The Deceptive World of Transcendental Meditation - The Cult of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

in 1959 maharishi mahesh yogi traveled the globe with the intention of selling a simple mantra based meditation practice that he called transcendental meditation or tm in this practice of transcendental meditation the mind experiences the subtler state of the thought and as the surface activity of the conscious mind contacts the deeper levels of the mind then the thought waves become much more powerful this transcendental meditation is a way to enable a man in a very easy manner to begin to use his full mental potential the maharishi was a self-proclaimed enlightened sage whose message was championed by the hippie generation of the late 1960s quickly becoming something of a sensation in the united states it was a time of social unrest nuclear anxiety war in vietnam and psychedelic experimentation people were looking for answers and the giggling guru as the enamored media like to call him was at hand to deliver them all those who want peace should meditate and spread transcendental meditation and peace will result in every man naturally and the world will be in peace he was featured on the tonight show and the front cover of popular magazines and was celebrated as the spiritual advisor of the beatles and other major celebrities but little did his adoring fans know that he was in fact far from the qualified guru he claimed to be his real name was mahesh prasad varma and in the 1940s and early 1950s he was the secretary of the hindu sage gurudev when gurudev passed away mahesh relocated and changed his name to maharishi bal rahamachali mahesh yogi maharaj this unearned title roughly translates as the great seer the enlightened one and great king and any traditional hindu aware of the facts of mahesh's history would surely have denounced him as a blasphemous fraud on account [Music] [Music] [Music] was unwilling to settle for the simple life in his homeland he borrowed one of his master's basic teachings assumed credentials that didn't belong to him and set sail in search of power and thanks to his audacity and charisma he found it periodically there have been articles published about the assets of maharishi mahashyogi that is the spiritual empire that he controlled it's been valued in the billions i am one of thousands of people who were scammed by one of the greatest con artists of our generation tm was completely dead so he literally promised the ability to levitate to become invisible eternal life everything for about ten to twelve thousand dollars he's an evil man he knows what he's doing he wants their money and he wants power [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] marishimaya's yogi was at the height of his fame and popularity when he was associated with the beatles and the hippie movement in the 1960s as we've already discussed with a taste for power came a thirst for more and he sought to expand his operation he said his sights on the development of thousands of tm centers worldwide and in 1974 he purchased an abandoned 10-acre college campus in fairfield iowa to serve as the movement's new us headquarters it was on this land in iowa that marissa set up a university called maharishi international university as well as a children's school named maharishi school for the age of enlightenment here young adults and children respectively would practice tm and study a curriculum dedicated to the concept of spiritual enlightenment the goal of the consciousness-based education they offered was to create a new world of angelic individuals who can develop the ability to know everything and do everything spontaneously right in the memoir greetings from utopia park surviving a transcendent childhood former la times and rolling stone reporter claire hoffman revealed the inner world of the transcendental meditation movement from first-hand experience she was raised and schooled on the maharishi school campus in the 1980s and according to her book maharishi's face was on virtually every wall of the school building in addition to posters of the 16 core principles of the maharishi's philosophy and elaborate charts and diagrams showing how maharishi's interpretation of vedic knowledge was scientific at maharishi's school i quickly learned that what we wanted to do was experience the world the way the mahdi she did that seemed to be why everyone started every sentence with maharishi says the answer to everything was mari she said and if i said mari she doesn't know about this [Music] that didn't matter every moment of every day had a prescription for maharishi on how to be and how to act the students had to wake up at 6 00 am to align with the rhythms of nature they couldn't wear jeans because the maharishi said they weren't classy enough and they couldn't wear anything black because mareshi said black attracted negative forces negativity of any kind was forbidden children weren't allowed to draw pictures of monsters because according to marishi monsters were not part of bliss consciousness but despite the restrictive rules and regulations teachers treated the school kids like chosen ones in many respects because maharishi had said we at my school were brahmin reincarnated fortunate to be born when we were and selected because of an infinite lifetime of good karmas to be leaders of the age of enlightenment the school children were also informed via a department called the global good news that the group practice of tm was helping disarm russia bring better weather to africa and was bolstering the financial markets when i was 12 years old we got called into like an emergency school assembly one of the administrators is on stage he's practically weeping and he announced that because our meditations have been so strong and so powerful for the last week we had torn down the great wall i mean the berlin wall the berlin wall yes while the maharishi was serving up his hindu-centred new age teachings within these newly formed education systems he was also exploring ways to significantly increase his organization sales in other departments too he would come to decide that tm alone was no longer enough to ensure the happiness and enlightenment of individuals nor sufficient to deliver peace between nations for some time the transcendental meditation organization sold its standard meditation practice for up to two and a half thousand dollars but existing customers of the tm community would now have to pay for additional training if they wish to see heaven on earth unfold in their lifetime mauricio figured out if you're charging people even a thousand dollars and you have office expense and publicity salaries and utilities you can't really make that much money what he did was he went after his best customers who were his teachers with this cities program the mcd program is a program for our conscious mind to gain mastery over those fine fine impulses of nature which functioning from within themselves create anything that they want this is gaining authority over those creative processes which are responsible for the whole creation maharishi had always promised that tm could have transformative effects on both the individual and collective scale tm siri went a step further vowing to make gods of man he literally promised the ability to levitate walk through walls turn invisible read minds to have the strength of an elephant be able to travel through the cosmos spiritually listen to the utterances of all animals omniscience supervision eternal life i mean just name it you could have it maharishi promoted the cities as a dramatic accelerant to enlightenment cost for the courses range from three thousand to ten thousand dollars for perspective's sake three to ten thousand then would be fifteen to fifty thousand dollars in today's terms but people paid up and the promise of levitation was central to his success but when it came down to it maharishi's style of levitation actually looked like this [Music] this so-called levitation was later rebranded yogic flying and marish's followers swallowed it writer this technique refreshes the mind and the body if people do this in a group world peace will be the immediate consequence others were less impressed saying i devoted well over four hours a day to tm in the cities for well over a year i did not experience anything maharishi promise nor from what i could tell did anyone else the united states district court jury actually ordered two transcendental meditation organizations to pay a hundred and thirty eight thousand dollars to a man named robert kaprinsky after he filed a lawsuit against them claiming that the costly tm city course failed to teach him to fly as advertised but for the most part maharishi had created an environment in which he was valued like a god it didn't matter how preposterous things became few dared or even thought to question his authority all the people that had told me i need some let me tell you this is the lieutenant governor of pennsylvania at that time scranton brian josephson a man who received a nobel prize in physics for tunneling in 1964. these were not just like slouches and they're up on the stage saying i took the course for six months and i can levitate what about the maharishi how far can he fly i would imagine mahashi could fly any distance but he not in the mode of demonstrating such things to the world because it's a it's a different thing have you seen him fly no no i haven't has anyone seen anyone fly i don't know in this generation but throughout the history of the world it's been recorded again and again that people have been known to have the ability to actually fly eventually when the world is a less stressed place probably there will be a lot of people able to float in the air marishi was taking his customers and devotees for a ride and sadly it was powerful enough propaganda to capture the imaginations of people in unstable or desperate life situations there was one guy i'll never forget a bit it sometimes brings tears to my eyes when i think about him he was a paraplegic he was in a wheelchair and he was looking so forward to learning to fly because he would be able to move and the people who told us it was real were nobel prize winners and famous physicists and doctors that you trusted and then you know you know that this guy's not gonna fly it just was sad good old mario she was the giggling guru all right he was laughing his ass off all the way to the bank selling his community on his products was so easy that the question of whether or not to expand his existing range of products and services was of course a total no-brainer he formed what would become the most successful ayurvedic health company in america in addition to selling programs like maharishi joytish a vedic astrology service and maharishi yagya a sonic magic ritual ceremony in which you pay the maharishi crew a huge wad of cash in the hope that they can inspire the hindu gods to grant you whatever you desire programs for celebrate tm monks and nuns were also initiated as maharishi had always insisted that celibacy was a cardinal virtue you're a lifelong celibate is that right uh yes i'm a life celibate as a monk is celibacy part of transcendental meditation it's not a part of transcendental meditation it's my life funny then that numerous women have come forward claiming they had long lasting affairs with the self-proclaimed celibate when i decide i'm i'm going to go to india i am preparing for a deeply spiritual experience i was sort of seeing him as as a living prophet really comparable perhaps to jesus he called us we're going to become teachers of meditation all down to his home he decided he was going to have a brief chat with every single one of us when i went to finally to have my interview he said what took you so long and he said i was waiting so he started to touch me and then and not in an offensive way he touched my hair and he stroked my face but then he immediately said don't tell anyone then i realize oh maurice is a man and i'm a woman i was so blown away by my god this is my master this is my god this is a living prophet and he loves me and then a year and a half we're at some course and i'm starting to realize there are other women and that was so tough maharishi really was a master con artist but could he go a step further by adding the scientific community to his ever-expanding collection of dupes if he was able to persuade the world of science to sing the praises of tm and yogic flying the reach of his movement would surely know no bounds and so he plotted to scientifically proven theory that he had always insisted was true that when enough people came together in the world in one location to practice tm and yogic flying world peace would be a glorious and inevitable result the idea was called the maharishi effect and in the summer of 1993 it was put to the test john hagelin a harvard phd and professor of physics at maharishi international university was employed to oversee the study calling upon 4 000 individuals in tm programs worldwide to come together to practice tm and yogic flying in a single location for six hours a day every day for three weeks in the district of columbia washington dc hagelin and his team hypothesized that the presence of four thousand meditators would contribute to a dramatic decline in the district's crime rate data from the district of columbia's metropolitan police was assessed throughout the study and when the experiment was over hegelin concluded that homicide sex and assault crimes dropped significantly during the demonstration project but this actually wasn't true in fact the police had recorded the highest murder rates in the district history while the experiment was taking place during various press conferences that followed haggling acknowledged that the murder rate had increased but emphasized that brutal crime was down the distinction between murder and brutal crime remains unclear when journalists questioned how he arrived at the specific figures indicating this notable decline in crime haggling geniusly explained that whilst the crime rate appeared to have increased it was in fact significantly lower than it would have been had the district not been blessed with the meditator's presence and how did he know what the data would have looked like if the meditators hadn't been there he knew he said because of a scientifically rigorous time series analysis that included not only crime data but such factors as weather and the fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field unsurprisingly then the study was dismissed as absurd willfully deceptive and a load of absolute nonsense by virtually every theoretical physicist this side of cloud cuckoo land but of course maharishi knew that the maharishi effect was nonsense all along i was sitting with mahesh i said marishi why don't we just put a 10 000 group in place i've donated enough money to support a group like that in india and with 10 000 people you've been saying there would be world peace right away and he looked at me and he said i have no idea if a ten thousand group would create world peace we would have to create that group and see what effects it would have and i was shocked because mahesh had done numerous fundraisers you know gotten so many thousands of people to donate money with this idea that he was going to create a permanent 10 000 group that would usher in world peace and when we were in private he told me he had no idea where the distortion of scientific data is concerned the maharishi effect is just the tip of the iceberg perhaps the most striking example is the 2013 study by the american heart association beyond medication and diet which tested the effects of various health-based modalities on blood pressure the study found that aerobic exercise and resistance trainings were the most effective ways to lower high blood pressure what about tm well here's what they have to say tm modestly lowers bp it is not certain whether it is truly superior to other meditation practices in terms of lowering bp we are unable to recommend a specific method of practice when tm is used for the high treatment of bp watch how dr suzanne steinbaum speaking on behalf of the tm organization interprets these findings believe it or not it wasn't until april 2013 that the american heart association made a scientific statement that transcendental meditation was the only form of stress management and meditation to reduce blood pressure it is the most efficacious way for us to treat one of the major risk factors of heart disease which is stress matthew barnister a senior figure of the american heart institute addressed the distortions publicly saying unfortunately we have found that some in the media and many in the tm community have tried to overstate our findings in order to promote their own agendas the tm organization also attracts thousands of customers every year by claiming tm to be free of religious influence and potential side effects in the last 40 years there has never been a single study conducted at any major university or research institution and published in any significant scientific journal that has ever shown transcendental meditation to produce anything other than positive effects the truth is negative mental health effects have been associated with the practice since the 1970s when the german government launched an investigation into the movement after an excess of troubling reports were made to public officials about tm related side effects the government's investigation found that people who were committed to regular lengthy sessions of tm were subsequently more prone to experience mental disturbances what you have is deep psychological damage to 10 to 20 of the long-term meditators what this meditation technique is essentially is self-hypnosis or transinduction which can relieve stress if used in very modest amounts but if you excessively use it which many of the tmrs do it can cause you to really kind of float in and out of reality even when you don't want to the movement was sued back in 1986 by a guy named walter kapinski who brought forward a list of 40 some odd victims of people who had committed suicide or jumped out of windows because they believed they could fly i mean it goes on and on they don't talk about people who've gone psychotic people who've become dissociative within the organization these were actually really common there was one guy who just started going into like seizures she was on the floor just shaking and it was like frightening in march 2004 at the maharishi university a student named srivendershem stabbed a classmate in the face with a pen during a lesson called teaching the age of enlightenment the student was badly wounded and had to be hospitalized instead of calling the police as the university's policy demands the university's administrators tried to mask the incident in an attempt to avoid negative publicity they decided sem was to be permanently dismissed and sent away from the university the following day but after making their decision they left sem unsupervised and he made his way into the university cafeteria where he stabbed another student this time to death this is precisely the kind of psychotic behavior that many former members of the tm community have reported and warned about given the evidence at hand it seems fair to say that tm doesn't really belong in schools at all but since the 1970s the tmo was pushed and pushed to make the tm a feature of daily school life in the early days they were actually successful in procuring government funds for tm instruction in state schools but that came to an end in 1977 when a judge in new jersey prohibited further instruction in public schools on the grounds that it violated the first amendment requirement for separation of church and state people ask me all the time is transcendental meditation a religion and the answer is no it's not a religion in the new jersey cool case a translation of the puja the prayer song by the tm instructor as part of every customer's initiation was provided to the court unsurprisingly the puja was revealed to be a dividation or hymn to various hindu gods and gurus see when anyone learns tm they're instructed to bring fruit a white cloth and flowers to their opening meditation session the instructor places these offerings on an altar next to a picture of maharishi's deceased master guru dev the offerings represent the sacrifices of the initiate to the guru and gods of hinduism in exchange for their energetic blessing a leading member of the tm organization said as much himself in a meeting that was hacked by wikileaks and published in 2009 dakshina is a gift like the fruit flowers and course fee to learn tm the tm technique isn't going to work until there is a dakshina we don't tell the general public this in other words the main players in the tm world believe that tm is an effective spiritual and health-based modality because of the puja in their eyes it's an authentic form of religiously centered ceremonial magic they don't tell the general public this because if they did the vast majority of their potential future customers would run for the hills before they stepped foot in a tm center maharishi mahashyogi was actually quite open about the religious features of transcendental meditation whilst he was living in india during the early days of the tier movement speaking about tm mantras at an event in the 1950s he said we do not select any word at random for our practice we select only the suitable mantras of person or gods such mantras fetch us to the grace of personal gods and make us happier in every walk of life but when he identified resistance to certain religious concepts on foreign shores he adapted his message essentially telling his audience whatever they wish to hear the actual practice involves thinking of a word a word devoid of meaning i have been asked but aren't mantras the names of buddhist deities or hindu gods or whatever and the answer is a flat out no there is no meaning associated with the sound despite the court ruling of 1977 in recent years the transcendental meditation organization have tried to weasel their way back into the public school system via the david lynch foundation the question is why are they so determined to target children the earlier you inculcate a person a human being with a particular belief the more likely you have them for the rest of their lives claire hoffman's story is a perfect example of this a large portion of her memoir details the absurdly deceptive avaricious and authoritarian qualities of the transcendental meditation organization which she experienced growing up but for all the faults she identified in the cult and its leadership she not only goes back to the fairfield campus to partake in the costly yogic flying program but she also took a four-year-old daughter to be initiated by bob roth into the world of transcendental meditation it was a surprising conclusion to hoffman's story but on reflection it makes sense since early childhood maharishi was the man her mother had worshiped as a god he was plastered on every inner wall of her school building upheld by a community as the living symbol of goodness in the world and when the going got tough the voice of the maharishi forever rooted at some deep seated level of her consciousness called forth claiming to show the way to the life you

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Keywords: Transcendental Meditation Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Transcendental Meditation Cult, TM Cult, Transcendental Meditation The Beatles, Transcendental Meditation 1960s, Giggling Guru, Maharishi fraud, Maharishi con artist, TM science, TM religion, The Maharishi Effect, TM movement, Transcendental Meditation courses, TMO, TM education, TM mental health, TM side effects, effects of TM, The Deceptive World of Transcendental Meditation - The Cult of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Id: wCUZXQ0b-MA

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022