"People are so convinced we can't have peace that it's a joke now. Somebody wins a beauty pageant, and the joke is, she wants world peace. And everybody has a big laugh. Nobody believes in peace. It's a nice idea. But that's all it is — just a sweet-little-old lady idea. It's meaningless. It's never going to happen. And we live in this hellhole, and we think it's got to be this way.
"But what if we're wrong?
"We know that in one human being, when you ramp up consciousness — when you ramp up that light of unity — negative things begin to recede. In that individual, you see more and more intelligence, more and more creativity, more and more bliss, negativity going away and a positive influence pouring out into the world. So if there were many, many meditators, it would be beautiful. But even without that, small groups of advanced meditators could still make a huge difference.
The theory is that if the square root of 1 percent of the world's population, or 8,000 people, practices advanced meditation techniques in a group, then that group, according to published research, is quadratically more powerful than the same number scattered about.
"These peace-creating groups have been formed for short-term studies. And every time the advanced meditators got together in a group, they dramatically affected the area around them. They measurably reduced crime and violence. How did they do that?
"There is a field of unity within everyone. It's always been there. It's unbounded, infinite, and eternal. It's that level of life that never had a beginning. It is, and it will be, forever. And it can be enlivened. In the human being, the enlivening of that field leads to enlightenment — the full potential of the individual. In the world, the result of enlivening unity by a peace-creating group would be real peace on earth."
