---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote :
OK, one last time because I have said this before. People on earth are stupid and gullible, but not all of them and all of them are not COMPLETELY stupid. Ergo, IF the Marshy Effect was real and as effective as Johnnie Hagelin claims then millions of people around the world would have latched onto it. This would be particularly true of all Third World countries. Most of them may be run by utterly corrupt and venal individuals, some of them totally selfish and cruel, but most of them are not completely stupid. IF the Marshy Effect were as effective at stopping wars and "preventing enemies to be born" every single Third World country would mandate by law that every citizen and every visitor to the country would have to practice TMSP twice each day. To not do so would be insane. To do so would insure that no wars would occur, and no foreign influence could take from the country what is rightfully theirs. When the success of the Third World countries was obvious through TMSP, all the developed countries would mandate the practice of TMSP also and everyone would be a siddha or governor. The fact that that has not happened is proof the ME is hawg shit, so unless you boys can come up with better proof than "See! The crime rate is 18% lower than it would have been if we had not been doin' program! We have a vedic crystal ball that Marshy gave us before he died that we can tell what the crime rate would-a been, so believe us and give us more money!" then shut up cause its all made up bullshit. Is there something missing in my DNA because I just don't care about any of this one way or another. I don't care if people think there is a ME, I don't care if it has been scientifically proven and I'm certainly too disinterested to get into an actual discussion about it let alone excited enough to argue about it all. From: "dhamiltony2k5@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 7:04 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Science and the Meissner Effect of Consciousness as Field Yes quite evidently you and the other anti-meditation anti-science folks here are afraid of where the data is going. Your asserting no data therefore no replication and therefore it can't be talked about or researched. Asserting that it does not exist defies reality and scientific process itself of data, observation, hypothesis and testing . Lawson is looking at how to replicate given the practical constraints of such a project given the data. You completely miss-interpret to your own vile ends. You evidently don't want anything to happen less it disturb your anti-meditation and anti-spiritual grumblings. You contend the research can't be replicated and shouldn't be, well talk about subterfuge and anti-science anti-intellectualism. Next we'll hear from you that there never was such a thing as darshan where obviously there is and then you'll say it is not worth trying to look at for fear of what we might find. Did you just renew your membership down at the local conservative Anglican Church or something that you come on so regressive like you do? -Buck in the Dome Thanks LEnglish5 very much for this more even-handed review of what is current. It is refreshing in the face of all the anti-science and allergy that so many have to TM and spirituality here on this board. -Buck What are you talking about Buck? Lawson used to be the hard core defender of ME research, it's only very recently he's come round to the viewpoint I've held all along, that ME research doesn't show what is claimed for it. So why are you calling me "anti-science"? Criticism is science, that's how it works. Someone has an idea, they collect evidence and publish it. The ME research doesn't show anything beyond statistical manipulation, it sure as hell didn't show a huge decrease in crime. So the ball is back in the court of the people who claim its efficacy to prove it was a real effect. Your problem is that you get all sensitive when someone criticises a pet theory of yours when it's all part of the scientific process. If the ME stands up someone will find a way of demonstrating it. It might help if they had an explanation for how it might work in the first place. Instead all they have is a bunch of wishy-washy new age terms explained in the context of other wishy-washy new age terms. So why should anyone take it seriously and go to the expense of testing it when, as Lawson points out, there appears to be no evidence to try and replicate? LEnglish5 writes: It may have been demonstrated to the satisfaction of true believers, but not to the satisfaction of skeptics. The problem with the ME research is that it is essentially not replicatable on a large-scale. No two cities or groups of cities are really alike, and even using the same city over and over again for a study has many issues. Fred Travis' thesis research on interpersonal EEG coherence (the ME between two people) would be a better route to go, but he was forced to use averages of EEG statistics over a period of many seconds, and it turns out that there is a ceiling effect on that specific measure which makes it unlikely to find the effect consistently. So... what to do? As I pointed out before, there's a more sophisticated way of analyzing global EEG called "EEG microstates," where the average electrical activation of the brain can be examined in tiny slices of time, down to as low as 2-10 milliseconds per slice. That is easily 400x the resolution that Fred used in his original study. The people in charge of the TM organization are well aware of how the ME research is viewed by most non-believers, but there's been no way to satisfy genuine concerns like independent replication until now. The DC experiment not only cost the TM organization several million to conduct, but it required coordinating the lives of 4,000 Sidhas. This is NOT something that can ever be replicated on a regular basis, no matter what kind of resources you have and you can't expect the average skeptical scientist to arrange to do such research, either. When the upcoming EEG microstate research on TM is published, if it turns out that there is a definite pattern associated with pure consciousness, it may be possible to redo Fred Travis' original research with as many as 400x the number of data points in a given TM session. I don't know offhand, how much more sensitive this would make a specific study, but I'm pretty sure it is a LOT more sensitive... ...tried just now to plug various values into online statistical calculators, and it looks like having 400x as many data points roughly makes a given simple experiment 400x as sensitive (sorta -there might be a square-root in there, but it looks like it is a lot more than 20x as sensitive so not sure)... John Hagelin obviously realizes the points above. He was giving the standard party line to me earlier this year about how the research into the ME is reliable, etc., but when I started to point out that there would be potentially 400x as many data points as was available in Fred Travis' experiments and that this meant fully independent skeptics could conduct their own very cheap experiments, he kinda got excited and interrupted me about halfway through my spiel, saying he would talk to Fred Travis about it. Lawson