Prayer/Meditation DOES make the world a better place

[Cyberman]

Okay. I read your cited article, and I think the kindest word that can be used to describe it is "interesting". Essentially, it is espousing the so-called Maharishi Effect, which is the claim that a small number of Transcendental Meditators, all TMing away together, has a beneficial effect on society as a whole. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - yes, the same beardy bloke who ruined the Beatles - claimed that it would only need one percent of the population to make it work. However, he made this statement in 1960; the years that followed are virtually synonymous with an obsession for TM, Zen Buddhism, LSD, psychedelia and the like. Unfortunately, they are also synonymous with Vietnam and concomitant protests, various other wars in Africa and the Middle East, the Cuban Missile Crisis (not to mention the whole Cold War thing itself), riots in America and Europe. 1963 was a particularly bad year for one man.

Perhaps beardy bloke was wrong and in fact it needs quite a bit more than one percent? Now this really is interesting... a study done in 1986 on the Maharishi Effect concluded that it only takes a minimum of 100 TM practitioners to produce an observable result. This study was performed by the Maharishi University of Management, founded in 1971 by beardy bloke himself and which provided the article that you cited. I'm sorry, I really wanted to give this information a fair shake, but I find it very difficult to take anything seriously that requires Yogic Flying to make it work.