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?     

Yes, We Are No Religion, part 2013

The TM organization (TMO) continues to insist that the TM technique is not a religion.  This may or may not be true of the technique itself.  However, if a TM meditator learns the advanced TMO technique known as the "TM-Sidhis program," the TMO calls him/her a "Sidha," and may send them emails like the one below.  From the following email, I conclude that the TMO is trying to propagate a Hindu-like religion.  What do you think?

The TMO sent this email to a TM-Free reader, who was kind enough to forward it to TMF.  Thank you!  Readers are invited to send us anything which may be of interest to other TMF readers.  I have edited the email for brevity:
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From:  [one of the TM organizations - ed.]
To: xxxxxxx
Sent:  Nov 10, 2012
Subject: Nov 11-13 Broadcast Times for Global Celebrations

The Transcendental Meditation Program
NATIONAL COMMUNICATION OFFICE

Global Celebration Broadcast Times for

Dhanvantari Jayanti, Hanuman Jayanti, and Mahalakshmi

Dear Governors and Sidhas,

It is a pleasure to invite you to enjoy the global broadcasts on Maharishi Channel 3 on each of these beautiful Vedic Festival days taking place November 11th, 12th, and 13th.... 

You can connect each day on the Internet on Maharishi Channel 3:http://maharishichannel.in/....                   

Sunday, November 11, 5:55 pm (EST)—Dhanvantari(1) Jayanti:                                                                    
Celebrating the Birthday of Lord Dhanvantari, the eternal custodian of Ayur-Veda, the Science of Life, for living and enjoying the lively field of Immortality—the field of perfect health—in the midst of change. On this day of Dhanvantari, the tradition of the complete knowledge of Ayur-Veda is enlivened in human awareness and we can take advantage of this opportunity to imbibe in our consciousness the elements of perfect balance, perfect health, and immortality to help create a disease-free society.

Monday, November 12, 5:50 pm (EST)—Hanuman(2) Jayanti:
Enlivening Nature’s infinite organizing power for enjoying every wave of life in the fullness of bliss, in perfection, health, and happiness. The day of Hanuman enlivens those impulses of creative intelligence that help maintain the flow of evolution in an uninterrupted way and help remove obstacles on the way to enlightenment, thereby promoting Natural Law-based administration, Raam Raj, where society is free from problems and suffering.

Tuesday, November 13, 7:25 pm (EST)—Mahalakshmi(3) Celebration; Deepavali, the Festival of Lights:
Enlivening the qualities of prosperity, affluence, fullness, and fulfillment, and the glorification of all aspects of life—inner and outer—in every corner of the globe. The day of Mahalakshmi is one of the most important days in the Vedic calendar, enlivening all good everywhere and Heavenly Life on Earth. The Sanskrit word Mahalakshmi means “great wealth.” On this auspicious day we enliven the specific values of creative intelligence in nature that bestow prosperity, growth, wealth, and affluence; and eliminate poverty and remove obstacles and weaknesses in individual and collective consciousness.

Jai Guru Dev                                                                          

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 According to Wikipedia:
(1)  Dhavantari is an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu
(2) Hanuman is a Hindu monkey-god
(3) Mahalakshmi is a Hindu goddess

Do you think the TMO is misleading the public?  If yes, do you think it is doing so intentionally or unintentionally?  Why do you think it is doing that?  How do you feel about that?

Making Sense of a Nonsensical Movement

The following is something I wrote earlier tonight as part of some private correspondence. It might be helpful in trying to make sense of the TM movement's nonsense, particularly when it comes to the constant insistence that TM is "not a religion." The truth of the matter is not easily explained, in large part because of inconsistent concepts as to what a religion is.

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1. The most accurate, broad self-characterization of "Maharishi Mahesh Yogi" and the organization he established ("Global Country of World Peace") is as a means of Vedic revivalism. "The complete theoretical and practical knowledge of the Veda and its profound significance for life has been revived and understood in a scientific framework by Maharishi’s Vedic Science and Technology..." which can be found in exactly this language here and here, and similarly elsewhere.
   
   
2. While TM devotees attempt to separate "Vedic" from "Hindu," there is very little to support this separation, and what's effectively a simple word substitution. TM devotees often claim that their particular interpretation of ancient texts that they call "Veda" is the pure form of knowledge from which later traditions they consider corrupted, such as Hinduism, were derived. These assertions are evidently unique to those associated with the TM organization, and allied religious groups in India.  All that is being sold as "Vedic" under the TM organization's auspices, that was not reinterpreted, misinterpreted or completely manufactured by Maharishi and other group leaders over time, traces to the spiritual and cultural traditions of India that are usually referred to as "Hindu." However, much of it has certain unusual twists or doctrines unique to the organization. Among these is a group of males wearing crowns and white outfits who've paid 1 million USD to become "rajas" as part of a so-called "Global Government," and who may run the organization.
   
   
3. Likewise, there is no support for describing any part of the Vedas as "scientific." The attempt to draw connections and parallels between aspects of the Vedas, Vedic or Hindu practices, and Western scientific concepts has been common among Hindus for decades if not centuries, and continues as part of the TM organization doctrine. There is no scientific support for such claims made by TM devotees. As an example, the organization has long claimed direct association between Vedic concepts and those of quantum mechanics, put forward by longtime TM devotee and American leader ("raja") John Hagelin. While Hagelin is a physicist, his pronouncements of this nature have gained zero support from others.
   
   
4. Supremacy of the Vedas, and Vedic practices, is foundational to the TM organization's purpose, as it says at the bottom of this page under the title "Everything Should Be Vedic." This would include the folding of other cultures and other religious practices into a system in which Vedic practice is supreme. The gaining of alleged positive benefits at every level (personal/social/national/planetary), including the "world peace"  often referred to by proponents including David Lynch (and internally as "Heaven on Earth" or Sat Yuga), is the motivator for the organization's attempt to popularize "Vedic Knowledge." The products and services sold by the organization, of which Transcendental Meditation is usually one's initial contact, are the actual mechanism by which "Vedic Knowledge" is disseminated. Unlike TM, on which the organization has focused its efforts to obtain scientific research on which to base its claims of efficacy, there is very little, if any, research on any of the other product categories, listed at the bottom of this page.
   
   
5. Note that in this description, things that are part of implementing this "Vedic knowledge" are practices, not beliefs.  There is no profession of faith or anything of that sort which many Westerners associate with "religion." It is in this way that TM and all the Vedic products are similar to consumer products, in that they are sold as being effective, but the buyer need not know, or care, or even believe in, the specifics of why or how they are effective. (Do you know or care why your stick of deodorant works?) The key activity becomes marketing, and everything to support the claims of efficacy in the marketing, which is why the organization seems obsessed with getting any possible support, no matter how shaky, preliminary, or unreplicated it may be from the scientific community it can possibly dig up. Incessant name-dropping of celebrities who sign on to the program is also part of this process.
   
   
6. From the TM organization's view, the whole point is to recruit individuals into a system of practices, that are believed to be a correct, pure implementation of "Vedic knowledge," to bring about "Heaven on Earth." While prospective meditators are told in introductory lectures that the ultimate purpose is to bring about world peace, they are never clear about the details of how that's supposed to happen. World peace in this system is brought about, not through individual, personal development, but through adherence to Vedic "knowledge" in every detail across all aspects of life through the purchase and use of the organization's products and services by many people in aggregate. It is at this point where involvement with TM takes the form of participation in a religious enterprise without knowledge or consent; while the individual meditator may not need to believe anything, and may even deny belief, may even think everything about the organization is completely bogus, and in the practice of meditation (the introductory product) may not be doing anything even recognizable as a religious practice, the motivations of the teachers and marketers of TM are obviously in a different realm and of a different nature, are based in a belief system that holds to unusual notions of causation that are not clearly disclosed, and that would be considered by many to be religious, although unorthodox if not completely bizarre by Western standards.
   
   There is no rational or scientific basis for the claim that the more people adopt these products, the more likely "Heaven on Earth" will come about, in the same way that, to cover some of the more outrageous claims made for its other products, an east-facing home of proper Vedic proportions will give its owner health and wealth, spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to have someone in India perform a ritual would likewise give the buyer health and wealth, or that bouncing on foam rubber while thinking certain thoughts... the list goes on like this for a while.  These more advanced products carry obvious spiritual or religious connotations, while the organization continues to insist that their basis is entirely "scientific."
   
   Meanwhile, the simple practice of meditation does provide some benefit for some people. For some, the initial benefit serves as validation for other claims made by the organization for its other products, and becomes part of the sales pitch for deeper involvement with its programs, and continues the intended intake path.

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A longer post covering similar issues.

Where the TM Program Clearly Resembles a Religious Faith

Krishna, as seen in the TM movement's
"Heaven is Descending" animated video

Anyone who's spent any time examining TM is probably familiar with the usual outlines of this sort of discussion. Is TM religious in nature if not itself a religious practice? The usual response is that critics and non-devotees point out the obvious - the pervasive use of Hindu/Vedic imagery and practices at all levels of the TM organization, right down to the elements of the initiation ceremony and TM mantras. The response by TM devotees is perpetual denial of those same obvious features, or to summarize very briefly, a futile attempt to recast "Hindu" to "Vedic," and "Vedic" as somehow "scientific."

I'm going to set aside all of that well-worn territory for the moment and talk about something a bit different. This is the aspect of religious faith that is both about the creation and perpetuation of a religious institution, and the role of "faith" in sustaining that process.

How do you perpetuate a religious faith? First and foremost, a group of people must be conditioned to stick with that faith no matter what. It doesn't matter whether there is any concrete, repeatable evidence to support the beliefs associated with that faith; the true believer sticks with the faith. It doesn't matter if those beliefs are shown to be outright false, outrageous, backward, harmful, or the rough equivalent of insisting, despite all the readily available evidence in a modern world, that the world is flat.

The interesting thing about the creation of such a group is that often the window of opportunity to do that can be rather small, in two ways. First, the members of the group are often recruited while young, while teenagers or young adults, and recruitment depends on obtaining access to pools of young people who may serve as candidates for conversion. The likelihood of conversion falls off as the prospect ages. Candidates must at least be those who suppress the "you must be nuts" sort of response to the initial presentation of the tenets of the faith and be willing to proceed, even if they harbor doubts about it. Second, broad cultural influences that supported the basic tenets of the faith, which might be relatively transitory in society as a whole, can be exploited to support recruitment for people to build an institution that will outlast those cultural influences, surviving while those elements of the surrounding culture, as they were, become a fond memory of the distant past.

Now, having written that, I can hear some grumbling out there at the words, "tenets of the faith." It sounds so Christian, Western, so inapplicable to what TM is, or its promoters say it is, about. But the tenets are in some ways not explicitly pointed to as tenets; they are the figures of speech, sometimes metaphors, that are used over and over by those who've in some way made it their life's work to perpetuate Transcendental Meditation.

One that comes to mind is in the words of Mike Love, who once was recorded for a radio program distributed by the TM movement. I can't offhand remember the rest of what he said in that program, but what stuck is four words: "just by simply meditating." It plays with the complicated relationship between what goes on in our minds and our imaginations, and the act of actually doing, of actually making a dent in our physical surroundings.

The TM faith says two things at the same time. It first says, meditate, then do. It then says that meditation has some magical direct effect upon the environment through some vaguely-described mechanism that exists outside any known and generally recognized scientific theory. These two things exist in tension, but there's an element of, you can have your cake and eat it, too. You continue doing whatever it is you're doing, while meditating and changing the world by exerting very little effort at all.

This is, of course, in the context of a grand plan; they even used to call it, back in the '70's, a "World Plan," fairly obvious to most since at the time the TM teaching organization was called the "World Plan Executive Council." In glowing terms, such as this from the beginning of "The TM Book," TM is, by implication, held to be more important than almost anything else: "The Transcendental Meditation program changes the quality of life from poverty, emptiness, and suffering to abundance, fulfillment, and happiness." This is the kind of broad claim that's generally only heard from the devotees of a religious faith.

All this sort of language was very much part of the context of the late 1960's and early 1970's. It fit right in with popular culture, attracted celebrities, and resonated among relatively affluent, and often young, Westerners with time and wealth, as it was basically a call to "change the world" by taking 45 minutes of individual leisure time each day and doing nothing with it. What a deal! Today, it just sounds rather quaint, particularly when you keep in mind that the TM movement has had 40 years or more to support such grand claims with overwhelming supportive evidence - not another set of flimsy preliminary studies, surveys and promotional videos - and it consistently comes up empty.

This week, we're about to see another round of celebrity-laced promotions for Transcendental Meditation organized by the David Lynch Foundation. Lists of alleged "experts" supporting the programs, who'll appear at these events, are circulating. The thing that strikes me is the degree to which many of these "experts" are so alike. Most are over 50 years old, were initiated into the TM program as teenagers or young adults sometime around 1975, the peak years of TM initiation, and over the years, many of them have participated in other promotional efforts including running as political candidates under the Natural Law Party banner. (The NLP was a thinly-veiled and ultimately doomed attempt to obtain governmental support and funding for the Transcendental Meditation program by direct involvement in the political process.)

They are examples of exactly how TM was both a product of its times, and a product of the youthfulness of many who were initiated. They're almost instinctively repeating the same tenets and metaphors I first heard back in the mid-70's; rather than accepting and adapting to change - one of the alleged named benefits of TM back in those days - they continue to support TM, almost in defiance of its ineffectiveness relative to their claims, and the devolving of the organization to the point where its leaders express open contempt for, and avoidance of, science and medicine. *

Few, if any, of these "experts" can be described as having been completely independent of the TM organization for most of their adult lives. Most use their practice of TM for more than thirty years as confirmation of TM's efficacy. On the other hand, that could be viewed as evidence of extreme stubbornness in the face of having become involved with an ultimately faith-based program that will never live up to the decades of hype created by its proponents.

I'll go into some detail on the background of all those people described as "researchers," who'll be part of the next David Lynch Foundation event, in my next article here.

* "We are not going to take help from medical Drs. as medical professionals give poison. So don’t engage any medical Drs. for anything—absolutely whatever it is—even if they are in our Movement family" - Kingsley and Leslie Brooks, "Governor Recertification Course Overview of Policies & Procedures May, 2005"

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.