In Memory of Beloved "Dan". Be True. Peace. Family Condolences.

(Names respectfully withheld, as requested by the mourning family)

A ‘gently grizzly” passed to eternal slumber last week. He wanted his story told.

"Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collection of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in in the memory by collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language- this will become,not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”
-Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

Electron webs of heavy-hearted global TM offspring buzz over another premature passing of a beloved peer. Like most TM-kids, “Dan” deeply loved his meditation and genetic family. Dan’s frighteningly strong arms will never again embrace anyone.

Many in TM’s global community care deeply for Dan and his kind family. Dan’s lifelong connections with the well-intentioned Transcendental Meditation community sustained him with compassionate love and commitment.

Raised with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s deemed enlightened peace plan through the global Transcendental Meditation Movement, Dan’s connections and love encompassed the world. Even as a youth, Dan lived by his recent favorite Facebook quote ~ “be true.”

Dan was one of the most kind, gentle and forgiving souls. He strove always to do right by himself and for others. Nearing age 40, Dan lived his last few years with his patient loving non-TM father. With support of his solidly stable father, family and far flung loved ones, Dan’s soul flowered peacefully through art, music, and his continued connections with global loved ones.

Dan joins one sister and his mother who passed before him.

Guest Post: "An Alumni's Response to Oprah's Visit to Maharishi School"

Previously: Triumph of the Incurious: Oprah Visits Fairfield's Pandits

Previously: Oprah Winfrey's Transcendental Meditation episode airs Sunday, and open thread

Today's guest post was contributed by an alumnus of the Maharishi School in Fairfield, Iowa; this school is one of the Transcendental Meditation movement institutions that was featured in the recent episode of Oprah's television program. - Mike

An Alumni's Response to Oprah's Visit to Maharishi School

Oprah visited my home town; she visited my high school. This would be a big deal for any alumni of any school but the reason she chose mine is unique. At my school we meditated together every day. Oprah is a new inductee in to the celebrity Transcendental Meditation club and she is going all-in by having her staff learn TM and dedicating an entire 1 hour show to her visit to Fairfield, Iowa.

I wasn’t angered by her visit or even her endorsement of TM; live and let live. I grew up in Fairfield and I was used to wealthy and famous people being toured around our school. Musicians, politicians, movie stars, magicians etc. The celebrity TM club is large. What did disturb me was how she kept parroting the movement line that TM is not a religion. She keeps saying this while they show students reading Sanskrit texts from Hindu holy books. She says this while standing around with chanting Hindu monks from India. I suppose I should have expected this but then Oprah said something to the teenage girls wrapping up their afternoon meditation session that stopped me cold.

She told them they were changing the world.

This is when I sighed. It was a moment in the show where I almost cried; Oprah is good at that.

There were clips in the show with people I know; people, who helped raise me, cared about me and truly believed they were giving me the best education possible. I love my teachers at Maharishi School; they were mostly good people with good intentions. I had a counsellor who recognized that my mother had mental issues and could be abusive which takes a keen eye and real bravery in a secretive town full of eccentrics, to put it mildly. That counsellor reached out to me and saved my already bombarded psyche. I do not hold a grudge against these teachers. However there is a price to pay for everything in the movement. For a Maharishi School student that price is earning glory; glory for the school, glory for the movement, glory for the choices their former hippie, baby-boomer parents made.

Triumph of the Incurious: Oprah Visits Fairfield's Pandits

Previously: Oprah Winfrey's Transcendental Meditation episode airs Sunday, and open thread

Update: An Alumni's Response to Oprah's Visit to Maharishi School

Remember when reporters actually practiced something that used to be called "investigative journalism?" When they used to ask embarrassing questions on TV shows like "60 Minutes" and not let go until they got an answer - or, when the subject's silence made it clear they had something to hide?

Yeah, I'm idealizing the way TV used to be, and it's easy to forget that that sort of ambush-style reporting wasn't always the norm. Today, though, there's Oprah and her new series, where something like the reverse is true. An important question gets asked - and it just sort of sails off into thin air, forgotten, while the subject gets to divert the viewer's attention to something else completely innocuous. Perhaps it's just the cost of doing business, when one's remaining career has devolved down to making the rich and famous but utterly bogus look good. Very good.

Maharishi Vedic Pandit barracks. (Google Maps)

In my post over the weekend I mentioned that Oprah's "Next Chapter" episode focusing on Fairfield, Iowa, and Transcendental Meditation might be noteworthy if only because it would be the first time a videographer from the outside world would visit the relatively "mysterious" pandit compound two miles outside of town - a clear manifestation of the religious inner core of the global Transcendental Meditation organization. I'd asked, what kind of spin would the TM movement's spokespeople need to apply, to reframe those images into something innocuous, that wouldn't serve as a complete show-stopper to prospective meditators?

It turns out, no spin is necessary, if the questions never get asked - or, if asked, answers are never pursued.

I am, of course, talking about an episode of a program that was little more than an infomercial for Transcendental Meditation, along with plenty of supporting advertising material and links on the show's own website. The hour was filled with the usual personal testimonials, bracketed by footage provided by the David Lynch Foundation and a documentary filmmaker long associated with the DLF. By the end of the next-to-last segment, the address of the tm.org website was prominently displayed, after most of an hour of Oprah being easily impressed and "shocked" about everyday life in Fairfield, and the idea that both children and adults would take time out of their day for other things besides work.

Oprah Winfrey's Transcendental Meditation episode airs Sunday, and open thread

Update: Triumph of the Incurious: Oprah Visits Fairfield's Pandits

Update: An Alumni's Response to Oprah's Visit to Maharishi School

The episode of "Oprah's Next Chapter" that resulted from Oprah Winfrey's brief visit to Fairfield, Iowa, last October is scheduled to air at 9pm Eastern time tomorrow night (25 March 2012) on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), in the U.S. and Canada. This segment of Oprah's signature show, which has received very little press coverage, arrives just as she and her network are receiving considerable attention for having just laid off one fifth of the network's staff amid poor ratings and rumors of its impending doom.

Last November, as news of this celebrity visit to Fairfield began to ooze into the tabloid press, and other celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres were publicly endorsing TM in the run-up to David Lynch's yearly gala for his TM-supporting foundation, I wrote about the absurdity of this sort of spectacle: the fact that one of the world's most powerful women, Oprah Winfrey, was "endorsing a program that can only be purchased from a blatantly sexist organization, that allows no women in leadership positions, and that enforces a strict separation of the sexes when administering its programs."

The TM movement has cultivated celebrities for decades, both for recruitment and donations, as Gina reviewed in "Transcendental Celebrity Shtick;" the first or historically most prominent of many of those celebrities was, of course, the Beatles. Meditators used to brag about their associations with celebrities, even the most brief encounters with them. Not much has changed, as Oprah's visit to Fairfield spawned its own set of stories in the local paper, another round of personal stories of having seen her, or been seen with her, in town or in the dome.

Tomorrow night's airing of this episode of "Oprah's Next Chapter" may be noteworthy if only because it might provide an unusual glimpse inside the religious inner core of the TM movement. As the press release reads: "Also, for the first time, cameras are allowed inside a top-secret, 80-acre compound where 800 Indian men live spending eight hours a day meditating and chanting." These "Indian men" are pandits, or effectively, Vedic clergy, performing religious rituals that, according to TM movement doctrine, will bring about "world peace." We will likely get to watch some serious gyrations as TM spokespeople, along with a perennially "shocked" Oprah, attempt to reframe these religious habits as completely scientific and rational, and how they should be just more reasons why you, yes you, should sign up for a session with a recertified Transcendental Meditation teacher right now, without delay.

We can also expect a great deal of exaggeration about the benefits of living in Fairfield, as is clear from the 30 second preview. I suppose Fairfield has "virtually no violent crime" if by "virtually" you exclude a murder that occurred in the cafeteria at the TM movement's own Maharishi University of Management nine years ago. A faulty or very selective memory does appear to be one lasting benefit that comes from many years of practice of Transcendental Meditation.

No girls allowed in the treehouse! Oprah, Ellen, and Transcendental Meditation

It's getting to be TM silly season again. The first reports have just begun to arrive, of famous talk-show hosts having visited the Fairfield, Iowa, epicenter of almost all things TM in the US, and the formal announcement of David Lynch's yearly fundraising gala. Soon we'll be treated to a small stream of mentions of Transcendental Meditation in various media, usually involving some marginally-famous or once-famous movie star, music legend or other public figure.

As always, though, they'll only be repeating one tiny little piece of the story: about how this particular form of meditation is allegedly the cure for almost anything that ails you, and how some supposedly "at-risk" population group - usually a group that's also vulnerable to manipulation by various hucksters and quacks - stands to benefit by learning TM through the fundraising efforts of the David Lynch Foundation.

Oprah Winfrey, "His Majesty Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam," head of the global TM movement, and Ellen DeGeneres.

Those of us who've been involved in some way with TM for some time, or watched the movement's gyrations for some years, have seen it all before. The marketing of the program has for decades focused on recruiting prominent individuals to the cause, who may then support TM publicly, recruiting others personally through their connections, or through the media, promoting it on television or in print. Today, though, it's inexplicable why intelligent and resourceful people, who you might think would know better, and who have a reputation to protect, would bother getting anywhere near TM or the organization that sells it.

A few minutes with Google should reveal to most anyone that the TM sales pitch actually says very little about the organization and the people doing the selling; there's an anti-scientific, anti-medical and extraordinarily odd, if not just plain bizarre, social structure that lies behind the façade used to sell the TM program to the world, where its devotees profess habits and beliefs that many would find repugnant if not positively medieval.

Transcendental Celebrity Shtick

Since Maharishi’s late 1960’s with the Beatles, Beach Boys, Mia Farrow and Donovan, Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation Movement cultivated celebrity appeal for enhanced recruitment and donations.




Glitz of the rich and famous appeals to many. When I was with the TM Movement, many TMers bragged about their association with various celebrities coming through town or on advanced TM courses. While I met my share the rich and famous, and was friendly with a few, the starstruck twinkle unto itself did not draw me. Many others were magnetically attracted to associate with the stars, much like associating with the popular crowd in high school. Name dropping is a common phenomenon within TM circles.

Many talented individuals gain celebrity status through talent and hard work. But celebrities are fallible human beings, like the rest of us, who can be misled and recruited in vulnerable moments - just like anyone else! Celebrity endorsement unto itself does not mean something is valuable. All that sparkles is not gold, folks!