You are on the right path, Preston.
I speak about this in various places in this book, but here is what I think are the most important points:
First, the description of the effect of your meditation on both yourself — “internally attuned” as you put — and on others, who seem to immediately catch when you’re being “jangly and out-of-tune,” are evidence of the responsiveness of reality, based upon the contextual conditions of your own state, the state of others around you that you interact with, and the greater environment.
In our normal way of making sense of the world, such a ‘synchronicity’ is seen as completely unfounded, but as Carl Jung said about these causeless events, they evidence a completely different structure to space and time than our standard way of viewing reality allows.
Seeing events as the manifestation of responsive naturing makes sense of them, and supports your experience with how your meditation effects others, as well as yourself. This is a known phenomenon called the Maharishi Effect. It’s based on statements by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1960, and experiments that were run by his Transcendental Meditation organization. It’s described on their website:
In 1960, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi predicted that one percent of a population practicing the TM technique would produce measurable improvements in the quality of life for the whole population. This phenomenon was first documented in scientific research in 1976 when it was found that when 1% of a community practiced Transcendental Meditation, the crime rate was reduced by 16% on average. At this time, the phenomenon was named the Maharishi Effect. The meaning of this term was later extended to cover the wider influence generated by group practice of the TM-Sidhi program. Generally, the Maharishi Effect may be defined as the influence of coherence and positivity in the social and natural environment generated by the practice of the TM and TM-Sidhi programs.
In the Tibetan prophecy that you’ll find at the end of Tranquillity’s Secret in the “Back Matter” section, the Buddha asserts:
There is a teaching useful during the time when the dark age arises. If one writes of it, propagates it, and practices the “Great Responsiveness Meditation and recitation, impurities and obscurations will be quickly purified. If one sincerely makes offerings to this spiritual text with flowers and incense, all sentient beings will benefit. By propagating this text and writing about it, one will obtain a good existence throughout all of one’s lives.
The Buddha then goes on to say that if even one person does these things it will benefit a city, and if a whole city does so it will benefit all countries. It’s a similar idea to that expressed by Maharishi Mahesh.
As I explain it in this book, the reason why good things happen in our lives is not a result of what we do — there is no cause-and-effect relationship, as most of us realize when matters don’t go our way. Instead, good things happen to us when what we are doing is in harmony with what we deeply feel we need to do — in our actions, our thoughts, and what we pay attention to in our lives.
When we are in harmony within ourselves, all of reality comes to our aid — with no regard for our limited understanding of how reality works, such as my experience with the GRE exam, which I recount in a series on “nonrational experiences” in the Proem section of the book.
When our actions diverge from what we authentically need to be doing — when we are like water trying to flow uphill — the disharmony leads to events that undermine our hopes and dreams in ways that can be self-destructive, and which brings us nothing but stress and frustration.
And both of these states have an effect upon everyone around us.
The world needs to learn this, and we need individuals like yourself, to do what you are already doing intuitively.
Thank you, for sharing this.
