Find out which Presidential candidate most likely fits your political views.

I never had heard of him so I was curious and found this interview with him:

http://lightworks.com/MonthlyAspectarian/2002/September/conversation.htm

Over the years, The Monthly Aspectarian has published scores of conversations, many of which have brought welcome new perspectives to readers. This month, we bring you an interview that stands apart as one of the most extraordinarily meaningful messages to grace these pages. Hagelin, a research physicist, explains what is meant by the full development of consciousness, based on results of hard-nosed scientific research. His methods really get down to the nitty-gritty of solving the problems that stand in the way of true, global change.


The Monthly Aspectarian: John, let's start out with a short description of your work.

John Hagelin: I'm a research physicist with a specialty in unified field theories. It's these discoveries of the last few decades that constitute a fulfillment of Einstein's dream of discovering a single, unified source of all the order and intelligence displayed throughout the universe.

I also became involved in a deep exploration of the full development of consciousness. This started for me in earnest when a medical doctor recommended I try the Transcendental Meditation technique while I was in a body cast after a motorcycle accident at age 17. He recommended it purely for health reasons, but I quickly found that the mental side effects of the practice were to me more striking than the improvements in health that meditation brought.

It was a decade later that I began to sense the convergence of my work in quantum physics and unified field theories and my growing understanding and experience of consciousness. At about that time I went to Switzerland for a year and studied under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to become a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. This deepened my understanding of the Vedic science of consciousness as I was gaining greater expertise in the cutting edge of unified field theories.

But this convergence of modern science and the ancient spiritual wisdom of India came into focus with the relatively recent discovery of unified field theories based on the superstring.

These theories identify a single source of all the diverse particles and forces that fill the universe, a universal field of intelligence, as the basis of mind and matter. These theories also proclaim that all individuals are unified. This brings scientific corroboration of the Vedic wisdom of India and what is probably the principal tenet of most profound spiritual and philosophical traditions ... that is, the ultimate unity of life and of humanity.

That convergence, this unity at the basis of creation, really ignited me to pursue the full philosophical and practical implications for life.

TMA: It's been said that science and magic or spirituality would be proven to be the same thing. I've often thought that what has been given to us in the metaphy-sical traditions from all over has been remnants of a technology of previous civilizations.

JH: I would agree with that strongly, and also agree with the fact that for fifty years, even a hundred years, there have been hints of a potential convergence of science and spirit. Ever since the emergence of relativity and, especially, quantum mechanics, there has been some sense that our material universe is, at its core, not material at all.

Quantum mechanics suggests that we're living in a world of mind stuff as opposed to matter. This macroscopic gross physical level is where what we're seeing is a classical material tip of an immense quantum mechanical iceberg that extends deep into the structure of existence. At those deeper, unseen levels, quantum mechanical levels, we discover that elementary particles for example are not particles at all. They are vectors in an infinite dimensional space. In other words, they are mathematical entities made of the stuff that thoughts are made of.

TMA: Little units of consciousness.

JH: Exactly. What happened with all of these hints, the convergence or parallels between science and spirit, had been more poetic than rigorous, but for the past fifteen years or so since the superstring revolution and the real emergence of unified field theories, we have now a rigorous, quantitative and mathematical basis for this unity of science and spirit. Because science and spirit are one at their bases.

The basis of science now is this universal unified field of intelligence, and that is also the origin of spirit and mind and emotion. Subjectivity and objectivity have a common source in this universal field of intelligence which is now a scientific reality as well.

With this rigorous and quantitative unification of subjectivity and objectivity at the unified source of natural law, all of a sudden previous hints of a potential convergence of these two superficially diverse areas of life have been brought into focus.

TMA: It's fascinating how humanity has become so enthralled with the physical plane that the vast majority think they're from here and it's some kind of miracle that we can go there. When in fact we are from there and it's more of a miracle that we come here.

JH: That's right. In scientific terms we could say twenty years ago the attitude of science towards consciousness was that consciousness was a fluke of the universe. Now what more and more physicists are being drawn to admit--and I must say slowly is the operative word--is that matter is the fluke in an overwhelmingly conscious universe,

TMA: One of my pet theories is that we were originally drawn to the physical plane for its density because what we experience here seems so solid and real.

JH: It provides a sense of stability.

TMA: Making the physical plane more or less a theme park.

JH: It does move slowly and actually provides in some respects a sense of security and simple laws which can be used to learn the deeper principles that govern the universe. It's an excellent training ground for junior achievers.

[laughter]

I want to share some of the world transforming discoveries of modern science and how they illuminate the truths of ancient science including the Vedic science of consciousness. I want to share and highlight the profound convergence of science and spirit which is spectacularly, richly detailed to a degree that was only imagined before.

What I really would like to achieve in Chicago or Cleveland or wherever I'm speaking, is to create a core of peacemakers. I'd like to draw upon the recent experiments that have been published in the world's top journals that show that collective practice of meditation, particularly specific meditation practices designed for this purpose, dissolve societal stress. It relieves acute religious and ethnic and political tensions that fuel violence and conflict throughout the world.

Even crime in our cities, domestic violence, drug dependency and abuse—these are social diseases that are an eruption of accumulated social stress just as thirty years ago it was speculated that 90% of individual disease was caused or complicated by individual stress, something that was subsequently confirmed by decades of medical research. Now similarly, social diseases, violence, terrorism are increasingly seen to be a manifestation of societal stress and tension. And just as individual stress can be diffused through individual meditation, it turns out that acute social stress can be effectively diffused by collective meditation by even relatively small groups of a couple hundred in a city. It has a demonstrable effect on crime rates, accident rates, domestic violence and psychiatric crisis calls. Every available measure of societal tension is significantly reduced through group meditation.

TMA: I've seen some of the reports and some of the anecdotes on what the TM people have done in cities with their group meditations. But there has been a huge victory that's been won that people don't seem to have appreciated and worked more with, and that is the end of the Cold War. The Cold War didn't end because our system was better than the Soviet's or that we could outspend them militarily. The Cold War was ended by the global peace meditations and prayers that rose up and struck it down.

JH: I am aware of some very good research, some published research about this. It is very tough to publish in mainstream journals. The process of publication in peer-review journals is a very stringent one, and the more progressive and innovative your hypothesis is, the more intensely and even unfairly scrutinized those studies become. That's why I sometimes refer to the importance of publication in these peer-review journals.

But there is evidence of how the Cold War was possibly impacted by a variety of global meditations.

In fact a very recent study using Rand statistics has shown global reductions in terrorism during periods of global meditations, group meditations by significantly large enough groups. There's a lot of evidence for this and one of my specialties as a research physicist is explaining the mechanisms, some concrete and some subtle, through which this spreading of social coherence, this reduction in societal stress takes place. How it is we affect one another, and on the different levels of human existence, from gross physical contact or spoken word or gesture at a traffic jam, all the way to the deepest levels of consciousness where we are most profoundly linked.

Something I know you appreciate, and that has become increasingly mainstream within this whole field of conflict resolution--it's now a scientific fact--that the first stage in the eruption of war or social conflict is always rising tensions. Tensions include enmity, hatred, religious and ethnic tensions. Rising tensions among rival factions in critical hot spots throughout the world is the precursor of social conflict.

So if you can target the underlying cause of terrorism and war, which is rising tensions, you can effectively prevent the outbreak of war and even stop warfare in war-torn areas. That is some of the most impressive research. Seven different international collaborations went in under the recommendations of the editors of Yale University's Journal of Conflict Resolution to replicate this effect during the peak of the Lebanon war by creating different sized groups of meditators located at different distances from the Lebanon war to assess the effects of group meditation on that long-standing conflict.

TMA: I don't think there is a problem that humanity faces that couldn't be fixed with this mechanism.

JH: Yes, I think you're right. Most of the published research is focused on war, particularly the Middle East, because it is such an intractable problem. As you know, peace treaties among elected representatives of nations aren't worth the paper they're written on if enmity and vengeance still seethes in the hearts of the affected peoples, the rival factions. You've got to at least create a fertile field of harmony in the underlying field of collective consciousness before you can expect a negotiated settlement to take root. Generation after generation of peace treaties in the Middle East bear this out and you would think by now that nations and their elected representatives would see the futility of military and even diplomatic settlements without attending to the root cause of regional and global violence.

What I'd really like to get across is the soundness of the research that demonstrates that people can collectively prevent violence and war and terrorism and other serious social problems. Over large distances depending on the number of people, meditators can collectively really have the power to do this if they are organized.

TMA: I have often said it is almost an equation: physical plane reality is created and defined by mass consciousness. If you want to change the world, the way to do that is to change mass consciousness.

JH: Yes. And you can leverage relatively small groups to change mass consciousness more than one might think, taking advantage of simple physical principles like constructive interference. Two loudspeakers playing the same monaural music produce four times the sound of a single loudspeaker if the speakers are nearby, or three speakers will produce nine times the sound. That's because of this N-squared phenenomon which is a consequence of the constructive superposition of the coherent waves, identical waves generated by the different emitters. The same thing applies to human radiators of harmony and that's a very strategic technique that one can use to amplify the impact of an individual meditator.

TMA: Somebody significant was reported to have once said, "Where two or more are gathered"....

JH: Yes, that's a beautiful quote. I never really understood why that should necessarily be true, but today there is even a physical understanding of why that ought to be true.

TMA: It's interesting that people such as yourself who are working in both worlds are faced with a scientific fundamentalism that is just as retrograde as religious fundamentalism.

JH: Oh, it's terrible. You would hope it would be getting less, I think it may be getting less, but it's a slow process. The scientific vigilantes that run around and write publications like The Skeptical Inquirer or this one individual who writes for it, Steve Park who has written such hollow and bombastic articles, pure polemics. He's the author of the book, Voodoo Science, the Road from Fallacy to Fraud or something like that. These people are not active scientists, they're certainly not contributing to the forefront of research in physics. They are scientists turned bureaucrats who have simply found themselves staunch defenders of the conceptual status quo. Science is not about an established body of fact.

TMA: It's not supposed to be.

JH: It's a method of inquiry, a reliable method of repeatable experiments and empirical verification to help sort out fact from fiction, that's fine. But when it fails to be that and it's just used as an excuse to defend a dogma that is as baseless and inflexible as any other dogma in the history of the world, then science becomes destructive. It becomes pseudo science, which is exactly what these people are trying to defend against!

TMA: You see it in all kinds of places--like mainstream Egyptologists don't want to hear about the Sphinx being ten to twelve thousand years old, which it is.

JH: I know from the standpoint of the Vedic tradition of India. When was the Mahabharata written? Was there ever a Krishna on earth, for example? Modern historians like to collapse human history into the last three millennia. Everything that's BC automatically was in the first thousand years.

TMA: One significant thing I see happening in modern society is that the sheer amount of information that people have to process to keep up is more or less dragging the mainstream kicking and screaming into a state of semi-enlightenment. People don't know what to do with themselves.

JH: I think we are living in a time of phase transition. There is an enormous explosion of information. I don't think people begin to know how to sort it all out.

TMA: The very fact of seeing pictures of the planet from space radically transforms consciousness.

JH: Space photography is a powerful tool; it has had some impact on the world.

Hopefully, we've seen enough of the failure of antiquated means of education, antiquated technologies of offense and defense, antiquated systems of criminal justice based entirely on punishment of crime, which is, as we know, not an effective deterrent to crime.

I think we've seen about enough of a crumbling of the old to begin to explore and embrace a deeper science of life based upon the scientific truth of the fundamental unity of existence. And on the basis of that scientific fact of unity, whole new systems of education and criminal justice and defense will arise.

One of the joys of being a presidential candidate of the Natural Law party, a party founded on the scientifically verifiable truth of the unity of existence, is that it has been a delightful exercise for me and all the hundreds of candidates involved to reformulate social policy and educational and criminal justice and defense and the economics and health care on the basis of this newer paradigm.

TMA: I think there is a lot of confusion about what the Natural Law party is, and what Natural Law thought is. You had Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings to be on the Supreme Court talking about natural law.

JH: And even earlier than that. The term has been used and misused for a long time.

TMA: There is a tendency among people who are into metaphysics and alternative lifestyles to have come out of a past leftist leaning. I think there is a real tendency for people to see, without a real examination of it, for people to look at the Natural Law party, lump it with the Green Party and say, "Well, these are just recycled socialists."

JH: I don't think anybody could look at the Natural Law party platform [Natural-Law.org], and think of it as a socialist platform in any way. Because individual creativity, individual achievement, individual entrepreneurism is very much valued and in some respects, one would probably describe the Natural Law party as fiscally conservative, in that we focus on the elimination of government waste and the tremendous waste of human and financial resources that comes from not preventing problems that are preventable. That's why we promote preventive health care and effective crime prevention, for example, and the prevention of environmental disasters before they happen. It's a very fiscally conservative and growth-oriented platform, although we also believe in sustainable growth, having our economic and energy and other policies put on a renewable and sustainable track.

But Natural Law in this scientific age means the natural laws, the laws of nature that govern the vast universe and maintain order and growth throughout the physical universe. Even here on earth there are seven and a half million species that have evolved and are continually nourished through the operation of natural laws. All these seven million species live and interact in this intricate web of mutual interdependence and mutual nourishment. It's primarily in human society that we see violations of natural law and life damaging behavior that needs to be brought back into harmony with natural law through sustainable, forward-looking, prevention-oriented solutions.

People that look into it see that there is a deep logic that informs the platform of the party. It's a very consistent platform that is purely in favor of life, not in favor of the arms manufacturing industry or the pharmaceutical industry or the biochemical industry or the genetic engineering industry. Simply in favor of life. Restoration of balance in our political system can be achieved in two ways: one, through the elimination of PAC's, for example, which distort the political system and make our government beholden to a few moneyed corporate special interests—we can call that political reform; and two, by raising the collective consciousness of the people, raising the collective merit and deservability of the people, so that we deserve a better government.

Really, government is fundamentally weak in that it is not a generator of health or wealth. The people generate their own health through their own choices in lifestyles. They generate their own wealth through their own creativity. We can really improve the quality of life and improve the quality of the politicians we elect by raising the creativity and the level of consciousness of the people.

In addition to political reform and bringing in prevention-oriented policies and solutions in harmony with natural law, the Natural Law party is also about education and raising the level of consciousness of the people to the point where the people support renewable policies, sustainable energy, organic agriculture ... where the people elect a better government. It's a very noble goal and the Natural Law party has had considerable impact. Three million voters voted for Natural Law party candidates--not the presidential candidate, that's more difficult--but they saw the wisdom of the party and voted for congressional and other candidates.

TMA: Well, I didn't see the Natural Law party as socialist, but I wanted to throw it out there and let you answer it for those who do.

JH: Natural-Law.org should take you to our website. The party tends to draw the most naturally cooperative and coherent people.

TMA: We're on the same page, it's all about consciousness. To me, the job is to raise consciousness as much as we can as fast as we can with as many people as we can. Just a cursory glance at what people may think of as prehistory tells us that we've flowered and been busted numerous times. We're at that place now, you could view it as final exam time.

JH: With weapons of mass destruction with mutually twenty times overkill and our terrible polluting technologies, we can't blow it this time. With biological weaponry, chemical weaponry and, of course, nuclear weaponry, we can't afford to make a mistake.

TMA: Yet when you look at vast regions of the world, the mistake is being made. Eastern Europe right now is a giant Weimar Republic. I shudder to think what could arise out of that mess.

JH: Yes, it is precarious. That's why what I'm focusing on mainly right now is trying to create a global coherence. I have worked for six months straight and have raised about $83.5 million to create, as cost effectively as I think is possible, a huge force of coherence and light in the world: a university in India for forty thousand very advanced meditators who are doing Vedic meditation as well as other techniques from the Vedic tradition of knowledge that has been revived by Maharishi.

All these practices in a large group of forty thousand volunteers who dedicate themselves full time to this purpose—to produce an enormous lighthouse of coherence for the world, creating positivity and unity so intense that negativity and darkness will have trouble finding a foothold in this world.

TMA: Well again, it is almost mathematical. Darkness can't exist in light.

JH: That's exactly right, and according to published research in the past, a group of eight thousand would be enough, marginally, to produce a measurable effect throughout the world, but we're trying for a five-fold safety factor here. To produce a group of sufficient size that it will not just affect the world but should dramatically transform the whole direction on Earth. Because I don't want all these potential areas of conflict all over the world, all the potential problems that people see, to manifest. I thought I would try to concentrate my energies as one human being (right now at least), in this most effective way that I can think of, and that is to permanently engage a group of up to forty thousand. We're at eight thousand now. In a few months we'll be at sixteen thousand permanent advanced meditators practicing some very advanced and rather uncommon Vedic technologies of peace.

TMA: I would like your opinion on this. It's wonderful to have forty thousand people using these Vedic technologies, but it's seems to me that it is important to get people on a global basis lending their energy and consciousness with whatever system they're using.

JH: I hope they do. Everyone needs to be a part of the solution. I very strongly support that.

TMA: For instance, for the past one hundred years, Unity school of Christ-ianity in Kansas City have had 24 hours non-stop prayer. It's called Silent Unity. Things like that need to be linked up with what you're talking about in India.

JH: The linking will be automatic. People just have to do it. They don't have to worry too much about the linking because not a drop of energy is ever wasted. Nobody's efforts will ever be wasted and they will all be linked up. I think everybody needs to do whatever he or she can, and don't worry so much about linking up ... because we're linked on the level of consciousness. There is only one consciousness in this world ultimately. It is at our very core. To the extent that we are stimulating that, we are having an effect everywhere.

TMA: So what we're after is a critical mass of light by whatever means it's generated.

JH: That's right. And I'm taking advantage in this project of the constructive, coherent effect to produce the effect of forty thousand squared individual people, and that's about sixteen million people. This is a fairly quick way of trying to create an influence of sixteen million people together in one place.

TMA: With this technology, we have the opportunity to create heaven on earth. It can be done.

JH: It can be done.

TMA: I believe that Gaia is a living intelligence, and that if enough of us will love her, she can heal herself in an afternoon of all the pollution we've done without spilling a teacup. There really isn't a problem humanity faces that can't be fixed with this mechanism.

JH: Yes, I agree. I don't know about in an afternoon, but quickly.

Everybody should use whatever means they have, whatever training they have to create coherence, whatever techniques of prayer and meditation. But they aren't all actually the same. Some are a little more powerful than others, some are much more powerful, only because they utilize the mind at deeper versus more superficial levels.

As a physicist I "get" this fairly well. Molecular power, chemical energy which comes from manipulating molecular structures, is a source of a certain concentration of energy. Just by going to a smaller scale, the nuclear scale, and creating transformations at the nuclear level, you typically generate a million times as much concentrated energy.

There are different levels of mind. Human awareness is incredibly flexible. It can span the whole range of creation from gross macroscopic perceptions to normal thinking process to fine, fine impulses of feeling to pure unbounded consciousness itself. That's the whole range of physical creation known to science. Human awareness can traverse that entire range of existence. Where you station your awareness has a big influence on how fundamental and powerful is your effect.

For example, if you're standing in church and you're crying out the name of God, that has a certain power of emotional upliftment. But if you're feeling God's presence on a very fine level of feeling, a deep level of silent prayer, that's more powerful still, in terms of its measurable impact on human physiology and even the development of the human brain. On the level of pure consciousness itself, unbounded awareness, that is more powerful still. In fact, the experience of pure consciousness, at the source of thought, is the only experience scientifically shown that engages the entire brain, from the frontal to the occipital lobes, left and right hemispheres, even the basal ganglia ... the entire brain is involved in that experience.

Every major religious tradition that I'm aware of, when you dig into the Kabbalah, or the new Testament or early Christianity, every tradition of significance that has withstood thousands of years; they have all been based upon the meditative experience of unboundedness, of universal intelligence.

TMA: It's all the same stuff.

JH: Every significant spiritual tradition is based upon the experience of transcending. Whatever they call it, any technique that brings about the experience of pure consciousness is equally fine. Not all meditations do that: certain contemplative methods keep the mind engaged in an intellectual or devotional way, certain concentration techniques keep the mind rather sharply focused as opposed to allowing the focus to spread, to become infinite.

Meditations that bring about the experience of unbounded awareness are all equally effective in producing a truly global effect. One of the things that I'd like to see in the world is all of these beautiful spiritual traditions revitalized through the rediscovery of their meditative sources.

But this is not necessarily my job. Right now I would be content to produce one huge group of forty thousand advanced meditators in India to transform the destiny of life on Earth. To produce groups of one or two hundred meditators in every major city is another of the things I would like to accomplish. To create a similar enlivenment of consciousness and raising of collective consciousness throughout the United States, my country. The whole country will sparkle as a result.
John Hagelin, Ph.D., is a world-renowned quantum physicist and public policy expert, and was the Natural Law Party's Presidential Candidate for the 2000 election.

Dr. Hagelin has conducted pioneering research 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. His scientific contributions have been featured in a cover story of Discover magazine.

As Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy ( www.istpp .org ), at Maharishi University of Management ( www.mum.edu ), Dr. Hagelin has successfully headed a nation-wide effort to identify, scientifically verify and promote cost-effective solutions to critical social problems in the fields of crime, health care, education, economy, biotechnology, energy and the environment.

Dr. Hagelin received his A.B. summa c*m laude from Dartmouth College in 1975 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1981. He is currently Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Professor of Physics, and Director of the Doctoral Program in Physics at Maharishi University of Management.