TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION
DISQUIETING
ASPECTS
First
published in Doctrine and Life,
June 1979.
A few years ago I did a full course in Transcendental
Meditation (TM) and later attended a TM-Sidhi weekend course, since I found the
whole subject of meditation interesting and useful as an aid to relaxation and
prayer. At that time any criticisms of
TM I came across, I dismissed as the views of bigoted fundamentalists with no
meditative tradition of their own,
But earlier this year, I received a copy of the text
of the Malnak versus Maharishi court case in America which banned TM from
public schools in New Jersey. (1) This
text convinced me for the first time of the deception involved in TM. As a result, I found I could no longer
recommend TM as a technique, and in this article I would like to explain
why. I shall deal with TM’s covert
religious nature, its alarming tendencies, and I will conclude by examining its
scientific claims.
TM AS A RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT
The TM people claim that theirs is not a religious
movement and that it can be practised by people of any religion, or none. But TM is
a religious movement and this is quite clear from the evidence given in the
court case before Judge Meanor. The
latter ruled that the puja, or
initiation rite, was closely akin to a religious liturgy because the TM teacher
chanted some Sanskrit verses invoking “Lord Narayana.... lotus-born Brahma, the
Creator”. The puja appears to be an extended mantra and these mantras, though
supposed to be individually chosen are, in fact, few in number, and are
assigned indiscriminately to everyone in certain age-groups: for persons under 11 years, eng; 12-13, em;
14-15, enga; 16-17, ema; 18-19, ieng; 20-21, iem; 22-23, ienga; 24-25, iema;
26-29, shirim; 30-34, shiring; 35-39, kirim; 40-44, kiring; 45-49, hirim;
50-54, Hiring; 55-59, sham; 60 years and over, sgama. (2)
These mantras appear to be invocations of known Hindu
deities and the Maharishi has admitted that “the gods we bow down to in the puja [are] the same as the mantras”, and
that the purpose of chanting the mantra is “to produce an effect on some other
world, to draw the attention of those higher beings, or gods, living
there. The entire knowledge of the mantras...
is devoted to man’s connection, to man’s communication with the higher beings
in a different strata of creation”. (3)
The usual TM explanation, for example that the puja is only a thanksgiving celebration for the TM tradition, like
laying a wreath at the cenotaph, was rejected.
Thomas Hopkins, an expert on Hindu religion, points
out that in Hinduism the puja
replaced sacrifice (Yajna) as the
principal form of worship. This ritual
was done before an image and gifts were offered like flowers and fruit, as well
as incense and dishes of water, rice, and sandalpaste. Hopkins says that “the image in the puja is treated as one would treat the
god himself in person, for the image is the
god in person”. (4) In the TM puja
there is an image of Guru Dev, Maharishi’s dead teacher, whom he now regards as
divine and to this image all the aforementioned gifts are offered.
Participation in this puja ritual is compulsory for all new meditators and no exceptions
to this rule are permitted. The whole
ritual is conducted in Sanskrit so the new meditator is not fully aware of what
is happening as no translation is given even if one requests it. But a quotation from “The Holy Tradition” by
Maharishi, a secret booklet given to all new teachers, leaves one in no doubt
about the religious nature of the TM movement:
“This revival theme of Lord Krishna and Shankaracharya has been adopted
by our movement... This message [is] the
doctrine of the Vedanta”. (5) TM
teachers also swear an oath of allegiance “to serve the Holy Tradition and
spread the Light of God to all those who need it”. (6)
Maharishi made no secret of his overt religious
intentions when he first came to the West, calling his movement the Spiritual
Regeneration Movement (SRM). But when
this title did not catch on, it was altered to the International Meditation
Society (IMS) and it is now called the World Plan Executive Council (WPEC), so
concealing its religious nature even further.
A commentary Maharishi wrote on the Bhagavad-Gita
in 1969 may help to explain this deliberate deception. He writes:
...
The Lord (Krishna) warns the enlightened man not to trust his understanding of
life upon the unenlightened ... the Lord warns the enlightened [i.e. the TM
meditators] not to reveal the inner state of their mind to the ignorant [i.e.
the non-meditator] ... He should not
tell him about the level of the realized because it would only confuse him. (7)
Harvey Egan, a Jesuit priest, writes that the
Maharishi’s “monistic commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita is carried over into his
teachings on Transcendental Meditation”. (8)
So it is not surprising then that Leo McAlister, a Roman Catholic priest
in California, whose letter highly recommending TM to Catholics is published in
The TM Book, has retracted his
endorsement and demanded his letter to be deleted from all TM literature. (9)
Robert Bellah, the well-known sociologist of religion,
in conversation with Mr. Robert Winquist, an official of Maharishi
International University (MIU), expressed his opinion that TM definitely seemed
to him to be a religion and he wondered why the TM people denied its religious
nature. Robert Winquist replied by
affirming TM’s religious nature, but stated that they did not admit that to be
the case for public relations reasons. (10)
I think from this that it is quite clear that TM is a
religious movement, or in scholarly parlance, a ‘neo-Hindu’ movement. (11) Its deliberate concealment of this and its
esotericism is perfectly in line with the Maharishi’s interpretation of
Hinduism as exemplified in his Commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita. Part of this
interpretation is the keeping of the unenlightened in their ignorance.
But this religious dimension, though not well known
outside America, would not, I think, dissuade many Christian TMers from their
meditating, especially if they found it was doing them some good. The more Scripturally minded ones may excuse
their attendance at the puja as St.
Paul dismissed fears about food sacrificed to idols – they don’t exist, since ‘there
is not God but the One’. (1 Cor.
8:4). However, I don’t think they can
turn a blind eye on alarming tendencies in the movement.
ALARMING TENDENCIES
Agehananda Bharati, the well-known Hindu Sannyasi
monk, sociologist and prolific writer on Hinduism, has known Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi from earliest days in India. Whilst
admitting that TM has given comfort and temporary relief to many, he states
that “Maharishi’s spoken words are as jejune as those of the other roaming
swamis”. He goes on to say that once the
Maharishi and the other roaming swamis’ “philistine, uncritical and dormantly
Hindu-fascist view of things becomes known to a large number of people, their
success may well be halted”. (12)
The Maharishi’s “Hindu-fascist” views can be gleaned from
his writings and public statements. He
is in favour of government’s intervening in religious matters:
It is
not enough to allow people to profess and practice their religion freely. It is necessary that the authorities should
be alert to see that the religion followed by the people produces in them the
right spirit of life and living ... If
religion fails to produce the effect it promises, then it needs help, and the
national authority should provide that help. (13)
Once when asked about a drug offender who had been
sentenced to four years of TM by a judge in Detroit, Maharishi enthusiastically
commented:
This
is the judgement of the Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment where the man is
forced to develop his pure consciousness by law. This is the law of the Age of
Enlightenment. By penalty he is forced
to evolve. (14)
In a similar strain, Maharishi says elsewhere:
There has not been and there will
not be a place for the unfit. The fit
will lead, and if the unfit are not coming along there is no place for
them. In the place where light dominates
there is no place for darkness. In the
Age of Enlightenment there is no place for ignorant people. The ignorant will be made enlightened by a
few orderly, enlightened people moving around.
Nature will not allow ignorance to prevail. It just can’t. Non existence of the unfit has been the law
of nature. (15)
Relevant here is Andrew Greeley’s remark that a
visionary “in the throes of a millennialistic or messianic vision can be an
extremely dangerous fellow – as can anyone who decided he should impose virtue
on his fellow man”. (16)
Lesser mortals in the TM hierarchy have reiterated the
Maharishi’s ideas on coercion. One of
them forecast that in the day that the “World Plan” achieves its objective of
delivering one teacher of TM for every thousand persons on the earth, “all
job-applications will feature the question ‘Are you a meditator?’ “ (17) Another has stated:
A
study of chickens in which they were allowed to choose their own food showed a difference
in ability to choose what was good for them.
Some became stronger, larger, healthier and more dominant than the
others. When the diet selected by the
‘good choosers’ was forced upon the ‘bad choosers’, the bad choosers became
healthier and stronger. Thus the good
choosers were able to choose better than the bad choosers what was good for the
bad choosers themselves! The
implications of this for human values and human behaviour are enormous. (18)
Jerry Jarvis, president of the movement in the U.S.A.,
has spoken of “a law that everyone should have to practice TM”, that “everyone
should be forced” because, “since it is illegal for anyone to throw their
garbage out into the street ... it should also be illegal for individuals to
throw their tensions out into society”. (19)
What is so alarming about this talk is the fact that TM may soon have
enough clout to put their ideas into practice.
This is particularly true in the United States where it has great
backing from many powerful government organisations, too numerous to be
mentioned here.
Once again, to understand Maharishi’s policies one has
to go back to his writings, especially the commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita. In a passage dealing with the moral
predicament of the hero Arjuna, who is called to fight and kill even his
closest relatives, Maharishi comments: “Arjuna has set himself a task which is
impossible unless he attains a state of consciousness which will justify any
action of his and will allow him even to kill in love in support of the purpose
of evolution”. (20)
Professor Arthur Danto says the picture of Krishna and
Arjuna slaying their way
dispassionately
across the field of conflict, as though they were cutting their ways with
scythes through a field of wheat ... is not a pretty picture. It is a picture, however, of a self that has
located itself beyond good and evil.
That is a dangerous space. It has
been occupied by Nietzsche’s Superman and by those who thought of themselves as
supermen. (21)
Bharati with his great knowledge of Hinduism from the
inside, makes similar observations saying that these “dangerous” ideas may have
influenced the Nazis:
With
the phony mysticism that floated around the Nazi fortresses the top leaders may
have vaguely absorbed these teachings. It is not impossible that they got hold of
some translations, and seeing themselves as Arjunas and Krishnas, acted the new
Aryan heroes who made their own rules, and who believed that murdering might
not be murdering after all, and that they, as superior hierophants, were doing
what Krishna had suggested. This sounds
monstrous when said in the West, but I have heard it dozens of times enunciated
by gentle Hindu scholars who would not kill a single fly or eat a single fish.
(22)
The Maharishi would probably fit in this latter
category for certainly his statements, and those of his close associates, smack
of the “Big Brother” mentality and incipient fascism. They also show a mentality which is beyond
morality as we know it. This would
account for the Maharishi’s ambivalence or deception about TM’s real
nature. He emphatically claims it is not
a religion and then elsewhere says “TM is a path to God” and “TM is a very good
form of prayer”. He says that the
mantras are meaningless words and yet elsewhere states that the mantras are
calling on “the gods we bow down to in the puja”.
(23) This ambivalence caused Mael
Melvin, a Professor at Temple University, and ex TMer, to say that “Maharishi
is flexible in what he considers truth”. (24)
It is not that he is a bad man, but rather he is just being true to his
religious background as he interprets it rightly or wrongly
in his Bhagavad-Gita commentary. Like Arjuna, he resolves his moral dilemmas
by attaining a state of consciousness which dissolves morality. The “enlightened” or consummate TMer is
beyond good and evil. His is not a moral
stand but a stand outside morality.
THE SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS FROM TM
The TM organisation makes extraordinary scientific
claims for itself and I think that it is here that its greatest strength
lies. If it could be proved that the
alleged beneficial effects of TM were not their exclusive preserve, then much
of their credibility would vanish.
They claim that the TM programme is subjected to
rigorous scientific scrutiny. But this
very claim will not sustain much close scrutiny! The glossy graphs and flow-charts produced by
the organisations, showing the good effects of TM, are certainly impressive at
first sight – but only at first sight!
I would like to make three main points about the TM
scientific claims. First of all a lot of
the TM research has been carried out under the auspices of the TM movement:
“Much of the research on TM is done by meditators themselves and published in
their own journals which don’t report contradictory result”. (25) A good example of this is the research done
by Professor R.K. Wallace, which is all very favourable to the TMers. Wallace is also president of the Maharishi
International University in America.
There is no mention in TM literature of bad effects and yet these are
certainly real and well catalogued. (26)
Secondly, a great deal of the TM research lacks
experimental control. This is admitted
by R. Peter Fenwick, a British neurophysiologist:
All
of these studies need to be looked upon with reservations. Few include adequate control groups and none
that I am aware of have yet used a blind control procedure where neither the
subject nor the observer is aware of the treatment given or the aims of the
experiment. Until this sort of study is
carried out in meditating groups, it is almost impossible to draw any
conclusions. Psychological results are
capable of being influenced by many non-specific factors and those of us in
psychiatry are aware of the large numbers of treatments which have been hailed
as the panacea in their time, but which have later been shown to have had their
effects entirely in a non-specific way. (27)
This lack of control is particularly true of the
claims made concerning the populations of whole towns and cities where one
percent of the people have been trained in TM.
The organisation claims that in these cities crime has dropped
dramatically, and all because of the good “vibes” coming from TMers! I think the Maharishi sincerely believes this
does happen, but privately may
believe it due to the Pax deorum!
Among the “non-specific” factors Fenwick refers to,
which may cause the beneficial effects attributed to TM, is the “placebo
effect” which comes from the suggestion that TM will be beneficial.
Thirdly, TM is not unique in achieving such
results. This is freely admitted by Dr.
Herbert Benson, of the well-known Wallace and Benson duet responsible for most
of the initial research into TM. Benson
claims that TM is only one of many ways, including prayer, to achieve what he
calls the “relaxation response” which is the natural ability of the nervous
system to rid itself effortlessly of stress and is the direct opposite of the
“fight or flight” response. In his best
selling paperback, Benson is rather critical of his earlier studies with
Wallace for their lack of control and the smallness of the sample sizes used.
(28) Wallace too seems to concur with
this, according to C.S. Calian, but not to the same extent as his colleague.
(29)
Melvin Calvin, chemist and Nobel Prize winner, says
that the Maharishi “doesn’t know anything about science” and the use of
Calvin’s name in his catalogue comes “perilously close to false
advertising”. Buckminster Fuller, whose
name was also tossed lightly about by the TM people, was of a similar opinion.
(30)
CONCLUSION
The tenor of my reflections has been basically
negative and I think this is a fair assessment of TM. Elsewhere I have given acceptable
alternatives to TM that are just as effective. (31) As I see it, TM might become acceptable and
palatable when it clarifies its position and states clearly and unambiguously
whether it is a purely secular technique or a religious movement. The efficacy of alternatives to it is borne
out by C.S. Calian who sees no need for TM “since its benefits are already
available through hesychasm and other forms of Christian meditation”. (32) Herbert Benson maintains in his book that any
word can be used as a mantra, and Una Kroll, who has written favourably of TM,
refers to someone happily substituting the TM mantra with a Christian one. (33) This I have done using the ancient Aramaic Maranatha, and found the effect not
dissimilar from TM.
Many have soft pedalled their criticism of TM because
they believed it benefited some people – the young, the lonely and the anxious
– and whilst not being indulgent, have been fairly tolerant of it. Obviously priests and religious are lucky in
having support from their communities, but the lonely and anxious who are often
drawn to TM are often a prey later to TM’s disturbing tactics and
super-salesmanship. Once a name is on
the TM books, one is subjected to a stream of literature about further courses
which are promoted with almost missionary zeal – even phone calls are
common. Many struggle to find the
exorbitant sum of £45 for the initial TM course, believing they have found a
panacea for all ills, and are then inundated later with literature telling them
how their way to happiness and enlightenment can be accelerated by another few
hundred! This speeding up process is
called the TM-Sidhi course and the end result is levitation or the ability to
“fly”, as well as the ability to become invisible. How this resolves life’s problems is not made
clear!
TM is a big money spinner, but unfortunately little of
this money goes to charity or the poor.
The money is ploughed back into the organisation. The Maharishi, when asked once what
meditation would do for India, gave the appalling reply: “They will be hungry, but they will be
happy”. (34)
REFERENCES:
1. TM in Court: the complete text of the
Federal Court’s opinion in the case of Mabak v. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Spiritual
Counterfeits Project, Berksley, 1978.
2. J.G.
Shortt, Transcendental Meditation, 1979.
[Cyclostyled notes], p.5.
3. Meditations of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bantam
Books, New York, 1968, pp.17f.
4. Thomas
Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, Dickenson,
California, 1971, p.110f.
5. TM in Court, Foreword, p.v.
6. Shortt,
op. cit., p.5.
7. Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, On the Bhagavad-Gita: a New
Translation and Commentary, Penguin, 1969, p.224.
8. Harvey
Egan, S.J., Christian Apophatic and
Kataphatic Mysticism, Theological Studies, 39 (1979) 3, p.407.
9 David
Haddon and Vail Hamilton, TM ..., Baker
House, Grand Ra[ids, Michigan, 1976, p.174.
10. Affidavit
of Dr. Robert N. Bellah, filed in Malnak v. Maharishi court case.
11. cf. Christian Century, vol. 94, Feb. 16th
1977, p.150.
12. Agehananda
Bharati, The Light at the Centre, Ross-Erikson,
Santa Barbara, 1976, p.183f.
13. Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, The Science of Being and Art
of Living, International SRM Publications, 1966, p.262.
14. Haddon
and Hamilton, op. cit, p.128.
15. Inauguration of the Dawn of the Age of
Enlightenment, MIU Press, 1975, p.47.
16. Andrew
Greeley, Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing, Prentice-Hall,
Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1974, p.101.
17. William
Gibson, A Season in Heaven, Bantam
Books, New York, 1970, p.104.
18. Jack
Forem, Transcendental Meditation ..., Dutton,
1973, p.177.
19. Verbal
testimony of John Vos, transcribed verbatim from a tape recording.
20. Maharishi,
Bhagavad-Gita, p.76.
21. Arthur
C. Danto, Mysticism and Morality, Penguin,
1976, p.98f.
22. Bharati,
op. cit., p.200,
23. Meditations, p.69f.
24. Constance
Holden, Maharishi International
University, Science, vol. 187, 28th March 1976, p.1180.
25. Script
for BBC TV programme in the Horizon series, Meditation
and the Mind, (1975) in J.G. Shortt, op. cit., p.11.
26. cf.
Dr. Leon Otis, Psychology Today, Feb.
1979, who writes of frequent and severe side-effects experienced by some. Also A.A. Lazarus, Psychiatric problems precipitated by TM, in Psychological Reports, 39(1976)2.
27 Peter
Fenwick, Times Educational Supplement, 17th
May, 1974, quoted in Shortt, op. cit., p.11.
28. Herbert
Benson, The Relaxation Response, Collins
(Fountain Books), 1977, p. 113.
29. cf.
C.S. Calian, Hesychasm and Transcendental
Meditation ..., Eastern Church Review, 10(1978)1/2, p.136.
30. Holden,
loc. cit., p.1180.
31. cf. The Clergy Review, May & July 1979.
32. Calian,
loc. cit., p.137.
33. Una
Kroll, TM: a Signpost for the World, Darton,
Longman & Todd, 1974, p.140.
34. William
Jefferson, The Story of the Mahareshi, Pocket
Books, New York, 1970, p.35.
