Saturday, September 13, 2008

Join the peace intention experiment!

WHAT IS THE PEACE INTENTION EXPERIMENT?

From the website:
The Intention Experiment is embarking on a series of scientific studies to determine whether "group mind" has the power to increase peace and cooperation in war-torn areas around the world experiencing high levels of conflict and violence.

Lynne McTaggart, architect of the experiments and author of the best-selling book The Intention Experiment, has enlisted a team of internationally recognized scientists from University of California, Princeton University and University of Arizona and elsewhere, to help design these studies.

Although many meditation groups and other peace initiatives are being formed and studied, the Peace Intention Experiment represents the first scientific study of whether collective targeted intention can restore peace.
The TM research

This project was sparked by the numerous Transcendental Meditation studies showing that when a critical mass of meditators regularly meditate in an area, the crime rate goes down.

The TM organization has also targeted global conflict. In 1983 a special TM assembly met in Israel to attempt to use meditation to resolve the Palestinian conflict. During their sessions, they made daily comparisons between the number of meditators working on the project and the state of Arab-Israeli relations. On days with a high number of meditators, fatalities in Lebanon fell by 76 per cent. Ordinary violence - local crime, traffic accidents and fires - also all decreased.

But the TM studies mostly concern group attention. In many instances, the meditators are not people who maintain a focused intention to change something else. The Peace Intention Experiment will take their work one step further by examining what happens when a large group sends a highly specific intention to make a change.

The first study will begin on September 14, 2008, to tie in with the Unity Church's Eleven days of Unity, and run for 10-minute intervals each day at the same time for one week.

1 comment:

Boodiba said...

I tried to get involved on a volunteer level, once, with a political party that was looking to be a viable 4th party, abolish the electorate system, etc. TM was a big part of their platform. Funny right?

I didn't have any experience with that kind of meditation & still don't, but I wanted to get involved.

Unfortunately they didn't call me until the fall, when I was already busy again.

OK... nap time.

 

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