It's funny, I've always been a critic of the TMO's Maharishi Effect research - even when I worked there. Mostly because I don't understand how it might possibly work (and they have never explained it in a way that is accessible to people who aren't happy with vague, new age terminology) and also because it never seems to have any effect beyond normal fluctuations in daily life, or even in daily war.
What I never suspected was that they were being extremely dishonest with the way they collect and interpret the data they use to reach their rather unconvincing conclusions. And to be honest, if somebody working in head office and who practised the TMSP twice daily doesn't believe it then what hope have you got of persuading the man on the street? Or the professor in the government research lab, working desperately to find ways of lowering the crime rate for the least expenditure? The below letter was posted on "the other side" by MJ but I repost it here because we all love talking about science and this is an opportunity to refresh our memories some of the ways in which science works, or should work if you are doing it properly. It seems to me that the very definition of what science is has become untrustworthy with ME research. Science is a kind of safety net for the natural human ability to believe silly things, and that's not our fault, we all have ideas non-stop each and every day - science really is basically a filter for stopping bad ideas getting through to the general population. It seems obvious from this that MUM were playing fast and loose with standard data gathering principles, reporting and some rather optimistic interpretations of not much data, but there's a bit more that interests me. From the letter: "....having examined carefully a number of kibbutzim where up to 10% of the population were engaged in daily TM practice, no improvement regarding a series of social economic, and health indicators of progress was found, I received from you the surprising answer that no positive result from TM practice is to be expected with regard to a population smaller than 10,000." This is what we call a Deux ex Machina, an unexpected invention dropped into a story in order for it to continue making sense. Obviously, a continuity of results when dealing with a field effect should go without saying and this is a major filter for the Maharishi Effect, this is supposedly physics after all. It's dubious enough ascribing anthropomorphic resonances to the level of particles and fields, but expecting them to discriminate between small groups and large is utterly preposterous. Why would they even if they could? This single revelation should damn the entire proposal on it's own and it reveals to me that manipulation of statistics is the name of the game here, the higher the numbers the more you can claim is happening from the smaller actual variations. I highlight it because I've never heard a get-out clause like it in the TMO and wonder if anyone else has? In his response, Orme Johnson accuses the author of scaremongering by offering the letter for publication in a journal of cult study. Bang on, I would have said, but I would like to see the research studied elsewhere. It has been of course, and always with the same result, but not by the sort of large highly credible college that everyone would defer to, and I don't mean that disrespectfully to the smaller university in Iowa (I think) that pulled apart the Washington study, they were quite right to ask the questions they did - The main problem is a lack of explanation about how it might work, you have to give an understandable mechanism if you want people to look further or it's just so much statistical waffle, and now we see we can't even rely on that. This is why they continue to get away with promoting it, it isn't important enough to draw major attention, at best it's an odd footnote in social study. And then some. At the bottom OJ makes a comparison to Stephen Hawking's work on non-locality in subatomic particles and claims the Unified Field might be a candidate for explaining that. But Hawking doesn't even believe in unified field theories, he teaches that the latest and best fundamental explanation we have is M theory which is a huge and bewildering collection of equations created to explain the many different fields and forces governing the behaviour of particles, it's a long way from Einsteins dream of a simple equation of unification which John Hagelin rather dubiously claims to have demonstrated but everyone else abandoned in the 80's when the only experiment anyone could think of to demonstrate it brought back a resounding "No". If this Maharishi Effect was a good idea I would expect the continuing research and criticism to be stacking up into an impressive body of evidence that answers more questions that it raises, instead it seems to get murkier and less impressive the further you look into it. The Use of Transcendental Meditation to Promote - International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) http://www.icsahome.com/articles/the-use-of-transcendental-meditation-to-promote-csj-3-1 http://www.icsahome.com/articles/the-use-of-transcendental-meditation-to-promote-csj-3-1 The Use of Transcendental Meditation to Promote - Inte... http://www.icsahome.com/articles/the-use-of-transcendental-meditation-to-promote-csj-3-1 This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1986, Volume 3, Number 1, pages 135-141. View on www.icsahome.com http://www.icsahome.com/articles/the-use-of-transcendental-meditation-to-promote-csj-3-1 Preview by Yahoo
