HOW I MADE THE MANTRA GO AWAY

one of our readers has sent us his TM story:

HOW I MADE THE MANTRA GO AWAY

by Dave H.

When I tell my friends that I once was involved with a cult, their eyes get wide and their response is generally, “You?” And then they want the details.

So I tell them that I was one of those people who got caught up in Transcendental Meditation when it was sweeping the U.S.A. in the 60s and 70s. I explain the initial meetings, the Puja ceremony, the post initiation checking meetings, etc. I even tell them that for awhile, TM actually brought me some benefit.

I was never one of those uber-movement types, although I did attend a residence course or two in Fairfield, Iowa, where I was introduced to “rounding” and the whole TM thing took further root. Had I not awakened, I could have easily been drinking the Kool-aid.

Then MMY announced that we could all learn to levitate and the Sidhis program was launched. The shock of it forced me to examine what I had become involved with and thankfully, the critical thinking I had learned in college began to kick in. Levitating? Becoming invisible? How could I belong to an organization that advanced such thinking and demanded high fees for the “knowledge?”

I immediately stopped doing TM and promised myself I would never think my mantra, “Shirim,” again.

But it wouldn’t go away. For over a decade that pesky mantra would creep into my thoughts: waking, sleeping, dreaming. At first I gave it no notice, just shutting it off whenever it would appear. But after many, many years of putting up with it, combined with all of the wacky stuff coming out of the TM movement, its continued presence became a major concern for me. I wanted it gone.

I consulted with a therapist, a very capable person, but not experienced in cults. He suggested that I pretty much do what I had been doing, shut it off when it showed up in my thoughts. But that was not good enough for me.

I live in a very beautiful part of Southeast Minnesota, an area with 300-foot bluffs and an incredible paved bicycle trail system. One weekday summer morning I walked out a couple of miles on the trail. Not many people out there that early in the morning. I stopped on a bridge and decided to shout Shirim as loud and as many times as I could. It was strange how guilty I felt for even thinking about doing this. Guilt and fear manifested themselves, as if something really bad would happen to me. That’s how deeply the movement hooks had gotten into my psyche. 

But I did it. I shouted that mantra out into the light of day, loud, clear and often. Then I came back a couple of days later and repeated the experience. And then a third time.

It didn’t happen overnight, but after a couple of weeks I noticed that the mantra and I were no longer joined at the hip, and its encroachment into my life began to diminish. And today, it doesn’t show up at all.

When I read of all the junk that the true-believers in the TM movement accept as truth … Jyotish, Yagyas, Sidhis and such … I am so blessed to have my once-abandoned critical thinking skills and pleased that the mantra no longer has power over me.

And all I had to do was shout it into the atmosphere.

Did Maharishi Teach Different Ways to Do TM?

Readers of this blog who learned TM may recall the importance Mahesh placed on how to think the mantra.  My notes on how to check a person's meditation, which date from approximately 1973, read in part, "...Now this time, when we close our eyes, sit easily, and after about 1/2 a minute begin to think the mantra in the same, effortless way we think any other thoughts."  And, "In this meditation, we do not concentrate; we do not try to think the mantra clearly.  Mental repetition is not a clear pronunciation; it's just a faint idea...Just think the mantra easily, effortlessly...."

In my TM-Free research, I stumbled on an older set of checking notes, from about 1961.  There I found that Mahesh did not tell people to "think" the mantra.  Rather, back then he talked about "listening" to the mantra.  I don't have the notes on hand, but here is my best recollection of what was written:  "Think the mantra easily, and then just follow it down; listen to it as it changes."

Does anyone have an old set of checking notes that they can share with the readers?  Do you think this change is significant?  

Thirty Years Later: What was all that about? (Part 3 of a series)

(To read this series from the beginning, start here.)

Today we can easily go back and inspect the movement's "secrets," all those things we were told during the initiation process we weren't supposed to go talking about, even among other meditators. With the dawn of the Internet, such secrets don't stay that way for long, and as the 'net became popular in the mid-1990's, so did the accessibility of information, analysis and commentary on the TM programs and organizations.

Perhaps the single most widespread and enduring cultural artifact of the TM movement is that of "mantra mystique." It's the notion that the sounds given to meditators to silently repeat in their heads are somehow special, private, special, and uniquely selected to be suitable for the initiate. Did I mention that the mantras are supposed to be very special?

A list of many if not most of the mantras distributed by TM teachers has been available for more than thirteen years online, on the minet.org website I created to offer as a base for critical examination of TM, the TM organizations, and its associated programs. It's just a list of sounds, and it's rather obvious that the means by which the particular sounds are given to initiates has had very little consistency over the years. There's a lot of variation across sets of mantras that differ depending on when the teacher was instructed. But given all the fuss over mantras, and the seemingly random changes through time, the list doesn't suggest that the mantras are of any particular value except perhaps as some device to fill the initiate's expectation that they're about to receive something of value.

The same goes for other aspects of the initiation. The prospective meditator must witness a ritual, a "puja," performed in a language they don't understand. Even if the prospect were given a translation of the ritual, it would probably be meaningless without an explanation of the culture and terminology. But this is just the start of an obvious pattern, first pointed out to me years ago by a former meditator: the TM movement offers pieces of India's culture, disconnected and decontextualized, that are fed, piecemeal, to paying customers. It doesn't matter if the customer doesn't understand what's going on: the mystery is part of the product, it inflates its apparent value. Why else does the prospective meditator have to sit through such a thing, except to be disoriented and perhaps a bit confused by it?

There's also something called "checking," where a meditator allegedly has their meditation practice "checked" by an instructor. The checking notes are also readily available, and what's clear is that the checking ritual is something of a flowchart, with scripts of exchanges between the instructor and meditator. An interesting feature of the flowchart is such that the meditator doesn't get to leave until agreement with the instructor is obtained. There is, again, not a whole lot to the "checking" ritual of substance other than the reinforcement, through repetition, of the same ideas and expectations that are present even before meditation instruction, in the introductory lectures. Meditation is supposed to be easy and effortless, and we'll stick you in an endless loop of our checking flowchart until you agree.

(Continue to Part 4)