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.<\/p>\n
Until now.<\/p>\n
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<\/u>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I flipped.<\/p>\n More graphs.<\/p>\n Flipped more.<\/p>\n More graphs and cheesy pictures.<\/p>\n What the hell?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n What do you know, they were trying to sell me something.<\/p>\n And it’s all nonsense.<\/p>\n I did some googling today, and discovered their official site<\/a>. Creepy. It’s a cult. Indeed, the 4th hit on google for Transcendental Meditation says The Transcendental Meditation program is a money-making cult.<\/a><\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n See what I mean about being a child of the 80s? I totally missed this.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And I want my 25 cents back.<\/lj-cut><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}