It’s ironic, if not a synchro, that TM is the well known abbreviation for both Transcendental Meditation and trademark. That’s because TM, the entrepreneurial meditation company, has literally trademarked meditation—or at least that’s how it seems.
Of course, you can meditate without signing up for TM, but if you read their website it sounds as if their option is the one that’s both easy and it works.
As a meditation teacher, I must confess I’ve never gotten involved in TM. The reason: I’m just naturally suspicious of attempts to corral meditation and charge for mantras. It seems crass. I feel the same way about energy companies that want to harness solar energy and sell it as their own product. C’mon, it’s the sun.
So, call me cheap. I never paid for a mantra. But maybe deep down I didn’t like the name, or at least the ‘dental’ part of transcendental. It sounded painful. Maybe that’s why they just call it TM. Okay, I’m making fun.
From all the advocacy for TM generated from the scientific, business and entertainment communities, transcendental meditation apparently works for many people who participate. I guess sometimes we feel that if we pay for something, then it must be worthwhile, and we better practice to get our money’s worth.
TM also homogenizes and Westernizes meditation. The TM website describes it as effortless. “Unlike other techniques, the TM technique involves no concentration, contemplation or control of your mind. It is effortless and enjoyable, and can be practiced sitting comfortably in a chair.”
Wow, sounds like you could be watching your favorite TV show and eating popcorn at the same time. (Yes, I’m making fun again. It beats getting angry.) Meditation is more challenging than that. But it’s a good come-on to get people interested.
Lynn Stuart Parramore took a TM course in Manhattan and paid $2,500 for it. Writing in AlterNet.org, she disassembles her experience. “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.”
You can read Lynn’s entire article here. It’s well written, and an eye-opener.
That said, it’s worth pointing out that more than 350 studies published in 160 scientific journals have found positive results from practicing TM. You’re more relaxed and focused, you’re more in control of your emotions. The practice reduces stress, anxiety, and fatigue, and promotes balanced functioning of mind and body.
Of course, similar results have been found in studies of other types of meditation. In other words, other methods also work, even ones where you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a mantra.
If you’re thinking about beginning meditation, should you try TM? Think of it as one option, an expensive one. If you’re employed with a corporation that advocates TM, and some do, go for it—especially if it’s a perk, or at least you’re getting a corporate discount.
But other methods also work, and you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a mantra. The bottom line: OM is free.
What you don’t understand about TM is that the “technique of TM is simply “think a mantra effortlessly,” which isn’t really a technique at all.
TM teachers spend 5 months, in-residence, memorize the right words to use to teach medtation, as well as HOW to use those words. This includes the body language, hand-gestures and tone-of-voice that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used when teaching.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi created the TM organization to honor his teacher, and devised the teaching methodology so that just about anyone, even people who were NOT the least bit enlightened, could teach other people meditation. This flies in the face of his monastic tradition, which traditionally says that initiation into dhyan can only come from an enlightened guru, but it seems obvious that the overwhelimingly painstaking attention to detail pays off.
On the level of EEG coherence, it turns out that highly experienced practitioners of other forms of meditation tend to reduce overall connectivity between various parts of the brain, as measured by how in-synch all the parts of the brain become during meditation, as compared to how in-sych they are outside of meditation:
https://www.amaye.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/med-connectivity-EEG-tomog.pdf
Reduced functional connectivity between cortical sources in five meditation traditions detected with lagged coherence using EEG tomography
Even beginners in something as simple as Benson’s Relaxation Response show this same reduction in functional connectivity during meditation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4030190/
sLORETA intracortical lagged coherence during breath counting in meditation-naïve participants
On the other hand, higher global brainwave coherence is a hallmark of the enlightenment state found in certain long-term TM practitioners, which is a situation where the EEG pattern found during “pure consciousness” during TM is stabilized outside of TM practice:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12316/full
Transcendental experiences during meditation practice
The effects of TM on hypertension are so much more consistent than those from mindfulness, that, even though 25x as many studies on mindfulness are published every year as TM studies, the American Heart Association says that they tell doctors that TM is the only meditation practice that has sufficiently consistent effects on blood pressure that the AHA says it can be recommended in clinical practice for the treatment of hypertension as a secondary treatment for hypertension. The AHA specifically says that all other meditation practices need more research (25x as many studies published every year, and the AHA still won’t give mindfulness a nod):
https://hyper.ahajournals.org/content/early/2013/04/22/HYP.0b013e318293645f.full.pdf
Beyond Medications and Diet: Alternative Approaches to Lowering Blood Pressure: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association
TM’s effects on PTSD in African war refugees are so overwhelmingly effective that already United Nations relief agencies have inquired as to how fast the David Lynch Foundation’s African PTSD relief project can be expanded to make TM available to all 100 million people with PTSD in Africa:
https://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/africa.html
And the effectiveness of TM on PTSD in school kids is equally noteworthy. James Dierke was principal of Visatacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco for many years, and nothing worked. As Dierke put it:
My html is not so good. I meant to quote James Dierke as saying:
“Most of the students in our school have a family member who has been shot, who did the shooting, or who saw a shooting.”
Instead, the quote was omitted and I ended up with the weird italic formatting above.
I was hoping that a TM person would respond and straighten me out. Thank you. I am a meditation instructor myself, have been for four-plus years, and 22 years as a yoga teacher. I also charge a fee, but only $12 for meditation class. Namaste.
TM teacher training is 5-6 months long, in-residence, as I said.
By all accounts (I’m not a TM teacher) it is quite challenging. The fee for the training is currently $16,500, which includes room and board, but there’s a big push to train younger teachers, so if you qualify, between scholarships and forgivable loans, you can become a TM teacher for as little as $1,500, which includes the training pluse room & board for 5 months.
Of course, you not only have to be young to qualify for that kind of financial support, but you have to be willing to teach in inner city schools, or on Indian reservations, and similar places. In other words, you have to be willing to join the equivalent of the TM Peace Corps for several years.
Everyone complains about how much TM costs to learn, but not only do TM teachers invest a large chunk of time and money in becoming a TM teacher, but all active TM teachers are required to provide free lifetime followup for anyone who ever learned TM, even if it was from a TM teacher who died before the active TM teacher was even born. The TM teacher’s cut is about $500 per student, but that pays for rent for both the TM teacher’s house, as well as the TM center (often they are one and the same), and the TM center is expected to keep its doors open for any TMer who ever learned. This means, ideally, that TM teaching is a full-time job, even if no-one learned this week (or month).
The current price was set by the old monk a few years before he died, because he realized that the only way to get the entire society to meditate was by getting the wealthy and influential people to meditate, and “the rich don’t shop at poor stores.”
The local TM center can offer scholarships and grants to lower the price for the non-1%ers, and if you write a paper letter (not email) to the David Lynch Foundation explaining your financial situation, they often are willing to help make the price more affordable (the TM teacher gets paid at least partially by the DLF in that case).
The DLF gets the people who pay full-price without blinking to donate money to help others learn, and about 500,000 people have learned TM for free over the past 9 years thanks to their generosity. Whether you learn TM for the full price, or for $0, you still get the same free lifetime followup from any active TM teacher. When TM is taught in schools, TM teachers are assigned to work full-time in that school, providing support for all students, faculty and staff. In some cases, the TM teacher comes to the student’s house, rather than the student traveling to the TM teacher -remember, the entire school gets this kind of service for the period of the contract (typically the school year).
The TM organization is a non-profit, and the overall goals of the organization are to create world peace, and eventually “Heaven on Earth.”
To that end, large groups of meditators are being created around the world, so that twice-daily group meditation will be practiced every single day.
At the TM headquarters for the USA in Fairfield, IA, you can get paid up to $700 per month to meditate for world peace 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. This project has been going on for about a decade, and wealthy donors have provided about $100,000,000.00 over the past 10 years to try to keep the numbers around 2,000 meditating together 8 hours a day, twice a day.
The TM organization is reasonably large, and the money is obtained from fees and donations is spent according to the guidelines set up by the old monk before he died.
The TM HQ in Iowa has an accredited university associated with it. You might find the commencement speech given to this year’s graduates worth watching. You might even recognize the speaker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V80-gPkpH6M
It sounds kind of like a religion with converts, big money, we are the way, the only way to meditate mentality. If that works for you fine, but there was meditation before TM and there will be meditation after TM.
The TM organization was designed to last indefinitely. Whether it will or not, who knows?
But TM has effects on the brain that don’t show up consistently from any other practice.
This is easily explained because all TM teachers are trained to teach exactly the same way.
As the research on meditation and PTSD becomes stronger, I personally believe that TM will be found to be far, far more effective than other practices for deaing with that specific issue.
Given that tehre’s 100 million people in Africa alone who are thought to have PTSD, this means that TM is going to be around for a very long time. Centuries, I’m afraid.
Sorry, I meant a ‘cult,’ not a religion.
>>But TM has effects on the brain that don’t show up consistently from any other practice.
I can believe that.
Here’s what one former teacher has to say:
https://suggestibility.org/
https://www.suggestibility.org/
That TM teacher isn’t a scientist.
After reviewing all available research on all forms of meditation, the American Heart Association released its statement, and the lead author, Robert Brook, who doesn’t practice TM and knew nothing about it before he helped write that paper, is now doing his own study on TM to see if it affects how the body responds to the stress of air pollution.
He was impressed enough with the main TM research into cardiology, that he shared the podium with him recently at the TM university and spoke for about an hour:
https://new.livestream.com/mum/brook
and he IS a scientist.
That teacher believes in the scientific research about TM. That’s not where he has a problem.As you can see he finds other things disturbing about TM. I can’t help but think of the similarities to Scientology, regarding the cultiish nature.
I just heard from one TM researcher. There’s been no similar study on “functional connectivity” done on TM yet, so me claiming for certain that TM is different on this measure is unsupported. The research team that did those “functional connectivity” studies IS doing such a study on TM later this year, so…
“We will see what unfolds.”
Is that independent research or TM people researching TM?
The team that published that study on “functional connectivity” and meditation is comprised of some of hte most famous EEG researchers in the world. They all work at the Key Institute in Zurich, and none of them practice TM or any other form of meditation, as far as I know:
https://www.uzh.ch/keyinst/
Dietrich Lehmann has been publishing research on EEG for about 50 years now.
In other words, yeah, not only are these guys independent of TM or any other meditation, but they’re amongst the tip-top EEG researchers in the world.
If (IF) they say TM is unique on some measure, everyone will take notice.
Joe Kellet is being every bit as deceptive as he says that the TM organization is, when he says this:
While it is true that early posters on the TM-Siddhis were deceptive, the actual presentation made by the TM organization to TMers was always upfront about things. No-one was floating n 1976 when they first started teaching the TM-Sidhis, and in fact, after someone sued them for “false advertising,” they made it a requirement that you had to write out, in long-hand, that you understood that the TM-Sidhis were not to obtain magical powers, but were a form of mental practice designed to develop higher states of consciousness, and that the TM organization was not promising that you or anyone else would ever obtain any power.
I heard this in 1976 at the first formal presentation on the topic, and by the time I learned in 1984, it was a requirement that people explain that they understood it.
Kellet goes on to say:
Those people aren’t just “learning” how to levitate. They are also “learning”, they sincerely believe, how to become invisible. In fact, they are “learning” quite a number of supernatural powers. And that’s just the beginning of what they’re getting into. How did those people get from just wanting to relax to finding themselves practicing levitation and invisibility?
Is there a way of editing or at least reviewing the stuff we write? I keep making stupid mistakes in formatting.
I don’t know We can edit comments from inside the dashboard Don’t worry about the formatting stuff. The content comes through fine.
There’s something in what you say about “if we pay for something, then it must be worthwhile” and often we think the more expensive it is the better it is. So TM works and people are more likely to stick with it because of that cost. If it costs nothing or very little, why bother.
But, in saying that, I agree with you. It’s a very expensive mantra and OM is free, though people seem to pronounce it or prolong the sounds in differing ways.
I prefer the A-U-M version of OM. Three sounds. AHH…OOO…MMMM.
I so agree with your post.
A beginning meditation I often suggest is to relax and stare at a plant or tree.
As you stare at it notice the colors, the veins and trace the outline of it.
Imagine in drinking up nutrients from the soil.
This is a good starter, I have found, for people who tell me they can’t quiet their mind or “see nothing” with eyes closed.
It is also something you can do anywhere.
Once they see that they can quiet their mind and they feel relaxed they get excited.
I’ve had so many people tell me that meditation doesn’t work for them until they try this.
“It’s so simple!”
You don’t need a mantra .
That’s a good one, though I find open-eye meditation more difficult. I would prefer visualizing the plant rather than staring at the physical tree or plant.