Joseph W. Kellett
Website: http://www.suggestibility.org/
This site is critical of Transcendental Meditation®
My name is Joe Kellett. Although I am a former "Transcendental Meditation"® (often just called "TM"®) teacher I no longer in any way represent the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi or any or his organizations.
On the contrary, the purpose of this site is to provide information and arguments recommending against involvement with any of his organizations.
If you want the official TM position, go to an official TM organizational source. You also can find links to many additional official TM organizational sources at AllTM.org.
They want to do much more than just teach you how to relax!
However, after researching those sites then come back here. What you will have read is that TM produces very deep relaxation which has been scientifically proven to have both physical and psychological health benefits. (You may have read some outrageous things about "world peace" too but let's skip over that for now.)
What that scientific research does in fact show is that (a) TM produces deep relaxation in some people, and (b) deep relaxation can have physical and psychological health benefits. I have no argument with that. It's true (however do beware though of egregious spin-doctoring performed in TM propaganda regarding scientific research).
What I do have a problem with is that TM teachers use that as a starting point to recruit people into a cult. For one example, many people who start off thinking that they will just learn how to relax end up paying several thousand dollars for classes in developing supernatural powers such as levitation.
Those people aren't just "learning" how to levitate. They are also "learning", they sincerely believe, how to become invisible. In fact, they are "learning" quite a number of supernatural powers. And that's just the beginning of what they're getting into. How did those people get from just wanting to relax to finding themselves practicing levitation and invisibility?
First, those people were deceived
TM teachers are trained to deceive you. They are good people and they deceive you from good motives because they want to hide from you things that "you aren't ready to understand yet." If you heard those things then your misunderstanding might prevent you from learning TM, and that would be a very tragic thing for you.
These well-intentioned TM teachers will deceive you in two ways. The first way is that they freely employ a technique of deception called "mental reservation." This form of deception involves hiding information from you while letting you believe that you have all of the information that you need. This was the form of deception employed by Bill Clinton when he said "I did not have sex with that woman." He wasn't "lying" (at least not according to his private unstated mental definition of "sex") but he was still deliberately "deceiving." As he famously said "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is". TM advocates are pulling identical deceptions on you!
TMers also quite freely and egregiously employ a form of propaganda called "spin doctoring." This is a form of deception involving deliberate distortion of the facts. In this website I will show you how both of these techniques of deception are used.
Second, those people's psychological vulnerabilities were taken advantage of
As I will discuss in detail this is how TM works: (a) first a person is told that by following a certain procedure he will attain deep relaxation, and (b) then he is then shown how to induce a trance state in himself in which that suggestion is acted out. Of course TM is very elaborate and effective in how it carries this out and I discuss this in great detail at that link.
Continue Reading: http://www.suggestibility.org/
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