on 5/30/05 2:07 AM, George DeForest at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Blank> Off_world_beings >> >> my understanding is that thousands upon thousands >> have learned TM in the past few years in India. >> The past decade would put it at 100's of thousands. >> Is this an innefective organization? >> >> Maharishi is right now teaching TM to more people >> than possibly any other teaching in the history >> of the human race. >> >> With the TM fee the initiate would also at the same >> time sponsor 100 people in India to learn . This is, >> in simple form, what Maharishi is doing with his fee. > > i have never heard anything like this! > > do you have any website or other way to > prove this wild claim. if it is true, i dont think > we ever hear of it, at least not in fairfield > > i was under the conviction that initiation > into TM is almost nil, anywhere!
I forwarded this thread to Steve Briggs, who taught in India with Purusha for many years, and he said the following: Hi Rick I know firsthand about several hundred thousand initiations in India in the past twelve years. Just before we arrived in India in September, 1994 to launch Maharishi Corporate Development Program (MCDP), TATA Corporation sponsored TM for 50,000 employees on their tea plantations in Kerala and at one of their chemical operations. This was the result of Darbari Seth, CEO of TATA Tea, who was a devotee of Maharishi's that had gone to Holland. I met both Seth and the CEO of TATA Chemical, Mr. Krishna, and discussed the project with them. Later, in 1996 I co-directed a government project in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh which was sponsored by Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu, a dynamic politician who has been visited by both Bill Gates and Bill Clinton in the last decade. Chandra Babu Naidu requested massive initiations for government workers, schools, and prisons in the state and we taught 45,000 over a nine month period with the support of 8 local teachers. This project was exceptional from the standpoint of cooperation and funding by the government. In addition to these two large projects, the corporate programs (MCDP) I was involved with (we taught over 100 corporations from 1-15 TM courses each) and other initiatives in public schools and prisons organized by European Purusha in India between 1994-2002 resulted in tens of thousands of initiations. It would seem reasonable that 200-250,000 initiations have been done in India since 1992. If we include the 150,000 school children at the Maharishi Vidya Mandir Schools around India then the number of TM initiations goes up to 350,000-400,000. However, the idea that the high price of TM in the US is used to underwrite the cost of teaching TM in India is questionable. For example, the projects with TATA and the Andhra Pradesh state government were both paid in full by those organizations and MVM school children learn TM as part of their tuition. I personally submitted our receipts for both American and local teachers to the Andhra government and they were all reimbursed by them. That said, portions of the revenues from US-TMO activities ranging from donations to Ayur Ved products do go to International and presumably on to support pundits or whatever is deemed necessary in India. Indian TM teachers are all salaried, but the salaries are small. There must be 500 hundred or more salaried TM teachers in India (and plenty of administrators), and the funds to support their salaries probably don't come from teaching revenues alone because course fees at the Indian centers aren't much. Their salaries are subsidized. But remember that India also produces FAR more revenues than TM initiations in the States. MAPI, yagyas, jyotish are all based in India and they generate substantial revenues globally. I don't think its realistic to connect TM fees in the States to TM initations in India. Feel free to post this message on FFL if you like. Steve Briggs To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
