|
|
|
|
Papers I Wrote and a Video I made about TM |
|
|
|
|
Books and Links to Websites that changed my perception of TM, and oher links. |
|
|
|
|
Addendum, May 18, 2010 - I have decided to start doing TM and the Sidhis program again. I'm going to start slowly. I think I had been doing it incorrectly in the past; I think I was forcing it. I've been doing it again for about 4 days after not practicing the technique, except very occasionally, for over 10 years.
My Experiences with
Transcendental Meditation® (TM®)
This May Be very much critical of TM®, so don’t read it if you are a proponent. If you are in doubt then you should very likely read this article, which is my own story from start to finish regarding Transcendental Meditation®. You can certainly come to your own conclusions. All that is written here is the truth, as I see it.
As of this moment in time I realize I didn’t really know what I was doing at the age of 24 and I didn’t really know what was best for me. I didn’t have a clue. I started practicing Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) at this young age of 24. This was many years ago. I was told it is an easy, effortless technique to gain enlightenment. At first I was told: through TM® one would gain enlightenment in about 8 years. Yeah, right. I now believe that I am very suggestible. Read on….. if you dare….
I first heard about TM® by reading the book about the Beatles, I believe, called “The Beatles” by Hunter Davies. I also read some articles in magazines about the Beatles and TM®. I remember that they talked about learning TM® and how it was beneficial in many areas of life. I was a real fan of the Beatles! I was also drawn to learn TM® because it came out of India and I was always drawn to things and ideas from India. I wanted to improve myself. I was extremely shy. When I was in high school I was so scared of speaking in front of even my small group of classmates that I would throw up on my way to the school bus on the day that I had speech class. I hardly talked, and people in my extended family called me the shy one; the quiet one. Also, even in High School I was searching for “something more” because I knew that there was more to life than what I saw on this the physical plane of existence. I read several books including a book called “Yoga, Youth and Reincarnation” and I read several Edgar Cayce books. I wanted to learn more about reincarnation because I knew in my heart that reincarnation is reality. I became a bit interested in learning more about Witchcraft as well, but never got very far with it. I did become interested in eating more healthy foods.
I was sitting at my parents’ home, in Methuen, Massachusetts, one evening in 1974 reading the newspaper, and discovered that same evening there was a lecture at the library in Lawrence about TM®. I wanted to find out more about it. Initially I attended the two required Introductory meetings (required to learn TM). The two TM® teachers who led the meetings were very sweet and adorable. I was totally sold out and hooked. Then I went through the interview process and was eventually initiated; I was taught the TM® technique. There is a very religious-looking procedure performed by the TM teacher when one is initiated. It is called The Puja and includes chanting in front of an alter and placing of fruit, flowers and a white handkerchief brought by the new initiate on to the alter. The TM people say it is not a religion but I have experienced a lot of very religious-looking sessions. Check out my video on YouTube if you'd Like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0smU-7FHzyE
There is at least one Web site on the Internet by a TM® teacher now that says that those who attend the Introductory Lectures are being hypnotized. http://www.suggestibility.org/ I've also read that the Puja routine is actually hypnosis. Some people also say that TM® is a hypnosis technique; that we are hypnotized when we practice TM®. Is this true? I don’t know yet. There are also Web sites that say that TM® is a cult group. Well, I do think this is true, that many of the people who have joined the TM® Organization and become obsessed with “doing their program” regularly and with doing what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says to do are part of a cult group. But I don’t think the people who only meditate 20 minutes twice a day (or less) are part of a cult group.
After being initiated I attended the four nights of checking as I had agreed to do at the TM® center in North Andover, Massachusetts. The above mentioned web site also says there is hypnotism going on during these “checking” meetings. I know for a fact that anyone who is now involved in TM® and is an exponent of TM® would vehemently disagree with this idea. They would point out all the research done that says that TM® is good for anyone. The web site and some of the books I have red say that the research is false and created by the TM® Organization and that any bad psychological results of TM® are hidden and never spoken about.
Anyway, I was drawn in and wanted to attend more meetings even after the four nights of checking. I started attending the weekly meetings at the TM® center. I heard about the “Residence Courses” where the attendees hear lectures by TM® teachers and watch videos of Maharishi talking about TM®, and where participants "round" for a weekend or a bit longer. "Rounding" is doing extra sessions of TM® along with Yoga asanas - exercises/postures that were taught during these residence courses. I’ve read that during these residence courses we were more and more hypnotized. We were told to not make any decisions during these courses. My first Residence Course was in New Hampshire. I also attended at least one in Massachusetts and one in Connecticut. I don’t know if my shyness improved or not, because I pretty much stayed to myself. Even though I was so shy, I still met many interesting people during these courses.
Eventually the TM® teachers at my TM® center in Andover mentioned to me about the opportunity that I might want go be on staff at the TM® Academy for the Science of Creative Intelligence “retreat” center in upstate New York. I applied and was accepted; and I quit my job of a couple of years at that time. I wanted to become a TM® teacher. I thought TM® would eventually decrease my shyness, and my self-esteem would increase over time and that I would be able to become a TM® teacher; I wanted to help other people find peace, contentment and enlightenment. I found out somehow or other that when one was accepted to be on staff, it was preferred that we did not travel outside of the academy, so I had my mother drive me to the academy and had her leave me there with no car (see picture to the left of me shortly after I arrived). Was I so hypnotized that I wanted to do whatever the TM® people told me to do without question?
I worked at this place for about 10 months. During that time the staff members got room and board, all meals, and were paid a stipend of $25.00 per month. I lived, meditated and slept in a room, with three beds, with two or three other women and we shared a bathroom down the hall with others in our building (see picture of me to the right). We ate in a community dining room and sometimes meditated in other big rooms as a group. We also watched videos of Maharishi a lot. We were earning “credit” toward courses that we could attend, such as Teacher Training courses. After being there for some time I got my own room, still with a bathroom down the hall; I don’t think I had that room for very long. I also met the man, Bert, who was to be my husband, and the father of my child, at this time. He was from California; I always wanted to live in California and we seemed to "click." I’m not so sure that TM® was helping me in my self-esteem but I know that going out and being with people and joining a group did help with my self-esteem. Some time at the age of 26, I think it was in August, something happened and the academy asked a bunch of people to leave. I think they were running out of money or something. Anyway, I was one of the people asked to leave. They gave us a couple of weeks notice. I did not want to leave, but after being asked to leave, and knowing that I would not be able to plead my case, I became angry that they would do such a thing and called my father and mother and they came and picked me up right away and brought me home. My parents even gave a couple of my friends who had also been asked to leave rides home; one person lived in Connecticut and the other one lived in Boston. After some short period of time my “credit” was frozen and eventually I lost it all. I think it was over $2,000 in all that I lost. $2,000 was a lot of money in those days - the later part of the 1970's. Well, at the time I figured it was my Karma.
I went back home and got a pretty good job. Eventually I moved in to the TM center in Andover, Massachusetts and continued to work in my job in Andover, Massachusetts. The man I met at the academy, Bert, called me and asked me to marry him. I said, “Come on out here and we’ll see.” So he did! He moved out from California to Massachusetts. We got along very well. He also moved in to another room at the same TM center before we were married (it was a large place) and we shared a room after we got married. We got married toward the end of 1977. We lived together there at the TM center till May of 1978. We then both quit our jobs and left Massachusetts. My husband had outfitted our red van so that we could live in it and enjoy the extended trip across the country.
We moved to California in 1978. On the way to California we stopped off at the same Academy of the Science of Creative Intelligence (mentioned above), in upstate New York where we met. I was not allowed out of the van because the place became only for men at the end of 1977 (right after I left). I wasn’t happy being closed up in a small van while my husband went and talked to some of his friends. We were there for several hours. To tell you the truth, I was very nervous about moving to California even though I had wanted to do so. We also stopped off at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa on our trip and felt very fortunate indeed to be there.
In California we worked for a bit. We did several short stints on staff, with the TM group, at Stanford University and near Lake Tahoe. We were there to earn credit to attend some courses so we could learn the TM-Sidhi’s course. The TM-Sidhis were supposed to accelerate one’s growth and evolution toward enlightenment. In 1979 we heard about a TM group in Missouri, so we moved there and were on staff there for a year and a half. The Maharishi had been asking people to go be in groups and that it would help the world consciousness rise, and help create world peace. Se we went. We wanted to help create world peace. We got the usual stipend of $25.00 per month, room and board, food, and we also got credit toward learning the TM-Sidhis course.
We both learned these TM-Sidhis at the end of 1979 and learned the flying/levitation “sutra” at the end of 1979 in Fairfield, Iowa. This time we did use our “credit.” While we were there for two weeks the “Golden Domes” were being built.
Also the Maharishi was there and spoke to the group in the new skeleton of the men’s Golden Dome (see picture above with all the heads - It was freezing and we had waited a long time, but we didn't mind). I felt a wave of appreciation and love and I felt very honored to be there in person with Maharishi (even though there were over a thousand of us there). Was this just hypnotism? There is a picture somewhere of me and my husband at that time - I think we are looking adoringly at Maharishi (see picture to the right - I found it!). After learning the levitation sutra we went back to Missouri to work some more. We eventually left Missouri and moved back to California - that was at the beginning of 1980.
I found a web site where they referred to Maharishi as "Marshy." I thought that was interesting.
I’ve had probably about five meditations in my life where I went into a deep darkness and when I came out I didn’t remember time passing. Is this a good thing? or a bad thing, like the above mentioned web site seems to imply. Was this just being hypnotized? The TM teachers said it was a good thing. My shamanism teacher thinks it's a bad thing.
We worked some in the “regular” world in California, but by this time we were really attached to being part of the TM world. We eventually joined a Sidha Village in Los Altos, California. We were there for about a couple of years. We were earning a small stipend, room and board and meals and nothing else. I actually got a “real job” in an office during much of this time. Sometime toward the end of 1980 I wanted to have a child; my clock was ticking. So I convinced my husband and became pregnant. A friend of ours also convinced him that this would be a good thing, which it is! I somehow or other attended a few birthing classes while we lived there. We were still at the Sidha Village in August of 1981 when I had my child. When our daughter was just a month old the Sidha Village was winding down so we moved out. We lived in our van (fixed to live in) for some time, traveled a bit with our baby.
We left the Sidha Village and continued to live in our van. We worked at the TM center in Palo Alto and eventually got a small apartment in East Palo Alto. We heard that Maharishi wanted as many people as possible to move to Fairfield, Iowa and join in on the group meditations and levitations there to help the world move toward world peace. When my daughter was about 5 or 6 months old we traveled in our van and our few possessions to Fairfield. We had also heard that there was this great school there and we thought our child deserved to attend the best school in the world. We arrived in Fairfield in March of 1982 with a baby, a van that only worked in 2nd gear, and about $100 in our pockets. We moved in with a friend for a couple of weeks. My husband got a job working at the Maharishi International University and eventually we moved in to the motel in Fairfield for a couple of months. After some time we rented a house. We started to regularly attend group practice in the Golden Domes. Him in the men’s dome, me in the Lady’s dome. (No, there is no tunnel leading underground between the Men's and Lady's domes - this is a rumor I heard going around.)
My daughter attended childcare for free for a while. My husband worked at the Maharishi International University (now called The Maharishi University of Management) for about 15 years. We bought a small house in Fairfield in 1982 and owned it till 1997. We both attended group meditation practice in the domes twice a day. Well, actually sometimes I couldn’t stand to be there in the dome, and unbeknownst to my husband, I would sometimes sneak out of the ladies dome and go home, then come back shortly before the women were “let out” of the dome. I would go in to the entry way of the dome and stay there and then exit to meet my husband as he got out of the men’s dome. I felt much better when I did this and I felt much worse when I forced myself to attend the group meditation and TM-Sidhis practice. Sometimes also I would bring a book or magazine and read in the ladies’ rest room so I wouldn’t have to do the group practice, which was starting to make me feel more and more uncomfortable in my body. If I mentioned this to any of the regular practitioners or the TM teachers they would say I was doing something wrong. I don’t think so!
My daughter attended The Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, which we had been told was the best school in the world. She attended from Kindergarten through most of fourth grade. She has dyslexia and eventually they said they couldn’t help her. They asked us to take her out of their school. Well, her fourth grade teacher was psychotic, so I took her out of there a few weeks before fourth grade ended and put her in to the public school system, which at the time had only a couple of weeks left. She had no clue what was going on but she agreed to change schools because of the fact that the public schools had less weeks left of fourth grade, plus we went and met her would-be teacher and some of her would-be fellow students. She liked them. So if anyone tells you that the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (or whatever it’s called now) is the best school in the world, don’t believe them. They only have such high scores because they kick out the students who can’t cut the grade. That's a fact that I experienced first-hand.
My daughter learned the TM "walking technique" when she was about five years old. I believe my daughter had problems with TM from the beginning. She once told me that someone, as part of an experiment in high school, tried to hypnotize her and she was not able to be hypnotized. Hmmmm….. She forgot her mantra at first and got another one at the age of nine. Then sometime when she was a teenager she said that meditating gave her a headache. I had her TM checked, or I tried to convince her to have her TM practice checked. I think she did it a couple of times. She said it gave her a headache every time. Double hmmmm….. She no longer practices TM. That’s something to think about. I've also read that the checking procedure is a hypnosis procedure. Hmmmmm.....
In 1994 we met Rob Robb and got more and more away from TM. Even my husband who was a TM fanatic became less and less obsessed with doing his “regular” TM practice. But then, all that is another story.
I have continued practicing TM off and on since 1994. I quit going to the Golden Dome in 1996. Me and my husband and my daughter left Fairfield in 1997 and moved to Taos, New Mexico. I left my husband in 1999 and got divorced in 2000. I lived in Fairfield from June of 1999 till the end of 2001 with my daughter and moved back here to Taos on December 27, 2001. My daughter left Fairfield on January 1, 2003. She moved to L.A. and loves it there. Added in 2008: Bert and I moved back in together the beginning of 2006. We remarried in June of this year. We worked out our stuff. Neither of us are practicing TM any more.
I stumbled on to the below mentioned web site a year or more ago and heard about the book TM and Cult Mania but I guess I wasn’t ready to read it until now. I finally read it in August of 2005.
I, at this moment in time, am no longer practicing TM. I don’t know if I will ever practice it again. I’ll keep you posted as to whether I feel any different over time. As of this writing, it’s only been a few days since I quit totally.
Like I said, I wasn't really ready till now to read anything that was against TM, but now I did and now I know.
See addendums Below
Back to Top
| All I ask is that people THINK and read a lot - not just the TM group propaganda - Check other Web sites and books - before deciding! |
Addendums:
January 26, 2010 - People keep giving my video on YouTube a "1" and they keep flagging my video (see link above). I think it's some immature TM people. It is really so not fair for them to be doing such things. Do you really want to be a part of a group like this?
January 19, 2010 - I still haven't done TM for quite a while. About my video on YouTube: Someone keeps flagging the video and I don't know why. It is a fine video and it is just my own opinion. I think it is being flagged and given "1s" by the TM people. Do you really want to be involved with a group that would do such immature things? Think about it and read more books that are NOT put out by the TM group! Look at my list of Websites and Books above. Read, read, read. That's my advice anyway.
October 26, 2008 - I virtually haven't done TM for over Three years and I feel fine. I have done other types of meditation and I have done shamanic journeying and have found as much and maybe more good results from these than I did from TM.
Maybe I should be happy I didn't join the Jim Jones group. :-)
July 2008. Bert and I got married again last month!! This is mentioned above as well. We no longer practice TM and that is just fine!
September 27, 2007. I've been finding a lot of discussion about other New Age techniques on the Internet - both positive and negative. Is the New Age and are Metaphysical techniques real? Or is it all just a farce? Do we reincarnate? Is there more than this "physical," "middle world" reality? Somebody tell me! I've been "searching" for the truth for far too many years. I always thought that there must be more than only this physical reality. I hope so, but it looks to me that I may not find out for sure till I die. I just wish I could see something, like an angel, a fairy, someone disappear, someone walk through a wall, someone manifest something (like gold) in their hand, or SOMETHING.
January 15, 2007. I have been doing other techniques and I occasionally "practice" TM. I find that just living life to the fullest is the best way to go. I still read many books and watch movies about metaphysical stuff. The last movie we watched was "The Secret," and I own the book - It's GREAT! I also attend college part-time. Life is good and I just keep on keeping on.
Back to Top
Information From Other Sites:
To find out more about TM from the Transcendental Meditation Site go to tm.org. But do read more than their propaganda.
"Transcendental Meditation® (TM®): One of the two most important techniques of Maharishi Ayur-Ved. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded TM in 1957 and introduced it in the United States in 1959. TM is an alleged means of experiencing "pure awareness." It involves sitting comfortably, with eyes closed, for 15 to 20 minutes twice a day while one mentally repeats a mantra. In TM, a mantra purportedly is a "thought-sound" that has a "known" vibratory effect but does not have a designative meaning. The TM teacher supposedly chooses a mantra suitable for the initiate."
from: http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/dictionary/mdt.html
Dr. Stephen Barrett, M.D.: "[Meditation is] a relaxation technique, one of many. I don't think
relaxation has a tremendous amount of use. Transcendental meditation is
one form of meditation. It's very expensive to learn, and it's been closely
associated with a lot of mumbo-jumbo on health-related things."
From: http://www.quackwatch.org/10Bio/biography.html
Back to Top
Linda M. Lange
Taos, NM 87571 |
This document maintained by musiclover1111usAyahoo.com (replace the A with @) .
Material Copyright © 1998 - Today, AngelStar
Creations Web Design
http://angelstarcreations.com
