Series: Elements in New Religious Movements
The Transcendental Meditation Movement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2023
Dana Sawyer, Cynthia Humes
Showing posts with label Deepak Chopra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deepak Chopra. Show all posts
Jan 14, 2023
The Transcendental Meditation Movement
Jun 21, 2019
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
The guru who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the west died on 5 February aged 91. He's remembered by the renowned spiritual writer, a close friend for more than 20 years
Deepak Chopra
The Guardian
Dec 13, 2008
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
The guru who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the west died on 5 February aged 91. He's remembered by the renowned spiritual writer, a close friend for more than 20 years
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi started out as one kind of cultural curiosity - a lone Hindu monk who aimed to teach meditation to the world - and ended up as a different kind of cultural curiosity: the one-time guru to the Beatles. He came remarkably close to fulfilling his original intent. Millions of westerners learned Transcendental Meditation (TM), and a new word, 'mantra', was added to the English language. He survived long after the departure of the Fab Four, who decamped almost as soon as they sniffed the thin air of Maharishi's Himalayan retreat (excluding George Harrison, who turned into a genuine seeker and quiet ally).
Maharishi owed his survival to two things. He was sincerely a guru, a 'dispeller of darkness', who had the good of the world at heart, despite the wags who turned TM into the McDonald's of meditation and the caricatures that morphed his white-bearded image into a pop cliché. Sincerity would have served him little if Maharishi hadn't also been a gifted teacher of India's ancient tradition of Vedanta. Many visitors who came to gawk went away moved by both qualities.
Beginning in the mid-Eighties, I had the opportunity to know Maharishi as a friend. Whenever my medical practice permitted, I joined his inner circle. It wasn't necessary to be reverent in his presence. He made a point of not being seen as a religious figure but as a teacher of consciousness. Of the many memories I could offer, here is the most intense ... Maharishi had fallen mysteriously and gravely ill on a visit to India in 1991. My father, a prominent cardiologist in New Delhi, ordered him to be rushed to England for emergency care. Soon, I was standing outside the London Heart Hospital, watching an ambulance navigate the snarled traffic, sirens wailing.
Just before it arrived on the hospital's doorstep, one of the accompanying doctors ran up with the news that Maharishi had suddenly died. I rushed to the ambulance, picking up Maharishi's body - he was frail and light by this time - and carrying him in my arms through London traffic.
I laid him on the floor inside the hospital's doors and called for a cardio assist. Within minutes he was revived and rushed to intensive care on a respirator and fitted with a pacemaker that took over his heartbeat.
I became his primary caretaker during this crisis, tending to him personally at a private home outside London. It quickly became apparent that he was totally indifferent to his illness, and there was an astonishingly rapid recovery. The hospital expected lasting health problems, but there were apparently none. Within a few months Maharishi was back to his round-the-clock schedule - he rarely slept more than three or four hours a night. When I approached him one day to remind him to take his medications, he gave me a penetrating look. In it I read a message: 'Do you really think I am this body?' For me, that was a startling moment, a clue about what higher consciousness may actually be like.
As he saw himself, Maharishi knew that he had come tantalisingly close to changing the world, as close as any non-politician can who doesn't wage war. He held that humanity could be saved from destruction only by raising collective consciousness. In that sense he was the first person to talk about tipping points and critical mass. If enough people meditated and turned into peaceful citizens of the world, Maharishi believed, walls of ignorance and hatred would fall as decisively as the Berlin Wall. This was his core teaching in the post-Beatles phase of his long career before he died peacefully in seclusion in Holland, at the age of about 91, his following much shrunken, his optimism still intact.
https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2008/dec/14/deepak-chopra-remembers-maharishi-mahesh-yogi
Feb 20, 2017
In pursuit of wellness
February 20, 2017
Shovon Chowdhury's most recent novel, Murder With Bengali Characteristics, is gluten-free, flavoursome and spiritually uplifting
The pursuit of wellness leads to an increase in human happiness, especially for those who provide it. Deepak Chopra is worth over $80 million. Baba Ramdev will soon be bigger than Procter & Gamble. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s attempts to promote yogic flying never rose beyond six to nine inches above the mattresses on which his yogis bounced, optimistically, in the lotus position, but the value of his real estate holdings has skyrocketed. This is commendable. The first thing purveyors of wellness have to do is achieve wellness themselves, because otherwise, how will they help other people? Currently, those at the top of this profession feel a deep and abiding sense of well-being.
What about the rest of us? Our search for wellness begins at birth, when we realise that amniotic fluid is no longer available, and we will have to find things to eat. In India, many of us are still doing this. On the other hand, many others have achieved this goal, which is why close to 5% of our population can be classified as morbidly obese. According to the National Family Health Survey, Delhi has taken the lead in this matter, with 49% of the women and 45% of the men falling in this category. This has placed a lot of pressure on the transport system, leading to breakdowns of buses and overcrowding in the metro. Flights leaving from Indira Gandhi International Airport may soon be unable to take off. The runner-up is Punjab, where 37.5% of the men and 30% of the women are obese. This once-proud state is being brought to its knees by a combination of drugs and butter chicken. Kerala, Goa and Tamil Nadu round out the top five.
I was a little surprised by this. I was brought up to believe that South Indian eating habits are healthier than ours, but this appears to be a canard spread by the Udupi mafia. What this data tells us is that, in India, our preliminary pursuit of wellness involves large amounts of ghee. In Amritsar and Ludhiana, which have always been more open to Western influences, butter is preferred. However, there is no escaping evolution, and over time, our needs have begun to evolve. We order Diet Cokes with our Maharaja Macs. We have an extra spoon of dahi with our aloo parathas . These urges go beyond the physical. We have come to realise that carbohydrates cannot fill the yawning emptiness in our souls. It is at this point that our true pursuit of wellness begins, and we at The Hindu are here to support you. In the coming months, we will explore ways and means of achieving this, including inner engineering, quantum health and bananas.
Shovon Chowdhury’s most recent novel, Murder With Bengali Characteristics , is gluten-free, flavoursome and spiritually uplifting
Our search for wellness begins at birth, when we realise that amniotic fluid is no longer available, and we will have to find things to eat
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/in-pursuit-of-wellness/article17332773.ece,
Jan 24, 2017
I was a self-help guru. Here’s why you shouldn’t listen to people like me.
:format(webp)/cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/52830817/shutterstock_557648440.0.jpg "New Age movement")
Vox
Michelle Goodman
January 23, 2017
Deepak Chopra is a fraud. This is what I was thinking as I lingered 20 rows back, waiting for Bree, my boss, to finish huddling with Deepak onstage about the presentation he would give that evening.
Bree ran the San Francisco chapter of The Learning Annex, that mainstay of adult education courses for the personal-growth set. This was the mid-'90s, when people still called the New Age movement "the New Age movement." Deepak was our big get that season. We proudly positioned the blurb announcing his lecture at the front of the newsprint catalog on its own two-page spread, rather than tucked away amid the litany of courses taught by shamans, sexperts, and self-professed real estate tycoons.
I had nothing against Dr. Chopra. I just found it surprising that moments before the dry run now underway, this beacon of enlightenment, a man supposedly above the trivialities of ego and self-doubt, had asked Bree if the khakis he was wearing made him look fat.
Apparently, I learned, gurus are people too, even gurus lining the self-help shelves of friendly neighborhood bookstores. They aren't infallible, all-knowing oracles above worrying about their generous muffin top or widening backside. They are businesspeople — businesspeople with books, keynotes, and openings in their consulting practice to peddle.
"It's all smoke and mirrors," my friend Cherise, a ghostwriter for a number of these bestselling gurus, told me the following week over tea, her Mission District apartment stuffed with piles of self-help books, CDs, and videos. "Many of these people are no more qualified to dole out life lessons than you or I."
How I became a self-help "expert"
A decade and change later, I got a firsthand taste of the guru trade. It was 2007 and my first book, a career guide for creative types who didn't want an office job, was approaching publication.
"Wonderful!" my mother said when I called to tell her my advance copies had arrived in the mail. "When do you go on Oprah?"
I explained to her that most authors, especially small press authors like me, don't get the opportunity to meet the queen of daytime television. I also broke the news that I would not be flying first class around the country on my publisher's dime or drinking Champagne from dollar-bill‑shaped flutes anytime soon. For most nonfiction authors I knew, "going on a book tour" meant blogging obsessively and visiting a couple cities where you had couches to crash on and knew someone who knew someone who ran a conference or an event space at which you could speak. More often than not, you footed the bill yourself.
"You never know," my mother countered. "Look at that Eat, Pray, Love lady. She certainly didn't sell herself short. Just keep me posted so I can tell everyone what shows to see you on and when."
Shortly after this pep talk, the marketing director at my publisher gave me one of her own. Everything was on track, she said across her large, cluttered desk. Press releases and review copies had gone out. The PR team had begun to get some nibbles; I could expect to see a couple early reviews soon and would start getting calls for interviews any week now.
"The rest," she said, "is up to you. Any grassroots steps you can take to connect with readers and build a following will help."
So began my year-long odyssey of doling out career advice to anyone who would listen. Suddenly I was speaking in public, giving TV and radio interviews, writing nationally syndicated columns and recapping it all on multiple social media accounts.
I soon learned that playing pundit is a hypocrite's game
Book promotion is both the best and worst job a writer can have. Yes, getting asked to do interviews and appearances means people actually care about your book, or at least some producer or event organizer facing a hole in their programming schedule does. It's flattering, thrilling, a dream come true — that is, until you sit before the TV camera in your pancake makeup and realize you've forgotten everything you've practiced saying for the past three days and, despite doing a hundred jumping jacks in the bathroom to calm your nerves moments earlier, your hands are shaking and your eyes are twitching and you're pretty sure you're going to throw up.
To say I was an awkward public speaker is to put it mildly. Most radio and TV interviewers are trained to smooth over their guests' rough edges. At bookstore and library podiums, it's possible to pass off repeatedly losing your train of thought or bonking your glasses into the microphone as charming. Not so much when you're at the head of an auditorium filled with hundreds of professionals who expect you to sound like you've been commanding crowds your entire life.
During one particularly disastrous talk I gave to a chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers, I took the stage only to realize I'd brought the wrong speech. I had agreed to pontificate on how self-employed professionals could stay organized. Only in my haste to leave my hotel room, I'd brought my speech on how writers needed to diversify their skill set. Flustered, I tried to improvise, shuffling through my printed pages for some semblance of a relevant talking point. A couple minutes in, I abandoned my carefully crafted slide deck, as it no longer had any bearing on the morass of words tumbling from my mouth.
"Thank you for coming today," the association board member who'd enlisted me to speak said once it was over, pressing a $15 Starbucks gift card into my hand. (Thank you notes, gift cards, and the "opportunity to sell books afterward" were standard payment for D-list speakers like me.) I smiled sheepishly, desperate to make my way to the book signing table. "You might want to check out Toastmasters," she said, nodding toward the stage. "I used to be terrible up there, too."
I met a lot of other self-help authors along the way. And I discovered there were two types of us: people who lived to write, and self-appointed experts hoping to get rich and famous. "A book is just a means to an end," one A-list blogger told me in the green room of a local TV station, where we awaited our upcoming live segment. Eyeing her crisp red blazer and perfect blowout, I smoothed my rumpled blouse and tried to forget about my frizzy mane.
"Your book is basically your calling card," she continued. To her, a book deal was a business plan — a stepping stone to ad revenue, keynote invitations, corporate sponsorships, consulting gigs, even startup capital. If you wanted to make money writing books, you had to be a thought leader, a guru. Basically you had to be Deepak Chopra.
Attaining Chopra-like status was tough but not impossible, my fellow authors assured me. The key was to monetize my expertise, as though every person I'd ever encountered was loose change waiting to be salvaged from the couch. To do so, I needed to pepper my website with authoritative photos of myself — arms crossed, face confidently arranged into a tell-me-something-I-don't-know expression. I needed an e-newsletter promoting products my many acolytes could buy, like webinars, ebooks, and $499 coaching packages. I also needed to invest $10,000 in a media trainer who could teach me to hold my own with Terry Gross and Anderson Cooper. Never mind that $10,000 was far more than I'd received for my advance and I was already behind on my rent.
If Deepak Chopra was a fraud, then so was I. As I was beginning to glean, playing pundit was a hypocrite's game.
I started to miss deadlines. My inbox was a disaster. My social life suffered.
Rather than follow any of the aforementioned advice, I zigzagged along like the harried freelancer I'd become, rushing from column deadline to media interview to public event and back again, trying to keep both my Amazon ranking and checking account from tanking, often pulling all-nighters to keep up.
I started to miss deadlines. My inbox began to crowd with angry "WHERE'S YOUR STORY?" emails from editors. Each Monday morning ushered in a new round of deciding which late project to finish first. Sometimes I'd arrive at my public talks on two hours of sleep. "You look tired," a colleague said after one particularly lackluster conference session I delivered on how writers could build an impeccable reputation. She neglected to mention the river of pasta sauce I'd unwittingly dribbled down the front of my dress at lunch.
My social life wasn't faring much better. Friends were growing annoyed with me for repeatedly canceling plans so I could work late. My fiancé asked more than once if we were still engaged. At a rare dinner with a couple of buddies, one asked what I was working on. "A story about entrepreneurs who don't work 80 hours a week!" I chirped, entirely serious. One friend cackled wildly. Another spit out her beer.
And then I started having chest pains
Around this time, I started having chest pains. My doctor thought I just needed some TUMS. Three weeks later, the TUMS I was popping like Life Savers stopped working. The tornado in my chest was all I could think about. My doctor now on vacation, I was left to my own neurotic devices. I called the 24-hour number on the back of my insurance card.
"When did the pain start?" the hotline nurse asked.
"About two days ago."
"Shortness of breath?"
"A little…"
I took the nurse's advice and went to the ER. Six hours and multiple tests later, a cardiologist told me there was nothing wrong with my heart. I'd probably been having a panic attack. The prescription? Less stress, more rest.
Publicly I was the poster child for the well-balanced, successful freelancer. Privately I was unraveling. Writing a book about creating a self-styled career you love had led me straight to a job I hated. I was supposed to be this emissary of work-life balance, the queen of controlling one's career destiny. Yet Sunday evenings now gave me the same fetal-position dread my book claimed to help readers avoid. I'd gone to the hospital with chest pains in my 30s, for chrissake, racking up $4,000 in out-of-pocket expenses in the process.
The lesson: practicing what you preach is really, really difficult. So I decided to stop preaching.
Practicing what you preach is tough. And not just for me. I've known dating advice columnists who don't date. I interviewed a career expert who advocated nanny care for telecommuting parents while trying to manage two crying children between sound bites. I know a "turbocharge your freelance income" workshop leader who's privately admitted he has no idea how much he makes because his wife handles all the money.
The dirty little secret of those in the advice business is that we wind up teaching others the lessons we most need to learn ourselves.
When the recession hit, my inbox filled with emails from people facing foreclosure and bankruptcy. People with unfathomable health problems and insurmountable piles of medical bills. One career advice columnist I knew had received letters from people asking if their family still could collect on the life insurance policy if the letter-writer committed suicide.
After one of my bookstore appearances, a woman with short gray hair who resembled my mother approached me, her contorted face the embodiment of all those desperate emails. She had been out of work a year and was out of employment ideas. She was also worried about paying her mortgage the next month.
I ran through my usual spiel about the hidden job market, interim freelance work, networking strategies for job hunters over 50. She spoke slowly, mournfully, shooting down each suggestion, insisting she'd already tried them all.
It worried me that people in such dire straits would tap a stranger they stumbled upon online or in a bookstore for legal, financial, or mental health advice. These were questions to which the only responsible answer was, "You should really talk to a qualified professional about that." It's not that I didn't want to help. It's just that I didn't know how.
"I don't really have anyone to talk to about this," the woman continued, the small bookstore now empty save for the two of us and the event coordinator, who looked to be closing up shop. "I live alone. And nobody cares." The conversation limped along like this for some time, fruitless, hopeless. I suggested a couple sliding scale counseling services and she shot those down, too. I left the bookstore desperate to sleep.
I was starting to feel irresponsible, like the only way I could keep doing this was to forget about all the people my one-size-fits-all platitudes couldn't help. But with coachology comes great responsibility. Responsibility to offer advice you know works, preferably advice you've put to the test yourself. Responsibility to rise above bullshit artistry. Responsibility to not try to solve people's problems you are in no way equipped to fix.
Advising others on how to steer their professional lives and livelihood was a job I no longer wanted. This wasn't just a crisis of skills or cash flow; it was a crisis of conscience.
I'd reached the fork in the road. It was time to make a choice: I could embrace a life of gurudom, assuming a slicker, more polished persona, selling what I knew and faking my way through what I didn't. Or I could return to the quieter, simpler life of a freelance writer. Essentially, I could go Chopra or I could go home.
I chose to go home.
Michelle Goodman is the award-winning author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life. Her essays and journalism have appeared in Salon, Vice, Bust, Mental Floss, nytimes.com, Seattle Times, Seattle magazine, Entrepreneur and several anthologies. Find her on Twitter @anti9to5guide.
This essay originally appeared on Narrative.ly.
http://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/1/23/14238530/self-help-advice-bogus
Deepak Chopra is a fraud. This is what I was thinking as I lingered 20 rows back, waiting for Bree, my boss, to finish huddling with Deepak onstage about the presentation he would give that evening.
Bree ran the San Francisco chapter of The Learning Annex, that mainstay of adult education courses for the personal-growth set. This was the mid-'90s, when people still called the New Age movement "the New Age movement." Deepak was our big get that season. We proudly positioned the blurb announcing his lecture at the front of the newsprint catalog on its own two-page spread, rather than tucked away amid the litany of courses taught by shamans, sexperts, and self-professed real estate tycoons.
I had nothing against Dr. Chopra. I just found it surprising that moments before the dry run now underway, this beacon of enlightenment, a man supposedly above the trivialities of ego and self-doubt, had asked Bree if the khakis he was wearing made him look fat.
Apparently, I learned, gurus are people too, even gurus lining the self-help shelves of friendly neighborhood bookstores. They aren't infallible, all-knowing oracles above worrying about their generous muffin top or widening backside. They are businesspeople — businesspeople with books, keynotes, and openings in their consulting practice to peddle.
"It's all smoke and mirrors," my friend Cherise, a ghostwriter for a number of these bestselling gurus, told me the following week over tea, her Mission District apartment stuffed with piles of self-help books, CDs, and videos. "Many of these people are no more qualified to dole out life lessons than you or I."
How I became a self-help "expert"
A decade and change later, I got a firsthand taste of the guru trade. It was 2007 and my first book, a career guide for creative types who didn't want an office job, was approaching publication.
"Wonderful!" my mother said when I called to tell her my advance copies had arrived in the mail. "When do you go on Oprah?"
I explained to her that most authors, especially small press authors like me, don't get the opportunity to meet the queen of daytime television. I also broke the news that I would not be flying first class around the country on my publisher's dime or drinking Champagne from dollar-bill‑shaped flutes anytime soon. For most nonfiction authors I knew, "going on a book tour" meant blogging obsessively and visiting a couple cities where you had couches to crash on and knew someone who knew someone who ran a conference or an event space at which you could speak. More often than not, you footed the bill yourself.
"You never know," my mother countered. "Look at that Eat, Pray, Love lady. She certainly didn't sell herself short. Just keep me posted so I can tell everyone what shows to see you on and when."
Shortly after this pep talk, the marketing director at my publisher gave me one of her own. Everything was on track, she said across her large, cluttered desk. Press releases and review copies had gone out. The PR team had begun to get some nibbles; I could expect to see a couple early reviews soon and would start getting calls for interviews any week now.
"The rest," she said, "is up to you. Any grassroots steps you can take to connect with readers and build a following will help."
So began my year-long odyssey of doling out career advice to anyone who would listen. Suddenly I was speaking in public, giving TV and radio interviews, writing nationally syndicated columns and recapping it all on multiple social media accounts.
I soon learned that playing pundit is a hypocrite's game
Book promotion is both the best and worst job a writer can have. Yes, getting asked to do interviews and appearances means people actually care about your book, or at least some producer or event organizer facing a hole in their programming schedule does. It's flattering, thrilling, a dream come true — that is, until you sit before the TV camera in your pancake makeup and realize you've forgotten everything you've practiced saying for the past three days and, despite doing a hundred jumping jacks in the bathroom to calm your nerves moments earlier, your hands are shaking and your eyes are twitching and you're pretty sure you're going to throw up.
To say I was an awkward public speaker is to put it mildly. Most radio and TV interviewers are trained to smooth over their guests' rough edges. At bookstore and library podiums, it's possible to pass off repeatedly losing your train of thought or bonking your glasses into the microphone as charming. Not so much when you're at the head of an auditorium filled with hundreds of professionals who expect you to sound like you've been commanding crowds your entire life.
During one particularly disastrous talk I gave to a chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers, I took the stage only to realize I'd brought the wrong speech. I had agreed to pontificate on how self-employed professionals could stay organized. Only in my haste to leave my hotel room, I'd brought my speech on how writers needed to diversify their skill set. Flustered, I tried to improvise, shuffling through my printed pages for some semblance of a relevant talking point. A couple minutes in, I abandoned my carefully crafted slide deck, as it no longer had any bearing on the morass of words tumbling from my mouth.
"Thank you for coming today," the association board member who'd enlisted me to speak said once it was over, pressing a $15 Starbucks gift card into my hand. (Thank you notes, gift cards, and the "opportunity to sell books afterward" were standard payment for D-list speakers like me.) I smiled sheepishly, desperate to make my way to the book signing table. "You might want to check out Toastmasters," she said, nodding toward the stage. "I used to be terrible up there, too."
I met a lot of other self-help authors along the way. And I discovered there were two types of us: people who lived to write, and self-appointed experts hoping to get rich and famous. "A book is just a means to an end," one A-list blogger told me in the green room of a local TV station, where we awaited our upcoming live segment. Eyeing her crisp red blazer and perfect blowout, I smoothed my rumpled blouse and tried to forget about my frizzy mane.
"Your book is basically your calling card," she continued. To her, a book deal was a business plan — a stepping stone to ad revenue, keynote invitations, corporate sponsorships, consulting gigs, even startup capital. If you wanted to make money writing books, you had to be a thought leader, a guru. Basically you had to be Deepak Chopra.
Attaining Chopra-like status was tough but not impossible, my fellow authors assured me. The key was to monetize my expertise, as though every person I'd ever encountered was loose change waiting to be salvaged from the couch. To do so, I needed to pepper my website with authoritative photos of myself — arms crossed, face confidently arranged into a tell-me-something-I-don't-know expression. I needed an e-newsletter promoting products my many acolytes could buy, like webinars, ebooks, and $499 coaching packages. I also needed to invest $10,000 in a media trainer who could teach me to hold my own with Terry Gross and Anderson Cooper. Never mind that $10,000 was far more than I'd received for my advance and I was already behind on my rent.
If Deepak Chopra was a fraud, then so was I. As I was beginning to glean, playing pundit was a hypocrite's game.
I started to miss deadlines. My inbox was a disaster. My social life suffered.
Rather than follow any of the aforementioned advice, I zigzagged along like the harried freelancer I'd become, rushing from column deadline to media interview to public event and back again, trying to keep both my Amazon ranking and checking account from tanking, often pulling all-nighters to keep up.
I started to miss deadlines. My inbox began to crowd with angry "WHERE'S YOUR STORY?" emails from editors. Each Monday morning ushered in a new round of deciding which late project to finish first. Sometimes I'd arrive at my public talks on two hours of sleep. "You look tired," a colleague said after one particularly lackluster conference session I delivered on how writers could build an impeccable reputation. She neglected to mention the river of pasta sauce I'd unwittingly dribbled down the front of my dress at lunch.
My social life wasn't faring much better. Friends were growing annoyed with me for repeatedly canceling plans so I could work late. My fiancé asked more than once if we were still engaged. At a rare dinner with a couple of buddies, one asked what I was working on. "A story about entrepreneurs who don't work 80 hours a week!" I chirped, entirely serious. One friend cackled wildly. Another spit out her beer.
And then I started having chest pains
Around this time, I started having chest pains. My doctor thought I just needed some TUMS. Three weeks later, the TUMS I was popping like Life Savers stopped working. The tornado in my chest was all I could think about. My doctor now on vacation, I was left to my own neurotic devices. I called the 24-hour number on the back of my insurance card.
"When did the pain start?" the hotline nurse asked.
"About two days ago."
"Shortness of breath?"
"A little…"
I took the nurse's advice and went to the ER. Six hours and multiple tests later, a cardiologist told me there was nothing wrong with my heart. I'd probably been having a panic attack. The prescription? Less stress, more rest.
Publicly I was the poster child for the well-balanced, successful freelancer. Privately I was unraveling. Writing a book about creating a self-styled career you love had led me straight to a job I hated. I was supposed to be this emissary of work-life balance, the queen of controlling one's career destiny. Yet Sunday evenings now gave me the same fetal-position dread my book claimed to help readers avoid. I'd gone to the hospital with chest pains in my 30s, for chrissake, racking up $4,000 in out-of-pocket expenses in the process.
The lesson: practicing what you preach is really, really difficult. So I decided to stop preaching.
Practicing what you preach is tough. And not just for me. I've known dating advice columnists who don't date. I interviewed a career expert who advocated nanny care for telecommuting parents while trying to manage two crying children between sound bites. I know a "turbocharge your freelance income" workshop leader who's privately admitted he has no idea how much he makes because his wife handles all the money.
The dirty little secret of those in the advice business is that we wind up teaching others the lessons we most need to learn ourselves.
When the recession hit, my inbox filled with emails from people facing foreclosure and bankruptcy. People with unfathomable health problems and insurmountable piles of medical bills. One career advice columnist I knew had received letters from people asking if their family still could collect on the life insurance policy if the letter-writer committed suicide.
After one of my bookstore appearances, a woman with short gray hair who resembled my mother approached me, her contorted face the embodiment of all those desperate emails. She had been out of work a year and was out of employment ideas. She was also worried about paying her mortgage the next month.
I ran through my usual spiel about the hidden job market, interim freelance work, networking strategies for job hunters over 50. She spoke slowly, mournfully, shooting down each suggestion, insisting she'd already tried them all.
It worried me that people in such dire straits would tap a stranger they stumbled upon online or in a bookstore for legal, financial, or mental health advice. These were questions to which the only responsible answer was, "You should really talk to a qualified professional about that." It's not that I didn't want to help. It's just that I didn't know how.
"I don't really have anyone to talk to about this," the woman continued, the small bookstore now empty save for the two of us and the event coordinator, who looked to be closing up shop. "I live alone. And nobody cares." The conversation limped along like this for some time, fruitless, hopeless. I suggested a couple sliding scale counseling services and she shot those down, too. I left the bookstore desperate to sleep.
I was starting to feel irresponsible, like the only way I could keep doing this was to forget about all the people my one-size-fits-all platitudes couldn't help. But with coachology comes great responsibility. Responsibility to offer advice you know works, preferably advice you've put to the test yourself. Responsibility to rise above bullshit artistry. Responsibility to not try to solve people's problems you are in no way equipped to fix.
Advising others on how to steer their professional lives and livelihood was a job I no longer wanted. This wasn't just a crisis of skills or cash flow; it was a crisis of conscience.
I'd reached the fork in the road. It was time to make a choice: I could embrace a life of gurudom, assuming a slicker, more polished persona, selling what I knew and faking my way through what I didn't. Or I could return to the quieter, simpler life of a freelance writer. Essentially, I could go Chopra or I could go home.
I chose to go home.
Michelle Goodman is the award-winning author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life. Her essays and journalism have appeared in Salon, Vice, Bust, Mental Floss, nytimes.com, Seattle Times, Seattle magazine, Entrepreneur and several anthologies. Find her on Twitter @anti9to5guide.
This essay originally appeared on Narrative.ly.
http://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/1/23/14238530/self-help-advice-bogus
Dec 5, 2016
CultNEWS101 Articles: 12/6/2016
"Saudi Arabia's terrorist rehabilitation centre is actually a "hidden radicalisation programme," an accused al-Qaeda bomb-maker detained at Guantanamo Bay has claimed."
“They’re just sitting, waiting to sue the crap out of me, and I wish they would,” Remini told Dr. Oz. "Why do I wish they would? Because they’d have to be deposed. I’d have to be deposed, so we’d get some real information out. They won’t sue me, because they know that’s true. They know that these stories are true or they would have sued the crap out of every single one of us.”
"The approximately 1,600 members of the community in Israel obey the laws of the country, pay their taxes and believe that they are upstanding citizens, but refuse to fulfill one national obligation: to perform military service. As with Witnesses abroad, they believe in the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Prophets, Writings), which they call the “Hebrew Scriptures,” and also in the New Testament, or the “Christian Greek Scriptures,” in their terminology."
"Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and Jaggi Vasudev are among spiritual leaders lending their names to everything from honey and herbal remedies to toothpaste and clothes."
"Lawyers for Bikram Choudhury and the Bikram Yoga College of India filed papers Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court stating that the lawsuit filed by plaintiff Sarah Baughn was resolved. No terms were divulged."
"A travelling preacher in a religious sect has been jailed for a year for indecently assaulting and attempting to indecently assault a young boy, who was also a member of that sect, in the 1970s."
"Weighing in are a parade of peaceniks, from Donovan, the late Pete Seeger and David Lynch, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and New Age granddaddy Deepak Chopra, who cautions against becoming that walking contradiction known as the “angry peace activist.”"Incorporating some terrific archival stuff, including groovy black-and-white footage of John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Mike Love and Mia Farrow hanging out with transcendental meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Reitman has assembled an easy-to-digest package that ultimately feels more like a spirited primer than an impassioned polemic."http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-mn- capsule-rooted-in-peace- review-20161128-story.html
"Oktar refers to his cadre of devoted women as "kittens." At his behest, the "kittens" shirk hijabs and traditional dress. Instead, they wear designer outfits, apply heavy makeup, and undergo plastic surgery. They also happen to be wealthy socialites."
"The first thing to realise is that people in cults are not crazy but are the same intelligent, creative and interesting individuals they were before. As with falling in love they are just crazy about the group, its amazing leader and its great potential to change the world and them with it."http://www.cultnews101.com/2016/12/how-to-talk-someone-out-of-damaging-cult.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/ religion-of-sports-gotham- chopra-tom-brady-michael- strahan/508913/
A new German report found about half the 800 recruits studied remain committed to the ISIS ideology when they return home
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Jan 29, 2016
Deepak Chopra Says Bacteria Listen To Our Thoughts
Kavin Senapathy
FORBES
January 27, 2016
Deepak Chopra, author, public speaker and alternative medicine advocate who shot to fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the 90s, was the first guest at this week’s “Fat Summit” online conference. Hosted by Mark Hyman, celebrity doctor, long time Clinton family advisor and author of upcoming book, Eat Fat, Get Thin, the Fat Summit’s tagline– “Separating Fat From Fiction”– is clever fluff.
Boasting interviews with thirty “top scientists, doctors and health experts,” Hyman’s summit purports to explain to viewers of the online conference, available at no cost for a limited time (after which there is a fee for download), why eating more fat is the key to getting healthy and fit. Featuring the who’s who of food quackery, from David Asprey of the unscientific butter-in-your-coffee school of thought, to Vani “The Food Babe” Hari, known for her fearmongering antics, the summit is less about fat and more about demonizing modern technologies like genetic engineering and ingredients like artificial preservatives.
“I feel like a slacker, I only have nine New York Times bestsellers,” Hyman laughed as he introduced Deepak Chopra, who has more than 20 bestsellers under his belt. The summit’s first guest, he touted the benefits of Indian-style clarified butter known as “ghee,” as well as the advantages of keeping a gratitude journal, which he claims can reduce “leaky gut,” in turn decreasing incidence of heart disease and diabetes.
While “leaky gut syndrome” is poorly understood and is not a diagnosis taught in medical school, Chopra blames stress and an “inflamed microbiome” for causing the condition, which he implicates in a raft of health problems. Though “leaky gut syndrome” is largely promoted by pseudoscientists and is not recognized by the mainstream medical community, scientists are learning that “the gut,” or intestinal tract, can “leak,” allowing substances through microscopic openings in its lining and into the rest of the body. And although our understanding of intestinal permeability is changing, Chopra’s misinformation-laden messaging is a far cry from evidence-based.
According to Chopra, that pesky inflamed microbiome is sentient. The genome, microbiome and epigenome, which the author collectively calls the “super gene,” are referenced throughout the interview. His book, Super Genes: The Key to Health and Well-Being, was published last year.
In the world of science, the genome is the entirety of the genetic information contained in the nucleus of each somatic cell in any organism’s body, coding for the functions of life. The microbiome is a term used to describe the entirety of all of the microorganisms in any environment, as well as the genetic information contained therein, with those myriad little guys’ genes outnumbering the human genes in our body by 100 to 1. The epigenome is an array of structural compounds that don’t code for proteins the way genes do, but that interact with and affect gene activity.
The functions, interactions and inner workings of these “omes” are complex, with our understanding of them still at an infant stage. In other words, what we know about the microbiome, epigenome and genome is dwarfed by what we have yet to learn, and Deepak Chopra exploits this, taking brazen liberties to fill in the gaps.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kavinsenapathy/2016/01/27/deepak-chopra-says-bacteria-listen-to-our-thoughts/
Dec 1, 2015
Why Do Some People Find Deepak Chopra Quotes Deep And Not Dung?
Forbes
November 30, 2015
In what may well be the first-ever paper to evaluate susceptibility to pseudo-profound BS, Gordon Pennycook and colleagues have found that people who are more susceptible to BS score lower for verbal and fluid intelligence, are more prone to “conspiratorial ideation,” and more likely to “endorse complementary and alternative medicine.” Their paper, “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit,” was published in November in the journal Judgment and Decision Making.
To reach their conclusions, the authors conducted a series of studies in which they presented participants with sentences that had recognizable English syntax but were simply a series of randomly organized buzzwords. Examples of these pseudo-profound statements include “Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty,” a totally meaningless sentence that appears to be profound because it uses buzzwords like “hidden” and “transforms” and “abstract” and “beauty.” Indeed, rearranging the same words can yield a similarly pseudo-profound statement: “Abstract meaning transforms unparalleled hidden beauty.”
For real-world examples, the authors turned to Twitter, which they describe as “particularly conducive to the promulgation” of BS because of its 140-character limit. As their example of choice, they sought out Deepak Chopra’s tweets, for reasons that should be obvious. If they aren’t, here’s a sample Chopra tweet: “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” What they left out of the quote is the hashtag Chopra added: “#cosmicconsciousness.” Reactions to the tweet were mixed.
To determine factors that might make someone susceptible to reading that Chopra tweet and finding meaning in it, Pennycook and co-authors evaluated participants’ analytical thinking, tendency to confuse one knowledge category with another, such as viewing the material as spiritual, and tendency to hold implausible beliefs. In a series of studies, the authors presented participants with randomly assembled pseudo-profound statements, Deepak Chopra tweets, and tests of cognitive and reasoning ability along with several scales to evaluate factors such as personal beliefs and a tendency to conspiracy ideation.
In general, the profoundness ratings that participants gave the BS statements were very similar to those they gave to Chopra’s tweets.
In addition to looking into what makes people susceptible to finding BS statements profound, the authors also looked at what factors make others have hypersensitive BS detectors, or the cognitive measures that “inoculate against bullshit,” as they put it. To measure this feature, they looked at factors associated with those who rated legitimate quotations as far more profound than pseudo-profound BS. Those folks were more likely to have an analytic cognitive style and be skeptical about paranormal phenomena.
The authors also draw an interesting distinction between types of open-mindedness, one that might explain why people who are on the same side of the aisle politically can have very different responses to pseudoscience. Pennycook and colleagues contrast reflexive or uncritical open-mindedness, in which a person is accepting of information but doesn’t pause to evaluate inherent conflicts or other features, and reflective or active open-mindedness, in which a person seeks information for the purpose of critical thinking.
I’m sure that much of the coverage of this publication will focus on the inherent hilarity of an entire academic paper devoted to assessing susceptibility to bullshit and the use of a potty word in a study report that includes priceless sentences such as, “Bullshit comes in many forms and we have focused on only one type,” and “Bullshit is not only common; it is popular. Chopra is, of course, just one example among many,” and “This is not to say that everything Deepak Chopra has written is bullshit.” It must have been fun to write and fascinating to do.
But what emerges from this seemingly tongue-in-cheek research—the first author is pretty pleased at having used the word “bullshit” ~200 times in the paper—is something more, um, profound than might be expected. The emerging picture is that people have divergent psychological profiles that make them more or less likely to believe in certain phenomena, buy into conspiracy theories, embrace the language and promises of alternative medicine over conventional medicine, and find meaning in a meaningless series of profound-sounding words.
These findings could very well be confirmation of what those who market certain products already know, that words that sound truthy, deep, and believable are far more compelling to their target audience than terms like “data” and “evidence.” But more profoundly (sorry), this kind of tendency also feeds into broadly resonating societal effects, such as the susceptibilities that led—and still lead—some people to chase false “cures” for everything from autism to cancer, to follow false prophets who promise them transformation and revelation of hidden beauty while giving them nothing, and to confuse categories of existence and believe that the material is magical. And that is deeply, deeply important to understand.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2015/11/30/why-do-some-people-find-deepak-chopra-quotes-deep-and-not-dung/
Oct 11, 2015
Backstage: A lesson in concentration from Deepak Chopra
Adrian Chamberlain
Times Colonist
October 10, 2015
Deepak Chopra, the new-age guru lecturing in Victoria tonight, seems to have mastered the art of summoning Zen-like focus.
He spoke to me recently from his New York City office. Soon after the conversation started, a phone started ringing. The ringing didn’t emanate from my end, however. And Chopra seemed equally mystified about the intrusion. Some kind of glitch.
“I don’t know where that’s from,” he said. “Let’s keep going. We can ignore this.”
Was this a test? Did Chopra want to see if I could keep my cool? Could I ignore this?
He began talking about tonight’s lecture at the University of Victoria Farquhar Auditorium. Chopra plans to speak about new research on meditation and how it influences cell biology and gene expression.
Ring, Ring!
“Man, I really hope this phone stops ringing,” I said.
“It’s, uh, not interfering with my concentration. So let it go,” Chopra advised.
“OK. So, is meditation the best thing we can do for our health?”
Ring, ring!
“Yes, meditation is (ring, ring!) probably the easiest way to allow your biological system to self-regulate itself. But other things are also important. (ring, ring!) Sleep is important. (ring, ring!). Exercise is important. There are certain breathing techniques that activate healing. (ring, ring!) Emotions influence your biology. And now, we know so much about something called the ‘microbiome,’ (ring, ring!) which is bacteria in our GI tract, and how it responds to food,” Chopra said.
The annoying ringing suddenly disappeared.
“OK. Hey, I’m so glad that phone stopped,” I said. “Oh, there (ring, ring!) it goes again. Do you think I could phone back?”
Chopra graciously gave me his cellphone number. The rest of the interview went smoothly.
At press time, Chopra’s lecture was approaching sell-out at the Farquhar Auditorium. It’s an impressive achievement, as the hall holds 1,000-plus, with ticket prices ranging from $62 to $200.
For those who haven’t watched The Oprah Winfrey Show, Chopra is one of the superstars of the holistic medicine movement. Time magazine deemed him “the poet-profit of alternative medicine.” He has sold millions of copies of his books.
His notions combine ideas from traditional Hindu medicine (Chopra was born in New Delhi) and mainstream medicine (he served as chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital before leaving to found the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Centre).
Chopra is famous for many things, not the least of which is his well-publicized spat with Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist who, not surprisingly, takes a scientific “seeing is believing” stance. Chopra, meanwhile, believes a “kind of cosmic consciousness” lies at the root of fundamental reality.
In Chopra’s view, one’s notion of the world is specific to one’s species. If you’re a cat, you see the world as a cat does; if you’re a parrot, you have a parrot’s viewpoint. So the very fact we’re human beings means we’re aware of some things and unaware of others.
As humans, we might have blinkers of which we’re unaware. This, says Chopra, is especially so if we believe the scientific method (conducting experiments, then making observations based solely on that) is the only way to view the world and beyond.
Dawkins is an advocate of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its emphasis on natural selection. Chopra, on the other hand, once remarked: “Charles Darwin was wrong. Consciousness is key to evolution, and we will soon prove that.”
On the phone, Chopra said: “The pendulum has shifted too far, with people like Richard Dawkins and his gang and his cronies. It’s called militant atheism ... they are as dogmatic and fundamentalist as religious fundamentalists.”
He said he doesn’t dismiss science — he just believes people must try to embrace a wider perspective of reality.
Science is the reason people are moving away from organized religion to embrace secular spirituality, Chopra said.
Religion, he said, is increasingly recognized as “cultural mythology.”
He added: “It’s difficult to believe in the Book of Genesis once you know about the Big Bang.”
http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/backstage-a-lesson-in-concentration-from-deepak-chopra-1.2082540
Times Colonist
October 10, 2015
 |
| Deepak Chopra |
He spoke to me recently from his New York City office. Soon after the conversation started, a phone started ringing. The ringing didn’t emanate from my end, however. And Chopra seemed equally mystified about the intrusion. Some kind of glitch.
“I don’t know where that’s from,” he said. “Let’s keep going. We can ignore this.”
Was this a test? Did Chopra want to see if I could keep my cool? Could I ignore this?
He began talking about tonight’s lecture at the University of Victoria Farquhar Auditorium. Chopra plans to speak about new research on meditation and how it influences cell biology and gene expression.
Ring, Ring!
“Man, I really hope this phone stops ringing,” I said.
“It’s, uh, not interfering with my concentration. So let it go,” Chopra advised.
“OK. So, is meditation the best thing we can do for our health?”
Ring, ring!
“Yes, meditation is (ring, ring!) probably the easiest way to allow your biological system to self-regulate itself. But other things are also important. (ring, ring!) Sleep is important. (ring, ring!). Exercise is important. There are certain breathing techniques that activate healing. (ring, ring!) Emotions influence your biology. And now, we know so much about something called the ‘microbiome,’ (ring, ring!) which is bacteria in our GI tract, and how it responds to food,” Chopra said.
The annoying ringing suddenly disappeared.
“OK. Hey, I’m so glad that phone stopped,” I said. “Oh, there (ring, ring!) it goes again. Do you think I could phone back?”
Chopra graciously gave me his cellphone number. The rest of the interview went smoothly.
At press time, Chopra’s lecture was approaching sell-out at the Farquhar Auditorium. It’s an impressive achievement, as the hall holds 1,000-plus, with ticket prices ranging from $62 to $200.
For those who haven’t watched The Oprah Winfrey Show, Chopra is one of the superstars of the holistic medicine movement. Time magazine deemed him “the poet-profit of alternative medicine.” He has sold millions of copies of his books.
His notions combine ideas from traditional Hindu medicine (Chopra was born in New Delhi) and mainstream medicine (he served as chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital before leaving to found the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Centre).
Chopra is famous for many things, not the least of which is his well-publicized spat with Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist who, not surprisingly, takes a scientific “seeing is believing” stance. Chopra, meanwhile, believes a “kind of cosmic consciousness” lies at the root of fundamental reality.
In Chopra’s view, one’s notion of the world is specific to one’s species. If you’re a cat, you see the world as a cat does; if you’re a parrot, you have a parrot’s viewpoint. So the very fact we’re human beings means we’re aware of some things and unaware of others.
As humans, we might have blinkers of which we’re unaware. This, says Chopra, is especially so if we believe the scientific method (conducting experiments, then making observations based solely on that) is the only way to view the world and beyond.
Dawkins is an advocate of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its emphasis on natural selection. Chopra, on the other hand, once remarked: “Charles Darwin was wrong. Consciousness is key to evolution, and we will soon prove that.”
On the phone, Chopra said: “The pendulum has shifted too far, with people like Richard Dawkins and his gang and his cronies. It’s called militant atheism ... they are as dogmatic and fundamentalist as religious fundamentalists.”
He said he doesn’t dismiss science — he just believes people must try to embrace a wider perspective of reality.
Science is the reason people are moving away from organized religion to embrace secular spirituality, Chopra said.
Religion, he said, is increasingly recognized as “cultural mythology.”
He added: “It’s difficult to believe in the Book of Genesis once you know about the Big Bang.”
http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/backstage-a-lesson-in-concentration-from-deepak-chopra-1.2082540
Oct 2, 2015
Jan 23, 2014
The Maharishi Years - The Untold Story: Recollections of a Former Disciple
Deepak Chopra
The Huffington Post
February 2, 2008
August 1, 1991 saw the publication of my book, Perfect Health, a popular guide to Ayurveda that came at the height of my involvement with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although I had been meditating less than a decade in comparison with TM meditators who went back to the '60s, my association with Maharishi quickly became personal. He felt comfortable around other Indians and had a special regard for trained scientists and physicians. In return I had a deep fascination with enlightenment and the almost supernatural status of gurus. A few days before the book's publication, I was in Fairfield, Iowa, to participate in a meditation course. Maharishi was supposed to address the assembly on speaker phone from India, but the phone call didn't come through at the appointed time. We all dispersed.
A couple of hours later when I was in meditation I had a vision of Maharishi lying in a hospital bed with intravenous tubes in his body breathing on a respirator. I quickly got out of the meditation and phoned my parents in New Delhi. My mother picked up the phone and told me that Maharishi was very sick. "They think he's been poisoned. Come quickly," she said. I asked to speak to my father, who was a cardiologist. She said, "Your father isn't here. He's taking care of Maharishi." This began a journey that took me to the very heart of who the guru is and who he is expected to be. The two can be in jarring opposition.
I immediately left Fairfield for Chicago, where a wealthy TM donor had been kind enough to charter a plane for me. When I arrived in Delhi, it was past midnight. I first went home. My father was not there, and my mother told me he was still with Maharishi in a house in Golflinks, a private reserve in the city. One room had been converted into an intensive care unit presided over by my father and other doctors. I arrived at the house at 2:00 am, and when I entered the makeshift ICU I saw Maharishi lying unconscious in a bed with IV tubes and a respirator just as I had foreseen. My father informed me darkly that after drinking a glass of orange juice given to him by "a foreign disciple," Maharishi had suffered severe abdominal pain and inflammation of the pancreas, along with kidney failure followed by a heart attack. Poisoning was suspected. Over the next few days Maharishi's condition worsened. The pancreas and kidney functions continued to deteriorate, and his heart didn't improve. My father was of the opinion that Maharishi should be taken to England for a course of kidney dialysis. The Indian TM organization, centered around Maharishi's nephews, Prakash and Anand Shrivastava, were adamant that no one in the movement should find out that Maharishi was grievously ill. The rationale was that his followers would panic and lose faith.
I found myself torn, because Maharishi had long presented himself as being far from the typical Hindu guru. He did not assert his own divinity. He credited his entire career to his own master, Guru Dev. He seemed indifferent to the cult of personality and the aura of superstition surrounding gurus, which includes the notion that they have perfect control over mind and body and hold the secret of immortality. But deeper than that, Maharishi wasn't a religious figure. Although he had taken vows as a monk, he brought a technique to the West, Transcendental Meditation, that was entirely secular and even scientific. Indeed, his lasting memory will probably be that he convinced Westerners of the physical and mental benefits of a purely mechanical non-religious approach to consciousness. I was troubled that his falling ill had to be hidden essentially to preserve the image of a superhuman being who couldn't get sick like mere mortals.
There was one person the Indian inner circle chose to trust, however. He was Neil Paterson, a Canadian who had been chosen by Maharishi as chief spokesman and de facto head of the movement. Neil and I flew to England and made arrangements for Maharishi to be admitted to a private hospital on Harley Street. My father and two other doctors chartered a plane and brought Maharishi to London. I remember standing outside the London Heart Hospital, watching an ambulance navigate the snarled traffic, sirens wailing. Just before it arrived on the hospital's doorstep, one of the accompanying doctors ran up with the news that Maharishi had suddenly died. I rushed to the ambulance, picking Maharishi's body up -- he was frail and light by this time - and carrying him in my arms through London traffic.
I laid him on the floor inside the hospital's doors and called for a cardio assist. Within minutes he was revived and rushed to intensive care on a respirator and fitted with a pacemaker that took over his heartbeat. The attending physician felt that Maharishi was clinically dead. My father suggested that we keep him on life support, however, until the family gave permission to take him off. As fate would have it, after 24 to 36 hours the attending informed us that Maharishi was recovering miraculously. His kidney function was returning to normal, his heart was beating independent of the pacemaker, and he had started to breathe on his own. Within a few days he was sitting up in bed, drinking milk with honey. The doctor could not explain this recovery; everyone in the hospital, including his nurses, were awestruck, not just by the turn-around but by his presence, which induced a sense of peace in anyone who came near.
Let me pause here to reflect on the strange juxtapositions at work. I genuinely felt in the midst of the crisis that I was fulfilling a purpose beyond myself. A series of circumstances had brought me to the very moment when someone had to intervene to save Maharishi's life, and it was as if the universe had conspired to carry me to that moment. At the same time, he exhibited both the all-too-human qualities found in every holy man and other qualities one associates with the superhuman. I had the distinct sensation of standing on the border between two worlds, or should one say two versions of the human condition? It was easy to believe that other disciples in another time felt much the same in the presence of Jesus or Buddha.
Maharishi's complete recovery happened slowly. There was a point where the doctor informed us that he had severe anemia and needed a blood transfusion. When they typed and cross-matched Maharishi's blood, I turned out to be the only match - this, of course, only increased my sense of being a participant in a drama shaped by forces outside myself. When he was informed about the situation, however, Maharishi refused to accept my blood but would give no reason. Considering that much had been made of how he had studied physics in college and had insisted on the scientific validity of TM, this was a baffling decision. Then I had a sudden insight. He didn't want my blood because he didn't want my karma. After all, I had been a smoker, had indulged in alcohol and sex and had even experimented with LSD years before. I went to Maharishi and confronted him with my realization. I asked if he believed that karma could be transmitted in the blood. He responded reluctantly, "That's true." I told him that red blood cells do not have a nucleus and therefore contain no DNA. Without genetic information my blood would only be giving him the hemoglobin he needed without karmic infection. At first he was suspicious, but I had the hematologist explain to him that memory and information is not transferred through a red blood transfusion. Eventually he accepted my blood. As he regained strength, we removed him from the hospital, and he was brought to a London hotel to continue recuperating.
This began a period of increased intimacy between us. We would go for long walks in Hyde Park, which felt strange given the complete blackout of news to the TM movement, which was told that Maharishi had decided to go into silence for the time being. On one occasion, a stranger ran up to us in the park and asked, "Aren't you the guru of the Beatles?" My wife Rita, who had joined us that day, quickly interjected, "He's my father-in-law. Please leave him alone." In the end we felt that staying in London risked unnecessary publicity. So Maharishi was moved to a country home in the southwest of England where I spent hours personally nursing him. He took the occasion to give me deep insight and knowledge about Vedanta. He also gave me advanced meditation techniques. Those languid weeks and months alone with Maharishi, except for the servants who cooked and served his meals, were the most precious days of my life. I grew very fond of him and he evoked a love in me that I had never experienced before. In turn, I realized that he was also getting fond of me. We discussed just about every topic in the world from politics (on which he had very strong opinions) to human relationships (which he thought were full of melodrama) to the nature of consciousness (his favorite subject). Yet I still remained on the cusp of an uneasy truce between the physical frailty of an old man who at times could be fretful and worried and a guru whose mortality was like an admission of imperfection.
In all, Maharishi was out of circulation for almost a year; few in the TM movement knew where he was, and almost no one was willing to concede that he had been sick. After he was fully recovered we flew him via helicopter back to his chosen residence, which wasn't in either India or the U.S. but the obscure village of Vlodrop in Holland. It would be impossible to calculate how many disciples and even casual TM meditators would have given anything for personal time with Maharishi. Because of his mass appeal and his undeniable presence, there were many who cherished a moment with him as the most precious in their lives. Yet I was growing increasingly disturbed by contradictions I couldn't reconcile.
Maharishi had spent decades traveling the globe to promote TM; now he remained permanently in Vlodrop while I was sent, as one of his main emissaries, on a routine of almost constant jet travel. He aimed at ever-increasing expansion. Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc were opened up to meditation. Gradually so was the Islamic world, which resisted TM in large part because the initiation ceremony included a picture of Maharishi's teacher sitting on an altar, which went against the Muslim prohibition over depicting God or holy men. Everywhere I went I was given the respect accorded to my guru, bringing with it a level of pomp and ceremony that verged on veneration. Not only did this make me uncomfortable personally, but I wondered why Maharishi, the first "modern" guru, allowed and encouraged it. It seemed inconsistent with Vedanta's central theme that the material world is illusion, not to mention the freedom from materialism that is expected of one who is enlightened.
Ironically, the respect shown to me in his name came to be my undoing. Maharishi started to give me the perception (perhaps that was my own projection) that he felt I was competing with him in a spiritual popularity contest. On more than one occasion, he casually mentioned that I was seeking adulation for myself. This was odd considering that he had been the one who thrust me forward in the first place, and who insisted on piling tributes on me that I had no choice but to accept whatever my embarrassment. The situation came to a head. In July, 1993, during the celebration of Guru Purnima, I went to see Maharishi in his private rooms to pay my respects. It was close to midnight after all the day's public ceremonies had ended. Rita and I entered the room in near darkness. Besides Maharishi, the only person present was a TM higher up, Benny Feldman, who kept silent as Maharishi said, "People are telling me that you are competing with me."
At that point I had only heard indirect reports about his displeasure; this was the first time, in fact, that Maharishi had shown anything but the highest trust in me. It was true that after his medical crisis he refused to discuss his health and took pains to indicate that where once I had been his physician, now I was to consider myself in the former position of disciple. Actually, I admired him for this. It would have been impertinent for me to take any other role. To be in the presence of someone like Maharishi is to realize an immense gulf in consciousness. His physical status continued to be amazingly strong considering what he had been through.
Here he was now, in my eyes, playing the part of an irascible, jealous old man whose pride had been hurt. For my part, I was dismayed that he might believe the rumors. Then he made a demand. "I want you to stop traveling and live here at the ashram with me." He also wanted me to stop writing books. After delivering what amounted to an ultimatum, I was given twenty-four hours to make up my mind.
It was a critical moment. Then and there I had to consider the entirety of the guru-disciple relationship. To anyone outside India, much misunderstanding surrounds the whole issue of taking on an enlightened teacher. To begin with, there is a Western predisposition to doubt that enlightenment could be real except as personified in Buddha or a limited number of saints and sages who existed centuries ago. There is also a sense in the West that following a guru is tantamount to surrendering your personal identity, your bank account, and your dignity. None of these issues concerned me, however. In the role of guru Maharishi was authentic, dignified, respectful, and accepting. In addition, he was personally lovable and a joy to be around (even if one had to suffer patiently through discourses that lasted many hours and that circled around the same basic points.) The dilemma I faced was more fundamental: Can a real guru be unfair, jealous, biased, and ultimately manipulative?
For a devotee, the answer is unquestionably yes. The role of a disciple isn't to question a guru, but the exact opposite: Whatever the guru says, however strange, capricious, or unfair, is taken to be truth. The disciple's role is to accommodate to the truth, and if it takes struggle and "ego death" to do that, the spiritual fruits of obedience are well worth it. A guru speaks for God and pure consciousness; therefore, his words are a direct communication from Brahman, who knows us better than we know ourselves. In essence the guru is like a superhuman parent who guides our steps until we can walk on our own. Was Maharishi doing that to me?
I never found out, because practical considerations loomed large at that moment. I had a family with children in school, a wife who decidedly did not want to live an ashram life, and no visible means of support if I stopped producing books and giving lectures. I told Maharishi that I didn't need twenty-four hours to make my decision. I would leave immediately and not return. With some surprise he asked me why. I told him that I had no ambitions to be a guru myself - the very idea appalled me. I was dismayed that he would believe such rumors. It was beyond my imagination for anyone to compare me to him or that I would have the gall to do the same.
It's only after his death that I feel free to divulge this final parting of ways. To outsiders it will seem like a tempest in a teapot, but in my leaving the TM movement it was widely rumored that I wanted to be the guru of my own movement. While the media casually refers to any spokesperson from the East as a guru, but that doesn't diminish the fact that Maharishi actually was a guru and great Rishi of the Vedic tradition, while I am a doctor who loved the philosophy of Vedanta and also loved articulating it for the man on the street. I said goodbye to Maharishi, took Rita's hand, and walked away. We drove from Vlodrop to Amsterdam in the middle of the night and took a plane to Boston. When we arrived home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the phone was ringing. A contrite and forgiving Maharishi was on the line. He said, "You are my son, you will inherit all that I have created. Come back and all will be yours."
I replied that I didn't want what he was offering. I loved the knowledge of Vedanta and wanted to devote myself to it. By the end of the conversation, however, I relented and told him that I would think about it. In the ensuing months I was approached by medical institutions and universities to introduce Ayurveda and TM as part of their programs. However, when I contacted Maharishi and the movement with these promising prospects I was told that I shouldn't pursue these offers. At the same time decisions were made to raise the cost of TM astronomically, putting it out of reach for ordinary people. On January 12, 1994 I went back to Vlodrop for the annual New Year's celebration and told Maharishi that I was leaving permanently. I expressed my immeasurable gratitude to him and told him that I would love him forever. When we parted, he said, "Whatever you do will be the right decision for you. I will love you, but I will also be indifferent to you from now on."
At first his being indifferent felt very hurtful, but then I realized that Maharishi was offering love with detachment, the mark of a great sage. I remembered one of his favorite remarks, which he once directed to me: "I love you, but it's none of your business." What followed for me was the arc of a public career that became more acceptable to the outside world once I was no longer aligned with a guru. In some people's eyes I dropped Maharishi in order to launch myself. This perception has led to recriminations in the TM movement. One is faced with the sad spectacle of people striving to gain enlightenment while at the same vilifying anyone who dares to stray from the fold. Nothing I did after leaving Maharishi was premeditated. I later visited the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math and told him about my situation. His response was sympathetic: he told me that I remained an exponent of Vedanta for the West and was therefore true to the tradition.
I believe that Maharishi would have been the first to agree. It's not possible to stray from the one reality, and if Maharishi the personality couldn't give his blessing, at a deeper level Maharishi the guru was doing his job of coaxing consciousness to expand. There was no way for me to reconcile the two opposites back then, but I have come to realize that I never needed to. All opposites are reconciled in unity consciousness, the state that Maharishi was in and the state I aspire to every day.
The Huffington Post
February 2, 2008
August 1, 1991 saw the publication of my book, Perfect Health, a popular guide to Ayurveda that came at the height of my involvement with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although I had been meditating less than a decade in comparison with TM meditators who went back to the '60s, my association with Maharishi quickly became personal. He felt comfortable around other Indians and had a special regard for trained scientists and physicians. In return I had a deep fascination with enlightenment and the almost supernatural status of gurus. A few days before the book's publication, I was in Fairfield, Iowa, to participate in a meditation course. Maharishi was supposed to address the assembly on speaker phone from India, but the phone call didn't come through at the appointed time. We all dispersed.
A couple of hours later when I was in meditation I had a vision of Maharishi lying in a hospital bed with intravenous tubes in his body breathing on a respirator. I quickly got out of the meditation and phoned my parents in New Delhi. My mother picked up the phone and told me that Maharishi was very sick. "They think he's been poisoned. Come quickly," she said. I asked to speak to my father, who was a cardiologist. She said, "Your father isn't here. He's taking care of Maharishi." This began a journey that took me to the very heart of who the guru is and who he is expected to be. The two can be in jarring opposition.
I immediately left Fairfield for Chicago, where a wealthy TM donor had been kind enough to charter a plane for me. When I arrived in Delhi, it was past midnight. I first went home. My father was not there, and my mother told me he was still with Maharishi in a house in Golflinks, a private reserve in the city. One room had been converted into an intensive care unit presided over by my father and other doctors. I arrived at the house at 2:00 am, and when I entered the makeshift ICU I saw Maharishi lying unconscious in a bed with IV tubes and a respirator just as I had foreseen. My father informed me darkly that after drinking a glass of orange juice given to him by "a foreign disciple," Maharishi had suffered severe abdominal pain and inflammation of the pancreas, along with kidney failure followed by a heart attack. Poisoning was suspected. Over the next few days Maharishi's condition worsened. The pancreas and kidney functions continued to deteriorate, and his heart didn't improve. My father was of the opinion that Maharishi should be taken to England for a course of kidney dialysis. The Indian TM organization, centered around Maharishi's nephews, Prakash and Anand Shrivastava, were adamant that no one in the movement should find out that Maharishi was grievously ill. The rationale was that his followers would panic and lose faith.
I found myself torn, because Maharishi had long presented himself as being far from the typical Hindu guru. He did not assert his own divinity. He credited his entire career to his own master, Guru Dev. He seemed indifferent to the cult of personality and the aura of superstition surrounding gurus, which includes the notion that they have perfect control over mind and body and hold the secret of immortality. But deeper than that, Maharishi wasn't a religious figure. Although he had taken vows as a monk, he brought a technique to the West, Transcendental Meditation, that was entirely secular and even scientific. Indeed, his lasting memory will probably be that he convinced Westerners of the physical and mental benefits of a purely mechanical non-religious approach to consciousness. I was troubled that his falling ill had to be hidden essentially to preserve the image of a superhuman being who couldn't get sick like mere mortals.
There was one person the Indian inner circle chose to trust, however. He was Neil Paterson, a Canadian who had been chosen by Maharishi as chief spokesman and de facto head of the movement. Neil and I flew to England and made arrangements for Maharishi to be admitted to a private hospital on Harley Street. My father and two other doctors chartered a plane and brought Maharishi to London. I remember standing outside the London Heart Hospital, watching an ambulance navigate the snarled traffic, sirens wailing. Just before it arrived on the hospital's doorstep, one of the accompanying doctors ran up with the news that Maharishi had suddenly died. I rushed to the ambulance, picking Maharishi's body up -- he was frail and light by this time - and carrying him in my arms through London traffic.
I laid him on the floor inside the hospital's doors and called for a cardio assist. Within minutes he was revived and rushed to intensive care on a respirator and fitted with a pacemaker that took over his heartbeat. The attending physician felt that Maharishi was clinically dead. My father suggested that we keep him on life support, however, until the family gave permission to take him off. As fate would have it, after 24 to 36 hours the attending informed us that Maharishi was recovering miraculously. His kidney function was returning to normal, his heart was beating independent of the pacemaker, and he had started to breathe on his own. Within a few days he was sitting up in bed, drinking milk with honey. The doctor could not explain this recovery; everyone in the hospital, including his nurses, were awestruck, not just by the turn-around but by his presence, which induced a sense of peace in anyone who came near.
Let me pause here to reflect on the strange juxtapositions at work. I genuinely felt in the midst of the crisis that I was fulfilling a purpose beyond myself. A series of circumstances had brought me to the very moment when someone had to intervene to save Maharishi's life, and it was as if the universe had conspired to carry me to that moment. At the same time, he exhibited both the all-too-human qualities found in every holy man and other qualities one associates with the superhuman. I had the distinct sensation of standing on the border between two worlds, or should one say two versions of the human condition? It was easy to believe that other disciples in another time felt much the same in the presence of Jesus or Buddha.
Maharishi's complete recovery happened slowly. There was a point where the doctor informed us that he had severe anemia and needed a blood transfusion. When they typed and cross-matched Maharishi's blood, I turned out to be the only match - this, of course, only increased my sense of being a participant in a drama shaped by forces outside myself. When he was informed about the situation, however, Maharishi refused to accept my blood but would give no reason. Considering that much had been made of how he had studied physics in college and had insisted on the scientific validity of TM, this was a baffling decision. Then I had a sudden insight. He didn't want my blood because he didn't want my karma. After all, I had been a smoker, had indulged in alcohol and sex and had even experimented with LSD years before. I went to Maharishi and confronted him with my realization. I asked if he believed that karma could be transmitted in the blood. He responded reluctantly, "That's true." I told him that red blood cells do not have a nucleus and therefore contain no DNA. Without genetic information my blood would only be giving him the hemoglobin he needed without karmic infection. At first he was suspicious, but I had the hematologist explain to him that memory and information is not transferred through a red blood transfusion. Eventually he accepted my blood. As he regained strength, we removed him from the hospital, and he was brought to a London hotel to continue recuperating.
This began a period of increased intimacy between us. We would go for long walks in Hyde Park, which felt strange given the complete blackout of news to the TM movement, which was told that Maharishi had decided to go into silence for the time being. On one occasion, a stranger ran up to us in the park and asked, "Aren't you the guru of the Beatles?" My wife Rita, who had joined us that day, quickly interjected, "He's my father-in-law. Please leave him alone." In the end we felt that staying in London risked unnecessary publicity. So Maharishi was moved to a country home in the southwest of England where I spent hours personally nursing him. He took the occasion to give me deep insight and knowledge about Vedanta. He also gave me advanced meditation techniques. Those languid weeks and months alone with Maharishi, except for the servants who cooked and served his meals, were the most precious days of my life. I grew very fond of him and he evoked a love in me that I had never experienced before. In turn, I realized that he was also getting fond of me. We discussed just about every topic in the world from politics (on which he had very strong opinions) to human relationships (which he thought were full of melodrama) to the nature of consciousness (his favorite subject). Yet I still remained on the cusp of an uneasy truce between the physical frailty of an old man who at times could be fretful and worried and a guru whose mortality was like an admission of imperfection.
In all, Maharishi was out of circulation for almost a year; few in the TM movement knew where he was, and almost no one was willing to concede that he had been sick. After he was fully recovered we flew him via helicopter back to his chosen residence, which wasn't in either India or the U.S. but the obscure village of Vlodrop in Holland. It would be impossible to calculate how many disciples and even casual TM meditators would have given anything for personal time with Maharishi. Because of his mass appeal and his undeniable presence, there were many who cherished a moment with him as the most precious in their lives. Yet I was growing increasingly disturbed by contradictions I couldn't reconcile.
Maharishi had spent decades traveling the globe to promote TM; now he remained permanently in Vlodrop while I was sent, as one of his main emissaries, on a routine of almost constant jet travel. He aimed at ever-increasing expansion. Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc were opened up to meditation. Gradually so was the Islamic world, which resisted TM in large part because the initiation ceremony included a picture of Maharishi's teacher sitting on an altar, which went against the Muslim prohibition over depicting God or holy men. Everywhere I went I was given the respect accorded to my guru, bringing with it a level of pomp and ceremony that verged on veneration. Not only did this make me uncomfortable personally, but I wondered why Maharishi, the first "modern" guru, allowed and encouraged it. It seemed inconsistent with Vedanta's central theme that the material world is illusion, not to mention the freedom from materialism that is expected of one who is enlightened.
Ironically, the respect shown to me in his name came to be my undoing. Maharishi started to give me the perception (perhaps that was my own projection) that he felt I was competing with him in a spiritual popularity contest. On more than one occasion, he casually mentioned that I was seeking adulation for myself. This was odd considering that he had been the one who thrust me forward in the first place, and who insisted on piling tributes on me that I had no choice but to accept whatever my embarrassment. The situation came to a head. In July, 1993, during the celebration of Guru Purnima, I went to see Maharishi in his private rooms to pay my respects. It was close to midnight after all the day's public ceremonies had ended. Rita and I entered the room in near darkness. Besides Maharishi, the only person present was a TM higher up, Benny Feldman, who kept silent as Maharishi said, "People are telling me that you are competing with me."
At that point I had only heard indirect reports about his displeasure; this was the first time, in fact, that Maharishi had shown anything but the highest trust in me. It was true that after his medical crisis he refused to discuss his health and took pains to indicate that where once I had been his physician, now I was to consider myself in the former position of disciple. Actually, I admired him for this. It would have been impertinent for me to take any other role. To be in the presence of someone like Maharishi is to realize an immense gulf in consciousness. His physical status continued to be amazingly strong considering what he had been through.
Here he was now, in my eyes, playing the part of an irascible, jealous old man whose pride had been hurt. For my part, I was dismayed that he might believe the rumors. Then he made a demand. "I want you to stop traveling and live here at the ashram with me." He also wanted me to stop writing books. After delivering what amounted to an ultimatum, I was given twenty-four hours to make up my mind.
It was a critical moment. Then and there I had to consider the entirety of the guru-disciple relationship. To anyone outside India, much misunderstanding surrounds the whole issue of taking on an enlightened teacher. To begin with, there is a Western predisposition to doubt that enlightenment could be real except as personified in Buddha or a limited number of saints and sages who existed centuries ago. There is also a sense in the West that following a guru is tantamount to surrendering your personal identity, your bank account, and your dignity. None of these issues concerned me, however. In the role of guru Maharishi was authentic, dignified, respectful, and accepting. In addition, he was personally lovable and a joy to be around (even if one had to suffer patiently through discourses that lasted many hours and that circled around the same basic points.) The dilemma I faced was more fundamental: Can a real guru be unfair, jealous, biased, and ultimately manipulative?
For a devotee, the answer is unquestionably yes. The role of a disciple isn't to question a guru, but the exact opposite: Whatever the guru says, however strange, capricious, or unfair, is taken to be truth. The disciple's role is to accommodate to the truth, and if it takes struggle and "ego death" to do that, the spiritual fruits of obedience are well worth it. A guru speaks for God and pure consciousness; therefore, his words are a direct communication from Brahman, who knows us better than we know ourselves. In essence the guru is like a superhuman parent who guides our steps until we can walk on our own. Was Maharishi doing that to me?
I never found out, because practical considerations loomed large at that moment. I had a family with children in school, a wife who decidedly did not want to live an ashram life, and no visible means of support if I stopped producing books and giving lectures. I told Maharishi that I didn't need twenty-four hours to make my decision. I would leave immediately and not return. With some surprise he asked me why. I told him that I had no ambitions to be a guru myself - the very idea appalled me. I was dismayed that he would believe such rumors. It was beyond my imagination for anyone to compare me to him or that I would have the gall to do the same.
It's only after his death that I feel free to divulge this final parting of ways. To outsiders it will seem like a tempest in a teapot, but in my leaving the TM movement it was widely rumored that I wanted to be the guru of my own movement. While the media casually refers to any spokesperson from the East as a guru, but that doesn't diminish the fact that Maharishi actually was a guru and great Rishi of the Vedic tradition, while I am a doctor who loved the philosophy of Vedanta and also loved articulating it for the man on the street. I said goodbye to Maharishi, took Rita's hand, and walked away. We drove from Vlodrop to Amsterdam in the middle of the night and took a plane to Boston. When we arrived home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the phone was ringing. A contrite and forgiving Maharishi was on the line. He said, "You are my son, you will inherit all that I have created. Come back and all will be yours."
I replied that I didn't want what he was offering. I loved the knowledge of Vedanta and wanted to devote myself to it. By the end of the conversation, however, I relented and told him that I would think about it. In the ensuing months I was approached by medical institutions and universities to introduce Ayurveda and TM as part of their programs. However, when I contacted Maharishi and the movement with these promising prospects I was told that I shouldn't pursue these offers. At the same time decisions were made to raise the cost of TM astronomically, putting it out of reach for ordinary people. On January 12, 1994 I went back to Vlodrop for the annual New Year's celebration and told Maharishi that I was leaving permanently. I expressed my immeasurable gratitude to him and told him that I would love him forever. When we parted, he said, "Whatever you do will be the right decision for you. I will love you, but I will also be indifferent to you from now on."
At first his being indifferent felt very hurtful, but then I realized that Maharishi was offering love with detachment, the mark of a great sage. I remembered one of his favorite remarks, which he once directed to me: "I love you, but it's none of your business." What followed for me was the arc of a public career that became more acceptable to the outside world once I was no longer aligned with a guru. In some people's eyes I dropped Maharishi in order to launch myself. This perception has led to recriminations in the TM movement. One is faced with the sad spectacle of people striving to gain enlightenment while at the same vilifying anyone who dares to stray from the fold. Nothing I did after leaving Maharishi was premeditated. I later visited the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math and told him about my situation. His response was sympathetic: he told me that I remained an exponent of Vedanta for the West and was therefore true to the tradition.
I believe that Maharishi would have been the first to agree. It's not possible to stray from the one reality, and if Maharishi the personality couldn't give his blessing, at a deeper level Maharishi the guru was doing his job of coaxing consciousness to expand. There was no way for me to reconcile the two opposites back then, but I have come to realize that I never needed to. All opposites are reconciled in unity consciousness, the state that Maharishi was in and the state I aspire to every day.
Oct 21, 2012
Maharishi Ayur-Veda: Guru's marketing scheme promises the world eternal 'perfect health'
Andrew A. Skolnick
JAMA, Medical News & Perspectives
Oct. 2, 1991
IF THE CLAIMS of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi prove true, those who follow him soon will be blessed with eternal youth, "perfect health," and the "strength of an elephant." They will be able to "walk through walls," make themselves "invisible," and "fly through the air" without the benefit of machines.
In addition, there will be no more war or crime. Automobile accidents will be a thing of the past, and even the weather will have to obey their collective consciousness.
Such are the widely promoted claims of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement and Maharishi Ayur-Veda, some of which were presented by authors Deepak Chopra, MD, Hari M. Sharma, MD, FRCPC, and Brihaspati Dev Triguna, in their "Letter From New Delhi" ("Maharishi Ayur-Veda: Modern Insights Into Ancient Medicine," JAMA.1991;265:2633-2637).
According to a number of experts on religious cults, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Hindu swami from India, began his rise to fame and great fortune in the 1960s when the Beatles rock group briefly joined his following of worshipers. Today, he leads many thousands of devoted followers who are dedicated to bringing about his widely publicized "Master Plan to Create Heaven on Earth. "Many of these disciples are prominent in science, medicine, education, sports, entertainment, and the news media. According to Indian newspaper reports, his master plan has created an empire for the guru conservatively estimated to be worth more than $2 billion. But according to representatives of the TM movement, the Maharishi's plan to turn earth into heaven is not just wishful thinking; they say they have more than 500 scientific studies to prove they can do it.
Among them now is the "Letter From New Delhi," which is being pointed to throughout the TM movement as a sign that the Maharishi's plan is gaining scientific respectability. However, among many authorities on quackery and long-time watchers of this movement, the article in JAMA has brought anger and dismay. (Please see Letters, pages 1769 through 1774.) They say that Maharishi Ayur-Veda is not traditional Indian medicine, but the latest of the Maharishi's schemes to boost the declining numbers of people taking TM courses, through which the movement recruits new members.
This June, members of the TM community in Fairfield, Iowa, were called to a special assembly at one of the Maharishi International University's "Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge" to celebrate the news of JAMA's publication of "Letter From New Delhi." The same month, The Fairfield (Iowa) Source, a monthly newspaper that is run by members of the movement, reported that the "Letter From New Delhi" was "the lead article in JAMA."(The newspaper has since published a correction identifying it as the first article in the issue rather than the lead scientific article--a subtle but important difference.)
What the newspaper didn't report was what editors of THE JOURNAL learned shortly after the article was published: The authors are involved in organizations that promote and sell the products and services about which they wrote. Despite this, they submitted a signed financial disclosure form with their manuscript indicating that they had no such affiliations.
The statement, which all authors of articles accepted by JAMA must sign before publication, says: "I certify that any affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with a direct financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript (eg, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, expert testimony) are listed below. Otherwise, my signature indicates that I have no such financial interest. "The authors of the "Letter from New Delhi" listed no involvements or affiliations. Upon learning otherwise, THE JOURNAL immediately requested a full accounting from the authors, which was published as a financial disclosure correction (JAMA.1991;266:798).
Although the confusing list apparently holds the record in terms of length for corrections published in THE JOURNAL, it still is incomplete. In addition to being the medical director of TM's premiere health facility, the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management and Behavioral Medicine, in Lancaster, Mass, and a former consultant and board member for Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International (MAPI) Inc, also in Lancaster (the sole distributor of Maharishi Ayur-Veda TM products, an extensive line of herbs, teas, oils, food supplements, incense, and devices said to prevent or treat disease and reverse aging), Chopra performs many of the unproven and expensive Maharishi Ayur-Veda services throughout the country. Indeed, he claims to have treated more than 10 000 patients with these remedies between 1985 and 1990 (Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide.New York, NY: Harmony Books; 1990:6).
JAMA, Medical News & Perspectives
Oct. 2, 1991
This June, members of the TM community in Fairfield, Iowa, were called to a special assembly at one of the Maharishi International University's "Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge" to celebrate the news of JAMA's publication of "Letter From New Delhi." The same month, The Fairfield (Iowa) Source, a monthly newspaper that is run by members of the movement, reported that the "Letter From New Delhi" was "the lead article in JAMA."(The newspaper has since published a correction identifying it as the first article in the issue rather than the lead scientific article--a subtle but important difference.)
Failure to Disclose Connections
The statement, which all authors of articles accepted by JAMA must sign before publication, says: "I certify that any affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with a direct financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript (eg, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, expert testimony) are listed below. Otherwise, my signature indicates that I have no such financial interest. "The authors of the "Letter from New Delhi" listed no involvements or affiliations. Upon learning otherwise, THE JOURNAL immediately requested a full accounting from the authors, which was published as a financial disclosure correction (JAMA.1991;266:798).
Although the confusing list apparently holds the record in terms of length for corrections published in THE JOURNAL, it still is incomplete. In addition to being the medical director of TM's premiere health facility, the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management and Behavioral Medicine, in Lancaster, Mass, and a former consultant and board member for Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International (MAPI) Inc, also in Lancaster (the sole distributor of Maharishi Ayur-Veda TM products, an extensive line of herbs, teas, oils, food supplements, incense, and devices said to prevent or treat disease and reverse aging), Chopra performs many of the unproven and expensive Maharishi Ayur-Veda services throughout the country. Indeed, he claims to have treated more than 10 000 patients with these remedies between 1985 and 1990 (Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide.New York, NY: Harmony Books; 1990:6).
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