on 5/30/05 2:07 AM, George DeForest at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Blank Off_world_beings
my understanding is that thousands upon thousands
have learned TM in the past few years in India.
The past decade would put it at 100's of thousands.
Is this an innefective organization?
Maharishi is right now teaching TM to more people
than possibly any other teaching in the history
of the human race.
With the TM fee the initiate would also at the same
time sponsor 100 people in India to learn . This is,
in simple form, what Maharishi is doing with his fee.
i have never heard anything like this!
do you have any website or other way to
prove this wild claim. if it is true, i dont think
we ever hear of it, at least not in fairfield
i was under the conviction that initiation
into TM is almost nil, anywhere!
I forwarded this thread to Steve Briggs, who taught in India with Purusha
for many years, and he said the following:
Hi Rick
I know firsthand about several hundred thousand initiations in India in the
past twelve years. Just before we arrived in India in September, 1994 to
launch Maharishi Corporate Development Program (MCDP), TATA Corporation
sponsored TM for 50,000 employees on their tea plantations in Kerala and at
one of their chemical operations. This was the result of Darbari Seth, CEO
of TATA Tea, who was a devotee of Maharishi's that had gone to Holland. I
met both Seth and the CEO of TATA Chemical, Mr. Krishna, and discussed the
project with them.
Later, in 1996 I co-directed a government project in Hyderabad, Andhra
Pradesh which was sponsored by Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu, a dynamic
politician who has been visited by both Bill Gates and Bill Clinton in the
last decade. Chandra Babu Naidu requested massive initiations for
government workers, schools, and prisons in the state and we taught 45,000
over a nine month period with the support of 8 local teachers. This project
was exceptional from the standpoint of cooperation and funding by the
government.
In addition to these two large projects, the corporate programs (MCDP) I was
involved with (we taught over 100 corporations from 1-15 TM courses each)
and other initiatives in public schools and prisons organized by European
Purusha in India between 1994-2002 resulted in tens of thousands of
initiations. It would seem reasonable that 200-250,000 initiations have
been done in India since 1992. If we include the 150,000 school children at
the Maharishi Vidya Mandir Schools around India then the number of TM
initiations goes up to 350,000-400,000.
However, the idea that the high price of TM in the US is used to underwrite
the cost of teaching TM in India is questionable. For example, the projects
with TATA and the Andhra Pradesh state government were both paid in full by
those organizations and MVM school children learn TM as part of their
tuition. I personally submitted our receipts for both American and local
teachers to the Andhra government and they were all reimbursed by them.
That said, portions of the revenues from US-TMO activities ranging from
donations to Ayur Ved products do go to International and presumably on to
support pundits or whatever is deemed necessary in India. Indian TM
teachers are all salaried, but the salaries are small. There must be 500
hundred or more salaried TM teachers in India (and plenty of
administrators), and the funds to support their salaries probably don't come
from teaching revenues alone because course fees at the Indian centers
aren't much. Their salaries are subsidized. But remember that India also
produces FAR more revenues than TM initiations in the States. MAPI, yagyas,
jyotish are all based in India and they generate substantial revenues
globally. I don't think its realistic to connect TM fees in the States to
TM initations in India.
Feel free to post this message on FFL if you like.
Steve Briggs
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