Word: tm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Snapping is a word coined to describe the sudden, drastic alteration or even total transformation of personality that apparently occurs in mass psychological therapies and spiritualistic cults like est, TM. Hare Krishna, the Moonies, Scientology, the Born-Again Christian movement, the Children of God, the Love Family, and so forth. An interested observer goes to a cult meeting, becomes convinced, and the effect is as if someone had reached out and changed the channel on his mind's television screen--snap--and now he gets channel 12 instead of channel 5. To reach him, you have to broadcast...
...Healing Festival, a collection of people who believe they are the fulfillment of a Hopi prophecy that said five generations after the white men destined to live in harmony with the great Spirit of the Earth. Karma, reincarnation, natural foods, meditation, tai chi, buddhism, astrology, yin and yang, ecology, TM, astral projection, cosmic consciousness, acid--anything spiritual or far out and freaky was right on with these people. I got to the gathering--7000 hippies in a cold, wet, muddy meadow in Boondocks, Oregon with dogs, goats and drunken people and a huge, disgusting pot of beans--this...
...read with eagerness Kenneth Walton's defense of the claims by TM that 4000 of its meditators are levitating and turning themselves invisible. TM's leaders have been making these claims for nearly a year now, but they still do not allow outsiders to witness these marvelous goings-on. At last, I hoped, here was someone--a Harvard Med School instructor no less--who could provide firsthand reports...
...Strip away his rationalizations and intellectual fog, and all Walton is saying is that because TM is a good experience for him, he will believe whatever TM's leaders tell...
...when I see it--and so should Walton. There are already too many intelligent people around getting drawn into one cultish sect or another to the point of believing--and vigorously defending--whatever craziness the group leaders tell them, whether it be comical craziness as in the case of TM, or frightening and dangerous craziness as in the case of certain religious cults recruiting locally. History suggests that this syndrome does not lead to happy results. --Alan M. MacRobert