REDISCOVERING THE TM NIGHTMARE
Aryeh Siegel was a teacher of Transcendental Meditation in the mid-1970s and worked directly with the Maharishi. Siegel eventually left the movement and ran a community mental health center for several years, before working as a planner in a large Jewish Federation. After nine years he left the Federation to become a commercial real estate broker (which he continue to do to this day).
After leaving the organization, TM faded into my distant past until 2015, when I noticed a steady parade of well-publicized, glowing endorsements of TM by various celebrities. I couldn’t help myself. I got curious about this most recent revival and visited TM.org, the organization’s flagship website for the U.S. market. I found more of the same: celebrities extolling the benefits of TM and claims of TM’s positive effect on a host of medical and mental health issues.
DAVID LYNCH AND FRIENDS
I learned that David Lynch had become the chief promoter of TM in the U.S. I didn’t know who David Lynch was, but he was clearly primarily responsible for the wave of celebrity endorsements. In addition to large-scale conferences and fundraisers targeting educators and the military, in the spring of 2017, the David Lynch Foundation held a sold-out fundraiser at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Hugh Jackman hosted the evening, with entertainment provided by Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno. Musical acts by Ke$ha and others added more star power.
THE MISSING MAHARISHI
But where was Maharishi? Maharishi introduced TM to the world over sixty years before and controlled the organization with an iron grip until his death in 2008. Now he barely had a presence on the TM.org website. Aside from a thumbnail photo relegated to the top-left corner of the site, Maharishi was missing in action.
Jerry Seinfeld at the David Lynch Foundation
My wife Tova and I became TM teachers in the pursuit of higher consciousness. Higher consciousness was all Maharishi talked about in our teacher training courses and the video discourses we watched for hours on end. Today, there’s not even a hint of “higher consciousness” on TM.org. There’s no mention of the TM-Sidhi techniques that take between up to six hours a day to perform. Maharishi promised the sidhis would accelerate enlightenment and Sidhas would have the ability to levitate, have super strength and vision, along with a holy host of other supernatural powers, including omniscience and eternal life. We, his faithful teachers, would do our part to end crime, create world peace, make nations invincible, and bring heaven down to earth. I wondered — how had Maharishi’s lofty promises of enlightenment been reduced to such mundanities as lower blood pressure and better sleep?
CUT-PRICE MEDITATION
I did some more digging and found that the price of instruction had dropped from $2,500 at the time he died, to just under $1,000 in recent years. Still a high price for meditation, but an alarming decline nevertheless. One explanation makes the most sense: the organization is struggling to recruit new initiates. That would explain the PR push. But why was Maharishi downplayed? Why was higher consciousness absent from the pitch? The answer I found was that TM is, once again, courting government funding.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS: AN OLD TARGET TAKES ON NEW LIFE:
A major goal of the David Lynch Foundation is to expand teaching TM in public schools. A major goal of this book is to prevent that from happening. Beyond teaching kids to relax, the TM organization and the David Lynch Foundation want the public to believe TM is a cure for post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, hyperactivity, drug abuse, and even homelessness. And, they want government funding to pay for TM instruction. Taxpayer-funded programs offer tremendous income potential for the TM organization. However, to gain acceptance in public schools, TM has to steer clear of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution separating church and state. To do so, it has to keep secret its cosmic goals and pose as a secular, scientific, relaxation technique. It has to seem as American as apple pie.
This is the great lie of Transcendental Meditation. Things are fine as long as they pretend to be a secular organization, but the game is over when their Hindu roots are revealed. There were two landmark rulings banning TM from being taught in Public Schools, but they continue promoting it nevertheless. In may take another lawsuit to get TM removed once and for all.
[Excerpt from ‘Transcendental Meditation’, 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
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