MASS-MARKETING MEDITATION — A TRANSCENDENTAL DECEPTION
Aryeh Siegel is a former teacher of Transcendental Meditation who left the cult and is revealing its hidden Hindu truths. He is the author of ‘Transcendental Deception’. Discover more at www.tmdeception.com
When you learn TM, are you participating in a religious ritual? Is it religious even if you don’t intend for it to be? Does it matter? Does the answer differ if you are told that your experience is not religious?
TRANSCENDENTAL DECEPTION #1
The first deception people encounter when they come into contact with TM is being told it is not a religion. Most people walking through the doors of TM centers aren’t looking for a new religion or a spiritual practice. I certainly wasn’t. I wanted to learn how to meditate because I thought it would help me manage the stresses in my life. However, if I had known that I would be participating in Hindu rituals and had understood the meaning of the Sanskrit verses my instructor would be chanting, it’s quite possible that I would have walked away. Every single person who has learned Transcendental Meditation over the last fifty years has participated in the exact same initiation ceremony. And likely, not one of them was told by their TM teacher that what they were doing was in any way religious. That’s because its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, designed it that way.
TRANSCENDENTAL DECEPTION #2
The second deception people encounter when starting TM is ing told that TM mantras have no meaning. The fact is that they are the names of Hindu deities. They have no meaning to people learning TM because their teachers withhold the meaning. TM is rooted in Hinduism — a Hinduism that Maharishi exploited and twisted to suit his personal and financial ambitions.
The question is, why? The answer is simple. Maharishi’s major contribution to meditation was not the secretive initiation procedure or the mantras, but rather the technique itself: the relaxed, non-focused, self-paced repetition of a sound. Before TM, the majority (although not all) of meditation techniques involved some sort of concentration. Maharishi emphasized a non-concentrative meditation practice, while most other approaches didn’t. However, he oversimplified it and tried to use the issue to unfairly discredit other approaches.
MASS-MARKETING MEDITATION
What Maharishi really did to revolutionize meditation was mass-market his non-concentrative technique. Even according to Maharishi, the mantra or word used didn’t actually matter. This is important to note because, if the sound doesn’t matter, there is no reason to pay large amounts of money for a “unique” TM mantra when you can learn the technique from a book. Obscuring this fact, and many others, allowed Maharishi to build an empire.
Where are things today? The David Lynch Foundation has funding of $16million, celebrity endorsements and is running huge PR campaigns to get TM taught in US Public Schools, the military, veterans organizations and more. They continue to pretend that TM is a secular practice, and so far, the majority of people seem to believe them. Now is the time to reveal the transcendental deception.
[Excerpt from ‘Transcendental Deception’, available on amazon.com]
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Aryeh Siegel 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. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and family. Discover more at www.tmdeception.com
[Blog 7. p31–32]