“These findings are more relevant now than ever before, at a time of pandemic and social unrest,” says Spivack, offering three examples from the studies cited in the book. Each of these experiments consisted of large numbers of people practicing the TM program on their own or in groups for a period of weeks or months, and in some cases years, in societies wrestling with violence:

• on 93 experimental days in Lebanon and Israel, between 1983 and 1985;
• in Cambodia, between 1990 and 2008;
• and in the United States, between 2007 and 2010, compared with the previous four years.

In each case, statistically significant drops in violence occurred during the periods when the numbers practicing the TM and TM-Sidhi programs were above the predicted threshold of the square root of 1 percent of the national population.