The Dream Tiger

Several decades ago, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi gave the following comment (paraphrased here) on one of my courses:  "If a person has a dream that a tiger is chasing him, it doesn't help him at all that under his pillow he has a gun.  A waking-state gun is no protection against a dream-state tiger.  Likewise, if a real tiger is attacking, it doesn't help that in one's dream, one has a gun." Mahesh was trying to illustrate his teaching that what applies in one state of consciousness cannot automatically be transferred to another state of consciousness.

Of course we students already knew a lot about waking and dreaming.  In this lecture, he was attempting to explain three additional states of consciousness to us.  He had told us that if we practiced TM regularly, enlightenment awaited us.  In succession, we would attain "Cosmic Consciousness," then "God Consciousness" and then "Unity Consciousness."  (Historical note:  He later changed the name from "God Consciousness" to "Glorified Cosmic Consciousness.")   These, he said, were increasingly advanced states of "enlightenment."  He was using the tiger metaphor to explain that we shouldn't even bother planning for what we would do once we were enlightened, since once we were in that state, our experience of reality would change so much.

He never said it outright, but we all believed that he was in Unity Consciousness.  (Historical note:   When he announced a few years later that there was a state above Unity Consciousness, called "Brahman Consciousness," we all believed that he was at least in that state.)  I'm thinking over his tiger illustration now, and I wonder if he was not only telling us not to make plans for ourselves in "higher" states, but also that he was in such an exalted state himself that we were in no position to pass judgment on his actions.  That's one of the messages I took away from his lecture.  That anything he did, we should probably believe and obey, because he had a different, higher way of looking at the world.

Did you believe that we should not judge Mahesh according to the rules that the rest of us live by?  Was there ever a time when he did something that you felt critical of, and then reminded yourself, "We can't judge Mahesh by our standards"?     

Emotional Problems Post-TM; Relating to Fairfield Relatives, Part I

Recently I saw two readers' comments on TM-Free Blog that caught my attention in that I thought they lent themselves to serious discussion.  

The first one mentioned psychological problems the reader has had since leaving the TM movement.  

The second one asked how others manage the tricky terrain of visiting true-believer TM relatives and friends who live in Fairfield and Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa.

I was surprised that no one responded to these two comments.  Since some TM-Free readers read only the essays, but not the reader comments, I suspect this may have been what happened, and these two topics slipped through the cracks.      

So I hope I have not overstepped these two readers' privacy by reprinting portions of their comments below:

First Topic:  Emotional Problems Post-TM?

 Reader's comment:   

"...My commitment to TM lasted about 8 years....I did not have any acute psychological trauma as a result of the rounding and the indoctrination, and the recovery, although a bit slow, was not traumatic either. But I sometimes wonder if some of my psychological/ emotional difficulties are related to my years with TMO [TM organization - ed]."

My response:  

It is not uncommon for people who have left high-demand groups and have re-integrated themselves into the non-cult world to find that they have emotional problems.  The problems may not seem connected to the group; therefore it may not occur to them that these problems are a result of their time in the group.  If they see a psychotherapist, the psychotherapist may also agree that the problems are due to pre-existing issues.  (Psychotherapists are only slowly being educated on this new field of post-cult syndrome.)  For example, long ago I told my psychotherapist that I walked around in constant terror that the world was about to blow up.  He interpreted it in the standard psychodynamic way.  That is, he theorized that I must be angry about something from my childhood, and that I was experiencing that anger in a disguised form, as fear of the world exploding.  

Then, I met with Steve Hassan, an exit counselor.  Steve asked me, "What did they tell you would happen if you left TM?"  I replied, "Why...they said that if I left Fairfield, I would be 'personally responsible' for World War Three!"  And as soon as I made the connection, the terror went away!

That's an obvious example, but it illustrates my point.  I recommend Steve Hassan's website freeminds.org, and his books.  I hope these help.        

Second topic:  How to Relate to Fairfield TM Relatives

Reader's comment:

"I’d like to get back to some previous comment threads on how to relate to family in TM if you are not in it....

'...I don’t expect my [relatives] to give up TM, and I don’t even try to convince them much or argue with them. But I do....

[NOTE:  Something's gone wrong with this computer program, so I will continue this article as Emotional Problems Post-TM; Relating to Fairfield Relatives, Part II. - ed.]

Changes in TM Teachings; Religion; Videotapes

A few of my recent random thoughts on TM that I'd like to share with readers.

Random thought #1.  Changes in TM belief system over the years:

     Example A:  In the early days, the giggling guru told us to judge the value of TM not by the subjective experience during the meditation, but by improvements in one's life.  But recent emails from the TM organization (TMO) inviting people to attend courses often rave about the "deep meditations" and "blissful experience" one can have during these courses, as if that were a worthwhile end in itself.

     Example B: The TMO used to publish studies of dubious accuracy showing that as more and more people practice TM, the quality of life in that vicinity continues to improve.  But recent emails from the TMO emphasize what perilous times we are living in, and how we need to "keep our numbers of meditators up" to prevent calamity.  They have replaced their message of "We are successfully creating Heaven on Earth" with fear-inducing "Danger is around us everywhere, and only we can stop it through ever-more intense devotion to the TMO."

Random thought #2.  Mahesh used to say that "No matter what your religion, TM will make you a better member of your faith.  If you are Christian, it will make you a better Christian; if you are a Buddhist, it will make you a better Buddhist," etc.  I am asking for reader feedback -- did TM make you a better member of your faith?  Or a worse member of your faith?  How so?

Random thought #3.  The audiotapes and videotapes featuring Maharishi or his followers that I had to listen to when I was on courses -- I found them anywhere from (occasionally) interesting to (often) excrutiatingly boring.  What was your reaction to the tapes?     

"Maharishi Says...."

Spokespeople for TM organizations extoll Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a great spiritual leader, scientist, humanitarian, world leader; as a man of nearly divine brilliance, wisdom, holiness, insight, vision, and so on.

So I thought it might be useful for TM-Free to compile a list of outrageous quotations from Mahesh, as a way of deflating the TMO's claims.

Also, maybe this list will be helpful for people who are working on their recovery from TM mind control.

Here's my favorite quote from Mahesh:

"Having achieved world peace, we are now on the way to creating Heaven on Earth...."  (From www.maharishi.org/adv_techniques/index.html.  This web page was last updated April 2007.)

Please contribute your most outrageous quote(s) in the "Comments" section.  List the source or context if you know it.  Paraphrases from memory are fine too; please note "from memory" and context if possible.

Recovering from Transcendental Meditation, part 2012

For many, recovering from TM takes a lifetime.  So if you're still recovering after many decades, don't lose hope, and don't berate yourself.  It's normal.

I hope that some day there will be better techniques available to help people recover more quickly.  Right now, the best advice is to learn about mind control.  Other things that help are:  conversations with other former members, physical exercise, practicing real-life skills that you lost (or never learned if you were raised in a cult), psychotherapy, residential recovery centers, continued reading about destructive cults.  One exit counsellor suggested writing down every single thing you remember from your time in the destructive cult.

Gina (a co-contributor to this blog - see panel on the right) published a post on this blog, ("Psychotherapy with Former Cult Members" posted September 2, 2011;  http://tmfree.blogspot.com/2011/09/psychotherapy-with-former-cult-members.html), in which she informed the readers of a new Continuing Education Units course for psychotherapists.  I was moved to send the following e-mail to the teacher of this course, as follows:

From:  Laurie ------    

Date:  June 14, 2012 

To:  Patrick O'Reilly  

Subject:  Recovery for former destructive cult members

Dear Dr. O'Reilly:  

I am a friend of Gina Catena's, and like her, I am in recovery from the Transcendental Meditation (TM) organization. 

She showed me your excellent internet article on how therapists can help former cult members by encouraging them to learn about mind control.  I am grateful that you are putting the information about mind control and post-cult syndrome (which can masquerade as other mental health conditions) out there, and are offering a CEU course.

Since the psychological community is still at the beginning stages of learning how to help former destructive cult members, and since you are a leader in educating therapists on how to help cult victims, I hope it will be helpful for you if I share three additional steps that I had to go through in order to help me recover from my cult.

1.  I needed to learn information about my particular group - the specific lies that my particular group taught which kept me a believer.  Even though I already understood mind control, I still was a believer because of the 600 research studies I had been taught about, which proported to prove how marvelous TM was for every aspect of every person's life.  I had to read anti-TM websites to discover that TM experiments were usually biasedly designed and/or biasedly conducted in order to produce only positive results.  Also, I learned that some research had shown that TM sometimes produces unimpressive or harmful results, but that the TM organization had kept that information from us.

2.  I needed to talk to other former TMers who had been at my level of involvement in TM.  Even though I had spent over 20 years telling my TM experiences to sympathetic friends, therapists, and former TMers who had been at lower levels of TM involvement than I, TM memories continued to flood my mind.  However, when I finally found peers, and told them my memories, the memories finally stopped.  

3.  I have been in psychotherapy for many years.  By working on family-of-origin issues, TM has less and less hold over me.  

If these additional steps were necessary for me, then I assume there must be others out there who also need more than just education about mind control in order to recover from their destructive cult.

I hope this information is helpful to you.  Please feel free to contact me if I can be of assistance to you.

Please keep up the good work!  Thank you for what you are doing! 

Sincerely,

Laurie --------" 

I have been out of TM for 31 years, and I am still recovering.  As Sudarsha, a co-moderator for this site, has said, "You have to claw yourself out of the TM mindset, ('Maheshism') inch by inch."  For instance, it was only last month that I realized that part of the reason I eat a lot of nuts on my morning cereal is because Mahesh said that nuts were very good for you.

A problem I still have 31 years after leaving TM is my difficulty in learning new skills from books.  Before I got into TM, I had taught myself guitar, typing, shorthand and crocheting from books. But since leaving TM, I find it excruciatingly hard to learn new things from books, , like how to use a  computer or follow a recipe.  I think this is because when I try to learn something new, it activates the feelings I had when I was learning to "fly:"  "If you're don't 'fly' twice a day, you're wasting your life."

What stratagems have been helpful in your recovery from TM-brain?  In what areas are you still recovering?

Unhooking From Maharishi's Teachings: Laurie Interviews Sudarsha about the Puja (Ceremony)

I (Laurie) left TM 30 years ago, after 10 years in the TM movement, and I have been "deprogramming" myself ever since. I now believe that everything I was taught on the TM Teacher Training Course while I was "rounding" (meditating many times a day) bypassed my critical thinking, and went straight into my belief system. Therefore, even today I am still finding unexamined beliefs inside myself that hook me into Mahesh Prasad Varma's system. (According to Wikipedia, "Mahesh Prasad Varma" may be Maharishi's given name.)

One of those beliefs was that the puja had magical powers. Mr. Varma told us that the word "puja" translates as "traditional ceremony of gratitude," but most other translators say it means "worship". On my TM Teacher Training Course in La Antilla, Spain, in 1974, Mr. Varma taught us that the puja must be performed before the person is instructed in TM. Without it, he said, TM cannot be successfully learned or practiced. He gave quasi-scientific and quasi-mystical reasons why this was so; and I was left with fear and trembling for the sacred, God-given puja.

Therefore, it was helpful to my recovery to learn that after his disillusionment with Mr. Varma's movement, Sudarsha, (one of the co-editors of TM-Free), successfully instructed many people in TM without first chanting the puja. I thought it might be helpful to other readers recovery too, to read about this, so I decided to interview Sudarsha. Here goes:

Laurie: How did you first hear of TM?

Sudarsha: I remember it like it was yesterday! It was in May of 1968. I had just finished another miserable day teaching high school English, and I decided to go for a walk rather than immediately take the bus home. I wandered into a drugstore, and there on a book rack was this childishly cuddly guy draped in white on the cover of a book. For some reason, I was fascinated and I bought it.

That night, I started to read it. He had written, "To be is to live." Those words struck me like lightening. I sat up straight and confirmed to myself, "This is it! This is what I've been searching for!" Sadly, the book didn't actually teach me anything. It just theorized and theorized. The title? "The Science of Being and Art of Living" by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I felt hooked. Now I believe that I was more hooked by to have that final secret of how to do it than anything else. I wanted to learn to do this. Cleverly, Mahesh could rope us in by coming so close to telling us the secret, but just stopping short.

A week or so later, I found and bought an LP (a vinyl record - remember those?) of Mahesh giving a talk. His voice sounded so captivating. There was an address and phone number on the record sleeve. I phoned and made an appointment to learn TM.

L: What results did you get from TM?

S: Same results as everyone else: in the beginning TM felt good. I felt a sense of relief. As I think back on it now, I realize that "relief" is quite different from the "pure consciousness" or "source of thought" that Mahesh was promising, but I mistook the relief for what he was promising. Ultimately, I think it all comes back to "me": my understanding, my misunderstanding, my expectations, my desires, my greeds. But being a schoolteacher was stressful, and I was stressed. TM was a contrast to that, so it felt good.

L: What made you decide to become an initiator?

S: TM was easy to do and it felt good. It was only many years later that I began to believe that it operated on the basis of contrast and little more. Back then, though, I thought that this was good, worthwhile, valuable, a lot more satisfying than what I was currently doing. And, into the bargain, a lot more valuable to others. So I went to Estes Park, Colorado, USA, in 1970 and took the TM Teacher Training Course.

L: What was your understanding at that time of the reason for doing the puja?

S: That's complicated. It was what we were supposed to do; it was what Mahesh taught us; it somehow empowered us to "give" the mantra - he said it allowed us to pick up the mantra at the finest level. It was special, maybe even sacred.

But when I was finally given that piece of paper with the mantras written on it, and saw that they were selected not by some deep psycho-spiritual-physiological reasoning, but just by age and gender - well! There was a conflict! Something wasn't making sense, and it was very difficult to think about that, when I really wanted to teach TM because I thought it was really a good thing.

L: From today's vantage point, what do you think the puja is really about, or what is its purpose?

S: The puja was a nice touch. I suppose it was Mahesh's way of trying to flaunt his so-called tremendous devotion to Guru Dev. We know from what Paul Mason has written on his website about Guru Dev that some pundit wrote the puja for Guru Dev, and Guru Dev didn't like it. He said to tie it to a stone and throw it into the Ganges. Which the pundit did. Mahesh said, and I don't remember where, that he dove in and rescued it.

Some of the earliest initiators to be trained in India by Mahesh learned an ending which Mahesh later changed, probably in the early 1960's. Also, when I learned the puja, in 1968, there were only three parts to it: the Sanskrit words, the English translation and the movements we made with our hands, etc.

L: By 1974, when I learned it on my TM Teacher Training Course, there was also a fourth part, called "puja feeling." Mr. Varma said all four parts were essential for the puja to "work." So this whole business of "the purity of the teaching" and "doing the puja to preserve the purity of the teaching" is suspect.

S: I think now that what the puja actually does is simply what all ceremonies do: it draws attention away from everything else. Look how the Roman Catholic Church used the Mass to manipulate people all through the Middle Ages. In teaching TM, the puja is very useful because it is so strange - at least to Westerners - at least it was strange when TM hit the West in the 1960's. People being instructed get completely disoriented. They can't figure out what is going on. This is useful, because when the teacher says a mantra and asks the person to start repeating it, the person does so in a completely non-judgmental state. I believe this is one of the reasons why the first TM experience is so spectacular. It's a real contrast to how you were feeling an hour ago when you were walking to the TM Center.

L: How many people did you initiate using the puja?

S: Something near 800.

L: What experience did those students have with TM?

S: They had the prescribed experience, much like my own initial experience: it felt good, they experienced deep rest. I wonder now if what they experienced wasn't deep rest, but a contrast from their normal way of feeling, which they mistook for "deep rest," because that's what the TM teachers told them they would experience.

L: What led you to consider teaching TM without the puja?

S: That's a really tough question, Laurie, because I don't really remember all the details. I do remember being dissatisfied with what Mahesh had done with TM: adding the Science of Creative Intelligence, Six-Month Courses, Age of Enlightenment techniques, sidhi nonsense. It was obvious to me that the steps of initiation were the only thing that was useful, to lead an individual into a very quiet state so that thinking the mantra would be easy.

After I quit teaching at the TM Center, some friends showed an interest in TM. So I said, "OK, let's just sit quietly and I'll teach you how to do it," and very off-handedly did the steps of initiation starting with the "open the eyes; close the eyes" business from the checking notes. The results were the same. People were happy with the results. Another one of Mahesh's dogmatic superstitions bit the dust.

L: How many people did you instruct without the puja?

S: Maybe 25 or 30. I don't really remember. Those were very traumatic days. I was feeling very sad that I had wasted three months learning to teach TM when anyone could learn how to teach it in a weekend. All the hubbub of rounding for three months had just been brainwashing - or whatever the correct word for that is these days.

L: Were you nervous or guilty or scared about teaching TM without the puja? I know I would have been.

S: No. I hadn't bought into the superstitions of Maheshism. If nothing else, those two years when I was on TM's international staff intimately working side by side with Mahesh demonstrated to me, beyond any doubt, that Mahesh was making it up as he went along. There was no evidence at all that he was any kind of superhuman. Granted, he was very intelligent and quick-witted, and had a remarkably retentive memory. But so do lots of "normal" human beings. What Mahesh had that other people didn't have was the aura of specialness. That is to say, our attribution of mystical specialness to him . He let us believe that he had all sorts of knowledge and "blessings" from Guru Dev. Mahesh was also extraordinarily clever, and used his cleverness to manipulate others. He had a very amoral approach to what he did: if it benefitted his agenda, it was OK.

So, since I came to the conclusion that Mahesh was very human indeed - from direct contact with him - no, I had no nervousness, guilt or fear at all about dropping the puja. And as it turned out, dropping the puja had no effect on the learning or the practice of TM.

L: How did you choose the mantra for the non-puja initiates?

S: Same as I was taught. For some reason, back then it never occurred to me to experiment with mantras. How curious, because Mahesh himself had said that "any word would do," but back then, I only knew the mantras he taught me at Estes Park. I was still unable to think outside the box in this regard.

L: What results did the non-puja students have?

S: Same as all the people I taught the "orthodox" way.

L: Did they keep up with meditating? Did you "check" their meditations?

S: They all got checked, non-puja students and puja students alike. Both groups had the same outcomes: some continued , some said they thought it was silly, some said they didn't have time, some said it quit working....

L: Did you tell them what the mantras really meant?

S: Back then I didn't know what they meant. I found that out later.

L: Thanks so much, Sudarsha, for letting me interview you.

S: It was my pleasure, sort of. This is stuff people have a right to know. Mahesh was using his cleverness, his powers of persuasion, his amoral manipulation of others, without regard to their safety, well-being, or any other aspect of their lives. He simply used people for his own ends, something which is never taught or done by legitimate teachers.

I wonder if my answers are typical. I would find it really interesting - perhaps we could do a survey - to see how many other initiators discovered that the whole puja thing was just part of the phobia-induction that Mahesh used to make our minds like his.

Mourning Raga for a Catastrophy

Oil and Wind and Water. oy veh!

The image is from today's CNN story.

I wish there were a way to show this to Guru Bev or Raga Hagelin and inquire, straight faced and in all sincerity, for an explanation of Inwincible America. Course, the answer, today, is obvious: it ain't over 'till it's over. - which both Guru Bev and Raga Hagelin have no doubt practised to perfection in front of a mirror, facing east, of course.

By the time it's over other much more important questions will need to be asked, such as how to prevent this in the future. Lucky for Guru Bev and the imaginary raja, Hagelin, by then no one will bother with such nonsense as Maheshism's inwincibility; or will this still be an actual belief in the quasi-religion of Maheshism and the dogma of worshipping Mahesh's ego?

Don't forget to click on the Title to find out more about the ridiculous beliefs of the TM organization.