Vaclav Havel died 18th December 2011. He is justifiably recognised as the hero of the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. That unstoppable wave of liberation transformed the country from a puppet Soviet satellite state to an independent sovereign country.
During the pivotal days of December 1989, Vaclav Havel’s reputation and authority as a longstanding dissident playwright and poet, commanded enormous respect even veneration.
Over the previous years, Havel’s stoic resistance had resulted in him suffering several spells in prison including four and half years’ hard labour. It was the widespread admiration for him that made him the focal point for the rising tide of protest against communist tyranny.
 But it is no disrespect to this great man that we should ask what provoked the unstoppable wave of liberation in the first place. The underlying cause of the Velvet Revolution was not the actions of one man, however heroic, but a shift in the nation’s ‘collective consciousness’ as Havel himself understood.
What do we mean by a collective consciousness?
In simple terms, modern physics now recognises more and more that the basic building block of the universe is what is known as a 'Unified Field' that encompasses within it all matter fields and energy fields; in fact all the laws of nature. And there is a growing understanding too that this unified field is also a field of consciousness or field of pure intelligence.
Given that each and every one of us is both part of and connected by this unified field then it follows that every action, even every individual thought, influences every other thing in the universe. So whenever our individual awareness dives down and settles at the level of pure consciousness, as with deep meditation, we not only create a calming, harmonising effect for ourselves but also a calming and harmonising influence for all people everywhere.
In other words it isn’t just our individual consciousness that gets affected, but the consciousness of everyone else as well.
This sea changing idea is now well backed up by scientific research.
Numerous studies show that when there are enough people doing Transcendental Meditation, there is an influence of peace and positivity transmitted across whole populations. The effect is especially powerful when meditators practice the more advanced technique of the TM-Sidhi meditation programme together in the same place and at the same time.
The results from the studies have been so systematic that we can now predict that if a group of people, equivalent to the square root of 1% of a population, sit together in one place at the same time to practice the TM-Sidhi meditation programme then there is an immediate and dramatic shift in the collective consciousness towards harmony, positivity and peace.
During the course of the mid to late 1980s there were a succession of large-scale peace projects using experts in the TM-Sidhi meditation programme. Several of these projects achieved the magic square root of 1% threshold for the whole world and so stimulated a growing liveliness of consciousness across the planet. The effect was especially marked in Eastern Europe, as a number of the projects were held close by in what was then Western Europe.
Starting at the turn of 1983 and 1984 a global project was instigated at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa USA. The idea, suggested by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the founder of Transcendental Meditation, was to stave off growing Cold War tensions that were looking to grow out of hand at the time.
The immediate results of the project were felt across the globe.
Retrospective studies carried out for the duration of the project in several different countries demonstrated decreased international conflict, increased progress by heads of state towards reversing prior negative trends in international relatinships, decreased road and air traffic fatalities, decreased infectious diseases in the US, reduced fatalities in the Lebanese civil war, and a global upsurge of economic positivity and optimism, as reflected in a rise in worldwide stock indices.
But this was only the start of a peace process.
 A series of short-term world peace projects took place in Europe and America culminating in the assembling of the first full-time group of 7,000 TM-Sidhi meditators in India at the end of the 1980s. This full-time group generated a transformation in world consciousness that in turn triggered a rapid dissolution of first the soviet regime and then the collapse of the whole Warsaw pact apparatus of tyranny in Eastern Europe, including of course the socialist regime in Czechoslovakia.
Unfortunately the momentum was not sustained.
Lack of funding and government bureaucracy prevented the continuation of the full-time Indian peace project, which gradually contracted in size during the early nineties. The result has been a growing turbulence in world affairs, the onset of global terrorism and a revival of super power rivalry. This is why the Natural Health Research Trust is fund raising to create a permanent TM-based world peace group.
Research references:
Orme-Johnson DW; Alexander CN; Davies J, Chandler HM, and Larimore WE, International Peace Project in the Middle East, "The Effects of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field”; published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, 32 (1988) 776 812.
Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Social Statistics Section, pp. 297¬302. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association, 1990.
Orme-Johnson DW; Cavanaugh KL; Alexander CN; Gelderloos P; Dillbeck M; Lanford AG; and Abou Nader TM; Department of Psychology and Department of Management and Public Affairs, Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, Department of Nutrition and Food Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1984. The influence of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field on world events and global social indicators: The effects of the ‘Taste of Utopia’ Assembly. The Collected papers of Scientific Research on Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi Programme Volume 4 Paper 337.
"Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which the world is headed ¯ the ecological, social demographic or general breakdown of civilization ¯ will be unavoidable." Vaclav Havel
Article by Jeremy Old
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