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Renowned quantum physicist John Hagelin was the Natural Law Party candidate for the presidency in 2000. He has taken a fascinating and innovative peace proposal to congress and the White House, and reports open-minded interest from the administration. SPIRITUAL AWAKENING IN THE US GOVERNMENT? Dr. John Hagelin

John Hagelin is a world authority in unified quantum field theories. His articles on electroweak unification, grand unification, supersymmetry, and cosmology include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences.

I am John Hagelin, and I am the director of Maharishi University of Management's Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy. I am calling to report on what I think is some quite surprising progress, I think, here in the capital city of Washington, DC, in our efforts to find support - both public support and private support - for our critical program to bring peace to the world, to defuse the acute ethnic and religious and political tensions that are fueling terrorism and threatening to spread this conflict further to different countries.

The U.S. is contemplating where to take the war next. It's these sorts of tensions, fueling our response to terrorism and fueling terrorism itself, that we can defuse and undercut easily through the approach of reducing societal stress and tension and creating indomitable coherence and unity in the collective consciousness in the world.

I have had the great honor and really wonderful joy of presenting this practical - certainly innovative, but practical - scientifically- proven proposal, this very cost-effective proposal, to take the pressure off our nation's defenses against terrorism and global defenses against terrorism, and to diffuse the ethnic conflicts and social conflicts that have really plagued humankind for generations.

I was dispatched to Washington, DC, to see whether the U.S. government would be responsive to an entirely different approach to safeguarding our country against terrorism. And I have found during the course of this month, in meeting after meeting with the top levels of government - the White House, the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Army, the House, the Senate - I have found an absolutely unprecedented response that I certainly would not have expected based upon the years I have spent in Washington, DC, promoting innovative solutions.

People recognize here that our nation's defenses against terrorism, and the world's defenses, are remarkably porous. Nothing, for example, that has ever been conceived - including the hundred-billion-dollar missile defense shield - would have provided any security, any safety, against the attacks of September 11, or against the anthrax threat that has come since.

So our defenses against terrorism are absolutely porous. And the government is expending, as you know, tens of billions of dollars in this global effort to stamp out terrorism, and doing it in a way that is at best very inefficient.

In talking in the White House, for example, when I was invited back for a further presentation recently, I asked the Special Assistant to the President for Homeland Defense, "Even if we succeed in martyring bin Laden, will that really prevent new people, new recruits, from taking up this fanatical cause?"

And he said that he did not believe that it would. Nobody I talked to thought that martyring bin Laden was going to put a stop to, or even decrease, the number of people who were swept up in this conflagration, this disease of terrorism.

So our defenses are thin, and the approach is wanting. And I have never seen the government, frankly, so humble, or so open to innovative solutions.

The Defense Department has published a public call to Hollywood and to the general public for ideas on how we can outsmart and somehow defend ourselves against terrorism. But ideas that are practical and effective and scientifically proven have not been forthcoming.

Our effort, even though it is certainly "outside the box" of what has been considered in the past, is the only approach that has really been backed by scientific research. And it has received a tremendous audience and tremendous response.

Following my presidential candidacy, I founded the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy to put forth forward-looking, scientifically proven, prevention-oriented solutions in harmony with Natural Law.

Since then, we have been working with the government. One idea we have put forth, for example, is to support preventive medicine. Preventive medicine is verifiably cost effective. It is an idea which, you would think, is simply common sense. It is undeniably effective. Nevertheless, the idea once enraged certain Congressmen - members of the Republican Party and the House, for example.

So times have changed, for what we are finding now is absolutely, completely different.

And what we are presenting, certainly, is far more avant garde, far more cutting edge, than preventive medicine. Because really, the approach we are talking about is a technology of consciousness - harnessing, accessing, stimulating, and applying - for the first time in history - the most powerful field of Natural Law, the Unified Field.

We are talking about harnessing this Unified Field that is at the foundation of the universe, and using it to generate indomitable waves of unity and positivity, spreading that influence into the collective consciousness of the world.

We propose doing this through a group of professionals - 40,000 experts created and cost-effectively sustained in India, thousands of miles from the United States.

This is the proposal, scientifically founded, but certainly far beyond the realm of what has been considered in the context of our defense and foreign ministry before. This is the policy - 40,000 experts, stimulating and enlivening unity in the collective consciousness of the world, defusing acute social, religious, ethnic, and political tensions.

We have made this proposal based upon fifty previous studies that have appeared in the world's top scientific journals.

And this is the proposal that has been met with such remarkable response!

Starting from Ground Zero

So, for example, we have spoken to members of Congress. And typically, our proposal has had enough merit on the surface that we have gotten through the appointment secretaries and scheduled the appointments. But generally speaking, by the time we sit down across from them, the congressmen, the senators, have not really had an opportunity to be briefed on the nature of the solution we are proposing. And that means we are usually starting from ground zero.

By "we," I am referring to others who have helped. For example, sometimes I have had the good fortune to bring with me in these meetings Dr. Peter Salk, son of Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the Salk vaccine. Also, Dr. Jonas Salk himself has helped, and Dr. David Edwards, a very esteemed professor of political science at the University of Texas in Austin who has written ten textbooks on the subject of politics, foreign policy, and conflict mediation. Also there are a large number of non-meditating scientists who in the past have been in a position to review our research for publication and who have conducted research in the context of our Washington, DC, crime reduction study and other studies.

These experts who come to the meetings with me represent a large and growing number of scientists who will absolutely attest to the scientific reality and the effectiveness of the approach that we are promoting.

A Preventive Approach

So, armed in many cases with this very powerful, credentialed scientific team, we go into offices of senators and congressmen. We are starting at ground zero, sitting across from an often surprised and even stunned member of Congress, who may sit poker-faced for five or ten minutes.

And then, gradually, we see him visibly soften as he is exposed to the logic - the very simple and compelling logic - that Maharishi himself, in conversations I have had with him, has suggested is so common sense and undeniable.

For example, crime and violence have been with us in every generation. And yet in every generation there has been a penal code, meting out punishments in response to crime. So this approach has been ineffective, and violence has persisted, generation after generation. What we need, and what everybody recognizes that we need today, is an effective preventive approach. Because the punishment of crime is not preventive. It punishes people once the crimes have been committed. And obviously the penal code's small component of deterrence is not enough.

And punishment is of course absolutely meaningless when it comes to suicide bombers who are ready to give their lives in order to claim the lives of others. What possible use could the threat of punishment be to perpetrators of these desperate fanatical acts of terrorism? Obviously, none.

Something that is truly preventive in nature is obviously what is needed. So that logic is extremely compelling. And it's compelling to remind the members of Congress that they actually have nothing new to offer this new situation. That the mightiest countries in the world, with their $300 billion defense budgets, have absolutely no capability of defending ourselves effectively against this.

Quantum Physics and Societal Coherence: A Recent Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery

Recent scientific discoveries are with us. The Nobel Prize that was awarded three weeks ago now for physics is a direct experimental confirmation of the principles of societal coherence that we are implementing in our collective meditation approach.

For those who haven't been following the science news, I'll quickly remind you of what this Nobel prize-winning discovery was. It's quite remarkable and directly applicable. It demonstrates the exact principles of collective consciousness that we are applying in our proposals to prevent violence and terrorism.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to a very, very remarkable experiment confirming something that Einstein and the Indian physicist Bose predicted back in the 1920s.

And today's scientists did was to take atoms - rubidium atoms - and slow them down using sophisticated laser techniques.

Simply by slowing the atom downs, the quantum mechanical nature of the atom began to become more and more evident, because the wave function of the atom began to spread.

These wave functions are ordinarily so small that the atoms appear effectively to be particulate in nature. But when the particles are slowed down - as the momentum goes toward zero - the wave function goes toward infinity. Practically speaking, the wave function reaches a few millimeters in size, which is large for an atom. And when that happens, you begin to see that these are not atoms at all. These are just waves of some purely abstract "field of rubidiumness."

That's all an atom is. A rubidium atom is just a wave in an abstract ocean of existence - in this case, a "field of rubidiumness."

So when these rubidium wave functions become so big, you start to see these so-called particles bending around corners and behaving like waves - refracting, defracting, interfering with each other.

And when the waves get so big that they start to overlap one another, then something even more remarkable happens. The wave functions lose their individual identities totally, and the whole assemblage of atoms becomes one giant wave of intelligence. One giant wave of flowing intelligence. One wave, one macroscopic wave of this absolutely abstract field of rubidiumness. So a rubidium atom is no more an elementary particle than I am, or than you are.

These are not elementary particles. These are big, fat atoms with hundreds of particles in them. And what this shows is that even big systems, even complicated systems like you and me - we slow down when we are systematically de-excited. And when we slow down, we lose that individual existence and we all become what we are anyway - waves of a common field, a universal field of intelligence.

So in this collective practice of Transcendental Meditation and its advanced techniques from the Vedic tradition of India, specific mantras are compiled to produce a particular resonance of unity and peace. And when these waves, these vibrations, are emitted ensemble by a group, an influence is created that is truly global. Individual consciousness, as it transcends, loses that individual smallness and becomes one flowing impulse of wholeness.

The Maharishi Effect

Anyway, at these meetings, in describing the mechanics of what is called the Maharishi Effect, we use some very obvious examples. For example, there is the fact that two loudspeakers, moved close together, produce four times the sound of a single loudspeaker, because the coherent superposition of sound - the intensity of that sound, the power of the sound - grows as N-squared: the number of the loudspeakers squared. Three loudspeakers close together produce the sound of nine individual loudspeakers. That's a very universal, elementary principle of constructive interference.

But we are adding to that, now, a uniquely quantum mechanical mechanism such as this rubidium example, which shows us two things: From the experiment, we know that when a rubidium atom is in the vicinity of other rubidium atoms, each of those atoms displays an increased tendency to transcend, to go global or unmanifest, to become universal in the presence of others. That's called Bose Statistics. The experiment also illustrates the disappearance of individuality - the expansion of individuality to become universality.

These mechanisms are identical to the mechanism of individual consciousnesses displaying an increased inherent tendency to become global, to transcend as a group.

These scientific tests show that an individual mind, fully expanded, is global. And so this trained group of experts will have an influence, as a whole, far more than the sum of the individual parts.

Science is with us, in both theory and experiment.

In these last few months, remarkably, some of the greatest studies verifying empirically this phenomenon of collective consciousness have appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals - top journals. These include the Lebanon study by Professor John Davies, Professor Skip Alexander, and others, where the collective application of Maharishi's TM and TM-Sidhi program was used seven times to reduce war deaths by an average of 71 percent.

These seven consecutive replications lowered war related injuries and increased progress toward peace with a statistical confidence that was absolutely unprecedented in the history of social science.

Unprecedented Understanding and Acceptance

Now, talking to congressmen, talking to people in the White House, in the National Security Council, in the Secretary of State's office, the Department of Defense, and the Army - people who have promised, collectively, to provide for the security of our country and yet have been absolutely unable to deliver on that promise - it took these people only ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes - thirty minutes sometimes - to comprehend the gravity, the importance, the significance of this scientific breakthrough, and see that it is really an answer to their prayers.

So these were very, very interesting meetings, very sobering. In almost every case, the individual said, "I am surprised at the degree to which I get what you are saying and the degree to which I find myself fully in support of your proposal. I probably would not have acted this way, responded this way, prior to the 11th of September."

But everything has changed. And the collective consciousness in the country significantly, profoundly, has changed since that time - there is more humility, and more need to recognize the shortcomings of our outmoded technology of defense-based-upon-offense.

Stories of Individual Responses

In the Congress, there was this one Democratic Congressman who is a member of the science committee. And he was a very thoughtful man, and absolutely, sternly silent at the beginning of our presentation. And he began to offer comments indicating that he understood.

By the end of this thirty-minute or forty-minute meeting, he was on the phone. He called three billionaires from his constituency on our behalf. He was calling other members of Congress, members of the terrorism committee of Congress, and the science committee of Congress, and setting up more meetings for us, including some very top people - including Nancy Pulosi [D-San Francisco], the newly elected minority whip.

And everybody - everybody - responded in the same way. Republicans and Democrats. Representative Wayne Gilcrest [R-MD] not only phoned some very important billionaires, but he also formed a committee, a group of congressmen with whom we have already met to implement support of our effort.

Congressman Kucinich - widely beloved, and known for his legislation to create a Department of Peace within the U.S. government - drafted an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill. That is a $300- plus billion bill to defend the country, and his amendment actually proposes to fund a group of 40,000 experts of these Vedic technologies of consciousness in India. And it has powerful support from both Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives - a tremendously unprecedented thing.

The Republican-led Congress needed to fuel the war machine and so it had cut down discussion of further amendment. So this amendment didn't receive a full hearing in the Congress. But two to three weeks after our arrival and the commencement of this project, the support was such that there was in fact an amendment to our Defense Appropriations Bill to cover this approach. And members in the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department also received tremendous support and confidence from Congress for their own efforts to implement what we were talking about.

I remember our meeting with Congressman Christopher Shays (R-CT), because he was one of the only members of congress, the Administration, the Army, the National Security Council, the State Department, or the White House who didn't seem to be aware of my previous presidential candidacy. He didn't recognize me.

After a few moments of our discussion, he interrupted and said, "This sounds a lot like the Natural Law Party."

I looked at him, and then I looked at my watch and realized that I didn't have a lot of time. So I just said, "Yeah, the Natural Law Party supported this approach because it is proven and prevention-oriented and in harmony with Natural Law."

And then I went on, but Shays interrupted me again. "You know, I'm surprised by the fact that I get this," he said. "I totally get this. But nobody else will. Politically, you're not going to make any progress. I get this, but others won't."

And I said, "Just wait and see. Because everybody has been telling me they get this but other people aren't going to get this. Everybody has said exactly the same thing."

And indeed, this is what we found.

Congressmen Reading the Vedas

Now, fortunately, there is a coordination of these people who thought they were loners, but are not.

Gilcrest, for example, thought he was a loner; he was reading books on physics and consciousness. He was fascinated. He didn't care about the empirical practicalities, he wanted to go deep into the knowledge of the Veda and of the Unified Field, and of Consciousness. And he thought he was completely a loner in the Congress.

But now these people are getting networked to the point where an amendment was drafted and ready to be supported by both parties.

Deflating the Influence of Terrorism

In the White House, in our second meeting, we were invited back for a wonderful meeting with the Special Assistant to the President for Homeland Security - a very intelligent person who brought also with her another member of the president's staff. And the questions were absolutely brilliant.

And I know one of the questions was, "Well, you know, I recognize that you can substantially reduce the incidence of terrorism by diffusing societal stress and religious and ethnic tensions through your technology. But can you also somehow reduce the disproportionate influence of a terrorist act?

He cited the example of anthrax - five letters sent by one person, and the whole Senate is practically shut down. People are afraid to go out and shop. A hugely disproportionate effect. And he said, "Can you inoculate the country against these excessive psychological vulnerabilities and mood swings?"

And I cited, of course, the research on the stock market and the national mood, and the instability becoming a great stability, with growth of optimism and confidence, and so forth. And he was very, very excited about that.

He said, "But can you possibly consider this for for us? Not just in India? What about creating a group here, for us, in the United States, maybe five or ten thousand - to create more of a coherent influence in this country?" [This question causes great hilarity on the part of those listening to the conference call.]

And I said, "Well, I normally don't grant such favors [pause for extended laughter], but you know, if the government pays for it and it's within the military, I could conceive of a prevention wing of the military in this country as well. It wouldn't be as cost-effective. But, you know, anything is possible." [More laughter. The listeners know that the National Law Party has been offering this plan to every president since Reagan.]

The "Red Line Process": Intimations for the Future

And so the questions were really good. And right now, someone very high in the state department - a name that you probably know, but I need to be a little bit quiet about this - anyway, someone very high is preparing briefing papers. What this means is that a careful, scientific review of our proposal will be circulated in the White House and the Department of State in what's called the "red line" process.

The red line process is very different from "red tape." Nothing ever happens with red tape, but "red line" means that this proposal will not stop, will not rest, until it is either implemented or - for one reason or another - rejected. So hopefully within a day or two that brief will be circulating in the White House.

Also, an even more remarkable response is anticipated within a few weeks from the Department of State, and I won't go a great deal into that right now either.

But anyway, the Department of Defense and the advanced research programs there are having tremendous meetings and further meetings and follow-up meetings. These people are incredibly busy.

The Difference: Now and Then

Maharishi himself found it extremely auspicious - "significant" was his word - that we were being received and invited with such dignity into the White House at higher level meetings than we have ever, ever experienced before.

In the past, we have had the kind of meetings where somebody who plays golf with the President says something, or where we are playing chess or bridge and something gets said, all very indirect. We have never before had the sort of access to the White House or the departments of state and defense or the congress that we have had in these last few weeks.

Whether something practical comes out of it or not in terms of funding - and I think it will - what is happening is that this thinking is permeating the highest levels of government to the point where it is easier and easier in every meeting for the people we are talking to to deeply comprehend what we are saying.

It is as though a critical mass has been met. We are bumping into congressmen now who are running around with our proposal in their hands

Response from the Private Sector

Some of these calls from Congress and some of the calls are resulting in meetings with billionaires and multimillionaires. And some of these people are really, really responding.

I'll just mention one. Michael Milken is a very interesting, very wonderful person. He is the person who is rather notorious (served time) for introducing the concept of high-yield (junk) bonds as an effective investment instrument. That created a bit of a frenzy, and he ended up - that whole industry ended up - in some difficulty. But he's a brilliant man. I'd say he's a genius. And he's very philanthropic, very compassionate. And he is thinking deeply and contacting people within his circle of influence, which is a huge circle of influence.

I still suspect that it will be the private sector that responds first. That the government will be more comfortable in year two or year three.

We need these innovators, these early innovators, as a startup venture to get this process moving.

To view the proposal that so many congressman are "running around with in their hands" and that is opening so many doors in the private sector, please visit Permanentpeace.org.

John Hagelin is a world authority in unified quantum field theories. His articles on electroweak unification, grand unification, supersymmetry, and cosmology include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences.

Dr. Hagelin has conducted pioneering work at the forefront of theoretical physics at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics) and SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), and is responsible for the development of a highly successful grand unified field theory based on the superstring.