The Jerusalem Post covers TM and it's putsch into schools:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1239710826837&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
LINK
Trance 101
Apr. 30, 2009
Mel Bezalel , THE JERUSALEM POST
"It's a little bit like when milk is boiling over, you can take a drop
of cold water and dip it in, and it all settles down. When stress
begins to build up, it erupts into violence."
Perhaps it isn't surprising that when international director and raja
("administrator") of Transcendental Meditation in Israel, Kingsley
Brooks, talks about the practice in which he's been involved for 35
years, he speaks using elusive terms and near-constant metaphor. After
all, the specifics of the practice are only revealed to those who
train in it - which requires three preliminary steps and four sessions
spread over four consecutive days, taught only by qualified
Transcendental Meditation teachers.
(...)
Many critics of TM take issue with the movement's supposedly "non-
religious" standpoint, taking issue specifically with the allusions to
Hindu gods that appear in the TM puja - initiation ceremony. Hindu
gods such as Shakti, Krishna and Vishnu are all mentioned in the
private ceremony, in Sanskrit, and some say their personal mantras
include them, too. Bob Roth, spokesperson for the international TM
movement and national director of expansion, states that the Hindu
connection is purely "cultural" however: "The culture goes back
thousands of years, and it's nonsense to say that mantras are names of
gods - 100 percent absolute nonsense. It just creates fear and there
is no basis to it whatsoever."
One TM critic is Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus Software and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, the international non-profit advocacy
organization. Kapor was involved with TM for seven years until 1976
and trained as a TM teacher. "TM is heavily promoted as a
scientifically-validated, secular method of stress reduction," says
Kapor, "whereas in fact the TM technique is inextricably bound up in a
religious Hindu tradition, as is obvious to anyone who considers the
mandatory TM initiation ceremony and the supposedly secret mantras.
Proponents of TM twist themselves into pretzels to deny or explain
away these inconvenient facts, but the real reason they do such things
is as part of a drive to recruit as many people as possible into the
TM movement." Kapor has strong objections to the program being taught
in schools, despite initially experiencing some relaxation benefits
from TM himself. Kapor believes that the twice-daily sessions being
introduced in schools are designed to recruit members to the movement,
who will then become much more involved.
THOSE WHO do immerse themselves in the movement often go on to become
TM teachers and many practice an advanced technique known as
"rounding" - intensive meditation that can last for several hours at a
time. It is with rounding that more issues reportedly surface with
regard to physical and mental side-effects, though the movement
officially states there are none, pointing again to its store of 600
studies.
Past practitioners of TM have publicly spoken out about the alleged
side-effects, including American social worker John Knapp, who joined
the TM movement in 1972. Although Knapp speaks with 23 years of his
own experience in TM, his role as a social worker specializing in
recovery from toxic groups, abusive churches and cults and his website
about the alleged problems of TM, mean that he is in frequent contact
with those suffering with problems related to their experience with
the technique. After signing up for TM to boost his grades at the age
of 18, Knapp recalls that he had "a cultic relationship with the
organization." Soon, Knapp became more involved with TM and began
practicing rounding. "I was spending so much time and money on TM that
other very important areas of my life were being completely
neglected," he says. "During the time I was most involved, for about
20 years I only saw my family a handful of times." Although he is
clear to state that it wasn't a directive from the organization, he
says it was "a non-stated judgment."
Knapp says he suffered several side-effects from his intensive
meditation practice, such as head-shaking (which he occasionally still
experiences), disassociation or "spacing out," problems with his
memory and a movement where his head would rapidly flip left and he'd
feel an energy surge in his spine. On visiting the doctor, it was
suggested that he'd developed a kind of Tourette 's syndrome. Knapp
says that past TM practitioners contacting him have also reported
involuntary twitching, grimacing, shouting and other tick-like behavior.
Mentioning difficulties with the meditation was difficult in the
movement, explains Knapp, because "to bring up any, what they called
'negativity,' meant that you were likely to be ostracized from the
group. If you had any problems with the meditation, and people did, it
was the kind of thing you did behind closed doors."
In Knapp's experience, many of the problems experienced by meditators
were explained away by teachers with a concept known as 'stressing,'
'stress release' or 'body purification,' where the body experiences
temporary ticks as part of the body's healing process.
(...)
PART OF the problem with determining the legitimate benefits and
problems of TM is the conflicts within the scientific community. As
with many areas of research, some of the studies offer contradictions.
Although the movement quotes the "600 studies" in its favor, some have
been criticized for bias and a lack of scientific evidence. For
example, a research paper published in June 2007 by the University of
Alberta Evidence-based Practice Center for the US Department of Health
and Human Services, stated about meditation research (TM included):
"We found the methodological quality of meditation research to be
poor, with significant threats to validity in every major category of
quality measured, regardless of study design."
Therefore, either Roth's statement regarding the lack of scientific
evidence for TM side-effects is not straightforward, or he is simply
uninformed. Such studies do exist, such as Stanford University's Leon
Otis's 1984 study which revealed that although 52-64 percent of the
subjects who practiced TM in the study did not list a single adverse
effect, "adverse effects do occur in a sizeable percentage of those
who take up the practice," and "the number and severity of complaints
were positively related to duration of meditation. Of considerable
interest," states the research, "is the finding that the specific
adverse effects reported were remarkably consistent between groups and
formed a pattern of people who had become anxious, confused,
frustrated, depressed and/or withdrawn since starting TM."
There are additional studies that follow similar veins; however, it
seems that for every study published, a counter study is produced to
dispute the scientific claims. It is important to highlight that much
of the criticism launched at TM is, on the whole, focused on the more
intensive practicing of the technique.
