TM & David Lynch

Transcendental Meditation, at one level, is nothing more than a simple mantra meditation.  A mantra can be a good tool to give the mind something constant to attend to as opposed to being embedded or lost in thought.  Of course, my tendency would be to recommend what we could almost call a "dynamic mantra" in the form of the Mahasi noting technique.

Although the TM mantras themselves are veiled in secrecy, supposedly chosen psychically by a guru, you could actually determine your TM mantra with a simple look up table, and assuming you had the basic idea of mantra meditation down, you could save ~$1000 or more.

"David Wants To Fly" is a documentary about TM by a German filmmaker that includes a number of interviews with David Lynch, the famous artist-director-TM advocate.  Flying is a reference to the rather silly TM "yogic flying" program which purports to develop the ability to levitate.  In the picture above, you can see an example of this, which is absolutely nothing more than hopping up and down while in a lotus position.

I was not aware of some of the large sums of money ($1,000,000) which people pay to be in certain TM leadership positions, nor of the wealth of Mahesh's heirs, apparently now one of the richest families in India.  One wealthy American publisher who was featured in the film gave $150 million, and was disappointed that the money was clearly never spent on the intended projects.

I came across the reference to the documentary on "Falling Down the Rabbit Hole", a site that is highly critical of TM.  [I would briefly mention that meditation of any type is not all unicorns and rainbows, and as we open ourselves up there is definitely potential for some repressed stuff to rise to the surface.]

And then there's the famous Beatles song about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Sexy Sadie.



EDIT:  I didn't particularly want to throw David Lynch under the bus here, he seems like a nice guy and seems relatively awake.  I'm not sure that David literally wants to fly, but maybe he does believe in that stuff, who knows.  He has started initiatives to introduce children to meditation (TM of course) through his David Lynch foundation.