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The only real no-no in meditating is trying. If you try to be a good meditator, you will, paradoxically, almost certainly be a bad meditator. Meditating, TM officials insist, cannot be forced, and it must be done in all innocence, a word they use over and over again. "If you list instructions, you can't do it," asserts Charles Donahue, coordinator of TM's Northeast region. "It's like falling asleep. You can tell someone what he has to do—brush his teeth, put on his p.j.s and so on—before going to bed. But how do you describe the actual process of falling asleep? You can't."
Even TM officials admit that 20% to 25% of the people who try TM give it up after a while. Others claim the apostasy rate is still higher. One of those who quit is Victor Zukowski, owner of a Sharon, Mass., beauty parlor. "Look, I really tried," he says. "I paid my $125, attended all the sessions, and submitted to a ridiculous initiation ceremony. I meditated for six months, and do you know what happened? I fell asleep ev ery time. I just don't think it's right to charge people $125 for nothing."
For many people, however, TM seems to work:
¶ Richard Nolan, 31, is a Democratic Congressman from Minnesota. "When you are in the political arena," he says, "your day can start at 6 or 7 in the morning at a plant gate, and before you know it, it's 4 in the afternoon and you still have hours of work in front of you. That's when it is nice to meditate, so you can get the rest you need."
¶ Marilyn Forman, 40, is a housewife in Melville, Long Is land. When she found herself screaming at her two children and wondering, "Why can't I control myself?" she signed up for TM.
By the end of her second week she felt noticeably less tense and realized that her "boiling point" had been raised to a reasonable level. "Whatever TM does," she says, "it releases those pressured, tense, harried feelings we all have from life today."
¶ Curly Smith, 53, a native Oklahoman, is now a land developer in Boulder City, Nev., living "mighty fine"—enough to pilot his own Lear jet. "I'm a very practical person," he says. "I found that with TM I could take life's pressures better. My mind was clearer, and I had a better disposition. The darndest thing about it is that all you have to do is say your mantra twice a day.
Period. Everything else just falls into place. With me, I immediately lost my taste for booze. I mean, my friends back in Okie City couldn't believe that. Curly Smith not drinkin'. Lord Almighty!"
These glowing testimonials are reinforced by scientific studies that at least partially back up TM's claims. The tests are relatively new and not definitive enough to amount to final proof in the eyes of most doctors, who are also made a little uncomfortable by the fact that much of the research has been carried out under the auspices of the TM organization or has been published by the Maharishi International University Press. Among significant findings: