boo wrote: > ...there's a PhD dissertation on the history of the tm mov't... > "After about one year of ascetic seclusion at Uttarkashi, in a place called "valley of the saints," Maharishi Mahesh Yogi accompanied his ailing aunt from Calcutta to a medical facility at Madanapalle in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. By his own admission, he was responding not only to the request of his relative but more directly to an irrepressible impulse to "go south" and visit the temples of pilgrimage at Kanchi, Rameshwaram, and Kanya Kumari.
Sometime in June or July of 1954, he acquired his first students at Madanapalle and initiated them into "transcendental meditation". According to T. Rama Rao, perhaps the very first initiate, the technique of meditation and its instruction was exactly the same as it is taught today by TM teachers throughout the world." Source: 'Text and Context in the Communication of a Social Movement's Charisma, Ideology, and Consciousness: TM for India and the West' By Jay Randolph Coplin, Ph.D. http://members.aol.com/drcoplin/SRMemergence.html
