Elder: So, if you had soothing music in public places, or if there were more healthful school lunches, the murders you just now mentioned wouldn't have taken place?
Peckman: Less likely to have taken place.
Elder: What causes you stress, personally?
Peckman: If I miss a night's sleep, get way off the routine, or --
Elder: And what should the city do to make sure that you don't miss a night's sleep?
Peckman: Well, that part is my responsibility. But it's like trash. You can only do so much to get people to reduce the amount of trash they create . . . there's still too much. . . . You could say, why is it the city's responsibility to take away an individual's personal trash? It's in the best interest of the city.
Elder: You are, in my opinion, quite right when you say it's your responsibility to get a night's sleep. . . . You get stressed because your wife gets sick or . . . when you lose a job. . . . I don't know what the government's function is to deal with those kinds of things.
Peckman: Think about air pollution. Everybody contributes . . . but the government has regulations . . . to try and control that. . . . This theory is that stress accumulates as an environmental pollutant . . . in the collective consciousness of the community. . . . When you do things to reduce that society-wide stress, all those negative social indicators are reduced and the positive trends are increased. That's what the research shows.
Elder: The research also undoubtedly shows that life causes stress. The only way to have a completely stress-free life is to be dead. . . . What can the city do to reduce terrorism?
Peckman: There have been studies documenting the effect of large group practice of specific technologies of consciousness, or meditative techniques, that had a global influence of significantly reducing terrorist acts. . . . This research shows there was a causal relationship between these practices in certain large groups and a very broad influence of coherence and peacefulness generated over a country or city or even globally.
Elder: If the president . . . issued an edict that everybody meditate for an hour, September 11th wouldn't have happened?
Peckman: I don't know. Depends upon what kind of meditation they were doing.
Wow. Now we know the cause of al Qaeda's anger toward the West -- their failure to engage in transcendental meditation. More gurus, please.