Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Transcendental Meditation filtered into my consciousness in 1991. Completely stressed out by my Industrial Design thesis work, I desparately needed to decompress.
I signed up for the initial TM course, and discovered for the first time what silence really was. The TM teachers were strange, distant, aloof, energized. They fascinated me. The technique was scientifically proven (or so they said), and genuinely seemed to work.
We would meditate in assorted uncomfortable old chairs, in a converted convent on the top of a windy Wellington hillside. Hours of watching bizarre Maharishi Mahesh Yogi videos topped out the sureality of the whole experience.
The TM trip lasted about about six months, and changed my life. I meditated twice daily to get me through my design thesis work, with weeks of 3am work nights building models, cutting foam core, developing photos and tediously pasting stick on letters onto presentation panels. These days, design students just sit in front of their Mac and create like magic. We slaved for hours with tape, xerox machines and spray glue...
I also started a relationship during a weekend followup to the initial TM course. She was an worldly, experienced older woman (ie. 25 to my 22) and we'd share mind and body experiences to try and make sense of doing something that everyone around us thought was nuts. This was after all, Wellington New Zealand, and not Big Sur, California.
It all came to an abrupt end over coffee one evening in one of Cuba Street's many hip coffee bars, when someone told us about all the cult deprogramming efforts around the world required to extract people out of the TM network. Usually this occurs when dedicated TMers start donating their life savings to leaning the Sidhi programming and buying $10,000 birthstone rings to align their spiritual energy.
We got challenged to share our 'secret' TM mantra, and surprisingly, we both felt an immense resistance not to. It dawned on us that the secrecy of one's TM mantra and a resistance to sharing it had been well and truly indoctrinated into us as a way to increase the mystique of the TM training. I think my mantra was AENGA, but I couldn't be sure. They are all available on the internet with five minutes research, so they are hardly secret. However, secrets held with the threat of reprisal or oustacism from the group if a sign of pretty sure sign cult programming, so we reluctantly agreed that we had been pretty duped by a lot of the dogma fed to us by the TM teachers.
I don't think I ever used my TM mantra again. Despite that, and perhaps ironically, I still maintain the thorough and proven way TM teaches meditation is probably the best way you can learn to meditate.
Just take everything the Maharesh Mahesh Yogi says with a grain of salt.
I signed up for the initial TM course, and discovered for the first time what silence really was. The TM teachers were strange, distant, aloof, energized. They fascinated me. The technique was scientifically proven (or so they said), and genuinely seemed to work.
We would meditate in assorted uncomfortable old chairs, in a converted convent on the top of a windy Wellington hillside. Hours of watching bizarre Maharishi Mahesh Yogi videos topped out the sureality of the whole experience.
The TM trip lasted about about six months, and changed my life. I meditated twice daily to get me through my design thesis work, with weeks of 3am work nights building models, cutting foam core, developing photos and tediously pasting stick on letters onto presentation panels. These days, design students just sit in front of their Mac and create like magic. We slaved for hours with tape, xerox machines and spray glue...
I also started a relationship during a weekend followup to the initial TM course. She was an worldly, experienced older woman (ie. 25 to my 22) and we'd share mind and body experiences to try and make sense of doing something that everyone around us thought was nuts. This was after all, Wellington New Zealand, and not Big Sur, California.
It all came to an abrupt end over coffee one evening in one of Cuba Street's many hip coffee bars, when someone told us about all the cult deprogramming efforts around the world required to extract people out of the TM network. Usually this occurs when dedicated TMers start donating their life savings to leaning the Sidhi programming and buying $10,000 birthstone rings to align their spiritual energy.
We got challenged to share our 'secret' TM mantra, and surprisingly, we both felt an immense resistance not to. It dawned on us that the secrecy of one's TM mantra and a resistance to sharing it had been well and truly indoctrinated into us as a way to increase the mystique of the TM training. I think my mantra was AENGA, but I couldn't be sure. They are all available on the internet with five minutes research, so they are hardly secret. However, secrets held with the threat of reprisal or oustacism from the group if a sign of pretty sure sign cult programming, so we reluctantly agreed that we had been pretty duped by a lot of the dogma fed to us by the TM teachers.
I don't think I ever used my TM mantra again. Despite that, and perhaps ironically, I still maintain the thorough and proven way TM teaches meditation is probably the best way you can learn to meditate.
Just take everything the Maharesh Mahesh Yogi says with a grain of salt.
He's smiling all the time because he is laughing at how gullible we all are.
