cs4l3az@maccs.UUCP (....Jose) (04/12/88)
I'm looking for some information on Transendental Meditation,
from people who know something about it.... both PRO and CON....
EG: - is it a relgion, a philosopy, or what?
- what kind of psychological/physiological support exists
for it (or against it)
I saw one of those late night "you don't have to be such
a loser, and here's how we can help you justify your pitiful existance
with our financial/religous/investment/lifestyle/hair-replacment/
exersize (take your pick) program" shows on TM... And it sounded to good to
be true... (with lots of "scientific" talk and nifty graphs).....
....Jose "Hmmm.... We Wonder" Hachezero
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fighting for Truth, Justice ....Jose Hachezero
and anything else that might Department of Biochemistry
seem like fun at the time.." McMaster University
cs4l3az@maccs.uucp
------------------------------------------------------------------------gush@tektronix.TEK.COM (Gus Hellman) (04/12/88)
Try reading The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson. Benson was/is Assoc- iate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Hypertension Section of Boston's Beth Israel Hospital( at least that's what the book jacket says.) Benson had wanted to find out what happens when a person practices TM. He studied a group of meditators and the book lays out what he found including a method that does the same thing as he says TM does. gus
bitter@ttidca.TTI.COM (Mark Bitter) (04/14/88)
I know this isn't exactly the right place, but I can't resist:
Q. Why did the guru refuse Novacaine?
A. Because he wanted to transcend dental medication.
--
Mark Bitter (bitter@ttidca.TTI.COM)
Citicorp/TTI
3100 Ocean Park Blvd. (213) 452-9191, x2425
Santa Monica, CA 90405 {csun|philabs|psivax|trwrb}!ttidca!bitterjwm@stdc.jhuapl.edu (James W. Meritt) (04/18/88)
Trans means across
dental means teeth
meditation is thinking
so
transdental meditation is thinking across your teeth!!!
Disclaimer: Individuals have opinions, organizations have policy.
Therefore, these opinions are mine and not any organizations!
Q.E.D.
jwm@aplvax.jhuapl.edu 128.244.65.5doug_rands_merritt@cup.portal.com (04/20/88)
You might want to see "The Nature of Human Consciousness" edited
by Robert E. Ornstein (c) 1973. Among many other topics, it
includes an EEG study of Zen meditation, which appears to me to
be essentially the same thing as Transcendental Meditation.
There are other, more direct EEG studies of TM but I don't have
the references handy. I originally got references to the scientific
literature simply by asking the TM people themselves (there's a
TM center in just about every major city, as far as I know).
The whole point of the technique is to achieve relaxation, but of
to a more complete and extreme point than the usual techniques derived
in Western tradition.
There is a lot of mystic airy-fairy stuff associated with the ultimate
state of mental relaxation, which they call "Cosmic Consciousness",
and which appears to be identical to similar terms in other mystic traditions.
However, personal experience tells me there's nothing mystical whatsoever
about this state. After following their technique faithfully for
six months (around 1973 or so), I experienced the symptoms that they
described to be associated with "Cosmic Consciousness". All of these
symptoms (bad word for it, but never mind) I found to be very positive,
beneficial and generally desirable, but none contradicted any
scientific principles, even though the experience was decidedly out
of the ordinary.
The subjective experience was of *extreme* calm, clarity of mind,
self control, clarity and intensity of perception, a general feeling
of benevolence and humor directed towards the world at large and
people in particular, a feeling that the world was a loving and
nurturing environment, etc.
There were some more objective things, too. I found that people's
responses to comments and actions became extremely obvious and
easy to predict...I'd know what they'd say in response to my comment,
and I'd be right, word for word. You could still call this subjective,
if you like, since I can't prove it. Doesn't matter.
Some people would claim that the above constituted telepathy or
precognition or some such similar crap. To me it just seemed to be
a matter of normal common sense reasoning carried out much more
effectively than usual.
Similarly, in science class, the teacher would start a problem on
the blackboard, and get to a hairy calculation, and ask students
to figure it out on their (then-newfangled) calculators. I found
I could somehow guess the answer, correct to 5 decimal places, while
people fiddled around with their calculators for another minute or
two. This seemed pretty eerie, but it's not necessary to postulate
anything mystic. This kind of thing is called "hypercognition", and
it isn't especially well understood, but there are a lot of instances
in the psychological literature of people pulling off mental feats
effortlessly and without awareness of mechanism. Lightning calculation
and eidetic memory ("photographic memory") are similar examples of
eerie but non-paranormal phenomena.
Anyway, just meditating is not guaranteed to get you into this state.
It's almost a precondition, but it's not sufficient. They don't teach
the rest of it, probably because the people in the organization (most
of whom are clearly *not* in this state) don't really *know* what it
takes to get there. I've known quite a number of people who have
practiced TM for many years, and though they found it relaxing and
generally beneficial, never hit this state of "Cosmic Consciousness".
I might have gotten luc because I augmented TM with posthypnotic
suggestions aimed at achieving exactly the state I'd read about...
I was trying to speed up the process of getting to "Cosmic Consciousness".
It seems to have worked.
Some people would claim that I was just deluding myself, but what the
hell, it was a very pleasurable state, with no negative side effects.
It disappeared when I (A) stopped meditating regularly and (B) began
drinking and such regularly [ah, those wild high school days].
Doug Merritt sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merrittjboggs@inco.UUCP (John Boggs) (04/21/88)
In article <253@aplcomm.UUCP>, jwm@stdc.jhuapl.edu (James W. Meritt) writes: > > Trans means across > dental means teeth > meditation is thinking > > so > > transdental meditation is thinking across your teeth!!! > I've heard, through a similar interpretation of the word's components, that it means: Talking over your head while putting the bite on you. -- John Boggs McDonnell Douglas - Inco, Inc. McLean, Virginia, USA
tracer@stb.UUCP (Jeff Boeing) (04/26/88)
Before you all go thronging off to Maharishi Iowa University in search of your Cosmic Consciousness through Transcendental Meditation, you should all know the flip side as well. Psychotherapists, particularly those who are sensitive to their patients, notice a considerably "thinned-out aura" coming from those patients who are chronic meditators. Those therapists who think the whole aura thing is a bunch of sheep's piddle tend to notice their meditative patients as being more "spacey" and less "in contact." TM, like hypnosis, is a means of getting into the so-called "alpha state," where most of the brainwaves lie in the alpha (6-12 Hz) frequency range. The right hemisphere of the brain operates most effectively at these alpha wavelengths. This allows a person who would otherwise be a left-brain zombie to tap into that other half of himself, realize his creative potential, et cetera. But on the other side of the coin, the left brain hemisphere operates primarily at beta ( > alpha) frequencies. While in alpha state, the left side of the brain is effectively "tuned out," or even turned off. Without the reasoning power of the (larger) left hemisphere to filter incoming information, the meditator/hypnotized person becomes extremely susceptible to suggestion. This is why hypnosis works so well. In the case of a chronic (read: daily) meditator, the left brain will begin to have problems coming back on. Some of the liveliness and sharpness-of-wit, as well as hard motivation, will begin to disappear. A healthy person needs BOTH sides of his or her brain operating at full capacity; it's not a "good right brain versus evil left brain" kind of a deal. One final word. The T.M. people have this whole mystical thing about giving you your "mantra," which they will usually charge you rather steeply for. Since a mantra is just something that has no specific meaning (to you) which you repeat over and over, I would think that any old syllable would do. Well, that's my two cents' worth. Have a nice day. -- Jeff Boeing (which is not my real name) | ...!uunet!stb.uucp!tracer ------------------------------------------|---------------------------- DISCLAIMER: YES! Everything I write ABSOLUTELY reflects the opinions of my employers DOWN TO THE LAST LETTER! Nyaah!
doug-merritt@cup.portal.com (05/03/88)
Jeff Boeng recently posted some misinformation about TM.
A) His comments about therapists thinking meditators have "thinned
out auras" is content-free, given no real definition or objective
evidence for auras.
B) The fall-back comment about other therapists thinking that meditators
are spaced out or out of contact is also content-free, since those
are wholly subjective comments devoid of denotative meaning. Except
that they might think they're a little strange, but consider that
if TM does in fact produce any kind of state different than normal
at all, then of course people in normal states *would* consider that
strange, now wouldn't they.
C) *Wholly* inaccurate is the comment about TM causing alpha-production.
What it causes is a complex cycle of EEG patterns that includes alpha,
delta, and theta. Simple biofeedback training produces simple alpha,
and there have been zillions of studies by third party investigators
that show the difference between the two.
D) Also 100% inaccurate is the comment about losing the ability to
use one hemisphere or the other. Virtually *all* neuropsychologists
are in complete agreement that currently popular notions of people
being "left brained" or "right brained" are hopeless simplifications
that never occur in fact. Everyone (aside from those who are severely
brain damaged, perhaps) uses both hemispheres, and they use them
both 100% of the time. There's a good article in an issue of Science
sometime in early 1987 by researchers at EEG Systems Labs that gives
a very nice explanation of how people use different *patterns* of
activitity in different regions of the brain, depending on what they're
doing (e.g. walking versus solving math problems). This does not at
all cleanly map into the layman's "left brain versus right brain model".
In general the state of the art of research into areas like this is
nowhere near advanced enough to be able to give definitive answers to
questions like: does TM have a positive or negative effect on my brain
waves? So don't go around claiming scientific support for your
personal opinions. There's no strong proof either way. (Note I
say this despite having posted a positive article about meditation
recently; but I made it clear it was based on subjective personal
opinion.)
Doug Merritt ucbvax!sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
or ucbvax!eris!doug (doug@eris.berkeley.edu)
or ucbvax!unisoft!certes!dougfawcett@gort.rutgers.edu (Tom Fawcett) (05/06/88)
It's probably a waste of time trying to rebut the claims of "Jeff Boeing"
about TM. First, he cross-posted his message to rec.humor. Second, he
ended his message with:
Jeff Boeing (which is not my real name) | ...!uunet!stb.uucp!tracer
Anyone not willing to sign his or her own name to a posting shouldn't be
taken seriously anyway.
--
Tom Fawcett
Fawcett@Paul.Rutgers.Edu
{harvard,seismo,ut-sally,sri-iu,ihnp4!packard}!rutgers!paul!fawcett