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Comment by ana maria carvalho on October 5, 2009 at 4:35am

I voted
Create genocide monitoring and alert system

Comment by Shells on October 5, 2009 at 1:49am

Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists - I voted for this category - we need all people in all areas to make a positive and peaceful change. Good luck and peace to the Universe.

We are light! Photo by mdl, 09-09

Comment by pascal on October 5, 2009 at 12:51am

Hello,
I believe all causes carry valuable meaning

My vote goes to the project that helps build schools ans stimultes social entepreneurship
Educate-liberate
Be well
Pascal

Comment by Huri Cinar on October 4, 2009 at 11:50pm

Thank you,David and so many people with fabulous ideas to make this world a better place to live in for your efforts.I voted for making educational materials available online for free! I believe that many people will benefit in this way and they will try to make a difference as well.

Comment by Rev. Kriss Siler on October 4, 2009 at 10:56pm

Thanks for the reminder to submit my vote, David.

Blessings of Loving Oneness to all,
Rev. Kriss Siler,
Spiritual Peacemaking Minister
Nondenominational, Nonsectarian

Comment by Irit Hakim-Keller on October 4, 2009 at 10:29pm

Hi David,
It wasn't very easy to decide which one to vote - there are several very good big ideas.

THank you.

Comment by Barbara Arndt on October 4, 2009 at 8:33pm

Not that I think that the other suggestions are less important. Humanity has to change on so many levels in order to survive. We have no where else to go.
Barbara

Comment by Barbara Arndt on October 4, 2009 at 8:30pm

Hi David,
just cast my vote in favour for Create genocide monitoring and alert system
Namaste Barbara

Comment by Ciro Liuzzi on October 4, 2009 at 8:06pm

www.imipeu.ning.com
Hello David, thanks for my request for a vote. I voted in an idea that I think is just cause for a better world.
However, do not underestimate my cause that I carry on for over 5 years alone.
Right to life free movement of persons and against racial discrimination.
Against the unjust laws of my country Italy and discrimination on immigrants.
No one on Earth and illegal!
www.imipeu.ning.com
In defense of the rights of man on earth!

PER PERSON AN ENTIRE WORLD!

Ciro Liuzzi.

Comment by Chris-tea-fur, here 4U2as1 on October 4, 2009 at 8:05pm

I know these two articles are posting seemingly long, so please forgive me, but they really are some of the most influential work that has been done in a long time. The following article is the one that mentions the square root of 1% finding!

1983: "Global Maharishi Effect" Defuses Cold War Tensions

by David Hughes

(This article first appeared in Transcendental Meditation News, May 2001)

The first group of Yogic Flyers large enough to produce the "Global Maharishi Effect" in modern times demonstrated the vital importance of being able to produce a silent, invincible influence of peace in world consciousness.

The group was assembled at Maharishi University of Management at very short notice in the closing weeks of 1983, at a time of Cold War tensions that some historians now believe posed as much threat of nuclear war as did the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Throughout 1983 tensions had been building, with US plans for a "Star Wars" defence system, the deployment of American Cruise missiles at bases in England, and the hard-line rhetoric of the Reagan administration towards the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union.

From the Russian perspective, Western intentions were viewed as serious preparations for a nuclear war. In September 1983, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko warned: "The world situation is now slipping towards a very dangerous situation."

"Few, until now, knew just how serious," commented The Sunday Times in 1997, when Soviet archives from the period were accessed. Top-secret documents revealed that the Russians believed "They were heading for war," according to Beatrice Heuser, a military historian from King's College, quoted in the newspaper. "It had gone beyond rhetoric," she said.

East German documents detailed how by the end of November 1983 Soviet bombers were on standby for a possible pre-emptive attack on Britain and other American allies, with the KGB believing that a forthcoming NATO exercise could be a full-scale nuclear assault. In England, "Mrs Thatcher was warned by MI6 that the game of brinkmanship in late 1983 risked a disastrous outcome," according to The Sunday Times. In an article entitled "Kremlin was poised to launch nuclear strike," the newspaper commented that "The cold war had reached boiling point."

Interestingly, one of the analogies Maharishi makes for the impact of a group of Yogic Flyers on rising tension and conflict is that just a few drops of cold water sprinkled on a pan of boiling milk, will instantly stop it boiling over.

History records that, against the odds, there was no disastrous outcome in the winter of 1983. Only months later, Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev were meeting in Helsinki and the road to the end of the Cold War was open. What had happened in the meantime?

Historians may find it of interest that at the end of November 1983, Maharishi, in the words of Dr Bevan Morris a "quiet guardian of all nations", announced an immediate

World Peace Assembly to give the world a "Taste of Utopia".

Just three weeks later, over seven thousand Yogic Flyers from 56 countries assembled in the Golden Domes of Maharishi University of Management (then Maharishi International University), in Fairfield, Iowa. The number - the square root of one per cent of the world's population - was large enough to create an influence of coherence and positivity in the whole world consciousness, according to research up to that time.

Measurements of this "Global Maharishi Effect", named after Maharishi who predicted it in the early 'sixties, was recorded at the time of the Taste of Utopia assembly in such effects as: decreased international conflict, increased progress by heads of state to reverse prior negative trends, as well as decreased traffic fatalities and decreased infectious diseases in the US, reduced violence in the Lebanon, and a global upsurge of positivity and optimism as reflected in a rise in worldwide economic indices.

Overwhelming evidence

The evidence from such research conducted on this and other World Peace Assemblies became overwhelming during the following decade. As Dr John Hagelin said in his 1998 book Manual for a Perfect Government: "During the last 20 years, diffusing social stress and resolving international conflict through collective practice of the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programme has amassed more scientific evidence than any previous approach in the history of the social sciences. This approach has repeatedly proven its ability to quell violence and to stop open warfare, even in areas where deep-seated tensions and historic animosities have persisted for generations.

"If, according to the UNESCO Charter, ‘War begins in the minds of men,’ then it can easily end in the far more fundamental experience of Pure Consciousness, which underlies and unites us all."

These Assemblies, and the daily experience of millions of people practising TM around the world, have been unseen safety factors in world events in recent decades.

Historians may one day chronicle the many instances over the past fifty years where timely drops of water have been sprinkled on boiling milk, and conclude that the lack of a nuclear holocaust was due to more than the aptly-named MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) strategy adopted by the Cold War powers.

With the assembling of the first permanent group of 7,000 Yogic Flyers in India at the end of the 1980s, the Cold War effectively came to an end with the astonishingly peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and eventually the Warsaw Pact. Yet, with the group dispersed in the past decade due to lack of funds, world peace has remained out of reach and serious international tensions are again in the news. The impact of several permanent groups of Yogic Flyers would change all that forever, in ways that would go far beyond merely achieving world peace.

Heaven on Earth

"For Maharishi, establishing permanent, irreversible world peace is only the beginning," commented Dr Robert Keith Wallace in his 1992 book The Physiology of Consciousness (written when the number of Yogic Flyers in a group required to create the Global Maharishi Effect was 7,000, rather than today's 8,000 for the larger world population of six billion): "The effect of having several permanent groups of 7,000, he has said many times, will be not only world peace, but a quality of life for everyone on earth so beautiful that it could only be called ‘heavenly’.

"Records of Vedic civilisation describe a time of peace so profound and long lasting that it was referred to as ‘Heaven on Earth’. Since Maharishi first came out from the Himalayas in 1957 to teach Transcendental Meditation, the goal of all his programmes has always been to create Heaven on Earth once again, in this generation."

Now, with the assembling of the first three groups of 8,000 Yogic Flying Vedic Pandits in India, this goal is about to become a reality.

Ref: D.W. Orme-Johnson, C.N. Alexander, J.L. Davies, H.M. Chandler, and W.E. Larimore, International Peace Project in the Middle East, "The Effects of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field". This study was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, 32 (1988) 776 - 812, and was noted by the journal's editors for its high standard.

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