Falling Down the TM Rabbit Hole, How TM Really Works, a Critical Opinion

The "Residence Course": your first experience of headache and lingering dissociation

Things are getting weird, Alice is growing tall

There is a rather grisly analogy about "how to boil a frog". Supposedly, if you throw a live frog in boiling water, the scalded frog will quickly hop out. If you really want to boil the frog to death, you must put it in cold water and then gradually turn up the heat. The frog won't notice that things have gotten too hot until it is too late.

Well, they've been turning up the heat on you since you walked into the first introductory lecture. And if you are one of the people who are susceptible to trance induction and post-trance suggestion, the water may have gotten a little warm for you already. But they are going to keep turning up the heat if you let them.

The usual next stop down the TM rabbit hole is often to go to a weekend "residence course". You will have been told that at the weekend residence course you will meditate more than twice a day (something that you are instructed not to do at home), which supposedly greatly multiplies the benefits.

You go off to a retreat facility where, at the first meeting, you learn about "rounding". " Rounding" is a very important concept in TM. "Rounding" involves alternating periods of "meditation" with periods of doing the stretching exercises (called "asanas") that most of us think of as "yoga". For example, in the morning you may induce trance ("meditate"), then do some "yoga asanas", and then induce trance again. That would be "two rounds". Then perhaps you would go to a lecture, then go to lunch, and then perhaps to another lecture. Then perhaps you do two more "rounds" in the afternoon. Perhaps another lecture, then dinner, then another lecture, then off to bed.

At the first lecture of the residence course where you are taught how to "round", you will also be told rather emphatically that "we don't make important decisions on this course -- we wait until we get home again before making important decisions." There actually is a very important psychological reason for this advice: the extra periods of trance, which includes acting out your TM teacher's suggestions about thought reduction and relaxation, on the residence course can produce a state called "dissociation". This state may persist even when you are not "meditating". Among TM practitioners, dissociation is very well known state and is usually called being "spacey" or being "fried".

But another important thing that is happening to you is that you are undergoing a period of intense dogmatic indoctrination. For example, my first residence course was where I learned that TM could produce "God Consciousness" and "Unity Consciousness". This indoctrination is performed at every one of those many lectures that you attend at the residence course, all probably while you are in a post-trance dissociated state. And since you have already fallen down the TM rabbit hole enough to attend one of these residence courses, then possibly you are one of the people who indeed accepts indoctrination uncritically while in a post-trance dissociated state.

The course ends and you go home.

But you may go home with problems...

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