A visitor to Fairfield, Iowa, the nearby Maharishi Vedic City, or other TM communities will see that, in practice, Maharishi’s teachings can, and do, provide a totalistic, highly prescriptive, all-consuming lifestyle for thousands of devoted followers of the Movement.
For these practitioners of TM, meditation, the sidhis, and the wide range of related practices and services constitute a complete spiritual path, an “ultimate concern,” whether you call it a religion or not. In its dealings with meditators fully committed to TM, the Movement can be highly controlling and intolerant of deviations, encouraging orthodox thinking and enforcing orthopraxy. By most standards, TM looks and behaves like a new religious movement, at least for its most devout followers.
