Startling Charges about TM Pandits and Yagyas

Some weeks ago, I corresponded with a TM Org employee from India. He made some startling allegations about the late Maharishi's pandit and yagya programs that I quote below.

For those unfamiliar with pandits and yagyas, a pandit is a high-caste Brahmin who chants Hindu Vedas and mantras and may perform various religious rituals. Yagyas are religious rituals performed for a specific effect, such as to promote business success. Although Transcendental Meditation claims not to be a religion, for the past 20 years they have charged TMers high fees to have these Hindu rituals performed in their names. (More detail below.)

A word of caution: I have tried to confirm the employee's charges through other parties. But as is so often the case with whistleblowers, it appears that it is very difficult to find others willing to talk about his charges. So his story remains unconfirmed — yet quite disturbing. (He has requested anonymity.)

I shall be happy to honestly tell you the truth about movement without any motivation whatsoever. I am no more with the movement so there is no moral dilemma to keep quiet about the wrong doings. I am a free person so I can speak my mind.....

I joined Movement in 1995 to become a translator for jyotishies. I studied jyotish and some tricks to do my work efficiently. We were encouraged to be regular practitioner of TM and sidhi. We learned it for almost free. Our pay in India was linked to the meditation hall sittings. If we were unable to attend one sitting we had lo lose the pay for that sitting. There were exceptions to the rule too.

Br[amhachari] Nandakishore was controlling all happenings of Jyotish and yagya programme then. Their sole aim was to get as much yagya business as possible as it is high margin business for them. They never gave importance to good professionals. They also got yagya Pandits in a very unhealthy living environment so they never bothered to do their work sincerely. It is still the case. You would be shocked to know that at times there were uprising and I know a few Pandits got killed. They have local police in their side as regular payments are made to them. Almost all political parties get donation from movement so they never got into any big trouble. There were a lot of politics to decide who goes to what country as far as we professionals are concerned. I can say for sure there is still nobody in the Indian Movement who really cares about the sincere execution of the various programs. All are looking for opportunities to make money. This is the case today too with international. I know many of the movement people, who are working against the interest of Movement from inside. Some are using their official position and official email address to extract business for their confidants outside the Movement.

I wrote back asking for more detail.

The Pandit killing happened at Karondi ashram in Madhya Pradesh. It happened in 2001 or 2002. I was at Vlodrop then. It was an uprising and probably stress of some Pandits. Some Pandits killed a Pandit for some heated exchange. I think it was not intentional. It did not make any well known paper. Movement is good at suppressing such events. Most of the Pandits are from very poor family so movement never faced any challenge from any of the Pandit family.

Re tricks, they are normal instructions like recommend yagyas as per the financial situation of a client and his desperation. Always try to keep the client happy by telling him/her what he/she likes to listen. Promote other movement programs through consultations and lectures. Never contradict a fellow jyotish.

Re yagya I am not surprised. I worked for the department for 8 years. I know clients pay high. Some pay millions of $. Yagya performance is a Vedic procedure. Sometimes it is chanting of a specific mantra and sometimes it is repetition of a mantra in the mind by the Pandits. For some performances there is a fire ceremony in the end. It is a genuine good technique if done sincerely with devotion. For different purposes different deities are invoked. Ganesh is invoked to keep obstacles away and knowledge. Mahalaxmi for wealth, success in business. Vishnu for enlightenment, evolution etc. Shiva for health, enlightenment etc. For love Mother divine (Durga). Actually it is a big list and it depends upon the jyotish chart of the person. For planets there is specific mantra. Usually 11 Pandits form a group to do a yagya. For bigger yagyas more Pandits are used. All Pandits get money in the end, which is called daxina.

No I have no contact with any movement leaders including Br Nandakishore. I am too small a person to have contact with a leader figure.

I know some Movement Governors from Australia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Italy, Germany, France, USA some of them are running TM centers, Ayurveda clinic, Vastu related business, some are leaders of their country are having yagya performances done by ex TM joyotish people and also encourage their students to have yagya performance because they are beneficiary (financially like earning a commission or free yagya for themselves).

I am no more with Movement so I do not know exactly under what program the Pandits are going. Usually they sign a contract to stay for 2 years or something like that. They promise to live a tailor made life style. They are paid in India. In USA too they sign some agreements without properly understanding what they are signing. Defection is always a problem. I know a few jyotish and translators defected but movement did not take any action. Probably they were not in a position to do so.

My conversation with this former TM employee are ongoing. I will continue to share his allegations as I learn them.

Everywhere you look

Everywhere you look you see
The Happiness Business
By Robert Fulford
Star staff writer

He entered slowly, smiling a gentle smile, a tiny Indian in a white robe and flowing hair, carrying flowers. He walked past his acolytes to the throne they had prepared for him - a chair draped in white, banked with flowers. He took one of the flowers from his own bunch and sniffed it absent- mindedly as a young man introduced him.

This was in a rented public room at the Inn on the Park last September. On the night before the same room had held a fashion show, and in a sense this was a fashion show, too. For the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, inventor of the cult of Transcendental Meditation, had just now become the latest fashion in Instant Happiness.

The Beatles had only recently announced their conversion, so some of their followers were there to find out what it was all about. But among the several hundred people in the room there were also representatives - as the question period later demonstrated - of various competing cults.

The acidheads were there in strength, and the astrology people, and the people who worry about whether you cast good or bad vibrations, and the ones who concern themselves with reincarnation. There were some Scientologists, too; but not, so far as I could gather, any Flat Earthers.

All of these people were involved in a phenomenon of our time, the search for a new way to happiness. The old security-providing institutions of the past have, as almost everybody has noticed, begun collapsing around us - community, family, church, whatever people relied on in the past, are no longer enough. City people, thousands and thousands of them, are reaching out of their loneliness, for something, anything, to grasp. You can hear them at night on the radio, phoning in, enduring some boorish announcer's insults just so they can get in touch. You can see them at the social clubs, longing for a new contact, a new meaning. You can see them at the night schools (anyone who teaches a night course realizes quickly that half his students are there just so they won't have to be alone) or the modeling schools or the dance schools. They are the consumers of the products of the Happiness Business, in which the Maharishi is now a leading figure.

Now they had come to see him, to find out whether he had, in fact, an answer. The man introducing him said the Maharishi wouldn't explain his system (for that you had to join up, and pay), but he would tell us why we needed it. The Maharishi then began to point out that the world was in trouble. There was all this tension, he said, and strain. We were sacrificing life for the standard of living.

"Somehow," he said, "we have to face this situation ... it is very easy to face it, because nature is in our favor."

He spoke in a light, relaxed, confident voice, his remarks punctuated, frequently by giggles. His accent occasionally gave his words an extra comic dimension, as in, for instance, his inability to handle "th". When he tried to use the word "thought" in a sentence, the sentence came out "Where is the tought before you tought it?" (Giggle.)

At one point he gave us what I sometimes think of as The Swedish Lie. "Sweden," the Maharishi said, "has the highest standard of living in Europe but also ... the highest suicide rate." (No it doesn't" In the UN statistics, Sweden has a lower suicide rate than Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Finland; it's tied for fifth place with Formosa, Denmark, and West Germany. A small point, perhaps, but someone has to defend those poor Swedes.)

The Maharishi's answer to the problems of Sweden and everywhere else was a series of statements so simple-minded and so banal as to make the average United Church preacher sound like Socrates himself. They went like this: "Action is based on thinking. On what is based the thinking? ... We must at least be ... Being is the basis of thinking, as thinking is the basis of acting."

"Weakness is due to lack of strength." (He actually said that.)

Some psychologists, he said, claim stress is necessary, But no: Stress is the greatest enemy of man, the greatest enemy of progress. What is necessary is to gain that state of mind in which we are never in stress or strain. The way to do this, he said, is Transcendental Meditation, "which makes one so profound in his thought and action that everything goes on without stress and strain."

(Elsewhere he has explained how it works: "They (his students) have to sit in meditation. This transcendental meditation, and each one is given a thought, a thought without meaning: this is the mechanics of meditation. We don't meditate on any specific point of love or God or this or this or this.")

In the question period the Maharishi slowly revealed his attitudes. When a young man asked how Transcendental Meditation could cope with the potency of the fact that we must die, and die alone, the Maharishi laughed in his face, very hard.

"Have you read some book on existentialism?" (giggle). the Maharishi said. He then reported that he himself, had first heard of existentialism two years ago. He told a long, meandering anecdote about someone he described as a famous Canadian professor of philosophy specializing in existentialism. He wouldn't name names, but this professor had confronted him with the same sort of question. He had said to the professor: "Is this existentialism or is this deathism?" (Laughter.) The man had submitted himself to Transcendental Meditation and had been converted almost overnight. Next question.

The story had exactly the same structure, and the same point, as one of Norman Vincent Peale's infinitely retellable anecdotes about businessmen finding success through faith. Indeed, the Maharishi answered all his questioners in the Peal style: Pat, final, finished. He knew the answer to everything, and the answer was always the same. As one of his acolytes said, Transcendental Meditation "makes obsolete all attempts to improve mankind up to now".

And then a curious thing happened. A young man holding a paper flower rose from the audience and asked: "Is space translucent or transparent?" A meaningless question, of course, but no nuttier than some we'd heard already. I didn't at first realize that it was intentionally meaningless. It took me a while, watching the questioner's face, to realize this was a put-on.

The Maharishi never did get this point, so far as I could see. He tried to answer seriously. It "depends on how we see," he began. "We put on dark glasses and ..." But this wasn't leading him anywhere. So he said it "depends on our state of consciousness ... This is a relative world and nothing is the same for everyone ..." And on and on, as the young man with the flower stood there, watching and smiling. The Maharishi himself finally realized that he just wasn't saying anything at all - that he was in fact saying even less than he had been saying all evening - and finally he ground to a halt. There was a sense of embarrassment in the room.

By the end of the evening - the meeting lasted more than two hours - at least a third of the audience had left. Of those remaining, a good many were grumbling in a quiet, disenchanted way, Some had come as true believers, and perhaps some others were converted during the course of the Mararishi's [sic.] remarks (anything is possible), but most of us, I suspect had discovered the evening's central truth: The Maharishi hasn't got the answer, either. Whatever the Beatles may think, the high priest of pop meditation is a meandering, annoying old bore.

The Toronto Star, 11 November 1967, pages 29 and 31.
"Reproduced with permission - Torstar Syndication Services"

A friend of mine was at this talk and told me about Fulford's write up (and helped me proofread my faulty typing). He has this to report about the young man with the paper flower:

Robert Fulford is a very sharp writer and has been at it for years. The guy asking the question about the translucency or transparency of space had wafted in carrying gigantic paper flowers on very long stems. He was wearing white robes and sandals, and he had long hair and a long beard. He looked like Maharishi except that he was Caucasian and taller. He handed the flowers to his attendant just before they sat down. During Maharishi's talk he stood up to ask a question. In the midst of Maharishi trying to fumble an answer to his question the guy smirked knowingly (because he knew the question was meaningless and too stupid to deserve an answer, let alone one from a supposed "yogi:). took back his gigantic flowers from his attendant and then he immediately paraded (or strutted) out with the attendant in tow just after Maharishi stumbled to a halt.

--

I thought the whole story, Fulford's and my friend's, was wonderfully funny. But, plain as the sun at noon on a clear day, it was obvious to the writer and probably the guy with the paper flowers, that the giggling guru was far from what we believed he was. We fell for him like pheramones. If Mahesh could, indeed, do magic, if he was the kind of yogi who was capble of tricks, this was it.

Transcendental Meditation: No Place to Be Gay?

I recently received an email from a man who posted his personal TM story on the old trancenet.net site. "Mark" discovered there was no place in the TM movement for "what Nature made him."

His original TranceNet story follows, along with his most recent email to me.

Should I tell you my story?

I mean I guess you are a very busy man and I appreciate the fact that you could not possibly handle all the requests for help that are sent to you. I will try to make it brief and to the point as I believe that my experience could be of value to people like me who maybe are trying to fit in and being abused by organisations like TM in the name of helping them to overcome [their] differences.

I am referring to being gay, John, and some people who would use organisations like TM to either find themselves or run away from [their] sexuality.

My story starts on the day I read Perfect Health by Deepak Chopra (more on him later!).

It was May of 1992 and I was a naive, sensitive and closeted gay person. I had no one to talk to about my sexuality and decided the only option was to suppress it. So anyway I read the book and was really interested in the technical side of Ayurveda. I had a real understanding of it and thought that this was what I wanted to do, not only learn more about it but maybe practice as well.

I rang the number on the back of the book for further information[.] I spoke to [a local TM teacher], and he said that the best thing to do was to come into the centre and have a consolation [sic, consultation]. I went along and was taken [a]back by his friendly, professional manner and of course his knowledge of Ayurveda which was what I really was after. After a brief talk he convinced me to learn TM as part of finding out more about Ayurveda (Maharishi Ayurveda, I had no idea there was any other sort).

That was the first deception... You must meditate to learn the most from Ayurveda.

My father had done TM many years ago to help control his anger and it worked (he no longer practices TM and I understand why!) and is still an angry man, but I digress.

So I knew that it was a technique to help reduce stress and had certainly never heard of other claimed benefits.

My group of six other people who started mediating together were are [sic] [an] odd sort of housewives, another gay person (as I later found out), managers and office workers. Of that group I know for sure that four including me no longer practice TM and never will again. So I started to meditate and from the first day I had the most amazing special affects [sic, effects] while meditating. I mean these were like out of body experiences the works! [The teacher] said that these were very special things but not to concentrate on the[m] too much and it all would settle down soon.

I[t] didn[']t. I started to have spontaneous transcending at my work (I was a printer working with dangerous machines!) and would have to stop working and sit down to rest during them. I was having up to 5 per day at one time.

The experiences, although felt wonderful, were not getting less, and I started to have psychic manifestations or maybe they were hallucinations? Anyway [my teacher] couldn[']t offer any real help or guidance but the usual rubbish (and I got the feeling that he had no idea what I was talking about).

My beloved aunt died that year and she came to me in the most moving experience I have every had during meditation (ghost?). It rocked me to my soul and all [my teacher] could say was, "Let[']s check your practice." I think he was scared of my experiences.

I put up with 12 months of on and off experiences but in no way was I getting enlightened. I was [losing] friends fast and my job wasn[']t looking too good either! I was putting pressure on friends to learn and family too. I must have been a real pain in the ass to my loved ones, but they are a[n] understanding lot, thank goodness!

It was when [my teacher] and his new wife went to Germany for a holiday that I started and did have my first break from TM.

I was living in [their] home, house sitting for them while they were away, and I had my first sexual experience with another man. It was a total disaster but [it] gave me a new understanding of my self and my sexuality and how I could incorporate into my medi[t]ation!

I was very excited and when [my teacher] came back from Germany I arranged a meeting with him on our usual group meeting night (being 7:30pm on Thursdays) we met at 7:00pm and by the time we went into the meeting with the others at 7:30pm I [k]new that I would be never coming back to TM again.

I sat throughout the meeting and didn[']t even talk the whole way through — my world was shattered. I went home that night and cried for 4 hours. A TM friend came around to comfort me and called [my teacher] who also came round, but by then it was too late I was out of TM.

What Bruce said to me that caused the death of part of me and the birth of another and sent me on my way to become free of TM forever was, "You can never become a[n] Ayurvedic doctor, you can never become a TM teacher, you can not be gay if you want to be involved with TM."

I must say coming from someone that I loved dearly (I really did love him, now I only pity him) sent me into a bit of a spin. His only correspondence to me (through a friend) was that, "Martin you are limiting yourself by choosing this lifestyle," but it fell on deaf ears. I was not going to listen to him.

In a way I was so happy to be free of TM, it was like a release from prison. You think that you[']ve got it made and then you see what[']s really outside and you think that you can never go back. Of course I was wrong.

My last contact with [my teacher] was at the meeting in which I learned the Primordial Sound Technique. I wanted to learn it for two main reasons, to meet Deepak Chopra and to experience (what I thought) was a[n] Ayurvedic technique.

I spent the $700 and had the personal consultation with Mr Chopra, which consisted of two [minutes] of pulse touching and mantra-giving (something like 'Trapus-vena'? can[']t really remember it clearly). Anyway I never did it once and it was a complete waste of $700 (of which I couldn[']t really afford to spend!) although the tape of Maharishi chanting (supposedly) is actually quit[e] good (boy was that the most expensive tape I ever bought!)

The brainwashing was deep but my sexuality was deeper. You can[']t fight nature. They always said so, who was I [to] argue, my sexuality was what nature made me.

The one thing that I resent was the loss of Ayurveda. It was my life and I just couldn[']t continue with it under Chopra.

I [now] understand that TM [doesn't] own Ayurveda or, in fact. meditation — anymore than Christians own the words of Jesus. However with TM and my experience of Ayurveda being so linked I have a totally block now, and it is sad for me.

It was a surprise and real pleasure to hear from Mark last week:

When I look back at my story its amazing how my life has moved on[.] I am doing well and have a stable loving relationship and great job.

Just as a note from my story, around about 1999 I have a call out of the blue from my old TM teacher[.] [H]e asked if I remembered him and them went on to say he had felt guilty even after all those years after what he said to me, and that he himself is gay!

It’s amazing what people do to each other out of their own insecurities and inadequacies.

John I hope that are well and keep up the good work.

I know a number of stories that tend to show the TM Org as not gay-friendly. If people are interested, just ask in the comments below.

Discussion Thread

It's been too long since we have had a thread devoted to our loyal family of commenters! Here you go — talk amongst yourselves!