Meditation, Delusion and Deception

Debunking the "Maharishi effects"

It is intensive, prolonged meditating that TM promotes and for which it claims all kinds of marvelous "Maharishi effects" when it is performed by masses of meditators. It is hard to keep up with TM's claims for mass meditation. TM's "intellectual" center at Fairfield, Iowa, called "Maharishi International University" (MIU) chums them out.

TMers claimed they influenced the weather at MIU while concrete was poured for buildings (the "Domes") in which hundreds could meditate. A dispassionate study showed that the concrete contractor checked the National Weather Forecast each time before deciding to make a delivery the next day and that the meditators sought warm weather only later in the day, after the forecast on which the contractor relied was already made. Trumpy, An Investigation of the Reported Effect of Transcendental Meditation on the Weather, The Skeptical Inquirer, VIII, 143 (Winter 1983/84)

TMers claimed that if 1% of a city' s population meditate regularly the crime rate would go down. In Fairfield, Iowa, 13% of the population meditates, yet crime has not gone down. Randi, Flim-Flam, cited in Rational Enquirer, newsletter of the BC Skeptics (Vancouver April 1989).

TMers claimed that meditators massed in Jerusalem in 1983 brought about social benefits including "a solution to conflicts in the region that were impossible of solution until now." Mordecai Kaffman, Director of the Research Department of the Kibbutz Child and Family Clinic, dismissed TM methods as unscientific and TM "claims of positive results in the Israeli context" as unconvincing; he branded TM's theory of "unified field" as incredible. The Use of Transcendental Meditation to Promote Social Progress in Israel, Cultic Studies Journal, 3:1 (1986).