---In [email protected], <LEnglish5@...> wrote :
Who says that the Maharishi Effect "converts" anyone? Not me, what are you talking about? Oh, I see "I convert for evidence" that means that you have to prove it before I take it seriously. I haven't seen any worth chucking out my perfectly good world view for. Here is MY understanding of the Maharishi Effect: TM, by its very nature, has a beneficial effect on the practitioners AND on their surroundings. Group TM, by the nature of synergy, has a greater effect than TM practiced outside of groups. Why does something that you also think is a function of brain waves travelling through the thalamus (or whatever the idea was) have something to do with the environment? They don't leave your head you know. Since all of reality is consciousness at its basis, WTF? Prove it. This is wild speculation that no one outside of the new age lecture circuit actually believes. I recommend Stephen Hwkings new book The Grand Design for an accessible intro to current cosmological thinking. Save yourself some time by looking up consciousness in the index. In fact do that in any physics book. all of reality should benefit in some way from TM practice, whether group or non-group. The people who benefit the most, of course, are the participants in the group. Since people in general manifest a more sophisticated level of consciousness than a rock, the rest of Society near the meditation group, being made up of people, should show more of this beneficial effect of group meditation than rocks. Erm... But rocks have to change in some way right? Unified fields and all that...How about dogs they should be easier to test. Serious question: The ME should work on animals too, given their simpler lives they should be easier to study. Since people tend to wander about doing things, one way to measure the beneficial effect from group meditation is to measure what people are doing before, during and after the group meditation period. Since the effect is so slight (they're not participating in the group meditation after all), the effects will only be noticed by doing careful statistical analysis of the behavior of a large group of people. How convenient! And so... the Maharishi Effect research programme proceeds. By my understanding, everyone benefits a tiny little bit. Due to random differences between individuals, some people show this benefit a tiny bit more in their behavior than other people do, just as different meditators take different times to become enlightened. Other than the assumption that there's some effect to measure in the first place, there's no mystery for why the effect supposedly manifests the way it does... how could it manifest any other way? LOL With the caveats you just put on that determinedly hamper all study, how will we ever know? But people have tried. Open minded researchers have suggested studies that would show a relationship between one mind and another at a spooky distance but they were never attempted at MUM. Can't remember the guys name (Barry Markovsky?) from Iowa university. He made a lot of good points about why no one takes the TMO seriously about this. Basically there is no explanation that uses known phenomena, you also have to throw out most of what we think we already know and get all 'consciousness is the unified field' about it, and who believes that? Who even has any reason to believe it? You don't based on the evidence here. L ---In [email protected], <[email protected]> wrote : ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote : Likewise, your notion that if there was anything to the Maharishi Effect, it should have immediately resulted in a huge decrease in the crime rate is absurd. Why? If it works for some why not everyone. Why does the unified field pick out one rapist to convert and not another? If the meditation intervention did result in only a 20 percent reduction over eight weeks, would it therefore not be worth doing at all? That's just not a sensible objection. But it didn't. Not that I saw looking at the actual crime rates. If it had it might be useful but as I have pointed out quite a lot lately, the crime rate didn't go down anywhere near as much as it did the year later with changes in policing methods etc. So why would any crime agency choose yogic flying over something that works better. Unless you want to go along the standard TM excuse that the effects of the ME are accumulative which the good people of Skelmersdale and Fairfield will tell you isn't actually the case. Have a go at answering the rest of the points I raised. Get objective. As you accuse me of being unobjective I'm not going to bother reading the link you posted. I've thought long and hard about this stuff for years, read all the research (even had a set of the collective papers). I've probably read it before anyway but even if I haven't everything I say about it stands: why only 20%? Why can't you see the amazing results when you look at at the actual figures? How does it work? Have we really got to rewrite physics, psychology, sociology and biology just to because of a bit of statistical jiggery-pokery? I can only assume you think I'm not objective because I don't agree with you about it. I also don't think much of your analysis of Lawson here. If he was objective I doubt he would say that an instance of mass murder "skewed" the results. They are part of the results, like it or not. And so what if one sceptic doesn't approach it the way I do? You might be forgetting that what we are talking about is an obviously ambiguous set of statistics that supposedly means the world could be made peaceful on the basis of people jumping up and down on bits of foam. Who isn't going to laugh at that? If all you can say is that the results would have been better if some nutjob hadn't gone postal with an AK47 then it isn't a great demonstration of Heaven on Earth is it? You are going to have to do better and often and come up with an explanation that isn't a bunch of new age hogwash. Unobjective? I was curious enough to learn how to do it. But here's the clincher; Why doesn't the Maharishi Effect affect everyone? It is supposed to be the infinitely powerful unified field after all (ask Buck for details). If you want to fall back on the old TM standby of "It was a bit of unstressing" then you have to accept that the rapes and murders that did happen wouldn't have happened if the TMO weren't there. I dub it BS until there is Heaven on Earth. ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote : Salyavin, I posted a link to the study. Have a look at it, please, in particular the explanation of the methodology. It's a lot more complicated than you think to determine whether the rate actually went down during the study period. The issue is whether, in the absence of the meditating group, the violent crime rate would have been what the researchers projected it to be statistically, or what it actually was with the meditating group. Then read the rebuttal to the Skeptical Inquirer article and tell me the author came at the research "from a position of wanting it to be true and looking for confirmation." And please note, Lawson is the one saying the results of this study were "ambiguous." Shame on the TM critics who repeatedly try to portray him as a "cult apologist." He is far more objective than you are. Ambiguous is as good as false. When you look at the actual US government data for the year, broken down week by week, you can't see any drops in crime levels, sure there are dips all over the place but the one in August is no bigger than the one in March so if you are claiming that coherence causes crime rates to drop then who was meditating in March. And the crime rate dropped significantly more the next year due to changes in policing and gentrification. It's all on the government website. The thing about sceptics is we almost always originally come at paranormal research from a position of wanting it to be true and looking for confirmation. That's true for me and Susan Blackmore and any amount of people from CISCOP. It's only the constant failure of of world to confirm whether it has provided us with any paranormal abilities to measure that gives rise to what you may think is a narrow minded sceptic. I still hope for the best though, but the TMO could make it easier by making the crime rate fall beyond the level by which they naturally fluctuate. An easily noted 80% drop for instance, that'd be more convincing. I convert for evidence. ---In [email protected], <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Teh statistic was skewed. For one week, the homicide rate was double the average. THAT was what was picked up by the press and extrapolated for the entire 8 week period. True Believers want the research to be true Skeptics are often as desperate to be sure that it is false. The reality is that the study was ambiguous, IMHO. L ---In [email protected], <mdixon.6569@...> wrote : Judy, I don't remember the details but that it was a national concern at the time on all the national news programs. It sure seems that there were more than just ten homicides. Might have been ten homicides and ten or twenty non lethal shootings in addition. On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 5:10 PM, "authfriend@..." <authfriend@...> wrote: This is a bit misleading, Mike. Rates of aggravated assault and rape decreased significantly from what would have been expected over the period of the study. Robberies stayed about the same. And the homicide rate (around 10 per week) over the eight weeks of the study was also about the same as "normal." There was a "spike" of 10 homicides over one 36-hour period (there apparently was some sort of gang battle), but the following week there were only 4 homicides. So it evened out statistically. You just happened to be there the week of the "spike." I think "shootings" would be included in the "aggravated assault" category; that rate declined significantly over the course of the study. One would, of course, have hoped that the homicide rate would have decreased, but no joy. OTOH, the homicide rate didn't increase, contrary to what some reporters claimed. Here's the text of the study as published in Social Indicators Research:: http://www.istpp.org/crime_prevention/ http://www.istpp.org/crime_prevention/ Here's an article by one of the study's authors rebutting a very sloppy article attempting to debunk the study in Skeptical Inquirer: http://istpp.org/crime_prevention/voodoo_rebuttal.html http://istpp.org/crime_prevention/voodoo_rebuttal.html It addresses the 36-hour homicide spike in some detail. I took my *flying* block in DC during the big campaign there. There was a huge spike in murders and shootings at the time. I guess the TM explanation was, *well you should have seen what it would have been like had we not been there.* On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 1:27 AM, nablusoss1008 <[email protected]> wrote: Along with the mounting medical evidence of the various health benefits of meditation, research shows group meditation can actually reduce crime rates in the greater population. http://guardianlv.com/2014/04/research-shows-group-meditation-can-reduce-crime-rates/ http://guardianlv.com/2014/04/research-shows-group-meditation-can-reduce-crime-rates/
