Will This Peace Plan Fly? : Ideas: Maharishi says flying, TM-induced levitation, can even calm Persian Gulf conflict, if practiced on a grand scale.

You know the ‘60s are really back when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi starts talking to the press again.

The maharishi, the Indian guru best known for introducing meditation to the West in the ‘60s through the Beatles and other celebrity followers, has an unusual plan for ending the crisis in the Persian Gulf. And, though he rarely grants media interviews, he wanted to talk about it.

By telephone, from Vlodrop, Holland, where he is visiting, the guru pointed out that lasting peace will never be created through the tactics of fear now being pursued in the Persian Gulf.

“Peace can only be stable if there is support, if there is nourishment and certainly not fear. What has happened to Kuwait can happen to any country at any time,” he warned in nearly flawless English and in the lilting, sing-song tones familiar to viewers of his educational television shows.

In fact, the maharishi considers it a “laughing stock” that governments are using economic blockades and other tactics of intimidation to fight “the darkness, the madness of Iraq.”

“No wise man fights the darkness. What he does is he does not deal with the darkness. He just brings the light,” the bearded, gray-haired guru declared. “It’s not necessary to deal with any madman. It’s only necessary to nourish his existence . . . and the next day he’ll be a changed man.”

As might be expected, though, the maharishi’s method of providing nourishment is bound to strike many as strange, if not downright impossible. Indeed, the maharishi summarized his prescription for permanently ending conflict throughout the world in just one, rather startling word: flying.

For followers of the India-based teacher, flying is nothing new. But it’s not particularly easy, either.

It’s an advanced form of their leader’s stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation practices, which TM officials say have now been taught to nearly 3 million individuals worldwide.

In flying, as taught by the guru, meditators attempt to levitate, which they believe is possible when their brain waves reach an altered state far beyond that of standard meditation.

“Meditation is a process which widens the mind,” the maharishi explained, describing the now-familiar practice of quieting the mind and using a word or sound known as a mantra to reach an expanded state of consciousness--a procedure that was initially ridiculed by Westerners when he began advocating it 35 years ago.

“Flying is a process which widens the mind via the activity in the body, because the mind is in a transcendental state of consciousness. . . . The phenomenon just demonstrates the integration of the mind and body. The body becomes so integrated with the mind that the intention of the mind is carried out by the body.”

Since the maharishi began offering his flying techniques in 1976, through the TM-Sidhi program, thousands of advanced meditators throughout the world have followed his instructions and attempted to fly.

But, as he acknowledged, even the most advanced “flyers” are actually just exuberant hoppers at the moment, as journalists who have witnessed their exhibitions have attested.

Nonetheless, to the maharishi, who fully expects his hoppers to fly eventually, it doesn’t matter. “When the first airplane flew, it actually hopped,” he asserted. “But that hopping was celebrated in terms of flying. The first flight was a hop, but everyone said it took off. It doesn’t matter what we call it. The phenomenon, that level of intelligence from which this phenomenon is promoted, is really a perfectly balanced state of natural law.”

Thus, when large numbers of hoppers get together and attempt to fly, he insisted, their positive energy emits such a powerful force that the entire world cannot help but be affected, even to the point of laying down its weapons and moving toward peace.

By the maharishi’s calculations, 7,000 hoppers hopping together anywhere in the world, for half an hour twice a day, then meditating together for another 20 minutes are enough to generate world peace. He claims the energy produced by such a group (roughly the square root of 1% of the world’s population) would be powerful enough to produce “coherence and harmony in the whole world consciousness.”

“Not too much time is needed,” he indicated. “Only the group should live together (and hop and meditate together) on a permanent basis, because we want positivity to be permanently lively in world consciousness.”

Thousands of the guru’s followers have gathered at global assemblies to meditate and hop together for days. The maharishi claims that world peace has improved as a result. He attributes the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union to the actions of these joint hopping and meditating sessions.

“It’s completely possible to change the (Persian Gulf) situation within a few weeks, but it must be done so that the situation continues to last,” he said, adding that the problem is that conflicts will continue to erupt unless the hopping and meditating can continue permanently. “My only concern is that when the assembly is dispersed, when the light is switched off, the same darkness takes over.”

To prevent this, the maharishi proposes that a government or group of concerned individuals subsidize a group of at least 7,000 hoppers to continually create “irreversible peace on earth.”

As for the cost, TM officials have offered to provide training for a group of 7,000 free of charge. They ask that, in exchange, the sponsor provide ongoing, basic living expenses for the group so its members can continue their practice indefinitely. Such aid, the maharishi estimated, would be “whatever a man needs to survive in any poor country, 7,000 times that.” Though the guru’s group has taken out full-page advertisements in newspapers worldwide to advise leaders of the peace plan (it plans more ads in upcoming weeks), no government or group has yet offered to support the meditator-hoppers.

At the White House, a spokeswoman was asked if President Bush’s staff was aware of or had investigated the maharishi’s proposal. “I’ve just been told we don’t have anything on that,” she said.

Meantime, some researchers have been attempting to scientifically test the maharishi’s notions.

John Davies, research coordinator for the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management, has studied the effects of meditators and hoppers throughout the 1980s. But it wasn’t until 1988 that a study he conducted in 1983 (in conjunction with researchers at Harvard University and Maharishi International University) was published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution.

The study observed the effects of about 250 individuals meditating and hopping for two months in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. Researchers studied their effects on Israel and Lebanon. Lebanon, in particular, was selected, Davies said, “because it was the site of the most, consistent, deep-rooted violent conflict, which has been virtually nonstop for 15 years.”

During the time the meditating-hopping occurred, Davies and his co-researchers documented “a significant impact”: an average 75% reduction in the daily number of deaths, or about 10 as opposed to 40 a day.

An upcoming issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution will contain a critique of Davies’ research by Philip Schrodt, associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas. Schrodt’s chief objection is that the dates on which the meditation-hopping experiment took place were not chosen at random and were not compared with randomly selected dates in which the meditation-hopping did not occur.

“We know, statistically, that levels of violence, if they go down, they tend to stay down a while or if they go up, they stay up for a while,” Schrodt said. “If I was a meditator, if I saw the violence going down, I’d go join the crowd because the trend to lower levels of violence would normally continue. You can control for that by creating a randomized experiment. If they can ever do that, I’m perfectly willing to look at their articles again.”

Davies, who is a hopper-meditator but does not consider himself a follower of the maharishi, responds that the experiment’s dates were picked two months in advance and publicly announced. He also said that independent scientists were notified of the dates when initially announced to further ensure objectivity.

“You can’t predict things such as death rates two months in advance,” he argued, noting that purely random selection of dates makes it difficult to amass a large group of meditator-hoppers since the dates may not occur at convenient times for them to get away.

“It’s enormously expensive. You have to fly people in,” Davies said. He also thinks that groups should also not be disbanded according to randomly chosen dates. (Closing dates for the experiments were determined, in part, by the amount of funding available to subsidize participants’ stays.)

“If you have the ability to maintain a group and it’s saving 30 out of 40 deaths a day, you don’t, for the sake of satisfying critics, sacrifice 30 lives per day to be extra safe on these (methodology) points,” he maintained.

Even so, Davies revealed he is not surprised that some scientists still find the research hard to believe: “We’re hitting up against the edges of the current thinking . . . . “

Which, of course, does not deter the maharishi and his followers in the slightest. From Oct. 14 to 21, for example, about 3,000 true believers are expected to hop together in Fairfield, Iowa, the site of Maharishi International University.

According to the guru, “any man with the slightest intelligence can see the logic” behind this approach to creating peace on Earth.

But if it’s so simple to understand, why haven’t governments or other concerned citizens responded to the maharishi’s proposals yet?

Replied the guru, with the laugh of a merry elf, “That is the mystery I’ve not yet been able to solve.”