THE TM CRAZE: 40 Minutes to Bliss
Before each game, New York Jets Quarterback Joe Namath finds a quiet spot and seems to nod off. In the middle of a gale on Long Island Sound, while her friends are wrestling with lines and sails, Wendy Sherman, a Manhattan adwoman, slips to the bow of a 36-ft. yawl, makes herself as comfortable as she can, and closes her eyes. On warm afternoons in Rome, Ga., Municipal Court Judge Gary Hamilton and his wife Virginia can be found on their screened porch, apparently dozing. It is not a compulsion to sleep that these and perhaps 600,000 other Americans have in common. It is TM, or Transcendental Meditation, a ritual that they practice almost religiously twice a day and every day.
Last week the man who brought TM to America and the rest of the world, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was in the U.S. on one of his infrequent visits to spread The Word. The white-bearded guru visited his new university, the Maharishi International University in Iowa, and then flew to Los Angeles, where he taped the Merv Griffin show. Scores of his followers were in the audience, welcoming their leader with the traditional Indian greeting in which the hands are held, prayer-like, just below the chin.
"He's the greatest spiritual leader of our age," proclaimed one of the Maharishi's devoted band. "He hasn't established a religion, but a knowledge to benefit mankind."
Outside the TV studio, however, a group of Christian fundamentalists was present to demonstrate that the diminutive guru has attracted more than a few detractors. JESUS IS THE LORD, NOT MAHARISHI, read their signs. The Maharishi saw them, then was whisked away in his limousine to a suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. "We are not a religion," he retorted.
Why is there so much fuss about something so arcane-sounding as Transcendental Meditation? Simple. TM is the turn-on of the '70s--a drugless high that even the narc squad might enjoy.
All it demands of its practitioners is that they sit still for 20 minutes each morning and evening and silently repeat, over and over again, their specially assigned Sanskrit word, or mantra.
This simple exercise is the cureall, its adherents claim, for almost everything from high blood pressure and lack of energy to alcoholism and poor sexual performance. "I use it the way I'd use a product of our technology to overcome nervous tension," says Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan. "It's a nonchemical tranquilizer with no unpleasant side effects."
That recommendation alone is enough for many people in this Valium-saturated age, and the TM organization can scarcely keep up with those seeking nirvana by the numbers. Some 30,000 are signing up every month--more than three times as many as a year ago. There are now 370 TM centers around the country, and around 6,000 TM teachers.
The movement is biggest in that supermarket of Eastern cults and fads, California, which claims 123,000 meditators. According to the TM organization's statistics, there are also 300,000 TM meditators and 2,000 teachers in other countries. Canada leads the way with 90,000, followed by West Germany (54,000).
Books about TM are on both the hardcover and paperback bestseller lists, up there, for the moment at least, with the joys of sex, the dictates of diet, and the woes of Watergate.*
Maharishi International University occupies a 185-acre campus in Fairfield, Iowa, and is offering 600 students courses in such ordinary subjects as administration as well as such esoterica as "Astronomy, Cosmology and the Science of Creative Intelligence" (SCI, as it is always called, is the grand and somewhat amorphous theory behind TM). The revenues of the World Plan Executive Council-U.S., the umbrella name for the burgeoning American TM movement, now amount to $12 million a year.
At national headquarters in Los Angeles, 60 full-time employees oversee a conglomerate of euphoria that includes the Students International Meditation Society, which has programs on 100 campuses; the International Meditation Society, which gives both beginning and advanced TM courses; and the American Foundation for the Science of Creative Intelligence, which caters to businessmen. In addition to the many TM centers, there are also five fully owned and hundreds of rented country retreats offering lectures, seminars and advanced meditation (up to 120 minutes a day, or three times the usual dosage). One such center that the movement owns is set amid 465 acres of unspoiled countryside at Livingston Manor in New York's Catskill Mountains. It has a 350-room hotel, a sophisticated printing plant for the masses of TM newsletters and other literature, and a videotape and sound-recording complex worthy of a TV network.
TM is even setting up a television station in Los Angeles. Channel 18 is scheduled to go on the air in November with taped lectures by the Maharishi and variety shows featuring such famous meditators as Stevie Wonder, Peggy Lee and the Beach Boys, who have written a one-line TM song ("Transcendental Meditation is good for you"). Station KSCI will report only good news. there is talk of a TM network sending smiles from sea to sea.
TM is often mistaken for other nostrums of the '60s and '70s, but it has little or no relationship to most of them. For example, Esalen, which inspired the encounter movement in the '60s, in cludes such therapy as nude communal bathing and rolfing--deep-probing, painful massages that are supposed to release the unawakened consciousness. Arica, a nationwide spiritual organi zation, searches for "the Essential Self through, among other things, Egyptian gymnastics and African dances. Meditation is only incidental to Arica, and involves concentrating on the plan ets Jupiter and Saturn and the colors blue and black. Est, a San Francisco-based group, puts large numbers of people together in a room and keeps them there for up to 15 hours at a time, with only three toilet breaks. This supposedly forces modern man to look at his existential roots and discover, as Founder Werner Erhard phrases it, that "what is, is." Because of the confusion of names, the Maharishi is also often mistaken for the junior guru, the Maharaj Ji, 17, the pudgy, high-living "Perfect Master" of the Divine Light sect. In contrast to all of the other consciousness-raising groups, TM appears refreshingly dull and commonplace.
The only exotic component of TM, indeed, is the some what mysterious figure of the Maharishi himself. Questioned about his past, he roars with laughter. "You see," he explained to TIME'S Robert Kroon, "I am a monk, and as a monk I am not expected to think of my past.
It is not important where I come from. I am totally detached and peripatetic, like Socrates."
This much is known: he was born in India's Central prov ince some time around 1918 (he refuses to give his age) into the Kshatriya or warrior caste. In 1940 he took a degree in physics at Allahabad University. He decided, however, to seek enlightenment in a less scientific and more orthodox Indian way: he spent 13 years, from 1940 to 1953, with Guru Dev, a swami who left home at the age of nine to seek enlightenment. Guru Dev revived a lost meditation technique that originated in the Vedas, the oldest Hindu writings. According to one legend, Guru Dev charged the Maharishi with a mission: to find a technique that would enable the masses to meditate. The Maharishi hid away in the Himalayas for two years. When he emerged, he started the TM movement. In 1956 he took the name Maharishi, meaning Great Seer in Sanskrit. Now in his late 50s--though looks as old as the Vedas themselves--the Maharishi, by all accounts, is a living advertisement for the energy TM supposed to release. He is forever jeting round the world to visit TM centers in 89 countries. Last month, for ample, he was in Courchevel, a ski resort in the French Alps, where the movement has temporarily converted the posh Anapurna Hotel into a training center. In Courchevel, the Maharishi has a two-seater helicopter always at the ready to save driving up and down the mountains. The center is a place of great contrasts. Near the hotel's indoor swimming pool there is a dais covered with a saffron-colored cloth and surmounted by a portrait of Guru Dev. Yet nearby is the inevitable color TV studio, ready to record the Maharishi's every word and gesture.
His aides are always awed and reverential around him. The headquarters of the movement, they say, is not in one physical spot but rather "wherever Maharishi is"--true believers do not use the article before his name. He is the only one in the movement who is not expected to and does not meditate on a regular basis. "He doesn't have to," says Robert Cranson, who served two years as one of his secretaries. "He long ago achieved a perpetual fourth state of consciousness. The clarity of his mind is awesome."
The Maharishi believes that if only 1% of the population any community or country is meditating, the other 99% will feel good effects and crime will be reduced. If 5% meditates, he adds, great things will really begin to happen. "A good time for the world is coming," he says. "I see the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. I am only giving expression to the phenomenon that is taking place."
Whether the Age of Enlightenment is at hand remains to be seen, but meditating the TM way is in fact as easy as the Maharishi says it is. First off, a would-be meditator must attend two introductory lectures of an hour to an hour and a half. Tl if he is still interested, he pays his fee: $125 for an individual with lower rates for college and high school students and children four (the minimum age) to ten.
The initiate takes off his shoes and gathers his "offering": a fresh, white handkerchief, several pieces of sweet fruit and a bunch of flowers. TM claims to be totally secular, and the offerings are supposedly meant only as symbols: the flowers represent the flowers of life, the fruit the seed of life, and the handkerchief the cleansing of the spirit. After handing over his gifts, the newcomer is taken to a private room, where his teacher lights candles and incense and places the fruit, flowers and ha kerchief on an altar under a color portrait of Guru Dev. The teacher then chants in Sanskrit and introduces the meditator to his mantra, the one word that is meant to keep him meditating for the rest of his life.
The meditator is never supposed to reveal his mantra--not to wife, husband, lover or children. Each teacher is personally given a set of mantras by the Maharishi--exactly 17 according to one knowledgeable source. He must parcel them out to his initiates, based on a secret formula that presumably includes temperament and profession. Duly initiated, the fledgling meditator is ready for his meditating classes, which last about an hour and a half each and which must be taken on three consecutive days or nights. Together with others, up to 50 or more, he sits in a lecture room, meditates for ten minutes or so, opens his eyes with the others, then meditates again. With the help of charts and diagrams, TM theories are explained by instructors who, following the movement's dress code, are invariably well-groomed and conservatively clothed.
How do you meditate? According to Physicist Lawrence Domash, chancellor of the Maharishi European Research University in Weggis, Switzerland, describing meditation is like "trying to explain the innards of a color television set to a tribe of Pygmies. What you can do is tell the Pygmy how to switch on the set and tune in to a station so he can enjoy the program." In fact, say the TM people, there is no wrong way to meditate. About 30 seconds after the eyes close, the mantra should come into the mind on its own; if it refuses, the meditator gently nudges it and starts repeating it silently to himself. He does not have to repeat it at any particular speed or to any special rhythm, such as his heart beat or his breathing. Other thoughts can come into his mind--they almost invariably do--and the mantra can slip away for a time, to come back a few seconds or a few minutes later.
There are only a few rules for meditation. It must be done for 20 minutes (some people, for reasons that only their teachers know, are prescribed only 15 minutes) in the morning and late afternoon or evening, but it must never be done before going to bed. One couple who violated the rule by meditating at 9:30 p.m. told TIME Reporter-Researcher Anne Hopkins that they were so full of energy afterward that they could not fall asleep until 4 a.m. It must never be done immediately after a meal. Meditating can be done almost anywhere--on trains, in cars, in hotel lobbies.
The only real no-no in meditating is trying. If you try to be a good meditator, you will, paradoxically, almost certainly be a bad meditator. Meditating, TM officials insist, cannot be forced, and it must be done in all innocence, a word they use over and over again. "If you list instructions, you can't do it," asserts Charles Donahue, coordinator of TM's Northeast region. "It's like falling asleep. You can tell someone what he has to do--brush his teeth, put on his p.j.s and so on--before going to bed. But how do you describe the actual process of falling asleep? You can't."
Even TM officials admit that 20% to 25% of the people who try TM give it up after a while. Others claim the apostasy rate is still higher. One of those who quit is Victor Zukowski, owner of a Sharon, Mass., beauty parlor. "Look, I really tried," he says. "I paid my $125, attended all the sessions, and submitted to a ridiculous initiation ceremony. I meditated for six months, and do you know what happened? I fell asleep ev ery time. I just don't think it's right to charge people $125 for nothing."
For many people, however, TM seems to work:
P: Richard Nolan, 31, is a Democratic Congressman from Minnesota. "When you are in the political arena," he says, "your day can start at 6 or 7 in the morning at a plant gate, and before you know it, it's 4 in the afternoon and you still have hours of work in front of you. That's when it is nice to meditate, so you can get the rest you need."
P: Marilyn Forman, 40, is a housewife in Melville, Long Is land. When she found herself screaming at her two children and wondering, "Why can't I control myself?" she signed up for TM.
By the end of her second week she felt noticeably less tense and realized that her "boiling point" had been raised to a reasonable level. "Whatever TM does," she says, "it releases those pressured, tense, harried feelings we all have from life today."
P: Curly Smith, 53, a native Oklahoman, is now a land developer in Boulder City, Nev., living "mighty fine"--enough to pilot his own Lear jet. "I'm a very practical person," he says. "I found that with TM I could take life's pressures better. My mind was clearer, and I had a better disposition. The darndest thing about it is that all you have to do is say your mantra twice a day.
Period. Everything else just falls into place. With me, I immediately lost my taste for booze. I mean, my friends back in Okie City couldn't believe that. Curly Smith not drinkin'. Lord Almighty!"
These glowing testimonials are reinforced by scientific studies that at least partially back up TM's claims. The tests are relatively new and not definitive enough to amount to final proof in the eyes of most doctors, who are also made a little uncomfortable by the fact that much of the research has been carried out under the auspices of the TM organization or has been published by the Maharishi International University Press. Among significant findings:
P: Blood pressure drops. Working with 22 hypertensive patients for 63 weeks, two researchers from Harvard and U.C.L.A. found a significant drop in systolic and diastolic blood pressure after the patients began meditating.
P: Oxygen consumption is as much as 18% lower during meditation, according to a study by the same researchers. This denotes a marked slowing of the metabolism.
P: Alpha waves, produced by electrical activity in the brain and generally associated with a feeling of relaxation, become denser and more widespread in the brain during meditation.
This has been established in studies by a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and by two psychiatrists at Hartford's Institute of Living.
P: Other studies show meditators becoming less dependent on cigarettes, liquor and drugs or hallucinogens of any kind.
The Federal Government has so far funded 17 TM research projects, ranging from the effects of meditation on the body to its ability to help rehabilitate convicts and fight alcoholism. Some companies even think that TM can improve corporate efficiency. TM courses have been given at, among others, AT&T, General Foods, Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Chicago, and the Crocker National Bank of San Francisco.
The chief scientific challenge to TM is not that it is wrong but rather that it is not the only meditative technique to benefit the body. Says Dr. John Laragh, director of the cardiovascular unit at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan and perhaps the leading expert on hypertension in the U.S. (TIME cover, Jan. 13):
"I'm not sure that meditating has had any different effect on blood pressure than relaxing and sitting on a couch and reading a book." To find out, Laragh will soon conduct his own study of the effects of TM on a group of hypertension patients. Cardiologist Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, who collaborated on much of the original scientific research on TM, now says that he has a method that gives the same results; anybody can learn it in a minute, he says, without a fee and without going to TM classes. "To say there is really only one way to get the relaxation response is silly," says Benson, whose book The Relaxation Response has just been published (Morrow; $5.95). Simply stated, Benson recommends that the meditator sit down and, with eyes closed, relax his muscles, beginning with his feet and working up to his face. He then breathes only through his nose, and as he breathes out, he says the word one silently to himself. With every breath out he silently repeats "one," continuing for ten to 20 minutes.
"Anyone who claims exclusivity is immediately suspect," says Psychiatrist Stanley Dean, summing up the chief scientific complaint against TM. "The TM people's claim that theirs is the best of all possible worlds is nonsense. It is a sales gimmick. Meditation has been a way of achieving mental serenity through the ages, and they have no patent on it. TM is an important addition to our medical armamentarium, but it is not exclusive."
Other psychiatrists, always wary of anyone seeming to poach on their preserve, say that the TM organization does not screen prospective meditators and that the technique--especially a sequence of extra meditations called "rounding"--might well cause unstable persons to go over the edge.
Paradoxically, TM is also criticized for being too practical and not meditative enough. Most Hindu gurus, for instance, teach one or another form of yoga, which combines practical exercises with meditation to achieve union with Brahma--the ultimate reality or Absolute. Yoga itself is the Sanskrit word for a yoking, or union. The various branches of Buddhist meditation--Zen and Tibetan, for example--usually require great discipline and concentration to try similarly to gain nirvana, that ineffable state of liberation and union with ultimate reality in which suffering is eliminated and compassion and wisdom are attained. "Transcendental Meditation does not reach the stage of giving you awareness of your real self," complains Dr. Kumar Pal, secretary of the Yoga Institute of Psychology and Physical Therapy in New Delhi. "It is merely a technique, a very limited technique, and it is not yogic because it lacks the prerequisites of yogic meditation. A moral life is the sine qua non of yoga practice. The students and admirers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi have no need to give up sex, liquor and other immoral habits. They are reveling in immoral habits at the cost of basic moral values." TM, adds A.K. Krishna Nambiar, publisher and editor of Spiritual India, "can make you a better executive, but it cannot give you the spiritual ecstasy that other, more spiritual meditation techniques do. It can never lead the meditator to turya, the fourth and eventual stage of spiritual ecstasy which is the final aim of meditation and which makes the meditator one with and part of the universe."
On the other hand, some Jews and Christians, like the placard-carrying fundamentalists in Los Angles last week, say that TM, despite its claims to being purely secular, is really Hinduism in disguise. Their argument has at least some merit, and though the ordinary meditator sees traces of religion only in the initiation ceremony, the rites for TM teachers are permeated with Hindu words and symbols.
The invocation, for example, reads in part: "To Lord Narayana, to lotus-born Brahma, the Creator, to Vashishta, to Shakti, and to his son, Parashar, to Vyasa, to Shukadava . . . I bow down . . . At whose door the whole galaxy of gods pray for perfection day and night, adorned with immeasurable glory, preceptor of the whole world, having bowed down to him, we gain fulfillment."
Whatever it has borrowed from Hinduism, TM does owe something to religious tradition, and all major religions--Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as the Eastern faiths--at one time or another have included both meditation and the repetition of a mantra-like word. "Clasp this word tightly in your heart so that it never leaves no matter what may happen," advised a 14th century Christian treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing. "This word shall be your shield and your spear."
Perhaps the most significant fact about the TM craze is that, in the words of Krister Stendahl, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, it suggests a "genuine hunger for mystical and religious experiences." It is the most visible manifestation of the industrialized nations looking for relief from the pressures of modern life in Eastern spiritual or quasi-spiritual movements. The ideal of combining Western technological society with Eastern spiritual serenity has long appealed to many American and European victims of what they regard as the tensions of the 20th century. Japan is sometimes cited as having achieved that ideal, with tycoons coming home from the shipyard or computer plant and slipping into their kimonos and into the serenity of the past. This is possible in Japan because it has preserved the framework of old traditions and values. Without those, TM or any similar movement in the West can be at best palliative.
Judged on its own terms and used as a technique and not as a religious panacea, TM works--at least for many. It will not necessarily make people better, but it may very well make them feel better or, if nothing else, think that they feel better.
And that is about as much as they can expect from 40 minutes a day.
* TM: Discovering Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress, by Harold Bloomfield, Michael Peter Cain and Dennis T. Jaffe (Delacorte; $8.95), and The TM Book, by Denise Denniston and Peter McWilliams (Price/Stern/Sloan; $3 95). both in third place this week. Another book that deals in part with TM, Adam Smith's Powers of Mind (Random House; $10), is due later this month.
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