To the Editor:

At least three of us from the Albany metropolitan area assembled in India with 11,000 people meditating together for peace: Tom Bajorski, who runs the Albany Transcendental Meditation center, a friend who came with him, and me.

Now, to be honest, I’m licking my wounds and wondering if I’ll do it again next year. My wife definitely will not. “I’ve got some sense,” she argues. For her, India as a whole is off the table.

We traveled from 139 countries to come together in one place and practice meditation and yogic flying together. The idea is that numbers doing these Vedic practices together multiply the effect, and 11,000 is more than the square root of 1 percent of the world’s population and enough to bring on a phase transition in the direction of peace.

We even had one talk by a neurologist who demonstrated the “Superradiance” effect when we all meditated together. His demonstration screen lit up. And the effect was supposed to go everywhere — Russia, Iran, Israel, Altamont, Brazil. You name it. Everywhere.

And these places were represented in the assembly, too. One guy I ate lunch with, communicating mostly with hand signals, was from Russia. One woman sat across from me at a crowded table: Natalia from Ukraine.

They were all there, gorgeous beyond belief, surviving travel hardship just to get there. And when the bell rang, we all transcended together and did our yogic flying together — for a long time. And there it all was, burgeoning out from a silent assembly, coherent brain waves multiplying and reinforcing each other.

I had some nice experiences there. The instruction was to be there for the world, but I pretty openly was there for the experiences.

A famous Vedic saying is “I am that. Thou are that. All this is that,” and I decided the saying was wrong. First, it should be “I am this,” not “I am that.” Second, it should just be “I am.” That is the experience of totality, of being one with the universe, of being one.

However, I have to say, I now have a cold and a cough. I have ant bites from these fierce little combatants who exact more than their share of flesh and leave a welt.

I began to wonder if we had been purifying the stress of the world. Not sure, but I don’t want to just stand here and make claims and hide the fact that, hey, this was tough duty.

Our experience is that transcending creates peace.

Now, at the assembly, we had our collective experience. Our professional observers, the scientists and statisticians, will tell us how well we did. Or, if you notice some positive changes in the world, maybe it was us for those couple weeks in January.

Albany was there. And, if you look close and know where to look, we’re in that picture from Hyderabad.

James Meade, Ph.D.

Milanville, Pennsylvania

Editor’s note: Author Jim Meade is a Transcendental Meditation teacher and a 1962 graduate of Guilderland High School. He’s 79. He says he is now planning a book on dementia, if he can remember to work on it.