June 2025
Studies have demonstrated that mass meditation events have led to decreases in violent crime. Now the phenomenon of focused attention is being directed to help planet Earth. Public Parapsychology’s new app, Planet Minute aims to harness individuals’ focused attention to reduce global warming and humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions.
“Each day, you’ll choose from real-time climate mitigation goals and send your focused intention to help resolve critical environmental challenges”, the website explains.
Public Parapsychology promotes advances in parapsychology still largely ignored in Western society. The organisation, founded by researcher Annalisa Ventola, “explores the art, technology, and science of various topics associated with exceptional experiences and phenomena collectively referred to as ‘psi’”.
In 2021, a team led by Ventola conducted a form of nonphysical geo-engineering experiment, in which volunteers from academia and the public were invited to a consciousness-based practice to change the composition of the air. The purpose of the experiment was to “develop an exploratory but testable prototype that uses online consciousness-based interventions to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from an air-based chamber and move it to a second chamber”.
Planet Minute is the latest in a series of such conscious-intention experiments. Among them are those by Lynne MacTaggert, researcher and author of “The Power of Eight”, and the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, which has organized mass meditation events since the 1990s aimed at reducing violent crime. In June and July of 1993, around 4,000 people participated in a 54-day mass meditation experiment in Washington, D.C. The ‘Maharishi Effect’ reduced violent crime in the capital city by 18 percent from predicted crime levels, according to the assessment by the TM movement scholars who analysed the event.
Violent crimes was defined as homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. The analysis accounted for various circumstances known to also affect crime, such as weather variables, daylight hours, changes in police and community anti-crime activities, prior crime trends in D.C., and concurrent crime trends in neighbouring cities.
A paper from 2016 by researchers at The Maharishi International University, published in Sage journals, corroborated that the effect is real. Increased transcendental meditation participation predicts a decreased crime rate, it said.
Anders Bolling
