Breaking: US Department of Justice allegedly funded Transcendental Meditation "Quiet Time" program in Chicago

A filing today in the ongoing Federal court case against the Chicago Board of Education, the David Lynch Foundation, and the University of Chicago disclosed that, during the course of discovery, the Board of Education informed the plaintiffs that the Department of Justice, and not any of the other named defendants, financed the so-called "Quiet Time" program as part of a supposed research project involving Chicago public schools.

Northern District of Illinois courtroom.
(Library of Congress photo)

This means that, according to this filing by the plaintiffs, the teaching of TM was directly financed by the US government, a clear violation of the separation of church and state.

The "religious nature" of TM was established in the late 1970's in Malnak v. Yogi, which was upheld on appeal in the Third Circuit. Technically this decision is binding only in New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, but such opinions are often cited as being persuasive in other Federal courts; Malnak has been cited over sixty times in other cases involving church/state matters.

Apparently this disclosure will likely result in the US Department of Justice being added to the list of defendants in this case.

You can't spell TM without SCI

A formal reckoning with attempts by the David Lynch Foundation (DLF) to place Transcendental Meditation programs in public schools, defying the fact that a Federal court injunction prohibited TM instruction within them on Constitutional grounds, is long overdue. The flaws in the Malnak v. Yogi opinions, leaving unaddressed the possibility that TM could be completely separated from a formal course in the so-called “Science of Creative Intelligence,” have been deliberately misunderstood and exploited by the DLF and the TM organization for years. The suggestion that TM promotion and instruction in public schools would be permissible if the words “Science of Creative Intelligence” were never mentioned is simply ridiculous; TM is the practical element of SCI and doctrinal tenets of SCI of a religious nature are present throughout TM promotion, preparation and instruction. 

Northern District of Illinois courtroom.
(Library of Congress photo)

Since the puja, the ceremony which is always performed before individual TM instruction, occurred on Chicago school premises (as the DLF has insisted that it must), in some fundamental way the DLF was organizing its own prayer services on school property; whether they were understood to be religious by students is irrelevant. The organization mandated a puja performance to satisfy its own priorities, based in its own SCI doctrine, with respect to TM instruction. 

The religiosity of what the David Lynch Foundation and its allies have attempted to do, rooted in the doctrine of SCI, is obvious, and the District Court’s phrasing in its Malnak opinion over forty years ago is still very appropriate here:  “the proposition needs no further demonstration.”

"TM-Kids" Open Up Publicly

Willy Blackmore's essay about a young father's childhood hometown was published online October 24, 2014 : Growing Up in Utopia .

He describes the contrast between growing up as a non-Iowan in Iowa.  How do you tell your current friends that you learned to fly when you were 17?  Why do local Iowans think "you're not from around here" when you really did grow up in their backyard? He eloquently describes coming of age surrounded by cornfields, idealistic ex-hippies who believe they bring world peace by holing up to bounce on padded foam for hours daily, shmoozing with visiting celebrities, and his peers' angst.

Click here to read Willy's : Growing Up in Utopia

After years of declining invitations to make a formal presentation at San Francisco's reputable intellectual forum The Commonwealth Club of California, On October 20, 2014 I presented  Cult or Benign Cure-all? Life in Transcendental Meditation's Hidden Society

With an illustrated Power Point presentation and screen shots of TMO's active websites, I described the lives of my loved ones and myself in the TM Movement from 1966-2014.  By coincidence fifty years of my family life were defined by the TM Movement, even though I physically left in the late 1980s with my own three TM-born children. Without throwing slanderous stones, I shared stories of loved ones as TM's focus changed from mysticism to mystical science, of child neglect, psychosis, suicides, thousands of dollars spent for promises, fortunes lost and the next generation's struggles for self definition.  Such stories lay doubt on the David Lynch Foundation's promise of one-shot panacea for Transcendental Meditation in public schools, the Veterans Administration and elsewhere.  Listeners might appreciate post-talk objections that were raised by TM true believers.

You may listen to the 45 minutes audio track by clicking here : Cult of Benign Cure-all? Life in Transcendental Meditation's Hidden Society

Musings on the process of getting caught up in a cult and breaking free

I learned TM in 1968. Mahesh had just been dumped by the Beatles, something I didn’t know at the time; he  hadn’t yet started showing the world just who could out-perform some of the greatest performers of his time. TM was, at that time, just a nice thing, twice a day, and meeting with other meditators once in a while and hearing a talk by Mahesh was also nice (even though looking back I knew full well that he didn’t always say things I could understand). No, it probably wasn’t a nice thing, but it seemed like that at the superficial level.

Two years later, I quit a perfectly good, well-paying job to become a TM teacher and the year after that, Mahesh asked me to stay on as a member of his “international staff”! This lasted 3 years, until one day I got a call: Maharishi wants you to go and teach. And that was the end of my sojourn with his travelling psychotic circus. The year after that, I quit TM.

So, here’s what I am thinking: I noticed when I moved house, recently, that it was very hard to remember to do little things, small matters of daily routine previously established. I’d forget to floss or I’d forget to put something away, forget where I had put something that used to have a “special” place; I’d reach out to put my hand on something, but it wasn’t there any more. Alas, the “old ways” have ceased to function.

I had created patterns, pathways of behaviour that were dependent upon the relatively stable objects in my environment (where furniture was, what set of behaviours to follow after watching TV in the evening, for example) — I had previously been prompted by a routine that had become dependent upon the objects in my environment and now those prompts were gone but the behaviours remained, the tendencies remained, the patterns remained - but didn’t exactly work! This is obvious to almost all of us the first time we come home and find that the furniture has been re-arranged! We keep stumbling over the furniture as well as the routines set up by the old arrangements.

No, this isn’t news.

But what might come as something of a surprise is when we put this exact same thing into the TM-Maheshism context: we established patterns of behaviour based on the relatively fixed or stable things in our environment. For example: we are prompted to do and think specific things dependent upon either the objects or people who remind us of what comes next. So, it’s easy to get set into patterns we have created in order to easily navigate our environment, whether or not that environment is physical, mental, or, in another sense, emotional. Because TM-Maheshism is based on very subtle suggestion, subtle prompts established during our highly susceptible moods generated by TM, our patterns are deep-set, almost ingrained, deeper than “superficiality”.

We depend on our environment to remind us what to do after we do this or that. Otherwise, almost every activity would be new learning, take a lot of time and we’d become very frustrated and stressed; our productivity would decrease and our quality of life would be less skilfully managed.

People who travel constantly (salesmen, military personnel, etc.) spend a lot of time reminding themselves of routines because there are no external prompts or because external prompts are constantly changing. It’s somewhat of a tiring life! It’s a lot like living in the constantly changing rooms of the fun-house at the amusement park – but not very amusing on a long-term basis.

So what point am I making‽

First, I want to be very clear that I am in no way seeking to perpetuate the all too familiar defence mechanism followed religiously by the Maheshites! I am not seeking to blame the victim here. BUT, we all have to, at one time or another, recognize that we were “victimized” by Mahesh. We were beguiled by his charms and built up patterns of behaviour in order to find our way around his various teachings and attempts to control our lives. Really, simple as that.

So, here’s the point: if we built patterns, we can change the patterns we built. It doesn’t matter why we built the patterns. The patterns, in and of themselves, are neither addictive nor demanding nor powerful. They are just patterns, means to save time and thought. They do not have meaning inherent in their being. They only have the meaning we attribute to them, the meaning we let them have. Same for the mantra, by the way, and Mahesh, and the beliefs he led us into about all the stuff he made up and convinced us was real, important, vital and necessary to the survival of the whole world (actually meaning his organization and meal ticket).

I am not an exit counsellor, not a professional psychotherapist, so please do not simply take my word for this. YOU have to weigh and consider, seek your own information, do some introspection, do some work. Sorry. I know that following the leader is so much simpler – that’s what the Germans were doing before WWII ! It didn’t turn out so well. I have difficulty seeing that following Mahesh/Maheshism has turned out well.

What patterns are you following? What pathways have you created (based on TM-Maheshism) that you are letting manage your activities, your mental and emotional behaviour? Can you look at them, see their context, move your mental and environmental furniture so that new pathways can be created?