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Transcendental meditation threat to
New Zealand schoolchildren by Dave Swaney
In early July, the Maharishi Foundation of New Zealand presented educators’ conferences in Auckland and Christchurch promoting TM in schools as a way to improve student behavior and performance. They are in the process of contacting interested schools about their Stress Free Schools Programme, said Martin Jelley of the foundation. According to a report in the New Zealand Herald, Principals' Federation president Pat Newman said the idea was ridiculous. "Get real, I say,” he told the Herald. “We have enough on our plates. Let them do it at home. It might be handy for parents.” Ministry of Education media spokeswoman Christine Field said that as far as the ministry was concerned, individual schools were free to bring in TM if they chose and believed it was a benefit to their students. Many researchers are not sanguine about the prospect. “Few religions are as deceptive or defective as TM,” said author and former TM practitioner John Weldon, writing in the Christian Research Journal, published by the respected religion watchdog group Christian Research Institute (CRI), of Charlotte, North Carolina. Transcendental Meditation gained global attention in the 1960s when the Beatles and a few other high-profile celebrities dabbled in it. In reality, say experts, it’s a Hindu meditation technique that was packaged for Western consumption by the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the “giggling guru” who earned his nickname for his nervous tittering during TV appearances. In Western nations TM is positioned as “scientific” and its religious aspects are downplayed and even denied in many cases, although the founding guru is usually prominently featured in promotional material. TM New Zealand’s website home page makes no mention of TM’s connection to Hinduism. It presents it as a “scientifically validated programme” and “the single most effective technique available for gaining deep relaxation, eliminating stress, promoting health, increasing creativity and intelligence and attaining inner happiness and fulfilment.” Although it claims to have “over 500 scientific studies at more than 200 independent research institutions in 30 countries” to support TM’s claims, serious medical authorities do not give these reports much currency. One researcher notes that “the studies ... have been performed primarily by the TM organization or by people they sponsor at Maharishi University of Management and at other universities.” Chemist and Nobel Prize winner Melvin Calvin, of the University of California at Berkeley, concluded: “Maharishi’s principal business is collecting money from new acolytes. He doesn’t know anything about science, but does know that cloaking his dogma in scientific jargon is the only way to gain legitimacy.” Mrs. Winnington left the organization when she became a Christian and has been an ardent opponent of TM for more than 20 years. Like most TM teachers, she found the profession profitable. “I was very well paid and could afford to go overseas for extra training,” she said about her takings from teaching TM. Attempts to introduce TM into public schools are not new. In the United States schools for years have resisted efforts to have it adopted into their curriculum, according to the Skeptic’s Dictionary, an online resource. At the TM educators’ conferences in Auckland and Christchurch, Dr Ashley Deans said that the school he heads in the US added TM to its curriculum more than 20 years ago. But his school is the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, which is at the organization’s American headquarters in Fairfield, Iowa. Teaching TM to school-age children is “opening their minds up to something that is definitely not neutral”, said Mrs. Winnington. “It is a deception and a demonic reality that has the potential of drawing them, as time goes on, into further areas of deception.” Author Weldon also practiced TM in the early 1970s. He noted that TM is still using famous personalities to expand its influence. According to Weldon, “Transcendental meditation is a simplified yoga technique designed to alter one’s consciousness in order to achieve the realization of one’s personal divinity. “The purpose or goal of TM is that the one practicing it might realize that he or she is one essence with Brahman in his or her true nature; that is, he or she is God.” Weldon cites several authoritative reports of TM leading to
serious maladies such as mental illness, suicide, seizures and demon
possession. Mrs. Winnington says she had many experiences with demon activity and psychological problems among others practicing TM. “I came across numerous instances of meditation-induced mental illness, including schizophrenia.” She pointed out that Maharishi had said: “Meditating leads one to contact the gods, thereby gaining their help, and one sins if he does not contact these gods.” She summed up her opinion of the practice: “TM is not primarily a stress-relief technique, but a spiritual practice and the results are coming from that source. “Most people can calm down by sitting down with their eyes closed for 20 minutes. You don’t need a mantra to do that.”
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