Thirty Years Later: What was all that about? (Part 5 of a series)

(To read this series from the beginning, start here.)

What is the actual cost of committing oneself to practicing the basic TM technique?

Back in 1959, according to Paul Mason’s biography of the program’s founder, an initiation fee was set at one week’s pay. That amount has varied over the years, perhaps depending on whose definition of “one week’s pay” is being used. It also says something about what stratum of society the program is being marketed to. When the current fee of $2500 is considered against the “one week’s pay” rationale, the size of the fee suggests that the program is being marketed to people with an income of $130,000 per year, or more.

Along with the fee, the initiate must bring fruit, flowers and a white handkerchief. Perhaps the need to bring physical objects underscores the underlying transactional assumption, that to be involved with the movement’s programs and to gain the claimed benefits, one must bring something of substance to the table. Later, clearly, that substance is money, but at the beginning, physical offerings are also part of the exchange. Belying the movement’s claim that what it’s offering is some kind of eternal “knowledge” available to all, clearly the “knowledge” is only made available to those who can pay whatever they charge for it.

Less obvious is the time commitment. The initiation process, about eight hours in total over seven days, involves five group sessions outside of the “interview” and the initiation itself. Thereafter, one must meditate twenty minutes twice a day, and allow an additional few minutes’ time to finish meditation. What is that time worth? Perhaps the clearest way to put a price tag on that time is to consider, as I put forward above, that the movement’s target prospect makes $130,000 a year. Based even on a sixty hour work week, that comes out to about 42 dollars an hour. Given that TM requires a time commitment of at least fifty minutes a day - time that can’t be spent doing anything else - at that rate, TM costs 304 hours a year, and if that time is valued monetarily, that cost is, at least, an additional $12,750 a year.

Thus the program conditions the meditator towards the idea that involvement in the program involves ongoing expenditures of time and money, particularly when the current program becomes stale and the movement’s other products and programs become attractive. At the very high end is the movement’s ultimate product: the million-dollar residence course. While the cost and the trappings are in a different realm of price and ostentatiousness (or, perhaps, outrageousness), the underlying appeal of all the programs are the same. They offer the initiate the promise of control of various aspects of life that generally are not under conscious control.

(Continue to Part 6)

Kansas Peace Palace Not So Peaceful

A TV station local to Smith County Kansas reports that some citizens are upset that the TM Org's proposed Maharishi Central University will be located in their back door. Seems they think TM might be a cult.

Comments are open at the station's website for readers who have opinions on these matters. Please be polite.

J.

Thirty Years Later: What was all that about? (Part 4 of a series)

(To read this series from the beginning, start here.)

In asking "what was all that about?" I am looking for things of substance, something more substantial than meaningless sounds, alien rituals in foreign languages, and repetition of elements of the sales pitch for the practice. There are more substantial aspects to the program - but they aren't all that obvious unless one turns the tables and considers what the prospective meditator brings to the initiation.

The marketing of the TM program, all the way from product placement of the program in popular culture through the two evenings of introductory lectures that precede initiation, accomplishes two things which are both, in a sense, rather obvious. The marketing first serves to select for individuals who are receptive to certain aspects of the program, which might not actually be the meditation practice itself. Secondly, the marketing sets certain expectations even while being vague as to what the actual process of initiation is; "easy" and "effortless" are part of that expectation-setting, as well as the assumption that, after having spent a considerable amount of time and money, there will be benefits from the practice.

One example of the marketing is "The TM Book," a paperback written by two then-TM teachers in 1975 and distributed by the movement. It was given free to new meditators when I started. While the book is 221 pages long, it can be summarized with a quote from the beginning, and one from the end of the book. In one sentence on the first full page of the book is this remarkable summary of the program:

The Transcendental Meditation program changes the quality of life from poverty, emptiness, and suffering to abundance, fulfillment, and happiness.

The book is illustrated throughout with two cartoon characters representing a TM teacher and prospective meditator. On the next-to-last page of the book, the prospect gets out of his chair, stands up, puts his finger in the air and declares, "I'll take it!" as if he'd just finished the negotiations for purchase of a used car.

It's these two elements that I think epitomize TM, elements that have been central to the nature of the TM movement all along. First, the program is presented as being more important than pretty much anything else in life, can influence all aspects of one's life, and that acceptance of the program can cause profound positive change in one's life; in this sense, the program emulates religious faith, certainly a "born-again" faith hinging on a one-time "decision" as it often appears in American culture. Second, the program is a package, a consumer product, marketed as if it were any other product, where "I'll take it!" indicates a decision to buy. Nothing special is required - the prospect need not learn new skills or meet anything other than the most simple requirements. The "easy"-ness and "effectiveness" of the product are in the forefront of the sales pitch for it.

The prospective meditator brings two things: their expectations and the means by which they pay the purchase price for the product. Here is where things get interesting, because the TM movement offers an endless series of just this kind of purchase transaction, up to a scale that is hard to believe.

(Continue to Part 5)

Thirty Years Later: What was all that about? (Part 3 of a series)

(To read this series from the beginning, start here.)

Today we can easily go back and inspect the movement's "secrets," all those things we were told during the initiation process we weren't supposed to go talking about, even among other meditators. With the dawn of the Internet, such secrets don't stay that way for long, and as the 'net became popular in the mid-1990's, so did the accessibility of information, analysis and commentary on the TM programs and organizations.

Perhaps the single most widespread and enduring cultural artifact of the TM movement is that of "mantra mystique." It's the notion that the sounds given to meditators to silently repeat in their heads are somehow special, private, special, and uniquely selected to be suitable for the initiate. Did I mention that the mantras are supposed to be very special?

A list of many if not most of the mantras distributed by TM teachers has been available for more than thirteen years online, on the minet.org website I created to offer as a base for critical examination of TM, the TM organizations, and its associated programs. It's just a list of sounds, and it's rather obvious that the means by which the particular sounds are given to initiates has had very little consistency over the years. There's a lot of variation across sets of mantras that differ depending on when the teacher was instructed. But given all the fuss over mantras, and the seemingly random changes through time, the list doesn't suggest that the mantras are of any particular value except perhaps as some device to fill the initiate's expectation that they're about to receive something of value.

The same goes for other aspects of the initiation. The prospective meditator must witness a ritual, a "puja," performed in a language they don't understand. Even if the prospect were given a translation of the ritual, it would probably be meaningless without an explanation of the culture and terminology. But this is just the start of an obvious pattern, first pointed out to me years ago by a former meditator: the TM movement offers pieces of India's culture, disconnected and decontextualized, that are fed, piecemeal, to paying customers. It doesn't matter if the customer doesn't understand what's going on: the mystery is part of the product, it inflates its apparent value. Why else does the prospective meditator have to sit through such a thing, except to be disoriented and perhaps a bit confused by it?

There's also something called "checking," where a meditator allegedly has their meditation practice "checked" by an instructor. The checking notes are also readily available, and what's clear is that the checking ritual is something of a flowchart, with scripts of exchanges between the instructor and meditator. An interesting feature of the flowchart is such that the meditator doesn't get to leave until agreement with the instructor is obtained. There is, again, not a whole lot to the "checking" ritual of substance other than the reinforcement, through repetition, of the same ideas and expectations that are present even before meditation instruction, in the introductory lectures. Meditation is supposed to be easy and effortless, and we'll stick you in an endless loop of our checking flowchart until you agree.

(Continue to Part 4)

The story of TM

Here is the story of TM

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20080518

Thanks to G. B. Trudeau for seeing plain as day what has always been right in front of us.