While taking a walk in downtown Lansdale Monday during my lunchbreak I stopped in the local thrift shop. I’m not much of a thrift shop person, but they have a lot of books, and even a scifi section that sometimes has good books, and at 25 cents each it’s worth it even if they aren’t.
Until now.
I wandered from the scifi section to check out their cookbooks (which turned out to almost all be about microwave cooking, a whole bookcase full, what’s up with that?) and drifted into the religion section where I saw The Transcendental Meditation TM Book : How to Enjoy the Rest of Your Life. Transcendental Meditation? I hadn’t heard of it, I’m a child of the 80s. The cover of this 300+ page book proclaimed “NEW EDITION OF THE BEST SELLER… Over 1 Million Copies in Print” I flipped through a few pages in the book, it had cheesy pictures and looked like it fell out of the 1970s. I looked at my watch, needed to get going back to work. So I grabbed a quarter out of my purse and bought the book. It’s just a book about a style of meditation right?
Last night to get sleepy I pulled the book out of my bag and started reading it. It appeared that the first few chapters were about the “TM System” and as I flipped through it and saw all their “scientific graphs” of how it boosts intelligence and all sorts of stuff.
Very quickly it began to feel like someone was trying to sell me something. Alright, it helps, move on to the meat of the book.
I flipped.
More graphs.
Flipped more.
More graphs and cheesy pictures.
What the hell?
Turns out that this is just a big ole book of propaganda. You have to spend a couple grand on a class if you actually want to learn TM.
What do you know, they were trying to sell me something.
And it’s all nonsense.
I did some googling today, and discovered their official site. Creepy. It’s a cult. Indeed, the 4th hit on google for Transcendental Meditation says The Transcendental Meditation program is a money-making cult.
Apparently: “Many know of TM because of the Beatles and other celebrities like Mia Farrow and Donovan, who hung around at the Maharishi’s ashram in the late sixties.”
See what I mean about being a child of the 80s? I totally missed this.
I mentioned this to Michael this evening, he mentioned that this is the kind of crap that makes New Age people look bad. He’s right. It’s sad.
And I want my 25 cents back.