There are certain claims of eventual benefits that are regularly made to people after they’ve started practicing TM, that are often eagerly accepted by those who’ve had enough experience with it that, accurately or otherwise, they begin to view it as beneficial for themselves. The experience of perceived initial, immediate benefit primes them to readily believe what they’re told may come later if they stick with the program. These claims stand in stark contrast to the everyday, mundane reality of the lives of many long-term meditators. That has never stopped both those meditators, and people with positions of responsibility in TM organizations, from continuing to make specific yet completely unsupportable claims about how all meditators’ lives will be improved through the practice of TM.
Far exceeding their public promotional claims of stress-free, healthy lives made as if TM were some “wellness” cure-all for everyone, are the statements that aren’t often made in public, and that are reinforced among meditators and in the meditating subculture. One of the most ridiculous, if not corrosive, of these claims is that of “spontaneous right action” resulting from long-term practice of TM and related “Maharishi” branded programs. But if you know where to look, you’ll find out that the publishing operation of the Maharishi University of Management (MUM) actually has printed such drivel, written by the university’s vice president of academic affairs, and former executive vice president, Craig Pearson. This places such things well beyond the realm of simple rumor, into that of fully acceptable, officially sanctioned, doctrine or belief.
Keeping in mind that though every TM introductory lecturer insists that “no belief is necessary” to practice TM, people who’ve been meditating for decades often sound much like the following quote from “The Complete Book of Yogic Flying,” a book which describes the TM movement’s long-running levitation hoax that they call the “TM-Sidhi program.” To insiders who do this “program,” the point isn’t necessarily to actually levitate, since every single one of them knows that all they’re able to do is simply bounce on foam rubber and convince themselves that whatever they’re doing in their minds at the same time is somehow worthwhile and beneficial, is worth spending considerable sums of money to learn, and is worth spending two hours a day, or more, doing. This excerpt is much like that:
Moral reasoning ability increases significantly after people learn the Transcendental Meditation technique, and even more after they learn the TM-Sidhi program. Moral reasoning ability, moreover, is correlated with EEG coherence; that is, the more coherent one's brain physiology, the greater one's moral development. The "moral compass" resides in a coherently functioning brain.Almost every sentence of these two paragraphs is completely disconnected from authentic, generally accepted, scientific research. EEG coherence is one of the TM movement’s hobby horses, and this assertion of such a hard link between alleged TM-induced coherence and moral behavior exists solely in the realm of unpublished research performed at the movement’s university by meditators who were once trained in the scientific method. But that hasn’t stopped these assertions from becoming some of the core beliefs of thousands of meditators.
As we grow in enlightenment and live increasingly in accord with Natural Law, Maharishi explains, we spontaneously use our growing creativity and intelligence more responsibly, acting in a way that benefits everyone around us. This growth of "life-supporting behavior" reaches its fulfillment in Cosmic Consciousness, when we enjoy what Maharishi calls spontaneous right action. We no longer make mistakes. Everything we do is for good.
