Transcendental Nonsense

Dear Robert,

I have just read Ten Thousand Things, and your latest book should be arriving today! I would be most grateful if you would consider my question.

I practiced TM (transcendental meditation) from 1986 to 2001 mainly because I loved meditating, not to achieve enlightenment. During that time, I trained as a TM teacher and also joined a monastic group they offer. I had a blast and really enjoyed it. There was a lot of weirdness around the organisation, but I thought it was kind of entertaining.

Looking back, I now see it gave me a way to run away from life, which, for whatever reason, I had to do back then. Then, in 2001, I had a sort of awakening, where I realised my desires were not my own. It was only after reading your book that I could contextualise it. My understanding and experience are not that mature, and I have a bit of a conundrum on which I would love your perspective—if you would be so gracious.

Ever since 2001, I felt a bit without direction. Materially life is wonderful but a part of me sees the stress people go through and all I want to say is ‘it’s all in your head!’ Of course I don’t say that because I don’t feel it’s helpful, but I feel like a dog who can’t let go of the bone. I still teach the meditation to people who want to be less stressed, but it feels a bit shallow, and what I really want to do is help folks see through their absorption in their stories. But I don’t have any methods to offer. I myself did a lot of meditation but I’m not sure if the effect from that was causal or just plain correlation. I wondered whether to train as some sort of therapist, but it all seems terribly serious and heavy.

Do you have any suggestions based on your experience, or am I missing something fundamental? I appreciate that my blind spots are unknown to me!

Many thanks in anticipation.

Vendedor Ambulante, 2022

Hi. As always, when asked a question, I do not mince words, so let me begin by acknowledging your desire to be free of stress and your attraction to Transcendental Meditation as a method of pursuing that goal. I understand that, but I want to encourage you to “transcend” the desire to be free of stress, which I consider a false goal.

The word “meditation” can mean so many things. In Vipassana meditation, for example, the instruction is just to allow thoughts, feelings, and sensations to arise and pass away again as they do without clinging to any of it and with no intention to “transcend” anything. I do not recommend following any procedures, but if you want to meditate, that is the method likely to do the least harm and might even be helpful for some people.

In a “guided meditation,” one relaxes and allows another person to lead the mind, which means entering voluntarily into a kind of hypnotic trance. Personally, I would not touch that with a ten-foot pole.

In transcendental meditation, which is Japa yoga, rechristened as a brand by the pop idol Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the middle of the 20th century, one is given a mantra to repeat silently with the aim of reducing stress and silencing or stilling the mind. Adherents claim that Japa yoga is an exact science that demands just the right individualized mantra for the job, but that is dubious. Most likely, any sound repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated will do the trick, but at what cost? Such repetition will induce a trance that dulls the mind and creates a soporific state that may feel less stressful because it is less aware--not awake, but stupefied.

You say that when you see people who appear “stressed out,” you want to tell them, “It’s all in your head,” and yet that feels shallow. Good for you. It should feel shallow because it is shallow. Thank your lucky stars that you recognize that, if only vaguely.

Everything is all in your head, but being told that will not make troubles go away or stress disappear. Stress is a part of human primate life—both physical stress, such as overwork, injury, and disease, and mental/emotional stress, such as anxiety, fear, sorrow, etc. If one learns to paper over stress by mechanical means, one might as well be drugged or sleeping through life instead of fully experiencing this aliveness, which must include stress and sorrow.

TM fans imagine that repeating a mantra endlessly until one’s mind is pacified (stupefied) is a spiritual practice. I do not agree. Yes, perhaps after a half-hour of self-hypnosis, you feel less “stressed,” but so what? If a dull, sedated mind is what you want, OK by me, but I see nothing “spiritual” in it.

The idea that a particular mantra must be assigned based on secret instructions promulgated by the Maharishi looks like magical thinking plus multi-level marketing. If anesthesia is the goal, any old word will do, and you don’t need to pay for it. Just keep repeating any sound until you achieve the desired level of insensibility, and Bob’s your uncle. TM is a franchise like McDonald’s, and the custom-made mantra is the special sauce.

You say you desire to help others, but that training to be a therapist “seems terribly serious and heavy.” Yes, psychotherapy and its training are weighty in the way TM is not. No wonder lightweights like Oprah (she fell for “The Secret”) or Dr. Oz (he tried to get me to refer patients to him for exploitation on his TV show) love it. The triviality of mindless repetition matches the triviality of their own approaches to living.

I am giving it to you straight here because I think you already get this and just want me to confirm it. The idea of suppressing suffering through repeating nonsense syllables is no more than escapism. The wise among us, I say, do not seek relief from the stress of this aliveness and its uncertainties but face up to what is in each moment, whether that is pain, pleasure, or anything else. They know that even if a kind of relief from suffering were attained through some procedure, it would be a shallow relief that would not stand up to a real-life challenge. What will a TM fan do when an irreplaceable friend or partner dies or when diagnosed with a terminal illness, repeat the mantra? Oh, please!

I wish you well.

Thank you, Robert. I agree with everything you say. I’m in the middle of your second book, which I started yesterday. A strange thing happened this morning. I was doing a TM refresher on Zoom, and I just felt like I was parroting a load of nonsense. It was strange and kind of liberating. I said to my wife, “I’m wondering if I’ll have to get another job.”

Beautiful. That’s what I recommend to the self-described spiritual teachers: get another job. As long as you depend for survival on speaking what you call “Truth,” there cannot be any real truth in it because the truth is that you don’t know anything at all about ultimate matters, such as what consciousness is or where it comes from. You know zero about that. Zilch. So when you sit there acting as if you did know, you are lying.