Word: maharishi
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What is a maharishi to do when sales start to grow sluggish? One answer: announce a shiny new product. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder and guru of Transcendental Meditation (TIME cover, Oct. 13, 1975), has done just that. TM monthly enrollment slid from its 1975 peak of 40,000 trainees a month to a low of 4,000 this year, partly because the Maharishi invited several thousand of his teachers to TM headquarters in Switzerland to acquaint them with the organization's new wares. The teachers have now brought those wares to the American market: lessons that will lead...
Last Oct. 12,25 high school students waited in the Union, N.J., office of the Transcendental Meditation movement. One by one they entered a room and reverently knelt before a candlelit altar holding a picture of the late Guru Dev, Hindu holy man and predecessor of TM Leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Each student brought fruit and flowers to be placed on the altar by Teacher Janet Aaron, who then recited a Sanskrit puja (hymn of worship)* and whispered each student's mantra, the secret word that must be repeated to aid meditation...
...coalition buttressed its claims by releasing a heavily documented booklet by John E. Patton, a Roman Catholic attorney who lives in Maplewood. As Patton paints it, TM was going nowhere till the Maharishi in 1967-68 decided to "camouflage" it as a secular "science" in order to qualify for taxpayer funds and reach a wider following. Since then TM has become the McDonald's of meditation, attracting hundreds of thousands of initiates...
...that TM novices are not indoctrinated outright in Hinduism, as they might be in Judaism or Christianity. Rather, they are gradually conditioned to accept a Hindu world view, after which many move into a deeper involvement through meditation. Meanwhile, two prominent Protestants in Iowa, where the movement's Maharishi International University is located, have argued in the liberal Christian Century that TM is too religious to be taught in public schools...
...Jersey project for TM, explains that the mantras are just "meaningless" sounds, that the puja simply reminds the teacher of the highest ideals of his profession, and that the deities it invokes are only "the forces of nature." In Fairfield, Iowa, Seymour Migdal, dean of the faculty at the Maharishi University, is confident that TM will survive court scrutiny. Says he: "It doesn't require faith, and it doesn't require worship...