Tingalingalingaling... Ringing Bells of Invincibility

In gold lettering, the white ribbon reads "A Woman's Place is in the Dome". The green ribbon reads "Maharishi Invincibility".

These bells were in a box with some old family items. These small bells probably came from the 1981 celebration to inaugurate the Bagambhrini Golden Dome. The bells were distributed for attendees to ring rather than clap. The sound of hand clapping was considered too crude. Attendees were told to ring these little bells, creating group tingalinging, in response to inspirational talks about group meditation, enlightenment, and Maharishi's world plan.

Such bells were also used in group meditation by an assigned "timer" or "bell ringer" to announce time to change from the mental practice of TM (...aingnamah... aingnamah... aingnamah... aingnamah..), to next think the TM-Sidhi Program (...friendliness.. compassion... happiness.. strength of an elephant...), tingaling to switch to deemed-flying (...relationship of body and akasha, pause, lightness of cotton fiber... repeat...), tingaling again to lie down and rest while listening to an oral reading about soma flowing through and around Hindu gods, from a translation of the Rig Veda's 9th mandala.

TM devotees still practice the TM-Sidhi program for hours twice daily in gender segregated domes. The better constructed men's dome was built first and is near to  the women's dome. Dome participants believe they influence global events through their TM-Sidhi program.

One friend, also raised in the TM Movement, responded when I texted him this bell image, "Ugh!! Such victimized sweet people. It really makes me sick to think about Maharishi and how callously he used people."

tingalingalingalingaling   You may excuse yourself now in silence.

No girls allowed in the treehouse! Oprah, Ellen, and Transcendental Meditation

It's getting to be TM silly season again. The first reports have just begun to arrive, of famous talk-show hosts having visited the Fairfield, Iowa, epicenter of almost all things TM in the US, and the formal announcement of David Lynch's yearly fundraising gala. Soon we'll be treated to a small stream of mentions of Transcendental Meditation in various media, usually involving some marginally-famous or once-famous movie star, music legend or other public figure.

As always, though, they'll only be repeating one tiny little piece of the story: about how this particular form of meditation is allegedly the cure for almost anything that ails you, and how some supposedly "at-risk" population group - usually a group that's also vulnerable to manipulation by various hucksters and quacks - stands to benefit by learning TM through the fundraising efforts of the David Lynch Foundation.

Oprah Winfrey, "His Majesty Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam," head of the global TM movement, and Ellen DeGeneres.

Those of us who've been involved in some way with TM for some time, or watched the movement's gyrations for some years, have seen it all before. The marketing of the program has for decades focused on recruiting prominent individuals to the cause, who may then support TM publicly, recruiting others personally through their connections, or through the media, promoting it on television or in print. Today, though, it's inexplicable why intelligent and resourceful people, who you might think would know better, and who have a reputation to protect, would bother getting anywhere near TM or the organization that sells it.

A few minutes with Google should reveal to most anyone that the TM sales pitch actually says very little about the organization and the people doing the selling; there's an anti-scientific, anti-medical and extraordinarily odd, if not just plain bizarre, social structure that lies behind the façade used to sell the TM program to the world, where its devotees profess habits and beliefs that many would find repugnant if not positively medieval.