User:Will Beback/TM background

Note: This is a just a short page intended to provide background for members of the ArbCom working on Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Transcendental Meditation movement. While no sources are listed here, almost all of the information is taken from Wikipedia articles and is well-sourced there.

The international Transcendental Meditation movement encompasses dozens of organizations and has assets valued at over $3.5 billion. It is generally categorized as a new religious movement, though it rejects the label. Skeptics and scientists have accused it of promoting fringe theories and pseudoscience.

TM and TM-Sidhi

There is a sharp distinction between two parts of the movement. There is the 20-minute, twice-a-day practice of Transcendental Meditation (TM), practiced by millions including dozens of celebrities. It is well known for being an effective relaxation technique that results in lowered blood pressure and other measurable physiological changes. The two most controversial issues are whether it's a religion and whether it can exacerbate mental instability. A key issue is the initiation ceremony in which Hindu gods are invoked and the mantra words themselves, which some say are the names of other gods but which others agree are just meaningless sounds.

The much smaller part is the core movement, perhaps something like 20,000-50,000 around the world with 5,000-10,000 in the U.S. They engage in group practice using lengthier and more complicated mantras that lasts a couple of hours twice a day, the TM-Sidhi program. The climax of the ritual is "Yogic Flying". In the 1970s posters advertising courses explicitly said that they would teach people to fly. The movement refused to make public demonstrations for years while asserting that people were flying, but eventually conducted demonstrations which revealed they had only accomplished what they described as the first stage towards the next stages of floating and then free flight, but which appeared to all observers as energetic hopping.

Group practice of Yogic Flying is said to create such powerful coherence that the field of the entire area is altered to quell negativity and prevent harmful events while promoting positivity, the Maharishi Effect. They credit the fall of the Berlin Wall to their intervention, and have dozens of studies which prove the effect is real. For decades the movement has sought support from various local and national governments to hire cadres of Yogic Flyers to create a shield of invincibility to protect the population from things like accidents, bad weather, terrorism, and crime. The belief is that the actions of a small number can affect millions of people, and can do so from great distances (even across the Atlantic). Only the core members engage in these practices which require the investment of thousands of dollars and significant time every day and which are preferentially practiced in a group.

The movement has created monastic communities for men and women to practice TM-Sidhi in a celibate setting. Whenever possible, activities in the movement are segregated by gender. All of the leaders of the movement are male.

The price of TM training increased significantly in recent decades, peaking at $2500 in the U.S. before dropping slightly. The increases led to protests by TM teachers, and some broke away to teach it independently at more reasonable prices. Among them is David Spector, user:David spector, who advocates Natural Stress Relief (NSR) as a lower cost alternative. NSR has been threatened repeatedly by TM lawyers for trademark infringement.

MUM and Fairfield, IA

In 1971 the newly formed Maharishi International University (now called Maharishi University of Management or MUM) bought the campus of a defunct college in Fairfield, Iowa. Since then that small town has become a "magnet" for TM practitioners. There are currently an estimated 2,500 TM practitioners in and around Fairfield, not counting the 1,000 Indian pandits who spend their days chanting Vedic scripture in a special enclave and do not socialize with others.

MUM has 47 full-time and ten part-time faculty. (Or 71 faculty, according to a 2001 source, or 80 in a 2003 source.) Their internal directory lists a total of 339 faculty and staff. The average male faculty member is paid $15,692, and the average female faculty member is paid $7,296 annually, as of 2008. It is fully accredited. There is also a lower school on campus, the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, which is reported to have about 49 faculty members.

The adjoining settlement of Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa (MVC) is the literal capital of the movement's Global Country of World Peace (GCWP). While the MUM does not actually run the movement, the movement in the U.S. is run from Fairfield/MVC by people such as Bevan Morris and John Hagelin who (nominally) work at MUM. The Fairfield area is also the headquarters of several TM-related businesses and foundations.

People who live in Fairfield and have no specific role in the MUM or GCWP but who participate in group practice of Yogic Flying are called the "Town Super Radiance community" or TSR.

Studies and funding

Maharishi techniques, products, and other technologies have, according to the movement, been studied more than 600 times, and published in peer-reviewed journals 350 times. A large percentage of those are devoted to the non-controversial physiologic and mental benefits of mantra meditation. While many studies have unaffiliated co-authors, and a few have been conducted entirely independently, the bulk of the research has been conducted by MUM faculty and graduate students, and they have done all of the research on the more esoteric elements.

The movement makes the production of research a priority. In 1993, one study alone cost a reported $6 million, though most is much cheaper. Several journalists have reported that members of the movement mention the "over 600 studies" at every opportunity, and the phrase appears often on the Internet.[1] In recognition of his important Vedic scholarship, and to fund future research, Tony Nader received his weight in gold. The cost of learning TM has been a matter of some controversy, especially in the last ten years. One explanation for the price is that it subsidizes research.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and other U.S. federal agencies have provided at least $24 million in funding for studies, mostly on the TM technique itself. A grant of $8 million went for creating a new institute to study cardiovascular effects. Study after study have shown significant effects of TM in reducing hypertension.

Global Country of World Peace and global reconstruction

The movement spent about eight years seeking power through the political process, creating the Natural Law Party which ran candidates in almost every state in the U.S., and in at least a dozen other countries. In India, the NLP was considered a religious party. None of the candidates were elected in any country and the movement then condemned democracy. Maharishi declared a new kingdom, the Global Country of World Peace in 2000 and appointed its head king (maharaja) and local administrators (rajas). The GCWP has a flag, a currency, sells bonds, and has three capitals (Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa, Vlodrop, the Netherlands, and 70 Broad Street, New York City). It spent years unsuccessfully courting small countries with attempts to buy or lease land to create a sovereign Vatican-like city-state, offering billions of dollars. Its officials were thrown out of Costa Rica after trying to create a nation on tribal land in Central America, even crowning a local king.

The movement strongly believes that homes and other buildings which face any direction besides due east or due north are actively harmful to the inhabitants. The majority of illness and unhappiness in the world is attributed to mis-oriented housing. The movement calls for the immediate evacuation, demolition, and reconstruction of significant government buildings such as the White House, U.S. Congress, Westminster Palace, the Congress House in India, etc. All other buildings and cities must soon follow suit, an estimated 95% of all buildings being inauspicious. The reconstruction effort is estimated to cost $300 trillion. The new construction must all comply with the Maharishi's architectural principles, a Vedic Indian form of Feng Shui, and his movement is to receive a 20% commission on every new building.

The movement owns or has owned dozens of famous old hotels and resorts in the U.S. It bought and later sold the huge stately home, Mentmore Towers, in the UK. It has several large parcels of undeveloped land. It owns a few little undeveloped islands. There are several large university campuses and a network of lower schools, especially in India. In 2008 the movement was estimated to have $3.5-$5 billion in assets.

Other locations

Vlodrop, the Nehterlands, was where he Maharishi spent his final years and the de facto capital of Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam. It is home to two more universities: MERU and MOU (a distance-learning website). There's a small community in Lelystad, with a major Maharishi foundation in Amsterdam.

There are several communities of movement followers around the world, some with Golden Domes used for group practice. There's a major center near Boone, North Carolina, and a smaller center in Livingston Manor, New York. There's a spa and elementary school in Lancaster, Massachusetts. There are a couple of communities in England (Skelmersdale and Rendlesham, each with about 100 people). There's also a small settlement in Hararit, Israel.

In India, the movement apparently has several large monasteries in which monks (pandits or pundits) chant Vedic verses, or perform yagyas to attain certain wishes for those who make contributions. There are also many schools and colleges in India run by the movement. The movement is building a magnificent mausoleum for the Maharishi on a bank of the Ganges.

Health products

Maharishi Ayurveda (MA) is described as a revival of ancient Ayurvedic medicine. The movement manufactures and sells botanical mixtures in order to treat a variety of ailments. They operate spas in which imbalances are diagnosed and treated. Deepak Chopra was the head of one of the Maharishi spas for a few years and the Maharishi's personal physician, but he was later shut out for competing for prominence with Maharishi.

Chopra and other co-authors were specifically criticized by the editors of the prestigious JAMA for failing to disclose a conflict of interest with Maharishi when submitting a paper on the benefits of MA. In the UK, some doctors were officially admonished for claiming that the MA products could cure AIDS without having any proof. In the U.S., a movement member sued the movement after discovering she had been poisoned with lead from MA products imported from India.

The health treatments include oil drips, massages, enemas, and other spa-type treatments. They also include horoscopes, proper home orientation (see above), and light treatment, in which special flashlights with gems attached are shone onto the afflicted areas. In MVVT, practitioners mentally recite Vedic scriptures while blowing on the diseased part. They suggest it can treat ailments ranging from baldness to leukemia, and a basic course of three treatments costs $900, but more deluxe versions are available. Studies by movement researchers have proven the efficacy of these techniques.