Tell your stories
Now that The Maharishi Effect has been out for a month or so, I’m getting a sense of how readers respond to the book. It’s been wonderful hearing from current and former members of the TM movement who say that the book spoke to them. It’s helping them find some perspective and closure on an important chapter in their lives. It occurred to me that the process could continue on this blog. If you’d like to share your story about life in the TM movement or with other groups and gurus, feel free to post it as a comment to this message.
Posted in: The Maharishi Effect
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I’ve only recently discovered much of the online debate about MMY and TM. I’m a former TM teacher who stopped teaching in 1978 when I went to Israel to learn more about my Jewish background. Before I departed for Israel, I attended an ATR course in Livingtston Manor and was disappointed when told that for some reason, we would only receive the first 3 sidhis. Once instructed, however, I remember being very disappointed. The whole process left me empty, and I remained a firm believer in “capture the fort.” When I returned from Israel, I went to rabbinical school and continued meditating, which I still do, though not always regularly. I guess my fascination with my earlier days in the TMO is mere nostalgia for wonderful times, when I firmly believed I would one day be enlightened. I think fondly about those days, like the Jewish texts that idealize the days when the Jewish people wandered in the wilderness with their God. Anyway, I look forward to reading your book.
Hi, rebmi. Thanks very much for sharing your memories. It sounds like we left the TM movement about the same time in the late seventies. Like you, I continued to meditate and puzzle over my experiences in the movement. I wrote the book in an attempt to make sense of it all. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to contact me if you have any comments or questions.
Geoff, I will look for your book. I, too attended MIU in the late ’70s (78/79). The experience helped shape the man I have become – I was then little more than a boy, attending my first year of university there when I had just turned 17.
There are enduring positives, although at the end of my first year there, I decided I did not have a place within the TM movement, due to the school authorities’ hostility to students reading the works of other spiritual teachers. What I remember were some wonderful experiences in meditation, and the friends I had there.
David, in Ontario, Canada