Crunching the Facebook Numbers: How Many Meditators Are There?

One of the most persistent claims made by the TM movement is that there are currently about one million people practicing Transcendental Meditation in the United States. There is very little evidence to support this claim, other than the fact that, according to the movement's own records, about 919,000 people learned TM in the US between 1968 and 1977. This figure was once published in a chapter on the TM movement in the 1986 book, The future of religion: secularization, revival, and cult formation.

This figure, while interesting, may not be relevant today. As many former TM teachers and even meditators have noted, the dropout rate among new meditators is very high, with many giving up the practice in as little as six months or less. Informally, anecdotally, it's relatively easy to run into people who used to do TM in the distant past, but people who are currently active meditators are much more difficult to find.

Through use of an advertising targeting tool on Facebook, it's possible to measure the popularity of a number of topics related to Transcendental Meditation across age groups, and thus extrapolate from that sampling of Facebook users to the general population. This method suggests that only about 60,000 people in the United States have any current interest in these topics, which is a tiny fraction of the "one million meditators" that the TM movement claims currently live in the United States.