http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061024/OPINION01/610240376/1035/OPINION
The Des Moines
Register
Hansen:
Iowa meditators shield Lebanon, rally stocks
By Marc Hansen
REGISTER
COLUMNIST
October 24, 2006
If you follow the news, you might
have noticed two seemingly unrelated developments.
One, the hurricane season has been a
dud. Last year, it was one killer tropical storm after another. This
year, we're still waiting for the big one to crash onto the
shoreline.
The forecasts were frightening. This
hurricane season was supposed to be worse than the last, when Katrina
and her friends led to more than 2,000 deaths and billions of dollars
in destruction.
Two, the stock market has moved into
record territory, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing at
12,116.91, its best historical close.
A coincidence? No, the Maharishi
Effect.
It's the 1,200 advanced
Transcendental meditators who are camping out for six hours a day in
Fairfield and elsewhere, "creating coherence in national
consciousness" and changing the national mood.
Granted, it sounds flaky. One
physicist called similar research on falling crime rates in
Washington, D.C., "voodoo science."
But since the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
himself predicted this would happen back in July, who are we to
argue?
It's important to challenge
mainstream thinking. You don't want to be the guy who told Guglielmo
Marconi there was no future in wireless communications.
The man in charge of the
"Invincible America Course" is John Hagelin, a quantum
physicist who graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth, earned a
doctorate from Harvard and was a researcher at Stanford before moving
to Fairfield and becoming the director of the Institute of Science,
Technology and Public Policy at the Maharishi University of
Management.
He also ran for president three
times as a third-party candidate and collected lots of votes in
Jefferson County.
He isn't running this time, mostly
because he's busy making sure the United States is surrounded with a
protective shield of collective consciousness.
This isn't something a person does
in a regular 40-hour work week, so it took a while to catch up with
him. When I did, he was in the Netherlands on a European speaking
tour.
The original idea, he said, was to
restore peace in Lebanon.
I wasn't sure how a group of 1,200
"yogic flyers" in Iowa and another 200 in Washington, D.C.,
could stop the bombing in the Middle East.
But Hagelin is convinced it did. He
answers the skeptics by referring to field-tested, peer-reviewed
documentation in 600 studies and 250 independent research institutes
around the world.
"We are not disconnected from
each other," he said. "We influence each other. Wars are
nothing other than the outburst of pent-up societal stress in critical
hot spots."
Get a large group of hard-core
meditators together for six hours at a time, things happen. The mind
settles down, awareness expands ... and expands ... until it permeates
the collective consciousness. The stress level goes down, people stop
shooting each other.
"The U.S. wasn't using the
leverage we have in that part of the world," Hagelin said.
"We weren't encouraging moderation on Israel's part. We started
this course principally to provide a cooling influence and sanity in
our foreign policy."
It wasn't long before U.S. Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice was changing her plans and flying to
Lebanon. A few days later, the United States was helping craft a
cease-fire.
"It was quite an amazing
turnabout," he said.
The good feelings spill over into
the economy. Consumer confidence picks up, which leads to more
optimism, a better economy and higher stock prices.
"The stock market,"
Hagelin said, "was a side effect, an _expression_ of the collective
mood."
Stocks up, gas prices down. Consumer
confidence rises, unemployment drops.
Stocks won't grow straight to the
sky, Hagelin warned. There will be burps and corrections and
mini-panics. But the swings won't be so extreme.
I asked Hagelin if he made a killing
with this really inside information.
No.
"If we were smart," he
said with a laugh, "we would have scraped together some money and
invested it. My limited resources were invested already outside the
market."
All right, then. If meditation works
so well in Lebanon, why not Iraq?
"Lebanon was easier to quell,"
Hagelin said, "because the political solutions were easy. Iraq is
an entrenched mess. The mistakes that have been made will take time to
unwind. Iraq is a victim of intense social stress of its own. Saddam
was a great contributor to that. It's there in spades, but it can be
unwound. We have to give the Iraqis and their geographical neighbors a
big dose of this stress-reducing technology. At some point, when
tensions are less acute, an act of violence no longer results in a
retaliatory act. Then you suddenly tip the equation into a state of
de-escalating violence."
Iraq won't be as easy, he said, but
the union of modern science and ancient wisdom can be a wonderful
thing.
Don't rule it out. Don't be the guy
who doubted Marconi.
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