We Can Decrease World Violence

Science has proven that we can reduce violence and increase cooperation in today’s world.

I graduated from St. Francis Major Seminary with a Bachelor’s degree in Scholastic Philosophy, which trained me as a Medieval Catholic Theologian. As a Medieval Theologian, I studied all the founders of modern science, like Francis Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Dun Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, who were Catholic monks wanting to understand God by understanding God’s creation. Their search for truth began with the belief that God existed and that God created all things, including nature.

The modern scientific method and modern logic started with them. They explored all aspects of nature to find out how God worked in the world.

With that training, I have always seen the unity of the physical and spiritual worlds because my philosophical and theological background understood that God operates completely through nature and the God manifests God’s Self in the human person. Jesus of Nazareth, the God-man according to Christianity, is the perfect example of the divinity of humanity.

So, my continued research and study is guided by a significant principle: God operates in physical reality. In other words, we can learn more about God through the scientific world and its findings, if we continue to hold that God is the Source of all that reality.

When I began to meditate, others noticed (as well as my own self-observation) that I was changing. Things that used to bother me now didn’t irritate me like they used to. The worry in my life had diminished and I felt happier, more at peace, and more in tune with purpose and meaning in my life.

Scientific study of Buddhist meditating monks by Richard Davidson, PhD, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the medical research of Harold Benson, MD, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, MD, at Harvard Medical College on the effects of meditation on the brain verified my personal experience. When we sit in the presence of the Source of life, as my medieval theological perspective asserts, “God” will change us and bring us more into union with God-Consciousness and God’s “way of thinking and acting.”

Social scientists have documented with 38 different studies that a group of people (exactly ½ of the square root of 1% of a given population) who are meditating can alter the level of violence in a given area. In other words, a dedicated, finite number of people meditating at the same time can reduce violence by 25% in a given locality. It happened in Washington, DC during one hot month of July 1985. The violent crime in that city declined 25%. Surprisingly, the number of fires, car accidents and other destructive incidents in the city reduced 68%.

The group meditation process also accelerated the problem solving that was needed to bring about a cease-fire in Israel during one of its wars with Lebanon in 1982. The scientists concluded that the peaceful consciousness of the meditators allowed the Collective Consciousness of a specific region to attune itself with more peace and harmony and more possibility for cooperation.

That same hypothesis, now considered a scientific fact in many of the researcher’s eyes, can become true in Fond du Lac if just ½ of the square root of 1% sat in meditative silence every single minute of the day. That means all we need is 104 Fond du Lac people, based on the 2017 population of 42,809, to sit in silent meditation every minute of the day for Fond du Lac to begin to deal with some of its violence.

With dedication, people can change the collective consciousness of our society. We can decrease violence, partisanship, racist activity, non-cooperative, self-centered activity in our own city.

Namaste’