Reddit reviews Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple
We found 2 Reddit comments about Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple
Russell Simmons, a longtime TM advocate has a new book out that will help you learn TM on the cheap.
Transcendental Meditation cheaply
A bit of history:
TM was founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to honor his guru, a famous spiritual leader in Northern India. MMY thought that TM was the single easiest way to spread his guru's teachings, because it was a simple technique whose practice would, he thought, create people who ere "enlightened" and such people would spontaneously appreciate the validity of his guru's teachings.
Over the years, the TM organization grew quite unwieldy, with 40,000 trained TM teachers and as many as 35,000 people in the USA learning every month.
Whether by design, or mismanagement, the TM organization started downsizing, and to compensate for loss of revenue, the old monk started to introduce other aspects of Indian ("Vedic") culture, selling them to the most hardcore believers for a price.
Understand that the old monk very obviously believed that the stuff he was encouraging his followers to do would help speed up their process of enlightenment, so the core purpose of his organization didn't change.
The OP was raised in the TM community in Fairfield, Iowa, where the most hardcore of hardcore believers moved to, and was surrounded by the paraphernalia, and practices associated with the most hardcore believers for, apparently, his entire childhood.
SO.... Is TM a cult?
TMers are defined by whether or not they ever learned TM. Some chose to continue to practice daily, some weekly or monthly, or forget to practice for years or decades at a time, and then decide to restart.
Some chose to live in a little town in Iowa and raise their families there, and others avoid the organization like the plague.
Some donate $30 million to the David Lynch Foundation and are honored by being called members of the DLF's "board of advisors" while at the same time publishing how-to books on rival meditation practices.
What makes a cult a cult?