Reading through some of the posts to Fairfield Life, alt.meditation.transcendental, and TM-Free lately, I have revised my opinion of the new "Electricity is bad for you" campaign being promoted by Maharishi and the TM movement. I'm beginning to think they're onto something.
I mean, think about it. If you watch these forums, it would seem that the strong, On The Program TM types consistently display behavior that one would charac- terize as agressive, antisocial, rigid, dogmatic, insulting, and tending towards mob behavior, if not downright craziness. By contrast, most of the Off The Program types on those forums (those who either no longer practice TM or who have distanced themselves from it and no longer identify with it as their main spiritual path) often display a great deal of balance and equanimity in their posts and in their lives. So what I'm thinkin' is that maybe John Knapp and Paul Mason and Sudarsha and Vaj are WRONG in their suggestion that the negative traits one tends to see in long-term TMers are somehow caused by TM or the TMSP itself. The problem may be ELECTRICITY. What if Maharishi is RIGHT about the negative effects of exposure to electromagnetic radiation from common household wiring? And what if he's RIGHT about it, but only as EMR affects On The Program *TMers*? I mean, the Off The Program types live in the same world as the On The Program types, and are exposed to as much Bad Electricity as the strong TMers are, but it doesn't seem to affect them. So what if there is some oversensitivity to Bad Electricity that is *caused* by the TM and TMSP programs, something that makes the individuals who pursue those programs more susceptible to the evil influences of EMR all around them? Isn't it worth checkin' out? A simple study -- with a control group of non-TMers (or former TMers who are now safely Off The Program) living their normal lives in rooms filled with Bad Electricity being given the same battery of psychological and sociological tests as a group of strong, On The Program TMers living in rooms similarly filled with Bad Electricity -- might settle this whole "TM is potentially bad for you" debate once and for all. And if it did, and the results of the tests *did* seem to indicate that TMers exposed to Bad Electricity were more vulnerable to the bad effects of EMR than non-TMers, wouldn't it be a kind of win-win situation for all concerned? The non-TMers or Off The Program types could relax, certain now that the negative traits they've been commenting on are caused *not* by TM, but by Bad Elec- tricity. That would cut down on the number of posts from their side. And the strong, diehard On The Program TMers could *also* rest easier, knowing that it had been finally established that TM was *not* the culprit. They could continue their TM program in peace, just taking proper precautions against the real culprit, Bad Electricity (precautions like moving into an unelectrified S-V house, or giving up their Internet addiction). And again, the volume of posts compulsively defending TM from claims that it can have harmful side effects would be at an end. Give it some thought, any of you researchers out there.
