The Square Root of 1%
One of the more interesting propositions of the TM movement is what's called the “Maharishi Effect.” This posits that if the square root of one percent of a population - any population of any size, from a small town to the entire globe - practices Transcendental Meditation regularly, there will be immediate, scientifically measurable, improvements to life within the whole of that population. Hospital visits will drop, crime will go down, students will do better in school, neighbors will smile more at each other (for the record, this last one is my own addition, there are no studies about the prevalence of smiling neighbors, so far as I know). The Maharishi explained it in terms of a lightbulb: “What is a bulb?” he asked, “It is a very small filament. How much is that in relation to the whole volume of the room? It’s a very insignificant area. Yet it becomes lighted and the whole room becomes lighted.”
Granted, there’s plenty of skepticism when it comes to independent verifiability of the actual science and data of the Maharishi Effect, but the interest here is more in the spiritual concepts that underlie it. Science aside, the Maharishi Effect presents a beautiful idea. It also jives (n’ vibes) pretty soundly with some of the topics explored on this blog. If (as hypothesized in a previous post (click the link on "jives n' vibes!")) our thoughts and moods are indeed different energies producing vibrations that, whether we are aware or not, are infectious to those around us, then the positive effects of TM on the individuals who practice it will be similarly affecting to those they live near. Not only that, the Maharishi Effect posits, but with lots of people TMing and feeling great, more people will be drawn to TM, and the good vibes will be spread that way too. Or to paraphrase Confucius: a person TMs into the quiet sea of infinite consciousness, so that others might also TM into the quiet sea of infinite consciousness.
While TM is meditation and not (strictly speaking) prayer, this combination of inward practice with external manifestation is, it seems to me, at the root of most forms of spiritual practice, especially prayer. And what’s more, the idea that a small group of people can employ a spiritual practice that is of benefit not only to those present, but to the surrounding world that is not practicing that spiritual act, is one that presents itself in all kinds of religious traditions. This happens in many different ways in many different traditions…and I’m going to come back to these differences in a moment.
First some thoughts on prayer.
Some Thoughts On Prayer
“The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. […] Prayer may not save us, but prayer may make us worthy of being saved.”
I’ve always loved this teaching. So often within religious traditions, prayer is treated as either a rote obligation - we pray so as not to be punished by some punitive God maybe, or perhaps as a part of the act of repetitive identity affirmation (as in: “why do I pray? Because I’m a Jew/Christian/Muslim and saying these prayers makes me remember that!”) - or as a place to ask for God’s miraculous intervention into human affairs. As I read it, Heschel’s point is neither to absolve the religious of their sense of obligation, nor to deny those who seek comfort in petitioning God, but to refocus the goal of praying onto the transformation of an individual’s inwardness. We pray, just like we meditate, to better ourselves. Talking with, and listening to God (or the Atman, or The Universe, or The Oneness, etc.) in the form of prayer - of song! - is individually soul enriching. It changes us. It makes us worthy of being saved.
One way of understanding this inner transformation is through the Jewish mystical notion of kavanah. Literally translated kavanah means “direction,” and it refers to the orientation of a person’s heart and soul when they undertake actions. In the current Western mind, we might call a kind of cousin to mindfulness (and here’s a video of an English rabbi, Laibl Wolf discussing this connection). Indeed, it is not just the best state in which to pray, but the very point of the act of praying. The direction of the heart/mind/soul toward a place of wonder and love is both the means and the end of prayer. And while this may sound nice, the question remains: how to actually do that? How to get there?
Faith vs. Knowledge
At the beginning of this odd trek, I interviewed a friend of mine who said he’d “hacked” his way into believing in God. What did he mean by hack? Everyday he said prayers to the fake god, Almig. He added the phrase “Almig Bless” into his everyday vocabulary. He invented rituals and stuck to them. He spoke to others about Almig. He observed fake holidays to the fake god. He not only believed, he actually changed his behavior, and he mindfully stuck to it. At the end of our discussion, he told me that the thing he’d realized, now that he believed in the “real God,” was that in some fundamental way knowledge and belief are on “different tracks.” You can't rationally, logically think your way to faith.
What does it mean that faith and knowledge are on different tracks?
It is a question worth a lifetime of inquiry.
But, for the moment, here is my working theory: Knowledge is something you have. You fill your brain with it, it is yours to do with as you wish, you use it when it's appropriate to do so (and maybe sometimes when it's not). Faith, on the other hand, is something you do. (And maybe belief is knowledge of your faith). But what does that mean to do faith? To do kavanah? To pray meaningfully in a way that is not solely petition or obligation? I have been struggling for weeks to articulate this, but all I can come up with is: you do it by doing it. You cultivate mindfulness in action. You work on just being. Patiently and honestly.
So, if this seems insufficient, perhaps I'll try a different question: why do it? Is faith even virtuous? I think that it is (have belief that it is) and might offer, from my burgeoning experience of doing faith on this trip in the form of personal ritual, that its virtue is that it allows a person to simply, openly, calmly be better. And to appreciate in being both the relentlessly humbling nature of these short, confusing lives we’ve been saddled with, and the infinite potential of love available to us in them. Which I guess is to feel the way that each of us is, at once, nothing but dust and an entire world. My point being that it is one thing to think those things, and quite another to experience them, to be them. For that, you've just gotta do (and, let me add, what you do is up to you, and maybe in conjunction with your Community).
Back to Groups
I’m coming back to the question from the beginning of the post. How to understand the Maharishi Effect? Or, extended outward, the notion that a small group of faithful practitioners can, by the virtue of their practice, be doing good for the others around them. And what are the differences in the ways this is done?
I suppose I'm trying to draw a sharp distinction here between those who pray together from places of individual kavanah (or those who TM for their own betterment, and produce the Maharishi Effect), and groups who pray for the souls of others purely in a manner of service to the world (and not for themselves). To do the latter, it seems to me, is to fall into a trap. It is to lose the spirituality of doing faith - which is first and foremost an enrichment of the individual - and that is to practice something that's both numbing and condescending. And yet, how beautiful it is when individuals doing faith are able to be together, and end up singing something greater than any single person could sing on his/her/gender non-specific own! This is surely a beauty that spreads beyond the space in which it is contained. One that brings goodness to the world. A small bulb to light a whole room.
One of the more interesting propositions of the TM movement is what's called the “Maharishi Effect.” This posits that if the square root of one percent of a population - any population of any size, from a small town to the entire globe - practices Transcendental Meditation regularly, there will be immediate, scientifically measurable, improvements to life within the whole of that population. Hospital visits will drop, crime will go down, students will do better in school, neighbors will smile more at each other (for the record, this last one is my own addition, there are no studies about the prevalence of smiling neighbors, so far as I know). The Maharishi explained it in terms of a lightbulb: “What is a bulb?” he asked, “It is a very small filament. How much is that in relation to the whole volume of the room? It’s a very insignificant area. Yet it becomes lighted and the whole room becomes lighted.”
Granted, there’s plenty of skepticism when it comes to independent verifiability of the actual science and data of the Maharishi Effect, but the interest here is more in the spiritual concepts that underlie it. Science aside, the Maharishi Effect presents a beautiful idea. It also jives (n’ vibes) pretty soundly with some of the topics explored on this blog. If (as hypothesized in a previous post (click the link on "jives n' vibes!")) our thoughts and moods are indeed different energies producing vibrations that, whether we are aware or not, are infectious to those around us, then the positive effects of TM on the individuals who practice it will be similarly affecting to those they live near. Not only that, the Maharishi Effect posits, but with lots of people TMing and feeling great, more people will be drawn to TM, and the good vibes will be spread that way too. Or to paraphrase Confucius: a person TMs into the quiet sea of infinite consciousness, so that others might also TM into the quiet sea of infinite consciousness.
While TM is meditation and not (strictly speaking) prayer, this combination of inward practice with external manifestation is, it seems to me, at the root of most forms of spiritual practice, especially prayer. And what’s more, the idea that a small group of people can employ a spiritual practice that is of benefit not only to those present, but to the surrounding world that is not practicing that spiritual act, is one that presents itself in all kinds of religious traditions. This happens in many different ways in many different traditions…and I’m going to come back to these differences in a moment.
First some thoughts on prayer.
Some Thoughts On Prayer
“The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. […] Prayer may not save us, but prayer may make us worthy of being saved.”
I’ve always loved this teaching. So often within religious traditions, prayer is treated as either a rote obligation - we pray so as not to be punished by some punitive God maybe, or perhaps as a part of the act of repetitive identity affirmation (as in: “why do I pray? Because I’m a Jew/Christian/Muslim and saying these prayers makes me remember that!”) - or as a place to ask for God’s miraculous intervention into human affairs. As I read it, Heschel’s point is neither to absolve the religious of their sense of obligation, nor to deny those who seek comfort in petitioning God, but to refocus the goal of praying onto the transformation of an individual’s inwardness. We pray, just like we meditate, to better ourselves. Talking with, and listening to God (or the Atman, or The Universe, or The Oneness, etc.) in the form of prayer - of song! - is individually soul enriching. It changes us. It makes us worthy of being saved.
One way of understanding this inner transformation is through the Jewish mystical notion of kavanah. Literally translated kavanah means “direction,” and it refers to the orientation of a person’s heart and soul when they undertake actions. In the current Western mind, we might call a kind of cousin to mindfulness (and here’s a video of an English rabbi, Laibl Wolf discussing this connection). Indeed, it is not just the best state in which to pray, but the very point of the act of praying. The direction of the heart/mind/soul toward a place of wonder and love is both the means and the end of prayer. And while this may sound nice, the question remains: how to actually do that? How to get there?
Faith vs. Knowledge
At the beginning of this odd trek, I interviewed a friend of mine who said he’d “hacked” his way into believing in God. What did he mean by hack? Everyday he said prayers to the fake god, Almig. He added the phrase “Almig Bless” into his everyday vocabulary. He invented rituals and stuck to them. He spoke to others about Almig. He observed fake holidays to the fake god. He not only believed, he actually changed his behavior, and he mindfully stuck to it. At the end of our discussion, he told me that the thing he’d realized, now that he believed in the “real God,” was that in some fundamental way knowledge and belief are on “different tracks.” You can't rationally, logically think your way to faith.
What does it mean that faith and knowledge are on different tracks?
It is a question worth a lifetime of inquiry.
But, for the moment, here is my working theory: Knowledge is something you have. You fill your brain with it, it is yours to do with as you wish, you use it when it's appropriate to do so (and maybe sometimes when it's not). Faith, on the other hand, is something you do. (And maybe belief is knowledge of your faith). But what does that mean to do faith? To do kavanah? To pray meaningfully in a way that is not solely petition or obligation? I have been struggling for weeks to articulate this, but all I can come up with is: you do it by doing it. You cultivate mindfulness in action. You work on just being. Patiently and honestly.
So, if this seems insufficient, perhaps I'll try a different question: why do it? Is faith even virtuous? I think that it is (have belief that it is) and might offer, from my burgeoning experience of doing faith on this trip in the form of personal ritual, that its virtue is that it allows a person to simply, openly, calmly be better. And to appreciate in being both the relentlessly humbling nature of these short, confusing lives we’ve been saddled with, and the infinite potential of love available to us in them. Which I guess is to feel the way that each of us is, at once, nothing but dust and an entire world. My point being that it is one thing to think those things, and quite another to experience them, to be them. For that, you've just gotta do (and, let me add, what you do is up to you, and maybe in conjunction with your Community).
Back to Groups
I’m coming back to the question from the beginning of the post. How to understand the Maharishi Effect? Or, extended outward, the notion that a small group of faithful practitioners can, by the virtue of their practice, be doing good for the others around them. And what are the differences in the ways this is done?
I suppose I'm trying to draw a sharp distinction here between those who pray together from places of individual kavanah (or those who TM for their own betterment, and produce the Maharishi Effect), and groups who pray for the souls of others purely in a manner of service to the world (and not for themselves). To do the latter, it seems to me, is to fall into a trap. It is to lose the spirituality of doing faith - which is first and foremost an enrichment of the individual - and that is to practice something that's both numbing and condescending. And yet, how beautiful it is when individuals doing faith are able to be together, and end up singing something greater than any single person could sing on his/her/gender non-specific own! This is surely a beauty that spreads beyond the space in which it is contained. One that brings goodness to the world. A small bulb to light a whole room.
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