Snapping

by Flo Conway; Jim Siegelman

  "To do TM," Robertson told us, "you repeat the mantra over and over in your mind, and as with anything, if you hear a steady noise over and over again, eventually your ears won't hear that noise anymore. For instance, I live by a railroad track, and when I first moved there the noise was terrible. Now I don't even know when the trains go by. My ears have been turned off to that sound."

  Unlike a passing train, Robertson said, TM mantras are pleasant sounds with no harsh vibrations or side effects. As the mind becomes accustomed to a particular one, the meditator's awareness begins to change.

  "You start the mantra in your mind, saying it over and over," he explained. "Then all of a sudden it gets quieter. At first it's a voice in your head, you're subvocalizing it in your mind. Then your mind just kind of floats on this nice sensation."

  As Robertson described it, the first effect of TM is a soothing emotional high brought on by the brain's response to repetition. But for the new student of TM, achieving this state of relaxation may require concentrated and laborious effort. He must close his eyes, sit in a quiet place, and actively undertake to still the normally busy faculties of the mind. With time and practice, however, the individual acquires the ability to keep the mantra present without difficulty. Then, slowly, as the mind adjusts to the repetition, the sound of the individual's "inner voice" becomes quieter still. At this level of relaxation, the technique can be beneficial, a kind of tranquilizer, relieving stress and providing the "restful alertness" TM claims to offer.

  "A lot of people do experience these positive effects for a long time," said Robertson. "A certain amount of relaxation and clarity of mind results when you reach this mental state."

  Robertson noted, however, that for some reason, after about six months at this level of achievement, almost half of all Transcendental Meditators stop practicing the technique. Despite its immediate benefits, the initial high wears off quickly, and the twice-daily, twenty-minute meditation periods become a chore.

  "People stop because they find it boring," he said. "Those who go into TM because they're uptight can't stick with the technique, and those who become involved in it for spiritual reasons usually drop it for something else."

  According to Robertson, those who stay with meditation for any length of time become vulnerable to its long-range impact. He described his impression of the cumulative effects of TM in startling terms.

  "To say that TM is a technique of rest is like saying that shooting off a forty-four magnum is just exercise for the forefinger," he said. "At first the new student has to work very hard at meditating, but eventually the mantra will just take over the mind. As you get better at it, your mantra is just there all the time. It gets to be like an impulse, something very subtle happening in your mind. It's not even a sound, it's just a kind of rhythm. Then it gets to a place where it's very, very still, and then, finally, nothing."

  Robertson went on to describe some of TM's roots in Hinduism and Tantra Yoga, stressing what he saw as the Maharishi's intention to keep the "unenlightened classes" ignorant of TM's religious underpinnings. Then he explained why he believes that among Western meditators the mantras may have a particularly destructive effect.

  "Pretty soon your mind gets to a place where it no longer associates meaning to anything," he said. "You just have this sound going on in your mind, and you get to a place where there's no longer concrete meaning. You're just abstractly experiencing nothing. You would think that a person would become afraid in this emptiness or vacuum, but this happens to your feelings, too. You reach a state where you're not feeling anything either. By the way, this is the state the Maharishi calls bliss."

  As Robertson described it, the TM state of bliss is not a state of profound pleasure. It is a level of awareness devoid not only of all thought but of all feeling and, by default, of all pain.

  "At first you don't even know that you're experiencing this transcendental consciousness," he said. "You can't remember it, you can't grasp it. But as you do more and more meditating, you become aware that you are aware of nothing. Then you have arrived at what is known as the fifth state of consciousness, where you are able to experience that nothingness, that emptiness. You can peer down into it."

  This fifth level of awareness is what TM calls Cosmic Consciousness. In this state, according to Robertson, the individual experiences the world around him from a peculiar orientation.

  "You can experience everything around you in Cosmic Consciousness," he said, "but you're totally detached from the world. It's like being at a movie theater when you're watching a boring movie. You're not really part of it. What you are doing, your personality, your emotions, your thoughts are no longer important to you. You can watch yourself do things, you can even watch yourself sleep! You actually -- it's hard to explain -- dissolve would be a good word."

  In 1973, Robertson told us, after he had been a casual meditator for a couple of years, he traveled to Spain to enroll in the Maharishi's training course for beginning TM instructors. There he found the course of instruction to be rigorous and methodical, consisting of lectures which had to be memorized word for word, individual training, class-time practice, and meditation for periods of up to ten hours a day. During that period of official instruction, Robertson first experienced the TM state of Cosmic Consciousness.

  "I only had glimpses of it," he admitted. "I never had a steady flow. I'd be driving a car and all of a sudden my arms would be holding onto the steering wheel and I'd be sitting back watching it happen. My body seemed more like part of the car than part of me. But again, there were no feelings involved with it. There was no fear, no joy. It was neutral, just happening."

  When Robertson returned to the United States and began to pursue his new career as a TM teacher, his ongoing state of bliss and Cosmic Consciousness made life in the everyday world a bit bizarre.

  "I was sensing all kinds of telepathic things," he remembered. "I would see energy surrounding people, little thin auras of different pastel colors, and bigger egg-shaped ones made out of huge spirals. It was weird, trying to associate in the ordinary world when you're seeing all these things happening around people."

  During this time, as Robertson described it, he became trapped in his state of Cosmic Consciousness. Yet, while he continued to teach TM and advance the cause of the Maharishi, he was beginning to grow disenchanted with the organization.

  "I was sold on it," he said. "I honestly believed that the Maharishi was the world's spiritual leader and that TM was going to usher in a new era of mankind. But the constant hassling for customers got to me eventually, and some of the Maharishi's teachings started rubbing me the wrong way. Deep down, I knew I was lying to the public. I was lying when I said that TM wasn't a religion. I was lying about the mantras -- they weren't meaningless sounds, they were actually the names of Hindu demigods -- and about how many different ones there were -- we had sixteen to give out to our students. I felt the Maharishi's goal was to bring about his particular bent of religious belief and get everybody into it, but I objected to the way he was going about it. He gives them a little tidbit and they have a certain experience. Then he gives them a little more, until they're lured into it and caught. When I say caught, I mean that a person's brain reaches this place where it's humanly impossible to come out of it."

  Indeed, Robertson was unable to find any direct way out of his predicament in Cosmic Consciousness. Visions of auras and other uncanny telepathic experiences continued to plague him. Finally, he found his personal alternative solution.

  "Once you get your brain to the place where you're seeing yourself as nothing, the only way anybody can get delivered from that would be through something of God's doing," he said solemnly. "So I asked the Lord, 'If you want me to be able to see that kind of stuff, halos and all that, I'll do it; but if you don't, take it away.' And then Jesus cleared my mind of all that stuff, and now I no longer see everyone glowing or perceive other people's thoughts."

  Barry Robertson discovered an unlikely -- but n
ot all that surprising -- route from the world of TM's veiled Hinduism to everyday life in the United States. This final episode of Robertson's TM adventure brought him to an almost comical split spirituality..

  "I started reading the Bible on the sly," he confessed, "and teaching TM the rest of the time. Then one time I added a prayer to God between my breathing exercise and my meditation. Then finally I got serious with myself, got serious with God, and asked him to reveal Jesus Christ to me. He did in a personal way and I became Born Again. I was alone, supposedly meditating, and I said, 'Jesus, I want to know who you are.' All of a sudden, deep down inside of me, I guess I had what you could call a divine revelation. It was a very strong, powerful experience. The whole thing happened in a second, and I surrendered myself to Him."

  After Robertson's personal encounter with Christ, he continued to teach TM until the conflict of interests became too much for him.

  "Two weeks later, I was getting ready to give a TM initiation ceremony, where we go through a Hindu ritual. The person was standing right there with his shoes off and he had his fruit and his flower and his handkerchief on a tray before the picture of Maharishi's master. The incense and candles were burning, and I started going through this chant in Sanskrit. But I was only pretending to go through with the ceremony. I was actually praying all the time, praying to Jesus that he wouldn't let it have a bad effect on me. And it was at that moment I chose to chuck my existence as a TM teacher and follow Christ. That's how I got out of it."

  In the beginning of our investigation, we openly approved of TM. Among America's mass therapies, it was the only one that seemed to be completely beneficial, having amassed a wealth of medical and scientific support which had been widely circulated and the subject of several best-selling books. And, although neither of us had ever enrolled in a TM course, we both had close friends, even family members, who were Transcendental Meditators. Robertson's view of TM wasn't the only one that surprised us, however. We had several in-depth conversations with another TM instructor who was currently active in the inner circles of the organization. His own dependence on the technique startled us, for we had known him before he became involved in TM. We had difficulty understanding his fanatic devotion to the Maharishi, his growing detachment and lack of emotion, and his unquenchable desire to advance to the TM world headquarters in Switzerland -- until we talked with Robertson. Then other random impressions of TM we had gathered began to line up with our understanding of snapping. There was the young professional we had met in the Midwest who told us that she was selling her home to take an advanced course in meditation, that she too was seeing auras around people, that she felt her life was "being controlled." Many other people we spoke with in connection with other mass therapies or cults began their searches, like Jean Turner, with a casual jaunt into TM. Finally, we went back and examined the mass of scientific data that had been published. We were surprised to discover the amount of questionable research that had been reported as fact and published by the TM organization, and the extent to which TM used the sciences of biology and physics to build its argument for "inner energy" and "creative intelligence."

  Perhaps most disturbing of all, we were struck by the way TM repeatedly called on alleged scientific facts to prove that only the explicit sound of its own secret mantras would produce the beneficial effects of meditation. TM has claimed that, unless the meditator takes the course and purchases his own specially tailored mantra, he will be vulnerable to "severely deleterious effects."

  TM, however, is not the only organization in America that could be said to abuse the practice of meditation which, when used properly and in moderation, may indeed be beneficial. Nearly every cult employs some version of the technique in ways that in our opinion may impair their members' ability to think.

  A former Krishna devotee told us how the Krishna ritual of chanting the familiar Hare Krishna mantra may have succeeded in maintaining and deepening his sustained altered state.

  "The chanting puts your mind on hold," he told us. "You totally concentrate on the words and listen to them and say them and don't try to think about anything else. It's very difficult at first, because your mind has a much higher capacity than just chanting for hours on end. Of course, we aren't told at the time that we're putting our minds on hold. It's just part of the program of activity, and it does reduce our anxieties because we aren't thinking about things while we're chanting. All I remember is that it would make the mornings go tremendously fast. You could go through the whole two and a half hours of chanting and the time would just fly by."

  Remembering the many snapping moments he experienced during his frequent periods of chanting, this young man looked back at them as indications of his domination by the cult.

  "I don't know when I lost control of my mind," he said. "Once in a while when I was chanting, I'd have little boilings of emotion, shivers and intense shudders, like a sort of mini-convulsion. Everything would just go boom , as if I'd jumped into an icy pool. All my muscles would contract, and I'd feel this sudden tensing and release, like a bip in my emotional state. I have no idea what it was. They explained it as a spiritual experience."

  For the new devotee, chanting is the principal activity of Krishna life, in our view a way to kill not only time but thought itself. Cult members are constantly being sold on the value of the activity.

  "They always tell you that chanting is the answer to everything," he said. "I remember one Krishna leader saying, 'I know the cure for cancer.' And I said, 'You know the cure for cancer! What is it?' And he said, 'Chant Hare Krishna. ' "

  During his deprogramming, this Krishna member snapped out of his cult state instantly and completely: For months, however, he felt the aftereffects of his endless days of chanting.

  "It took me a long time to get back to using my mind," he said. "It took me six months to get back to studying, but slowly I felt myself getting more and more together, feeling more and more aware of myself, knowing what my mind was thinking and why it was doing these things."

  Ironically, from their backgrounds of education, affluence, and lifelong good fortune, many young people remain ignorant of the happiness they already know.

  "I was twenty years old and I had no idea what happiness was," this young man said. "I'd been happy all my life, but if you've never been down in your whole life you don't really know what happiness is. So the cults come along and say, 'Here is the way to get the ultimate happiness.' First they convince you that you're unhappy, then they tell you that they've got the answer. They tell you all the nasty things you're doing and feeling, then they tell you how to right them: you chant Hare Krishna."

  ---

  The Divine Light Mission is apparently even more direct in its manner of transcendental seduction. A former member told us about the straightforward appeal that attracted him.

  "They had obtained my name from an organization I belonged to," he said, "and they sent me letters explaining that they were teaching meditation techniques free of charge. At the time, I had had contact with a number of people who had found TM beneficial, but I couldn't afford TM's initiation fee."

  As he became involved in the Divine Light Mission and had the first free lessons in meditation, he felt a weakening of his own mental abilities.

  "I found myself becoming increasingly dependent on other people's judgment," he recalled, "and increasingly willing to follow whatever course they laid down in order to be initiated. As I became more and more caught up in that, I noticed a decrease in my degree of attention and my force of will."

  In contrast to the emptying of the mind that takes place in TM, the Divine Light Mission style of meditation was what Barry Robertson would call concentration. As this former member explained the differences, the similarities also became apparent.

  "The meditation Maharai Ji was teaching involved intensity, not depth. The intensity was the concentration with which you focused on, say, the sound of your own breathing. As such, it was simply a technique for jamming the mind,
in the sense that the Russian government might jam Radio Free Europe by broadcasting sounds of railroad collisions on the same frequency. It gave me a certain absence of feeling. It eventually reached a point where, when I had doubts, guilt, or other uncomfortable emotions, I would immediately react by meditating. After a while, any significant thought I might have was immediately obliterated by meditating."

  When he was finally deprogrammed by Ted Patrick, he found himself unable to refrain from meditating.

  "After my deprogramming, it took several weeks before I was able to maintain a train of thought and make two sentences go together without having the whole thing erased," he said. "Meditation had become a conditioned response. My mind just kept doing it automatically."

  Immediately after his deprogramming, Patrick showed him ways to break the spell.

  "I was sitting there with this dazed look on my face," he remembered, "and I came to the conclusion that it might be a good idea to try experimenting with not meditating. Then I discovered this conditioned reflex and it was very difficult to stomach. It was very scary, depressing, and I asked Patrick what I could do to stop meditating. He suggested that I pick up a book and start reading aloud to keep a train of thought going. So I picked up a copy of '1984' and reread it with a completely blown mind. Now I understood very well what Orwell was talking about."