Spirit in Action
Maharishi Invincibility Center
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear that as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ We have another field trip out of the Northern Spirit Radio Studios for an on-site interview at the newly opened St. Paul, Minnesota, Maharishi Invincibility Center, home of Transcendental Meditation for the Twin Cities. I'm here with Billy Jean Billman and Jim Horwath, the co-directors of the center, and we'll talk about the new building, the modern practice of Transcendental Meditation, often known as TM. We'll talk about the ancient roots of the technique and the healing and help it can bring to a hurting world. And not least of all, we'll talk a bit about the scientific testing that's been done to verify and measure the effects of TM on health, crime, and even peace on the planet. Again, we're at the Maharishi Invincibility Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, with its co-directors, Billy Jean Billman and Jim Horwath. Billy Jean and Jim, thanks so much for inviting me into your new home for TM in the Twin Cities for Spirit in Action. Thank you. You had your grand opening, very recently, how did your grand opening go for the Maharishi Invincibility Center? Actually, it went really well. We had over 200 people throughout the morning and afternoon come, and many of them spent several hours with us, actually. And I think the question that was on everybody's mind when they walked in is what is an invincibility center? By invincibility, we are indicating something 180 degrees from military might. This type of invincibility comes through the harmonious and peaceful influences. In other words, if we can create a truly harmonious, peaceful, and coherent state in individuals, then automatically the neighborhood becomes more peaceful. And the same influence spills over into the city, and then as people become more and more harmonized and peaceful, and their neighborhoods are more in harmony and peaceful, then the nation is affected as well. So all our programs, whether it's Transcendental Meditation Program, the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Program, other consciousness-based education and wellness programs that we offer, everything is designed so that people can become more peaceful, less stressful in this stress-ridden times. So you can imagine people were very interested in finding out about how to get rid of stress. Also, I wanted to add that the term invincibility wasn't just something that was grabbed to create some popular buzz. Obviously, it was that intention because people would ask questions, "What is invincibility?" But it is also found in nature that there are several instances of invincibility in physical systems. When a physical system is allowed to come to a state of perfect orderliness, or zero entropy, in many instances, systems will suddenly go through a phase transition in which they can repel any outside negative influence and maintain a completely coherent and harmonious structure within themselves. There's many instances like this in nature, and so invincibility is a reality on all levels of the universe, and it was known in this tradition that brought us Transcendental Meditation that is possible to create a state of invincibility within the human nervous system, just through the repeated experience of Transcendental Consciousness and decreasing stress over time systematically. So the technique that we teach of Transcendental Meditation for allowing the individual to reduce stress and achieve perfect health ultimately leads to a state of invincibility within the nervous system. It can be monitored and measured through physical experiments. That's why now there's 600 studies on Transcendental Meditation that have been conducted around the world at 250 universities and research institutions in 30 countries, showing that health improves over time through practice of Transcendental Meditation, leading to higher states of consciousness and ultimately invincibility. When you were speaking, Jim, I had the sense you were quite studied in some subject besides TM before you got involved with TM. I have a sense of a good academic preparation in you, and also I want to know for you, Billie Jean, where did you come from and how did you get into TM? So I'm wondering what background or knowledge or foundation you've brought with you. Do you want to start out, Jim? Sure. Well, my college education was in English and philosophy at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. But right after that, I joined the volunteer staff at Maharishi International University, which is now a Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. And much of the educational background I have since then in the sciences, such as the analogy that I just gave, was from lectures of Maharishi, in which he took every single discipline in all fields of science and showed the relationship between that and his system of knowledge from the Vedic tradition of India. And what about you, Billie Jean? Well, it's pretty hard to separate me from transcendental meditation. I learned it when I was in high school out in California. And so at an early age, it became quite obvious to me that consciousness-based education was what I was looking for. I was always a very curious student and always looking for the deeper meaning in everything. And when I kept having my questions answered for the first time when I came into association with Maharishi Mashiogi, then I took my higher education actually at MIU, the International University, and then later on was granted a doctorate in World Peace Studies through Meru European Research University. Now as we're speaking about this, we're sitting here in St. Paul. We're St. Paul, Minnesota. And I don't think most people think of Minnesota as the center of the Vedic universe or anything like that. We're talking about the university that's down in Fairfield, Iowa. Why is TM in these places which are considered the hinterlands to most people? California, that's foreground for this kind of thing. Well, it turns out consciousness is everywhere. And the heartland somehow has attracted this really deep knowledge that satisfies the heart. And we think of the Midwest as the heartland. So I personally actually was born in Minneapolis and was raised in California, so I'm returning to my roots. But I have taught all over the country in probably 14 different cities over the last 35 years. This knowledge is not a fad. This is the knowledge of silence and dynamism, the integration of life, the integration of silence with dynamism. And so it's the knowledge of locating silence deep within every person and bringing that out into activity. And so it's not California-based, it's not, like I said, a fad. It's not something that is new age, you could say. It's something that's been here from the beginning of time, this understanding of the nature of life. To grow, nature of life is being progressive and the purpose of creation being the expansion of happiness. These are very deep understandings that sound very good and they resound with truth in the Midwest as well as on the coast. Also, I wanted to add that in the past year since we've been having these Vaidya's visit us for consultation to her, Vaidya is like a natural doctor from India. Ayurveda is the natural medicine of India. And Maharishi has been bringing out much of this knowledge also since the 1980s. So now we have some of the top Vaidya's in the world that come and offer consultation tours at our centers. And the interest has been growing, so there's a void to fill. The Twin Cities are a very progressive part of the country and yet there's not too much understanding or knowledge of Ayurveda, but people are looking for it and they're growing and they're finding us. So it turns out that this is a good place to have a center. Also to mention that the university that's now in Fairfield, Iowa started out in Santa Barbara, but then they moved to Fairfield when they needed to grow and they just found a campus that was ideal for the growth of all the different programs that Maharishi had envisioned. You said, Billie Jean, that this is known as the Invincibility Center. I've also seen it referred to as the Peace Palace. Tell us a bit about the grounds that we're on, how this is formulated, what this center is and why it's here. And I think there's logic and there's history behind every square foot or meter of the place. Yes, I think you're right. There's a lot to what got built here on this, what was a vacant lot for some time in St. Paul, right? Just one block north of the Ruth Street exit right off of I-94. We picked this particular lot because of its proximity to the freeway and that it would be accessible to any part of the Twin Cities and also Western Wisconsin. And also, more importantly, was that we were able to orient the building itself on the cardinal points because the Ruth Street that the building faces was already in line with the cardinal points, almost to the exact degree, not quite. Because that's one of the requirements that we use the ancient and timeless system of architecture, the Vedic architecture, also known as Maharishi Stapatiya Veda. And one of the primary tenetes of that architecture is that we orient a building to the due east, to the direction of the rising sun, so that the influences that are coming onto the building, the first influences every day, are also are always the most auspicious influences of the sun. That early morning light has an influence of all good to everyone and non-good to no one, also known as auspicious influence for human beings and life. And isn't this building patterned similar to buildings in a number of other places? Yes, the initiative is to have actually a peace palace or a Maharishi Invincibility Center of this nature in every major metropolitan area across the world, with at least 250,000 population. And in that way, being able to create these influences of peace and invincibility for all the major urban areas, is securing a permanent world peace. Other metropolitan areas, for instance, Bethesda, Maryland was the first structure of this nature. It was actually a smaller building than this. And then there's a larger one in Lexington, Kentucky, and one outside of Houston, what's called Woodlands. Of the same 12,000 square foot design, there's about 14 of them that are being finished up around the country, but this was the first one finished in a major metropolitan area. So I think we're very fortunate in the Twin Cities to have that here. Now, all of this is related in one way or another to what's known as TM, Transcendental Meditation. And I think that burst on the American consciousness in the 1960s, when the Beatles got involved with Maharishi Mahashoggi, give a little bit of history leading up to that encounter with the Beatles, how Maharishi came here. I think it's now been 40 years since that encounter with the Beatles, and things are here. So where does this movement come from, this technique, this thing called TM, Transcendental Meditation? And where has it traveled as it's grown in the United States, and I think elsewhere? Well, this technique is quite ancient. It really was a revival of the ancient Vedic wisdom, which had the knowledge of this integration, as I mentioned before, of silence and dynamism in life. And so Transcendental Meditation is a simple, natural, effortless technique. Unlike many other techniques that have come out of India that are also called meditation, a completely effortless technique that's based on this natural tendency of the mind to go to a field of greater happiness. So it turns out that that field of silence deep within is a field that is very attractive to the mind. It's very peaceful, very calming. It gives us greater contentment, so we don't have to force the mind to travel there. We just have to set up the initial conditions. And so when Maharishi brought this knowledge, when he first brought it out, he wasn't expecting to create a worldwide movement back in 1959. He just was, you could say, led to do it by the need of the time. When he got up to speak, he didn't even want to speak to anyone. He was a monk and he was deep in silence, but he had a nudge and he went on a tour to just go to the temples throughout India. And on that tour, someone found him and said, "Do you speak?" And he said, "Well, if you mean to a lecture, no." And he said, "Well, I've already set up seven lectures for you." So that's how the TM organization got started. It was just something almost by happenstance, by natural impulse of the environment. And at the end of those seven days, Maharishi inaugurated a worldwide initiative to end suffering for mankind. So that was back in 1959. And at that time, he traveled a little bit in India and in Asia. And in the early '60s, like in 1960, '61, he first made it to the United States a few times. And when he first came to San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about transcendental meditation and the Indian sage that introduced it. They had the headline that it was a technique for allowing you to sleep better. And at that point, Maharishi said, "Oh, my goodness, such ignorance. This is the technique to wake up consciousness to the ultimate degree. And these people think it's to make them sleep better." And so it took him a few moments of reconsideration and he realized that he would need to teach in a different way. And so he realized the gap that was there in understanding. Even from the beginning, he started to understand that this would have to be something that would need to be scientifically validated in order for the Western mind to be able to embrace it. You know, a few years later than the scientific studies began on the technique. And since then, as Jim said, there have been over 600 different studies. How did the Beatles connect up with that? Was that here or was that in India? Actually, the Beatles were introduced to it in Liverpool. They were introduced through some of their friends in the music industry. And so they met Maharishi and Maharishi, instructed them in Liverpool. And then when we all heard about the Beatles meditating, it was when they went to India, which would have been in 1968 or in '67, actually. Somewhere in there. Can you see me on yourself and you may find peace of mind waiting for me? And the time will come when you see where all the life goes on within and without you? When they went to India, when the press really picked it up, because they went for a training course where they were going for extended meditations. And they were in their little caves with Maharishi and Rishikesh, and it was quite a thing. They were all there, and Donovan was there, and Mia Farrell, and Mike Love, and others. At that time, they were already established in their TM practice by the time they got to India some years later. And I'm sure that the question that's on everybody's tongues is, do they all still practice TM? Well, John and George, of course, aren't here, but George was probably the most faithful meditator over the years, and I remember I used to see him come to the center in Pacific Palisades. He'd come for lunch and come for meditation sometimes there. And I think over the years, actually it's interesting because there was recently a benefit concert that caused a reunion between Ringo and Paul McCartney. This was on April 4th at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City, and it was the first time they actually performed the same songs together since the Beatles split up. Even though they had gotten together for a memorial for George, they hadn't actually performed the same songs. And it was a really joyous occasion, and they had a press conference, which you could probably air part of it if you wanted to sometime on your show, but then talking about what it meant to them to meditate. And Paul said that he had kind of been on and off over the years, but that he was back on now, that it actually helped him in his music and helped him deal with the frustrations and all the challenges of being of the type of life that they had led, that it was really a good thing for stress for him over the years. And Ringo also the same, just they really enjoy their practice and feel. It's been an important part of their musical career. If you just tuned in, this is Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps-Meet, and I'm your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. You can always find these productions on my website, northernspiritradio.org, including links to my guests. Today, we're meeting with the co-directors of the Marishi Invincibility Center here in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I'm sitting in the new structure, just opened up a week or two ago, and we're talking about transcendental meditation. We're talking about the riches that flow out of that, and I'm going to get shortly to the scientific validation that's been conducted, the studies that have been conducted to show us how this really affects the outer world. First of all, I would like to ask either you, Billie Jean or Jim, to talk about what the technique is from an external point of view. So when you learn TM, what do you learn? Transcendental meditation is a simple, effortless, easy-to-learn technique that allows the mind to settle down and experience finer and finer stages of its own thinking process until the mind transcends thought altogether, and arrives at a state of what we say, transcendental consciousness or pure awareness. And the experience of this state, what's so unique about it, is that it requires no effort. It's based on the natural tendency of the mind to want to go to more and more happiness, and it's just that the nervous system is so constructed that diving deep within is a very blissful experience. So it's an automatic technique, doesn't require effort, doesn't require concentration, and so it's easy to do and easy to learn. Anyone can learn it, children can learn, even starting at the age of four with a walking technique, and then that age of ten, a child can learn the sitting technique. So it's very simple, it's universal, it can be taught to anyone of any age, any religion, any background, and it's a technique that's very useful for improving health, improving mental potential, improving relationships, and even creating a more harmonious society. But Jim, what exactly do you do? Do you just sit down anywhere and then you're T. Emming? One can practice the technique sitting comfortably in a chair. We practice it typically twice a day, morning and evening. One can practice the technique anywhere, let's say we're traveling, people who travel a lot. They could even practice it on an airplane, or on the bus, or train, whatever, because it's just a simple mental technique that one can do anywhere. Consciousness is everywhere, as we've said, so we can tap into that field of pure consciousness anywhere if given the proper technique and understanding how to do it. And the technique utilizes, since what we want to do is transcend thought, and the environment of the mind is thinking, then in this technique what we do is we utilize thought itself. So there's a particular thought or sound that one is given in this practice called a mantra. There are many, many mantras and that word has become just a generic word to refer to, just something that we repeat in our life. And in transcendental meditation, the mantra is a sound whose effects are known, and not just known, but known to be life supporting on all levels of creation. So when a person comes to learn transcendental meditation, then they would receive a particularized sound, a mantra that they would also be given a technique on how to use it properly. And so both things are necessary, the correct thought to transcend with the sound, the mantra, and the technique of how to use it properly. What's special about TM is its effectiveness, that there have been, as we said, 600 studies, but there's been so much research now that TM is showing up in a category by itself. For instance, one of the most important studies is a meta-analysis showing that transcendental meditation is two to four times more effective than other techniques of meditation in reducing trait anxiety. So they looked at mindfulness techniques, they looked at progressive muscle relaxation. Those techniques had the same effect as placebo. They looked at other mantra meditation, something called mantra meditation, and that was actually very ineffective. And when they looked at techniques that involve concentration on this meta-analysis, that would actually increase the levels of anxiety rather than had any sort of decreasing effect. So this is a technique that is so simple to learn and to practice, but it's extremely delicate and it's very subtle. And so it has to be taught on a one-to-one basis with the teacher when you actually learn the technique. You sit privately with the teacher, and the experience is an instruction, excuse me, is given according to what the individual student is learning right at that moment. So how long does this instruction process take? Is this something that you'll study for six months and then you can start TMing, or is it everybody can do it first day? The course is taught over four days, so the basic part of the course in which you learn transcendental meditation is taught over four days, about an hour and a half to two hours each day. And the first lesson that when you come you actually learn to meditate. And then the three days after that are three follow-up days. So those are always taken in succession. After that there's what we call a 10-day check-up, and then once a month a person comes back for a follow-up session. And then we encourage people to come back for a free check-up of their meditation. We call it checking, free checking of meditation, which is available at any center or a person, you know, if they move, they can still go to another center and have that. But we encourage them to come back once a month for an entire year. And then there's a lifetime follow-up of free checking if anybody wants to come back. But the basic part of the course is taught over four days. And there's two free introductory lectures that precede that they need to hear in order to understand it. I've had some experience of TM, and my first experience actually with it was a girlfriend of mine when I was in the Peace Corps in West Africa. And one thing that I found rather stunning is she did her 20-minute TM sessions morning and evening. And sometimes that happened while we were traveling from one place to another. So we're traveling in an African taxi cab. That means you're crammed together with a whole bunch of people, and the driver had music on really loud. And she sat and did her TM in the midst of hubbub. Now, is that possible? Or don't you have to in order to do meditation? Don't you have to be in a quiet room separated from the rest of humanity? You would think so. But this technique is so effortless, and it's so compelling, really, that anywhere you can think of thought, you can practice TM. So you could be in an African taxi or a busy, noisy marketplace or on an airplane, or it's not based on mood. You're not making a mood of peace. It's just that you're allowing the physiology to release its own stress. And as long as we said, you can be thinking of thought, then you can practice this technique and the stresses will be released. And because you're not dependent on a mood, as I said, some mood of transcendence or inner silence or no thoughts or none of that is a part of transcendental meditation. We're not mood making peace. We're actually just allowing the physiology, the veins, the muscles, the stress hormones. Everything is affected, the heart, stomach lining. They've actually done studies to see that TM lowers the amount of plaque in the arteries. The NIH has funded over $25 million for the studies, and it's quite curious the things they want to study. You know, when you talk about the TM technique, it doesn't strike me that this is what I've learned about India. I mean, I've learned about many armed gods, and I've learned about chanting their kirtan. There's a bunch of things that are part of Hindu practice and religion, and I also realized, of course, Buddhism came out of India. How is TM related to all these other things? You're referring to things like Ayurvedic medicine, which I know that come from India, but is it all the same thing? Is it all different things? Where does TM come in? Did that originate in 1959? TM comes from the Vedic tradition of India, which is thousands of years old. We just say it's as old as time, and the knowledge of the transcendental meditation technique was passed on from teacher to student and carefully safeguard it so that the correct practice, the understanding of the correct practice, would not be lost. Because if even a slight shift in the understanding of the technique was introduced, it could completely change the outcome. And a lot of this has happened in India in different techniques that now maybe have misunderstood the simplicity of meditation, and now they involve mainly effort, and people spending years and years on a technique of concentration or putting some effort. And they don't get the results that people are now still getting from transcendental meditation because it comes from such a pure tradition. So it's slightly different because Maharishi revived the Vedic knowledge of India that understanding had been kind of neglected for a while, and then he brought that back because there's been a lot of Western influence in India. So India has many, many different influences, but Maharishi had revived the very correct understanding of the Vedic knowledge, including the understanding of the correct practice of transcendental meditation. So the big question, do they do TM in India? If they learn Maharishi, Maharishi, he's transcendental meditation, then they do TM in India. But otherwise they're probably not practicing something that is as effortless and as natural. If they were, if it was just as effortless and as natural, Maharishi has actually said, then that is transcendental meditation. And the knowledge, even though Maharishi was a monk and he was from India, it's not Indian knowledge, he was a Hindu by family, religion and all. But this knowledge is not Hinduism, it's not religious, and it's not actually Indian in the same way that the theory of relativity that came from Einstein was not Jewish, it wasn't German knowledge, it was basic knowledge of the fundamental laws of nature. So this is the science of consciousness and the relationship of consciousness to matter and how there's one unified field underlying all of creation, and that's not just in India, that's everywhere. Just as gravity works everywhere on the earth, and the same thing is when we close our eyes and we take the correct angle, which is what the TM technique sets up that condition, so that we take the correct angle, then automatically the mind will go to that field of increasing charm. And the silence, as we go more and more into the silence, that's more and more charming, so we don't have to force the mind to go there, it just goes there naturally. And even though that experience has been written about by great religious leaders and saints, and it's been experienced in all the different religious traditions, if we take a step backwards, we notice that it's not necessarily a religious phenomenon, it's a natural phenomenon that has been appreciated and described, and you could say, wanted to be achieved by all religions everywhere, and in every religion there is that today said somehow the kingdom of God is within, be still and know that I am God. These are sentiments that actually can be looked at scientifically as well, and so transcendental meditation, the technique itself, it's not a religious practice, it's just simply almost a mechanical practice that allows us to put us in touch with that field of lesser activity. In India, there is now quite a large group practicing transcendental meditation, there's a big organization there and schools where the boys and girls will practice the technique, and even the advanced techniques of the T.M. city program, 200,000 students, so Maharishi originally came out of India to the West, but you could say that India has grown very fond of all the latest technologies and everything influences of Western culture, so now that it became established in the West, then you brought it back to India, and this is something from the West, which is originally from here, but somehow it's grown and grown because Indian people have this innate spirituality, and when they hear this message of the simplicity of transcendental meditation and everything, it resonates with them, it resonates with Indians who are living here, and also with them now, so there is really a very big organization now in India, and it's growing. As you mentioned, it resonates with Indian, but it's quite curious too, it resonates with Native American Indians as well, there's quite a significant impulse that's starting to spread in the Native American community too, in terms of connecting them with their roots in terms of the silence that underlies their medicine and their practice of connecting with the natural laws, so we're seeing quite an upsurge in that community as well. As I've mentioned to you both, Jim and Bill Jean, I'm Quaker, and so I'm used to having an hour of silence, I mean that's the form our worship takes. The TM technique teaches you 20 minutes of meditation in the morning and in the evening, and what I recall quite vividly with my girlfriend was her sitting there with her watching her hand, so she'd do her 20 minutes, because at one point or another you can go to a place that's beyond thoughts, in which point time doesn't have much significance. Does anyone ever disappear, and you know they're gone a few hours, and oops, I came back and I've missed work today? When one practices transcendental meditation, they can very quickly achieve a state of restful alertness. Again, this is these two terms we've been talking about, silence and dynamism, and we also call it pure awareness or transcendental consciousness, but it's a unique state of consciousness in which we are awake inside, and yet deeply resting. Scientific studies have shown the metabolism decreases far below that of sleep, and yet we're still awake, so one can easily keep aware of the time while doing this practice they can check their watch. In fact, after one is used to meditating for some time, they are able to gauge when 20 minutes is up, but sometimes it goes very fast, sometimes it goes slow, and at certain times people could go over. The way we teach it, we don't criticize ourselves or punish ourselves for going over, but it's best if people, when they learn, they hold to a prescribed time, because the benefits gained from transcendental meditation, this is also a very unique part of the program, it's not just a meditation, it's meditation followed by activity, because during the practice of transcendental meditation, such profound changes happen within the physiology when this unique state of awareness is gained, that when we come back into activity, you could say that we harness more of that pure awareness, till over time it's something that's integrated into mind and body, and so it's not so much that we want to always see if we can meditate longer and longer and longer, the benefits are gained through the alternation of rest and activity. But there are times when we offer resonance courses and that when people can come for extended meditations and increased meditations. Again, this is Spirit in Action, and we're visiting today at the Maharishi Invincibility Center here in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm your host, Marc Helpsmeet, for this Northern Spirit Radio production. Go to our website, northernspiritradio.org, and you can listen to this interview over and over again, as well as find links to, for instance, TM.org, and also TwinCitiesTM.com, where you'll find about folks I'm talking to right now on people I'm speaking with, are Jim Horwath and Billie Jean Billman, and they're co-directors of the Maharishi Invincibility Center here in St. Paul. Now, one thing that you both have spoken about was the scientific studies, and you referred to hundreds and lots of money that's been spent on them. Can you give me some specifics? For instance, when I was wondering the halls here in your center, I saw something that said that TM was amazingly effective in helping people stop smoking, getting rid of the nicotine-dependent cigarettes. Give me some of the concrete studies out there that show that this inward technique has a difference in the outer world. I can just comment on that one study. I had a friend who was a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, who was a dentist, so he had a very stressful occupation, and he wanted to take TM to quit smoking. And he said that unlike anything else that he tried, what happened after he learned Transcendental Meditation is that he didn't leave it. It left him. He just forgot to smoke. And what was happening is that he was gaining peer awareness. And so at those times of the day, when he would ordinarily grab for a cigarette, all of a sudden he didn't need to do that because his mind had this new, fresh state of awareness, his nervous system was not in the grip of that desire anymore. It completely changed him, and so that's how he quit smoking. That's how people overcome addictions through practicing Transcendental Meditation. I had mentioned earlier that the NIH has funded over $25 million worth of studies, and this has been primarily in cardiovascular health. And a lot of the studies have been in the African-American community because they find that there's a higher incidence of blood pressure problems. So the studies have looked at before and after with control groups of African-Americans learning TM. And they found that the Transcendental Meditation groups, that their blood pressure, both systolic and diastolic, has been reduced significantly, very similar to what the drugs, except without any serious side effects. And so that's why the NIH keeps funding the studying because it's quite surprising to them that you could actually do this so naturally. The only problem they've had with the studies is that the control people usually don't really want to be part of the studies, they all want to learn TM because they see what's happening with the other people participating. But they have, as when you do these peer reviewed studies that all has to be done according to protocol, they even did a study down in the Atlanta, Georgia area with African-American youth. There were hundreds of high school students and hypertension has now become a high school level problem in that community. And there were very significant drops in the blood pressure and again, these drops in blood pressure and cardiovascular health. One significant study was done with Blue Cross Blue Shield statistics and it took a sampling of 2000 TM meditators and it compared them to the general population of people having Blue Cross Blue Shield. And they found that there was a very, almost too good to be true, actually results in the meditating community that there was 87% less heart disease. There was 55% less cancer amongst the meditators. And in nervous system disease, there was over actually 90% less disease reported amongst the meditators. So across the board, there were only two categories, one of them was pregnancy, there were more pregnancies amongst the meditators than the normal population, for some reason. But everything else with a huge dramatic and the implications for healthcare and for savings in the healthcare system is just some simple mental technique that we can practice that has such a profound influence on potential savings in the healthcare system. It really needs to be looked at very, very seriously. And the sad thing is this research was done like two decades ago and no one, you know, it's taken two decades to get the attention and it's been replicated in Canada, the same thing. It's much easier to study actually up there because everything is socialized and the records are very, very easy to get a hold of. The same sort of reductions, there were healthcare savings of 21% over three years that were documented to the Canadian healthcare system for TM meditators. This is something we should really, really all be looking into and embracing. And companies that are having to deal with the high cost of health insurance, even if they're not self-insuring, would seriously look at implementing transit and implementation as part of their workplace programs. Because this will only save them, not only the healthcare costs, but it will increase creativity and productivity and job satisfaction amongst all their employees. There's another study that's been done and it's been out for several years called reversal of the biological effects of aging. In this study, more than 40 different measurements that are associated with aging were looked at in two groups, meditating group and non-meditating group. And what they found with the meditators was reversal in every single category, things that decline with aging, they found a complete reversal with those practitioners of transit and implementation. So we could say that it reverses the biological aging. Generally, another study that was done was showing that people that have been meditating five years or more generally show that their biological age is 12 to 15 years younger than their chronological age. And this is using statistics from insurance companies which need to measure aging in order to prescribe their policies. Can they do double blind studies? I don't think you can do double blind studies because people know if they're meditating or not. Actually, I don't know how to answer that question. But I would say that most of the studies, especially in the last ten years, have been peer reviewed. And so they're significant and the P factors are very significant. Almost all the studies have incredible P factors in terms of their reliability of the data. TM has gotten kind of a bad rap about the scientific research almost as if we've paid people to research like maybe the drug industries do or that we've done our own research and it's not good scientific research. But actually, if you look into it, that's really not the case. There might have been one or two studies over the years that were not very good science but out of more than 600 studies. I mean, these were done at Yale and Harvard and Stanford and the equivalents in Germany and Paris and there just really hasn't been any other technique that's been researched like this. And I think the technique itself lends itself, the program itself being simple and effortless, easy to learn, easy to teach and easy for people to practice at home. They don't need paraphernalia to do it, you know, has made it so easy to research. You know, something that I neglected to ask you and I'm sure people are going to have questions about. I think there's a pretty hefty price tag connected with taking the course. So I want to ask about that. The price, I think, is over $2,000 or something like that to take what you said is a pretty short course. Why does it cost so much? Well, I want to maybe run through the prices then because right now through May some changes have been made just because the economy is in such a kind of a hardship situation. So for a working adult, the price is generally 2,000, but there's 25% discount now, so it would be 1,500 for a working adult. For a student or children, it's generally 1,000. Now there would be 25% off that, so it'd be 750. If a spouse learns at the same time as one spouse takes it and then another spouse learns within 30 days, then that's half off minus the discount. So that, again, would be $750. And if children learn at the same time, so families learn together, the child's rate is generally 1,000, but they can learn for 500 in terms of the family package. But there's also 25% off that, so the price now for a child to learn along with mother and father through the end of May is $375. I hope that's not too confusing, but now to talk about the price, I'm fond of giving even one single research study on our introductory presentation and then stopping and then reflecting on the value of that. So if we take one study that Billie Jean mentioned and see this comparison of 2,000 people that were practicing TM with 2,000 that were not and shown that they had 87% less risk of cardiovascular disease, how much would that be worth considering that is one single study in 600, that's all the benefits gained. The other thing to mention is that because TM is so efficient and so easy and it's a lifetime program that we don't charge over and over again, it's just one charge for the whole life. So for a practitioner that has been doing this technique for 20 years or maybe 30 years, it's minuscule, it's almost nothing. And when we want to answer the question, why do you have to charge so much? But the fees are different in different parts of the world and in the West we do take up a lot of the cost of providing the service in some of the less developed countries. And so our fees here, but also we feel we have a huge responsibility to make sure that this knowledge does not get diluted and does not disappear. We feel we finally now the technology for creating permanent world peace and enlightenment for everyone has actually been made available to human beings in mass. I mean, you may think that because of the price tag that it's not available in mass, but last year the David Lynch Foundation was able to raise enough scholarship money amongst well-wishers, people that care about kids so that 100,000 children around the world got to learn TM and they didn't have to pay anything. Their schools learned it, they learned it. And that was in Latin America and across Asia and across the United States. And this concert, this benefit concert that was done earlier in April where the Beatles sang and Donovan and Cheryl Crow and Eddie Vedder and others. This concert, their goal was to raise enough so that there could be a million children across the world learned. If we're really going to create something as significant as permanent world peace, then we have to have a stable, good operating organization. And so when you think of that, these fees are actually not, they're not out of proportion to what's actually being structured all around the world in this very exciting time. Another comment is that I think if you look across the whole self-development industry, all these fitness centers and their yoga centers that charge package rates for the quarter or monthly rates or yearly rates, whatever. And people that are involved with those over a number of years in order to try to achieve some level of physical fitness or immunity from disease, that they would spend even more than that in terms of paying incrementally through their memberships. But this is a one-time fee for life and a program that one can practice. And we offer this free follow-up checking so that one never feels lost, that they just learned this in four days and then that we didn't have any recourse to the center. These centers are here as a resource for people throughout their life. So it is quite a value-added program. And there's one reason you didn't mention, but I'm going to take a stab at that and you tell me if this is true. I've certainly experienced it with a number of organizations, concerts, activities. If you charge nothing for an event, people think it's worth nothing and therefore they don't value it. But if you raise the price, people say, "Gee, this must be something valuable. I want to do the work to get into this." Is that part of the thinking or does that never come up? It's a very Western way of thinking and it certainly wasn't the way that Maharshi structured the fees initially. But I think he saw in the West that people are used to paying for what they value and they don't value unless they pay something. Some of the other cultures around the world where Tian is taught just as much as it is here. They don't have those same sets of barriers, you could say. And so the fee structure is a little different there. We talked about a number of other scientific studies about personal health, but I believe there are studies out there also about peace and crime, violence, how those are affected. At one point, I remember reading something about the square root of 1% of the population and how that has some effect. Could you talk about some of those studies and what scope they've been done on? I'm pretty sure that there's some studies around Washington, D.C. Well, that's a very interesting topic and there have been actually 52 different scientific studies on either the super radiance effect that you referred to, the square root of 1% of a population practicing transcendental meditation creates a macroscopic coherence in collective consciousness. That's what you're referring to. And the last demonstration of that we did as an organization was in 1993 in Washington, D.C. And we went to the police chief in Washington, D.C. ahead of time, asked him if he would like us to drop the crime rate by 20% this summer, the summer of '93. It was really hot and steamy in Washington, D.C. that summer. He laughed and said, "Yes, it would take, sure, go ahead," he said, "but it'll take snowstorms in July in order to drop the crime rate here." So we didn't have snowstorms, but we did have 4,000 plus people descend, actually from all over the world, people paid to come to participate to meditate, to lower the crime rate by 20% in Washington, D.C. And this was a culmination study as far as the TM organization was concerned because there had been many studies done up until that time. And it took a lot to get any of them published because people didn't want to believe them, the editors didn't want to believe. But they had been published now for 10 years up to that point, but still it was not being taken seriously, the science part of it. So they got an impeccable group of 20 different research institutions and scientists well known and definitely not practitioners of transcendental meditation to design the study and agree upon ahead of time how they were going to measure it. And so, sure enough, at the end of the assembly, when the peak numbers were there all in mass, the crime rate in Washington, D.C., did drop just 19%, but it wasn't quite 20%. And so the prediction was there. It's a beautiful phenomenon, and Jim had referred earlier to this superconductor, superconductor, super fluid level of nature where there is coherence that goes on in the structure. This is a different level of functioning. So we have the Maharishi effect, the Maharishi effect, which is 1% of the population practicing the transcendental meditation, the TM, and they can be living all over the city. And in 1974, there were 11 cities. This was the first study where 1% of the population learned TM, and in those cities, the crime rate dramatically dropped. And it had been on the rise each year, according to the FBI statistics, so it was quite a surprise in those cities. And in the control cities, as it was predicted, the crime rate had increased. About the same percentage that it had decreased, about 15% on average, decrease in the TM cities, and 15% increase in those cities that were the control cities. So that's the Maharishi effect, 1% of the population meditating. Well, that's a huge number for the whole world, right? 60 million people, at least, meditating. And so far, there have only been about 6, 7 million people learning TM across the world. So in the mid-80s, Maharishi got very serious about, "We have to hurry this up," because remember he came out to teach transcendental meditation for one reason, and that was to end suffering for all of mankind. And he said it wasn't going to happen, just teaching TM. So he looked more closely into the Vedic literature and into the records of enlightened sages. And he developed another program called the TM City Program. So that's practiced in addition with TM. It's an advanced program that includes yoga sutras of Patanjali, including the yogic flying technique. This is actually a technique where it's an extension of mind-body coordination. Now we say arm lift, and we can lift our arm, right? We want to lift our leg, we can lift our leg. But if we're just sitting on the floor and we say body lift, it doesn't usually come off the ground. But in yogic flying, it actually lifts up off the ground. Now, this technique in itself is nice to practice. We feel very happy when we're practicing it. But the significance is in what's happening inside the physiology, inside the brain. At those points when the body actually lifts up off the ground, the brain is functioning in a highly coherent fashion. There is this phenomenon. It's the most effective way to experience global brain coherence. That is the whole brain, all the different parts of the brain, not just the right and left hemisphere in the front and the back, but the whole brain starts to function, first of all, together, and it's functioning in concert with synchrony. When this technique, this group of techniques, the TM and the TM City program, including the yogic flying, are practiced together in one place by the square root of 1% of the population. Then you get that same macroscopic coherence as we saw with 1%. So, for instance, if we take the world, instead of needing 60 million people practicing TM morning and evening, we just need the square root of 1% or square root of 60 million, which is 6,000. It's a lot easier, or it should be, a lot easier to achieve 6,000 people in one place morning and evening. Somewhere in the world, then it is to get 60 million at the rate. Maharishi was teaching, it seemed like that was a better way to go. So, in the last two decades of his life, he spent just arduously trying to convince governments all over the world to create peace-creating wings of the military. Just take 1% of the military and have them practice these advanced techniques, and you will create national invincibility. You will have a national armor of peace that will surround your country. You can imagine there were countries that looked into it, like Mozambique looked into it, and it started to work. Senegal, the whole prison system, learned to meditate in Senegal in the '80s. And every single prisoner, and they just had to close the prisons because they didn't need them anymore. It was absolutely dramatic and drastic, but because of all the instability and there was no way to maintain the coherence, it wasn't enough for all of Africa, it disintegrated after a while, the whole thing. And so, as far as permanent peace, world peace, this is now possible. It has not been possible, up until now, before these dynamics of collective consciousness and how to reduce stress and collective consciousness. Because terrorism and war is just a bubbling up of too much tension in collective consciousness. We solve that, and with these groups, it creates this like on the superfluid and superconductive levels of physics, it sets up these frictionless flows that don't stop. And so, the plan now is every continent to establish these peace-creating groups, and in every country. So that for time immemorial, that what we won't just achieve for a few minutes, like we did in Washington, D.C., are a few weeks. And what we did in Iowa back in 1983, we had 7,000 people for three weeks, and there were incredible changes in the world during those three weeks. But as soon as the group disbands, everybody has to go back to work, or back to school, or whatever it is. So what's happened in Iowa is they've made an invincible America course, and some well-wishers, some benevolent individuals have stepped up, and they're funding that program a million dollars a month, so that meditators can be. This is in Fairfield, Iowa, you wouldn't believe it, but they can actually, this is a new profession in America, that you can now be paid to create coherence and peace for your nation. And since the military hasn't, and the United States military hasn't picked it up yet, they haven't quite figured it out, maybe it'll happen under Obama, who knows, but we just went ahead with well-wishers, and are trying to achieve that anyway, so that the nation doesn't dissolve. Wow, such a wealth of information. Again, I want to remind people, you can always find these links on my site, northernspiritradio.org, but two of the places you want to check out are TM.org, and for the Twin Cities, the new center here, the Marishi Immensibility Center, you can check out Twin Cities TM.com. Thank you so much, Jim and Billie Jean, for spending your time here, and for help doing your bit to bring peace and coherence to a very incoherent world. You're welcome. It's been our pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING] Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup. They slid the wild because they slip away across the universe. Those of sorrow waves of joy are drifting through my open mind, assessing and caressing me. [MUSIC PLAYING] That was, of course, a tidbit from the Beatles' song "Across the Universe," touching on their experience with transcendental meditation. For Spirit in Action Today, we are at the new St. Paul, Minnesota, Marishi Invincibility Center, with its co-directors, Billie Jean Billman and Jim Horweth. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World," performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.