I wrote three posts about the 10,000 for World Peace Assembly in Hyderabad, India. The first was written on Boxing Day, 2023
‘A note from seat 32E on this morning’s flight to Mumbai due to take off in 20 minutes.
If I don’t reply quickly in the next few days, it’s because I am going to India to take part in a ‘World Peace Assembly with 10,000 other TM Meditators from 118 countries.
Many research studies over the past decades have shown that when people practise TM and the more advanced TM-Sidhi programme together, positive changes take place in the whole society. If the number of people is big enough, it can affect the whole world.
This effect has been called ‘the Maharishi Effect’ because it was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who predicted the sociological effects of TM back in the 1960s.
The world certainly needs some influence of peace at the moment! So please watch the news for me – I’ll be staying in a tent in Hyderabad, with no access to a TV or computer, but apparently there is wifi, so hopefully my phone will be working!’
The second post starts with Boxing Day but then describes some of the challenges – and delights – of the assembly
As we were driving to the airport on Boxing Day I said ‘It’s great that I’m going to India. Annie looked surprised and said ‘that’s not what you were saying a few days ago – you were thinking how to not go’. I thought about that for a minute and then said ‘Both those things are true’. Now I know why.
So my intuition about potential problems was correct: when I arrived at Hyderabad airport at 7.30am, having slept about 20 minutes that night, and was told that the accommodation wasn’t ready and I could either go into a dorm or to a hotel in town, that wasn’t the best start. I opted for the hotel.
But I was a long way from the Assembly and, with jet-lag and isolation, felt discombobulated for a couple of days. I tried to get an Indian SIM card for my phone, but that didn’t work and made my phone malfunction. On the way to the phone shop I tripped on a loose paving stone and the sole of my shoe came off. So not a perfect start.
After a couple of days, over lunch in the nearby vegetarian restaurant (breakfast 80p, lunch around £2), I met a couple of lovely IT professionals who had been looking for a meditation practice and were very pleased to hear about Transcendental Meditation from a visiting Westerner. Once I had met them, I felt I had done what I had gone there for, and was ready to go to the campus.
When I arrived, the tents still weren’t ready, but by now I was ready to try a dorm. Imagine a room with bunk beds, 8 in one row, 8 rows – that’s 128 beds. Sounds like hell? I didn’t think I would ever get to sleep. My bunk was near the door, people were coming in and out, talking, using torches, packing and unpacking.
Weirdly, that night I slept better than I had in the hotel, and I have continued to sleep well there, so I’m no longer planning to go to a tent. And yes, the tents are still being erected. Apparently the contractor had decided to work on a bigger job elsewhere, as builders sometimes do.
The food at the campus is fantastic. The idea that you can’t do good food when you’re mass catering has been blown out of the water here. They’re catering for 10,000 people each day, 3 meals a day, and it’s wonderful. My favourite type of food: traditional Indian food without onions or garlic and only a hint of chili.
The campus, too, is stunning, designed specifically for large groups of people meditating.
So, a couple of hiccoughs at the beginning. And then, the fulfilment of the second part of the feeling I had before leaving. During group practice of Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Sidhi programme – together with around 10,000 other people from 134 countries – including Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, among many others (at dinner this evening a Ugandan high school principal from Uganda was telling us about introducing TM to his school in Kampala, one of 13 schools in that city that have taught TM to all their students and are enjoying the usual benefits: calmer, more alert students, better behaviour in classrooms, higher grades), I noticed how strong the feeling of the transcendental field was there, full of light, blissful, unbounded.
I had noticed it on courses before but then, because the field is transcendental, beyond words and thought, beyond intellectual comprehension, it’s as if it slips out of your mind and then you just remember the accommodation, the food, but not the transcendent.
And it’s the transcendental field that’s important, it’s the field that connects us all, the field that, when enlivened by even one person transcending, but enlivened even more when it’s 10,000 in one location, creates a kind of wave of positivity in the life of everyone everywhere. So now we’ll see whether the number of people here, as well as the short duration of the assembly, will be enough to have even some effect of peacefulness on the world.
The power has just gone out, so I’ll continue later.
We’ve just heard that the principal of a university plans to introduce TM to all his 10,000 students and create a permanent group. BTW, a couple of days ago I met an admin working at a school in Chennai with 500 students where all of them practise TM, and she said there were 13 such schools in the Chennai area alone. So perhaps our presence will encourage other large meditating groups, but on a more permanent basis
And the weather here? 28 degrees during the day, 17 at night. We meditate in a huge hall with a roof but no walls, so basically outdoors. It’s often foggy (and still dark!) when we start in the morning and I get droplets of condensation on my meditation blanket. A friend with bushy eyebrows said that they were acting as gutters, with water dripping off the ends!
PS And Marmas? People here are fascinated by Marma Therapy. I have been invited to give treatments in a US Wellness centre, many have asked to be added to the Marmas of the Moon mailings, and several have asked for treatments. Unfortunately the schedule is too tight to do treatments, except for a lady who fell and hurt her foot and a man who had a DVT after his flight.
In the third post I wrote about some of the people I met in India
There are wonderful people here –
but, with over 10,000 course participants, who you actually get to meet on any day is a cosmic lottery. And if you lose sight of anyone for a minute, you might never see them again.
The day I arrived, a friend helped me with my luggage (I don’t travel light!). I wheeled the suitcase and he took my bag. At one point I turned round to look at something, and I had lost him. The bag contained all my papers, chargers, all the important stuff. I was worried he would put the bag down somewhere and I’d never see it again.
After a couple of hours of worrying, I saw him again in the registration area, and he still had my bag – what a relief. He said: ‘Where did you go?’ Incidentally, he helped train me in the 1990s in what was then called Maharishi Jyotish Gems – the use of gemstones for health and wellbeing, based on a person’s birth details. That was fun!
Meal queues are a particularly good place to meet people. It was there I met Kamna and Puja, who teach TM in Delhi. Kamna is also studying for her PhD in TM and Vedic literature, and told me her great-uncle was Satyanand, who was at Guru Dev’s ashram together with Maharishi.
They were both so bright and happy and capable, it felt like the future of the TM organisation will be in safe hands.
It was at dinner that we met David and his sister, who run 4 schools in Kampala, Uganda. All the students there practise TM.
And there was Ramalakshmi from Chennai – she works as an administrator in a school in Chennai, where all 550 students practise TM. She said it was one of 13 such schools in the region.
Oh, and I got hugged by a ball of bliss – it was my godson Manny whom I hadn’t seen for some years. So good to see him.
At breakfast one morning a friend told me that the main meditation hall was being used by our hosts that morning, so I should find another location. On my way out of the dining hall, a lady who was helping us clear dishes encouraged me to visit the Yatra Garden, which has displays and information about the host organisation’s understanding of Spiritual Anatomy.
So that’s where I went for my morning meditation. As I was walking through the garden afterwards, a lady told me I was going the wrong way round. I asked her about the garden and where she was from. She was a Russian from Moldova who lives in Canada. It turned out that she had trained in Chinese Traditional Medicine, so I asked her to treat the Marma point between my right thumb and index finger.
She did this with a lot of pressure. I then did a Marma taster treatment for her, which is very gentle, no pressure, and when she opened her eyes she asked how she could learn this technique and did I travel. (I should have asked if she was thinking of Moldova, Russia or Canada!)
She also said that the previous evening she had had an online astrology reading and had been told she would meet a person who was more knowledgeable and she would have the opportunity to learn.
Mick is here, too – I had the privilege of teaching him TM in 1974 and he’s been doing it ever since, and has gone on more of these international courses than I have.
And there’s the Gang of 4 – four of us who first met in Mentmore in the 1970s, enjoyed laughing and joking then, and still do almost 50 years later. I hadn’t seen them for decades. David and Mark both live in California, Mike in Vancouver, Canada, and I’m based in Newhaven, on the south coast of England. David is involved in land deals for wind farms, Mark works with medical software, Mike has a mud-based beauty and wellness range of over 100 products, and I give Marma treatments and train new therapists.
And we all still teach TM, and it’s TM that has brought us all here.
Update on dorm living: I still generally sleep well, although I’m currently surrounded by coughers, plus one person who alternates coughing with talking in his sleep. So I’m thinking about trying a tent for a couple of nights.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the 700 Himalayan ladies, who look very distinctive in their brightly coloured clothing and knitted headwear. It’s a kind of a cross between Cusco in Peru and Bollywood. Interesting how life in the mountains seems to favour bright colours – it’s similar in the Tatra mountains in Poland.
They’re always very cheerful and move around in a cloud of good humour and colour.
And of course there are the thousands of school students who have come from different parts of India to add to the numbers. Question: how can you keep a large number of high-spirited students quiet as they come into the meditation hall?
Answer: you can’t, so there’s a huge and wonderful hubbub as they come in and out.
And speaking of sounds during group meditation, as we’re basically outdoors but with a (huge!) canvas roof over us, there are also the Vedic pundits in their tent performing yagyas, and the sound of their recitation can be heard very clearly. It all seems to add to the joy, and there’s lots of laughter.
I suspect my joy may be reduced over the next couple of days before leaving, as I seem to be coming down with a bug. Let’s hope it passes soon. At the health desk (open 24/7, even if you may have to wake them up early in the morning as they sleep with their heads on the desk), one of the receptionists asked the other if they had a Covid test. She answered no, so they offered me some cough medicine instead – bright orange. Please send me wishes for good health – thank you!