the Organizations founded by Maharishi. And to you,
Maharishi, I promise that as a Meditation Guide I will be
faithful in all ways to the trust that you have placed in
me.9
The Mantra: More Lies
In his book, Roth states that your meditation teacher will give you
your mantra—a word or sound that has no meaning associated
with it. Roth offers a more detailed explanation of the mantra in a
YouTube video featured on TM’s flagship website, TM.org:
I have been asked, “Aren’t mantras the names of
Buddhist Deities or Hindu gods or whatever?” And the
answer is a flat-out no. There is no meaning associated
with the sound… They are not the names of some
deity. They are not the names of anything. They are
just a sound. [Bold added]10
For more than sixty years, TM has kept three mantra secrets. The
first is that the mantras that TM sells are not necessary to meditate.
Beacon Light of the Himalayas, a publication long suppressed by
TM, documents a religious meeting in Kerala, India in 1955. At
that meeting, Maharishi told his Indian audience that any word
or sound could be used to meditate. Holding a microphone,
Maharishi said that one could even use the word mike as a mantra:
By reducing the sound of the word “mike” to its subtler
and still subtler stages and allowing the mind to go on
experiencing all the stages one by one, the mind can
be trained to be so sharp as to enter into the subtlest
stage of the sound ‘mike’, transcending which it will
automatically get into the realm of [pure consciousness]
and experience it.11
Second, according to Maharishi, TM mantras invoke the spirits of
Hindu gods. Although a word such as mike would work, Maharishi
proposed that repetition of his mantras offers something unique:
They produce special vibrations. Hindu audiences learned that
these vibrations attract the “grace” of a personal Hindu god. Again,
from Beacon Light of the Himalayas, in Maharishi’s own words:
But we do not select the sound at random. We do not
select any sound like ‘mike’, flower, table, pen, wail, etc,
because such ordinary sounds can do nothing more
than merely sharpening the mind ...For our practice,
we select only the suitable mantras of personal
gods. Such mantras fetch to us the grace of personal
gods… [Bold added]12
Third, Roth likens competence in TM mantra selection to that
of a physician who has specialized training in how to identify a
person’s blood type. He says that the selection of the mantra is
based on three things:
• The information the student completes on the interview
form.
• The personal meeting with the teacher.
• The teacher’s own comprehensive certification
training.13
When I became a TM teacher, there was one criterion: the
student’s age at the time of instruction. To the best of my
knowledge, this has not changed.
No Negative Results—Ever
Discussing the safety of TM mantras, Roth states, “In fact, there
has never been any study published in a peer-reviewed journal
that has shown any negative impact, only positive.”14 That is true
only because TM doesn’t publicize information about those who
have been damaged by the practice. My book, Transcendental
Deception: Behind the TM Curtain – bogus science, hidden agendas,
and David Lynch’s campaign to push a million public school kids
into Transcendental Meditation while falsely claiming it is not a
religion, includes an entire chapter on TM casualties.15
In researching my book, I needed less than five minutes to
identify case histories of more than thirty people who were
submitted as evidence in a lawsuit against TM. The lawsuit was
filed by several long-term meditators who claimed to have been
physically, psychologically, and financially damaged by the
practice. TM chose to make significant settlements with many of
them rather than face them in court. In an affirmation written in
1986 in support of the lawsuit, a former Maharishi International
University (MIU) professor and legal counsel wrote that he had
witnessed:
A system of denial and avoidance, as well as outright
lies and deception, to cover up or sanitize serious
problems on campus. These included nervous
breakdowns, episodes of dangerous and bizarre
behavior, threats of and actual attempted suicide
and homicidal ideation, psychotic episodes, crime,
depression, and manic behavior.16
Many former TM teachers, myself included, believe the TM
organization is well aware of potential dangers of TM and, in my
opinion, the organization does not adequately disclose these
risks to potential students prior to instruction. As an example,
following TM instruction, every student’s meditation is checked
according to systematic procedures resembling a flowchart. TM
teachers do the checking, and the teachers have to memorize
the checking procedures. Roth is undoubtedly familiar with
them.
10 ICSA TODAY
Roth’s book attempts to sanitize
more than fifty years of TM by
failing to mention key elements
that reveal TM as much more than
the scientific, secular, relaxation
technique it pretends to be.

11 VOLUME 9 |ISSUE 3 |2018
For example, shaking and body movements, and also
overpowering thoughts, occur frequently enough even during
the first few meditations that an entire section of TM’s checking
procedures addresses these severe side effects. Students are told
to view potentially frightening experiences as a release of stress,
and new meditators are advised not to resist the symptoms
because they are beneficial. If the shaking becomes violent
and seemingly out of control, then students are told to open
their eyes and wait until it subsides and eventually stops. As if
uncontrollable shaking and overpowering thoughts aren’t bad
enough, in the case of “severe problems that might arise,” the
checking notes allow the ill-equipped, untrained TM teacher
to inquire if the student has seen a doctor.17 Unless things have
recently changed, students are not told about potentially very
serious side effects before instruction, and then only if the
students report such effects.
The frequency of severe problems is unknown because the TM
organization doesn’t provide information about adverse effects.
Like Roth, the organization denies problems exist, and Maharishi
led the denial chorus. As demonstrated in the following quote,
he instilled in his teachers that TM was the solution to all medical
problems:
We are not going to take help from medical Drs. as
medical professionals give poison. So don’t engage
any medical Drs. for anything—absolutely whatever
it is—even if they are in our Movement family… Hold
onto the fact that we are the supreme authorities on
health—we know how to create perfect health.18
Abysmal Evidence of Benefits
Maharishi was also primarily responsible for a stream of
misrepresentation, exaggeration, and hype designed to give TM
an aura of scientific legitimacy to sell a product. Roth and others
have assumed the mantle. For example, in his book, Roth points
to the U.S. National Institutes of Health providing tens of millions
of dollars to study TM’s effects on stress and heart health. While
the statement is true, the real story is that most funding for TM
research had stopped by 2004.
ClinicalTrials.gov, a repository of information on clinical research
studies either in progress or recently completed, is a gauge of
the scientific community’s loss of interest in TM. A review of the
number of meditation-related clinical studies listed on the site
identifies only 16 TM studies, and seven of those began in 2001
or earlier.19
In contrast, a search on ClinicalTrials.gov using the term
mindfulness identifies 196 studies specifically focused on
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a secular version
of mindfulness meditation that has many clinical applications.20
The site further identifies 289 “Relaxation Response” studies
underway or recently completed by research centers and
universities throughout the world.21
Some highlights that account for TM’s precipitous fall from grace
in the research world include poorly designed studies that rarely
include a randomized, active control group, researchers who are
affiliated with TM institutions and/or practice TM, and a history of
exaggerated findings. A comprehensive review of TM and other
meditation practices concluded that
Many uncertainties surround the practice of
meditation. Scientific research on meditation
practices does not appear to have a common
theoretical perspective and is characterized by poor
methodological quality. Firm conclusions on the effects
of meditation practices in healthcare cannot be drawn
based on the available evidence. Future research on
meditation practices must be more rigorous in the
design and execution of studies and in the analysis and
reporting of results.22
When Hype Gets Dangerous
While not a researcher himself, Roth is no stranger to TM hype.
He writes, “I want to shift gears here to talk in some detail about
some truly breakthrough research documenting the unique
and profound benefits TM has on stress and health” [bold
added].23 Roth first describes hypertension as “the silent killer”
because there are often no warning symptoms until the damage
is done.24 He is correct. Then, citing one severely criticized study,
he writes that TM led to a 23% reduction in death rate overall and
a 30% reduction in death rate from cardiovascular causes. Citing a
second study by the same researcher, he writes that the TM study
group had a 48% reduction in the risk of dying from myocardial
infarction and stroke as well as from all causes.25
This example shows where TM hype can turn deadly. Roth
cites a few preliminary, short-term studies with relatively few
subjects and conducted by TM affiliated researchers as though
the studies were profound medical breakthroughs. If the so-
called breakthroughs were even a fraction of what TM presents,
researchers worldwide would be trying to replicate the findings.
They aren’t. At the very best, TM research in this area is nothing
more than possibly hypothesis generating, if even that. Other
medical writers have scathingly criticized the main study Roth
references as severely flawed and biased one even went so far
as to suggest the possibility of data manipulation. He wrote, “In
other words, to use the old cliché, they tortured the data until they
made it talk.”26
One TM website not only repeats these outrageous claims, but it
also makes the extraordinarily dangerous statement that TM has
been scientifically proven to normalize blood pressure.27
As evidence of TM’s efficacy in lowering blood pressure, Roth
writes, “In 2013, the American Heart Association looked at years of
research on TM and concluded in its journal Hypertension that TM
is the only meditation technique shown to lower blood pressure.”28
I don’t know if Roth had actually read the study. I did. Robert D.
Brook, MD, of the University of Michigan, chaired a panel of 12
scientists who authored the report:
Numerous alternative approaches for lowering BP
have been evaluated during the past few decades. The
strongest evidence supports the effectiveness of using