Flying yogis and flying millions
Acolyte David Lynch isn’t happy with this exposé of Transcendental Meditation
by Brian D. Johnson
He was the original guru pop star. Made famous by the Beatles in the 1960s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the godfather of the Transcendental Meditation movement, known as TM. He inspired such acolytes as author Deepak Chopra and filmmaker David Lynch, and remained TM’s figurehead until his death in 2008 at the age of 94. The Maharishi was once dubbed “the giggling guru.” But now it appears he may have been giggling all the way to the bank. David Wants to Fly, a new documentary shown last week at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, offers compelling evidence that the Maharishi’s empire of enlightenment is more devoted to shaking down its followers and amassing wealth than transcending the material world.
The “David” of David Wants to Fly refers to the film’s director, a cheeky 32-year-old German named David Sieveking, and to the dubious feat of “yogic flying” or levitation. It could also refer to David Lynch, who has emerged as TM’s most prominent spokesman and is the prime target of Sieveking’s obsessive investigation. Sieveking embarked on his documentary as an avid Lynch fan dying to meet the genius behind Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. But by the time he’d completed his film, five years later, it had turned into an exposé. Sieveking told Maclean’s that Lynch threatened to sue him and tried to block the film’s Berlin premiere. No wonder. It depicts TM as a secretive hierarchy with overtones of Scientology, and portrays Lynch as its Tom Cruise.
Sieveking, who makes himself a character in the documentary—a neurotic man on a mission—is like a cross between a young Werner Herzog and a skinny Michael Moore. He first travels to America to interview Lynch as a star-struck fan, then becomes an eager student of TM. As his odyssey takes him from Manhattan to the headwaters of the Ganges, he never loses faith in the power of meditation, but he becomes deeply skeptical about TM’s well-heeled leadership.
He learns that its “rajas” pay $1 million for their exalted rank. At a groundbreaking ceremony for a TM university in Switzerland, we see Lynch introduce Raja Emanuel, TM’s “King of Germany,” who wears a gold crown and offers a provocative pledge: “I’m a good German who wants to make Germany invincible.” Jeers erupt from the crowd and a voice yells, “That’s what Adolf Hitler wanted!” Emanuel replies: “Unfortunately, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t have the right technique.” Trying to quell the catcalls, Lynch leaps to the raja’s defence, and hails him as “a great human being.”
Sieveking interviews several TM defectors, including Colorado publisher Earl Kaplan, who donated over US$150 million toward the construction of a vast meditation centre in India, where 24-7 shifts of 10,000 yogic flyers would create world peace. Visiting the project site, Sieveking finds an abandoned, half-built ghost town. And he shows footage of “yogic flying,” which looks more like cross-legged yogic hopping. We also meet the Maharishi’s former personal assistant, who says, “He’d use people and discard them when they ran out of money.” And although the guru preached celibacy, the ex-aide says one of his jobs was to bring women to the Maharishi’s room for sex. Another ex-disciple, Judith Bourque, reminisces about her torrid love affair with the Maharishi, which ended when he found another young woman.
Rumours of the guru’s sybaritic lifestyle have been rampant ever since the Beatles heard that he had hit on Mia Farrow in the late ’60s. His behaviour provoked John Lennon to write a derisive song called Maharishi, which George Harrison persuaded him to retitle Sexy Sadie (“What have you done? You made a fool of everyone”). The film shows Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr rallying to support TM at Lynch’s star-studded 2009 TM benefit. “John Lennon,” says Sieveking, “would be rolling in his grave.”
As for the analogy between TM and Scientology, the director acknowledges certain parallels, but considers TM less rigid—“you can’t be a moderate Scientologist.” Sieveking says he became paranoid after the German raja threatened to destroy his film career. Yet Lynch “is still a guru for me as a filmmaker,” he maintains, just not as a spiritual figure. “I wanted to be his friend. It’s tough for me, because now he sees me as an enemy.” But Sieveking may have found a new guru. Apparently Michael Moore, that documentary raja, is anxious to see his film.
This article was found at:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/05/19/flying-yogis-and-%EF%AC%82ying-millions/
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UK pupils to get lessons in yoga and transcendental meditation
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/2011/08/29/pupils-to-get-lessons-in-yoga-and-transcendental-meditation-115875-23379727/
A STATE-funded school which will offer pupils yoga and meditation lessons was yesterday slammed as a waste of taxpayers’ money.
The Maharishi School opens its doors for the new academic year as one of Education Secretary Michael Gove’s free schools, which have already cost up to £130million.
It will be run according to the beliefs and teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who became the Beatles’ spiritual adviser, and boasts on its website that the activities are on the timetable.
Labour MP Lisa Nandy said last night: “People will be shocked that their taxes are going on teaching transcendental meditation.
“We have one million unemployed young people in this country and the Government is spending money on teaching pupils yoga.
“It is completely ridiculous. The money would be much better spent on improving existing schools and building the new classrooms the Government scrapped.”
Shadow Education Secretary Andy Burnham said the free schools scheme is a “gamble” which could be damaging – as it was in Sweden, where the idea originated
He said: “I have worries that this is a gamble and I don’t see the evidence that it will automatically lead to higher standards.
“But the bigger question we need to ask is, in a time of scarce resources, is it right to have a school system where funding is given according to demand rather than need?”
The school, in Ormskirk, Lancs, boasts on its website that “pupils exhibit a beautiful balance and wholeness rarely seen in other schools”. It adds: “The reason for this is the use of consciousness-based education founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which includes Transcendental Meditation, as an essential part of their daily classroom timetable”.
Head Derek Cassells talks up the benefits of meditation in a promotional DVD, saying: “Restful alertness combines profound physiological rest with inner alertness.”
[read the rest at the link above]
BHA signs letter expressing concern at pseudo-scientific Maharishi and Steiner Free Schools
ReplyDeleteby British Humanist Association May 14, 2012
A letter in yesterday’s Observer expressing concern about pseudo-scientific Free Schools has been signed by the British Humanist Association (BHA). Amongst others, the letter was also signed by Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter; David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at University College London; and the science writer Simon Singh, and is specifically directed at Maharishi and Steiner schools.
The letter reads:
Sir – Since the formation of the coalition, a lot of public concern has been expressed over the potential establishment of creationist Free Schools. This concern resulted in the Government changing the rules for Free Schools to prevent them from teaching pseudoscience (Richard Dawkins celebrates a victory over creationists, 15 January 2012).
However, not enough attention has been paid to what we believe to be two equally grave threats to science education, namely Maharishi and Steiner schools. Maharishi schools follow the educational methods of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru of the Transcendental Meditation movement, while Steiner education is based on an esoteric/occultist movement called Anthroposophy, founded by Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner (Holistic unit will ‘tarnish’ Aberdeen University reputation, 29 April 2012).
The Maharishi School has as its specialist subject the ‘Science of Creative Intelligence’, which is not based on science. It also teaches the ‘Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health’, a system of herbal medicine, most of which lacks evidence of efficacy and safety. Anthroposophy, or spiritual science, is centred on beliefs in karma, reincarnation and advancing children’s connection to the spirit world.
The first Steiner Academy opened in 2008, with a Free School pre-approved by the Government to open this September. The first Maharishi School opened last September. Both groups have interviews to open more Free Schools in 2013. We believe that the new rules on teaching pseudoscience mean that no more Steiner or Maharishi schools should open.
Pavan Dhaliwal, Head of Public Affairs, British Humanist Association
Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine, University of Exeter
David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology, University College London and blogger, dcscience.net
Simon Singh, science writer
Andy Lewis, Quackometer.net
Alan Henness, zenosblog.com
Melanie Byng
Richard Byng, medical academic
James Gray
Mark Hayes
David Simpson
Applications to open Steiner Free Schools in Exeter, Leeds and Suffolk (the Fullfledge Ecology School) and a Maharishi Free School in Richmond in 2013 have recently been accepted to interview by the Department for Education (DfE). Progress of other applications is unknown.
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/05/bha-signs-letter-expressing-concern-at-pseudo-scientific-maharishi-and-steiner-free-schools/
David Lynch Is Back … as a Guru of Transcendental Meditation
ReplyDeleteBy CLAIRE HOFFMAN The New York Times February 22, 2013
Inside David Lynch’s bunker of a studio in Los Angeles, a small crowd of happy people gathered on a late summer morning to meditate and learn about the nature of consciousness. The dozen or so young actors and musicians and others were recent initiates of Transcendental Meditation, a trademarked form of relaxation that involves sitting quietly and saying a mantra to yourself for 20 minutes twice a day. T.M. initiation — a multiday instruction program that includes the bestowing of a secret personalized mantra — costs, on average, $1,000. But those gathered had been initiated as a gift of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Through its work, Lynch, who has been practicing T.M. for 40 years, hopes to teach meditation to the world and, as a result, create world peace.
Lynch’s compound is where Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette dove into a nether world of lust, porn, murder and shadow selves in his 1997 film, “Lost Highway.” But “Lost Highway” was 16 years ago, and besides, it was just a movie. On that recent summer morning, the sun flooded into the dining room and the table was laid out with pastries and lemonade. The wild-eyed actor B. J. Novak, formerly of “The Office,” wandered in, holding a to-go cup of coffee. The heiress Aileen Getty, whose foundation supports Lynch’s work in teaching the homeless to meditate, lingered near the door. Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs, stars of the sitcom “2 Broke Girls,” stood to the side, laughing. Adam Gaynor, a former member of the band Matchbox 20, told me how meditation helped him deal with the recent death of his mother. “I heard about it and pushed it off a few times,” he said. “But afterward, I was so grateful.”
Near a window that looked out onto the Hollywood Hills, a large, framed, pastel poster was set up. Standing beside it was Lynn Kaplan, a dark-haired, energetic woman who works for Lynch’s foundation, which is based in Manhattan. Kaplan had assembled this group of young talent and personally initiated each one with their own mantra. “This is where the mantra comes from,” Kaplan explained, gesturing toward the evolutionary pictogram of Indian men radiating light. At the base stood a small man in a white robe, his hands clasped. This was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, she said, the late founder of the T.M. movement and Lynch’s guru. Beneath him floated a pastel world, glowing.
Word came that Lynch was on his way down, and the crowd shuffled over to his in-house recording studio and screening room, settling into built-in, modern easy chairs. Lynch slunk in through a side door, casting a leery eye up at his audience. He took a seat near the wall, looking uncomfortable. Everyone fell silent. Lynch was stylishly rumpled. His frame was lean and his hair was pomaded loosely into a mature faux-hawk. He wore faded khaki pants that bloused over a worn leather belt. In the breast pocket of his white dress shirt, a pack of American Spirit cigarettes was at the ready. Lynch is a notorious creature of habit: he spent seven years drinking the same chocolate milkshake at the same time every day from Bob’s Big Boy in L.A., because he thought it affected his creative process; and part of his persona is his uniform approach to dress. That day, a yellow watch gave a flash of color.
Lynch, 67, has the plain-spoken demeanor of an old cowboy actor, a posture that masks a lifelong fear of public speaking. When his quietness got uncomfortable, Kaplan announced the start of a short meditation. For 10 minutes, the soundproofed room was dead silent. When it was over, Lynch stood up, refreshed. “So, do you guys have any questions?” he asked.
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Kat Dennings’s boyfriend raised his hand and asked how he started meditation. Lynch made a funny face — he has answered this question a hundred times, all over the world. “I started here in Los Angeles on July 1, around 11 o’clock in the morning, a beautiful Saturday sunny day in 1973.” The group laughed at his exactness. “It was just yesterday,” he said softly. He continued: “I always tell the same story. The Beatles were over with Maharishi in India and lots of people were getting hip to Transcendental Meditation and different kinds of meditation, and I thought it was real baloney.” There was a knowing murmur — those in the audience had once had their doubts, too. “I thought I would become a raisin-and-nut eater, and I just wanted to work. And then all of a sudden, I heard this phrase, ‘True happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.’ And this phrase had a ring of truth.”
ReplyDeleteLynch brightened proudly. “You just got to stay regular in your meditation,” he eventually said. “It’s the transcendent that does everything good for us human beings. You get a key that opens the door to that with Transcendental Meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.”
Over the past few decades, David Lynch’s babbling dwarfs, ominous red curtains and just-around-the-corner episodes of hideous violence have become shorthand for a generation of art-house filmmaking. “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Mulholland Drive” and his hit TV series “Twin Peaks” received critical acclaim. And somewhere along the way, Lynch’s fringe vision of reality became a marketable brand. He directed commercials — with flickering light and his signature unease — for Calvin Klein and Dior. He has lent his name to several products, from Lynch edition bottles of Dom Pérignon to the David Lynch Signature Cup Organic Coffee company. He recently released a discordant musical album — “Crazy Clown Time” — and has produced a number of others. For decades he has exhibited paintings and drawings and photographs around the world. He designed a nightclub, Silencio (a reference to the theater in “Mulholland Drive”), in Paris. Every night, people line up outside with hopes of experiencing something Lynchian, a phrase that David Foster Wallace once defined as that which “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s containment within the latter.”
What Lynch has not been doing, though, is making movies. Since “Mulholland Drive” was released in 2001, Lynch seems to have turned his focus almost entirely away from shadowy underworlds and toward spreading the word about Transcendental Meditation. In 2003, he told a group of reporters that he was part of a project to build “peace palaces” all around the world, where thousands of practitioners would live, eat, sleep and meditate around the clock. And during the last decade, Lynch has traveled the world, telling all who will listen about transcending to a unified field of being. In the meantime, he has only released one feature film.
Whether his tireless work for T.M. has prevented him from focusing on his directorial work or whether the peaceful world he now inhabits has become his higher calling remains unclear. But in 2011, the independent film director Abel Ferrara told the blog Indiewire that he thought Lynch had given up on movies entirely. “Lynch doesn’t even want to make films anymore,” he said. “I’ve talked to him about it, O.K.? I can tell when he talks about it.” And then, rhetorically: “I’m a lunatic, and he’s pushing Transcendental Meditation.”
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Watching Lynch stand in front of a giant movie screen, preaching in his singsong frontier voice about how meditation could transform all that ails, it seemed as if Ferrara might be right. Lynch told someone in the audience that the decision to meditate should be an easy one: “If you had a choice to vomit all day or feel healthy and strong, it would be kind of obvious.” Then he cackled, and it occurred to me then that, despite the lack of dwarfs or talking animals in the screening room, Lynch might be up to something else too. Trying to create world peace through meditation might simply be the most Lynchian thing that Lynch has ever done.
ReplyDeleteFrom the moment that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived at the Honolulu airport in 1958, wearing robes, his ambition was to make Transcendental Meditation a global practice. He had been traveling across India for a few years, spreading the notion that meditation wasn’t just for monks and yogis but instead could be simplified for the masses. He would soon seize on a generation of young people’s desires to recreate the nirvana of hallucinogenic drugs and to live meaningful lives. In 1967, the Beatles met Maharishi, and he quickly became their spiritual adviser. Life magazine declared 1968 “the Year of the Guru,” with photographs of Maharishi. By 1977, a Gallup poll reported that 4 percent of Americans said they practiced T.M.
But then things got murky, and questions about the cult of personality grew. The Beatles left Maharishi’s ashram in a huff. Maharishi intensified his focus on a “world plan” to create peace through what he called the “Maharishi Effect,” in which 1 percent of the square root of the world population would meditate and radiate positivity. By the late 1970s, he had told his followers that they should practice more advanced, and more expensive, meditation techniques that took about two hours a day and could result in superhuman powers — the strength of an elephant and the ability to levitate.
By the 1980s, only a devout base remained dedicated to the world plan, and many of them settled in a small community in a corner of southern Iowa. Deepak Chopra, who worked for the Maharishi at the time, told me, “I started to be uncomfortable with what I sensed was a cultish atmosphere around Maharishi.” Soon, Maharishi stopped making public appearances, spending his time in an isolated compound in the Netherlands. He named a Lebanese neuroscientist as his successor, giving him the ceremonial name and title Majaraja Adiraj Rajaraam, the First Ruler of the Global Country of World Peace. He had given him his weight in gold.
Far away, in Southern California, David Lynch drank, made money, married a number of women and directed violent and dark movies. Still, he loved meditating. On set, he would leave each day to go spend time alone in his trailer, “diving within.” Then, in 2001, Lynch heard about a rare opportunity: the Enlightenment Course. Maharishi, who had barely been seen in public for years, was offering devotees the chance to pay about a million dollars to spend a month with him in the Netherlands.
When Lynch arrived at the compound in Vlodrop, in June 2002, he had hopes that the $1 million fee — a significant investment for him — would allow him to spend a month at his master’s knee, basking in the glow of his enlightened consciousness. He was disappointed when he was told that Maharishi would not physically attend the meetings but instead would communicate with the small group of devoted benefactors via a teleconference system from his room upstairs. But it didn’t matter — like all things Maharishi did, Lynch says, his absence made sense. “When I play it back in my mind, he was right there,” he said. “It’s a strange thing. He was right above us but came through the television. But it was as if there was no television. And that’s the way it was.”
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At the end of the Enlightenment Course, Lynch made his way back to Los Angeles as a changed man. “Everyone I saw was like a hero to me, trying to do the best they can, live life,” he said. “I was just in the strangest place. I’d pass through these different airports, and I’d look at the people, and I’d just love, love, loved the people.” I asked him if he still had the same feeling. “Yeah,” he said, looking away from me. “But the thing is, you could very easily sit under a tree. But if I heard that before I started — that you might want to sit under a tree, I’d stay away from that ’cause I want to work. You see what I mean? It gives you that feeling that you could sit under a tree, but it also gives you the feeling you could just go work.”
ReplyDeleteCould he have ended up sitting under a tree? I asked.
“No. I’m not enlightened.”
Lynch did feel a new sense of mission. “It was important for me to say something to the people, whether they listened or not, about my personal experience,” he said. Though he had long been fairly private about his love of T.M., Lynch started announcing his support of not only meditation but of Maharishi’s agenda for world change. This zeal didn’t go unnoticed by the leaders of Maharishi’s organization. In 2005, John Hagelin and Bob Roth, who spent decades working for Maharishi, suggested that Lynch start a foundation dedicated to helping troubled children through meditation. Lynch quickly expanded on the idea: he wanted to raise $7 billion to spread T.M. “I just remember him taking this idea and going two or three ideas beyond what we had in mind,” Hagelin said.
A year after the inception of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, Lynch’s life began to change more visibly. He filed for divorce from Mary Sweeney, his third wife, longtime collaborator and the mother of his 14-year-old son. Not long after, Lynch was engaged to Emily Stofle, an unknown actress decades younger. When asked why he married so many times, he told this magazine: “We live in the field of relativity. Things change.” In 2006, Lynch released his first film in five years, “Inland Empire,” which grossed a meager $4 million. The Times called it a “savagely uncompromised” piece of art; others panned it as alienating nonsense.
Regardless, it would be his last movie to date. Lynch set out on a two-year global speaking tour that took him to more than 30 countries to talk to mostly college-age audiences about meditation, creativity and peace. Lynch’s phobia of public speaking was such that he occasionally pretaped acceptance speeches when honored with an award and stood silently at the microphone as the recorder played his voice. But on the global speaking tour, in front of audiences of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, he cracked jokes and told personal stories of his own transformation.
Then, in February 2008, Maharishi died. In the weeks before his death, the guru acknowledged Lynch’s birthday in a group teleconference — a special honor. “It was a celebration taking place long-distance over Skype,” Hagelin said. “Maharishi was so intent on participating and hearing, and he took great satisfaction. Even then Maharishi saw with David the great potential to meet many people, to fulfill Maharishi’s vision of alleviating the problems of the world.”
On a 100-degree morning last summer, I was with Lynch in the back of a stretch limousine for a long, slow ride down Mulholland Drive. The narrow two-lane road, which runs along the top of the Hollywood Hills, separates the multimillion-dollar canyon homes of Los Angeles from the sprawl of split-levels that make up the San Fernando Valley. Tacking between suburban and glamorous, the road itself is broken down, potholed and in places overgrown with desert flower bushes. It always feels a little lonely.
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There was an unspoken logic to us being up there. It was during the making of “Mulholland Drive,” which opens on a shot of a stretch limo lurching down the road, that Lynch began his transformation from iconoclastic director with a public-speaking phobia to global public evangelist for meditation and peace. On that summer morning, Lynch was a bit grouchy. (He was on a cleanse.) He squinted, watching the road as if we were braving a blizzard.
ReplyDeleteAs the car hummed along and we relived his spiritual journey, I asked Lynch what he really believed. Did he see Transcendental Meditation as simply a technique for relaxation, perfect for young Hollywood actresses, or rather as an all-encompassing way of life, as Maharishi had encouraged — one with peace palaces and an army of meditators fomenting world peace? Lynch paused, and then spoke for more than five minutes, explaining that T.M. was the answer for all seeking true inner happiness. He ended with this thought: “Things like traumatic stress and anxiety and tension and sorrow and depression and hate and bitter, selfish anger and fear start to lift away. And that’s a huge sense of freedom when that heavy weight of negativity begins to lift. So it’s like gold flowing in from within and garbage going out. The things in life that used to almost kill you, stress you, depress you, make you sad, make you afraid — they have less and less power. It’s like you’re building up a flak jacket of protection. You’re starting to glow with this from within.”
Lynch looked over at me scribbling on my notepad. When I finished, there was a pause, and I laughed — what could I say after all that? I had asked if T.M. was something he believed could be compartmentalized, like doing yoga or avoiding dairy. Lynch chuckled, but it seemed as if it was because he felt that he’d just given the definitive answer to all questions that might follow from me or from the universe for that matter.
I should say here that Lynch was not explaining transcendence to a neophyte. I got my first T.M. mantra when I was 3 years old, and for as long as I can remember, meditation and Maharishi were the basis for everything I did growing up. I was 5 when my family moved to Fairfield, the small town in Iowa where Maharishi and his followers bought a bankrupt college and established a community. Most of my early education took place at the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, where our curriculum was interwoven with our guru’s philosophy. His photograph hung on nearly every wall of my school and home. We wore crisp conservative uniforms and meditated twice a day in our classrooms. Those meditations were graded.
I still meditate. For 20 minutes or more, twice a day, I’m able to step back from the news scroll of thoughts and be truly quiet. I use T.M. to deal with anxiety and fatigue and to stave off occasional despair. But that’s because, in my head, I’ve managed to excise the weird flotsam of spirituality that engulfed T.M. for the first part of my life. Now, for me, it is something very simple, like doing yoga or avoiding dairy. Objectively speaking, meditation has been shown to decrease the incidence of heart attacks and strokes and increase longevity. The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense commissioned studies to determine whether T.M. can help veterans alleviate post-traumatic stress disorder. Thanks to the David Lynch foundation, low-performing public schools have instituted “Quiet Time,” an elective 10 minutes, twice a day, during which students meditate, with some encouraging results.
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Lynch seemed unsatisfied with my limited appreciation for the possibility of T.M. “Now, Claire,” Lynch said, leaning forward and staring into my eyes. “When I first met you, I felt that you had doubts. Is that a real feeling?” By doubts, Lynch was talking about T.M. as a worldview and the belief that Maharishi was an enlightened guru. He was talking about the T.M. organization’s $7 billion plan to create world peace. He seemed to want me to understand that transcending would change everything, for everyone. I had doubts.
ReplyDeleteAs the sunlight streamed through the tinted windows, my mind turned to Laura Harring, the red-lipped heroine of “Mulholland Drive,” and the way Lynch used this road as a portal into an underworld where monsters and dwarfs await by the nearest stalk of bougainvillea. Where had transcending taken Lynch? Had T.M. stripped him of the subversive weirdness that made him such a powerful artist? Had he allowed himself, on some level, to sit under a tree? Then, before I had a moment to consider the notion, he was nudging me, laughing. “Wave to them! Wave to them!” He rolled down his window and waved gaily to a Hollywood tour bus across the street, full of passengers frantically taking photographs of our limo. Lynch beamed. It was hard to see the macabre in the mundane.
As he rolled up his window, I asked him about the rewards of immersing himself in advocacy and philanthropy. Did they outweigh those he felt as an artist? He snapped at me — saying that this was all just a thing that happened and that his real focus was his wife, his children and his work. Lynch said he was just waiting for a movie idea to come to him. Then he quickly switched to the quantum mechanics of transcendence, and my mind wandered to what Abel Ferrara said. It must be hard to come up with an idea for a movie when you believe that you have the power to change people’s lives and maybe even the world.
The office of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in New York is filled with young adults, many of whom grew up practicing Transcendental Meditation. Since Lynch started spreading the good news about T.M., the number of people learning the technique has increased tenfold. Close to Lynch’s heart are those suffering from PTSD, it seems, but it is in his own industry that he has made a more visible impact. Roth, who runs the foundation, spends much of his time flying around the world as well as initiating a long list of public figures: Gwyneth Paltrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Russell Simmons, Katy Perry, Susan Sarandon, Candy Crowley, Soledad O’Brien, George Stephanopoulos and Paul McCartney’s grandchildren.
Russell Brand, the British comedian, often accompanies Lynch as an M.C. at the foundation’s star-studded fund-raisers in New York and Los Angeles. Howard Stern, Laura Dern, Clint Eastwood and Jerry Seinfeld, who meditated without much fanfare for decades, have filmed testimonials to help Lynch reach his $7 billion goal. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr sang together for the first time in years at a Lynch fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in 2009. Oprah Winfrey recently dedicated an entire show to T.M. As did Dr. Mehmet Oz.
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Despite the totality of the vision he laid out in the limo, one thing that is abundantly clear inside the foundation’s office is that the Lynch brand of Transcendental Meditation is vibrant and uncomplicated and unburdened by T.M.’s more controversial past. It is no longer, as Brand often says, “for weird, old hippies.” Nor is it only for committed devotees willing to spend their lives meditating in rural Iowa. Maharishi’s visage was nowhere to be seen.
ReplyDeleteMaharishi, in fact, seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Many of those I interviewed, who learned T.M. through Lynch’s foundation, compared the practice to going to the gym. Kevin Law, a former music-industry executive who has been invited to join the foundation’s board, told me that he was inspired by the fact that people like Martin Scorsese and the billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio were very public that T.M. had changed their lives. “These masters of the universe,” he said, “all from different backgrounds, all have one thing in common and it’s Transcendental Meditation.” Law said that for him, T.M. is more like working out. When I asked him about his sense of Maharishi, he said, “I know shockingly little about him because it’s not important.”
This reminded me of a conversation I had with Lynch along Mulholland Drive. I asked him why he went from someone who would talk only to friends and family about meditation to someone who was spending his life on the road, promoting a cause. At the time, he shrugged and demurred that he had simply been asked. Now, in the clean and well-lighted office of the David Lynch foundation, I wondered if this, in fact, was the reason he was asked. Was this simplified version of T.M., based in an office with Oriental rugs and pictures of Seinfeld, in keeping with Maharishi’s dying wish? Or was it a creation of Lynchian proportions?
A few months later, I reached Lynch by phone at his hotel room in Paris. Bob Roth had told me that Lynch said he was working on a new script and that it was typically dark. When I asked Lynch about this, he paused, annoyed. “Bobby’s got a big mouth,” he said. I asked him if the script was influenced by his work with T.M., and he said no, absolutely not. This will be a David Lynch picture, he said, adding, “I think people would probably recognize it.”
During our time together, I heard audiences ask Lynch over and over how he could create disturbing movies while dipping into a field of pure bliss. He had universally assured them that it was no problem: he has been meditating for years, and it actually helps him be more creative, to come up with better, more visceral stories. But when I pointed out that it had been more than six years since his last film, Lynch demurred. He was just a tool, he told me, in some larger, transcendent plan. “Mother Nature is very, very happy when people stop suffering and move things forward in a beautiful way,” Lynch said. “That makes me feel good. I’m just the messenger. I’m just telling them what Maharishi told me.”
Claire Hoffman is a journalist who has written for Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/david-lynch-transcendental-meditation.html
Do All Cults, Like All Psychotherapies, Exploit the Placebo Effect?
ReplyDeleteBy John Horgan |Scientific American (blog) March 4, 2013
I’m a child of the Sixties, so I’ve known lots of people over the years who’ve joined cults. One of the most popular was Transcendental Meditation, which the Indian-born guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi began marketing to westerners, notably the Beatles, a half century ago. TM is making a comeback, in large part because of the efforts of David Lynch, director of Eraser Head, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and other creepy classics. Over the past eight years he has become a global evangelist for TM. According to a recent New York Times Magazine profile, Lynch believes that TM can yield “true inner happiness.”
I have no doubt that for Lynch and many other practitioners, TM works; that is, it makes them feel better. “Better” can include anything from feeling calmer and less stressed to having a stronger sense of purpose, meaning and connection to other people and all of life.
Of course, by this criterion Scientology, Catholicism, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, the Hare Krishna movement, Unification Church and every other cult works. (Some readers may prefer the term “religion” for some of these institutions, but I view religions as cults that have achieved respectability, in some cases by abandoning extreme tenets.) After all, numerous studies have found a correlation between health and religious faith.
The question is, why do cults work? Why do they make adherents feel better? The obvious (to me) answer is that they harness the placebo effect, the tendency of our belief that something will benefit us to be self-fulfilling. Cults share many elements that seem designed to evoke potent placebo effects:
*Specialness. Each cult usually insists on its uniqueness and superiority to all rivals. It offers not just a path to knowledge and happiness but The Path. The cult holds out the hope that diligent adherents can achieve special states of being, called salvation, enlightenment, getting clear, etc. Followers are often encouraged to persuade others to convert.
*Supernatural Founder. Each cult insists that its founder—and sometimes its current leader–possesses revelatory knowledge and powers beyond those of ordinary mortals. This prophet, savior or guru is said to be infallible, enlightened, chosen by God, semi-divine or divine. Examples: Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Reverend Moon, the Dalai Lama, the Pope, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
*Rituals. Adherence to the cult often entails ritualized practices such as meditation, yoga, prayer, signing hymns to God, attending regular group services and so on.
*Secrecy. Some cults bind adherents together with secret knowledge. When I lived in Denver in the 1970s, I had friends who joined a cult called Divine Light Mission, which taught members meditation techniques that they could not reveal to outsiders. Each TM practitioner is also given a unique, secret mantra to repeat during meditation. I once pestered two friends who had learned TM to reveal their secret mantras. One finally told me, and the other blurted out in dismay that he had been given the same mantra.
*Money. We value what we pay for, so not surprisingly religions ask devotees to donate or tithe, and some, such as Scientology and TM, charge for spiritual training. Learning basic TM costs $1000, and advanced courses cost much more. In 2002, Lynch paid $1 million for an “Enlightenment Course” taught by Maharishi Yogi himself (who didn’t even teach in the flesh!). Sigmund Freud, who was no fool, insisted that payments were a crucial component of psychoanalysis. It’s a win-win situation for therapist and patient, guru and devotee.
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Speaking of Freud and psychoanalysis, I’ve written about how different psychotherapies all produce roughly the same benefits, or lack thereof, an equivalence that has been dubbed “the Dodo effect.” The term refers to an Alice in Wonderland scene in which a dodo bird, after watching Alice and other characters run a race, announces, “Everyone has won, and all must have prizes!” The Dodo effect is consistent with the hypothesis that all psychotherapies harness the placebo effect. My guess is that the dodo effect applies to all cults as well as to all psychotherapies.
ReplyDeleteCults and psychotherapies are hardly alone in exploiting the placebo effect. In his new book The Placebo Effect in Clinical Practice, psychiatrist Walter Brown of Brown University writes that “the history of medical treatment is largely a chronicle of placebos. When subjected to scientific scrutiny, the overwhelming majority of treatments have turned out to be devoid of intrinsic therapeutic effectiveness; they derived their benefits from the placebo effect.”
So here’s another question: What happens if you just practice one of a cult’s rituals—singing in a church choir, say, or eating peyote–without buying into all the claptrap about its supernatural specialness?
Journalist Claire Hoffman, who wrote the Times Lynch profile, apparently falls into this category. She learned TM as a child and still meditates twice a day “to deal with anxiety and fatigue and to stave off occasional despair.” But she doesn’t buy Lynch’s claim that if we all embrace TM it will “change everything, for everyone.” She calls her practice “something very simple, like doing yoga or avoiding dairy.”
Hoffman might get much stronger placebo effects if she had as much faith in TM as Lynch. The more you believe in the uniquely transformative power of your cult, the more you get out of it. The only price you have to pay is your rationality.
About the Author: Every week, hockey-playing science writer John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, Horgan is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's, 2012). Follow on Twitter @Horganism.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/03/04/do-all-cults-like-all-psychotherapies-exploit-the-placebo-effect/
Transcendental Meditation: How I Paid $2,500 For a Password to Inner Peace
ReplyDeleteHumans are anxious, tired and distracted; but we don’t need to pay big bucks to learn to relax.
By Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet March 31, 2013
Transcendental Meditation, that vestige of the 1960s fascination with Eastern-oriented enlightenment, is back with a vengeance. Celebs like Russell Brand and Moby swear by it. The celebrated filmmaker behind Blue Velvet and Eraserhead has made it his mission to spread the good word about TM through the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Oprah recently devoted a TV show to the TM movement.
Over a decade ago, I found myself introduced to TM in what turned out to be a very expensive, hype-filled journey to enlightenment. Allow me to share the wisdom I gained.
The Price of Inner Peace
I was dating a screenwriter when I stumbled upon TM. He was nearly two decades older than me and had come of age in the late '60s and early '70s, bringing with him a number of interesting relics from that era, including a twice-daily practice of TM. Each morning he would sit up in bed for 30 minutes, chin resting on his chest, looking enviably blissful as I stumbled around in a bleary funk trying to find my shoes. In the afternoon, he would repeat this sublime performance. Neither deadline nor meeting could distract him from his ritual. If necessary, he would don earplugs and conduct his journey inward on the subway or the bus. I was in awe.
My boyfriend didn’t participate in the broader Transcendental Meditation movement and insisted that there was nothing mystical, or even particularly special, about what he was doing. “Look, I took a course 30 years ago, and I liked the technique, so I stuck with it. Period." His daily practice, he assured me, had kept him grounded and sane ever since. That sounded pretty good to me. I’ve always been a rather high-strung creative type, and at the time I was in the throes of procrastination on my doctoral dissertation and a struggle to figure out whether a career in academia or journalism would best cure me of a deep sense of futility. So I signed up for a free introductory class on TM in Manhattan.
During the free intro, I heard a lot about scientific reports on the benefits of TM, like reducing stress and releasing creativity. It sounded reasonable enough, and I was impressed that the people in the room looked pretty normal. The instructor didn’t go into any religious stuff and could have easily fit into a corporate office with his clean-cut appearance and fondness for graphs and charts. The technique, he assured the class, was easy to learn and could provide a lifetime of benefits for both mind and body. We were invited to consider taking a beginner course, after which we would have access to a lifetime of “free followup and support.” Then came the kicker: the price of a beginner course was $2,500.
I gulped. That was quite a pricetag. But at this point, I was already looking forward to my transformation. Wasn’t inner peace worth it? I rationalized that people paid far more than this for therapy in New York City, and after all, I had hard evidence from my boyfriend that the technique could have long-lasting effects. I had just landed a lucrative ghostwriting contract, and if learning TM would make me less stressed and more productive, it would be worth it, right? My inner skeptic was silenced. I went for it.
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Over several courses, I learned to sit with my eyes closed and just let my thoughts flow until I began to feel a sense of peaceful awareness come over me. There was no need to concentrate or sit in any particular way, or refrain from scratching my nose. A steady flow of references to scientific studies promising increased intelligence and emotional development padded what was otherwise a pretty straightforward lesson on sitting still and chilling out. After the completion of the course, there was a special "graduation" ceremony in which students were given individual mantras to use in our practice. This was the first real whiff of spirituality. I was told to bring an offering of flowers to meet the instructor, who now appeared wearing a robe. He solemnly told me that he had a special word to give me that was mine alone and would be the key to my successful practice of TM.
ReplyDelete“I know something about you,” he said, staring meaningfully into my eyes. “And that’s why I’m giving you this particular mantra.” I was no longer a student in a class, but an initiate into a special order of enlightened beings. I was invited to attend group meditation sessions where the combined force of our effort would increase harmonic vibrations of the universe and contribute to global peace. Or something like that.
The Big Reveal
Meditation is an ancient technique for relaxing, and it comes in a variety of forms. Some focus on breathing; others on an object, like a flame or a bowl of water. Mindfulness meditation adds on the directive to be attentive to feelings of gratitude and not to be an asshole. There’s even a form that makes the orgasm the focus in reaching a meditative state.
Transcendental Meditation is just a fancy name for a common variety of meditation in which a mantra – a word or series of syllables – is repeated with the intention of creating a meditative state. Pretty much any word or syllable will do, despite the hype of TM, which insists that a mantra can only be given by a "qualified" instructor. The TM initiate is told never to reveal her mantra under any circumstances, lest its magic be lost. My instructor suggested that he had some particular insight into me in choosing my mantra, but this is utter nonsense. People who have taught TM have admitted that they are given a list of mantras they’re supposed to divvy out according to age and gender. Nothing mystical about it. Here’s one list, http://caic.org.au/eastern/sydda/free-tm.htm which contains a version of my "personal" mantra. In violation of the sacred rules of TM, I’m now going to reveal it to you: “aima.” That’s my mantra. Two syllables. Vaguely pleasant sounding. If I repeat it consistently for several minutes, I begin to feel a little spacey. The same thing happens, I have found, when I repeat the word “Tallahasee.”
My boyfriend was horrified that I had paid $2,500 to learn TM. His course cost him a mere $50 back in 1973, and as it turns out, he had long ago dispensed with the mantra-business and simply focused on an image when he sat down to meditate, which happened to be the sound of the blind on his childhood window tapping in the wind, a sound that to him signaled relaxation. Technically, he wasn’t even doing TM; he was simply relaxing for an hour a day. To achieve a similar result, some people take a nap. Others go for a walk. You could add all kinds of fancy components to a relaxing activity like walking, and call it Globally Conscious Perambulation or some such BS and require the muttering of special words and the donning of special attire, but it would still be a walk. Its primary benefits would still come from relaxing the body and mind, and if done regularly, adding some purposeful structure to the day. Dress it up in a thousand scientific studies and it’s still just a freaking walk.
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TM merely adds a scientific veneer to a simple technique and pretends that there is something unique about it. There isn’t. You could stroll down to your local community center and learn to practice meditation, perhaps for a donation of ten bucks. I paid $2,500 for a mantra, which, I will now tell you, is idiotic. I’ve tried several forms of meditation since, and I actually find other techniques better suited to me. I’ve paid a couple of hundred bucks for weekend retreats and trivial amounts for group sessions at various centers, always in the form of voluntary donations. I don’t meditate regularly these days, but when I do, I often feel refreshed. But I will never feel good about the ridiculous amount of money I forked over to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his merry band of hustlers.
ReplyDeleteThe Giggling Guru
Unfortunately, one thing that links many forms of meditation is the preponderance of guru figures associated with it. This is not always the case, but it’s common enough to muddy the waters of the river of consciousness. For many practitioners, it’s not enough simply to pass on a simple technique that may be beneficial to some people. Those who aspire to gurudom have to be the voice of global consciousness. Or moral transcendence. Or whatever. They have to be the One Who Knows. And all too often, the One Who Gets Paid Big Bucks. Or perhaps the One Who is Having Sex With Disciples.
TM’s famous guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, known as the “giggling guru,” was an Indian yogi who rose to notoriety as the spiritual counselor to the Beatles. The giggling guru had plenty to smile about, as he got people to pay millions for his lessons on transcendence. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, his organization, which boasts real estate holdings, schools and clinics, was worth more than $3 billion by the late 1990s. Teaching meditation was never enough for the Maharishi, or “His Holiness,” as followers called him. A marketing wiz, he launched the official TM-Sidhi program in the late 1970s that offered devotees the ability to levitate and bring about world peace. The levitation, or “yogic flying,” as followers call it, basically involves sitting on your duff in lotus position and bouncing up and down in what is possibly the most ridiculous-looking New Age practice on Earth -- and that’s saying something. This is thought to bring global consciousness. You really have to see it to believe it, so be sure to click here.
The Maharishi’s enthusiasm for the butt-flying technique actually led to the formation of a political party in 1992, the Natural Law Party, which runs campaigns in several countries, including the U.S. It must be admitted that most politicians speak out of their rear ends, so why not just make that part of the anatomy central to an entire platform? Makes sense to me.
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In 2000, the tireless Maharishi created the Global Country of World Peace, a “country without borders” that even has its own currency, the “Raam.” In 2008, the guru announced his retirement, went into silence and promptly died. Transcendental Meditation, with its expensive classes and ridiculous advanced practices, might have fallen into oblivion, but for David Lynch. Lynch paid a small fortune for his guru status within the TM movement when, in 2003, he forked over a cool million to participate in the Maharishi’s four-week "Millionaire's Enlightenment Course." Since Lynch came on board, TM has been on the rise, perhaps benefitting from the decreasing market share of Scientology among celebrities.
ReplyDeleteLynch has gotten a ton of press attention, including a recent profile in the New York Times. He has not been pleased, however, with all of it. In 2010, a German TM follower and filmmaker named David Sieveking produced a Roger and Me-style documentary about his quest to meet Lynch, which he eventually accomplished. In David Wants to Fly, the young man moves from an enthusiast of TM to a critic alarmed by the shaking-down of followers and the great wealth amassed by the leaders of a movement purportedly devoted to world peace. Sieveking claims to have received legal threats from the David Lynch Foundation since releasing the film.
As a concession to recessionary times, the TM movement dropped the price of its introductory course to $1,500 in 2008. That’s still an absurd amount of money for teaching a technique that could be learned in a hour. Any organization or movement that demands so much up-front cash from followers (still more if they choose advanced courses) and proffers such BS as global peace through butt-flying is bound to have a cultic dimension. I didn’t stick around long enough to explore it myself, but there are plenty of accounts of those who go beyond the initial meditation technique and find themselves feeling ripped off, angry andspiritually abused.
We humans are anxious, tired and distracted in the modern world. We need to relax. We just don’t need to pay thousands of dollars to do it.
For more on TM, visit Skepdic.com.
Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
to read the links embedded in this article go to:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/transcendental-meditation-how-i-paid-2500-password-inner-peace
Using Meditation to Help Close the Achievement Gap
ReplyDeleteBy NORMAN E. ROSENTHAL, M.D., The New York Times JUNE 2, 2016
NOTE: The following text in italics originally appeared at the end of this New York Times blog article. I have placed it here where it belongs to inform readers of the author's bias
Norman E. Rosenthal is a psychiatrist and the author of “Super Mind: How to Boost Performance and Live a Richer and Happier Life Through Transcendental Meditation.”
Closing the so-called achievement gap between poor inner-city children and their more affluent suburban counterparts is among the biggest challenges for education reformers. The success of some schools’ efforts suggests that meditation might significantly improve children’s school performance – and help close that gap.
In 2007, James Dierke, then the principal of the Visitacion Valley Middle School in a troubled neighborhood in San Francisco, was determined to improve both the quality of education and student behavior in his school. He partnered with the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education to develop a Quiet Time Program for his school. The program, which had initial funding from the David Lynch Foundation, involved introducing two 15-minute periods of quiet into the school day. During those times, students could either practice Transcendental Meditation, which is taught as part of the program, or engage in other quiet activities like silent reading.
A major factor preventing underserved children from learning is the stress they encounter on a daily basis – from factors like poverty, deprivation, lack of steady parental input, physical danger and constant fear. Research shows that chronic stress can impair healthy brain development and the ability to learn, and that Transcendental Meditation, a stress-reducing technique that involves thinking of a mantra, can reduce stress and its manifestations – for example, anxiety, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Mr. Dierke wondered whether meditation might reduce students’ stress levels and help them learn.
Over the next three years, Visitacion Valley’s suspensions dropped by 79 percent, attendance rose to 98 percent, and students’ grade point averages rose each year. Of even greater interest, the increase in G.P.A. for the lowest performing demographic was double that for the overall student group.
Anecdotally, favorable feedback poured in from both students and staff members. One seventh grader at Visitacion Valley said, “I used to be really fidgety, couldn’t stay in my seat for very long. Now, after meditating, I can sit down for a whole class without standing up.” Barry O’Driscoll, the school’s director of physical education for the past 14 years, said, “In the first seven years of my tenure, the school was dominated by stress and fighting.” But in the last few years, he said, “we have had very few fights.”
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One other middle school and two high schools in the Bay Area adopted the program. And a 2015 review of the program, issued by the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education in collaboration with the San Francisco Unified School District research department, had more good news.
ReplyDeleteThe results of 17 studies conducted to date in the Bay Area, varying in duration from three months to one year, showed benefits across parameters including reduced stress, increased emotional intelligence, reduced suspensions, increased attendance and increased academic performance.
Although controlled studies are difficult to perform in an academic setting, collectively the results of the Bay Area studies are encouraging. Two controlled studies have been published so far; others are in submission for publication. In one, the effects of the Quiet Time Program, conducted over half the academic year, were evaluated in public middle school students performing below proficiency level. Annual math and English scores improved in the students who meditated, while they declined in those who didn’t meditate. Given that the students in the study were performing below par at baseline, these results are promising.
The second controlled study, authored by WestEd, an independent evaluator, found that after seven months of the Quiet Time Program, ninth grade students who meditated showed a significant decrease in anxiety and a significant increase in resilience compared to nonmeditating students. In addition, meditating students reported sleeping better as well as higher levels of self-confidence and happiness.
It would be naïve to think that meditation alone could erase the effects of the many factors, like poverty, that are barriers to educational achievement. But Quiet Time is a relatively inexpensive intervention that teachers and students enjoy and which preliminary data suggest is effective.
And although this program has focused on schools in low-income areas, adolescents from middle-class and affluent families could benefit from stress reduction as well. Why shouldn’t all our students have access to meditation?
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/using-meditation-to-help-close-the-achievement-gap/
Conflicts of interest abound in NYT post on Transcendental Meditation
ReplyDeleteBY Joy Victory, deputy managing editor of HealthNewsReview.org JUNE 6, 2016
Twelve years ago, as a newspaper reporter in the New York City suburbs of Westchester County, a news release came across my desk alerting me that Transcendental Meditation (TM) followers were planning to bring their specific type of meditation to nearby public schools.
At first I thought, OK, our affluent readership will love this story, and it will be an easy one to bang out under deadline. But then I dug into the research, and quickly realized there were lots of questionable claims flying around (in some cases quite literally–ability to levitate is one made by TM founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi).
Other problems ranged from accusations of cult-like behaviors to self-funded, overwhelmingly positive studies rarely being conducted using rigorous science. This research became the underpinnings of my nearly 3,000-word investigation of the TM movement.
So perhaps it felt a bit personal when I scanned the recent posts of Well (the New York Times’ health blog), and saw “Using Meditation to Help Close the Achievement Gap.” The post describes a program called “Quiet Time” that’s being offered in economically disadvantaged schools. It involves adding two 15-minute sessions of “quiet” into the school day. During this time, kids are encouraged to meditate–using specifically the TM method.
It’s worth noting that while there are many types of meditation, and most of it is free, TM is trademarked and generates substantial earnings. I tallied $65 million in income from 2014 tax records of just six major TM-related non-profit organizations. Including more than a dozen smaller non-profits in the analysis would have brought the total even higher.
Amazingly, the Times tells us, after this Quiet Time was put in place “suspensions dropped by 79 percent, attendance rose to 98 percent, and students’ grade point averages rose each year.”
Yup, I thought while reading the post, looks like the TM folks are still up to their old ways. I wondered why news outlets–especially one as prestigious as the New York Times—weren’t applying a higher level of scrutiny.
Where’s the critical scrutiny of this research?
While there’s no shortage of puff pieces about the TM movement, there’s also reporting, opinion pieces and even a documentary that take a closer look at the claims and science, including these stories from The Daily Mail, Forbes, Scientific American, MacLeans, and even the Times itself.
In other words, this isn’t under-the-radar stuff anymore, and just as with any medical study where claims of benefit are being made, meditation research deserves a hearty dose of scrutiny and viewpoints from independent experts.
‘No evidence that mantra meditation programs improve psychological stress’
continued below
A good example is this Scientific American column “Meta-Meditation: A Skeptic Meditates on Meditation.” It includes these important findings from a 2014 systematic review:
ReplyDelete“The Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Center examined 17,801 papers on meditation and found 41 relatively high-quality studies involving 2,993 subjects. Of these 41 studies, only 10 had a “low risk of bias,” according to the Johns Hopkins team. In other words, even the highest-quality studies were, for the most part, carried out and interpreted in a manner that favored positive outcomes.”
When it came to the style of meditation that TM uses, using “mantras,” the review said “we found no evidence that mantra meditation programs improve psychological stress and well-being.”
The recent New York Times post doesn’t go there. Instead it tells us “Research shows that … Transcendental Meditation, a stress-reducing technique that involves thinking of a mantra, can reduce stress and its manifestations – for example, anxiety, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.”
TM research has deep ties with TM employees
Curious, I looked up the two controlled studies specifically called out in the post, and saw this same risk for bias noted by the Johns Hopkins review. The study author on this one is on staff at the Maharishi University of Management.
And the other study included researchers who are on staff at the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education, which is funded in part by the David Lynch Foundation. Lynch, a movie and TV director, is a big proponent of TM.
And the Times author is a TM follower with potential for bias
But that’s not where the problems end with this post. After closing on a very emphatic quote–”Why shouldn’t all our students have access to meditation?”–we finally get a byline: “Norman E. Rosenthal is a psychiatrist and the author of “Super Mind: How to Boost Performance and Live a Richer and Happier Life Through Transcendental Meditation.”
So, along with potentially biased research, we’ve got a potentially biased author.
If this post had been clearly labeled an opinion piece, that wouldn’t be so frustrating. But the post reads as straight news until the very end, where it closes with an emphatic opinion. And many readers will never make it down to the conflict of interest disclosure at the bottom.
If the Times wanted to pursue this topic, a better option would have been to assign it to someone without such a direct conflict of interest, and to ensure that independent expert perspective was included.
Or, they could’ve followed the Washington Post’s example and simply printed an excerpt from Rosenthal’s book. With the Post’s approach, we know right away that Rosenthal is a TM follower–and stands to gain income from selling his book about how TM can create a “Super Mind.”
Super Mind, OK. But we’re looking for super journalism, too.
http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2016/06/conflicts-of-interest-abound-in-nyt-post-on-transcendental-meditation/
A Childhood Of Transcendental Meditation Spent In The Shadow Of A Guru
ReplyDeleteNPR, Heard on Fresh Air June 13, 20161
Greetings from Utopia Park
Surviving a Transcendent Childhood
by Claire Hoffman
Hardcover, 265 pages
Author Claire Hoffman estimates that she's spent at least 2,200 hours of her life meditating — but not because she became a devotee of the practice as an adult. Her mother was a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Hoffman spent most of her childhood in a community in Fairfield, Iowa that was devoted to Transcendental Meditation.
Hoffman, who writes about her unusual upbringing in the new memoir Greetings from Utopia Park, tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that moving to the utopian community from New York City when she was kindergarten-aged was idyllic — at least initially. "Those first few years, it was entirely magical," Hoffman says. "We believed that we were changing the world, and everybody was meditating. ... It was this sort of blissful experience."
Maharishi, the Yogi whose teachings inspired her mother, specialized in "Yogic Flying," a practice that he claimed would infuse practitioners with the power to levitate. He charged Hoffman's mother and other devotees thousands of dollars to learn it.
Because Yogic Flying was practiced in secret, Hoffman believed for years that her mother could, in fact, fly. Then, when she was 9 or 10, she attended a demonstration of the practice and was crushed.
"It was this sort of funny frog hop that they were doing across the room," Hoffman says. "For me that moment of seeing this sort of awkward, ugly jumping, as opposed to this incredible levitation that I as a kid had imagined was a first moment, for me, of doubt."
Interview Highlights
On Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the origins of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement
His father was, I believe, a local administrator. He was born around 1919. There is some debate about his age. And he went to college. He was a physics student. He really loved science and math, which you see later on in the movement. ... He went to go see a guru and he decided to drop out of college and become this guru's secretary. The guru was called Guru Dev. ...
Maharishi ... he wasn't part of this sort of religious caste, he was from a clerical caste. He wasn't supposed to be a monk, he just worked as a secretary. And after Guru Dev died, the sort of story goes that he went and lived in a cave for a few years, and he came out and he sort of had this revelation that he wanted to teach the world to meditate. This is in the mid-to-late '50s. Meditation had been sort of the stuff of spiritual people like monks and yogis and gurus and his idea was to give it to what he called "the householder class," and it was sort of a revolutionary thought that regular people in India or around the world could just meditate and then go to work and have a job and have a family.
On moving to Fairfield, Iowa, so her mother could go to the Maharishi International University and live in the utopian community
We had lived for most of my life in New York City, so my image of moving to Iowa was this sort of rural paradise where we would live on a farm and there would be animals, I would be free to go outside and do whatever I wanted, which I didn't have in New York. I imagined, because my mom told me we were moving to this community, that everyone would meditate, and that had definitely been this part of our life, but not something we shared with anyone else. So I was really excited to have this community.
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We got there in the middle of winter, and it was very cold, and we drove to Fairfield and I was sort of taken aback. I found it very crummy, sort of old houses, dirty snow. There was a population of people there who had been there before the meditators showed up, who we called "townies," and they called us "gurus," or "rus,"and they weren't friendly to us. They were not happy to have us there. It was sort of all these city slickers or weirdos from California or the coasts, as well as a bunch of Europeans, who showed up in their town. So there was a lot of hostility.
ReplyDeleteOn being sent to the town school, because her mother couldn't afford to send her to the Maharishi school
My first day of school I was immediately asked, "Does your mom meditate?" and I said, "Yes." And they said, "Does your mother fly?" and I said, "No, but that's why we're here. She wants to learn to fly." I was immediately categorized as a "Ru" and on top of that, I had my sugar-free lunches with bagels and wheat bread and cream cheese and cucumbers. Everything I did was totally strange to them.
We would, during recess, play outside, and the kids from Maharishi School would walk past and the townie kids would rattle the fence and scream, "Guru!" sort of swearing and yelling and taunting them. Later on, when I did go to the Maharishi school, I would walk past my former friends who would yell at me.
On the idea that meditation could create world peace
A big part of life in Fairfield — in order to understand why everyone moved there and what the vision was — was that Maharishi had a theory that large groups of people practicing his trademarked form of meditation and his advanced form of meditation, which he called "Yogic Flying," would create world peace. He had a scientific formula that he had come up with where it was to be precise, the square root of one percent of the population — if that amount of people were meditating it would radiate this sort of peace engine that would change the world.
So the people that moved there, moved there to meditate together. And in the late '70s, early '80s, they built these two gigantic, golden dome-shaped buildings. There was a women's dome and a men's dome, and twice a day, people would go and meditate together. In the '80s and into the '90s it was thousands of people and they would meditate for about an hour and a half to two hours each session. So it would be an hour and a half to two hours, twice a day, so three to four hours.
On Yogic Flying
A big schismatic moment for the Transcendental Meditation movement happened in the late '70s. Up until that, Maharishi had been really advocating this 20 minutes of simple meditation twice a day, and he introduced something called the TM-Sidhi program and "sidhi," loosely translated, means superpowers, and so there were advertisements at the time — you can still find them — that say the "strength of an elephant," or you would get the powers of invisibility and that you could fly, you could levitate.
[People] paid thousands of dollars and they did these advanced TM programs. So Yogic Flying is sort of the core of what people who moved to Fairfield were practicing. I say that it was schismatic because TM was very mainstream in the '70s, and then he introduces levitation and he loses a lot of people.
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On why the Yogic Flying Course was so expensive
ReplyDeleteIt cost thousands of dollars because Maharishi said that Americans don't value things unless they pay a lot of money for them. ...
It cost thousands of dollars because Maharishi said that Americans don't value things unless they pay a lot of money for them.
Claire Hoffman
As time went on living in Fairfield, more and more there were all these different sort of trappings or accouterments of enlightenment. They all cost money. So you had to have a special kind of paste before you went to go practice your Yogic Flying, and the paste cost, like, $150, and the Yogic Flying cost thousands of dollars to learn, and then your badge to get into the dome to practice the group meditation cost $100 a month. Everything cost money. Everything about our life there, it felt like it became commodified.
By the time I was a teenager there was a special form of medicine, Maharishi Ayurveda; there was a special form of architecture, Maharishi sthapatya veda; there was astrology to follow and have your charts done, which was Maharishi jyotish; there was special gemstones and gemstone technology, I don't even know what that its, but it was there.
On what she thought this project would be and what it turned out to be
I never met Maharishi. My mother loved and loves him so much, and the people that I grew up with, my friend's parents, they loved him so much. He was so important to them. That does mean something to me. He gave them these incredible experiences, he changed their lives. He really shaped my life in so many ways.
In the process of writing this book my opinion of him changed. I think when I first started thinking about writing a book about the TM movement I was a youngish investigative reporter and I thought, I'm going to figure out what happened with all this money. I'm going to expose the hypocrisy. And over time and working on this book I feel like it's so much more complicated than that, because I think what happened in Fairfield we did to ourselves.
Maharishi never lived there. He was always somewhere else. So it was almost like we were existing with the shadow of a guru. So everything was trickle-down knowledge. We wanted to do everything the way that he said we should do it and we wanted to live life exactly according to his principles. But he was never there, so it was this distillation of power, which meant a lot of jockeying and positioning, and I think it created a very kind of screwed up community for a number of years. But I think that was our fault. ... I think by the end of doing this book, I feel like we do it to ourselves and why do we do it? I think that's such a more interesting question than, "Was he a great man or was he a con artist?" Who cares? What I care about is why people do this.
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/13/481845003/a-childhood-of-transcendental-meditation-spent-in-the-shadow-of-a-guru
Ivanka Trump’s Gurus Say Their Techniques Can End War and Make You Fly
ReplyDeleteCelebs from Katy Perry to Ivanka say Transcendental Meditation helps them focus. The movement’s chief promises more: quasi-magical powers and the ability to steer world events.
Daily Beast October 13, 2018
by Justin Rohrlich, with additional reporting by Jay Michaelson
When the David Lynch Foundation held a gala for Transcendental Meditation at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., last year, it drew a star-studded crowd. Comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Margaret Cho were there. So was the singer Kesha, as well as White House advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who had recently published a self-help book that included a section extolling TM’s benefits.
It was a pleasant, 77-degree June evening in the District. The guests wore cocktail attire, and the event was set up almost like a Hollywood premiere, with pre-show celebrity interviews on a red carpet. That’s where Kesha asked for a hug from Seinfeld, who brusquely refused her request while cameras were rolling (she later got one from Bob Dylan). Seinfeld laughed with Jay Leno for the cameras; Hugh Jackman, who co-hosted the event with Katie Couric, posed with real estate developer Jeffrey Abramson and his wife Rona. Jay Leno, Ben Folds, singer Angelique Kidjo, classical guitarist Sharon Isbin, and Seinfeld, Cho, and Kesha performed for the assembled luminaries.
The event was yet another sign that TM, with its lengthy (and growing) client roster of the rich and famous, had cemented a place among America’s cultural elites. Although independent estimates vary, TM officials claim that roughly 10 million people have learned the technique, which is meant to control anxiety, reduce stress, and increase their overall well-being.
“Transcendental meditation is a practice I picked up several years ago and I couldn’t do half of what I do in a day without it,” Ivanka Trump wrote in her book. “Twenty minutes is ideal for calming the mind, eliminating distractions, and boosting my productivity.”
The fundraiser promised to provide TM instruction so that underprivileged kids, military veterans, and trauma survivors could avail themselves of its benefits.
“We’ll be offering this to anyone and everyone who thinks they need some help,” longtime TM organization leader and David Lynch Foundation CEO Bob Roth told the Washington Post at the time.
Ten days or so after the Kennedy Center gala, Roth headed off to another, less-publicized TM event, which took place in a conference room at the Fairmont Hotel in Kiev, Ukraine: a “global peace summit” led by one-time presidential candidate John Hagelin, a Harvard-educated quantum physicist who serves as president of the Maharishi University of Management, TM’s fully accredited university in Fairfield, Iowa.
Hagelin’s speech focused not on TM’s benefit to the individual but on the spillover effect that TMers’ meditation supposedly has on others. Hagelin claimed the combined brain activity produced during regular group practice of TM radiates out to people who are not meditating or even aware that others are; these invisible waves bring instant peace and harmony to society at large. This, he explained, is the “Maharishi Effect.”
According to Hagelin, all it takes to achieve the Maharishi Effect and its commensurate reductions in everything from homicides to car accidents is for a group of people equivalent to one percent of the population of a city, state, or country to practice the basic TM technique at once.
Materials from the Kiev summit claim that “a day-by-day study of a two-month assembly in Israel in 1983 showed that, on days when the number of participants was high, war deaths in neighboring Lebanon dropped by 76%... In addition, crime, traffic accidents, fires, and other indicators of social stress in Israel (combined into a Composite Index) all correlated strongly with changes in TM group size.”
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When retired German Air Force Colonel and TM’s “Global Country of World Peace Deputy Defense Minister” Gunter Chassé got up to speak in Kiev, he issued a call for specially trained TM units within the world’s armed forces.
ReplyDelete“With such an alternative complementary force, every military will be able to achieve a strategic advantage by preventing the outbreak of hostilities and achieving victory before war,” Chassé claimed.
When you sit to do TM, “you’re not praying for peace,” Bob Roth told The Daily Beast. “You’re not even thinking about peace. You’re just settling down to your inner silence, but it radiates out because we’re all connected.”
The Maharishi Effect is applicable to just about anything one can dream up, as the Kiev conferees made clear. John Fagan, a Cornell-educated molecular biologist who staunchly advocates against genetically engineered crops and serves as the dean of Maharishi University’s College of Sustainability, gave a presentation in which he claimed that “[T]he rapid reversal of the U.S. food system from broad acceptance to widespread rejection of GMO foods correlates with a sharp increase in coherence in U.S. collective consciousness, when a large permanent group of TM practitioners was assembled in Iowa, USA.”
Those higher-level meditators—known as practitioners of the “TM-Sidhis”—have even more incredible abilities. They include the practice of “yogic flying,” during which meditators attempt to levitate while sitting in the lotus position.
Says Maharishi University’s Brain Research Institute, “[O]ver the last 25 years, the practice of Yogic Flying has been scientifically documented to enhance the quality of life for the individual and society.”
“What happens with yogic flying is, the mind basically tells the body, ‘I want you to fly.’ It’s training the mind to do mind over matter, because anything a human wants is through desire,” Asher Fergusson, Maharishi University’s 2008 valedictorian, told The Daily Beast.
“You may have people looking at people doing yogic flying and say, ‘That’s strange,’” Roth added. “I happen to think seeing people playing football, or boxing and beating each other up, is strange.”
It couldn’t be more different from the TM introduced to most casual meditators. But it shows there are essentially two TM movements: a “retail” version for the general public with an anodyne message about ridding yourself of stress, and another, more spiritually oriented movement for a small but devoted cadre of true believers—a virtually unknown “secret society” of sorts—that promises to unlock supernatural abilities and provide all manner of magical outcomes, some of which can allegedly be attained by paying teams of Indian monks thousands of dollars to chant for you half a world away.
TM is also a behemoth of a business. When the founder of TM died, he left an estate valued at $3 billion. TM has its own set of scientists, viewed with skepticism by the mainstream scientific community; its own universities and lavish properties around the world; and dubious claims to world government.
It all may seem to defy logic, science, or both. But as Roth said, “Consciousness, at the deepest level, can influence other people. And that’s not some kind of magical woo-woo stuff, that’s from the concept of underlying interconnected consciousness.”
TM as we know it was founded in 1955 by the Maharishi (meaning “great seer”) Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma. Later the guru to the Beatles—Maharishi was the subject of their bitter song “Sexy Sadie” after the supposedly celibate monk allegedly tried to seduce a member of their entourage—TM was originally part of the 1960s spiritual counterculture.
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It was the Beatles who are said to have first sparked a collective interest in TM among the general public. (Legendary record producer Rick Rubin has said he got into TM because he “wanted to learn anything the Beatles were involved in.”) In 1975, Maharishi appeared on the highly rated Merv Griffin Show with Clint Eastwood. Eastwood had recently gotten into TM, and Griffin, who was a tennis partner of his, asked him about it. Intrigued, Griffin invited Maharishi to be a guest on his program. Many longtime TM insiders point to this as a tipping point for TM’s wider popularity among the celebrity set.
ReplyDeleteBut as the New Age got going in the late 1970s, TM lost some of its luster, with the Maharishi promising ever more outlandish benefits—the flying, for instance—as alternative spiritual paths opened up for Americans. Finally, as meditation began gaining mainstream acceptance in the 1990s and 2000s, TM rebranded itself again, from spiritual technique to gain enlightenment to a secular relaxation technique. That is how it is often understood today.
On the surface, TM is not unlike other forms of meditation. Practitioners are taught to repeat a “secret” mantra, normally a few syllables, for 20 minutes twice a day, in order to feel less stressed and more focused. Jerry Seinfeld has pointed to TM as a catalyst for creativity. Russell Simmons has compared the effects of TM to magic.
“Transcendental Meditation has been one of the main tools for me to stay focused both at home and on the road,” Katy Perry, a TM devotee who learned the technique from Roth in 2011, told The Daily Beast. “It’s been my greatest joy to share my practice with my touring crew as well, and a highlight of my day to join them in a group meditation before every show.”
Twin Peaks director David Lynch claims he hasn’t missed a single session in more than four decades. In 2002, he took an “enlightenment course” with Maharishi in the Netherlands, for which he reportedly paid $1 million. Lynch came back to the U.S. with a new focus on spreading the word about TM, and established his foundation with Roth a few years later.
Roth got into TM while he was a student at Berkeley and became a TM “initiator” (initiators are now known simply as “teachers”) after studying with the Maharishi in Spain for six months. Today, Roth is perhaps the best-known public facing TM representative in the world; he’s the one who introduced it to Seinfeld, Tom Hanks, Sting, Oprah, Perry—and Ivanka and Jared. He also has, famously, given TM seminars to Google and Apple employees, spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, hosted a show about TM on SiriusXM Radio, and wrote a best-selling book on TM, Strength in Stillness, which was published this year.
Roth lives in New York but travels constantly. When he’s in town, Roth works out of the David Lynch Foundation’s midtown offices near the United Nations. The Foundation, which was established in 2005 “to ensure that any child in America who wants to learn and practice the Transcendental Meditation program can do so,” also has offices in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and on the campus of the Maharishi University of Management.
The New York space is, unsurprisingly, spare and zen-like, which Roth said was only partly intentional.
“Someone said, ‘I like your decision not to have art on the walls.’ I said, ‘We ran out of money,’” Roth laughed.
Roth is surprisingly accessible, extremely accommodating, and checks in often to ask how things are going. Although his hair is gray, he appears 10 years younger than his actual age of 67. Roth is slim, polished and extremely well put-together; he looks like he could have been an ad agency creative director in another life. He makes mention of the fact that he’s Jewish more than once over the course of multiple conversations.
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Normally, Roth evangelizes only about the workaday benefits of TM, which are not unlike those of other forms of meditation: stress reduction, emotional wellness, and the like. But in a series of exclusive interviews with The Daily Beast, Roth doubled down on TM’s most extraordinary claims—including the Maharishi Effect.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Roth, the purported effect occurs because of a shift in the quantum mechanical properties that make up the invisible fabric of our interconnected consciousness. Like “lighting the filament within a bulb [which] then spreads and lights up the room,” TM’s personal benefit subsequently radiates out to others “because we are all connected,” Roth explained. “It doesn’t spread magically, none of this is magic. It may be laws of nature that we don’t fully understand, but the effect would be there.”
In addition to the reported successes discussed in Kiev, TM claims that a two-year assembly of yogic flyers practicing the advanced Sidhis “created a history-transforming wave of peace around the world,” during which time the Cold War ended, as did the war between Iran and Iraq. Increased business activity and positive stock market swings have been attributed to the Maharishi Effect, as have rises in employment and entrepreneurship.
The organization also takes credit for ending Mozambique’s civil war in the early 1990s, having set up an “international peacekeeping group” of advanced yogic flyers in India. Knock-on effects in Mozambique created by the group practicing roughly 4,000 miles away included a 12.4 percent economic growth rate, inflation that fell from 70 percent to 2 percent, and a zeroing out of the national debt, they said.
The “deeper levels of reality present a very different picture in which things are much more profoundly correlated with each other, and the sort of correlations that exist at the quantum level don’t depend on distance,” chief TM scientist Hagelin told The Daily Beast. “Once a correlation is established, the influence of any correlation that might exist between two people doesn’t depend upon whether the person gets on a plane and wakes up in Hong Kong, if there’s a correlation, if there’s a bond, that bond is really independent of distance.”
Roth, for his part, admitted that the Maharishi Effect sounds pretty outrageous by current scientific standards. Then again, he argued, so did lots of things in their day.
“Is that any more unrealistic than if you had said 200 years ago, ‘I’m going to describe this little 2-inch-by-4 inch-by-1/2-inch device that you can hold in your hand and you can talk on that to somebody 2,000 miles away?’ They’d think that you were crazy,” he continued. “That’s the electromagnetic field, which no one saw 200 or 300 years ago. Didn’t mean it didn’t exist, it just meant that people hadn’t seen it, they hadn’t identified it, they hadn’t located it.”
Said Hagelin: “The paradigm in which at least some of us are living, which is the quantum mechanical paradigm, quantum field theory, unified field theory, things like this make sense.”
Hagelin says that while he welcomes “lively debate,” the reality of the effect is something that has been, I would say sincerely, incontrovertibly shown;” Roth cites “hundreds” of scientific studies as proof of TM’s efficacy.
“You’ve got the yoga sutras of Patanjali, you’ve got the texts of Ayurveda that go back thousands of years, you have the texts of Vedic architecture, these go back thousands of years,” Roth said. “All Maharishi has done is bring it out today, give voice to it today. It’s not his meditations, it’s him giving these ideas voice today. Like, Einstein brings out the theory of relativity. It’s not Einstein’s relativity, it’s his giving voice to it.”
However, many in the broader scientific community take a slightly more skeptical point of view.
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David Vago, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who studies the effects of meditation, pointed out that all of the Maharishi Effect studies are basically correlation without causation. “As much as I’d like to believe that crime rates will reduce in a causal response to group meditation increases, I have a hard time buying this kind of correlational research,” Vago told The Daily Beast.
ReplyDelete“TM claims that a two-year assembly of yogic flyers practicing the advanced Sidhis ‘created a history-transforming wave of peace around the world,’ during which time the Cold War ended, as did the war between Iran and Iraq.”
Clinicaltrials.gov, which tracks accredited clinical research studies, found 910 studies of mindfulness currently underway, but only 14 studies of TM—half of which began before 2002. While TM officials often note that the National Institute of Health has funded research in TM to the tune of $24 million, that funding ended in 2010.
In 2014, an independent meta-analysis of meditation research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association for Internal Medicine found “insufficient evidence that mantra meditation programs [such as TM] had an effect on any of the psychological stress and well-being outcomes we examined.” An earlier review of TM data by the NIH also found insufficient evidence that TM lowered blood pressure as claimed.
Other assertions have been fact-checked to TM’s detriment. The organization’s American home base of Fairfield, Iowa has a population of roughly 10,000 residents. In 1993, reporter Scott Shane inquired about the crime rate in the area, figuring that crime must be virtually non-existent what with all the advanced meditating going there on all the time. “Crime here is about the same as any small town in rural America,” Fairfield police chief Randy Cooksey told Shane. In fact, Cooksey said, “I’d say there's been a steady increase. I think, based on my statistics in Fairfield, I can show they have no impact on crime here.”
In 1994, Hagelin was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, a satirical honor that recognizes the silliest scientific studies of the year, for his D.C. experiment using yogic flyers to lower the crime rate. Other “winners” included W. Brian Sweeney and three of his colleagues, who took the Ig Nobel for Biology for their study, “The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops.”
Dennis Roark, the former chairman of the physics department at Maharishi University has described TM’s research as “crackpot science.” Roark said he resigned his position after being told to link TM’s effects to legitimate physics—a notion he described as “preposterous.”
“Although there is substantial work in the physics of quantum mechanics giving to consciousness an essential role, even a causal role, there is no evidence or argument that could connect some sort of universal consciousness to be subjectively experienced with a unified field of all physics,” Roark wrote. “In fact, the existing scientific work suggests just the opposite.”
“The style of research they use is what I call ‘painting the bullseye around the arrow,’” says ex-TMer Patrick Ryan, who attended Maharishi International University, the progenitor to MUM, against his Air Force general father’s advice, and spent 10 years in the movement as a “spiritual warrior” before quitting in the 1980s. “If a bunch of TM meditators get together and the stock market goes up, TM made it happen. If there’s another course and crime rates go down, or if accidents go down, TM created that. Find a positive thing that’s happened and take credit for it.”
The TM organization has issued forceful rebuttals of its own to various studies debunking the science, and dismisses outright the idea that mindfulness is as effective as TM.
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To the naysayers, Roth fires back: “Who are they? Who are these people? What are their scientific credentials? I’m also saying, I don’t want to stand on this alone. If a person is not convinced by the research, then help us raise the money to do a bigger study.”
ReplyDeleteIt costs $960 to take an introductory TM course, if you’re paying full price. Payment is due when you arrive for your first class; the cost can be spread out over four months. Students learn the technique over the course of four days, beginning with a one-on-one session that typically lasts 1-2 hours, followed by three group sessions which are 60-90 minutes in length.
Roth says the price is set at that level because TM has an organization to run and maintain, and that TM teachers need to get paid. Students can also come back for lifetime follow-ups and refresher courses at no additional cost, he said. Roth would like to continue bringing TM to any inner-city school that will have him, veterans’ organizations, homeless shelters, war-torn areas and so forth, all of which costs money.
Besides, said Roth, it’s cheaper than therapy.
“I had this one psychiatrist friend who was a meditator; he said $960 is a lot,” Roth recalled. “I said, ‘How much do you charge a client?’ He said, ‘Well, I charge $520 for 50 minutes.’ If he does 10 hours, that’s $5,200. And we do far more than that.”
However, TM is a proprietary technique that can eventually cost a considerable amount of money and people have to pay and pay to reach more and more advanced levels on the supposed road to enlightenment, argues Aryeh Siegel, a former TM instructor and author of Transcendental Deception: Behind the TM Curtain. Siegel, who worked at TM’s California headquarters in the mid-1970s and spent months with Maharishi, says some people get trapped in a never-ending cycle of chasing a goal that’s always just slightly out of reach.
“They’re looking for that 5 percent of people who will always believe they are this close to enlightenment, and they’ll pay for that one more class, one more advanced course,” Siegel told The Daily Beast.
“It has been reported that for $1 million, you can become a TM ‘raja’ with spiritual dominion over a country and designation as a representative of Divine Intelligence.”
According to Siegel, new meditators are encouraged to come back for “checking” following their initial TM instruction. These are essentially sales opportunities in disguise. Invitations to weekend TM courses featuring more frequent and longer meditation periods follow. The ones who respond are sold residential courses and advanced TM techniques, followed by teacher training which can cost as much as $20,000. TM’s nonprofit status adds another financial dimension to things.
“Donations are strongly encouraged all the time,” Siegel said.
Devoted TMers can get caught up in a spiritual “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses,” and taking more courses, adding more advanced spiritual titles, and wearing special “Jyotish gems” serves to elevate one’s status within the organization, explained Gina Catena, a former TMer who grew up in a high-ranking TM family, married within the movement (twice), and finally left in 1988.
“It is our present karmic situation that will determine our preferences and choices,” Fairfield jeweler Planetary Gems tells prospective customers. Stones are “set on the appropriate day,” and a Vedic ceremony is performed “prior setting the stone for additional appeasing of that particular planet.”
It costs $4,000 to learn the TM-Sidhis—the advanced TM program featuring yogic flying—over the course of four months, which includes two weeks in-residence, according to Roth. This cost, he said, can be brought down with scholarships “so anyone who wants to learn can do so.”
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Tuition at Maharishi University does not include the TM-Sidhis, a course that is worth four academic credits and is “taught by the Maharishi Foundation in coordination with MUM through a contractual agreement.”
ReplyDelete“The David Lynch Foundation has announced a scholarship to reduce the cost of the course from $2,500 to $1,250 for Maharishi University of Management students,” the current student bulletin says. “An additional scholarship of $750, reducing the tuition to $500, is also available to students who meet specific criteria specified by the Maharishi Foundation. There is an additional cost of $950 for the final two weeks in residence.”
But GoFundMe campaigns for people seeking funds to take an advanced TM course appear to indicate the available financial aid packages may not always go far enough.
In one, four MUM students fell about $1,500 short of their goal for Sidhis course tuition; they said the David Lynch Foundation was providing scholarships of $750 per student who committed to a year’s worth of advanced practice.
Another GoFundMe campaigner was looking for $2,700 to cover the airfare to New Zealand, where two recent MUM graduates wanted to participate in TM’s six-month “Mother Divine” program, where members stay celibate for the duration and meditate for many hours at a time.
One TM teacher-to-be sought $27,000 to bring TM to Afghanistan: $12,000 to get certified through the TM Teacher’s Course (already subsidized to a certain extent, it would appear), then $15,000 to get there and start teaching. Before going, the fundraiser told potential donors, “we would like to employ a year's worth of peace-creating yagyas to soften the atmosphere so that it will be easier to bring TM.”
Mike Doughney practiced TM for about a decade before becoming disenchanted with much of what he was seeing.
“If it was just mindfulness and meditation, where you go in and get instructed and go home, that would be one thing,” Doughney, a contributor to the TM-Free blog, told The Daily Beast. “This actually sets up a devotional thing, [where] over time they want a number of people to give up all their time and money and sustain their operations.”
“I easily laid down close to $100,000 back in the day,” former TM practitioner John Knapp told The Daily Beast, “but it was always very incremental. You don’t even notice it as you’re going.” (Knapp formally left the organization in 2010.)
From there, prices can get even higher. It has been reported that for $1 million, you can become a TM “raja” (literally, “king”) with spiritual dominion over a country and designation as a representative of Divine Intelligence.
Tony Nader became a raja in 2000 and took the name “Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam.”
The $1 million price to become a raja was revealed by filmmaker David Sieveking in his 2010 documentary on TM, David Wants to Fly. Other ex-TMers who speak about the million-dollar price tag tend to refer to the film as the source of their information; Catena has “a distinct memory of my mother’s excited conversation about what was then nicknamed ‘The Millionaire’s Course,’ or the ‘Enlightenment Course.' She phoned me excited for the guarantee to finally reach full enlightenment. She said that Maharishi claimed with a certain number of fully enlightened people, then we would finally achieve world peace.”
But Roth said rajas are in fact “administrators,” not kings, and that “Maharishi used the word to honor the ancient tradition of people looking out for the welfare of others.” He also denied that it costs a million dollars to become one, the idea of which, Roth conceded, sounds “like, bizarroville.”
“Once a year, max, in a ceremonial situation like a college president wears a cap and gown, they wear this garb which is sort of acknowledging ancient times, way, way, way back when,” Roth explained.
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He said he likens it “to being on the board of trustees of a university. You either apply or are recommended. But there is no rigid financial requirement other than the ability to cover your own costs. How much you give or spend is a personal consideration.”
ReplyDelete“Some people donated money because they’re very wealthy and some of that money went to bringing TM to school programs around the world,” Roth said. “Rajas are often people who are retired, who want to contribute, make a difference on a larger level. They could have retired to Florida or the Hamptons, but they’re taking their retirement and looking at the world today and saying, ‘Well, I’m not going to just turn this over to Congress or a corrupt government in some country’—they’re contributing their share.”
The relentless focus on money is one of the main reasons Southern California meditation teacher Lorin Roche left TM in 1975.
“The whole focus of TM in the United States became to get all the teachers and all the half-million or more people who had learned TM, to go take expensive advanced courses and learn to levitate,” Roche wrote on his personal blog. “Soon there were tens of thousands of Siddhas trying, but failing, to levitate, all across the United States and around the world.”
Roche “benefited from TM tremendously, but it was a different organization when I was there,” he told The Daily Beast. “Once it became worth a billion dollars, it just changed.”
One billion may be a low estimate. According to The Economist, the Maharishi’s land holdings alone were worth $3 billion in 1998. A 2012 investigation by India Today estimated Maharishi’s real estate assets at the time of his death 10 years later to be worth Rs 60,000 crore—roughly $9 billion.
Although private donations have dwindled in recent years, from $31.6 million in 2008 to $1.5 million in 2015, there still seems to be plenty of money around, and there are dozens of separate but related TM organizations across the globe. The Daily Beast’s detailed review of TM-related financial documentation revealed a byzantine tangle of non- and for-profit corporations, global land holdings, and hundreds of millions of dollars—maybe more—flowing each year through the various entities that make up TM.
One of the most expensive programs in all of TM, according to their most recent tax filings, is the so-called “pandit program,” which gathers hundreds of young Indian men in trailer homes on a special campus in Iowa to chant yagyas—Hindu rites—nonstop for two years at a stretch in an effort to bring about peace on earth.
The program began in 2007, and reactions among locals were mixed. Residents reported being approached by pandits on rural roads, asking for money and begging not to be sent back to the compound. In 2014, a mini-riot by some 60 pandits resulted in a sheriff’s deputy allegedly being attacked by members of the group.
Bob Roth said the domestic pandit program has now been all but shut down, maintaining that they have “like, four” pandits left in Iowa. According to its most recent tax filings, the TM affiliate which fundraises for pandit expenses reported spending $2,164,960 on pandit support in Iowa in 2016. However, the cost of fully implementing the pandit program’s Global Peace Initiative, according to the organization, is $45.5 million a year.
If you want a team of pandits to chant for you personally, the costs of which vary “depending on the size of the desired effect and the magnitude of the problem being averted or defused—for example a natural disaster, violent outbreak, or severe economic downturn,” that’s also available.
continued below
For a minimum donation of $1,500, you can get wedding anniversary prayers from a team of pandits. For $1,000, the pandits will chant for your newborn child. And for $1,250, the pandits will recite the necessary prayers to “resolve the pressing problems confronting the United States, including joblessness and economic recession, and government gridlock, obstructionism, and extreme partisan infighting.”
ReplyDelete“For $1,250, the pandits will recite the necessary prayers to ‘resolve the pressing problems confronting the United States, including joblessness and economic recession, and government gridlock, obstructionism, and extreme partisan infighting.’”
Most people who simply do the meditation part of TM “aren’t going to be interested” in paying for this, said Mike Doughney, “but if you get to a point in your life where things aren’t so great, they can offer these services to you as if you were going to an astrologer, hand them thousands of dollars, and they say. ‘You’ll feel better afterwards.’ TM units and affiliates offer products and services in an astonishing array of offerings.
There are treatments which filter light through precious gems which claim the “Information carried by the light shining through the orderly structure of gemstones awakens the body’s own internal self-repair mechanisms.” The cost for a Maharishi Light Technology With GemsSM (nearly everything TM offers, including TM itself, is trademarked in some way) at The Raj, a TM-affiliated hotel in Fairfield, IA: $120 for a “regular beamer session;” $250 for an “amplified” one; The Raj recommends guests undergo three treatments during a one-week stay.
If you’ve got $1,900, you can get 30 weeks of organic vegetables delivered from Fairfield, where they have undergone the “ancient practice of sounds administered live by Vedic Pandits trained in India to nourish the plants during the 8-stages of their growth from seed to seed.”
“I noticed right away that my awareness felt clearer during meals, rather than the feeling that energy was being taken away by the digestive process,” one satisfied customer is quoted as saying on the Maharishi World Peace Vedic Organics website. “Most importantly, after the first week, areas of chronic irritation in my colon felt eased.”
There are TM-based architectural services, which provide “fortune-creating” homes; so-called “Maharishi Vedic Vibration Technology” which is billed as a method “for enlivening the body’s inner intelligence;” even a TM currency called the Raam. TM has its own television network, radio station, economic and industrial policy which promises “maximum creativity and productivity without hard work.”
continued below
It may seem like TM has a solution ready for all of life’s ills, but TM can’t solve everything, said Dr. Scott Terry, an Iowa psychotherapist and Maharishi University graduate who runs the suicide prevention group Fairfield Cares.
ReplyDelete“Just because you’re meditating doesn’t mean the issue goes away,” Terry told The Daily Beast. “It means the secondary stressors will dissolve a bit, but [if you’re bipolar] you’re still going to be bipolar.”
Last year’s Kiev summit was “so fantastic,” said John Hagelin, he’d like to do it again next spring—at UN headquarters in New York, where they can “showcase all these solutions to a decision-making body that could, in principle, act on that on a global level.”
“People have varying degrees of openness to what consciousness can accomplish,” said Hagelin. “But if you think about it, consciousness accomplishes everything. Thinking people, if they stop for a moment, will be open, or can be persuaded, that there’s something very important that we’re potentially overlooking here.”
Roth plans to continue what he’s been doing, which is to spread the TM gospel far and wide. He’s excited about the new work he’s doing with professional sports teams and Olympic athletes, but says he doesn’t have an advertising budget beyond some small expenditures on Google. He probably doesn’t need one. Much as Clint Eastwood turned Merv Griffin on to TM, word-of-mouth has always been TM’s best marketing plan, anyway. And practitioners, famous and not, continue to rave about the benefits of TM: stress reduction, increased creativity, and overall relaxation in life.
On a more existential level, Roth believes it would be nothing short of foolhardy if society didn’t give the Maharishi Effect a chance.
“What are we going to do in the Middle East? It’s getting worse and worse and worse,” he said. “In Afghanistan we’ve tried nation-building, we’ve tried bombing, we’ve tried economic embargoes. Nothing is working. So this is being offered as something completely out-of-the-box, just like meditation for the individual was 50 years ago.”
Roth continued: “We want to establish universities, to bring it to schools, to establish groups almost like it’s their profession. Like the UN has peacekeeping forces that go in with their tanks and weapons and keep the peace, we would like to have a profession of professional peace creators. They can be students, they can be homeless, they can be anybody who gets trained in these techniques and they do them, quietly, in a group.”
One former TM instructor who asked to remain anonymous doesn’t see anyone taking Roth & Co. up on the offer. In fact, he doesn’t even see TM existing for much longer in its present form. One big hurdle, the former instructor said, is the lack of an appropriately Maharishi-like leader capable of truly assuming the lead role.
“With Maharishi dead, and Google able to clue people into the other side of the TM movement, I believe the movement is in a death spiral,” they said. “It will die with the aging baby boomers that made up the bulk of the movement.”
A 2015 New York Times article suggested that current TM leader Tony Nader “lacks the cult-like devotion associated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.”
To that end, Mike Doughney doesn’t think TM can last in its current form, nor does Gina Catena, who says the organization is “slowly dying.”
Or, maybe not.
Says Aryeh Siegel, “These people are insane, but at the same time, they’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars on this stuff. So maybe the rest of us are insane.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ivanka-trumps-gurus-say-their-techniques-can-end-war-and-make-you-fly
My Experience Living In A Cult For 20 Years - Here's How I Broke Free
ReplyDeleteAs the cult took hold, 1,000 of us moved across the world - squandering our fortunes - to meditate in a bid to prevent certain global annihilation
by Susan Shumsky, Author and spirituality expert
HUFFPOST UK, October 17 2018
For over two decades, I lived in the ashrams of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and guru of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Deepak Chopra, and hundreds of other celebrities. I served on Maharishi’s personal staff for six of those years.
Generally, people didn’t think of TM as a cult. For those who learned TM and practiced it twice daily at home, it was not a cult. When Maharishi first brought meditation to the West in 1959, he represented TM as a simple, effortless, mechanical technique that anyone could do. We weren’t required to change our lifestyle, habits, or beliefs. By simply meditating twice a day, our lives would naturally improve. And they did improve, dramatically—at least for me.
I loved TM. I experienced something previously unfamiliar and unknown: the true felicity of inner peace. The entire 22 years that I practiced TM, my meditation experiences were nothing but uplifting and blissful. I also loved Maharishi. I became entranced by his highly charismatic aura and hypnotic personality. So for six years I ended up on his personal staff in Europe as a rare insider—part of his inner circle.
While on staff, I endured an incredibly intense emotional roller coaster ranging from heaven to hell. Administering a kind of “open-ego surgery,” Maharishi would alternately make me feel like the most important person in the universe, saving the planet, or the most despicable, useless, worthless worm. Just as a military drill instructor uses tough love to train his recruits, so Maharishi dispensed severe treatment to his closest disciples. In the worst instance, he chastised me harshly before 400 of the TM organization’s leaders.
The first seeds of TM’s cult-like characteristics emerged in August 1979 in Amherst Massachusetts, where Maharishi gathered 2,600 meditators for a World Peace Assembly. There he made the fantastic claim that the Goddess “Mother Divine” had told him that crime, war, and environmental toxins had polluted the earth. Maharishi’s “World Plan” to create global peace wasn’t working fast enough, and therefore the Goddess was threatening to annihilate the entire earth’s population. After Maharishi pleaded with her, she purportedly agreed to give him one last chance.
Maharishi then declared that time had run out and there was a world emergency. All of us must pack our bags, relocate our families to Iowa within one week, and meditate together in order to prevent certain global annihilation. So about 1,000 of us moved to Maharishi International University (MIU) in Fairfield, Iowa, where the cult gradually took over our lives, as we squandered our fortunes on various increasingly expensive TM courses and products.
Two gigantic geodesic domes slathered in gold paint were built on the MIU campus—one for men and another for women, where we practiced group meditation twice daily. Every telephone-broadcast from Maharishi terrorized us into believing that if we didn’t adhere to this program, we would be responsible for nuclear holocaust or the end of the world. His manipulative fear-and-intimidation tactics proved extremely effective motivators.
continued below
Maharishi used highly successful bait — flattery. He convinced us of our vast superiority over the Great Unwashed as he bestowed on us outlandish titles such as “Executive Governors” in his self-proclaimed artificially devised hierarchy.
ReplyDeleteWe blindly adhered to Maharishi’s ironclad belief structure and rigid routine. His stifling rules determined what to eat, what to wear, where to live, what to believe, what to say, what to read and not read, what activities were acceptable, even our house’s architecture. As the personality cult expanded, so did the followers’ cliquish, elitist attitude. If we towed the line, we were “on the program.” If we wavered, we were “off the program” and branded as outcasts, shunned from the community. We could no longer enter the golden domes or take future TM courses.
We lived in Fear-Filled, not Fairfield—under extreme fear of the leaders policing the organisation. Since we believed TM was the only path to enlightenment and Maharishi was the only true spiritual master, we lived in terror of banishment from TM’s presumptive heavenly paradise. Our only chance for spiritual enlightenment would vanish, and we would be lost, unless we jumped through various hoops to prove our worthiness.
As the ungodly repression became increasingly overbearing, the MIU library purged all “negative” books and non-TM self-help books, including books on yoga, meditation, New Age teachings, and those authored by Indian gurus. We were forbidden to visit any spiritual masters, to take classes on any subject not officially sanctioned by the TM organization, or to even to take a vacation to India.
At MIU and MSAE (Maharishi School for the Age of Enlightenment), teachers reprimanded students for expressing original opinions. Kids who drew “negative” images, (such as monsters) or wrote “negative” stories were taken to task. “Entertaining negativity” was “off the program.” Students with drug, alcohol, or other addiction problems were not given counselling or advised to attend AA meetings. Instead, they were blamed for not meditating improperly.
I began to realise I’d spent over two decades in a dictatorial, repressive organisation, largely motivated by fear. In 1986 I took my first baby steps towards freedom when I started a prayer circle at my house.
After the TM spies made a list of license plates of cars parked nearby, they stripped the golden dome badges from my prayer circle attendees and blacklisted them. After that, nearly everyone in Fairfield avoided eye contact with me. Branded persona non grata, I came to realise I would have to sell my house and leave Fairfield.
Though it was painful to cut the cords with Maharishi and all my friends, leaving Fairfield in 1989 was the best decision I ever made. I found my way to greater awareness and self-sufficiency, and I never looked back.
Maharishi & Me: Seeking Enlightenment with The Beatles’ Guru by Susan Shumsky is out now
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/cult-maharishi-mahesh-yogi_uk_5bc5e04de4b0d38b5871a8c3
Disabled Army Vet Persuades VA to Abort $8 Million David Lynch Foundation Study on Transcendental Meditation and PTSD
ReplyDeleteLos Angeles, California August 1, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- by Aryeh Siegel,
TM Deception https://www.tmdeception.com/
In June of this year, the Veterans Administration (VA) terminated a study on Transcendental Meditation (TM) funded by the David Lynch Foundation, a leading proponent of the practice in the US. The decision came after disabled Army Veteran Steve Udovich revealed numerous concerns with the study and the practice of TM via a letter to the VA Office of General Counsel. The VA's action derailed the Lynch Foundation's plans to access Veterans through the VA healthcare system.
Udovich's TM Experience and Response
Udovich, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and Iraq War Veteran, was introduced to TM when he attended a non-VA affiliated retreat for Veterans with PTSD. Learning TM—a mandatory part of the retreat—entailed a Hindu worship ceremony, the Puja. While performing the ritual, the TM instructor makes 16 offerings with candles, incense, fruit, flowers, and a white cloth while repeatedly bowing before an altar, the centerpiece of which is a photo of Guru Dev, a long-deceased Hindu spiritual leader. The TM instructor chants the Puja in Sanskrit, a language commonly used in Hindu religious ceremonies.
Emotionally distressed for feeling he'd failed a test of his Christian faith by complying with the ceremony, Udovich says, "I asked for an English translation of the Puja because I wanted to know what I had participated in. But I was stonewalled; the program's executive and staff repeatedly deflected and provided misleading information."
Subsequently educating himself about TM, Udovich says, "I learned that deception is a big part of the TM process. Because they want government funding to pay for TM, they can't be honest about what they believe and what they're doing. And, because they have to hide the Hindu religious basis of the practice, they can't provide full disclosure or informed consent." Overall, he believed the retreat program was doing "some good work," but "their devotion to TM is misguided because the practice is not compatible for any Christian, Muslim, or Jewish veteran who's serious about their faith."
Udovich's assertion that TM is a religious practice is well documented in books and articles by TM teachers who have left the practice. Additionally, a federal court decision in 1978 ruled that the TM Puja ceremony was a religious practice and ordered the immediate cessation of all TM programs in New Jersey's public schools. (See Malnak v. Yogi, U.S. Court, New Jersey,1978)
continued below
Learning that the David Lynch Foundation was self-funding an $8-million study of TM in the VA as a possible treatment for PTSD prompted Udovich's 8-page letter to the VA Office of General Counsel, citing potential violations of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, VA policies related to the protection of human subjects, and the VA Patient Bill of Rights. Also, Udovich suggested that the secrecy surrounding the Puja would make it difficult for the VA to obtain fully informed consent from study participants.
ReplyDeleteConclusions
A letter from the San Diego VA Healthcare System Director informed Udovich that the study was canceled. He also received word from the Network Director of the VA's Institutional Review Board, which oversees all VA studies, confirming the study had been withdrawn and would not be resubmitted to the VA. "It speaks volumes about how problematic the study was if a disabled vet could derail it with a letter to the VA Office of General Counsel," says Udovich.
Udovich believes some organizations will continue to push TM as a treatment for Veterans with PTSD, and his mission to inform his fellow veterans about it is just beginning. But he's confident that the David Lynch Foundation's plan to teach TM to a half-million veterans at VA facilities across the country has been thwarted. Udovich says, "They saw my fellow Iraq and Afghanistan Vets with PTSD as recruits. Now they have to look elsewhere; they won't be pushing TM on unsuspecting vets in the VA system."
Aryeh Siegel, MSW, MPH, taught Transcendental Meditation and Directed TM's Institute for Social Rehabilitation for five years in the mid-1970s. He is the author of Transcendental Deception: Behind the TM curtain-bogus science, hidden agendas, and David Lynch's campaign to push a million public school kids into Transcendental Meditation while falsely claiming it is not a religion (Janreg Press, 2018). You can read more about his work on his website: https://www.tmdeception.com/
https://www.einpresswire.com/article/583527644/disabled-army-vet-persuades-va-to-abort-8-million-david-lynch-foundation-study-on-transcendental-meditation-and-ptsd
Federal Judge Grants Class Action to Students Alleging Coercion in Religious Rituals in Chicago Public Schools
ReplyDeleteMauck & Baker, LLC April 24, 2024
A petition for class action status by a former Chicago Public School student (Kaya Hudgins) who alleged that her school coerced her to participate in Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Hindu practices has been granted by a federal judge in a lawsuit against the Board of Education of the City of Chicago and the David Lynch Foundation. Attorneys at Mauck & Baker, representing Kaya Hudgins, received an order from The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois awarding class certification to Hudgins and her peers. The class action lawsuit alleges that while minor students were attending certain Chicago Public Schools (who chose to participate in the David Lynch Foundation “Quiet Time” program), they were required to participate in Transcendental Meditation that incorporated Hindu religious rituals, which Hudgins claims on behalf of the class is an egregious violation of their constitutional rights.
The design, implementation, and conduct of a Chicago Public Schools program, dubbed Quiet Time, was handled by the David Lynch Foundation for World Peace, an organization teaching Transcendental Meditation. As alleged in Hudgins’ First Amended Complaint, the Foundation worked together with Chicago Public Schools and the University of Chicago to implement the program at Chicago Public School high schools.
Hudgins, by her own Declaration, was made to take part in Quiet Time.
“A Chicago Public Schools teacher told me and my entire class to sign a consent form to participate in Quiet Time,” Hudgins wrote. “My entire class and I signed the consent because we felt pressure to sign. Our teacher told us that we would get in trouble and be sent to the dean if we did not consent. The teacher also told us that not signing the consent would affect our academics. We also received the same kind of pressure to participate in the Quiet Time program on a regular basis.”
Hudgins was 16 years old at the time.
“Additionally, I, like many of my classmates, signed a nondisclosure not to tell anyone, including our parents, about the program,” added Hudgins. “My classmates and I were particularly warned by a David Lynch Foundation representative not to tell our parents if our parents were ‘religious.’”
“Not only were these minor school children coerced by Chicago Public School teacher into signing a document they had no business signing,” shared John Mauck, a partner at Mauck and Baker, “They were duped into practicing Hindu rituals and Transcendental Meditation during class time and instructed to hide their mandated participation in them from their parents.”
Hudgins recalled being escorted into an uncomfortably private one-on-one Hindu “Puja” worship ceremony in a darkened room, with chanting and a variety of religious paraphernalia. During instruction about meditation the adult woman who was alone with her whispered a “mantra” into her ear and told Hudgins not to disclose the mantra to anyone. However, Hudgins revealed that she and her classmates discussed their mantras with each other.
“Eventually I researched on the internet many of our mantras and they turned out to be the names of Hindu gods,” reported Hudgins. “My classmates and I were very hurt to learn how the school and the instructor had us participating in a religious practice without our knowledge.”
Hudgins explained how the meditation sessions, a required part of the Quiet Time curriculum, “felt like hypnosis or being in a trance.” Despite the fact that these situations felt “abnormal,” according to Hudgins, she took part because she was informed that not participating would negatively affect her grades and her academic record.
Additionally, Hudgins recounted how students were rewarded with pizza for promoting Transcendental Meditation ... continued below
... which her instructor referred to as “following orders,” and how one friend was offered $100 by program coordinators to participate in promote Quiet Time.
ReplyDelete“I complained a few times to my teacher about not wanting to participate in the Quiet Time program,” shared Hudgins. “Once, my teacher sent me to the dean's office because I was questioning why we had to participate in the program. I felt angry and hurt because the school did not care whether or not I wanted to participate.”
Now 21 years old, Hudgins has talked about the damaging effect that Transcendental Meditation had on her. At the time, she was a practicing Muslim and what the school was pushing on her contradicted her religious Islamic beliefs and caused her to question her Islamic beliefs particularly whenever they said that there was a different higher power than the god she believed in.
“This was extremely offensive and very confusing,” Hudgins intimated. “It made me feel guilty and sinful because Muslims are not to worship men.”
“As a Muslim, I was supposed to pray five times a day,” said Hudgins. “Although the school made me take time away from class to practice in Transcendental Meditation, it would not allow me to take time away from class for those five daily prayers.”
Hudgins and her Mauck & Baker attorneys petitioned the court on her own behalf and for other students similarly situated, asking them to hold the Board of Education of the City of Chicago and the David Lynch Foundation accountable for deprivations of these students’ Constitutional rights.
District Judge Matthew Kennelly granted class action status for all students who participated in the Quiet Time program in Chicago Public Schools during the academic calendar for Fall 2015 through Spring 2019 and reached age eighteen on or after January 13, 2021.
In a similar case, former Chicago Public Schools student Mariyah Green, also represented by Mauck & Baker, received $150,000 in damages and legal fees in an agreed Offer of Judgment entered by the Northern District of Illinois on October 23, 2023. The monies were an agreed judgement in Green’s favor for alleged Constitutional violations of her rights by the Board of Education of the City of Chicago and the David Lynch Foundation, over mandated participation in Hindu rituals while attending a Chicago Public School. Green’s Complaint was brought to the court in February, 2023 in an effort to hold educators and program developers responsible for requiring participation in a disingenuously promoted program that violated her Christian beliefs.
Read the Memorandum Opinion and Order issued April 19, 2024, by District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly of the United States District Court – Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division granting class certification in Kaya Hudgins v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago et al., under the Establishment Clause claim, for all students who participated in the Quiet Time program in Chicago Public Schools during Chicago Public School's academic calendars for Fall 2015 through Spring 2019, and reached age eighteen on or after January 13, 2021, here https://www.scribd.com/document/725965003/Kaya-Hudgins-v-Board-of-Education-City-of-Chicago-et-al-Memorandum-Opinion-and-Order-04-19-2024
Read the First Amended Complaint in Kaya Hudgins v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago et al. as filed on February 3, 2023, by Mauck and Baker attorneys on behalf of Kaya Hudgins in United States District Court – Northern District of Illinois – Eastern Division here https://www.scribd.com/document/725967561/Kaya-Hudgins-v-Board-of-Education-City-of-Chicago-et-al-First-Amended-Complaint
About Mauck & Baker, LLC
Mauck & Baker, established in Chicago in 2001, is nationally known for its practice in the area of religious liberty. It works with individuals, religious institutions, and businesses. For more information, please visit mauckbaker.com
My Experience Living In A Cult For 20 Years - Here's How I Broke Free
ReplyDeleteAs the cult took hold, 1,000 of us moved across the world - squandering our fortunes - to meditate in a bid to prevent certain global annihilation
By Susan Shumsky, Author and spirituality expert
Huffington Post, October 17, 2018
For over two decades, I lived in the ashrams of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and guru of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Deepak Chopra, and hundreds of other celebrities. I served on Maharishi’s personal staff for six of those years.
Generally, people didn’t think of TM as a cult. For those who learned TM and practiced it twice daily at home, it was not a cult. When Maharishi first brought meditation to the West in 1959, he represented TM as a simple, effortless, mechanical technique that anyone could do. We weren’t required to change our lifestyle, habits, or beliefs. By simply meditating twice a day, our lives would naturally improve. And they did improve, dramatically—at least for me.
I loved TM. I experienced something previously unfamiliar and unknown: the true felicity of inner peace. The entire 22 years that I practiced TM, my meditation experiences were nothing but uplifting and blissful. I also loved Maharishi. I became entranced by his highly charismatic aura and hypnotic personality. So for six years I ended up on his personal staff in Europe as a rare insider—part of his inner circle.
While on staff, I endured an incredibly intense emotional roller coaster ranging from heaven to hell. Administering a kind of “open-ego surgery,” Maharishi would alternately make me feel like the most important person in the universe, saving the planet, or the most despicable, useless, worthless worm. Just as a military drill instructor uses tough love to train his recruits, so Maharishi dispensed severe treatment to his closest disciples. In the worst instance, he chastised me harshly before 400 of the TM organization’s leaders.
The first seeds of TM’s cult-like characteristics emerged in August 1979 in Amherst Massachusetts, where Maharishi gathered 2,600 meditators for a World Peace Assembly. There he made the fantastic claim that the Goddess “Mother Divine” had told him that crime, war, and environmental toxins had polluted the earth. Maharishi’s “World Plan” to create global peace wasn’t working fast enough, and therefore the Goddess was threatening to annihilate the entire earth’s population. After Maharishi pleaded with her, she purportedly agreed to give him one last chance.
Maharishi then declared that time had run out and there was a world emergency. All of us must pack our bags, relocate our families to Iowa within one week, and meditate together in order to prevent certain global annihilation. So about 1,000 of us moved to Maharishi International University (MIU) in Fairfield, Iowa, where the cult gradually took over our lives, as we squandered our fortunes on various increasingly expensive TM courses and products.
Two gigantic geodesic domes slathered in gold paint were built on the MIU campus—one for men and another for women, where we practiced group meditation twice daily. Every telephone-broadcast from Maharishi terrorized us into believing that if we didn’t adhere to this program, we would be responsible for nuclear holocaust or the end of the world. His manipulative fear-and-intimidation tactics proved extremely effective motivators.
continued below
Maharishi used highly successful bait—flattery. He convinced us of our vast superiority over the Great Unwashed as he bestowed on us outlandish titles such as “Executive Governors” in his self-proclaimed artificially devised hierarchy.
ReplyDeleteWe blindly adhered to Maharishi’s ironclad belief structure and rigid routine. His stifling rules determined what to eat, what to wear, where to live, what to believe, what to say, what to read and not read, what activities were acceptable, even our house’s architecture. As the personality cult expanded, so did the followers’ cliquish, elitist attitude. If we towed the line, we were “on the program.” If we wavered, we were “off the program” and branded as outcasts, shunned from the community. We could no longer enter the golden domes or take future TM courses.
We lived in Fear-Filled, not Fairfield—under extreme fear of the leaders policing the organisation. Since we believed TM was the only path to enlightenment and Maharishi was the only true spiritual master, we lived in terror of banishment from TM’s presumptive heavenly paradise. Our only chance for spiritual enlightenment would vanish, and we would be lost, unless we jumped through various hoops to prove our worthiness.
As the ungodly repression became increasingly overbearing, the MIU library purged all “negative” books and non-TM self-help books, including books on yoga, meditation, New Age teachings, and those authored by Indian gurus. We were forbidden to visit any spiritual masters, to take classes on any subject not officially sanctioned by the TM organization, or to even to take a vacation to India.
At MIU and MSAE (Maharishi School for the Age of Enlightenment), teachers reprimanded students for expressing original opinions. Kids who drew “negative” images, (such as monsters) or wrote “negative” stories were taken to task. “Entertaining negativity” was “off the program.” Students with drug, alcohol, or other addiction problems were not given counselling or advised to attend AA meetings. Instead, they were blamed for not meditating improperly.
I began to realise I’d spent over two decades in a dictatorial, repressive organisation, largely motivated by fear. In 1986 I took my first baby steps towards freedom when I started a prayer circle at my house.
After the TM spies made a list of license plates of cars parked nearby, they stripped the golden dome badges from my prayer circle attendees and blacklisted them. After that, nearly everyone in Fairfield avoided eye contact with me. Branded persona non grata, I came to realise I would have to sell my house and leave Fairfield.
Though it was painful to cut the cords with Maharishi and all my friends, leaving Fairfield in 1989 was the best decision I ever made. I found my way to greater awareness and self-sufficiency, and I never looked back.
Maharishi & Me: Seeking Enlightenment with The Beatles’ Guru by Susan Shumsky is out now
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/cult-maharishi-mahesh-yogi_uk_5bc5e04de4b0d38b5871a8c3
Chicago Public Schools faces class-action lawsuit over religious practices kept secret from parents
ReplyDeleteby Dylan Sharkey, Illinois Policy April 29, 2024 [see related article in comment above]
Former Chicago Public Schools students have started a class-action lawsuit alleging they were forced to meditate and signed nondisclosure agreements agreeing not to tell parents, especially religious parents.
Chicago Public Schools is facing a class-action lawsuit from former students about allegedly being pressured into meditation and “Hindu practices” they were told to keep secret from parents.
Kayla Hudgins, a former CPS student, is one of the plaintiffs alleging her constitutional rights were violated. Hudgins said her teachers pressured her to participate in transcendental meditation as part of a “quiet time” curriculum. Hudgins on one occasion said she didn’t want to participate and was sent to the dean’s office.
After quiet time, students were pressured to sign nondisclosure agreements to not tell their parents when they got home from school. Students were told if they didn’t sign the agreement it would affect their grades.
“Additionally, I, like many of my classmates, signed a nondisclosure not to tell anyone, including our parents, about the program,” Hudgins said. “My classmates and I were particularly warned by a David Lynch Foundation representative not to tell our parents if our parents were ‘religious.’”
A federal judge on April 19 certified the case as a class-action lawsuit. The law firm handling the case, Mauck and Baker, in November 2023 won a $150,000 settlement for another student forced to participate in the program or face being booted from her high school basketball team.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s new list of demands would give teachers more authority to teach what they want, force beliefs on students and keep parents in the dark. CTU has also demanded teachers keep student pronouns a secret from parents.
CTU’s current contract ends June 30. They have a list of demands filling a 142-page document, ranging from social and environmental justice issues to raises averaging $51,000.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-public-schools-faces-class-action-lawsuit-over-religious-practices-kept-secret-from-parents/
Malnak v. Yogi Date of Decision February 2, 1979
ReplyDeleteCase Summary and Outcome
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the decision of the United States District Court of New Jersey, which found that the teaching of an elective course in five New Jersey high schools constituted an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The course “The Science of Creative Intelligence-Transcendental Meditation” (SCI/TM) was taught by someone trained by the World Plan Executive Council, and organization dedicated to disseminating the teachings of SCI/TM and required students to participate in an off-campus weekend ceremony in which they had to recite Sanskrit chants and make offerings. The Court, using the three-part test developed by the Supreme Court in Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist, determined that the classes violated the Establishment Clause and upheld the lower court’s injunction.
Judge Adams’ concurring and extensive opinion has influenced how “religion” is interpreted in the context of the first amendment, noting that the law had moved towards a broader approach in recognition of the fact that adherence to the traditional definition would deny religious identification to the beliefs adhered to by millions of Americans.
Facts
The course “The Science of Creative Intelligence – Transcendental Meditation” (SCI/TM) was offered as an elective at five New Jersey high schools during the 1975-76 academic year. The course was taught by teachers trained by the “World Plan Executive Council” an organization devoted to disseminating the teachings of SCI/TM which consists in the belief that “pure creative intelligence is the basis of life, and that through the process of Transcendental Meditation students can perceive the full potential of their lives”. [p. 198]
The process of “transcendental meditation” relied on the use, while meditating, of a sound aid known as “mantra”. According to SCI/TM, meditators need to attend a ceremony called a “puja” in order to receive their mantra. Students were required as part of the SCI/TM course to attend a puja ceremony. These ceremonies were conducted off school premises on a Sunday, lasted between one and two hours, and required students to stand or sit in front of a table while the teacher sang a chant in Sanskrit and made offerings to a deified “Guru Dev”. [p.198]
A number of plaintiffs issued proceedings in the United States District Court for New Jersey seeking to enjoin the teaching of the SCI/TM course in public high schools on the basis of the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs included taxpayers, parents of children who attended the schools where the course was taught, a clergyman and the organization “Americans United for the Separation of Church and State”.
The defendants, among them Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Spiritual Regeneration Movement Foundation, World Plan Executive Council—United States American Foundation For Creative Intelligence and various educational authorities and officials, maintained that their activities were non-religious in nature. However, after analyzing the textbook used for the course, the content of SCI/TM teachings and the nature of the puja ceremony the District Court concluded that SCI/TM constituted a form of “religion” for first amendment purposes. Thus, the District Court enjoined the teaching of the SCI/TM course in New Jersey public high schools.
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In reaching its conclusion, the District Court reviewed several decisions in which the Supreme Court had adopted a broad view of the meaning of “religion”. However the District Court did not attempt to provide a definition of religion noting: “The court finds it unnecessary to improvise an unprecedented definition of religion under the first amendment because it appears that this case is governed by the teachings of prior Supreme Court decisions”.
ReplyDeleteThe defendants appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, which issued its decision February 2, 1979.
Decision Overview
The issue for the United States Court of Appeals Third Circuit to decide was whether the teaching of the “The Science of Creative Intelligence – Transcendental Meditation” (SCI/TM) course as an elective in New Jersey public schools constituted an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The Court agreed with the District Court’s finding that the SCI/TM course was religious in nature noting: “careful examination of the textbook, the expert testimony elicited, and the uncontested facts concerning the puja convince us that religious activity was involved” [p. 199]
The Court considered whether the teachings and activities of SCI/TM were religious in nature to be the determinant factor, given governmental action was apparent. The Court made reference to the test developed by the Supreme Court in Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist, 413 U.S. 756 for assessing possible violations of the first amendments’ non-establishment clause namely that “to pass muster, the action in question must: (1) reflect a clearly secular legislative purpose; (2) have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion; and (3) avoid excessive government entanglement with religion”. The Court then noted that the District Court had correctly applied this test in finding that the SCI/TM course had the primary effect of advancing religion and religious concepts and that the use of public school facilities for the teaching of the course constituted “excessive governmental entanglement with religion”. [p. 199]
The appellants argued that, even if the SCI/TM course was to be accepted as clearly religious, the religious effect of the course was not significant. However, the Court was not persuaded by this argument. Thus, the Court affirmed the decision of the District Court to enjoin the teaching of the SCI/TM course in New Jersey public high schools.
Judge Adams issued a concurring opinion in which he sought to determine the meaning of “religion” in the context of the first amendment. For this purpose, he conducted an extensive review of judicial precedent. First, he examined cases in which the traditional theistic definition of religion, which dominated Supreme Court case law for many years was applied. He highlighted Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333, 10 S.Ct. 299, 33 L.Ed. 637 (1890) where the Supreme Court had declared: “[T]he term “religion” has reference to one’s views of his relations to his Creator, and to the obligations they impose of reverence for his being and character, and of obedience to his will”. He noted that under this theistic view, SCI/TM could not be considered a religion as it did not focus on the belief in a supreme being. [p. 201]
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He then proceeded to examine the case-law on school prayers which required students to recite prayers in public schools and which had been found to be in violation of the first amendment, even when the prayers were non-sectarian in nature. The judge conceded that the puja chant, when translated into English, was similar in content to prayers whose imposition on public school students had been held to be unconstitutional. However, he considered that precedent was not directly applicable highlighting, among other factors, that it was unclear whether the puja chant could hold religious meaning to the participants as they did not understand Sanskrit, the chanting had not been performed on government property, participation in the SCI/TM course was truly voluntary because students did not risk punishment nor undesired notoriety for participating in it, and the students had submitted affidavits indicating they did not consider the chant to have religious meaning. Based on this the judge concluded that the precedent concerning school prayers was not sufficient to determine whether SCI/TM should be considered religious for first amendment purposes.
ReplyDeleteJudge Adams reviewed cases concerning conscientious objectors which dealt with the meaning of “religion” in the context of section 6(i) of the Universal Military Service and Training Act. He referenced United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 85 S.Ct. 850, 13 L.Ed.2d 733 (1965) where the Supreme Court had interpreted religion to include non-theistic belief systems and Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333, 90 204*204 S.Ct. 1792, 26 L.Ed.2d 308 (1970) where the Supreme Court granted conscientious objector status to a plaintiff whose opposition to service was based only on a “moral” opposition to war. He considered these cases relevant because “if the Court is willing to read ‘religious belief’ so as to comprehend beliefs based upon pantheistic and ethical views, it might be presumed to favor a similar inclusive definition of ‘religion’ as that term appears in the first amendment”. After reviewing these cases the Judge concluded that the Supreme Court had replaced its original conception of religion with a broader one. [p. 2o4]
Next, Judge Adams examined cases in which a broader definition of religion had been applied outside the context of conscientious objection. Among these, he highlighted Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488, 81 S.Ct. 1680, 6 L.Ed.2d 982 (1961) where the Supreme Court had applied a broad interpretation of “religion” in the context of a first amendment case and had stated “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others”. He also made reference to Founding Church of Scientology v. United States, 133 U.S.App.D.C. 229, 409 F.2d 1146, where Judge Wright had been “willing to accept, as religious, ideas that are sufficiently comprehensive to be comparable to traditional religions in terms of content and subject matter”. After examining these cases he concluded that they also reflected a broader interpretation of religion. [p. 206]
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Based on this comprehensive review, the Judge concluded that, while the classic definition of religion had been repudiated by the newer cases, a new definition had not yet been fully formed. He observed that the case law indicated an analogy-based approach to identifying what classifies as religious, noting that “presumably beliefs holding the same important position for members of one of the new religions as the traditional faith holds for more orthodox believers are entitled to the same treatment as the traditional beliefs”. He also identified three indicia useful for determining whether something is religious in nature. [p. 207]
ReplyDeleteFirstly, the nature of the ideas in question, religious ideas being those that deal with “ultimate questions” such as“ the meaning of life and death, man’s role in the Universe, the proper moral code of right and wrong”. Secondly, the “comprehensiveness” of the taught theories: according to the judge, “A religion is not generally confined to one question or one moral teaching; it has a broader scope. It lays claim to an ultimate and comprehensive “truth”. Thus isolated ideas that deal with “ultimate questions” but do not form a comprehensive belief system may not classify as religious. [p. 209] The third indicia consisted of external signs such as “formal services, ceremonial functions, the existence of clergy, structure and organization, efforts at propagation, observation of holidays and other similar manifestations”. The presence or absence of these signs would be indicative of whether something is a religion. [p. 209]
Despite identifying these three indicia the judge warned that they should not be considered a rigid final test of what constitutes a religion.
The Judge then addressed the question of whether a single definition of religion should be applied to the whole of the first amendment or whether separate definitions should be applied for the free exercise and the establishment clauses. He rejected the dual definition for the two religion clauses, considering that “although the Constitution has often been subject to a broad construction, it remains a written document. It is difficult to justify a reading of the first amendment so as to support a dual definition of religion, nor has our attention been drawn to any support for such a view in the conventional sources that have been thought to reveal the intention of the framers”. He also noted that adopting a dual definition would privilege new religion movements over traditional religions as they would be protected by the free exercise clause without being limited by the establishment clause. This was unacceptable. [p. 212]
Finally, the judge concluded that SCI/TM was a religion and that the SCI/TM course as it was taught in New Jersey public schools did not pursue an objective secular purpose. For these reasons, he agreed with the rest of the Court that the teaching of the course in public high schools was forbidden by the first amendment.
Mixed Outcome
While the decision protects students’ freedoms of thought, conscience and religion and safeguards the religious neutrality of the government, it is arguable that in expanding the scope of the first amendment’s non establishment clause it prevents students from exercising their freedom of expression in choosing a particular academic course.
Official Case Documents https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Malnak-v.-Yogi-592-F.pdf
This analysis of this case in on the website of Global Freedom of Expression - Columbia University at:
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/malnak-v-yogi/