TM Town Struggles into 21st Century

TM Town Struggles into 21st Century: Mental Health Problems lead Fairfield to Re-Evaluate Core Doctrines


As you probably know, the beloved actor/comedian Robin Williams, who suffered from depression, committed suicide on August 11, 2014.

In the weeks following Williams' suicide, residents of Fairfield, Iowa, USA, home to Maharishi University of Management and to several thousand TMers, have been inching suicide out of the closet.  Researchers noticed that Iowa has a higher rate of suicide than the national average.  And Fairfield has a higher rate of suicide than the average Iowa city.

Fairfield residents have been dragging their feet around suicide prevention for years.  This is due not only to the American stigma around mental illness.  It is also exacerbated by TM official and unofficial doctrine.  Just a few of them are:

- Maharishi disapproved of Western psychotherapy.
- If you saw a psychotherapist, you could be disqualified from attending a TM course.
- TM is supposed to make you emotionally healthy, therefore if you report emotional problems, you are making TM look bad.
- People with emotional problems have been advised to do more asanas or learn the TM-Sidhis, rather than to seek professional help.
- People with emotional problems have been told they are "unstressing" rather than being advised to seek professional help.
- When people have had emotional problems (including hospitalizations and suicides), the TM organization has tended to hide the information or blame the person for being too emotionally unstable to begin with.
- People with emotional problems have been misdiagnosed by TMers as being in higher states of consciousness.

A fascinating report on the blossoming of open discussion on mental health problems in Fairfield is found here:

http://littlevillagemag.com/suicide-in-fairfield-iowa-town-struggles-with-mental-health-awareness/

 "Fairfield Cares," a grassroots organization helping to increase honest conversation about mental health problems of TMers holds meetings and lectures.  And Maharishi University of Management, after 40 years of denying counseling  to their students, are adding counseling to their health services.  However, they state that it is offered as an "adjunct" to TM, since, according to TM doctrine, scientific research shows that TM improves mental health, making people happy and stable.  

The TM organization (TMO) doesn't publicize any of the research which shows that sometimes TM causes or exacerbates mental illness.  Until I discovered TM-Free Blog, I believed what the TMO taught - that every research study ever done on TM showed that TM produces only benefits.  You can find many articles on TM-FreeBlog about emotional problems that some people have experienced due to T.M.  You can find information on the suppressed research on the far-right column of TM-Free Blog's home page.  

What have been your experiences with the TMO and mental health?

Invincible Combustion - Pandit residence enflamed

Fairfield Ledger of March 3, 2014 reported that firefighters responded to a fire within Vedic City’s pandit compound on Sunday afternoon March 2. There were no injuries, but the burning roof of a residential mobile home collapsed and the building was destroyed. The cause of the fire remains unknown.

The original article can be viewed here : Fire destroys residence on pandit campus 

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?