Archive for Transcendental Meditation
02.27.09
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 1:01 am by Rick Ross
What do Paul McCartney, Donavan, Eddie Veder, Sheryl Crow and maybe Moby have in common?
Well, besides being celebrity rockers it seems that they can all be seen as supporters of a “cult” recruitment scheme that targets kids.
That’s right, these recording artists not only hope you listen to their music, they want to promote religious beliefs, or at least help to fund programs that are thinly disguised proselytizing aimed at schoolchildren.
Is this yet another example of stars trading on their celebrity status to preach, not unlike Tom Cruise and his endless ramblings about Scientology?
On April 4th McCartney, Veder, Crow and Moby will “Come Together” at the iconic Radio City Music Hall in New York City, to raise money for the David Lynch Foundation.
David Lynch (photo left), the director of “Blue Velvet” isn’t just a “cult” filmmaker; he is also a “cult” follower.
The director is a longtime devotee of the recently deceased Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, which has often been called a “cult.”
Apparently Lynch managed to persuade McCartney and others in the music industry to help him fund pet programs “used to teach Transcendental Meditation to a million kids” reports Examiner.com.
This is nothing new for the eccentric filmmaker, who seems to be more concerned about pitching his old guru’s teachings, than coming up with new movie projects.
And it wasn’t difficult for Lynch to get 1960s singer Donavan on board, since he is also a longtime TM devotee.
Sir Paul reportedly will be joined by his old band mate Ringo Starr at the NYC benefit event, who is the only other remaining Beatle.
There is a certain symmetry to all this since it was the Beatles that launched Maharishi (photo below) and his “meditation” techniques into the mainstream of popular culture during the psychedelic sixties, though John Lennon eventually became disenchanted and denounced the guru.
Lennon later said in interviews that the Beatles song “Sexy Sadie,” which includes the lyrics “Sexy Sadie, what have you done, you made a fool of everyone” was originally called “Maharishi.”
But Maharishi was no fool when it came to making money. The guru amassed a global spiritual empire that included assets valued in the billions.
TMers often make ridiculous claims, such as that their mass meditation somehow helped to bring down Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War.
However, TM critics see the group’s practices as little more than self-hypnosis or trance induction.
The Middle European Journal of Medicine found that out of 700 studies on TM spanning 40 years, only 10 were conducted in the clinical tradition of using strict control groups, randomization and placebos. Of those 10, four of the studies recruited subjects that had already shown an interest in TM.
Peter Canter a researcher from the Peninsula Medical School of the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in the United Kingdom concluded, ”there is a strong placebo effect going on which probably works through the expectations being set up.”
TMers have nevertheless continued to make preposterous claims, for example that their “technologies” can create an “all-powerful field of invincibility” that will “make any nation invincible.”
These claims certainly contradict what happened at Maharishi University in Iowa, where a student went berserk, viciously attacking and ultimately murdering another pupil.
Whatever supposed mystical benefits occur from TM helped neither of them avoid this tragedy.
In 2004 lawsuits were filed against Maharishi U alleging the school was “negligent” and failed to protect its students properly from the murderer, who was known to be violent reported the Associated Press.
Just this month the University quietly settled one lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.
The one time TMer turned murderer who was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
A former 17-year TMer wrote in an article featured at CultNews, that Maharishi (more recent photo left) was a “diverter of seekers, seducer of minds’ and “stealer of souls.”
Not exactly the kind of person you would expect Sir Paul McCartney to support.
Perhaps this knighted Brit is a bit more gullible than the average chap.
After all he was taken in by an alleged “gold digger” and went through a rather expensive divorce after a brief marriage.
In fairness though it seems the list of those taken in by David Lynch and/or TM is growing.
Ben Harper, Mike Love of the Beach Boys and Erykah Badu may be playing along with McCartney at the NYC fundraiser according to recent reports.
So Sir Paul won’t be the only “Fool on the Hill.”
However, David Lynch didn’t fool concerned parents in California.
When the movie director tried to unload his TM program in Marin County, a bastion of liberalism, it was soundly rejected.
Amidst allegations that TM was nothing more than a “cult,” Lynch’s proposed program was ultimately dumped reported NBC News 11.
The funding source for the program was none other than the David Lynch Foundation, that same entity that Paul McCartney and company seem so anxious to help through the coming New York fundraiser.
And the Lynch failure in California wasn’t the first time that TM devotees have targeted schoolchildren.
According to a report filed by Associated Press TMers have made similar attempts to promote their beliefs at public schools before in “New York, California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and other places.”
Barry Markovsky, a University of South Carolina sociologist labeled such efforts “stealth religion.” And almost 30 years ago in 1977, U.S. District Judge H. Curtis Meanor ruled against TM being taught at public schools.
These efforts were done through something called the “National Committee for Stress-Free Schools.”
Just when you thought that Madonna was the one to watch out for when it came to a music icon peddling religion, along comes a former Beatle and his virtual tag team of celebrity rockers.
Postscript: An interesting comment came in subsequent to this article appearing at CultNews. According to one TMer, “The one thing all the above mentioned outstanding musicians have in common is that they all practice Transcendental Meditation.” Shades of Tom Cruise indeed.
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08.14.08
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 6:18 pm by Rick Ross
By Bronte Baxter
The climate of the 60s: America was to question everything, challenge “the system” and the established world view.
Experimenting with sex and drugs, toying with every new or forbidden philosophy. A better world was around the corner – we were sure of it. Soon we’d be, as Arlo sang, “walking hand in hand with every man, sleeping in the sun with everyone.”
What happened?
Where have all the flower children gone?
Some became followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and the Students International Meditation Society (SIMS), an organization that descended on US campuses, recruited kids and cleaned them up, turning them into “upstanding members of society.”
TM gave them a mantra and taught them to meditate.
Hippies turned TM converts, trading in swear words for mantras, tie-dyed shirts for three-piece suits.
Many kids were recruited to become teachers, pulling in still more people.
In 1975, Merv Griffin featured Maharishi (1975 photo right) on his prime-time TV show then started TM himself. First promoted by the Beatles, the giggling guru’s meditation program went mainstream, with courses taught in corporations and schools so that executives could relax and students could focus.
A virtual army of TM teachers covered the globe, with centers in every major city, talks in every suburb. Maharishi said that world peace would happen – better yet, an ideal world – when enough people globally found inner peace by practicing TM.
I was among that army, personally instructing 350 people in the course of six years.
I fell in love with a starry-eyed boy, and we were going to create utopia together.
We preached the message of transcendence: taking the mind inward to bask in its Source, the state of pure awareness, from which all good things spring. We drank of those waters daily. Refreshed from contact with the supreme, we’d return to the world energized for more lectures and teaching.
It was a glorious time. Hope was everywhere. Gone was the contentiousness of our generation. We were avant-garde leaders now, shouting a new message, a new answer, to the world.
Challenging authority became a thing of the past. (Maharishi taught that people should respect it..) Working within the system, we were told we would bring about change, and change would happen by raising people’s consciousness.
Get them all to meditate, and problems would vanish from this earth.
We truly believed it. The idea was radical, new, and to our young minds it made sense.
TM opened a brand-new vista on the future, where troubles, all supposedly born of man’s separation from his pure infinite nature, would spontaneously disappear.
The ex-hippie TM army was passionate: our full love and energy went into achieving Maharishi’s dream for the world.
Recruits who didn’t feel called to become teachers found their way in businesses and vocations, becoming productive members of society. Those from wealthy families supported the movement with gargantuan donations, and received places of influence directly under Maharishi. It was only a matter of time until the world would be transformed and mankind would enter a New Age. Maharishi called it The Age of Enlightenment.
But something happened on the way to paradise.
Slowly and subtly, the tone of the guru’s teachings changed.
What used to be 20 minutes twice a day became hour-long, then 90-minute, meditations. The mantras were reshaped into “advanced techniques,” and chanting and Vedic readings (hymns to the gods) began.
In a bold move, Maharishi began teaching courses in TM-Siddhis, a slew of paranormal abilities which he said humans could develop. Turning invisible was one of the siddhis; levitation was another.
People that took the siddhi training, were told that it would elevate their consciousness. But instead of flying, people were bouncing around cross-legged on foam rubber mats on their posteriors.
Flying is coming, Maharishi promised – keep practicing: frog-hopping is only the beginning stage.
No one turned invisible, and no one demonstrated any of the other special abilities the several-thousand-dollar siddhi course was supposed to teach.
At the time of this writing, 30 years after the inception of the TM-siddhis, no one in Maharishi’s organization has yet demonstrated any levitation beyond frog-hopping.
Meanwhile the movement snapped photos of smiling butt-bouncers (photo right) caught in mid-air and plastered the pictures on posters and fliers as advertisements: “Come learn yogic flying.”
TM teachers who completed siddhi training were called “Governors of the Age of Enlightenment,” because Maharishi said our elevated consciousness would regulate negative tendencies in the world. Governors were told not to reveal to TM teachers or meditators that butt-bouncing was all that was being achieved on the siddhi courses to date.. That would spoil the innocence of the new initiates, interfering with their ability to learn.
For the first time, more than a few disciples started questioning. Why was TM deceitful in its advertising, pretending that people were flying?
Why were we asked to pay thousands of dollars for something that didn’t work?
And how had a simple meditation technique, that was supposed to be all we needed for cosmic consciousness, gotten so complicated?
Originally, we signed on for a non-religious “relaxation technique,” practiced a few minutes twice daily as an adjunct to dynamic activity.
TM had its roots in Hinduism, but we had ignored that.
As teachers or “initiators,” we had to perform a “puja,” a ritual of offerings performed on an altar before a picture of Guru Dev, Maharishi’s master. We were ordered to do this in the presence of every new initiate before dispensing their mantra. We were to kneel down and bow before the picture, making a hand gesture to indicate that the student was expected to kneel down, too.
At the time we teachers convinced ourselves that we weren’t being deceptive. Maharishi said the initiates would understand in time, after their consciousness was raised through meditation. He repeatedly told us that TM was not a religion. As if saying it enough would make it so!
But when the TM-Siddhis started, things got even more religious.
We were instructed to read prayers to the gods after every meditation and to listen to audiotapes of chants to Hindu deities as we fell asleep at night. Maharishi reassured us: the gods are not actual personal entities but “impulses of creative intelligence” that exist within ourselves. The fact that Hinduism anthropomorphizes deities, just signals immature consciousness he said, and that of course was something the movement was far too sophisticated to be guilty of.
The changes in the movement were so gradual that I hardly blinked an eye the day I got my own advanced technique, which consisted of adding the Sanskrit word “namah” to my original mantra. I didn’t quite understand, as I was told the mantras were meaningless sounds that have a beneficial effect on the nervous system. I didn’t know any translation for my mantra “Eima,” but I did know, from the puja, what “namah” meant in English. It means, “I bow down.” Who was I bowing down to, I wondered? Well, it must be a god. “Eima” must be a name for her, and she must be my escort on the path to higher consciousness. Another hidden teaching, obvious only to an advanced spiritual aspirant. I felt privileged and superior to be let in on the secret.
Around this time in the movement, many people started to complain of physical problems, as well as irritability and/or depression..
Once I was assigned to spend the night guarding one meditator who was being sent home from a siddhi course because she was “unstable.” She was being shipped out the following day, and course leaders were concerned that she might harm herself or create an embarrassing scene in the meantime, hence her need for a “guard.”
In 1978, an article appeared in Psychology Today reporting that “a substantial number” of individuals develop “anxiety, depression, physical and mental tension and other adverse effects” from meditating. (San Francisco Examiner, September 10, 1989) The scientific criticism was just starting.
While over a hundred studies had been done by TM scientists showing outstanding benefits from TM for mind and body, new studies by independent researchers failed to corroborate such claims.
Some new studies even suggested adverse mental and physical effects resulting from meditation (depersonalization, the onset of mental difficulties, psychological disorders).
TM was accused of failing to conduct double-blind experiments, and of influencing test results with the prejudice of the tester.
One insider, a friend of mine who was exceptionally devoted to Maharishi and who worked with TM psychologists as their research assistant, became shaken and left the movement when she found the scientists she worked with doctoring test results to make them better conform to Maharishi’s desired outcomes. (See the following site for more about independent studies done on meditators:http://minet.org/TM-EX/Winter-94)
Around this time, people started leaving the movement, but most of us held strong.
A meditating community had sprung up in Fairfield, Iowa within and on the borders of Maharishi International University (photo above). The town became home to a thousand meditators, teachers and TM “governors,” many of whom had a hard time fitting into normal jobs and living situations in the world. We were told to meditate and “fly” together daily. That was the new strategy to create world peace as well as success in our lives.
Maharishi began mens’ and women’s monastic groups (the Purusha and Mother Divine programs) and encouraged people to join them as “the most rapid lifestyle for unfolding enlightenment.”
People gave up dreams of love and a family to follow their guru’s advice, believing they were serving their enlightenment and the highest social good.
My best friend, intensely in love with her husband, was divorced by him when the monastic programs started. He became a celibate, while my friend tried to live as a nun with her broken heart. Within months she developed cancer, dying a couple years later. She forewent Western treatment to pursue an alternative healing system: Ayurveda, India’s ancient “world medicine” which then was being revived by Maharishi. Her physician was Deepak Chopra (photo above), at the time TM’s poster boy and its leading Ayurvedic physician. My friend Sharon withered away and died, but Ayurveda grew in popularity.
What troubled me most about the movement in the 80s was a growing sense of subterfuge and surveillance amidst an atmosphere of increasingly artificial “positivity.” Movement leaders instructed the rank and file to “never entertain negativity,” which meant never criticize and always wear a happy face.
There was a sense that we were being watched, that unknown people within the organization had been assigned as spies for the rest of us.
Any person suspected of entertaining doubts about Maharishi and the movement or visiting other spiritual teachers would find themselves refused admittance to new courses or group meditations in the central “flying” hall. The outcasts were never told what they had done to merit excommunication. “You know,” was the cryptic reply, or “Reapply in a few months” whenever the rejects asked, “But what did I do?”
The significance of being tossed out by the TM movement was devastating to those it happened to. The depth of their turmoil can only be fathomed by understanding that Maharishi was teaching then that two twenty-minute meditations a day no longer would cut it. Regular expensive advanced courses and meditating with the group in the flying hall had become pre-requisites not just for world peace but also for personal salvation. Unless you wanted condemned to many future lifetimes of ignorance and suffering, it was vital to keep up with the program.
Our goal was liberation, enlightenment: an egoless state where blissful “pure consciousness” suffuses the awareness at all times, trivializing everything that used to seem important. In enlightenment, nothing touches you, success and loss don’t affect you.
Because liberation in this lifetime required staying on the good side of the TM “gestapo,” people became artificial and prone to quoting movement slogans in front of each other. Everyone wanted to appear “kosher,” so they could stay on the campus and evolve.
The movie Man on the Moon depicts what happened to Andy Kaufman (photo left), a Hollywood comedian and TM governor who after years of movement involvement was found to be mysteriously wanting. There is a scene where a smiling TM-Siddhi administrator informs him he is not welcome on Maharishi’s campus anymore, no reason given. For an earnest meditator, that was like telling a cancer patient the drug he needs to live is being withdrawn.
In 1987, when I left TM and Fairfield, I had lived 17 years within the movement’s parameters. I’d seen so many of my generation go from “flower power” to “mantra power.” My friends had changed from buoyant folks delighting in free expression to paranoid people with phony smiles and legislated attitudes. It took me two years to break free of the thinking that kept me in Maharishi’s orbit. It felt traumatic, like a failed marriage. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew I could no longer be part of it.
In the 20 years since I left the Transcendental Meditation movement, Maharishi raised the price for learning to meditate into the thousands. Disciples able and willing to kick in a million dollars (apiece) were offered (in the last years of the guru’s life) proximity to him, a golden crown to wear, and the title of “raja” or “king”. Maharishi had created a “world government” he called “The Global Country of World Peace,” and his rajas are the rulers.
I’ve come to personally know two women who confide they were sexually propositioned by the “lifelong monk.”
One of Maharishi’s closest disciples from the 70s, a Swedish man named Conny Larson, published an autobiography in which he says he left the TM movement when he realized the girls who came into Maharishi’s room in the wee hours, leaving disheveled, weren’t really in there “reading him his mail.”
Since Maharishi’s death last February, one of his former girlfriends, Linda Pearce, is expected to come forward with her full story (first covered in a newspaper article in 1981, some years after John Lennon announced in a Rolling Stone interview that the Beatles believed Maharishi had tried to rape Mia Farrow).
In the years since I left the movement, the truth about the mantras has also come out.
The mantras (which Maharishi gave to the teachers to give in turn to the lower initiates) turn out not to be “meaningless sounds with life-supporting qualities” as he said. They are, rather, names of Hindu gods, a fact made public with the advent of the Internet.
Wikipedia, in its section on mantras, lists three of the mantras Maharishi gave me and other teachers to dispense: Eim, Hrim, and Shreem. Eim, says Wikipedia, is the Hindu goddess Saraswati, Hrim is the goddess Durga, and Shreem is the goddess Kali. (Wikipedia quotes these facts from “The Shakti Mantras,” by Thomas Ashley Farrand, Ballantine Books, 2003, pages 43, 124 and 138, but you can find the same information appearing dozens of places in a simple Google search.)
This intentional deception by Maharishi, perpetrated on his teachers and through them on the public, is to me the worst thing this “man of God” did to society. Through this lie, telling us that the mantras were “meaningless sounds,” Maharishi got unsuspecting Westerners to worship his gods under the guise of teaching them a “simple relaxation technique.” This is even more reprehensible than sex seduction of young disciples.
He seduced the minds of 6 million people, or should we call it rape?
I’ve written elsewhere about the hidden agenda of mantra meditation, and why it was important to Maharishi.
The power of recitation of the name of a god in meditation is very real power indeed. As individual identity disintegrates, the meditator continues his practice, because, he’s told, this implosion is a good thing. Oneness consciousness is taking the place of his formerly “limited” self. He is nearing his goal: universal awareness, the death of ego, and annihilation of “the illusion of I.”
This is why many of the 1960s flower children disappeared.
Maharishi (2002 photo right) transformed them from a generation of dissenters, the hippie generation, into pimps for the gods.
He turned their spiritual yearnings into spiritual servitude.
The ambition of so many 60s/70s youth, to make a better world, was undermined first by drugs and then by mantras. Often those converted by TM became grateeful thralls to boot, who would always remember that they had been “rescued” and how much they owed to their guru.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: diverter of seekers, seducer of minds, stealer of souls.
Any of those would be an appropriate epitaph. The mainstreaming of meditation in Western culture is this man’s questionable legacy.
Note: Read more of Bronte Baxter’s reflections at her blog “Splinter in the Mind.“
Copyright © Bronte Baxter 2008
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02.07.08
Posted in Transcendental Meditation, Al Qaeda, Miscellaneous at 1:40 am by Rick Ross
Mahesh Prasad Varma, better known as “Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” was born near the Indian town of Jabalpur, into a scribe caste family. He died last night at the age of 91.
At times referred to as a “cult leader,” one BBC website called him a “Rasputinesque” figure.
The Indian guru promoted “Transcendental meditation,” known as TM to its fans and followers. This practice involves reciting a mantra over and over again to still the mind.
However, TM critics saw the technique as little more than self-hypnosis or trance induction.
Classes to learn TM don’t come cheap. The current list price is $2,500 for a five-day session.
Mahrishi launched his public career as the “Beatles guru.” In 1968 the British group journeyed to his Himalayan ashram to study.
But it wasn’t long before the popular band dumped their would-be teacher.
John Lennon felt that Maharishi’s claim to celibacy was a lie. Lennon said in interviews that the Beatles song “Sexy Sadie,” which includes the lyrics “Sexy Sadie, what have you done, you made a fool of everyone” was originally called “Maharishi.”
This year on January 11th the guru announced his retirement, but apparently he was already quite ill and died in less than a month.
Maharishi and his followers often made ridiculous claims regarding the power of TM, such as a mass meditation session of 7,000 followers somehow being linked to the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War.
Maharishi’s mantra almost always included money.
The TM Web site states, “When the group cannot be maintained financially, new tensions arise in the world.” Such statements almost seem like spiritual blackmail.
Perhaps Maharishi will be most remembered for his shrewd business sense. He leaves behind the legacy of a multi-billion dollar spiritual empire.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported that TM has been marketed “with all the zeal of a multinational corporation — which is, effectively, what it became.”
In 1990 Maharishi moved to the Netherlands where he turned a historic former Catholic retreat into his home. The guru created considerable controversy when he attempted to demolish the landmark to suit his own taste.
One of Maharishi’s last fund raising pitches took place in 2002. The guru claimed he wanted to combat world terrorism and war through meditation.
The price tag this time was $1 billion dollars to train 40,000 TMers.
In the United States alone TM accumulated assets of about $300 million, including Maharishi University in Iowa.
Many of the guru’s remaining devotees live in Maharishi Vedic City, which is located a few miles from Fairfield, Iowa.
Maharishi may have been one of world’s most successful “cult leaders.”
That is, if measured by money, rather than mantras.
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10.20.06
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 1:15 pm by Rick Ross
It seems that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the old guru that briefly provided spiritual guidance to the “Beatles” during the 1960s, wants to influence American kids through public schools.
However, concerned parents upset this plan, in California’s bastion of liberalism Marin County and were unwilling to put out the welcome mat for Maharishi.
Amidst allegations that “Transcendental Meditation” (TM) taught by the guru was a “religion” and a “cult,” the program proposed by Terra Linda High School principal Carole Ramsey was ultimately withdrawn reported Associated Press.
The funding source for this proposed program was eccentric film director David Lynch, who was willing to pay $175,000 through his foundation for 250 students and 25 staffers to practice Maharishi’s meditation.
A long-time devotee of the guru Lynch seems to spend more time traveling to promote TM lately than making movies.
One Marin parent said at an open public meeting that TM was “the beginning of a whole new philosophy of life.” And that it works ”by putting people in trances, and when you’re in a trance you’re more suggestible” reported NBC 11.
Principal Ramsey insisted instead that the practice is “about quieting your mind” and “actually very good for your brain,” she said.
The principal allowed an open discussion last week, but it blew up in her face.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s religious,” pronounced yet another parent and opponent of the proposed program.
This is not the first time Maharishi’s followers have attempted to get their guru’s mantras into public schools within the United States.
During 2004 there were several attempts reported across the country.
According to one report filed by Associated Press TM fans were pitching their beliefs at public schools in “New York, California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and other places.”
Barry Markovsky, a University of South Carolina sociologist labeled such efforts “stealth religion.” And almost 30 years ago in 1977, U.S. District Judge H. Curtis Meanor ruled against TM being taught at public schools.
However, that didn’t discourage the faithful who kept plugging away at a number of venues through often through front organizations.
Working through the “National Committee for Stress-Free Schools” Maharishi’s disciples were ”aggressively promoting…in major cities, including New York City,” according to The Journal News.
And in North Carolina a charter school garnered controversy when it announced a TM and “Natural Law Curriculum.” However, it was deemed inappropriate for public funds to support what is essentially seen as a religious practice. Ultimately the school board voted down TM as part of its educational program.
TM supporters also tried to enter schools within Lexington, Kentucky.
In all of these attempts, much like the recently proposed Marin “wellness” program, Maharishi’s followers pitched a program they claimed would somehow lead to a decrease in blood pressure and discipline problems, improvement in grades and the lowering of stress levels.
But critics repeatedly questioned the research regarding TM, which has been characterized as “skewed toward positive results.”
The Middle European Journal of Medicine found that out of 700 studies on TM spanning 40 years, only 10 were conducted in the clinical tradition of using strict control groups, randomization and placebos. Of those 10, four of the studies recruited subjects that had already shown an interest in TM.
Peter Canter a researcher from the Peninsula Medical School of the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in the United Kingdom concluded, ”there is a strong placebo effect going on which probably works through the expectations being set up.”
It seems David Lynch hoped to avoid controversy with the recently proposed school program in California, by putting up the funding himself.
However, despite this demonstration of devotion to his guru, Mr. Lynch will not be gaining any new disciples for Maharishi and his teachings in Marin.
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07.21.06
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 7:20 am by Rick Ross
Attention President Bush and world leaders concerned about recent developments in the Middle East, someone has a way to “prevent the impending danger,” which can become “the basis of indomitable peace.”
Who has this fantastic peace plan?
None other than Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, former guru to the Beatles.
John Hagelin, Maharishi’s point man and a past presidential candidate, wants to “mobilize the entire country” to “pull together in this hour of need,” according to an urgent message he sent to key leaders within the guru’s Transcendental Meditation (TM) network this week.
CultNews received a copy of Hagelin’s communication, which amounts to “marching orders” or rather flying orders, for what TM calls its “yogic flyers.”
“Yogic flyers” are something like Maharishi’s spiritual air force.
However, these pilots have an unconventional takeoff that consists of essentially going into a trance and then hopping around within various buildings controlled by the guru.
This is what TM devotees mean when they claim to be airborne doing “yogic flying.”
Figuratively they are “flying high” through their guru’s meditation techniques, which can produce dissociated states of altered consciousness through something, more commonly called hypnosis.
Just like a stage hypnotist can get a subject to cluck like a chicken, Maharishi’s methods make them think they can fly and feel the sensation.
Hagelin reports, “I am returning to America today to rally…1,500 Yogic Flyers from Fairfield [Iowa]…and to mobilize another 1,000 from across the nation to fly together in the Domes. [Other TM devotees] will immediately mobilize 1,000 for Washington, DC…Only we can save the nation and bring peace at this critical time.”
And to think world governments rely upon diplomacy and at times military defenses.
Why bother when Maharishi has this magical solution?
But there might be some cost for the faithful to participate in the old guru’s peace plan, at least “$30.00 per day” for “room and board” according to Hagelin.
The official name for the plan is the “Invincible America Course” and it’s all part of the Maharishi pitch that includes “Peace Palaces.”
Those palaces have price tags, and Maharishi devotees like film director David Lynch travels around engaged in seemingly perpetual fund raising.
Despite Maharishi’s advanced age the guru wants to keep building his global spiritual empire that reportedly is now worth between $6 and $9 billion dollars.
At thirty bucks a day the guru’s billions could fund a virtual wave of “yogic flyers” to cover the earth, but something tells me that if Maharishi had to personally pay for his peace plan the guru’s spiritual air force would be grounded.
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03.06.06
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 8:49 am by Rick Ross
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi wants the world to know that he has a system for “invincible defense,” but the guru’s plan somehow doesn’t work at his own school in Iowa.
The former spiritual mentor to the Beatles says his plan ”calls for establishing in each nation a small group of Yogic Flyers who will enliven Total Natural Law—the light of God—and create a high level of integrated collective consciousness” This will then become “the basis [for]…permanent peace on earth,” according to a recent press release from the “Global Country of World Peace.”
The guru also claims that his “technologies” create an “all-powerful field of invincibility” that will “make any nation invincible.”
So why didn’t this supposedly technological achievement work at Maharishi University of Management (MUM) in Fairfield, Iowa?
One former MUM enrollee and the family of another who was killed in a stabbing on the school campus in 2004 have filed seperate lawsuits in U.S. District Court. The plaintiff’s allege that MUM was “negligent” and failed to protect its pupils from the rampage of a student known to be violent reports the Des Moines Register.
Maharishi claims that if governments will just support and subsidize his proposed ”all-powerful field” no nation need “sacrifice its youth” in war.
However, according to the recently filed federal lawsuits a youth at MUM was sacrificed needlessly and no “all-powerful field” protected him from a crazed killer.
And what about that murderer, who was once a deeply devoted disciple of Maharishi? Why didn’t the guru’s teachings help him?
MUM student Shuvender Sem, 26, was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity and has since been committed to an Iowa institution for the mentally ill.
This is hardly a ringing endorsement for Maharishi’s ”unified field,” which somehow must have short-circuited when it came to making Sem peaceful.
Maybe before preaching peace plans to the world Maharishi should test them out first at his own schools and see if they work, before hoping to sell them to others.
Or doesn’t his much-touted “Transcendental Meditation” bring about inner peace to the guru’s own devoted followers?
And if it doesn’t work for them why should it work for anyone else?
Instead of the guru’s “Yogic Flyers” attempting to “enliven Total Natural Law” worldwide, perhaps they should try calming down a couple of hundred acres at MUM first, or at least circle its campus periodically to provide better security for the students
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02.16.06
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 1:20 pm by Rick Ross
Dr. Deepak Chopra recently has done “a guest editor stint for the Times of India” reports Starpulse and he has supposedly ”exploded the myth” about the Beatles breakup with their 1960s guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
According to the good doctor Maharishi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, ”simply grew tired of the Fab Four’s drug use.”
The guru also didn’t really fool around with Mia Farrow as repeatedly rumored.
How does Chopra know?
Well, he bumped into the actress at an airport and she allegedly said, “she still loved” Maharishi.
Wow, isn’t that explosive?
Then there is yet another story about how George Harrison actually apologized to his former guru who then “forgave” him.
Touching isn’t it?
Again and again, readers just have to take the doctor’s word for it, since Harrison and John Lennon are gone and Paul McCartney appears disinterested.
But the consistent pattern to Chopra’s stories is that Maharishi is always right.
At no point does he in any way criticize his mentor or relate anything that the guru may have done wrong.
Doctor Deepak’s anecdotes were published by the Times of India, which afforded no less than two complete articles allowing him to essentially trash the Beatles and praise his guru.
One of these puff pieces is titled “Beatles are angels on earth, said Maharishi” and the other “When Maharishi threw Beatles out.”
Why were the Beatles ”angels”?
Well, because Maharishi said so.
But they were bad little cherubs that had to be cast out of the guru’s heavenly kingdom.
At least that’s what Chopra wants readers to believe.
John Lennon told Johnny Carson a different story on the Tonight Show. He said that the supposed ”holy man” was actually more like a “dirty old man.” And the revered rocker even wrote a satirical song mocking Maharishi called “Sexy Sadie.”
During the 1960s the guru that would one day go global used his association with the Beatles to launch a career that would eventually make him richer than all of them put together. The supposedly enlightened CEO rules over a religious empire estimated to be worth billions.
Chopra remains his steadfast and loyal disciple, despite all the bad press. And it appears that the medical doctor has also become Maharishi’s very own “spin doctor.”
Given the way Chopra has marketed himself, maybe he is after all just a ”chip off the old block.”
And perhaps that chip wants a “piece of the rock” when the old guru passes away, after all Maharishi is now 89.
Who better than Deepak Chopra to take up or take over his substantial legacy?
Maybe there is a deal in the works?
Despite Maharishi’s advanced age the old guru remains a tireless self-promoter who comes up with one project after another, which almost always require copious amounts of cash for his corporate coffers to be fulfilled.
CutNews recently reported about his rather expensive “peace plans” and the Associated Press titled an article about him ”All you need is love…and some cash,” an allusion to the Beatles hit somewhat modified to fit Maharishi’s style.
And the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported about the millions he says must be raised to build a new school.
In the end one thing is certain, Maharishi is no ”Fool On The Hill.”
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05.10.04
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 1:26 pm by Rick Ross
Things haven’t been very peaceful in Maharishi, Iowa lately.
One devoted follower attending Maharishi University (MU), named for the 1960s guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, apparently stabbed to death a fellow student reported the Iowa Channel.com.
And it appears that simultaneously elsewhere on campus a MU employee was busy growing marijuana reports Golden Triangle News Service.
Days after the police moved pot-growing equipment from a frat room on campus MU student and accused murderer Shuvender Sem pleaded “not guilty” in court reported the Fairfield Daily Ledger.
Perhaps it was just a bad week for Maharishi, the 92-year-old guru who once taught the Beatles TM (Transcendental Meditation).
So much for the ballyhoo about “yogic flyers” that supposedly can reduce stress and crime by bringing greater peace through meditation.
Maybe they were grounded in Iowa?
Or should the indoor marijuana grower have supplied them with leafy fuel for yogic flight?
Whatever, it’s unlikely that these recent setbacks will stop the aged guru from further fund raising for his so-called “Peace Palaces.”
A murder and marijuana bust will likely just become a minor media glitch for the tireless self-promoter and certainly won’t stop his ever-growing Maharishi/TM multi-billion dollar spiritual empire.
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11.18.03
Posted in Moonies / Unification Church, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology at 2:23 pm by Rick Ross
People often think that old gurus fade away like old soldiers, but some just get really rich.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM) at 92 is one of the oldest gurus around and also it seems possibly the richest.
He was the guru that handed out mantras to the Beatles in the 1960s. Old fans of the “Fab Four” may think after that he just toddled off into obscurity, without the cache of the British rockers.
However, over the following decades Maharishi methodically built a literal spiritual empire, which is now worth more than all the former Beatles fortunes combined.
Paul McCartney is reportedly worth more than one billion dollars, but his old guru has more than triple the wealth of the knighted Beatle known now as Sir Paul.
Maharishi controls combined real estate and business holdings of at least $3.6 billion dollars reports the Hartford Advocate. Though some estimate his vast financial empire is really worth closer to $5 billion.
This may make Maharishi the richest purported “cult” leader in the world.
The TM founder’s closest rivals for that title would likely be:
Rev. Moon 82, who controls the Unification Church and somewhere around $3 billion.
And then there is David Miscavige, the current head of Scientology, a global organization with its own hefty holdings, which some say might easily be worth more than $1 billion.
All this goes to prove that there may be “no business like show business,” but “cults” can really pay off big time.
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11.13.03
Posted in Transcendental Meditation at 6:32 pm by Rick Ross
John Gray’s bizarre claims about his education make him look more like a Martian than a reputable “doctor.”
The New York Post picked up the story first reported at CultNews about the relationship guru who faked an accredited college education.
Gray calls himself a “doctor,” but has no accredited college degree, even though he belongs to professional organizations that require them.
How did this ruse go on for so long?
It is startling that Gray was able to fool so many professionals, national publications, and network television news programs for more than a decade.
Even Oprah and Larry King were taken in, not to mention Harper Collins Gray’s publisher.
CultNews is still trying to verify that John Gray has an accredited high school diploma.
It seems he hooked up with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM) while still attending high school in Houston.
Gray spent nearly a decade as a celibate devotee of Maharishi before launching his own career as a relationship guru.
Did the teenage TMer drop out so he could meditate full-time with his mentor Maharishi?
One thing is certain. Any degree Gray claims beyond high school is not accredited and essentially worthless.
Hopefully, the so-called relationship “expert” at least managed to pick up his high school diploma before hitting the road with Maharishi.
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