A Bermudian has recently returned to the Island after taking part in a concerted venture to bring peace to the Balkans via the medium of transcendental meditation.

L.C. O'Toole arrived back in Bermuda last week after spending over a fortnight in Croatia.

She took part in the Dubrovnik Peace Project, a campaign organised by the Association for Transcendental Meditation in Croatia.

Transcendental meditation derives from the ancient Vedic tradition of India and was introduced to the western world by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It is a technique which, through stillness and silence, relaxes the mind and eases stress.

The project's aim was to bring together meditators from all over the world and for them to go through a course of intensive meditation with the purpose of, in the words of Croatian TM leader, Jadranko Miklec, "creating a coherence of collective consciousness'' and reducing the level of aggression in the area.

Ms O'Toole, a member of TM Bermuda, explained that, during the project, over nine hours of the day were set aside for communal meditation and that among the approximately 400 people involved, there were meditators from such countries as Germany, Canada, Great Britain and the US.

According to Ms O'Toole faxes were sent to TM centres all over the world in the hope of rallying enough people to create a noticeable effect on the level of hostilities in the area.

While such a technique may seem far-fetched, Dr. Brian Horsfield, a Bermudian TM teacher, explained that the practice of meditating in groups has been proven to produce positive effects on several occasions.

One such occasion happened in Bermuda in 1984, when a group of 30 people meditated twice daily for a week with the aim of reducing the Island's crime rate.

"The statistics for that week have only recently been made available,'' Dr.

Horsfield said adding, "and they do show that the numbers of crimes during that week came down by an astonishing 49.7 percent as compared with the average for the four previous weeks. Indeed, the Police at the time described it as `the quietest Christmas in recent memory'.'' Dr. Horsfield also explained that similar experiments have been carried out in Washington DC and in Lebanon.

He said: "These studies are published in the top scientific journals and have passed careful scrutiny by independent experts.'' In Croatia, the Dubrovnik Peace Project claimed a success when 200 Serbian troops withdrew from the Prevlaka Peninsular demilitarised zone, just 40 kilometres from where the meditators were staying.

Leader of the project, Jadranko Miklec attributed this withdrawal to the creation of "coherence in collective consciousness'' and said the meditators had provided "an unseen invincible armour of defence against destructive outside influences.'' Members of the Natural Law Party in the United States had proposed a similar solution to the problems in Kosovo to President Clinton in April.

The President did not give his support and meditators were forced to go ahead with their plans without government support.

The project did, however, experience a large amount of emotional support from the Croatians and this was supplemented by constant messages of encouragement from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, based in Holland.

Bermudian Ms O'Toole has no doubt that the Dubrovnik Peace Project did constitute an important peaceful influence.

"Before I went,'' she said, "I was an agnostic by heart. While I was there I became a true believer in the value of TM.'' Her participation in the project was funded by renting her house out and when asked if she thought it was worth it, she gave a simple answer.

"Absolutely.''