Elevate and Evolve | Cannabis & Psychedelic Culture Blog
Eduardo Salles is a designer with a talent for illustrating social commentary. Philosophy sprinkled with humor makes a great meal for the brain.
The Maharishi Effect is a phase transition to a more orderly and harmonious state of life in society as measured by decreased crime, violence, accidents, and illness, and improvements in economic conditions and other sociological indicators. Named in honor of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who predicted it thirty years ago.
Maharishi had predicted that when a critical sub-population of individuals – 1% – experienced and stimulated the field of pure consciousness through the Transcendental Meditation Program, a type of macroscopic field effect of coherence would occur in the society and the quality of life would improve. This would manifest in more orderly and harmonious individual behaviour and a measurable improvement in the various social indices which characterise the quality of life in society.
During the past 25 years over 500 scientific studies have been conducted on Transcendental Meditation and Yogic Flying showing the wide-ranging benefits for all aspects of life. 42 of these studies have shown that when 1% of the population of any town or country practises Transcendental Meditation, or when the square root of 1% practise TM-Sidhi Yogic Flying in a group, there are dramatic positive improvements in the entire society.
One such study was held in June-July 1993 in Washington D.C.
This National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness brought approximately 4,000 participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs to the United States national capital from June 7 to July 30, 1993. A 27-member independent Project Review Board consisting of sociologists and criminologists from leading universities, representatives from the police department and government of the District of Columbia, and civic leaders approved in advance the research protocol for the project and monitored its progress.
The dependent variable in the research was weekly violent crime, as measured by the Uniform Crime Report program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; violent crimes include homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. This data was obtained from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department for 1993 as well as for the preceding five years (1988-1992). Additional data used for control purposes included weather variables (temperature, precipitation, humidity), daylight hours, changes in police and community anti-crime activities, prior crime trends in the District of Columbia, and concurrent crime trends in neighboring cities. Average weekly temperature was significantly correlated with homicides, rapes and assaults (HRA crimes), as has also been found in previous research; therefore temperature was used as a control variable in the main analysis of HRA crimes. Using time series analysis, violent crimes were analyzed separately in terms of HRA crimes (crimes against the person) and robbery (monetary crimes), as well as together.
Analysis of 1993 data, controlling for temperature, revealed that there was a highly significant decrease in HRA crimes associated with increases in the size of the group during the Demonstration Project. The maximum decrease was 23.3% when the size of the group was largest during the final week of the project. The statistical probability that this result could reflect chance variation in crime levels was less than 2 in 1 billion (p < .000000002). When a longer baseline is used (1988-1993 data), the maximum decrease was 24.6% during this period (p < .00003). When analyzed as a separate variable, robberies did not decrease significantly, but a joint analysis of both HRA crimes and robberies indicated that violent crimes as a whole decreased significantly to a maximum amount of 15.6% during the final week of the project (p = .0008).
Analysis of 1993 data, controlling for temperature, revealed that there was a highly significant decrease in HRA crimes associated with increases in the size of the group during the Demonstration Project.
Based on the results of the study, the steady state gain (long-term effect) associated with a permanent group of 4,000 participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs was calculated as a 48% reduction in HRA crimes in the District of Columbia.
Given the strength of these results, their consistency with the positive results of previous research, the grave human and financial costs of violent crime, and the lack of other effective and scientific methods to reduce crime, policy makers are urged to apply this approach on a large scale for the benefit of society.
Scientific proof of meditations far-reaching beneficial effects are wonderful to read about, I have no doubt we will reach that 1% threshold soon.
thirdmonk certainly wants to help, if you’re interested in joining a weekly meditation with us, please email us or leave a comment below and we’ll send you the details.
> Maharishi Effect | Dubrovnik Peace Project
> Crime Prevention | ISTPP.org
Paul Kuczynski uses his paintings to convey concerns about social issues. Paul’s approach puts a focus on the parts of our society that are ripe for satire. His illustrations make you wonder about what is really going on in the world.
Please share your thoughts on in the comments and support Paul Kuczynski’s Facebook page.
The intention of this post isn’t to debate the source of these beautiful creations. It’s purpose is to showcase the magnificent beauty and complexity of crop circles. I hope no one can argue with that!
> Circle Images | Temporary Temples
Alan Watts explains why our culture is destructive. Offering the possibility that an underlying unconscious thematic pattern within humanity is causing our disconnection with the world and ourselves.
Why is it that we don’t seem to be able to adjust ourselves to the physical environment without destroying it?
Why is it that in a way this culture represents in a unique fashion the law of diminishing returns. That our success is a failure. That we are building up – in other words, an enormous technological civilization which seems to promise the fulfillment of every wish almost at the touch of a button.
And yet as in so many fairy tales when the wish is finally materialized, they are like fairy gold, they are not really material at all. In fact, so many of our products, our cars, our homes, our clothing, our food. It looks as if it were really the instant creation of pure thought; that is to say it’s thoroughly insubstantial, lacking in what the connoisseur of wine calls body.
And in so many other ways, the riches that we produce are ephemeral, and as the result of that we are frustrated, we are terribly frustrated. We feel that the only thing is to go on getting more and more. And as a result of that the whole landscape begins to look like the nursery of a spoiled child – who’s got too many toys and is bored with them and throws them away as fast as he gets them; plays with them for a few minutes.
Also we are dedicated to a tremendous war on the basic material dimensions of time and space. We want to obliterate those limitations. We want to get everything done as fast as possible. We want to convert the rhythms and the skills of work into cash. Which indeed you can buy something with, but you can’t eat it.
And then rush home, to get away from work and begin the real business of life, to enjoy ourselves. You know, for the vast majority of American families, what seems to be the real point of life, what you rush home to get to. Is to watch an electronic reproduction of life, you can’t touch, it doesn’t smell, and it has no taste. You might think that people getting home to the real point of life in a robust material culture would go home to a colossal banquet or an orgy of love-making or a riot of music and dancing, but nothing of the kind.
It turns out to be this purely passive, contemplation of a twittering screen. You see mile after mile of darkened houses with that little electronic screen flickering in the room. Everybody isolated, watching this thing, and thus in no real communion with each other at all. And this isolation of people into a private world of their own is really the creation of a mindless crowd.
And so, we don’t get with each other except for public expressions of getting rid of our hostility, like football or prizefighting. And even in the spectacles one sees on this television, it’s perfectly proper to exhibit people slugging and slaying each other, but oh dear no, not people loving each other, except in a rather restrained way. One can only draw the conclusion that the assumption underlying this is that expressions of physical love are far more dangerous than expressions of physical hatred.
And it seems to me that a culture that has that sort of assumption is basically crazy and devoted – unintentionally indeed – but nevertheless in-fact devoted not to survival, but to the actual destruction of life.
Watercolor by Stefan Kuhn
John Lennon quotes get to the heart of the matter like an arrow from Apollo’s bow; precise and piercing, provoking the inner depths of our minds into expansion.
Do what you love and you will love your life.
Focus on what’s positive in your life.
Let your love flow freely.
Do not use God to divide the masses. United God smiles upon us all.
Happiness is a choice. Choose to be happy and your life will align with that choice.
Be true to yourself.
Get in touch with your inner most desires and move towards them.
When you speak to and seek out God, focus on what you’re searching for; you’ll find all the answers are inside waiting for you.
Live, laugh and love openly.
Comedian George Carlin explains how money and religion have taken a big shit on human potential:
I realized that I really didn’t care about the outcome on this planet, I didn’t care what happened to the human species. This is a species that was given great gifts and had great potential and squandered them. I think this species squandered them.
I think it choose poor ways of organizing itself, socially and politically. I think it made a wrong turn when it came to buying the okidoke that the spiritual leaders gave, the high priest. We turned it over to the high priest and the traitors.
It’s commerce and religion that have ruined and spoiled the potential of this species. And in this country the same two things are true, but this country is the leader in the decay of the soul.. if you will.. I use that metaphorically, I just don’t care what happens to this country.
Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do.
And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time.
But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money. That kinda shit is very limiting. It’s very limiting for this brain we have.
Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, inventor, and philosopher known to many of his friends and fans as “Bucky” Fuller. He developed numerous inventions, the most famous of which is the geodesic dome.
Bucky designed his inventions with the core belief that there are more than enough resources available to feed and house every single human being in the world.
Fuller’s philosophy claims that convoluted politics and unnecessary labor are the biggest obstacles of human progress:
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
The youth of today is absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.
The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
Man is operating on a fundamental fallacy that assumes there is nowhere nearly enough resources to go around and never will be. The idea that man is supposed to be a failure and therefore has to prove his right to live has led to a division in consciousness:
“It has to be you or me. I must show I can earn my living, and let other people go die.”
On this basis, society has been assuming it is a handout or socialist system if you’re not “earning a living” at some job somebody has set out for you.
So we have the idea of a job as something you have to do that you don’t like in contrast to what your mind tells you needs to be done or what you’d like to do.
A brief look at Buckminster Fuller and his legacy, now more relevant than ever.
In a series of startling studies, psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley have found that “upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.” Even when wealth was accumulated by the roll of the dice, the rich felt entitled to their advantages.
Paul Solman (PBS) : But the simple Darwinian story is if I have more resources than you, I can have more kids than you; my kids will pass on my DNA, which is the resource-hoarding DNA.
Dacher Keltner (Psychologist, UCB): That was sort of an older view of how we evolved as the particular social species we are, but what we’re learning through a lot of new advances in evolutionary biology is that we really had to cooperate to make it as a species.
We had to cooperate in terms of food gathering, defending against predators and so on. And human cultures evolved particular tendencies to reward the generous — to ensure that there weren’t people hoarding resources and that the resources were more equally distributed.
There are really interesting new literatures on this called competitive altruism, which is as you give things away, in many different cultures, from hunter-gatherer societies to today’s America, you rise in the respect of your peers.
> Why Those Who Feel They Have Less Give More | PBS NewsHour
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, has publicly apologized for his part in misleading the public about the negative effects of Cannabis. Gupta’s admission that he had not done the proper research before condemning the drug, creates a path for others to do the same.
As Cannabis legalization gains momentum, this sort of back-peddling may become the norm. Those who claimed Cannabis is harmful will have to either feign ignorance as Gupta has or simply fade from public thought. Their dated opinions holding no weight in the face of an informed public.
In his op-ed “Why I changed my mind on weed”, Gupta explains his initial opposition and subsequent change of heart:
Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled “Why I would Vote No on Pot.
“Well, I am here to apologize. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.
“They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works.
They get in narcotics, on morphine, Oxycontin, Dilaudid. These types of medications don’t work, maybe at all, but certainly not after a few months. People can develop tolerance to them. And you come to find that marijuana in a percentage of patients, not only does it work better than these narcotics, it’s much safer. — Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Alan Watts and Terence McKenna talk about our need for a collective consciousness as our solvable global issues get neglected, causing us to become enemies of our planet and each other. Video produced by the Omega Point
What I am involves what you are, the problem is you see… We haven’t been taught to feel that way.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it–aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the eternal universe, each one of us.
– Alan Watts, The Nature Of Consciousness
It comes out of a personal act of courage made by the individual. An act of courage which involves Surrender. Surrender is the opposite side of the coin of Ego. The central issue of our times is the inability to surrender to what we KNOW is right.
We have the ability to feed the hungry, we have the ability to educate our children, to clean up our environment, to eliminate sexism, to eliminate racism. The question is: CAN WE CHANGE OUR MINDS FAST ENOUGH?
– Terence McKenna, MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Conference 1990
If you had the resources to block a competing technology that was more efficient and better for the environment, would you do it to protect your profits? In a cash driven society, many of the wealthiest companies have no remorse about choosing profit over progress.
The consumer tech industry will delay the release of better models until the current ones finish their sales cycles and become obsolete. Hospitals make money off a sick population, there is no incentive to push through medical breakthroughs when there is little profit to be made from a healthy society.
Here are examples of the most suppressed inventions ever:
In 2001, Rick Simpson discovered that a cancerous spot on his skin disappeared within a few days of applying an essential oil made from marijuana. Since then, Simpson and others have treated thousands of cancer patients with incredible success. Spanish researchers have confirmed that THC, an active compound in marijuana, kills brain-tumor cells in human subjects and shows promise with breast, pancreatic and liver tumors.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, meaning that it has no accepted medical use, unlike Schedule II drugs, like cocaine and methamphetamine, which may provide medical benefits. Bullshit.
Nikola Tesla was an undisputed genius, he figured out a way to bypass fossil-fuel-burning power plants and power lines, proving that “free energy” could be harnessed using ionization in the upper atmosphere to produce electrical vibrations.
J.P. Morgan, who had been funding Tesla’s research, had a bit of buyer’s remorse when he realized that free energy for all wasn’t as profitable as, say, actually charging people for every watt of energy use. Morgan then drove another nail in free energy’s coffin by chasing away other investors, ensuring Tesla’s dream would die.
In 1921, the streetcar industry netted $1 billion, causing General Motors to hemorrhage $65 million in the face of a thriving industry. GM retaliated by buying and closing hundreds of independent railway companies, boosting the market for gas-guzzling GM buses and cars.
While a recent urban movement to rescue mass transit has been underway, it is unlikely we’ll ever see streetcars return to their former glory.
When two physicists who were working on the decades-long Tokamak Hot Fusion project stumbled across a cheaper, safer method of creating energy from colliding atoms, they were allegedly forced to repudiate their own discoveries or be fired; the lab feared losing the torrent of government money for Tokamak.
In retaliation, the lead researchers created the Focus Fusion Society, which raises private money to fund their research outside of government interference.
Perhaps the most notorious suppressed invention is the General Motors EV1, subject of the 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? The EV1 was the world’s first mass-produced electric car, with 800 of them up for lease from GM in the late ’90s. GM ended the EV1 line in 1999, stating that consumers weren’t happy with the limited driving range of the car’s batteries, making it unprofitable to continue production.
Many skeptics, however, believe GM killed the EV1 under pressure from oil companies, who stand to lose the most if high-efficiency vehicles conquer the market. It didn’t help that GM hunted down and destroyed every last EV1, ensuring the technology would die out.
The Transcutaneous Electronic Nerve Stimulation (TENS) device was created to alleviate pain impulses from the body without the use of drugs.
In 1974, Johnson & Johnson bought StimTech, one of the first companies to sell the machine, and proceeded to starve the TENS division of money, causing it to flounder. StimTech sued, alleging that Johnson & Johnson purposely stifled the TENS technology to protect sales of its flagship drug, Tylenol. Johnson & Johnson responded that the device never performed as well as was claimed and that it was not profitable. StimTech’s founders won $170 Million, although the ruling was appealed and overturned on a technicality. The court’s finding that the corporation suppressed the TENS device was never overturned.
Hemp, is often identified as the same plant as marijuana and therefore unfairly maligned. Governmental roadblocks prevent hemp from becoming the leader in extracting ethanol, allowing environmentally damaging sources like corn to take over the ethanol industry.
Despite the fact that it requires fewer chemicals, less water and less processing to do the same job, hemp has never caught on. Experts also lay the blame at the feet of Presidential candidates, who kiss up to Iowa corn growers for votes.
Despite how silly it sounds, water-fueled vehicles do exist. The most famous is Stan Meyer’s dune buggy, which achieved 100 miles per gallon and might have become more commonplace had Meyer not succumbed to a suspicious brain aneurysm at 57.
Insiders have loudly claimed that Meyer was poisoned after he refused to sell his patents or end his research. Fearing a conspiracy, his partners have all but gone underground and taken his famed water-powered dune buggy with them.
Phillips, GE and Osram engaged in a conspiracy from 1924 to 1939 with the goal of controlling the fledgling light-bulb industry, according to a report published in Time magazine six years later.
The alleged cartel set prices and suppressed competing technologies that would have produced longer-lasting and more efficient light bulbs. By the time the cabal dissolved, the industry-standard incandescent bulb was established as the dominant source of artificial light across Europe and North America. Not until the late 1990s did compact fluorescent bulbs begin to edge into the worldwide lighting market as an alternative.
