Claire Hoffman in the NPR Fresh Air interview observes there was something of a schism in the TM community when Maharishi came out with the Yogic Flying TM-Sidhis. Hoffman: “..it was schismatic because TM was very mainstream in the '70s, and then he introduces levitation and he loses a lot of people”. Communal Studies scholars could similarly relate to an occurrence in Mormon history. The Mormon movement was set at a point with The Book of Mormon and similarly excelling at a time with enthusiasts out traveling widely spreading the message and converts where streaming from across America and the old world. While the devoted Mormon movement with an esprit de corps was out and away spreading the message, Joseph Smith out on the frontier in Illinois then came down with a new piece of knowledge, a new teaching with plural marriage delivered to a smaller group out with him. As a far flung Mormon movement came in after time to find this there was a WTF!. Likewise there was a WTF time in 1996-’78 with Maharishi ensconced over in Europe and Yogic Flying. “Everyone should get over to Europe and learn this”. Some went with it and some separated then. Like with the Mormons this was not the end but it reshaped what had been a successful movement up to then. So it was.
TM in the USA, 1975. Stats in the United States: year-1975: 5799 Initiators Initiations per Month: 16,000 440,000 meditators World Plan Centers: 205 Satellite Centres: 173 ATR Courses given: 48 Residence SIMS Courses: Numerous Etc., Source: World Plan Executive Council First National Leaders’ Conference in the Age of Enlightenment (1975) National Reports Early 2018: 28.5k new meditators taught last year in US America, a 30% increase. 380 certified teachers. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jr_...@yahoo.com> wrote : Doug, I listened to the recording of the NPR show. It was great to listen to the writer's experience of TM as a young child and as an adult. Everyone here should listen to the show and understand a little bit of ourselves. JGD ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Yes, Dave Davies of NPR’s Fresh Air does a really capable job of leading her through the interview. I appreciate the way she quickly recaps the history of the ™ movement. That is important as I learned a number of years ago going to scholarly conferences finding that professor-types under the age of 40, gen-X and under, really had no reference for ™. ™ and Maharishi had withdrawn and skipped them. (1980’s, 1990’s ™ had withdrawn from teaching TM. ) Then also, for those over 40 it was distant only, “Oh, the Beatles?” At conferences it was evident that these people who teach the young at real Universities, they had never heard of TM let alone Fairfield, Iowa. The Fresh Air interview does a good job of overview, introduction and some of how it felt. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : I had missed this book interview a couple of years ago. emf NPR - Fresh Ari A Childhood Of Transcendental Meditation, Spent In The 'Shadow Of A Guru' https://www.npr.org/2016/06/13/481845003/a-childhood-of-transcendental-meditation-spent-in-the-shadow-of-a-guru https://www.npr.org/2016/06/13/481845003/a-childhood-of-transcendental-meditation-spent-in-the-shadow-of-a-guru June 13, 2016 Author Claire Hoffman estimates that she's spent at least 2,200 hours of her life meditating — but not because she became a devotee of the practice as an adult. Her mother was a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Hoffman spent most of her childhood in a community in Fairfield, Iowa that was devoted to Transcendental Meditation. Hoffman, who writes about her unusual upbringing in the new memoir Greetings from Utopia Park, tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that moving to the utopian community from New York City when she was kindergarten-aged was idyllic — at least initially. "Those first few years, it was entirely magical," Hoffman says. "We believed that we were changing the world, and everybody was meditating. ... It was this sort of blissful experience." Maharishi, the Yogi whose teachings inspired her mother, specialized in "Yogic Flying," a practice that he claimed would infuse practitioners with the power to levitate. He charged Hoffman's mother and other devotees thousands of dollars to learn it. Because Yogic Flying was practiced in secret, Hoffman believed for years that her mother could, in fact, fly. Then, when she was 9 or 10, she attended a demonstration of the practice and was crushed. "It was this sort of funny frog hop that they were doing across the room," Hoffman says. "For me that moment of seeing this sort of awkward, ugly jumping, as opposed to this incredible levitation that I as a kid had imagined was a first moment, for me, of doubt."
