A house of cards: Dissociative bliss becomes addictive

[TM] The Canadian Edmonton Sun features an article on Joe Kellett, author of the web site Falling Down the TM Rabbit Hole.

Joe Kellett was a TM (Transcendental Meditation) disciple for years; then a teacher/guru.

Now he informs people about the dangers of TM, a task made difficult by TM’s association with the 2,000-year-old ayurvedic health rituals from India.

“When TMers say ‘TM is not a religion’ they are talking about the purely mechanical mental technique. However, ‘TM the technique’ is never taught without introducing recruits to ‘TM the religion’ during three days of instruction following initiation.

Mahesh initially came out of India openly as a teacher of spirituality. Then in the early ’70s he abandoned that approach and began disguising his message in the language of scientific analogy. But the core message is still the same under the semantic covers: do TM for long enough and you will become ‘enlightened.’ […]

Dissociative ‘bliss’ is often an easily produced substitute for true personal growth.

As teachers we memorize almost everything we are to tell students. We were very careful not to tell them too much less they become ‘confused’ by things that they ‘couldn’t yet understand’.

Only after they had the ‘experience,’ could we start very gradually revealing TM dogma in easy, bite-sized chunks, always after they had just finished meditation and were therefore likely to be still in a dissociative state.”
– Joe Kellet

Joe Kellett is one of the many people helped directly or indirectly by cult expert Steve Hassan:

When he left the group, Kellett took direction from cult deprogrammer Steve Hassan, who established a technique for what he calls “re-establishing reality testing” - taking people who’ve been addicted to the sensation of dissociative bliss and making them critical thinkers again.
– Edmonton Sun, Apr. 17 2006

As Joe Kellett says;

“I realized that everything I had believed and experienced was based on the premise that Mahesh was truly an enlightened man with the highest spiritual teaching on the planet.

When I abandoned that assumption, the whole thing fell like a house of cards.”
– Joe Kellett

* with quotes from the Edmonton Sun [Cached]