Among the Intellectualoids/Maharishi's Crash Landing
Mueller, William
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS MAHARISHI'S CRASH LANDING In January a judgment of $138,000 was awarded to Robert Kropinski of Philadelphia in his $1.5 million suit against Maharishi International...
...Reserve your ad in our exclusive 20th Anniversary issue...
...This is not escape...
...Ambassador to South Africa, Herman W. Nickel predicts that P.W...
...Deliverance for them lay inside the Golden Domes where people struggled to rise from foam pads...
...Basic TM was no longer sufficient for empire building...
...No other cult has crafted the variety of mental marketing schemes used to further TM...
...Former U.S...
...There will also be special media attention thanks to advance mailings to newspaper columnists and other promotional efforts...
...W hen Maharishi Mahesh Yogi be- came the darling of the Beatles and made the rounds of talk, shows in the sixties, he was peddling a 20-minute mental technique...
...Advertisers have begun to reserve space in The American Spectator's 20th Anniversary edition scheduled for December...
...And even three years after leaving TM, according to his psychiatrist, he still suffered periods of emotional flooding and disassociation which he attributed to his previous use of such TM practices as self-hypnosis and hyperventilation...
...Published quarterly by the Foreign Policy Research Institute For a free copy, write: ORRIS 3508 Market Street Suite 350 Philadelphia, PA 19104 (215) 382-0685 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987...
...What if it did...
...I could not answer at the time, though I know now how Robert Kropinski would answer...
...One cannot but admire some of these marketing methods, which find whatever is trendiest and give it a mystic topspin...
...The issue will have a bonus circulation in Washington, D.C., and increased bookstore distribution nationwide...
...TM was taking a new direction that had two significant goals: first, to bring meditators together into a community...
...To get into an advanced state of meditation, Sidhas find themselves by William Mueller ordering their lives to revolve around the meditation sessions...
...Not only did they consider TM the answer for their respective disciplines, but they saw the practice of meditation as giving them the means to go beyond the problems which separate scientific disciplines and voyage to the source of all natural laws, where they could be one with truth...
...Beckley went bankrupt over the deal...
...I sensed an uneasiness there at that time, which later resulted in a kind of massive bubble-bursting that swept through both the private and university sides of the meditator community...
...Beckley ran a company which at one time hired 560 employees and offered "Fortune Formulas," for quick profits in real estate, on 480 cable television channels nationwide...
...And in a sense I could see he was right as I- walked around the ratty campus and sat in the stark dining room with the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the well-off who were doing a form of penance by being here, enduring Iowa's hot summers and cold winters...
...Not only do they abstain from drugs or booze, but they become addicted to their three and four hours of meditation...
...But wasn't there a danger, I asked, that when you leave this mental bubble-bath you will be unprepared for the reality of the world...
...I also saw another glimpse, when the daughter of the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull explained about the freshmen who were required to take the SCI Sidha program and were usually a little reluctant to give up their life-style and take on inner responsibility (read: give up booze, drugs, and good food): "And then there is a click," she said, "and then they sayeah, it works.' " Which I guess is what scares me the most...
...Call Lou Ann Sabatier or John Funk at The American Spectator (703) 243-3733 PAVAPAPACAPAill • \t, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 35 With the creation of the Super Radiant Community, the Movement took on a new dimension...
...V-1* z kft ;7M 20th Anniversary 0 1116p^ D/11,-4 s• First71 <L>os Lid-0J 0.#.4 1 7 443 1 7 * F*1 *1 *I *1 r*1 gailriala= rartiv;7014 r r 0 0 • • * 4.0 ARE YOU IN...
...Is it all so bad to be led...
...SCI was a way of looking at knowledge using the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field, which said that everything came out of a Mental Big Bang 15 billion years ago...
...They left New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Boston, and many foreigncities for Fairfield...
...The TM-MIU story is not just about another cult gone sour...
...If it didn't happen, there'd be a massive destruction of everything...
...Again, the marketing of TM has been far superior to your, garden-variety cult...
...Now that meditators had been tantalized with the prospects of imposing world peace by regular group meditations, a super TM program was unveiled that would havefar greater impact on the world, while introducing meditators to powers of supernatural proportion, among them the ability to levitate...
...As one former Sidha explained, "I thought about flying all the time...
...If an outsider found the vision of TM leaders sobering, the students in their own way were equally unnerving...
...Maharishi created what he calls the Super Radiant Community in Fairfield, and constructed two Golden Domes, for boys and girls, where presumably the collective meditations enhanced each person's sutra and sent out more powerful radiances into the cosmos...
...And indeed after Maharishi made such predictions, a series of gatherings of meditators was held around the world, where scientists measured their impact on everything from crime to marriage certificates...
...Some of us turn to drugs when we don't have the answers, and some get lured into cults...
...By the early 1980s Fairfield experienced an explosion of 400 new meditator-owned businesses, employing more than 1200 people,, which turned aroundthe economy of the Iowa town of 9,000...
...A Journal of World Affairs Daniel Pipes Editor John H. Maurer Executive Editor Edward Jay Epstein examines CIA documents left behind in Tehran and pieced together by the Iranians...
...To attract new people, Maharishi also went into the health club biz with his Maharishi Ayurveda Prevention Centers, which use ancient Vedic Science techniques to reverse the aging process...
...People my age want answers," the student continued...
...All this .. at our regular advertising rates...
...There were 3,000 meditators 0000mmming in those Golden Domes...
...The problems of other gurus, mystics, and cults certainly did not help either...
...But the real impact came from the nonstudent meditators who chose to move to Fairfield...
...Rather than empty their heads of any thought (save their mantra) as is done in basic TM, TM-Sidhi directs meditation through exercises called sutras, which literally tell the meditator how well he is doing...
...After a stint in California, MIU moved to Fairfield, Iowa, buying up the defunct Parsons College's campus for a relatively small sum...
...with His Holiness's graces...
...Botha will defy Congress's conditions for lifting sanctions...
...In one strategy, a wave of MBA students was sent out to companies around the country offering to help them with personnel and management, including programs in TM for employees, thus funneling converts into local TM centers and maybe on to MIU...
...Ivisited the campus in 1985 for a magazine article...
...Each had a past, a history of disillusionment, rebellion, inferiority...
...Since there is a universal field around us all, the THE was a way for our minds not only to tap into the consciousness soup, but even affect it...
...His flying lessons had merely left him sore...
...By 1985 enrollment at MIU stood at nearly 1,000 for regular students and another thousand for their adult program...
...and then there is TM...
...I can now see why Robert Kropinski reacted as he did...
...TM centers and TM teachers sprung up around the country, two of whom would found MIU William Mueller is a writer living in Ely, Iowa...
...Students at MIU were required to take the training to become Sidhas...
...Enrollment at MIU plunged to about 500, despite a wave of sophisticated recruitment efforts...
...to live among the grain elevators and feed-service caps...
...The levitation sutra, for example, goes through the phases of excitation, hopping, hovering, and flight...
...But it appears that the architects of the Movement may have been too Icarian in their attempt to make TM all-encompassing...
...Adapt and exploit are the words to describe the two-decade growth of TM...
...They let you dream here," one told me...
...We want a system, a direction, and we can't find it anywhere...
...They arrived in Fairfield armed with the thought that they were being given a second chance...
...Kropinski spent four flightless years in the Movement, as it is called...
...Domes were used so that there would be no pillars to snag a Fighting Levitator sailing by on a magic carpet ride...
...TM scientists saw Fairfield as another Stanford and placed Maharishi in the same historical context as Freud, Darwin, and Einstein...
...Whew...
...You are not afraid to dream great dreams because they will not be squashed...
...For a fee of up to $700, people spend a few days receiving herbal steam baths, massages, and fruit and herbal digestive aids...
...Kropinski sued MIU and TM because he was promised that they would teach him to fly, or at least levitate...
...Initially, MIU offered a limited curriculum and the opportunity for TM scientists to gather extensive data on the pool of available meditators, who had more contact hours with EEG electrodes than they did class lectures...
...SCI used this everything-outof-one approach to break down individual subject areas into flow charts which made a great deal of sense to students, many of whom had never understood how parts of their traditional coursework fit together...
...The first sign that TM was going to be more than mental aerobics came in 1971 when Maharishi introduced the Science of Creative Intelligence to the MIU curriculum...
...Neither does one do this alone...
...These centers are open to both meditators and nonmeditators...
...Property values soared, money flowed, cultural events came to town, construction began, and it seemed hard to find much wrong with MIU or TM...
...Sidhas, as they are called, participate in the TM-Sidhi program, which calls for two 90-minute (or longer) meditation sessions daily...
...But my interviews with scientists and students at MIU weremore troubling...
...Some became oblivious mind people, others high-powered hucksters, True Believers, or carnivorous business types...
...But the new world-view predicted a physical consequence too, called The Maharishi Effect...
...living in near poverty, suffering from headaches, anxiety, impulses to violence, hallucinations, confusion, loss of memory, screaming fits, paranoia, and social withdrawal...
...Here was the kicker: when large numbers of meditators came together they could impose order in the cosmic waves, bringing on the world peace that Robert Kropinski alluded to in his court statement...
...Here they found housing cheap, a community of like thinkers, and electronic communications which could link their businesses to the rest of the world...
...nor has anyone been so shrewd in the introduction of new ripples to what began as a simple mind exercise...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS MAHARISHI'S CRASH LANDING In January a judgment of $138,000 was awarded to Robert Kropinski of Philadelphia in his $1.5 million suit against Maharishi International University and the Transcendental Meditation movement for what has been dubbed a case of mental malpractice...
...We left paradise to come here," another student corrected me...
...Dirk Verheyen explores the cultural images—cowboys and Eurovvimps—that affect the actions of American and European policy makers...
...On the private side, the meditator-owned Beckley Group was coming under the scrutiny of the Iowa attorney general...
...In separate business, the IRS was investigating MIU and found that MIU owed $12.7 million in taxes for 1985...
...This is reality...
...I believed that Maharishi held the destiny of the world in his hands," a disillusioned Kropinski told the court...
...and secondly, to extend the influence of TM into all phases of the meditator's life...
...I was living to fulfill the world plan...
...The MIU budget, meanwhile, ballooned to $15 million, which drained its endowments and made some wonder whether the faculty and staff were in fact working at near-starvation stipends for the joy alone of serving His Holiness...
...About the same time the University went through some heavy sledding...
...In the current issue of ORRIS Emmanuel Sivan conjures up the Islamic Republic of Egypt...
...The six plaintiffs suing MIU were gathering their case...
...State investigators determined that Beckley would have to return millions of dollars to customers...
Vol. 20 • September 1987 • No. 9
