MDD

CULT ABUSE POLICY & RESEARCH

Policy Representation of Cult Victims’ Unmet Needs
at the Federal Level

Vol. 2, No. 3 Newsletter October 1994

MEDITATION, DELUSION AND DECEPTION

by David J. Bardin, Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin &
Kahn Washington Counsel for American Family Foundation (AFF) and
Cult Awareness Network (CAN)

He’s really not so transcendental A true master of
mental manipulation has tar- geted Washington, D.C. He calls himself
Ma- harishi Mahesh Yogi. His devotees adore him, simply, as "Maharishi."
He sells Transcenden- tal Meditation, with a Capital "M."
It differs from many kinds of small "m" meditation. So
better examine it carefully before you buy.

His trademarked product, TMTM, has reputedly made
him a billionaire. He lives reclusively on a luxury estate in Holland,
far from the tax collectors of his former headquarters, in India,
Switzerland and the U.S.A. But Maharishi’s agents are again in Washington,
D.C., hunting for government funds to propagate TM and donations
from unwary individuals.

Public funding by the District of Columbia, the federal
government or a state would be unlawful because TM is a religion
— not the science it pretends to be. Donations would be unwise
because TM can harm people in the large doses Maharishi promotes
though it carries no warning labels.

TM is a religion

Federal courts ruled years ago that Maharishi’s TM
is a religion. Malnak v. Yogi, 440 F.Supp. 1284 (1977), affirmed,
592 F.2d 197 (3rd Cir. 1979). Government funding to propagate TM
is therefore unconstitutional.

During the Carter Administration the Depart- ment
of Health, Education & Welfare (HEW) and the New Jersey Department
of Education funded an "experiment" to teach TM and its
"Science of Creative Intelligence" (TM/SCI) as an elective
in five public high schools. Tea- chers specially-trained by TM
taught students four or five days a week. If it "worked"
the course would be taught state-wide.

Several parents, the Spritual Counterfeits Project,
Inc. (a Christian group based in Berkeley, California) and Americans
United for Separation of Church and State asked the U.S. District
Court for New Jersey to enjoin this experiment. These plaintiffs
argued that TM was a religion and that the teaching of TM in public
schools and the government funding were both an "Establishment
of Reli- gion" in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
TM representatives argued that TM is a secular science, not a religion.

Federal Judge J. Curtis Meanor ruled that TM is a
religion. He enjoined HEW Secretary Joseph A. Califano, Jr., N.J.
Commissioner Fred G. Burke, school officials and TM’s um- brella
organization itself from using public funds to propagate TM. The
Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia unanimously affirmed.
Judge Meanor’s injunction is still in effect today.

These judges looked to the religious nature of Maharishi’s
SCI textbook, which was being taught, and the religious nature of
his puja initiation ceremony which TMers must go through individually
to receive their secret meditation mantra. Without that mantra it
is

CULT ABUSE POLICY & RESEARCH

Newsletter — October 1994 — Page 2 &91; impossible
to practice TM.

At the compulsory puja ceremony, held outside the
school building, each student brought some fruit, flowers and a
clean white handkerchief which were taken and laid on a table in
a closed room. The student’s teacher would bow and make offerings
many times to an 8" by 12" color photograph of Guru Dev,
said to be Maharishi’s teacher, who had died in the 1950s. Each
student’s teacher also sang a chant in Sanksrit and the student
received "his own personal mantra which is never to be revealed
to any other person." 592 F.2d at 198.

TM witnesses swore that the chant was a pure- ly
secular expression of gratitude to teachers. However, Judge Meanor
read an English trans- lation prepared by TM and found not one word
of thanks in it. Rather, the chant des- cribes a deified Guru Dev
as "the Lord" and "Him" (with a capital aitch),
among a slew of divine epithets quoted by Judge Meanor. For example:

The Unbounded, like the endless canopy of the sky,
the omnipresent in all creation …. to Him, to Shri Guru Dev, I
bow down. the Eternal, the Pure, the Immovable …. to Shri Guru
Dev, I bow down.

Nonetheiess, a Catholic priest, Protestant minister
and Jewish rabbi, who practiced TM, testified that TM and the puja
chant had no religious meaning — even after they had read TM’s
English translation. For example, Rabbi Harry Essrig of Los Angeles
practiced TM, recommended it to his congregants, called it "primarily
a scientific technique," studied Maharishi’s SCI and somehow
found no conflict between his own religion and either the translated
text or the accompanying ceremony. In sharp contrast, Rabbi Seymour
Siegel, Pro- fessor of Theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary
in New York City, swore that in "the cultural setting of the
United States and in the tradition of both Hebrew and Christian
theology" such terms are "descriptive exclusively of a
Supreme Being or God."

Researchers will find that the District Court opinion
in Malnak v. Yogi extensively excerpts Maharishi’s "scientific"
SCI textbook and re- prints the full text of his puja ceremony chant.

TM is not a science

TM’s "scientific" claims as a branch of
phy- sics are spurious. Physicist Heinz R. PageIs, Ph.D., Executive
Director of The New York Academy of Sciences prepared an affidavit
on behalf of ex-TMer Robert Kropinski in 1986 for a court case here
in Washington, D.C. Pagels wrote as a "theoretical physicist
specializing in the area of quantum field theory":

My summary opinion … is that the views expressed
in the literature issued by &91;TM&93; that purport to find a connection
between the recent ideas of theoretical physics — unified field
theory, the vacuum state and collective phenomena — and states
of con- sciousness attained by transcendental medi- tation are false
and profoundly misleading. No qualified physicist that I know would
claim to find such a connection without knowingly committing fraud.

TM hurts people

Maharishi’s lieutenants speak of promoting 20- minute
doses of relaxation. How could that really hurt you (even if how-to
lessons and "your own" secret mantra were overpriced at
$600)?

They don’t tell you about the advanced (Sidhi) courses
(priced at over $2,000) that Maharashi began to sell in the late
1970s. Advanced TMers meditate for hours at a time. That can

CULTABUSE POLICY & RESEARCH

Newsletter — October 1994 — Page 3

It stimulate delusions and hallucinations.

TM insists it can teach you to levitate and fly.
("Yogic flying" lessons may cost $3,000.) TMers don’t
really fly. They hop, from a cross-legged yoga position. They develop
awesomely powerful thigh muscles. They may develop aches. After
hop, hop, hopping across a room, TMers coming out of their altered
mental state may believe that they flew even though it never happened.
Major TV pro- grams have shown how "flying" TMers really
hop. You can borrow a video tape to see for yourself.

The Washington City Paper reported (July 13, 1990,
p. 14) that former TM teacher and yogic flyer Diane Hendel:

"saw little creatures with wings" during
intensive meditation periods … They were like my pets. They’d
tell me things." Hendel was encouraged to believe that these
winged beasties were "devas" ‘- Hindu spirits of nature.
"I began not to be able to tell who was a person and who was
a deva," she said. Hendel sought counsel- ing, eventually quit
meditating, and left the movement.

Intensive meditation can make TMers seem lifeless
or flat, their personalities crushed and buried, devoid of emotion.
In some cases, the meditator may go into involuntary meditation
- - which could be devastating if driving a car or at many kinds
of jobs. Stanford psycholo- gist Leon S. Otis (who believed many
people could benefit from the 20-minute relaxation) concluded that
his data raise serious doubts about the innocu- ous nature of TM.
In fact, they suggest that TM may be hazardous to the mental health
of a sizable proportion of the people who take up TM.

Adverse Effects of Transcendental Meditation,
Update: A Quarterly Journal of New Religious Movements, 9, 37-50
(1985).

Maharishi has taught devotees that a TMer is healthfully
"unstressing" when symptoms of distress accompany his
meditation. Ex-TMers have sued TM, alleging severe harms. TM has
generally settled out of court, including cases in Washington, D.C.

TM’s failure to communicate "warning
labels"

Dr. Otis urged TM to "publicly recognize that
problems may be engendered by meditation and so instruct potential
initiates as well as to provide guidelines to both the general public
and the psychotherapeutic profession for their amelioration."
An ethical gum would prepare for harmful side effects, and would
immediate- ly instruct sufferers to ease off on their medi- tation.
Instead of "warning labels" about harmful side effects,
however, Maharishi taught his aides to welcome adverse symptoms
as evidence of "unstressing" — and to encour- age even
more intensive meditation.

Debunking the "Maharishi effects"

It is intensive, prolonged meditating that TM promotes
and for which it claims all kinds of marvelous "Maharishi effects"
when it is per- formed by masses of meditators. It is hard to keep
up with TM’s claims for mass medita- tion. TM’s "intellectual"
center at Fairfield, Iowa, called "Maharishi International
Universi- ty" (MIU) chums them out.

TMers claimed they influenced the weather at MIU
while concrete was poured for buildings (the "Domes")
in which hundreds could meditate. A dispassionate study showed that
the concrete contractor check- ed the National Weather Forecast
each time before deciding to make a delivery the next day and that
the meditators sought

CULT ABUSE POLICY & RESEARCH

Newsletter — October 1994 — Page 4

Warm weather only later in the day, after the forecast
on which the contractor relied was already made. Trumpy, An Investiga-
tion of the Reported Effect of Transcenden- tal Meditation on the
Weather, The Skepti- cal Inquirer, VIII, 143 (Winter 1983/84)

TMers claimed that if 1% of a city’ s popu- lation
meditate regularly the crime rate would go down. In Fairfield, Iowa,
13% of the population meditates, yet crime has not gone down. Randi,
Flim-Flam, cited in Rational Enquirer, newsletter of the BC Skeptics
(Vancouver April 1989).

TMers claimed that meditators massed in Jerusalem
in 1983 brought about social benefits including "a solution
to conflicts in the region that were impossible of solu- tion until
now." Mordecai Kaffman, Director of the Research Department
of the Kibbutz Child and Family Clinic, dismiss- ed TM methods as
unscientific and TM "claims of positive results in the Israeli
context" as unconvincing; he branded TM’s theory of "unified
field" as incredi- ble. The Use of Transcendental Medita- tion
to Promote Social Progress in Israel, Cultic Studies Journal, 3:1
(1986).

TM is a tyrannical sell-out of the New Age

Pulitzer prize winner Michael D’Antonio re- cently
surveyed the status and varieties of the "New Age" movement
in America. He dis- cusses TM in chapter 6 of HEAVEN ON EARTH -
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA’S SPIRITUAL FRONTIER (Crown 1992). As a
friend of the

New Age, who wanted to find something positive in
TM, D’Antonio concludes:

I would have welcomed the discovery of a middle way,
a path to spirituality that was consistent with reason. But TM,
as it is practiced at MIU, isn’t a middle ground.

For the first time in my travels through New Age
America, I worried that I was observing a cult rather than a culture
…. MIU and the Maharishi would take control of everything — right
down to matters of food, shelter, and child-rearing — for the most
devout.

TMers, D’Antonio sadly concludes, "have ac-
cepted rigid, authoritarian control in exchange for security. Far
from being a place where in- dividuals grow and innovate, the Fairfield
TM community is regimented and constricted …. All conflict, doubt,
perhaps even all genuine emotion, is stifled and covered over with
a pleasant veneer."

Conclusion

The Department of Education recently publish- ed
the student-loan default rates for all univer- sities and other
participating institutions in the country. MIU was listed as a 5-year
private in- stitution with 175 student loan borrowers in 1992; of
whom 12.9% were in default (the highest default rate of any 4 or
5 year college or university in Iowa). As a taxpayer, you are already
subsidizing MIU. Think twice before giving TM any more.

Board of Advisers ú Livia Bardin, M.S.W.,
Washington, DC ú Peter N. Georgiades, Esq., Counselor at
Law, Pittsburgh, PA ú Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., Thomas
S. Trammell Research Professor of Child Psychiatry, Dept. of Psychiatry,
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX ú Herbert Rosedale,
Esq., President AFF, New York, NY ú Patricia Ryan, M.P.A.,
Legislative Advocate, Sacramento, CA ú Margaret Thaler Singer,
Ph.D., Emeritus Adjunct Professor, Psychology Dept. Univ. of California,
Berkeley, CA ú Louis Jolyon West, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry,
UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA.

Send communications to:
David J. Bardin
Fax: 202-857-6395
lntemet: DJB%Arent_Fox@mcimail.com
Phone: 202-857-6089