TM Marches On

Merv Griffin, Clint Eastwood, Joe Namath and Peggy Lee practice it. So do thousands of other Americans, both famous and unfamous. Their passion, Transcendental Meditation, was not much more than a student cult when it first caught on in the '60s. But today TM, as its devotees call it, claims a fast-growing following among suburban housewives, businessmen, athletes and even retirees. The number of active TM practitioners has jumped from about 250,000 two years ago to more than 575,000 at present. Now TM has achieved indisputable certification as a full-blown nationwide fad: not one but two books extolling the movement are high up on the bestseller lists.

One of them is The TM Book (Price/Stern/Sloan; $3.95), an adoring introduction to the movement by Peter Me Williams, a Michigan poet, and Denise Denniston, a full-time teacher of meditation. Out less than a month, the book already ranks No. 2 on some major paperback bestseller lists, behind The Joy of Sex. Although the subtitle promises to explain "how to enjoy the rest of your life," the book in fact attempts little more than an almost childishly simple accounting of what TM is--or, more precisely, is not. The authors point out that TM is neither a religion nor a philosophy and that practitioners are not asked to wear "funny clothes" or follow vegetarian diets. TM followers, McWilliams and Denniston advise gravely, can even eat Big Macs in good conscience.

The second book, TM (Delacorte; $8.95), by California Psychiatrist Harold Bloomfield and two coauthors, is a more academic treatment of the movement. The book, currently No. 3 on hard-cover lists, makes the basic argument that 20 minutes of meditation every morning and evening can reduce stress, lower blood pressure, and even cure psychosomatic illnesses.

Indeed, there is undisputed evidence that meditation lowers oxygen consumption and induces other physiological changes. But many researchers are uneasy about the claims made for TM in the book's plethora of graphs and charts; these suggest, among other things, that students do better in school after taking up TM, and that practitioners get along with their bosses and co-workers better than nonmeditators. Says Harvard Psychologist Gary Schwartz: "A lot of those charts are based on unpublished data which can be explained by many other reasons than those interpreted by the TM people."

The TM authors take a swipe at psychotherapy, claiming that its focus on "previous negative experiences can lead to a loss of self-esteem rather than its enhancement." Their rather pat conclusion: "The key to successful therapy lies instead in creating psychological and physiological conditions which optimize the natural tendency of the nervous system to stabilize itself. TM appears to offer a systematic method to achieve this goal."

The main drawback of both books is that they tell almost everything about TM except how to go about it. Readers are referred to the 397 meditation centers across the country that offer a seven-session course in the TM fundamentals for $125 ($65 for college students). Following the procedures set up by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the nonprofit TM movement, new recruits are initiated in candlelit, incense-filled rooms. Trained teachers assign each student a personal mantra--a meaningless sound that must be kept secret. Students are taught to close their eyes for 20 minutes twice daily, focus on their mantra, and let their mind "float and float."

This kind of training, practitioners of TM insist, cannot be given in a book. Indeed, readers of the Bloomfield book are warned that mantras that are adopted without professional advice may lead to various "negative or unsettling" aftereffects. The books are, of course, on sale at most TM centers. As Harvard's Schwartz puts it wryly: "TM is no longer just a movement, but an industry."

It is also a mania, more appealing to many persons than psychotherapy or other relatively demanding kinds of help. Explains Boston Psychiatrist Lee Birk: "Transcendental Meditation appears to be based on art rather than science, and there is something people like about that. The white-coated laboratory researcher is just not as comforting as the Indian guru who has centuries of human wisdom behind him." Even so, the sweeping claims about TM still need to be proved definitively.

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