The author has himself practiced meditation for 13 years, 6 of which were spent in TM, and in addition to this he took a half month leadership course with the MAHARISHI. On account of my experience I strongly warn collagues against this and similar 'tharapies' as they neither promote peace of mind nor any deeper awareness.
TM is the trademark for a hinduistic meditation that was promoted in the West by the Indian monk Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1959 [2]. It is deeply rooted in Indian religious thinking and we can only underdtand TM by bringing in these aspects. Maharishi on his side has opposed all such attempts of interpretation as he has realised that the people of the West will only accept the method if the Hindu origins are camoflaged, hence the method's highly confusing and nondescript name.
The Indian way of meditation is firmly linked with the Hindu religion's belief in spirits. In the (Hindu) canonical scripture, the Veda, man is taught that no one can escape the power of the spirits but can at most receive good will from them through sacrifices (yagja).
The Veda is also a social system where people are divided into castes (varna). Each caste has its spirits, with the exception of the casteless (shruda) who are not allowed to take part in the official religion. This strong polytheism, built on the Veda, is in the West known as Hinduism.
Parallel to the Vedic religion we find another mainstream in the Indian religion: yoga. This teaching was, according to tradition, founded by the Kashmirian philosopher SHRI SADA SHIVA around 3000 BC and later developed by philosophers like SHANKARE, PATANJALI, and BUDDHA.
In yoga they teach that man can free himself from the sufferings of the world through meditation (sadhana). According to the various methods of meditation that gradually developed, different sects were formed.
The sects are nonetheless separated into two major groups: The ones who left the Vedic religion and taught that man could be free without the worshipping of spirits (for instance, Buddha), and the ones who insisted that you had to worship spirits to be redeemed (for instance, Krishna). Common to both groups is that they stress that no one can be free without the help of a teacher - a GURU (which derives from gu = saves from + ru = darkness).
Complete submission and worshipping of your guru is the key to success in meditation. The reason for such a submission to spirits and people is that the Indian philosophy does not know a personal God (Yahweh) as does Christianity.
TM, which belongs to the spirit-worshipping aspect of yoga, was founded by Shri Krishna in about 2500 BC as an integral part of the Vedic religion. In the 16th century the method was reformed by the priest SHANKARA who wanted to reacreate a pure and fanatic Hinduism through the foundation of the SWAMI ORDER. This order is comparable to the Roman Catholic Church's Jesuit Order, a fanatical, puritanical order of monks. The leaders within the Swami Order were given the title shankara-acharya.
GURU DEV, who was the Maharishi's teacher, was one of the four leaders of the Swami Order in his day. In the 1950s the Maharishi claims to have received orders from his teacher to "save" the West through meditation, a mission which innumerable gurus with similar sounding messages attempted both earlier and since.
The Maharishi, who has a university degree (BSc in Physics) understood quickly that his method needed to be renamed and that the Hindu contents had to be camouflaged if the people of the West were to accept it. The name sadhana (sadhana = to realise a spiritual goal) therefore became TM (Transcendental Meditation) which means to "meditate on the beyond", laterr renamed, "The Science of Creative Intelligence".
The method itself is mantra-meditation, i.e. a self-induced hypnosis by mechanical repetition of certain word combinations (mantra japa). The word mantra (mantra = mind + tra = lifts up) are Sanskrit words of a quite definite rythm, sonority and meaning! According to the Maharishi their meaning is insignificant and the meditator therefore never gets to know what it means [2][7][9].
The reason for this secrecy is obvious - the mantras are names of Hindu spirits (devas)! According to Hindu occultism, man is steered by certain spirits (Siddhi) which can help the man to gain certain powers when they are allowed to dwell in man. The name of your reigning spirit (istha deva) is bija mantra, i.e. "power word". (IN reality, bija = seed + mantra = word). In TM your bija mantra is chosen according to age (shown in brackets):
- ING (3-10)
- IN (10-12)
- INGA (12-14)
- INA (14-16)
- AING (16-18)
- AIM (18-20)
- AINGA (20-22)
- AIMA (22-24)
- SHIRING (24-30)
- SHIRIN (30-35)
- HIRING (35-40)
- HIRIN (40-45)
- KIRING (45-50)
- KIRIN (50-55)
- SHIAM (55-60)
- SHIAMA (60+)
Your complete mantra at the first consecration is then only chosen according to age. For the year group 16-18 your personal mantra will be AING which is the biji-mantra for the goddess SARASVATI (goddess for happiness and luck). The pupil does not, of course, get informed of this. The second lesson is SHRI AING which means, "I honour AING" (shri = honourable). The third lesson is SHRI AING NAMA which means, "I honour the One whose name is AING" (nama = name, invocation). In the fourth lesson you area sked to repeat the mantra in the heart region as a sign that you open your feelings for that spirit you are worshipping. Finally, in the fifth lesson, you will get to know what your bija mantra stands for. Your full mantra is then, in our example, SHRI AING NAMA SARASVATI AIN NAMA which means: "I honour the one whose name is 'aing', which is the name for (the goddess) Sarasvati.
When you are given your personal mantra by a TM teacher, this happens at a special ceremony: guru puja (guru = teacher + puja = worship of) where the teacher calls the spirits of the dead master (which is not possible according to the Bible) all the way back from Shankara to Guru Dev. As a symbolic sign of submission the pupil shall sacrifice a fruit (the symbol of the fruit of your work,(karma) a flower (the symbol of your thoughts, vritti and a handkerchief (the symbol for your caste, varna).
That is, the pupil dedicates thoughts, actions and deeds to the spirits in order to get knowledge of their secret name: mantra. As a reward the spirit will take you to his world, Ioka, at the moment of death. According to Hindu mythology there are seven spiritual worlds from the earthly to the seventh and supernatural paradise (Brham-loka). All classical meditations, including TM, have seven steps.
Publicly the Maharishi says that when one meditates, one comes to God, but to his inner circle he says that the mantra leads to one of the seven spiritual realms [7].
A mechanical and unreflected repetition of your mantra for 20 minutes morning and evening will, according to the Maharishi, lead to spiritual release [2][7]. This "release" (moksha) consists of experiencing yourself as eternally happy and unbound, whilst the realities of the world appear as illusiory. This ego-centric happiness the Maharishi calls "Cosmic Consciousness" and according to his own statements he is at present the only one who is in this condition.
As the realities of the world fade away, the meditator gradually loses interest in the world, and the peace the Maharishi talks about is experienced by most as a condition of apathy.
For the weak egoed person such a distortion of perspective becomes catastrophic: he downright drowns in his own world of fantasies. The Swiss psychiatrist C.G.Jung, who had deep insight into oriental mysticism, called this phenomenon "the unconscious flooding of the ego", and he warned the West against treading the ways of oriental meditation as early as the 1930s - a warning that may well be repeated considering the increasing amount of deviant behavioural patterns caused by Indian occultism [4].
The term "meditation-psychoses" is already an established term within circles to meditation, and I myself have had patients like these for therapeutic treatment who only got better after leaving TM! [2][3]. Especially cruel was, perhaps, the TM murder in Aarhus (Denmark) where a young but experienced meditator, apparently without motive, committed a ritual murder.
The Maharishi, who for a long time has acknowledged this problem, claims incidentally, that this was due to erroneous meditation. But at the so-called Sidhi courses in England, where TM is running under the strict supervision of experienced meditation teachers, the number of cases of meditation-psychoses was so large that many participants sued TM. The topic was given much attention in the British press.
On the other hand, one cannot deny that TM has advantageous physiologically relaxing effects [2], but the method is not unique in bringing about such relaxation. TM-researchers, however, state that TM is insurpassable for bringing about deep relaxation [2][7].
One of the foremost researchers within TM, Harold Benson from New York, discovered, however, that this claim was without any foundation and could produce in his laboratory the same effect when the patient meditated on words like; love, peace, a simple number, or just simply nothing. This completely discredited the claim that it was the TM mantras that had the magic effect, a discovery Benson has been violently criticised for by other TM-"researchers" [1][2].
TM's "stress research" must not be taken seriously but ought to be considered as a sales-promoting device. Most reports are made by TM practitioners or TM teachers who are more interested in proving TM's excellence than finding out how efficient the method is compared to other methods [2].
Control-tests are completely missing. The data put forth is sold, as soon as it is produced, viâ an efficient sales apparatus backed with millions in capital, not to help people full of stress but to entice intellectual people into accepting the method on a "scientific" basis.
If the Maharishi hadn't used this promotional technique, his method would probably have remained what it is: one among many Hindu sects that promise easy-bought salvation to a confused Western world [9].
TM is in its essential nature Hindu and breaks with all Western thinking in more ways than one. It promotes selfishness, denies faith in God (Yahweh), does away with social responsibilties and dismisses rationalism to the advantage of occultism. The scanty references to western science only occur if it can be used advantageously for promoting TM.
TM is, by the way, not only meditation but a part of a multimillion pound/dollar project that the Maharishi calls The World Government on which he works to create nations controlled by TM-faithful leaders with himself at the top.
The fact that doctors are to recommend this product to patients has nothing to do with medical science but sounds more like accepting a religious faith in the name of science. This breaks with all practice in school-medicine and doesn't serve either doctor or patient, but solely the Maharishi's sales-promotion. What will patients think when they get to know that the doctor recommends the invocation of spirits to lower their blood-pressure?
And what are we going to say to Christien patients? Shall we tell them to give up their Christianity in order to be healed by the methods of the Maharishi? TM's assurances that this cannot happen must be disregarded, as I myself had to leave TM to choose Christianity.
Besides, TM is a religion, something which has been concluded at the Courts of Appeal in the USA, without protest from TM [9].
And there is another point: India has for thousands of years been led by religious leaders with a philosophy which is identical to the Maharishi's. This country is today one of the world's most backward nations, and is the only remaining country in the world where the caste system is still highly esteemed in accordance with the religious books, which the Maharishi also honours. That alone is proof enough.
The Maharishi does not want to hear about Yahshua (Jesus) suffering death on the cross to save you and me. We ourselves are to be "gods" by regular meditation! We can only conclude that Transcendental Meditation is an anti-Christian religion with an anti-Christian goal - that worships Indian goddesses (demons). BEWARE OF TM!
[1] Benson, H. "The Relaxation Response" (W.Morrow & Co., New York, 1975).
[2] Bloomfield, H., Caine, M.P. & Jaffe, D.T. "TM, Discovering Inner Energy and Overcoming Distress" (Delacorte Press, New York, 1975).
[3] Frenche, A., Schmid, A.C. & Ingalls, E.J. Nerv.Ment.Dis. (1975, 161, 54-58).
[4] Jung, C.G. "Concerning Mandala Symbolism" Collected Works, vol.9, part 1, and vol.12 (Bollinger XX, Princeton University press, New Jersey, 1958).
[5] Kasamatsu, A. & Hirai, T. "An Electroencephalographic Study of Zen Meditation", I.Tart., C.T., ed. "Altered States of Consciousness" (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1969, pp.489-501).
[6] Kü-Yü, L. "The Secrets of Chinese Meditation" (Rider Company, London, 1964).
[7] Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. "The Science of Being and Art of Living" (SRM Publications, Stuttgart, 1966).
[8] Taylor-Stermann, L. Am.J.Nirs. (1975, 75, 2006-2012).
[9] Aagaard, J. "TM and Religion", Update (Publ of Dialogue Center, 1979, vol.3, 45-52).
[10] Yesudian, S. & Haich, E. "Yoga and Health" (Unwin Paperback, London, 1953).
