Wednesday, January 12, 2011

TM-Free News Brief, 12 January 2011

Billionaire for TM: A recent "tweet" from a certain TM "raja" points to a rather sarcastic piece in the Business Insider's "Clusterstock" section reporting that the hedge fund run by meditator Ray Dalio was up 34% in 2010, which theoretically might mean that Dalio made two billion dollars last year.  Of the $12 million or so he's given away recently, Dalio's foundation reportedly handed the David Lynch Foundation $1.23 million to promote TM in schools and everywhere else. Dalio's Bridgewater Associates pays half of the TM instruction fee for employees to meditate - but only if they stick with TM for only six months. How many quit doing TM after those six months? Who's checking to see who's meditating, and how? But I digress...

The only person I've noticed thus far who attempts to seriously draw the direct conclusion that "Transcendental Meditation boosts Hedge Fund profits" is "Raja" Felix Kägi, who's obviously been following this story and used exactly that title on his "silentadministration.org" blog. The rest of us might attribute Dalio's 2010 success to a lot of skill on his part and of those in his firm, meditating or no, and perhaps quite a bit of random luck and fortunate timing; let's not fail to point out that this same fund only earned two percent the previous year. But it's always the habit of various salesmen, be they selling traditional snake-oil woo or the products of Maharishi's movement, to take credit for the upside and ignore the inevitable downside. I think I'll wait and see how Dalio's hedge funds do for the next few years.  Let's also not fail to mention the link at the bottom of that lead "Clusterstock" story: "Bridgewater Employees Rave About Getting Blackout Drunk And Mud-Wrestling With Ray Dalio."
Meanwhile, around the corner from Wall Street:  The TM movement has finally sold the American Bank Note building at 70 Broad Street, in New York's financial district. They bought it for $5.5 million in 2004, attempted to sell it for $45 million about two years ago, and finally unloaded it for $18 million to a Chinese construction firm. Along the way, the movement borrowed some millions of dollars with the help of New York City's Industrial Development Agency to renovate the space. Clearly, the Global Country of World Peace created a palace fit for a king, er, raja. Rumor was that this was to be the precisely east- and north-facing residence of John Hagelin.

I'll let Fairfield Life contributor Bob Brigante take it from here. Bob wrote this back when the building first went up for sale: "The reason why they are selling is because it's an embarrassment for Hagelin to keep touting the group in Fairfield as being responsible for the market run-up which is no more. Hagelin had a vision of being able to sit in a grand bldg in the middle of the financial district and take credit for everything good happening in the markets correlated to the rising numbers of meditators in the domes -- now that he can't do that without being laughed at, the bldg has got to go..."


Not quite a Billionaire for TM: In an ongoing battle over the Gore-Tex family fortune, the adoption of an ex-husband by an heir who once devoted several years to Transcendental Meditation is at issue. Family members allege that Susan W. Gore, one of five children of Gore-Tex founder Wilbert Gore, adopted her ex-husband to correct "flawed" and "unfair" terms of the payout of a trust fund, after Susan lost large amounts of money through bad investments and after having "almost destroyed her life by moving to Iowa and devoting several years to transcendental meditation," to quote the wording of the Delaware newspaper's article.

According to The News Journal, Susan Gore also donated money and time to one of the TM movement's projects to introduce its meditation into a Vermont prison. At one point Gore was paying $12,000 a month to a Wyoming woman who served as a spiritual and financial advisor.


Briefly: The brother of TM movement figure Neil Paterson has been arrested in Canada and charged with fraud. It's not clear, from this rather confusing and blatantly sensationalistic National Post article, what the connection is between Neil and the business that was headed by his brother John, but we hear, and Wikipedia cites a Globe and Mail report, that Neil actually owned most of the gold mining operation that was the vehicle for his brother's alleged criminal activity. Neil Paterson was leader of the Natural Law Party of Canada, and ran unsuccessfully multiple times in federal elections there. I received the extra syllable of the so-called "advanced technique" from him in Washington DC in the early 1980's... The Natural Law Party is still alive in Michigan... Maharishi Ayurvedic Products is franchising in India, here's the press release... Also in India, The Assam Tribune reports on allegations that buses run by the TM-affiliated Maharishi Vidya Mandir to transport school children, among others, "are old, polluting vehicles in poor running condition, with the result that these frequently suffer breakdowns and are highly susceptible to mishaps. The general practice is to use those buses for schools which are unfit for other running purposes."

Go see "David Wants to Fly." It's playing in the United States at a few festivals and events: in Palm Springs tonight, Denver and San Francisco this weekend, and in Boston in March. Here's Gina's rundown with all the details, on the blog.

Also, recently, on the blog: Laurie on "Transcendental Meditation's Testimonials," a great antidote for when somebody tries to tell you they've made lots of money because of TM, and "Making Sense of a Nonsensical Movement," where I tackle the "Vedic" roots of the TM movement and the "it's not a religion" TM technique. Again.

TM-Free News Brief, 12 January 2011. Published irregularly here on Wednesdays by Mike Doughney, who's solely responsible for its content unless otherwise noted.
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Making Sense of a Nonsensical Movement

The following is something I wrote earlier tonight as part of some private correspondence. It might be helpful in trying to make sense of the TM movement's nonsense, particularly when it comes to the constant insistence that TM is "not a religion." The truth of the matter is not easily explained, in large part because of inconsistent concepts as to what a religion is.


  1. The most accurate, broad self-characterization of "Maharishi Mahesh Yogi" and the organization he established ("Global Country of World Peace") is as a means of Vedic revivalism. "The complete theoretical and practical knowledge of the Veda and its profound significance for life has been revived and understood in a scientific framework by Maharishi’s Vedic Science and Technology..." which can be found in exactly this language here and here, and similarly elsewhere.

  2. While TM devotees attempt to separate "Vedic" from "Hindu," there is very little to support this separation, and what's effectively a simple word substitution. TM devotees often claim that their particular interpretation of ancient texts that they call "Veda" is the pure form of knowledge from which later traditions they consider corrupted, such as Hinduism, were derived. These assertions are evidently unique to those associated with the TM organization, and allied religious groups in India.  All that is being sold as "Vedic" under the TM organization's auspices, that was not reinterpreted, misinterpreted or completely manufactured by Maharishi and other group leaders over time, traces to the spiritual and cultural traditions of India that are usually referred to as "Hindu." However, much of it has certain unusual twists or doctrines unique to the organization. Among these is a group of males wearing crowns and white outfits who've paid 1 million USD to become "rajas" as part of a so-called "Global Government," and who may run the organization.

  3. Likewise, there is no support for describing any part of the Vedas as "scientific." The attempt to draw connections and parallels between aspects of the Vedas, Vedic or Hindu practices, and Western scientific concepts has been common among Hindus for decades if not centuries, and continues as part of the TM organization doctrine. There is no scientific support for such claims made by TM devotees. As an example, the organization has long claimed direct association between Vedic concepts and those of quantum mechanics, put forward by longtime TM devotee and American leader ("raja") John Hagelin. While Hagelin is a physicist, his pronouncements of this nature have gained zero support from others.

  4. Supremacy of the Vedas, and Vedic practices, is foundational to the TM organization's purpose, as it says at the bottom of this page under the title "Everything Should Be Vedic." This would include the folding of other cultures and other religious practices into a system in which Vedic practice is supreme. The gaining of alleged positive benefits at every level (personal/social/national/planetary), including the "world peace"  often referred to by proponents including David Lynch (and internally as "Heaven on Earth" or Sat Yuga), is the motivator for the organization's attempt to popularize "Vedic Knowledge." The products and services sold by the organization, of which Transcendental Meditation is usually one's initial contact, are the actual mechanism by which "Vedic Knowledge" is disseminated. Unlike TM, on which the organization has focused its efforts to obtain scientific research on which to base its claims of efficacy, there is very little, if any, research on any of the other product categories, listed at the bottom of this page.

  5. Note that in this description, things that are part of implementing this "Vedic knowledge" are practices, not beliefs.  There is no profession of faith or anything of that sort which many Westerners associate with "religion." It is in this way that TM and all the Vedic products are similar to consumer products, in that they are sold as being effective, but the buyer need not know, or care, or even believe in, the specifics of why or how they are effective. (Do you know or care why your stick of deodorant works?) The key activity becomes marketing, and everything to support the claims of efficacy in the marketing, which is why the organization seems obsessed with getting any possible support, no matter how shaky, preliminary, or unreplicated it may be from the scientific community it can possibly dig up. Incessant name-dropping of celebrities who sign on to the program is also part of this process.

  6. From the TM organization's view, the whole point is to recruit individuals into a system of practices, that are believed to be a correct, pure implementation of "Vedic knowledge," to bring about "Heaven on Earth." While prospective meditators are told in introductory lectures that the ultimate purpose is to bring about world peace, they are never clear about the details of how that's supposed to happen. World peace in this system is brought about, not through individual, personal development, but through adherence to Vedic "knowledge" in every detail across all aspects of life through the purchase and use of the organization's products and services by many people in aggregate. It is at this point where involvement with TM takes the form of participation in a religious enterprise without knowledge or consent; while the individual meditator may not need to believe anything, and may even deny belief, may even think everything about the organization is completely bogus, and in the practice of meditation (the introductory product) may not be doing anything even recognizable as a religious practice, the motivations of the teachers and marketers of TM are obviously in a different realm and of a different nature, are based in a belief system that holds to unusual notions of causation that are not clearly disclosed, and that would be considered by many to be religious, although unorthodox if not completely bizarre by Western standards.

    There is no rational or scientific basis for the claim that the more people adopt these products, the more likely "Heaven on Earth" will come about, in the same way that, to cover some of the more outrageous claims made for its other products, an east-facing home of proper Vedic proportions will give its owner health and wealth, spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to have someone in India perform a ritual would likewise give the buyer health and wealth, or that bouncing on foam rubber while thinking certain thoughts... the list goes on like this for a while.  These more advanced products carry obvious spiritual or religious connotations, while the organization continues to insist that their basis is entirely "scientific."

    Meanwhile, the simple practice of meditation does provide some benefit for some people. For some, the initial benefit serves as validation for other claims made by the organization for its other products, and becomes part of the sales pitch for deeper involvement with its programs, and continues the intended intake path.


A longer post covering similar issues.
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