"TM and M&Ms"
TM & M & M’S
Robert Doss
Wilmington. October 26, 1975
Everybody knows stress is hard on the human system, especially since Dr. Hans Selye, dean of stress-medicine, told us the big problem in this area is not organic but mind stuff.
Stress is a “physiologic response inappropriate to the situation.”
Mind-signals to the body misfire today because we do not (as often as our cave and animal ancestors did), need the flight-or-fight responses they needed way back when.
All of a sudden, the sabre-toothed tiger or the dinosaur reared up and the brain said to the human body – pump adrenalin, tense-up muscles, and get ready coagulation-chemistry to resist wounds. … Body, you are going to fight or run like, sixty.
But today it is different. You get the word that the big boss wants to see you, or they’re going to lay off a bunch of people or, your unfavorite relative is coming to visit or, your husband forgot all about the guests coming to dinner and he’s not home yet or everybody’s going to be transferred to Caribou, Maine. … Pow! It’s saber tooth time! And you’re ready for fight or flight (adrenaline with not much appropriate place to go) … STRESS!
Not only that but daily experience is a cascade of thoughts, inner stress and noise, outer noise, emotions, perceptions, sensations, continuous impressions. One-third of the adults suffer hypertension. One-half of American deaths are from heart and circulatory diseases.
Fast moving paces and progress demand flexibility and change, that we keep calm but alert and people learn that they have to become self-sufficient in finding durable satisfaction inside themselves rather than looking to rigid social rules to satisfy their need of fulfillment.
What do so many do about it? Go to church or fellowship? Yes, some do, but that doesn’t do the whole job and doesn’t help at all, others say.
Go to therapists? Yes, but that is expensive and accentuates the negative to get to the positive and takes a long time and some are still not sure it works. …
Then thousands upon thousands turn to exotic and not-so-exotic-groups or drugs or the big drug, alcohol, or cigarettes, or uppers and downers, sleeping pills, etc.
Then there is gestalt, reconstruction therapy, primal scream, TA, and biofeedback. Zen, the I-Ching, Arica, EST, ESP, Edgar Caybe, you name it or him, somebody’s doing it or following to the promised land.
One man, lately, has finished a three-year-plus pilgrimage into inner space and has emerged for a time to write about it in a fascinating book called Powers of Mind.
He is Adam Smith, author of best sellers The Money Game and Supermoney; Adam Smith, actually George Jerome Waldo Goodman.
Most of the mind trips, psych trips, drug trips, group dips, right and left brain flips he has traveled through (and tells American about) in serious but humorous fashion.
Try him. I believe he knows some of what he is talking about and I received help from him or his book, in reaching for some of the information and estimates of TM, Transcendental Meditation, I shall use today.
Transcendental Meditation (TM) is the discipline I wish to stick with. I found the “mind” field too vast to try to cover special techniques, indeed the literature on TM is too vast, but since it is the “biggie,” or as Smith says, “It’s the McDonald’s of the meditation business in this country today, it deserves the time.”
I guess he called it the McDonald’s since it offers meditation’s answer to the slogan, “You deserve a break today,” but more on that later.
If TM works, does it work because it is a placebo, an M & M, a sweet soul food, a funny new prescription for those explorers who, when offered western medicine’s answer to imbalanced living. I.e. take it easy, take off some weight, watch your diet –– those explorers for whom that was not enough and who headed west by going east?
Smith suggested that partly there is a Rumpelstiltskin effect at work, an idea he got from psychiatrist anthropologist Fuller Torrey.
And, in the story, Rumpelstiltskin helped the miller’s daughter weave flax into gold and claimed her first-born child after she became queen. Remember?
After she was queen the miller’s daughter wanted out of the bargain – to renege – whereupon the dwarf said, “You don’t know my name. Guess it by midnight of the third day and you can keep the kid.”
Naturally, at midnight this third day there is a scene where the queen says with three guesses, “Is your name Michael? John? Rumpelstiltskin?”
With that, the poor old dwarf rumples and crumples and zips himself in, long gone, out of sight, disappears!
If you can give it a name it will disappear. Psychological truism! Is that the secret of TM, give the method a name, “transcendental meditation,” give the client a secret mantra to repeat, a special name, and stress goes away, the M & M dissolves and the stomach is satisfied and calm?
Well, maybe that is part of it, but I am still ahead of myself.
Just what is TM and where did it come from?
It comes from a man named Mahesh Prasad Varma, no call Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born in 1918 in India; degree in physics, on his way to becoming a merchant or a clerk and marrying by arrangement. When he met one of India’s religious leader, a guru, spent 13 and a half years with him as a disciple and was given an assignment then to find a simple form of meditation for everyone to practice.
To do that, he spent two years in a cave.
Out of the cave and having started quite innocently to talk to Indian businessmen, he found things accelerating, moving faster, in the west. By 1960 he was setting up the International Meditation Society. By the late sixties Mia Farrow and the Beatles were among his followers and there he was on Johnny Carson. Success!!
Now the procedure for entrance into this non-profit movement is relatively simple and not really all that expensive. You hear about it, perhaps from a lecture. Then for $125 you sign up for two lectures, then are initiated on a weekend, then one more lecture and one more weekend. That’s it, and you are off and meditating every day, two-twenty minute periods, one before breakfast and one before dinner, or what some detractor called “the pause that refreshes,” twice a day.
But it works … and a lot better than Coca Cola!
I won’t go into the lectures or the simple initiation. You can read about them in Smith’s or others’ books. But at some point the instructor gives you your secret mantram, or mantra, sound from the Vedic tradition that is supposed to fit you, is not to mean anything, we have too much trouble with words and meanings, as it is, but which, when repeated over and over silently in the head during the two-twenty minute periods as you sit comfortably somewhere where you won’t be distracted with your eyes closed will take you away from that cascade of continuous impressions that bombard you.
Your mantra is always a soft and mellifluous sound, never any “k’s,” nothing sharp, soft mm’s and o’s and quieting, calming vowel sounds.
Smith’s word, which he did not keep secret, though he was supposed to, was “Shiam.”
He says he could understand the meditation part, let the brain say “Shiam,” over and over silently in the head while sitting comfortably, eyes closed. … Don’t worry about other thoughts coming in – let them come – they will go away, but he wanted to know about the transcendental part.
And the answer:
“We are transcending thought when the mantram becomes so refined, it disappears, then the mind transcends everyday awareness and experiences pure awareness or cosmic consciousness.”
Those who have been there know that it happens.
You will understand that I am very much oversimplifying, but one of the beauties lauded in TM is that it is so simple and so available to everybody. Anybody can do it.
Does it work?
There certainly are impressive claims for it. California psychiatrist Harold Bloomfield in his tops-on-the-selling charts book “TM” subtitled “Discovering Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress,” with a foreword by stress doctor Hans Selye and an introduction by Buckminster Fuller, tells us, with charts and graphs (some, but not all of them in question), that TM reduces stress, lowers blood pressure and can even cure psychosomatic illnesses.
TM enables a person, he says, “to gain a deep state of rest which repairs the damage of excessive stress and promotes improved health, emotional stability and performance.”
And this deep rest is different, quite different, from sleep.
From the lab it has been demonstrated that, with TM, the EEG shows nice alpha patterns, those brain waves associated with serenity and alert calmness.
Resistance of the skin to electrical current goes up, the higher the skin resistance the greater the degree of relaxation, it has been shown.
Heart rates slow down, blood pressure goes down, oxygen consumption on inhaling and carbon dioxide on exhaling drops way down.
Lactate concentrations in the blood take a steep dive, and there is evidence that lactate, which comes from skeletal muscle tissue and which increases during stress not only drops but since lactate can make people anxious, the anxiety level is decreased (though the correlation between lactate and anxiety is controversial).
But many of these things do occur with and through TM.
It does work.
To be sure, some of the claims do seem just a little much. For example, TM put out a booklet for business men called Creative Intelligence in Business which said that “research showed that TM improved behavioral stability lessened susceptibility to psychosomatic disease, reduced nervousness, aggression, depression and irritability, increased the clarity of perception, improved learning ability, speeded comprehension, produced better memory and faster absorption of difficult material” and that’s only part of it.
You can see it has a lot more going for it than had Hadacol or Geritol!
All this from sitting still twice a day with the eyes closed and going “Shiam, Shiam.”
Shouldn’t we raise some serious questions about it? Sure. If this thing is good it will survive, it’s fadhood.
It is supposed to open one up to greater creativity. Probably does. …
But, it seems worth remembering that creativity is hard work and preparation more than inspiration. Maybe TM can get you ready but remember that James Joyce learned Norwegian just so he could read Ibsen, Edmund Wilson learned Hungarian so he could read Molnar and Einstein for all his marvelous far-out and exquisite right-side-of-the-brainedness, as Smith put it, “Einstein carefully figured out he could wear the same jacket all week and not have to spend thirty seconds thinking on clothes, so he could spend 18 hours a day thinking about geo/metro dynamics, space and time.”
I am not saying TM is a lazy dazy goof off. I do not believe it is. And if you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it too much, but I doubt that it would claim to be a quick pass to brilliance.
And if you are going to do it, though it gets big a fad these days, remember that many human beings have not been very tolerant of methods of slowing down and recharging unless they were socially acceptable in one’s group.
Unitarians didn’t get along so well in the 16th century Poland.
The Shakers were persecuted for shaking while getting religion. Repeating the Jesus prayer in old Russia brought you, warm and welcomed, to table but a similar Jewish prayer would have had you in trouble. Some spouses don’t like it when the other spouse practices TM.
One man was using the mantra, joking I’m sure, “Banana, banana.” Good sounds. Nice round soft vowels. It reminded me of an old knock, knock joke my son used to repeat or was it my daughter?
Knock, Knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Banana, banana.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Banana. Banana.
On and on it goes that way, banana, banana, adnauseum until …
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Oran-ge glad I didn’t say banana?
You bet!
As someone said, “If you say banana banana for twenty minutes twice a day with your eyes closed you better let our friends know it’s all right.”
Or even, Shiam, shiam.
One drawback Adam Smith discovered when TM works best is obvious from his statement:
“I don’t know when Joe Namath and Bill Walton do their meditating but I found it hard to do anything competitive afterward, for an hour or two. You just watch whatever ball it is go by and say, ‘O, nice shot.’ It’s okay with you, like you’ve had two beers.”
But that, in a backhanded way, is also a compliment, for in the next sentence, the great humorous-scoffer says, “For some of the people, some of the time TM works. There I said it. That is, it teaches a technique of meditating that produces relaxation and relaxation has some beneficial effects? Transcendental Meditation works.”
However, TM enthusiasts notwithstanding, other things also work and do the same thing.
A heretic, a man named Benson of Harvard Medical School, like Jung or Adler breaking away from Freud, the man who did some of the lab work along with devotee Wallace to prove the efficiency of TM earlier, broke away from excessive claims and mysticism and tested other methods or similar methods without the Yogi, without “secret” mantras, without initiations, without fee, and found that many things work, certain techniques or forms within Christianity, within Judaism, Islam, possibly Subud, Sho shu, Hare Krishna, Meher Baba.
What was it that worked? It was what Benson called the “Relaxation Response.”
Non-pharmacological, self-induced, altered states of consciousness can produce an integrated central nervous system response or reaction called the “Relaxation Response”–– a natural and lovely soft high.
A Nobel-winning Swiss physiologist, Walter Ness, had discovered or delineated the location often fight-or flight or “ergo tropic” response and its opposite, the “trophotropic” response in the brain of a cat.
“A relaxation spot in the brain,” wrote Benson, “the anterior hypothalamus extending into the supra- and pre-optic areas, septum, and inferior lateral thalamus.”
The doctors were taking something simple that worked – TM – and making it complicated, but then, some people like proof and big words to go with it.
So the question was, how to get the anterior hypothalamus to get the message to relax?
Benson said there are four elements in the method:
1. Use a mental device, a constant stimulus, e.g., a sound or word or phrase repeated silently or audibly, or fixed gazing at an object. The purpose of this discipline is to shift from logical, externally, oriented thought.
Not once, you see, did Benson say anything about navel gazing or use the word “mantra,” “mantram” or “banana;” not even “Om” or “Shiam.”
2. Passive attitude. Don’t worry about how you’re doing. If thoughts come, okay, but go back to the technique.
3. Decrease muscle tonus. Sit in a comfortable posture and take it easy.
4. Quiet environment. (Shut your eyes unless your meditation involves gazing continuously at one object.)
This technique brings results, the same results because it is the same techniques, as TM brings. And, it is found in many religions and literatures.
You do not need a SECRET MANTRAM, says science. Use the word “ONE” if you want to, and say it over and over and over –– One-One-One –– or count your breaths, your breathing. ONE IN – ONE OUT, over and over. It works if you stay at it.
May sound funny, a bit wiggy, but in front of scoffers just as the money-maker laughs all the way to the bank, so the successful mediator may smile all the way to serenity.
It is true that you must find it easier if you the sound you use has no particular meanings to block you because you are thinking about what the sounds mean … and it is easier if the sound is a pleasant one to you … so … take it easy.
But it doesn’t have to be TM. You may use an old old Christian method. Consider the method of the 14th century author of the work, The Cloud of Unknowing, who described reaching this altered state of consciousness that one was to eliminate distractions by picking a word, he preferred a single-syllable word such as “God” or “love.” Then he says, translated into the language of the 20th century:
“Choose whichever one you prefer or if you like, choose another that suits your taste, provided that it is of one syllable. And clasp this word tightly in your heart so that it never leaves it no matter what may happen with this word you shall strike down thoughts of every kind and drive them beneath the cloud of forgetting. …”
Or again, you might use another 14th century model, one of saying a prayer as suggested by Gregory of Sinai at the monastery in Mount Athos in Greece. He wrote this:
“Sit down alone and in silence. Lower your head, shut your eyes … breathe out gently and imagine yourself looking into your own heart. As you breathe out say, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ Say it moving your lips gently, or simply say it in your mind. Try to put all other thoughts aside. Be calm. Be patient and repeat the process very frequently.”
Such a method of reaching inner peace has been used for centuries. It is tried. It truly works, especially, of course, if you believe it will. But now we know it works even for agnostics and atheists. Harvard Medical says so. All one has to do is to do it.
Thirteenth century Jewish mysticism used the same technique. Sufism, a part of Islam, uses the same technique. Some branches of Yoga use the same system. Some techniques of Zen are the same, essentially. Or choose your own sound and begin –– you can do it, too, and if you stick with it, it will work.
The advantage of TM, of course, is that they offer some teaching and checking and group support, along with a touch of mystery, and that’s not bad.
But if you want it “free” or can do it without group support, something very hard to accomplish for some people – like losing weight or stopping smoking – by oneself. Though we know what to do, it comes easier for some with group support.
But if you wish to do it yourself, pick a sound.
It could be Christian, Hindu, Jewish, whatever. Perhaps repeating the Russian “Hospodipomilui, Hospodapomilui, Hospodapomilui,”–– Lord have mercy on us –– over and over or singing it would work.
Perhaps saying the Jewish “Adanoi elohinu, adanoi echod,” – the Lord our God, the Lord is one, would work. Or just saying simply: “one, one, one.”
Transcendental Meditation and similar disciplines work.
With Harvard Medical School and Scientific America, etc. to back it up, it works – also centuries of tradition – and thousands upon thousands doing it.
I read Bloomfield’s book Transcendental Meditation last summer and not having $125 and against his advice in that book, I decided to do it by myself.
It was easy while we were camping in the mountains and in Maine, vacation, quiet times, leisure, and beautiful surroundings.
Someone might say I was so relaxed already that I didn’t need TM. How melty do you want to get?
All the same, I searched around in my mind for my own mantra. Let it be soothing, let it not stop me with too many meanings in the words, mellifluous, was that it?
I chose some Italian words from a favorite opera, from Lucia di Lammermoor. The words or sounds, “O bel alma enamorata” … always thought that was beautiful. … “O my beloved adored one.” Then shortened it to “O bel alma, O bel alma, O bel alma.” I had a mantra. I may change my mantra now – for I do see some point in having your own secret word. As a child didn’t you make up occasionally – and then wasn’t it peculiar to hear your brother or sister using your word? I would say: what are you doing using my word? Besides, you don’t want anyone to make fun of your private devotions and sounds.
With “O bel alma,” I did the 20 minutes twice a day, eyes closed (and went hiking and blueberry gathering in between).
Delicious!
I found it calming, pleasant, but now, a few months back at church work and in the real world, I confess to letting O bel alma almost slip out of my neuronal pathways altogether. Not clocking much meditation time anymore. I tell myself it’s because I can’t find those two 20-minute periods of quiet before morning and evening meals in addition to a 40-minute brisk walk I take every day in a busy household and with a busy schedule.
But I may get back to it yet. For, I am convinced that it does relieve stress and further that it leads simultaneously to greater serenity and greater awareness of all the everyday things I fail to see and enjoy rushing by.
The grass does get greener – the sky bluer – the tree are sensed as friends in their aliveness –– awareness is keener, sharper, happier, for having been at deep rest while wide awake!!
Transcendental Meditation is wise in this country and in this century not to call itself a religion. No matter. What is involved is an ancient religious methodology. And it may be a way for people, including even some of us, to reach the depth dimension in the religious life that so many of use gave up long ago or never experienced in the first place.
In a troubled and troubling world, where we must meet realistically the tasks that confront us daily, we also need something to fall back on, something to release some of the creativity that is potential within us, some kind of faith in life or basic trust in existence that has always been a kind of response, I think, to the religious impulse.
Because others may fail me – because even groups may disappoint me or an institution and fall short of meeting my need for something greater and certainly I may fail myself – I feel that I must, that people must find some source of inner stability – serenity – independent of relationships that can change, even institutions that can change.
There are those whom find that TM (or a discipline like it) puts them in touch with this inner stability they center down through meditation.
Personally, I am glad, then, for the movement. If one needs calming and refueling this is one way of doing it. It does work. It is an old way out of the East, a positive way, to help us deal with our western world.
Try TM, try meditation, try prayer, try something.
There are times, and maybe this is one of them, when the wisest thing that can be said to us is:
“Don’t just do something. … SIT THERE.”
