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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
