Flying in the face of the war-mongers

AT the end of a long narrow garden, set back from the main road, is a small, neat terraced house. It doesn't look anything special, typical of many of the former pit villages scattered around Durham City.

As soon as Judith Kember opens the door, the smell of incense wafts out to greet me. Inside, six high-backed chairs are arranged in a circle in the front room. At one side, a table sits beneath a whiteboard. Huge posters cover the walls. "Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field - Physics", one proclaims. "Optimising Brain Function through the Transcendental Meditation Programme", declares another.

What space isn't taken up by posters is occupied by bookshelves. "Feel Great with Transcendental Meditation" sits alongside "How to End the Crime Epidemic". Not just a typical house in a pit village, then.

In fact, this is the Maharishi Vedic Centre, the nucleus of the Transcendental Meditation (TM, from now on) movement in the North-East. From here the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one-time guru to the Beatles, hopes to spread his teachings, from Teesside to the Scottish border, bringing personal fulfilment, and world peace.

Hang on a second. Personal fulfilment ok, but world peace? Through meditation? Surely that's beyond the reach of a few people sitting cross-legged and 'ommm-ing' to themselves?

Not so, according to Paul Kember, a softly-spoken but almost boyishly enthusiastic former lecturer who is the Maharishi's man in Esh Winning. In fact, it's a fact. Scientific studies have shown that meditation and yogic flying leads to a reduction in crime, more harmonious relations between nations, and general peace and well-being, apparently.

"What they found was there was a drop in negativity and an increase in positivity," Paul says. "Less crime was being reported, there were more positive statements from heads of government. In war zones, there was a drop in the number of fatalities and people injured and more cordial relations between heads of state."

This was all deduced from newspaper headlines over a period when there was a lot of yogic flying going on, but there's more. Nearly 50 scientific studies have shown the benefits of group flying, a phenomenon known, it seems, as the Maharishi Effect.

"During flying, the individual's consciousness is becoming very coherent and ordered. It is that effect which makes an individual more positive and less negative," he says. If there are enough flyers, this positivity then rubs off on other people within a certain area.

But this is no high-minded wishful thinking, there is science behind it. Hardly able to restrain his excitement, Paul launches into an explanation involving television and magnetic fields and how if you stimulate a field the whole field is affected. It all sounded very reasonable at the time, but when I read through my notes later I'm afraid it was all a little beyond me, but Paul does promise to send me details of some of the scientific studies which prove it works. One particular study he mentions saw a 20 per cent reduction in serious crime in Washington DC after 3-4,000 yogic flyers came together, with the results monitored by four universities in America.

As an aside, he tells me that this effect can only grow. There are three stages of flying, and we are now only on the first, which involves "hopping like a frog". Presumably the third will see an actual take-off, although nobody has managed that.

To further the cause of world peace, the Maharishi plans to set up hundreds of Peace Palaces around the world, including ones in Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, primarily to provide a place for yogic flyers to come together.

"The main function for the Peace Palaces is the coherence-creating group of yogic flyers," Paul says. "The plan is they will be young people drawn from the local community, who will make this their profession." As each palace will provide a home for 1-200 flyers, that's a lot of professional flyers.

These palaces will also provide courses on various Vedic traditions, including healthcare, education, architecture and agriculture. Although Vedic generally refers to Hinduism's sacred texts, Paul tells me the courses are suitable for followers of any religion, and of none. The Maharishi himself is seen as a great teacher, who is passing on the knowledge given to him by his master, Guru Dev.

But while yogic flying may get all the headlines, Paul and Judith's core business, as it were, is teaching TM. This differs from other types of meditation, Paul says, which are simply concentration or contemplation techniques.

'TM is a mental technique which spontaneously allows the mind to experience quieter and quieter levels of thinking, until the mind transcends, goes beyond the process of thinking, goes beyond thought and experiences the source of thought, the feeling within us if we can turn off the chatter of our thoughts," he says.

This all sounds pretty good to me, if perhaps a little hard to imagine, and indeed Paul adds: "It is almost impossible to describe, because it is beyond words."

But this doesn't stop Judith having a go. "People feel blissful," she says. "They feel very content and fulfilled and it is an area that is beyond boundaries, so people experience the feeling of boundlessness.

She says the technique is easy to learn, through a seven-step course over three months. Later, when Paul is out of the room, I ask her how much it is. "£1,280 for the three month course," she says. I don't know if it's significant that I only asked when Paul was out, although it did feel a little rude to talk cash in the face of his obvious eagerness to explain. When he comes back in I feel as though I've been caught with my hand in the sweet jar.

Paul first got into TM when he was lecturing in human psychology, and carrying out research into stress. He says he kept coming across TM as a good way to combat stress, so thought he would try it himself, and liked it so much he decided to devote himself to teaching others. When Judith saw the changes in Paul, she gave up her teaching job and followed suit, the couple becoming full-time devotees of the Maharishi about 15 years ago.

They may have been doing it for 15 years, but it's clear their enthusiasm hasn't diminished. Indeed, they are so obviously devoted to their cause, and yet so laid back at the same time, that it's tempting to think they're taking happy pills.

Whereas I am quite prepared to accept the benefits of TM, I confess I'm a little more sceptical over the claim that yogic flying could bring about world peace. But such was Paul's persuasiveness and sincerity, and perhaps my gullibility, that when I left the Maharishi Vedic Centre I was almost willing it to be true.

A day or so after my visit, Paul faxes me a summary of a study on the effect of group TM on preventing violent crime in Washington DC, signed by an impressive-looking list of half a dozen academics at the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy.

According to the study, carried out in 1993, when the group of around 4,000 people practised TM, the number of murders, rapes and assaults fell by up to 23 per cent - the higher the number of meditators, the larger the decrease in crime.

It all sounds very exciting, so it is with a heavy heart that I have to report that I ran the names of these six academics through an Internet search engine, to find that the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy is part of the Maharishi University of Management, and the academics are all devotees. Perhaps I shouldn't have been disappointed, but it just seemed such a shame. Never mind, at least there's still the meditation.

* The North-East Maharishi Vedic Centre can be contacted on 0191-373 2000