MAHARISHI FRAUD & VOODOO SCIENCE: AN OPEN LETTER TO DAVID LYNCH, PART 2
An Open Letter to David Lynch, David Lynch Foundation.
December 2, 2019
MAHARISHI: A FRAUD FROM THE VERY BEGINNING
Dear Mr. Lynch,
Are you aware that Maharishi was a fraud from the very beginning? Even his name was a fraud. Following Guru Dev’s death under mysterious circumstances, Maharishi began calling himself, Maharishi Bala Brahmachari Mahesh Yogi Maharaj. Yogi isn’t a title at all, but rather a description of someone who claims to be enlightened. If not bestowed by a worthy Hindu teacher or religious body, calling oneself a ‘yogi’ is considered boastful. Brahmachari refers to a celibate. Although Maharishi claimed he was; we both know he wasn’t. Maharaj or Great King (of the yogis) is a title added to great saints’ names. Thus, Maharishi Bala Brahmachari Mahesh Yogi Maharaj translates as The Great Seer, The Enlightened One and Great King. Maharishi served as a clerk-secretary in his guru’s ashram. His caste prevented his acceptance as a monk in his guru’s monastic order, or to dispense mantras. His self-appointed titles would be regarded as blasphemous and ludicrous by anyone familiar with Hinduism.
Wanna get enlightened? It’s a bargain at just $12,000 (not accounting for inflation, depending on when you read this)
THE ENLIGHTENMENT SCAM
In the 1960s and 70s, TM was about enlightenment. The enlightenment formula in India was 10 minutes of TM twice a day for three to five years. In the West, it became 20 minutes of TM twice a day for five to seven years. Enlightenment seekers were offered ever more frequent and expensive courses to speed things along, including weekend, week-long and month-long programs. Teacher training became the next step for the serious seeker. When I became a teacher, the course was six months long, and it cost thousands of dollars. Teacher training consisted of eight to ten hour-long meditations a day, with a bit of yoga and breathing exercises thrown in. Evenings were spent watching videos of Maharishi’s take on Hinduism. We also memorized the Hindu religious ceremony known as the ‘puja’ in Sanskrit and how to perform offerings to the Hindu gods whom we learned are present during the puja.
Maharishi knew enlightenment was a scam from the very beginning. According to Maharishi, his Guru Dev spent 45 years, from the age of nine, practicing the most arduous spiritual pursuits to achieve whatever level he attained. How could anyone ever get enlightened through TM? The answer then, as now, 60 years later, is no one.
THE $12k SIDHI PROGRAM
By the mid-1970s, when no one reached enlightenment, Maharishi introduced the Sidhis. He promoted them as the superhighway to enlightenment. The course cost between three and five thousand dollars ($12–20,000 today). Not only was enlightenment guaranteed, but every Sidha would have superpowers, including the ability to levitate. It took a minimum of four hours a day to practice the Sidhis, and every session concluded with reading Hindu religious texts for fifteen minutes and rest. (Current TM teachers, who are known as governors, have meditation programs that take six hours a day.)
Sidha courses were mostly held in TM-owned facilities and staffed by young TMers working for room and board, and credits to attend the course. Within the first six months, an estimated 2500 people, mostly TM teachers, were instructed. Maharishi likely netted over $25 million in 2019 dollars.
LEVITATION INSANITY (i.e. JUMPING ON A MATTRESS. WHY NOT JUST HAVE A PILLOWFIGHT?!)
The biggest draw of the Sidhis was levitation. In the late 1970s, at press conferences throughout the US, TM produced fake photographs of young men appearing to hover in mid-air. In reality, thin young men with strong thigh muscles were hopping around on their bottoms on dense foam. I was among them. When, after several years, not one person was levitating, Maharishi blamed atmospheric stress, and he offered a solution. The brain wave coherence generated by groups of Sidhas meditating together would eliminate atmospheric stress. Once the atmosphere was purified, Sidhas would fly through the air like birds and in the process, reduce crime and usher in an age of world peace.
TM COMPLETELY REDUCED CRIME (EXCEPT IT DIDN’T…AND CRIME INCREASED!!)
The centerpiece of TM’s claims to reduce crime and bring world peace, is a fatally flawed crime reduction study conducted in 1995, in Washington D. C. Proof would come from an experiment to reduce crime in the City by 20 percent. The reduction would result from the coherence created when thousands of advanced TM practitioners would meditate together over fourteen weeks. TM described this as “The Maharishi Effect.”
In his book Voodoo Science, Robert Park described a press conference held before the experiment began in which lead researcher, John Hagelin explained how the crime reduction project would be a scientific demonstration that provided proof of a unified superstring field — an abstract and highly speculative physical theory that attempts to connect all the forces in nature. According to Hagelin, large numbers of advanced TM practitioners meditating together in the same location would access this force, which he referred to as “collective consciousness.”
THE HIGHEST MURDER RATE IN THE CITY’S HISTORY.
Over the period, the highest murder rate occurred in the city’s history. At a press conference held when the study concluded, Hagelin acknowledged that the murder rate had increased, but emphasized that “brutal crime” was down. Park pondered the benefit: “Murderers shot their victims with a clean shot between the eyes rather than bludgeoning them the old-fashioned way!”
The following year, Hagelin returned with a 55-page report on the experiment. At a press conference, he claimed violent crime had dropped 18 percent. One reporter from the Washington Post queried, “An 18% reduction compared to what?” Hagelin said the actual crime rate compared to the crime that would have occurred without the meditators meditating. How did he know what the rate would have been? Hagelin answered that by using a “scientifically rigorous time-series analysis that included not only crime data but such factors as weather and fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field.”
According to Peter Woit, a theoretical physicist and senior lecturer in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University, Hagelin’s study has since been rejected by “virtually every theoretical physicist in the world” who evaluated it. Andrew Skolnick, a noted medical writer, wrote, “Indeed, it took Hagelin six years to find a journal willing to publish his much-ridiculed Washington, DC, crime study. It’s not impossible to get flawed and bogus science published in a research journal; it just takes longer.”
POPPING TM’S BOGUS SCIENCE BALLOON
In 1986, Heinz Pagels, then executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, wrote,
There is no known connection between meditation states and states of matter in physics. Individuals not trained professionally in modern physics could easily come to believe, based on the presentations in the Maharishi literature, that a large number of qualified scientists agree with the purported connection between modern physics and meditation methods. Nothing could be further from the truth. The notion that what physicists call ‘the vacuum state’ has anything to do with consciousness is nonsense. The claim that large numbers of people meditating help reduce crime and war by creating a unified field of consciousness is foolishness of a high order. The presentation of the ideas of modern physics side by side, and apparently supportive of, the ideas of the Maharishi about pure consciousness can only be intended to deceive those who might not know any better.
Sincerely,
Aryeh Siegel
Author, Transcendental Deception
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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.
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