Showing posts with label letter to the editor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label letter to the editor. Show all posts

Monday, August 12, 2019

TM in Chicago schools: Letter to the Chicago Tribune editor

This is a letter, thus far unpublished, that I submitted to the editor of the Chicago Tribune as a followup to their story reporting the allegations that have been addressed to the Chicago Board of Education about the so-called "Quiet Time" program - actually, the Transcendental Meditation program - implemented in Chicago public high schools by the David Lynch Foundation and the University of Chicago.

(More: "Chicago Tribune reports on allegations of high school students coerced to practice TM," August 10, 2019, here at the TM-Free Blog)


The point of this letter is to make it clear, that the aim of the David Lynch Foundation in introducing TM into schools is not merely some innocuous effort, allegedly directed at some of this country's most disadvantaged schools and students,  to improve young people's lives. It is instead, part of a means to implement a baldly religious agenda, of a group that at its core is obviously a religious sect, to remake the world into what they call, "Heaven on Earth." They seek to achieve this outcome by getting as many people as possible to practice a very specific form of meditation that will, as if by magic, transform the planet from a state of relative chaos to their concept of an orderly "peace." 

This agenda is even part of the full name of the David Lynch Foundation, the rest of its name being, "for consciousness-based education and world peace." Both those aspects, explanations of which were purged some years ago from the Foundation's website, are religious concepts that are drawn from the Vedic scriptures of India and sanitized of explicitly religious content for a receptive Western audience, that has often been deliberately misled by the implied falsehood that there's some broad consensus in the scientific community in support of this practice.  The religiosity of the "puja" ritual integral to the teaching of TM, and the mantras having associations with Vedic/Hindu deities, are details that are simply the tip of the iceberg, when the grandiose "let's take over the world" aspects of the TM movement - that are not well known or obvious to outsiders - are considered.