Transcendental Meditation in schools, the David Lynch program

[The Night Owl]

Transcendental Meditation in schools, the David Lynch program
September 6, 3:38 PM Boston Skepticism Examiner Douglas Mesner

Expel from your mind the stereotyped image of the robed, bearded yogi. Forget the worn image of the unkempt, hash-headed, lotus-seated hippy listening to sitar music in an incense-filled room behind a beaded curtain. This is not the Transcendental Meditation we are talking about. This is Science!

“Hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted on the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation program at more than 200 independent universities and research institutions worldwide in the past 35 years,” explains the TM-promoting David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace website. Among the positive side-effects of the TM program, we find: increased focus, decreased hostility, reduced anxiety, even a reduction in cardiovascular disease among practitioners.

Surely, with this in mind, no reasonable person would argue against teaching the TM method in public schools.

...

http://www.examiner.com/x-20682-Boston-Skepticism-Examiner~y2009m9d6-Transcendental-Meditation-in-schools-the-David-Lynch-program

In my opinion, Transcendental Meditation, like prayer, is an occult practice which does not belong in public schools. I'm all for schools teaching relaxation techniques but TM is a lot more than just a method of relaxation.

[RagAss]

1. Well the American Fucktards aren't going to tolerate this shit !

"We'll have none of this Satan Worship !"

[carlyhippy]

2. We couldn't even get a positive message presidential speech aired to the students....

I am pretty sure this won't make it to the classrooms either. I have always wanted to learn TM, I have heard it works wonders.

[Ian David]

8. Meditation = Good. Transcendental Meditation = Scam. n/t

[HughMoran]

9. not quite

You don't know what it is then - lol.

There were scammers that sold TM here, but TM itself is not a scam.

[Ian David]

10. Whatever. Your mind is already on the astral plane or something. Arguing is pointless. n/t

[HughMoran]

11. OK, so your a mindless repeater of lies. Hmmm, what does that remind me of?

I guess there is no point talking to you then.

[omega minimo]

21. You seem bent

on discrediting anything you don't understand, in order to prop up your beliefs.

[Ian David]

23. I suppose it might seem that way to someone like you.

I'm putting you on ignore, so I don't contaminate your magic faerie world where the unicorns play.

[omega minimo]

30. Methinks thou doth protest too much.

[patrick t. cakes]

34. visit fairfield iowa

it's a scam.

[LuvNewcastle]

3. More pagan, occult sorcery

If you want peace of mind, get on your knees and pray!:silly:

[blue sky at night]

4. anything that expands consciousness would be a great......

thing to teach everyone. The TIDE of low consciousness people in this country is frightening, as the level of stupidity grows day by day. I know that wading through the waters of most peoples souls would scarcely get one's feet wet...and most churches never go there, meaning Spirituality is absent from most peoples lives. I would also suggest Yoga as another great thing to teach in every public school, a path to enlightenment and physical health.

There, go ahead and flame me.

[omega minimo]

19. including art and music

:thumbsup:

[HughMoran]

5. I need to remember to do some TM

Be great for kids too.

[eShirl]

6. Will they be teaching yogic flight to the kiddos?

[Ian David]

7. We have enough fuckwittery in our schools without TM. n/t

[HughMoran]

12. You might want to Google TM before you continue to make a fool out of yourself

You're coming across as an impulsive right-winger - I'm sure that's not how you want to be perceived.

[The Night Owl]

13. Did you read the entire article?

From the article...

...

TM was founded by a man known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1956 in India, and the revered guru himself had once been accused of using “fear and intimidation” in order to work to prevent a disciple from leaving the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The disillusioned student, Robert Kropinski, and six other people sued Maharishi’s University for $9 million on the grounds of “fraud, neglect, and intentionally inflicting emotional damage”. Kropinski stated that none of the promised TM benefits ever surfaced during his time as a student, and he was awarded $138,000 by a Washington D.C. jury. Maharishi did not appear in court, as he was never available to receive summons.

Admittedly, all of this sounds most unpleasant, but what of the scientific data supporting the individual benefits of TM?

There are problems with TM’s data. While the David Lynch Foundation endlessly promotes the “unique” benefits of TM, there is a conspicuous shortage of comparative analytical studies that measure TM against other relaxation techniques. Surprisingly, studies measuring the effects of a simple mid-day nap report many of the same “unique” benefits touted by TM.

In fact, a study published in the journal Science in 1976 found in studying “five experienced practitioners of Transcendental Meditation”, that they “spent appreciable parts of meditation sessions” merely napping.

And, according to a June 2007 report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that evaluated the quality of the meditation research along an array of standard scientific criteria such as the proper use of randomization and control group techniques, “Overall, the methodological quality of both intervention and observational analytic studies on meditation practices is poor.”

...

Occult practices such as TM and prayer just don't belong in schools.

[HughMoran]

18. Well, it works for me and nobody ever forced me to do it

I really don't care about the history - the technique works for me and it's the most simple thing in the world to do - you simply sit relaxed and repeat a word that won't stimulate thinking. You then do your best to focus on the repetition and allow yourself to relax. Simple and it works for me.

[Maru Kitteh]

24. Millions of people claim prayer works for them too - are you for teaching prayer in school?

Or is it all about you?

[HughMoran]

40. Yes, it is about me

I was talking about me - I don't necessarily support teaching this in schools, but I'm not afraid of a little meditation.

People here are so closed minded I'm ready to :puke:

[Critters2]

27. That sounds VERY similar to Centering Prayer. nt

[abumbyanyothername]

31. I think that it works for you is great

it works for me too. Except I just do the meditation part, not the transcendental -- or at least not the trademarked transcendental -- part. Anthony Dimello's Sadhanna is the backbone of my guide, although I spend some time at Santa Monica Yoga.

I don't think it, the practice itself, should be taught in the schools. Perhaps discussion of the practice could be a part of a social studies unit on the 60s, or world religions, or India.

I do think parents should introduce their children to meditation but I do it mostly through joking. "I like my children best when they are meditating", etc. My older kids were big into sports so I introduced them to meditation as a performance enhancement. My youngest is big into pot (and skateboarding) so he may find his way into meditation more along the path that I took.

[patrick t. cakes]

35. did you drop 6 grand to learn that?

[sudopod]

44. So basically it's like scientology

but with sitars?

[eShirl]

14. You think so? He comes across as a realist to me.

Honestly, if you allow this in schools, what argument do you have left to keep Scientology from bringing an auditing program into schools? Slippery slope.

[HughMoran]

15. I really wasn't advocating it in schools, just taking on the falsehoods

I've done TM and all of the claims listed are for real. It does help lower tension/anxiety.

[eShirl]

16. Did you fly?

[HughMoran]

20. It's about relaxing

It doesn't make me act like an ass hole though.

[eShirl]

26. Read the article.

One doesn't need any particular *brand* of meditation to achieve the benefits of meditation (relaxation, stress reduction, lowered blood pressure).

TM is the only one I know of that claimed its adherents could achieve "yogic flight." I assume that since you know so much about TM, you're already aware of that claim.

[HughMoran]

42. Nope, only the scammers you want to bring up talk about that

You may be stereotyping and being kind of rigid in your thinking here. I neither promoted teaching this in schools nor believe the claims of the scam artists. If the technique doesn't matter, why are you attacking me for defending the technique that works for me? Did you even read my initial response to the dolt above I put on ignore? I was defending myself from a reactionary, then a whole pile more closed minded reactionaries started piling on.

[eShirl]

51. I am attacking Transcendental Meditation and Lynch's foundation to bring it into the schools.

(Not the technique of meditation.) That's the topic of this thread. I don't know you personally, nor did I have any idea how far your belief in TM goes; that's why I asked. After all, you said that you have had "all the benefits listed," and one of the claimed benefits of the OFFICIAL version of TM was yogic flight. I thought I was giving you and your intelligence the benefit of the doubt, rather than just assume from that that you believed you could fly. Instead of answering my question, you implied I was an "ass hole." Why do you insist on taking it as a personal attack? Where have I attacked you?

PS Also, I honestly had no idea that when you said we had had scammers here, what you actual meant was the official TM. In light of that, we are in agreement.

[HughMoran]

41. Did I once say that I thought it should be taught in schools?

Can anybody read and follow a conversation, or is this the official "witch hunt" thread where people are attacked for not being conservative Christians?

[eShirl]

53. No, you jumped in supporting TM in a thread about it being taught in schools.

Silly me for assuming your support extended to what this thread was about.

[Ian David]

17. If you could argue with woo-woos, there would BE no woo-woos.

I have better things to do with my time than to waste it on a futile attempt rescue the unwilling from their own ignorance.

[HughMoran]

22. Me too

You've consistently acted like an ignoramus here - I guess it's time to put you on ignore.

[immoderate]

29. Works both ways....

Google pointed me here:
http://www.behind-the-tm-facade.org/transcendental_meditation-tmresearch-problems.htm
This is a critique of the TM research that is touted by David Lynch.

I put TM up there with homeopathy. Or have you been levitating?

--imm

[Gabi Hayes]

25. Jai ya!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQbnjo3vxrw

[The Night Owl]

28. LOL! I loved the Jai Ya episode. {EOM}

[XOKCowboy]

32. Have you ever practiced TM?

It has nothing to do with prayer and, as taught by the Maharishi, had nothing to do with the occult. I took the course 40 yrs ago and still use the techniques.

Should it be in schools? Probably not but I think that you overstate your case.

[DRoseDARs]

33. Mmm, nothing quite like the scent of burning woo to calm the nerves...

For those who won't bother reading more than the very short excerpt of the article, it goes on to take down this nonsense. Meditation is all well and good, I do it myself now and then, but David Lynch and his ilk are trying to attribute more upon it than is actually scientifically quantifiable and the article calls him out on it. Hell, he can't even be bothered to do proper scientific studies and experiments, he just uses the Cliff Notes version of the Scientific Method and crib notes any studies he thinks support his claims.

Meditation does one thing and one thing only: Reduce stress. Meditate more, have less stress. And meditating isn't the only way to reduce stress, it's just a focused way of relaxing (and a fancy way of saying it, too); nothing mystical or paranormal about it. Less stress in one's life has many health benefits. No one can argue against this because the medical science is there. However, the claims of Transcendental Meditation proponents go much further than the studies and the data. Therein lies the woo. It's sad that fraudsters have to sully the goodness of simple meditation with their snake oil.

[Trillo]

46. It seems you're at least partly incorrect, it apparently increases brain volume

Age effects on gray matter volume and attentional performance in Zen meditation.
Pagnoni G, Cekic M.

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University, <snip>

Zen meditation, a Buddhist practice centered on attentional and postural self-regulation, has been speculated to bring about beneficial long-term effects for the individual, ranging from stress reduction to improvement of cognitive function. In this study, we examined how the regular practice of meditation may affect the normal age-related decline of cerebral gray matter volume and attentional performance observed in healthy individuals. Voxel-based morphometry for MRI anatomical brain images and a computerized sustained attention task were employed in 13 regular practitioners of Zen meditation and 13 matched controls. While control subjects displayed the expected negative correlation of both gray matter volume and attentional performance with age, meditators did not show a significant correlation of either measure with age. The effect of meditation on gray matter volume was most prominent in the putamen, a structure strongly implicated in attentional processing. These findings suggest that the regular practice of meditation may have neuroprotective effects and reduce the cognitive decline associated with normal aging.

PMID: 17655980

Hmm, here's another one

Our initial results suggest that meditation may be associated with structural changes in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing. The data further suggest that meditation may impact agerelated declines in cortical structure.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1361002

[DRoseDARs]

47. Huh. That's ... odd. Well, either way, we can both agree that that is SCIENCE at work, not woo.

It's my understanding that brain cells begin dying off after birth. I'm not going to read the paper (I tend to fall asleep reading research papers) but I suspect the increase in mass comes not from new cells, but rather new connections being formed between existing cells as well as fewer existing connections being lost.

[Trillo]

49. I haven't a clue.

Like I wrote below, I really don't know much about it. So, I looked briefly, and found those, as well as at least one other that was quite intriguing, but also "occult" in the sense that to understand it I had to read it far too slowly to understand (too much specialized language I was unfamiliar with), but it was along similar lines, something about emotions and empathy.

One thing that is clear is there have been a lot of studies on it, far too many to summarize for my brief incursion and the time I was willing to spend looking.

I don't have any issues with this type of thing being taught in school, if religious elements that may exist are sanitized. At the same time, I'm familiar with The Relaxation Response, but wonder if there's really a need to "westernize" something that's so simple.

It's possible that children naturally meditate on their own when they need to, but perhaps they're unintentionally trained to stop doing it, then perhaps they forget how to as they learn the hurry-up rat-race of our culture.

Perhaps the brain simply needs a lot of frequent rest periods to "chill" properly. This would be consistent with the "laziness" aspect that's typical of "hunter gatherer" cultures and our distant past when evolution seems to have occurred.

Personally, I find playing a musical instrument meditative. That said, I rather doubt it would provide meditative effects to children who are first learning an instrument, a learning period which frequently tends toward frustration rather than relaxation and repetition. It seems there are simpler ways to meditate.

[DRoseDARs]

57. You're mistaken if u believe meditation is just an Eastern development. Don't worry, it is a common

...misconception people have. Western, African and New World cultures (pretty much all cultures) also have had their own meditative elements as long as there have been people to practice them. The problem here is TM is inextricably linked with its religious/mystical/spiritual elements as it claims to imbue in meditation those very things. You're right and I don't think anyone here would necessarily disagree, that meditation would be a good thing to be taught in schools if the extraneous religious/mystical/spiritual elements were removed, regardless of who put them there be they Hindu (which is where TM comes from), Christian, or Native American. That really isn't a difficult thing to do, but people like this Lynch fellow make it an impossible task because they make ALL meditation appear to be woo at best, religious indoctrination at worst.

As to your point about musical instruments, meditation can take many forms and be completely devoid of religious/mystical/spiritual elements. It isn't just sitting, breathing, chanting and not falling asleep. A repetitive task like a Buddhist monk folding towels in a monastery can be a form of meditation. It's about the mental focus and the relaxed state, and whatever it takes to get you there.



Edit: Wording of subject line was ... awkward. Had to change it to make it less like a Zen koan. :P

[Trillo]

59. Thank you.

I hadn't realized all the various brandings that had been applied.

One of my favorite meditations was, and I guess still is, hand washing dishes. I think someone else also already branded it (Thich Nhat Hanh), but I still find it relaxing, and naturally, repetitive. I've never thought of including an outward verbal chant.

I think part of what I was getting to with the "westernization" comment was the tendency to overcomplicate things, but perhaps that's not solely a western concept, maybe it's just human, or perhaps, "civilization" based.

:hi:

[eShirl]

55. I would phrase that, "It works, therefore evidence exists that can be used to prove it works via the

scientific method."

[Confusious]

50. So what happens if you get anxiety from sitting still

and repeating a word over and over?

[DRoseDARs]

54. Something inside you snaps, and you go on a Watch Glenn Beck spree across the country.

Oooligarh, ooligarh, oooligarh, oooligarh, oooligarh... ;)

[eShirl]

56. I meditate and I focus on listening to my breathing and trying to get my mind quiet.

Repeating a word over and over never seemed helpful to me at all, but some people find the technique invaluable.

[Gabi Hayes]

36. TM without the religious connotations... ''The Relaxation Response'':

Herbert Bensen, M.D. coined the phrase after studying people who practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). TM has been shown to help people reduce the activity of their autonomic nervous systems. Bensen took the principles of TM and removed them from their Eastern religious context in order to make them more accessible for westerners.

The Relaxation Response:

1.Sit comfortably with your eyes closed.
2.Pay attention to your breathing, and repeat a word or phrase or prayer silently to yourself as you exhale.
3.When you notice your mind wandering (It will) just notice it and passively bring your attention back to your breathing.
4.Practice for approximately 20 minutes every day (or at least 3-4 times per week). Don't set an alarm, but sit with a clock in view if necessary.

http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/stressmanagement/a/relresp.htm

http://www.amazon.com/RELAXATION-RESPONSE-HERBERT-BENSON/dp/0002167123/ref=/ref=cm_cd_f_pb_t

the second review is particularly helpful for anyone interested, as it refers to the older edition, which contains the key 'exercise' which apparently is missing from the one advertised on Amazon

[Trillo]

37. I don't know anything about Transcendental Meditation.

"Occult" (hidden) and "prayer"(quiet time) means nothing much remarkable.

Brain surgery is occult, and hopefully requires some serious deep thought (meditation) to raise it from practice level to artform. Science is occult. Even making superior bread can be occult, judging by the multiple deceptions within deceptions that abound around it.

Tell us why you believe this type of meditation is occult and why whatever that is doesn't belong in schools.

Then maybe I'll go to the link to read a little more.

I remember when I was in elementary school that many of us, including myself, were frequently reminded to stop looking out the window. Curiously, I've learned over many years that some of my deepest moments of insight have come in unexpected moments when the brain is "emptied of thought" (ha ha ha, good luck on that one!), instead of being actively tired by "too many conscious inputs".

[Gabi Hayes]

38. relax, turn off your mind, and float downstream...

or something like that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x07N5uoWpIo

[Trillo]

39. Sounds like Timothy Leary.

"Turn on Tune in Drop out", or something like that.

[Gabi Hayes]

45. something like that, yes....

[Odin2005]

43. TM is a BS comercialized New Age bastardization of actual meditation practices.

I'm no New Age woo-woo and I practice Buddhist-type mindfulness meditation in connection with therapy and medication for my mental health issues.

TM is crap.

[DeadEyeDyck]

48. I could not disagree more

I have read Wilber since 9th grade. He is a TM psych. I cannot think of a better thing for the mind than TM. It is not a cult, it is a practice. We are all connected. We are one. That is not religion. That Just Is. Think about it.

TM would reduce violence and instill harmony to our youth. Look at Tibet. If you woke up tomorrow and we were like Tibet, would that be a bad or good thing?

[Confusious]

52. There is nobody in tibet

They are also Chinese and Buddhists. That probably has more to do with a low crime rate then TM.

A little more science and less "harmony with the universe" would help.

[Hannah Bell]

58. you could set up a chain of charter schools. i'm sure some parents will buy into it.