He and his similarly minded colleagues, of whom he said there were many thousands in almost every country in the world, were now working to make sure that human interaction with these forces was channeled for the good of all humanity—and quite specifically, so that humans could control their own destiny by harnessing forces within themselves to mitigate the chaos-tending forces of physics: that some humans, in other words, had the power to reduce chaos. “And to stop war,” he said brightly.
“You are, of course, here for the congress?”
I said that I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“The Croatian peace conference. Perhaps the most important conference going on in the world today. You are not attending?” he said, incredulous.
“We are on the brink—the very brink, you know—of bringing about peace in the Balkans. There are two hundred of us here just now. We only need a few more people. This why I am coming down from Sweden. People are coming in from all over. America. Italy. England. South Africa. We need just a total of, let me see”—he took out a chewed pen and scribbled a quick calculation on the palm of his hand—“two hundred and fifty-four people. Once we have them, all assembled in one room, then peace will happen. I assure you. It always works.”
I must have looked more than a little mystified, for he sat down beside me and with an accomplished bedside manner, began to explain. These, it is important to say, are Dr. Suurkula’s words, not mine. No product endorsement here. Just mystification and, because of one singular fact that was to emerge later on, a degree of impressed acceptance.
People, Dr. Suurkula said, can learn the secret of channeling their internal energies in a way that will communicate vibrations that will, or may, intersect with all the invisible webs that link the various fields of unified physical geometry. The secret to making that intersection useful, allowing people to make, by their mental powers alone, a measurable electronic effect on the way the physical world works, is to gather together a certain critical number of people so that, just like the critical mass in an atomic pile (or bomb), their presence and common effort creates a kind of mentally powered fission.
I blinked in disbelief, but the strangely beguiling Dr. Suurkula went on. I asked a question: How many people might be needed to make up this so-called critical mass. He was, it turned out, just coming to that.
The number of people required to have a measurable effect on a population varies directly with the size of the population that needs to be affected. Measurements made over the last thirty years, in a variety of towns and cities and countries around the world, had shown incontrovertibly that, by chance—or in fact probably not by chance—a perfect mathematical device invariably comes into play. For the critical mass seems always to be reached when the number of people assembled in one place, all of them manifesting the same vibrations at the same time, is equal to the square root of 1 percent of the population that is to be affected.
This curiously satisfying mathematical coincidence was noticed first of all in the mid-seventies, in Providence, Rhode Island. The town used to be a wayward place, the car-theft capital of the United States, a place of murder and burglary and enough crime to make the local police chief throw up his hands in despair. But then Dr. Suurkula’s friends—people whose names are familiar in this world: John Hagelin, Matti Pitkanen, Neil Phillips, Paolo Menoni—decided to become involved, trying to see if they could direct the powers they believed they had, in a way that they thought might help. They assembled enough of their like-minded colleagues to reach the number that equaled the square root of 1 percent of the Providence population—which, since it stood at 160,000, was the neat and precise number 40—and put them in a local hotel room and then—well, that, Dr. Suurkula said, was the part that a rationalist, as he assumed me to be, might well choose not to believe.
Too true, I retorted. I had not believed overmuch of what I had heard so far. Fair enough, he replied, and continued anyway. What these forty people in Providence then did, he said, was to indulge in several powerful minutes of simultaneous yogic flying.
Of course, I said to myself: Transcendental meditation. I might have known. My cynicism went into immediate overdrive. These people, I said to myself, were completely nuts. These here were part of a pathetic troupe of disciples of the now fabulously rich and probably totally cynical confidence trickster (as I saw him and his like) known as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had been the spiritual adviser to some of the Beatles and now lived as a wealthy recluse somewhere near Amsterdam.
Like so many others I had come across elsewhere over the years, and like the disciples of the Baghwan Rajneesh and Sai Baba and a woman called Maya whom half of social Hong Kong seemed to be following, they had been gulled into handing over huge sums of their own savings to be taught the nonsense that mental-energies-can-be-harnessed-and-made-to-bring-about-universal-peace, and were now performing in the Balkans, of all places, the same stupefying rituals—which culminated in something so perfectly silly, not to say unattractive, as managing to lift (for several continuous seconds) their backsides off cushions while sitting in the lotus position—that had made them a global laughing-stock. And now they were here trying to persuade innocents like me that by such madness lay the road to peace, that I might perhaps join them, or give them money, or write laudable things about them and so help them to win ever more credibility. The exploiting of a such a tragedy as this—it was all too shabby, too cynical, too tasteless.
Dr. Suurkula clearly saw the anticipated doubt on my face and tried to dispel it with a barrage of statistics. The forty people who performed simultaneous yogic flying in Providence, he said, had achieved great success. The number of car thefts and robberies in the city had dropped by 42 percent over the next week, he said, and has remained lower ever since. Had I heard any further discussion of Providence being the car-stealing capital of the United States? No, I said, I had not. “Well, that was all to do with us!” smiled the man, and launched into a barrage of facts and figures.
“Look at what we did in Jerusalem in 1979,” he said: 230 people—the Israeli population is 5.3 million—performed yogic flying on the eve of the Camp David talks, and a peace agreement was signed. Then again, and most ambitiously, seven thousand people met and performed the rituals in a gymnasium outside Washington, D.C., and, their power being harnessed to improve the lot of the then 4.9 million people of the planet, the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the atomic stalemate, which had dogged the global population for half a century, was ended.
His conversation then veered into areas I could not possible understand—the nature of the five sub-atomic particles, the coincidence of the five levels of Vedic-inspired consciousness, the overlapping circles of energy, the works of Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, the role of the mantra in stimulating internal vibration. And then, on the verge of losing me, he wondered whether I might not come down to the congress and see the preparations under way to bring peace to the Balkans.
The Dubrovnik Peace Project was being held in an airy resort hotel, the Mincenta, at the north end of town. There were no tourists in sight, just scores of the earnest-looking and friendly people—Germans, Israelis, Britons, Italians, Americans—who were delegates to the conference and who seemed to spend much of their time languidly strolling from workshop to workshop, or intently reading the messages (for cheap flights home, for organic food shops in town, for phone cards) posted on a bulletin board outside the conference office. It might have been a low-key trade show, or a book festival, and the delegates all sales representatives for health-food manufacturers, or sandals, or Peruvian sweaters. There seemed to be no leaders, as such—just instructors and lecturers, and once in a while, men who were so well-known in the field that the crowds parted before them, and there was a quiet collective gasp of awe.
Dr. Paolo Menoni, whose pair of impeccably made business cards pronounced him to be Avvocato and Insegnante di Meditazione Trascendentale, was one such, and he broke of
f what he was doing—which seemed principally to be talking to a group of excited middle-aged ladies—and sat down to talk of the urgency of the mission, the crisis it had now reached, the need for everyone to come and assemble so that peace might be brought into being.
“You may be skeptical,” he said, “and I would understand that. But you should know there are now no fewer than fifty-seven proven cases in which what we do—meditating, yogic hopping, skywalking, yogic flying—has truly brought about peace. Read the paper in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, back in 1988: It showed without a doubt how this really works.
“Your William Hague, leader of Mrs. Thatcher’s Conservatives, he believes in meditation, in the benefits of what we do. So does the president of Mozambique, Dr. Chissano. Believe me, this is catching on.”
And Dr. Menoni took me through the back of the hotel to what had once evidently been the large socialist-style dining hall where happy Slavic vacationers took their gruel and goulash. In it were hundreds of mattresses, readied for the evening flying session. There was a chart on one wall, showing the numbers taking part each day. Two weeks before the numbers had been low, 75, 90, 56. Then, after an appeal went out on the Internet, and concerned would-be fliers heard about the critical need to reach the super-radiance number, people started drifting in, and the figures crept up: 130, 178, 203, 217. Now, according to Dr. Menoni, two figures were vitally necessary: 254, which was to stop the war in Croatia and Bosnia, and 345, which was to bring peace to Yugoslavia.
I pointed out that there was actually no war going on in either Croatia and Bosnia, which perplexed him a little. But the figure of 345—that was indeed the square root of 11.9 million, which was more or less the population of Yugoslavia (more or less: The official figure appears to be 10.59 million). If perhaps the pleas and telephone calls and telexes that were then being sent out from the Mincenta did lure the faithful in sufficient numbers, then perhaps—just perhaps—peace might break out.
I left them just as they were beginning a session. Scores of earnest-looking and very friendly middle-aged men and women—there seemed rather few youngsters in the group—were taking off their shoes, signing up for the coming attempt, and taking up positions on their various mattresses. An instructor mounted the podium, muttered a few words of Sanskrit by way of universal greeting, and told everyone to begin mouthing their mantras. And then another pair of instructors looked at me, to suggest that I might leave, and drew shut the curtains. As I walked away a low, rhythmic chanting was beginning, a humming and a thumping and the sound of a growing ecstasy. And then I turned the corner, and there was the Adriatic, and in place of human ecstasy, the sound of waves crashing on the shore two hundred feet below.
Later, when I returned to the United States, I asked the editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Bruce Russett, if he thought there was any merit in the ideas of transcendental meditation, and of the Dubrovnik Peace Project—whether there was any sense behind the notion of harmonic vibrations and super-radiance numbers and the power to influence unified fields and to bring about peace by means of human electronics. Yale University’s Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science, for such was his other title, was acerbic in his reply, which came in the form of a long E-mail:
My considered opinion is that what the TM folks are peddling is snake oil. The premise that TM can help its practitioners reduce their own conflicts is reasonable; the premise that it can reduce conflict among nearby nonpractitioners is absurd.
It is true that JCR, which I edit, did long ago publish an article by the TM folks purporting to show big effects in the Jerusalem area. Even then I regarded the premise as absurd, but after a lot of internal debate decided that the empirical work should be judged on its own merits, separately from the plausibility of its chief assumption, and let it see daylight. That was in the December 1988 issue. A critic took a stab at demolishing their statistical analysis in the December 1990 issue, but in my judgment just missed driving his stake through the heart. Nonetheless, I have seen nothing since that persuades me that they have any general capability to do what they say; to the degree their Jerusalem experience does fit it is almost certainly a lucky coincidence, and they don’t tell us about all the tries elsewhere that didn’t work. I much regret having gone out on a limb for this, and would advise extreme caution to anyone else.
And yet. It so happens that the week during which Dr. Menoni was calling for new volunteers—the week when Dr. Suurkula arrived at the Mincenta Hotel, the week during which the numbers of those performing their various yogic feats was climbing up into the one hundreds and two hundreds—during that very week, the first week of June, there were significant moves toward peace being made in Belgrade, Moscow, London, Brussels, New York, and Washington, D.C.
And on the very day that the group did manage to assemble 345 yogic fliers, Slobodan Milosevic did accept the peace proposals from NATO. Peace of a sort was beginning to break out in the Balkans at precisely the moment that the Dubrovnik Peace Project was doing its hardest and most sustained work—when, as its leaders would claim, the vibrational forces were working at their maximum.
Maybe it is all absurd. Maybe what happened in the Balkans, like whatever happened in Jerusalem, can be dismissed as a lucky coincidence. Maybe there are those in the various great churches around the world who believe that their particular prayers or other spiritual intercessions did what was necessary. The possibility that human beings, harnessing some kind of invisible and indefinable energy, can on occasion influence external affairs with which they have no physical connection—the idea intrigues, and remains intriguing, long after the absurdity of the performance has vanished into memory. There is just a faint and lingering thought from Dubrovnik that says, all too quietly—Well, why not?
The frontier with Montenegro is half an hour’s drive from the outskirts of Dubrovnik. From the main road it is possible to see—impossible to avoid, in fact—the zigzag track that was cut up the Dinaric hillside to where the American secretary of commerce, Ron Brown, was killed in a plane crash in the spring of 1996. He had been in a U.S. Air Force Hercules, and according to reports at the time, had flown into the most terrible sudden storm and the pilot, not having the benefit of any navigation aids at the primitive Dubrovnik airfield, had flown his aircraft straight into the mountainside. Brown, along with thirty-four other members of an American trade mission, was killed.
The incident has been mired in argument ever since. Ron Brown was a black man, the highest-ranking of his race in the Clinton administration. He had been under investigation for supposed financial irregularities. And ever since his death there have been suggestions, or claims, that he might have been murdered. (Acting on a report from an air force pathologist that a wound at the top of Brown’s head could have been caused by a gunshot, the NAACP launched an investigation into the circumstances of his death.) A rash of theories, suggesting various kinds of conspiracy, flared up about a year after his death, coincident with the more florid suggestions about President Clinton and his various political problems. But, as with the White House scandals, the suggestions about improprieties surrounding Brown’s sad death quickly faded away. No one talks about the event much anymore, except in Croatia, where they have put up a memorial, and the shepherd who found the wreckage occasionally talks about the crash, and surprises listeners by saying that no, there was no storm, terrible or otherwise, on the March afternoon in question.
The most visible consequence of the tragedy, so far as Croatia itself was concerned, can be seen in the makeup of the fleet of the nation’s small airline. Mr. Brown had hoped that the directors of Croatia Airlines would order Boeing aircraft, and the dispatch of his trade mission was in part to help them make up their minds to do so. But after the accident the line decided not to buy American at all, and if you fly these days from Dubrovnik to Zagreb, or to Rome, you will do so now in a smart new A-340 Airbus, built by a consortium of European manufacturers, in France.
The flag with the red-and-whi
te checkered shield of Croatia, the once-notorious sahovnica that was also the wartime symbol of the Ustashi, fluttered over the little shack that housed the border control point south of Dubrovnik. There was no southbound traffic on the road at all—a road that still bore the scars of the fighting of the early nineties—and the skeleton staff at the checkpoint were surprised to see anyone venturing into Montenegro. The senior immigration officer was a woman, and she grinned uneasily.
“Are you sure you are wanting to go on?” she asked, with genuine concern. “Dangerous people ahead.”
But we said yes, she hastily stamped our passports, and ordered her assistant to raise the barrier. We edged ahead into the no-man’s land and rounded a corner beyond which stood a cluster of temporary shacks with the red-white-and-blue flag of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia snapping in the breeze above them. There was a thick steel pole across the road here, too, and behind it a group of heavily armed and camouflaged policemen and a big artillery piece that was pointed not toward us and any possible enemies back in Croatia—but back down the hill into Montenegro. For if these men perceived any threat at this frontier, was likely to come not from outside the country, but from within.
6
Western Approaches
A BLACK MERCEDES was waiting on the Montenegrin side of frontier, with two tough young Yugoslav women inside. They were called Dali and Vesna, they were university students from Belgrade, and they were known in the trade as fixers—members of an elite corps of unsung heroes who operate in all distant wars, the local helpmeets without whom almost no foreign correspondent could ever ply the craft.
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans Page 12