an indicator of deep relaxation), reduces cortisol (stress hormone), increases serotonin (low serotonin is a symptom of violence and aggression), and facilitates electroencephalogram (EEG) brain wave coherence.

Essentially, EEG coherence measures the degree of synchrony in the brain’s electrical activity. A high EEG coherence optimizes brain functioning in creativity, neurological efficiency, concept learning, increased IQ, and moral reasoning. EEG abnormalities are particularly common in violent criminals. One TM study demonstrates that TM facilitates strong EEG coherence at two weeks of meditation, significantly more coherence at four months, and an exponentially higher coherence during the TM-Sidhi Flying Technique.

Wallace and Marcus make the case that TM changes a terrorist from the inside out. To offer proof on this bold conjecture, Wallace turns to TM studies on prisoners--likely approximations of terrorist physiology. Not only did TM prove to be the only program consistently successful in reducing prisoner recidivism rates in the U.S., but was equally successful worldwide. In 1987, the director of penitentiary administration in Senegal, Colonel Mamadou Diop, bemoaned that 90% of released Senegalese prisoners returned to jail within one month. Impressed with tentative TM results in one prison, Senegalese officials introduced TM to all local prisons--approximately 11000 inmates and 900 staff. A year later, after a presidential pardon of about 2,200 meditating prisoners, recidivism dropped below 2%.

In addition to ameliorating individual physiology and brain functioning, TM manifests a similar peace-proliferating performance on a societal and global stage. Just as sound is augmented with multiple speakers broadcasting in perfect synchrony, TM brain coherence becomes exponentially more powerful with groups of meditators. The positive effects of group meditation is not limited to just the meditating individuals, but optimizes brain functioning for non-meditators within a certain radius. In 1993, physicist Dr. John Hagelin, director of the Institute for Science, Technology, and Public Policy, organized a panel of 20 renowned sociologists and criminologists to supervise a study on the effect of large numbers of yogic flyers (a more potent form of TM) on violent crime rate. Based on previous experiments, Hagelin expected crime rates to drop 16.5% once a meditating group amounting to the square root of one percent of the population (critical mass) was amassed. During the largely publicized eight-week experiment, crime rates decreased in direct correlation with the number of meditators. During the final two weeks, when the meditating population reached more than 4,000, Crime reduction rose to 23%. Forty-seven peace studies with similar results have been performed worldwide.

Victory Before War underscores the power of phasing out terrorism by preventing the physiological and psychological deficiencies that cause it. Under the current Vedic program to prevent U.S. terrorism, the United States will house 8,000 American yogic flyers as well as 500 Vedic pandits (meditation experts) in Maharishi Vedic City in Iowa. Additionally, terrorism across the world will be treated with a 40,000-pandit group in India. Wallace is also clear that nothing need change about current U.S. homeland security, but that groups meditating for peace should be a supplement to existing policy. He argues that with the ever-increasing availability of nuclear weapons on the black market, its time to think about decompression and not escalation. In a pithy manner, John Hagelin puts policy in perspective--with hundreds of billions spent on warfare, why not spend just a few million on peace.