Skeptics on the Transcendental Meditation technique • Criticism • Reviews • Responses to Skepticism

Criticism of Transcendental Meditation: Overview

2010-09-02T13:50:00.005-04:00

SKEPTICS: "Transcendental Meditation is not really scientifically validated."

FACTS:

• Over 350 research studies on TM published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals.

• All major findings replicated.

• Studies done at 250 independent institutions and medical schools worldwide.
• 50 randomized controlled trials.

• $26 million in National Institutes of Health/U.S. Government grants awarded over the past 20 years for scientists to continue researching the TM technique.
• Please see a review of the research here.

SKEPTICS: "The research was done only by 'TM' scientists.”

FACTS:

• 360 scientists in 30 countries have conducted research on the TM technique.

• The vast majority were not affiliated with the TM program.
• Quality of research on TM praised by independent scientists

SKEPTICS: "The TM program is a for-profit business."

FACTS:

• It’s a non-profit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) educational organization.

• All course fees go to support teaching activities—including the subsidizing of meditation courses in inner cities, on Native American reservations, for impoverished students in developing nations, and programs for the homeless—all of whom can learn the TM technique free of charge.
• No individual or organization has ever made a lucrative profit from teaching the TM technique—there are no highly paid share holders, no kickbacks—only modest salaries paid to organization employees. All non-profit financial records are public access.
• For anyone wishing to learn who cannot afford the full tuition, the TM organization offers special reduced fees, grants, scholarships, work-study programs and other financial aid options.

SKEPTICS: "Practicing the TM technique is no different from just relaxing."

FACTS:

• Numerous physiological studies have confirmed a unique state of restful alertness not found during ordinary relaxation.

• Neuroscience shows unique brain patterns—increased alpha power and high EEG coherence in the brain's frontal cortex, as well as intra-hemispheric synchrony and integration of the frontal and occipital regions—distinguishing TM practice from ordinary relaxation and other meditations.

• A wide parameter of physiological markers shows relaxation much deeper than eyes-closed rest or other relaxation techniques.

SKEPTICS: "All meditation practices are the same and other techniques produce the same effects as TM.”

FACTS:

• The variety of meditation practices engage the mind in different ways, have various aims and produce different results.
• Neuroscientists have discovered that different meditation techniques produce markedly different effects on brain function.
• According to research studies, only the meditative state associated with TM practice has been found to consistently produce high levels of EEG alpha coherence throughout the brain—indicating growth of more efficient, integrated brain functioning and improved mental performance.
• Comparative research studies and meta-analyses show that other meditation practices have not been found to produce the same effects as the TM technique for providing deep rest, reducing anxiety, lowering high blood pressure, promoting self-actualization and various other benefits.

SKEPTICS: "You shouldn't have to pay to learn meditation."

FACTS:

• Learning the TM technique requires a 10-12-hour course taught by a professional, certified teacher.

• The TM course tuition pays for this non-profit, educational service.

• The TM program offers lifelong follow-up and support as needed at no further cost—consisting of one-on-one guidance and ongoing classes.

• Other meditation practices may cost less or nothing because they are not as time-intensive for the teacher—or require no teacher at all. The authentic TM technique can be properly learned only from a certified TM instructor, and cannot be learned from a book, CD, or other less formal methods.

SKEPTICS: "It's a religion disguised as a science."

FACTS:

• TM practice is secular and not faith-based—it's a technique for direct experience.
• There is no TM-related belief system or dogma that one is urged to accept when learning the TM technique—or anytime afterward.

• It's practiced by people of all religions and no religion.

• TM is scientific because every principle associated with the practice is verifiable by direct experience and scientific research.

SKEPTICS: "It's a form of Hinduism."

FACTS:

• The TM technique comes from the ancient Vedic tradition of India—a tradition that includes systematic, testable knowledge about consciousness, meditation, health and other areas.

• Just as yoga is practiced by people of all religions in a non-conflicting, secular context, TM practice is universal and non-religious.

• According to Vedic and Sanskrit scholars, mantras such as those used in TM practice are not "names of deities" as sometimes claimed by anti-meditation advocates. Even if certain people were to ascribe religious context to particular mantras, that would be irrelevant to TM practice, which uses specific mantras or sounds in an innocent, natural way devoid of meaning. In fact, that the mantras not be associated with meaning is fundamental to the effectiveness of the TM technique.
• Maharishi, known by many as a "scientist of consciousness," revived the TM technique, which had been long lost to society even in India, and established it as a secular, scientific practice free of religious trappings. He identified the universal, scientific elements of this technique—previously shrouded in mysticism—and demonstrated its unique, practical benefits for people of all cultures and religions.

Is the "relaxation response" an alternative to Transcendental Meditation?

2010-07-05T16:12:00.012-04:00

from The Editors

The idea of a “relaxation response” emerged in the 1970s after the first scientific studies on the Transcendental Meditation technique were published in Scientific American and other scientific journals. Those studies found that the TM technique produces a distinct physiological state. It was hypothesized by some that all other meditation and relaxation practices would produce the same “low-stress” state and therefore the same benefits as the TM technique. Although the relaxation response theory gained widespread acceptance for decades and was even taught in medical schools, comparative data on different practices never substantiated the hypothesis and it has now been invalidated by subsequent research, including randomized controlled studies and meta-analyses showing that different relaxation and meditation techniques have different effects.

The “relaxation response technique” was developed as a practice intended to induce the same meditative state gained during the TM technique.

EEG research shows that the "relaxation response" does not produce the same brain patterns as the TM technique — during TM practice there is typically frontal alpha EEG coherence, and also intra-hemispheric coherence is often recorded as well as coherence from the front to the back of the brain (see the 2010 issue of the neuroscience journal Consciousness and Cognition).

Numerous research studies also show that the physiological state commonly gained during TM differs from the proposed physiology of the relaxation response, with the TM technique producing significantly greater decreases in oxygen consumption, respiratory rate, heart rate, muscle tension and blood pressure, and a greater increase in skin resistance (all showing a more restful state). It was also discovered that many physiological changes occur during TM practice that are not present during the relaxation response technique — and some are in the opposite direction, such as increased cardiac output (despite decreased heart rate), increased blood flow to the brain and the widespread alpha coherence.

Thus the TM technique provides the experience of a unique state of physiological functioning, different from ordinary waking, dreaming and sleep — a proposed fourth state of consciousness that is different from the relaxation response in many ways.

But perhaps the most fundamental difference lies in the actual cognitive activity involved in each process: the TM technique allows awareness to transcend thinking and settle deeply inward to the state of pure consciousness, described as the most creative, blissful, and peaceful level of the mind. This experience of transcending mental activity is a much different process from the "relaxation response technique," which keeps the mind active on a “mantra” and attentive to breathing.

Hundreds of independent scientific meditation research studies support the principle that it is the experience of transcending during TM practice and not just relaxation that is responsible for the TM technique’s wide range of benefits for mind, body and behavior — accumulative effects not found to result from the relaxation response or ordinary eyes-closed rest.

See "The Myth of the Relaxation Response" by meditation researcher David Orme-Johnson, PhD, for a more in-depth scientific discussion of the Transcendental Meditation technique and the "relaxation response."

Review:

2009-03-28T19:08:00.055-04:00

“The reader is forewarned that The Skeptic’s Dictionary does not try to present a balanced account…” —Skeptic's Dictionary author Robert Todd Carroll

by Tom McKinley Ball

The Skeptic's Dictionary offers a hardcore skeptic's usual denouncements of God, angels and other so-called “myths and dangerous delusions,” but also targets a surprising variety of more earthly subjects—from vitamins and organic food to psychology and chiropratic.

While it's doubtful that many readers will find solace from knowing that "professional skeptics" are on guard to protect us from the likes of Sigmund Freud, Big Foot and the Mothman, such skeptical evaluations may nonetheless prove useful for the slam-dunk debunking of certain ill-founded or outlandish beliefs.

However, readers seeking an honest assessment of the Transcendental Meditation technique may find The Skeptic’s Dictionary appraisal frustratingly biased. The author cites no empirical evidence to support his criticisms of the TM program, uses only inaccurate, non-science sources as references and disregards the body of peer-reviewed scientific literature that supports the program. The fact that millions of people around the world have learned the TM technique and report benefits in their daily life also seems to carry little weight in the Skeptic's Dictionary evaluation.

Is the TM program scientifically validated? Is it truly non-profit?

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: "The Transcendental Meditation program is a spiritual business whose proponents claim is scientifically validated."

Fact: After nearly 40 years of scientific investigation, the Transcendental Meditation program’s scientific validation is well established. More than 600 published research studies comprise the body of scientific literature on the Transcendental Meditation technique, along with scores of theoretical papers and critical reviews. Over 350 of these research studies have appeared in peer-reviewed scientific and academic journals, verifying benefits for mind, body, relationships and environment. All the major findings have been replicated. Scientific research on the Transcendental Meditation program has been conducted at 250 independent institutions worldwide, including Harvard Medical School, Yale Medical School, UCLA Medical School, Stanford Medical School, University of Virginia Medical School, and many others. More than 350 scientists around the world have conducted research on the TM technique, the majority of whom were unaffiliated with the TM organization.

Fact: The Transcendental Meditation technique is taught in the United States by Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation (MVED), a non-profit educational organization, designated 501(c)(3) by the IRS—it is not a for-profit business. In its 50-year history, the TM organization’s non-profit status has never been legally challenged. All of the revenues from course fees go entirely to support the organization’s educational and peace-creating activities around the world. There are no shareholders, board members or individuals who profit financially from the organization’s programs, beyond modest salaries paid to employees. All this is a matter of public record. Course fees from the U.S. and other wealthy nations support the organization’s teaching activities in places such as Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, where there are minimal or no course fees to learn the TM technique.

An overview of scientifically validated benefits

Why is there a course fee for learning the TM technique?

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: “Trainees pay hundreds of dollars for their mantras.”

Fact: The Transcendental Meditation course fee covers a seven-step program of personal instruction and classes (12-15 hours) with a highly trained, professional TM teacher. Instruction in the Transcendental Meditation technique does involve learning a mantra—a “vehicle for transcending” that allows the mind to settle inward—but the TM course involves much more. The student learns correct use of the mantra, gains a thorough understanding about the mechanics of the practice and receives comprehensive knowledge of higher stages of human development.

Everyone who has taken the TM course has free access to an ongoing but optional followup program of knowledge and instruction to insure correct practice and a lifetime of benefits.

In the context of the Transcendental Meditation program, the term “mantra” has a specific use (as described above), referring to a sound that has no association with meaning, not to be confused with other uses of the term referenced by “The Skeptic’s Dictionary.”

Are the TM program's mantras unique?

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: “Novices may be led to believe that their mantra is unique, though many practitioners will share the same mantra.”

Fact: At no point during the Transcendental Meditation course is it stated or implied that students will receive a mantra that is individually unique or "one of a kind." The mantras, derived from the Vedic tradition, are unique in the sense that they are special sounds whose effects are known to be powerfully harmonizing and beneficial for mind and body. The student receives the correct mantra according to the time-tested and scientifically proven knowledge in which TM instructors are trained.

Is there proof that the TM technique is effective in schools?

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: “It may be true that [TM instructors] really believe that TM can do all these things [improve student test scores, reduce violence and drug abuse, reduce student anxiety and depression, and diminish teacher burnout], but they do not have strong proof that TM in the schools will accomplish any of these noble goals.”

Fact: The Transcendental Meditation program’s effectiveness in education has been demonstrated by 40 years of scientific research and classroom experience. Researchers studying the application of the program in the classroom have published findings such as improved grades and academic skills, reduced anxiety and depression among students, increased intelligence and creativity, improved performance on standardized test scores, increased self-esteem, improved memory, reduced behavioral problems, and increased tolerance and appreciation of others.

Scientific research on the effects of the TM program in the classroom

A new standard of academic excellence: Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment

The Transcendental Meditation Technique Reduces ADHD Symptoms Among Students: New Study

"Millions of followers?"

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: The Transcendental Meditation program claims “millions of followers.”

Fact: While it is true that over 5 million people have learned the Transcendental Meditation technique over the past 50 years, the organization and Maharishi himself boast of no followers. Transcendental Meditation is a simple, natural technique practiced for 20 minutes twice daily—it is not a belief system or lifestyle that one is asked to follow. As Maharishi has said, “I have no followers. Everyone follows their own progress.”

Is the TM technique the same as ordinary relaxation?

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: Some of the studies on the Transcendental Meditation technique merely show “the same physiological results you can achieve by relaxing completely.”

Fact: Scientific research studies show that a wide range of beneficial physiological changes commonly occur during the Transcendental Meditation technique, distinguishing the practice from mere relaxation or other forms of meditation. Studies indicate that TM practice produces a state of rest much deeper than sitting with eyes-closed, and also much deeper than other meditation practices. Research consistently shows a natural decrease in breath rate during the TM technique that is 25-30% greater than controls, and an increase in basal skin resistance (a standard measure of relaxation) up to 70% higher. Physiological indicators of a deeper state of rest also include marked changes in respiratory volume, minute ventilation, tidal volume, blood lactate and heart rate. Studies suggest that this unique state of physiology promotes regulation of cortisol and other hormones associated with chronic stress, resulting in a healthier regulation of serotonin (a neurotransmitter associated with mood). EEG measurements show increased alpha coherence and integration of brain functioning, further differentiating the Transcendental Meditation technique from ordinary relaxation and other meditation practices.

Discovery of the fourth state of consciousness: According to many researchers, the unique physiological changes found to occur during the Transcendental Meditation technique constitute the discovery of a fourth state of consciousness—known as Transcendental Consciousness, a state of restful alertness unlike waking, dreaming or sleep. The repeated experience of Transcendental Consciousness through twice-daily practice of the TM technique has been found to produce a wide range of rejuvenating effects on mind and body, stimulating growth of intelligence and creativity and leading to a state of heightened well-being.

Many scientists have lauded the Transcendental Meditation program as a historic scientific discovery with profound implications for health and human potential. World renowned quantum physicist Dr. John Hagelin has equated Transcendental Consciousness with the Unified Field currently being researched by modern physics—theorizing that the silent source of nature’s limitless creativity and organizing power, the Unified Field, is directly accessed subjectively through the Transcendental Meditation technique.

Scientific research on the physiology of Transcendental Consciousness

Does the TM organization maintain real estate holdings worth billions?

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: Maharishi’s organization maintains real estate holdings “worth more than $3 billion in the late 1990s.”

Fact: The founder of the Transcendental Meditation program, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was not the owner of the TM organization and himself maintained no financial holdings. This is a public fact, easily verified on any country’s government website that lists the assets of nonprofit or educational organizations.

The TM organization's real estate assets are teaching centers, schools, Maharishi Ayurveda Health Centers or properties under development for these purposes. The author of “The Skeptic’s Dictionary” references Britannica Encyclopedia as his source for the claim that the TM organization’s net worth "is more than $3 billion.” However, Britannica itself fails to produce a citation or credible source for this figure, which was apparently picked out of the air or from other non-credible Websites. Officials of the TM organization state that the "$3 billion" figure is exaggerated many times over.

Perhaps the TM organization’s success is better measured by the results of its educational programs.

Complete listing of all nonprofit organizations in the United States, including the non-profit TM organizations

Summary of "The Skeptic's Dictionary"

The Skeptic’s Dictionary's assessment opens with a misquote from Maharishi, taken out of context to convey, presumably, that Maharishi's aim was simply to raise money. A closer look would reveal that Maharishi was advocating something very different: if the amount of public funding now being spent on war were to be spent on constructive measures, such as Maharishi's visionary programs for world peace and eradication of poverty, then we would quickly see positive results.

A further sampling of The Skeptic’s Dictionary’s unfounded pronouncements:

• The TM organization made false claims about Yogic Flying, and then recanted.
• Former meditators maintain a support group for others who have quit the practice.
• Claims for the Maharishi Effect (societal benefits through a "field effect") have been disproved.

The author shows little interest in details that could confirm or deny the truth of such statements; he merely links to a few other naysayers’ non-science, opinion-based Websites.

"The Skeptic Dictionary" assessment of the Transcendental Meditation program is based, seemingly, on two pre-existing assumptions—or "premature cognitive commitments":

1) The TM organization’s aim is to make money.

2) It is impossible that the TM technique could produce the wide range of benefits commonly reported.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary presents selective items that appear to reinforce these assumptions; because the author brings no other evidence to the table, because the items are placed one after the other, he magnifies his "skeptical" effect. However, if one subjects The Skeptic's Dictionary's account of the TM program to even moderate critical thinking, its analysis and assertions prove inaccurate.

One wonders why The Skeptic’s Dictionary features the Transcendental Meditation program among this eclectic mix of items to be "debunked." Perhaps the Website’s author should consider how many of his topics have been:

• Awarded over $24 million in research grants by the National Institutes of Health
• Validated by hundreds of peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals, including the AMA's Archives of Internal Medicine
• Approved by the self-same American Medical Association for continuing education study for physicians
• Shown by research published and promoted by the AMA to improve high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.
• Regularly featured in brain research presentations by the American Psychological Association
• Highlighted in American College of Cardiology’s press releases for benefits to cardiovascular health
• Learned by six million people over the past 50 years, including hundreds of thousands of students and teachers in public and private schools in the US and throughout the world, with a 40-year track record in education.
• Offered as a corporate leadership/wellness program in large and small businesses—including Fortune 500 companies—to reduce health care costs and improve productivity and performance.

For his own credibility, I urge the Website’s author to examine the Transcendental Meditation program more closely. His evaluation leaves one skeptical about the overall reliability and usefulness of The Skeptic's Dictionary.

Learning the Transcendental Meditation technique:

2009-03-18T15:32:00.018-04:00

Why personalized instruction?
Why a certified instructor & course fee?

by Tom McKinley Ball

There are many forms of meditation, practiced for various reasons—to simply chill or relax, to promote a sense of compassion, or to become more “mindful” of oneself or surroundings. Most of these practices can be learned either for free or very cheaply, from a friend who learned in her yoga class, from a book, online or from a CD.

The Transcendental Meditation (TM®) technique is a specific form of meditation introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Its purpose is to provide the experience of transcending: a state of restful alertness or 'pure awareness,' beyond thought, an experience known to revitalize mind and body and stimulate growth of one’s creative potential. According to Maharishi and the organization he set up to teach the TM technique, learning Transcendental Meditation requires personalized, one-on-one instruction, a series of classes and comprehensive follow-up—all taught by professionally trained teachers. The TM program is a non-profit, tax-exempt educational organization [501(c)(3)]. When you learn the Transcendental Meditation technique, your course tuition covers the educational expenses of teaching and supports the non-profit organization dedicated to bringing the benefits of meditation to people everywhere.

Why is the TM technique not taught for free, as many other meditation practices? Does one really need a professionally trained teacher and a systematic, seven-step course with personalized instruction and comprehensive follow-up to correctly practice this meditation technique and enjoy its full benefits? Our experience teaching meditation around the world for the past fifty years—along with hundreds of independent, peer-reviewed scientific research studies [1] that verify the program’s effectiveness—tells us that the answer is most definitely yes. Millions of people who have learned the TM technique in this way would agree.

If learning the TM technique requires personalized instruction and a series of classes, obviously educational expenses will be incurred—this is why there's a course fee.

But why is personalized, comprehensive instruction necessary to learn to meditate effectively? And why would someone choose to learn the Transcendental Meditation technique when so many other practices can be learned more cheaply or at no cost?

Why TM practice is unique:

The operative word in describing the Transcendental Meditation technique is transcendental. During TM practice, one transcends—the mind naturally and effortlessly settles inward—away from the surface, active levels of thinking to progressively more settled and refined levels of the mind, until you experience the silent field of restful alertness at the source of thought, known as pure awareness. Neuroscientists have found that this particular meditative state gained during TM practice is the only experience known to create “global EEG coherence”—a state of highly efficient and orderly functioning throughout the entire brain, which stimulates growth of creativity, intelligence and heightened awareness in daily life.[2]

A basic principle of the Transcendental Meditation program is that this experience of transcending is the primary cause of the positive effects of the TM technique—that is, experiencing the silent, self-referral field of pure awareness at the source of thought, as distinct from practices that have other purposes or which engage the mind and keep it active or busy in various ways, usually on the more surface thinking levels. According to physiological research, it is this state of “Transcendental Consciousness”—a fourth state of consciousness unlike waking, dreaming or sleep—that gives the most profound rest and rejuvenation to mind and body. Over 600 scientific studies on the effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique support this principle that Transcendental Consciousness produces the widest range of benefits among the variety of meditative experiences.

Why TM requires personalized instruction:

The process of “effortless transcending” is natural, simple and easy, but also very, very delicate; so delicate that the technique was lost to society—in the East and the West—for thousands of years simply because of misunderstanding and inadequate teaching methods.

In the 20th century, Maharishi revived correct practice of this ancient meditation technique and structured a systematic, standardized, seven-step course of personalized instruction to ensure that everyone everywhere can learn to meditate properly and gain maximum benefit.

Maharishi spent over 50 years elucidating the principles behind the Transcendental Meditation technique, always emphasizing the need for personal, one-on-one instruction:

“By necessity, the practice of Transcendental Meditation is imparted by personal instruction. It cannot be done through a book [or CD or online training] because it not only involves telling an aspirant how to experience the subtle states of thinking, but an even greater responsibility lies in finding out what the aspirant experiences when he proceeds on that path… The experiences on the path of Transcendental Meditation are very subtle… It takes a while for the beginner to be able to pinpoint his experiences of the subtle state of thought. The practice of Transcendental Meditation must always be given by the expert teachers of Transcendental Meditation who have been properly trained to give it and who have been trained to check the experiences.” [3]

When a person learns the TM technique, every instruction is given out on the basis of the previous instruction being understood and acknowledged. The certified TM teacher guides the student step by step, adjusting the teaching process according to the pace of the student.

Follow-up and one-on-one support:

The Transcendental Meditation course comes with extensive follow-up and personal support—offered at no further cost beyond the one-time TM course tuition. This means that even after you’ve completed your TM course, teachers remain available to provide further guidance and facilitate deeper understanding of the practice.

The one-on-one support allows the opportunity for personal meetings with your teacher, as needed, arranged according to your schedule. These private, 30-minute “checking” sessions stabilize correct, effortless practice and verify experiences. It is recommended that these personal meetings be scheduled weekly for the first month and monthly for the first year—or more, according to the student’s needs. After the first year this personal support remains available as needed to everyone who has learned the TM technique.

The follow-up also includes optional, ongoing advanced classes so that your understanding can grow along with your experiences. These advanced TM lectures are held weekly in most TM teaching centers and include checking and group meditation.

The Transcendental Meditation course, one-on-one support and follow-up is designed to allow each student to gain the experience and understanding they need to correctly practice the Transcendental Meditation technique on their own and gain maximum benefit in daily life.

Because there’s an established, professional organization and an initial TM course tuition, the lifetime follow-up can be offered at no charge, and you can go to a TM teaching center in almost any major city and have your meditation checked or receive further guidance from the teachers.

The TM course tuition is a one-time fee for a lifetime program.

What is the course fee used for?

1. Educational expenses: Although the TM organization is non-profit, it’s pays the same overhead that businesses must pay—rent, utilities, teaching supplies, etc. The TM course fee helps sustain the teachers, teaching centers, the non-profit educational organization and TM teaching activities around the world. As with every tax-exempt organization, the finances are public record.

2. To help others learn: Because others before you have paid their TM course fee, the program is now available to you in all its effectiveness. Everyone’s course fee helps ensure that others after them may enjoy the full benefits of the Transcendental Meditation technique—especially future generations.

In wealthier countries, like the United States, the Transcendental Meditation organization sends part of the course fees to developing nations to support TM programs for people who cannot afford to pay—places such as Brazil (pictured), India, and Thailand, where, with the help of private benefactors such as the David Lynch Foundation, over 140,000 schoolchildren have learned free of charge and practice the TM technique during in-school “Quiet Time.” [4]

3. Maharishi’s Program for World Peace: Another very important project supported by your course fee is the establishment of “peace-creating groups” around the world. These large groups of hundreds or thousands of people practice the Transcendental Meditation technique and its advanced programs together twice daily. Why? Because scientific research has shown that a sufficiently large number of people practicing the TM programs together create an intensified harmonious effect—not just personally for the individual meditator, but also for the surroundings. Through what scientists call a “field effect,” the quality of life of the whole society improves, measured by decreased crime and violence and improvements in the economy and other social indicators. These large groups have been established on almost every continent, and scientists continue to monitor the effects, with 13 research studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals validating the phenomenon.

As a teacher of meditation, Maharishi was concerned not only for the individual’s personal growth but for the whole world. He believed that a sufficient number of people in society ‘transcending’ twice daily, especially together in large groups, would have a significant positive impact on the entire civilization. This pioneering area of scientific research is ongoing and admittedly outside the current paradigm of conventional sociological methodologies. But the studies thus far are highly promising and support Maharishi’s formula for reducing collective stress in society and creating world peace through large peace-creating groups.

When you learn the Transcendental Meditation technique, your course fee helps support this peace-creating endeavor in your country and around the world. Admittedly, this is a bigger vision and more ambitious program than learning to watch your breath or relax, and a project with such global initiatives requires more funding than checking out a library book about meditation or learning meditation in a yoga class. But Maharishi remained true to his vision that life on earth can rise to its full potential. The certified TM teachers around the world continue to uphold the teaching procedures and policies that have proven so effective in bringing the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation program to everyone.

1. Selection of scientific research:
Hypertension 26 (1995): 820-827.
Annals of Behavioral Medicine 22 (2000) S133.
American Journal of Hypertension (2004).
Human Physiology 25 (1999) 171-180.
Psychophysiology 31 Abstract (1994) S67.
Psychophysiology 27 Supplement (1990) 4A.
Psychophysiology 26 (1989) 529.
International Journal of Neuroscience 13: (1981) 211-217.
Psychosomatic Medicine 46: (1984) 267–276.
2. International Journal of Neuroscience 15 (1981) 151-157; International Journal of Neuroscience 14: (1981) 147–151.
3. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Science of Being and Art of Living (New York: Plume/Penguin Group, 1963/2001), p. 35-36.
4. As of December, 2008.

Natural Stress Relief (NSR)

2009-03-18T15:31:00.031-04:00

By Tom Mckinley Ball

Advertisements and marketing articles about a form of meditation called "Natural Stress Relief" (NSR) have been posted by it's promoters throughout the Internet. The pitch typically begins with a few facts about the Transcendental Meditation program, which, as a certified instructor of the TM technique, I'm glad to see—it's wonderful that people wish to teach meditation and spread its benefits. But unfortunately the NSR articles quickly veer off into inaccuracy and make several misleading statements about the Transcendental Meditation technique and TM organization.

What is the Transcendental Meditation technique?

The Transcendental Meditation technique is a specific form of meditation introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The benefits of Transcendental Meditation technique for mind, body and relationships have been enjoyed by millions of people over the past 50 years, and verified by over 350 peer-reviewed scientific research studies conducted at independent research institutions—such as Yale Medical School, UCLA Medical School, Harvard Medical School and Stanford—and published in leading peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals. The National Institutes of Health has awarded over $24 million for scientists to further research the TM technique's benefits for cardiovascular health and brain functioning. The Transcendental Meditation program is a non-profit, tax-exempt educational organization [501(c)(3)], devoted solely to bringing the benefits of the meditation to people everywhere.

The first step in learning the Transcendental Meditation technique is an Introductory Lecture, given by a certified TM instructor or viewed online at one of the official TM Websites. To learn more about the TM technique, research and benefits, please visit TM.org or DoctorsOnTM.org.

A technique for 'transcending':

The operative word in describing the Transcendental Meditation technique is 'transcendental.' During TM practice, one transcends—the mind naturally and effortlessly settles inward—away from the surface, active levels of thinking, to progressively more settled and refined levels of the mind, until you experience the silent field of restful alertness at the source of thought, known as pure awareness. Neuroscientists have found that this particular meditative state gained during TM practice is the only experience known to create “global alpha EEG coherence”—a state of highly efficient and orderly functioning throughout the entire brain. Twice daily practice of the TM technique is said to stimulate growth of creativity, intelligence and heightened awareness in daily life.

What is NSR?

The NSR method is a form of meditation very loosely modeled after the Transcendental Meditation technique. The NSR internet marketing strategy is, first, draw attention to the scientifically proven benefits and track record of the TM program, then try and persuade the reader that the TM technique, while highly beneficial, is too expensive and that one doesn't need the one-on-one, personalized instruction and followup offered by the TM program. Next step: criticize the organization that teaches the TM technique for being "mystical," "elitist," "too inward," etc. (someone's personal opinion, perhaps, but irrelevant to the scientifically established facts about the TM program and counter to the benign nature of the non-profit educational organization). Finally, NSR strives to close the deal by arguing that the NSR method is basically the same practice as the TM technique and will produce the same results, but because NSR is taught much differently—by CD or online, as opposed to personal instruction—this home-study "alternative to Transcendental Meditation" can be delivered for much less money than the TM technique—only $47!

Personal instruction: is it important?

Maharishi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation program, spent over 50 years elucidating the principles behind the Transcendental Meditation technique, always emphasizing the need for personal, one-on-one instruction:

"By necessity, the practice of Transcendental Meditation is imparted by personal instruction. It cannot be done through a book [or CD or online training] because it not only involves telling an aspirant how to experience the subtle states of thinking, but an even greater responsibility lies in finding out what the aspirant experiences when he proceeds on that path… The experiences on the path of Transcendental Meditation are very subtle… It takes a while for the beginner to be able to pinpoint his experiences of the subtle state of thought. The practice of Transcendental Meditation must always be given by the expert teachers of Transcendental Meditation who have been properly trained to give it and who have been trained to check the experiences.

"The checking of experiences is a vital point in the practice of Transcendental Meditation. Again, it cannot be done through books…by nature it is delicate and therefore highly technical. But under personal instruction and guidance the way is smooth and easy.“ [Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Science of Being and Art of Living (New York: Plume/Penguine Group, 1963/2001), p. 35-36]

This principle applies to any medium of learning the Transcendental Meditation technique other than learning it through personalized instruction—CDs, videos, online—and to any form of meditation self-training. When a person learns the TM technique, every instruction is given out on the basis of the previous instruction being understood and acknowledged. The certified TM teacher guides the student step by step, adjusting the teaching process according to the pace of the student.

The process of systematic "effortless transcending" is simple and easy, but also very, very delicate; so delicate that it was lost to society, East and West, for thousands of years simply because of misunderstanding and inadequate teaching methods. Maharishi revived correct practice of this technique and structured a systematic, standardized course of personal instruction to ensure that everyone everywhere can gain maximum benefit from meditation.

If the TM technique could be learned from a book, CD or online, it would be taught that way. Selling CDs or offering this practice online could reduce educational expenses, but we would not see the benefits that people enjoy from TM practice. The TM organization's purpose is not to make money or sell a product at the most marketable price point to maximize sales. The purpose of the non-profit, educational organization is to create a better world by bringing the full benefits of this meditation to as many people as possible. This can be done only by preserving the effectiveness and quality (or 'purity') of the TM technique through proper teaching methods and providing ongoing meditator support.

Different practice/different results:

NSR is an autodidactic method of learning. This means the learner takes on the role of both student and teacher. A fundamental requirement for transcending is innocence—being natural and simple without complicating the process. A student is challenged to be completely simple and innocent when trying to teach themselves how to be simple and innocent.

The TM technique differs from NSR practice in many other ways—besides in how it is taught and practiced:

Scientific research: There are no peer-reviewed, controlled research studies verifying benefits from NSR meditation. It is claimed in NSR marketing materials that NSR practice produces the same results as the TM technique, but such strong claims are unsupported by research.

Followup: NSR does not provide continuing followup as needed with a trained and experienced instructor.

• The TM program offers personal "checking" of meditation: a systematic, one-on-one process that stabilizes correct practice and ensures effortless transcending, offered freely in all TM centers to everyone who has learned the TM technique.

• Knowledge program: The TM program provides ongoing advanced lectures, providing further knowledge and meditation instruction—offered at no charge in every TM Center.

Source: The Transcendental Meditation technique is authentic—a gift from the most ancient and revered tradition of meditation on earth, the Vedic tradition of India.

The TM course—one-time fee for a lifetime program:

To learn the Transcendental Mediation technique, or if you have questions, I suggest you contact your local TM center (or call 888-LEARN-TM) and speak to a certified meditation instructor. Learn about the 15 hours (or more) of training you get during the TM course and the careful personalized instruction you receive. Learn about the one-on-one followup—a lifetime of personal guidance, as needed—and the optional, ongoing advanced classes and group meditations at TM centers.

Maharishi created a wealth of knowledge and clarification to ensure that your understanding can grow as your experience deepens. All of this followup is available to you for the rest of your life when you learn the TM technique—at no further charge after you've completed the initial seven-step TM course. And learn about the gift of scholarships and grants for people in financial need, to help pay for such comprehensive training.

The Transcendental Meditation program comes from the oldest, possibly most venerated tradition of self-development on earth, the Vedic Tradition of India. Personalized meditation instruction has has been upheld by the master teachers of this great tradition of tradition of Enlightenment for thousands of years. I invite you to enjoy the gift of meditation from this ancient tradition and experience the many benefits of twice daily TM practice.

*Vedic: The Vedic (VAY-dik) tradition of knowledge is the oldest continuous tradition of knowledge on Earth. The Vedic tradition includes detailed information on a wide range of topics—from health care to architecture, from agriculture to music. But it focuses especially on knowledge about consciousness, technologies of consciousness, and evolution to enlightenment—the highest state of human functioning. People sometimes assume that the Vedic wisdom is a cultural tradition, relevant only in India. But Newton’s laws of motion are not English or Christian, nor Einstein’s theory of relativity German or Jewish. Scientific discoveries are true for all people, all cultures.

® Transcendental Meditation, TM and Maharishi are registered or common law trademarks licensed to Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation and are used under sublicense.

Review: Down Joe Kellett's Rabbit Hole

2009-03-18T03:33:00.034-04:00

By Tom Ball

Beginning with the faulty premise that TM practice produces a trance, the author of this critical site quickly descends into a labyrinth of personal issues and idiosyncratic interpretations.

“The story of my own fall…”

“This is not the experience that everyone has…”

—Joe Kellett, creator of "Down the TM Rabbit Hole"

Using detailed narrative, repetition of assertions, and storybook illustrations, the author of “suggestibility.org” tries his own powers of suggestion to argue that the most widely practiced and extensively researched meditation technique in the world has no significant benefit and produces harmful effects.

I acknowledge the author’s apparent sincerity, but find the website’s basic premise untenable and the barrage of negative assertions without merit.

If the sweeping accusations on the site were true, Transcendental Meditation would not have enjoyed such tremendous success around the world over the past 50 years, and the David Lynch Foundation—with growing numbers of scientists, scholars, physicians, businesspeople and educators—would not show continuing enthusiasm and support for the Transcendental Meditation program.

The site's fantastic claims, presented below, are at odds not only with peer-reviewed science but with the experiences of millions of people around the world enjoying the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation technique in their daily lives.

(To read what a psychiatrist says about Joe Kellet, click here.)

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Rabbit Hole: The TM technique induces a “trance state” through use of “the power of suggestion.”

Fact: Numerous scientific research studies on the Transcendental Meditation technique show that the practice does not remotely resemble hypnotic trance, nor is the subjective experience trance-like: as brain research shows, mental alertness increases, and the meditator does not become disassociated from surroundings as during hypnotic states.

Science has established that the physiology of hypnosis is generally non-distinctive, whereas the Transcendental Meditation technique consistently produces a unique parameter of physiological changes, characterized by a state of deep physiological rest and relaxation, beneficial changes in biochemistry and integration of brain functioning as indicated by EEG and neural imaging research. This physiological signature—known as the fourth state of consciousness—is unique to the TM technique and is unlike ordinary waking, sleeping, dreaming or hypnosis.

Improved Brain Functioning:
Unique to TM practice, brainwave coherence spreads over the frontal regions of the brain, the left and right hemispheres and posterior regions, clearly distinguishing the technique from hypnosis and other forms of meditation. Researchers have long known that most experiences (including hypnotic trance) activate only small, specific portions of the brain. Studies indicate that the Transcendental Meditation technique enlivens and coordinates synchronous brain activity over a wide area—stimulating what neuroscientists call “more efficient, integrated brain functioning.”

Twenty-four separate, peer-reviewed studies on brain patterns of people practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique show stabilized, long-term coherence in brainwaves, indicating the growth of improved brain functioning in daily life. Brainwave coherence is healthy and desirable for many reasons: it is associated with increased intelligence and creativity, improved moral reasoning and self-actualization.

Neuroscience has found no instance of hypnotic trance producing such results.

Enhanced Critical Thinking:
“Down the Rabbit Hole” states that people subjected to trance “are likely to have a severely reduced level of critical evaluation about anything that they are told immediately after they come out of a trance state.”

According to numerous research studies, the Transcendental Meditation technique creates a more integrated functioning in the frontal areas of the brain—called the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for higher-level discrimination and decision making. Also, reaction time is faster after TM practice, and research shows a general increase overtime in creativity, IQ, comprehension, and problem-solving abilities. Those who practice the technique actually become less susceptible to suggestion and control by other people, as shown by increased critical thinking, self-sufficiency and self-concept. People practicing the technique also display increased field independence, which psychologists associate with leadership qualities, self-reliance and independent thinking. Students of the Maharishi School (K-12) in Fairfield, Iowa, where the Transcendental Meditation technique is an integral part of the curriculum, are national and world champions at competitions involving critical, creative and innovative thinking.

Fact: There is no 'suggestion' involved in the Transcendental Meditation technique, whereas in hypnosis the physiology and behavior depend on the suggestion of another. (Self-hypnosis depends on a suggestion made by oneself, and such auto-suggestion is also absent during TM practice.) A person can come out of Transcendental Meditation practice at any time—no one is needed to "snap" you out.

How does the Transcendental Meditation technique work?
The TM technique allows the mind to settle inward by special use of the normal, natural mechanics of the thinking process. Effortlessness is a key feature of the Transcendental Meditation technique. TM practice requires no control or expectation, just simple innocence. The assertion that the Transcendental Meditation technique involves expectation and suggestion shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the practice.

Rabbit Hole: The reported effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique result from “post-trance indoctrination,” “suggestion” and “expectation.”

Fact: Hundreds of scientific research studies, along with the direct experience of millions of people who have learned the Transcendental Meditation technique, shows that the practice does not produce a trance state (please see above). If there is no trance, there can be no “post-trance indoctrination.”

Are TM’s benefits real or imagined?
“Down the Rabbit Hole” asserts that people who practice the Transcendental Meditation technique are mistaken about the wide range of benefits they report, and that these people have been merely indoctrinated—influenced by the power of suggestion and expectation to believe in the benefits of the TM program. Yet fifty years of teaching the Transcendental Meditation technique around the world and forty years of peer-reviewed science shows that the benefits of the program are genuine and do not depend upon personal belief in the technique. Even skeptics who learn the TM technique typically report the same results as people who are “sold out” to the practice, which would not be the case if the benefits were based on expectation.

Click here for a summary of scientifically validated benefits for mind, body, relationships and environment.

Rabbit Hole: The Transcendental Meditation program is introduced as “a simple, natural, relaxation technique,” but is really a “spiritual system” with “hidden levels of indoctrination.”

Fact: The Transcendental Meditation program indeed provides deep relaxation, and some people may learn it for that reason, but the practice has never been presented as a mere relaxation technique. Since its introduction over 50 years ago, the Transcendental Meditation technique has been taught as a program for the holistic development of all aspects of life—unfoldment of full potential of individual and society.

Is it a spiritual system, or is it scientific?
The Transcendental Meditation program is a system: it's a systematic program of self-development, with proven benefits for mind, body and behavior, as well as spiritual benefits. All human activities—enjoying a movie, running a marathon, contemplative prayer—are enhanced by a healthier mind and body and more efficient brain functioning. Everything good about the brain depends on its orderly functioning. The enlivenment and integration of the brain that results from TM practice naturally improves one’s spiritual life as well as all other areas. People of all religions have found that the Transcendental Meditation program deepens their spiritual understanding because the practice refreshes the mind and awakens subtler values of awareness.

Spiritual development:
The founder of the Transcendental Meditation program, Maharishi, defines spirituality with a broad stroke: living the wholeness of life—healthy mind, healthy body, with one’s inner reserves of creativity and intelligence fully awakened. Spiritual development in this sense is irrespective of belief and is open to all faiths and spiritual perspectives through the Transcendental Meditation program.

Is knowledge of “spiritual aspects” withheld?
“Down the Rabbit Hole” maintains that the full extent of the Transcendental Meditation program, including advanced levels of knowledge, is not disclosed until a person becomes more deeply involved. This is incorrect: all options for advanced programs are presented during the initial course of instruction, and this has always been the case. In Transcendental Meditation introductory lectures, the spiritual benefits of TM practice are cited with the many other benefits for individual and society.

As one’s experience grows with twice-daily practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique, it is natural for understanding and the desire for more knowledge also to deepen, and there is no withholding of knowledge on the part of TM instructors. There are over 20 books and many advanced lecture videos readily available to the public that expound the full range of knowledge about the Transcendental Meditation program. Many of these books deeply explore the spiritual implications of the practice and have been available in bookstores everywhere since the 1960s.

Most major cities have a TM Center for continued learning and instruction. Anyone who wishes to become a teacher of the TM technique is welcome to apply for TM Teacher Training, where all the intricate details of imparting the practice can be learned.

From spiritual organization to scientific?
“Down the Rabbit Hole” asserts that the Transcendental Meditation Movement began as a spiritual organization, but then changed its image to "appear" scientific. This is a misinterpretation of fact.

In the earliest days of the Transcendental Meditation Movement, no scientific studies had ever been conducted on the effects of meditation. But from the beginning of his teaching activities, Maharishi invited scientists everywhere to research the effects of the TM technique. As research studies accumulated it became possible to speak about the Transcendental Meditation program in more scientific language—“the language of our times.”

However, the Transcendental Meditation Movement has never shied from emphasizing the spiritual benefits of the practice. In fact, an oft-stated goal of the Transcendental Meditation program is to “realize the spiritual aspirations of mankind in this generation.”

There is as much open discussion of spiritual implications today as there was 50 years ago.

Rabbit Hole: The Transcendental Meditation technique can produce “unpleasant, even dangerous” results.

Fact: More than 600 scientific research studies have been published on the effects of the Transcendental Meditation program, involving over 20,000 subjects practicing the TM technique; no legitimate, well-controlled, peer-reviewed studies have ever found the practice to be unpleasant or harmful in any way—all such studies show positive results. Controlled research on the effects of TM practice has been conducted under a wide variety of settings and conditions: on general populations, people in the workplace, athletes, groups of students at all grade levels, patients at high-risk for heart disease, students with learning disorders, factory workers, members of the military, groups of corporate executives, new meditators, long-term meditators on advanced courses, and people with pre-existing mental health problems. All these studies show significant improvements in mental and physical health, with no negative side effects.

"Harmful effects" studies?
What about those studies said to have found harmful effects? “Down the Rabbit Hole” and a few other anti-meditation websites do present a handful of research studies that purport to show harmful effects from the Transcendental Meditation program—or that the program produces no significant benefit. However, these few papers all pertained to uncontrolled studies with so few subjects that the findings were statistically insignificant—and some of these studies did not actually investigate the TM technique at all, but considered other meditation practices that the authors erroneously generalized as “transcendental meditation.” The claim of harmful effects from the TM technique is typically based on unfounded speculation with no empirical evidence. For more about scientific papers said to show negative results, click here. For more about studies said to show that TM practice produces no results, click here.

Rabbit Hole: “There is no difference at all between other meditation techniques and TM,” and the same benefits “can also be obtained by other methods.”

Fact: Over 485 research studies on various approaches to meditation, relaxation and stress reduction, involving over 30,000 subjects, has shown that the various forms of meditation do not produce the same effects.

Because each kind of meditation practice engages the mind in it’s own way, there is no reason to expect the same results from the various methods, or that scientific research on the Transcendental Meditation program will apply to the various other practices. There have been many controlled studies comparing the effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique to other practices, such as Zen, Mindfulness, Tibetan Buddhist and Vipassana meditation, Progressive Muscle Relaxation and Benson’s relaxation response. These studies examined such factors as brainwave patterns, levels of rest and benefits for mind and body. While other forms of meditation have been found to produce good effects in specific areas, these various practices have different aims and are not necessarily intended to produce the holistic range of effects found to result from the Transcendental Meditation technique.

Neural imaging and EEG studies indicate that TM practice creates a unique brain pattern: it is the only technique known to create widespread brainwave coherence and enliven all areas of the brain. The Transcendental Meditation technique also produces deeper rest compared to other practices, and studies show the TM technique more effective at reducing anxiety, hypertension and depression, reducing drug and alcohol abuse, and promoting self-actualization.

For more about the many distinctions between the Transcendental Meditation technique and other forms of meditation, click here.

Summary
“Down the Rabbit Hole” begins with the faulty premise that the Transcendental Meditation technique produces a trance state, and then tries to pull the reader into a rabbit hole of misunderstanding and confusion. The author’s detailed personal narrative displays gestures of reason and authenticity, but soon becomes so far removed from the common experience of Transcendental Meditation that one wonders if the story is about the same TM practice that has been embraced worldwide for the past 50 years—and in a very real sense it is not. In the same way that science shows TM to be the “complete opposite of a trance,” reports of people everywhere who have learned the TM technique show its results to be the complete opposite of what “Down the Rabbit Hole” describes. One might say that this 16-page website is not really about Transcendental Meditation at all, but about the author’s personal struggle with what he has believed the program to be.

Evidence?
“Down the Rabbit Hole’s” dizzying but carefully devised Alice-in-Wonderland tale and its many collaborating links may catch some readers unawares, but the story remains utterly unsubstantiated. Consider items the author presents as supportive evidence:

• The website’s first page links to a 40-year-old affidavit of harsh allegations made by one man (what one might call a "disgruntled employee") against Maharishi University of Management. Allegedly, the document was signed by a former professor of MUM whom the website claims was also the university’s legal counsel. However, according to University records the author of these allegations, who worked on University clerical staff for a few months, was never actually on faculty at MUM (his application for faculty was denied), nor did he ever serve as legal counsel for the University. He appeared in court to present his allegations but his testimony was dismissed by the court. None of the allegations were legally acted on or substantiated. Incredibly, the author of "Down the Rabbit Hole" offers this document as his first major, authoritative proof that his experience with the TM program is not unique but shared by others.

• Again reaching four decades into the past, “Down the Rabbit Hole” links to a series of second- or third-hand anonymous stories collected by anti-meditation activists in the early 1970s—stories about unnamed people who were said to have experienced extremely harmful and bizarre effects from meditation. No factual records or even firsthand testimonies have ever been produced to suggest that these extreme accounts were anything more than a hoax.

An unreliable narrator?
Beginning on the home page, with overreaching parallels between TM and The Church of Scientology, the author’s reliability as a narrator grows increasingly suspect. I find that virtually every statement on this website reflects a gross misunderstanding of the Transcendental Meditation program and its founder, Maharishi. Most of the statements are blatant falsehoods.

The site’s author admits to having been severely delusional during the 1970s, the years he was active in the TM organization, and he claims that TM practice was the cause of his distress. One must consider the possibility that the reason the author’s account of the Transcendental Meditation program differs so radically from the norm is because he is recalling experiences that were psychotic delusions.

It is unfortunate that the author attributes his distress and delusions to meditation—especially when there is overwhelming evidence that continued practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique would have improved his mental health. (Please see, "A Psychiatrist Responds to Down the TM Rabbit Hole.")

It’s a technique, not a religion—no belief required
The site’s author claims that as a TM instructor he frequently spoke untruths about the Transcendental Meditation program—such as telling people that the practice is a mere relaxation technique or that it is not a religion. This and many other such statements highlight the author’s confusion about the program he was supposedly trained to teach. He professes that the Transcendental Meditation program requires acceptance of spiritual beliefs about the practice and about Maharishi’s status as a teacher. Yet the Transcendental Meditation course contains no such notions, nor are certified TM instructors asked to accept or promote such beliefs. To assert that the Transcendental Meditation program is a religious doctrine is to commit a category error: TM is a mental technique, not a belief system. The theoretical aspects of the program are not intended or presented as doctrines to be believed in, but as principles to be verified through direct personal experience, and the substantiation of benefits through scientific research lends empirical verification.

“Down the Rabbit Hole” concludes by attempting to refute possible public responses to the author’s anti-TM rhetoric—responses such as: the site’s author is merely disgruntled, he is seeking to profit, or he is just being negative or malicious. “Down the Rabbit Hole” spends over 2000 words in defense against these imagined responses.

As a full-time TM teacher since 1977, having noticed only positive effects of TM practice in the lives of friends, family and the hundreds of people whom I've taught, I suggest that the most plausible explanation for the author’s idiosyncratic interpretation of TM is this: Because his entire argument is based on the false belief that TM practice produces an unhealthy state of hypnotic trance, the man is simply wrong.

A renowned psychiatrist responds to Joe Kellet's "rabbit hole"

Why is the TM technique trademarked?

2009-03-18T03:32:00.001-04:00

by Tom McKinley Ball

If the Transcendental Meditation program is taught by a non-profit educational organization, then why is the TM technique trademarked—like McDonald’s or Microsoft?

The registered trademark sign (®) is commonly associated with for-profit corporations who use trademarks to protect their brand names, products or services against infringement by competitors, and thus help insure profits. However, in the case of the Transcendental Meditation technique and other programs founded by Maharishi, there is a different reason for the registered trademark.

The Transcendental Meditation technique is unique. There is no other practice that works in the same way or produces quite the same results. Many scientific research studies conducted at medical schools and independent research institutions worldwide have investigated and compared the effects of Transcendental Meditation technique to various types of meditation practices—such as Zen, Vipassana, mantra meditation, and various relaxation techniques—and no other meditation procedure has been found to produce the wide range of effects for mind, body, behavior and environment that result from TM practice.

The only way to legally distinguish the TM technique from other types of meditation available is to maintain the technique’s registered trademark. This way, when someone learns the Transcendental Meditation technique, they can rest assured they are learning the real thing, because only highly trained and certified TM teachers can teach this technique or legally use the name ‘TM’ or 'Transcendental Meditation.'

Trademarks protect consumers by allowing them to identify ‘the real thing’ as opposed to a facsimile. If meditation techniques were all basically the same and produced the same results, there would be no altruistic reason to trademark or otherwise distinguish the Transcendental Meditation technique. But all practices are not the same and do not produce the same results, as research shows.

The registered trademark is another way of maintaining the effectiveness or 'purity' of the Transcendental Meditation program—helping ensure that even future generations will benefit.

A Psychiatrist’s Perspective: "Down the TM Rabbit Hole"

2009-03-18T03:00:00.005-04:00

The post below is a psychiatrist's response to "www.suggestibility.org," a Website created by a person who formerly practiced the Transcendental Meditation program and then claimed that TM practice produced harmful psychological effects. Dr. Krag points out that psychotic disorders can be triggered by, or coincide with, any major life event—such as joining the Army, entering college, or job stress; as unfortunate that may be, it is unhealthy and perhaps unwise to blame the Army, college, or job for that mental disorder.
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James Krag, M.D., is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, president of the Psychiatric Society of Virginia and was president of the Virginia Association of Community Psychiatrists for four years. He is currently Medical Director of Liberty Point, a residential treatment program for adolescents with psychiatric problems.

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I am a Board Certified Psychiatrist who has worked with people of all ages and with a wide range of psychiatric disorders. I have worked in both hospitals and out-patient clinics. For a number of years I was Medical Director of a community mental health center and have encountered many people with sever and persistent psychiatric disorders. I have also been using Transcendental Meditation personally since 1970.

I have been asked to comment on the account of Joe Kellett, who has blamed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for various difficulties that have emerged in his life.

Psychotic disorders first tend to appear in the late teens and early 20s, though they can manifest at both younger and older ages. This group of disorders seems to manifest independent of economic level, country of origin or intelligence. The problem can persist for varying lengths of time and degrees of intensity. Fortunately this set of disorders only affects a small percentage of the world's population. Unfortunately for those that are affected by these disorders, it can become devastating to their life.

Although there are many theories for what brings these problems on, there often seems to be notable changes or stressors present in the persons life directly prior to the onset. For instance, I have seen this occur when men and women attend "boot camp" in their military training or when they leave home to attend college. I have also seen it when there is a death in the family or a major physical illness for the individual. Certainly it has long been noted that substance abuse can trigger these disorders. I have even seen it occur when a person works a "rolling shift" and their sleep-wake cycle gets disrupted. I have seen it occur for people when they enter a new charismatic religion and believe that they have been "saved". It is important to note that for individuals who are not susceptible to developing a psychotic disorder, none of the above stressors would trigger the onset of this disorder.

The account written by Joe Kellett is an interesting and unfortunate story. He attributes the problems he developed in his life to his involvement with the Transcendental Meditation program. I think it is entirely possible that he may have developed similar problems at some point had he experienced other notable life-style changes. If a person develops a psychotic disorder when they enter the U.S. Army, do we say that the Army caused the problem? Do we blame the Army when the person is discharged because of it? Are universities at fault when every year in the U.S. a percentage of the incoming students develop a psychotic disorder? Is the university at fault when the person then leaves the school? Is the field of psychiatry at fault when a person enters a hospital for care while delusional? (There is a very active group opposing psychiatry for "causing" psychotic disorders.)

Clearly the vast majority of young people going through notable changes and challenges in their life do not develop psychotic disorders whether they are in the military, colleges, or the Transcendental Meditation program. It is unfortunate that Mr. Kellett seems to be among that minority that develops such problems. The world is not perfect and institutions are not perfect. Perhaps it would be more productive for him to not criticize a specific organization that he was involved with when he became disturbed, and rather to join forces with those organizations that are working to find causes and treatments for psychotic disorders.

James Krag, M.D. FAPA
Liberty Point Residential Treatment Program
Staunton, Virginia
1/14/08

About this site—a note from the editor

2009-03-17T02:41:00.053-04:00

This is a non-official blog that aims to provide reliable information and critical discourse for anyone interested in learning about the Transcendental Meditation program. We provide corrective, expert responses to myths and misunderstandings about the TM program propagated on the Web, and answer questions raised by skeptics—with explanations supported by scientific reference and factual evidence.

Why this blog? Everyone knows that just because something is posted on the Internet, that does not make it true. There are several prominent Websites that claim astronaut Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon. Similarly, there are sites claiming that there are no real scientific studies verifying the TM program's benefits, that it's no different from relaxing in your easy chair, that it's a form of mind control with dangerous effects, that it's a religion or cult—seriously—that it's a moneymaking "$3 billion empire" with plans to take over the world, convert everyone to a foreign religion without the masses knowing they were converted, all while secretly setting up a worldwide "Vedic theocracy" to sacrifice horses!

Sites making unfounded assertions can gain visibility on the Internet because search engines collect information based on keywords and “relevant” content, not on accuracy. It’s not surprising, then, that search engines would yield a handful of disingenuous "anti-meditation" sites posing as “objective” or “skeptical,” which, in fact, have agendas and present untruths or misinformation about the TM program. (The same is often true for “Wikipedia,” an amalgam of shifting content assembled by a rotating group of “volunteer editors”—who are not required to have any expertise on a given subject.)

Both sides: The blog is called "Skeptics On TM" because it presents the most common objections to the TM program raised by skeptics, but unlike the existing "skeptical" resources, here we present both sides: scientists, medical doctors, psychologists and scholars respond to the standard criticisms.

Independent: The blog is independent because it is personally maintained by a board of advisors and contributors—people friendly to the TM program and knowledgeable about the practice—acting voluntarily and not under the auspices of any organization. Also, unlike some so-called "critical" Internet resources on the TM program, this blog is independent of (i.e., not driven by) the extreme bias and negativity that typifies the "anti-meditation" mindset.

Non-official: The blog is non-official because the site itself is not affiliated with or overseen by the TM organization.

For the official Transcendental Meditation program Websites, please visit www.TM.org or see the resources link on our home page.

Submissions, comments, questions and contrasting viewpoints are invited. ENJOY!

Site editor: Tom McKinley Ball

Skeptics on TM Advisory Board:

Jonathan Shear, PhD: Founding editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Affiliated Associate Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University

Peter Scharf, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit, Department of Classics, Brown University

David Haight, PhD: Professor of Philosophy; Chairman, Dept. of Philosophy, Plymouth State University

Patrick Pomfrey, PsyD: Clinical and Forensic Psychologist, Asheville, NC

Bridget Harwell, PhD: Clinical Psychologist, Cleveland, Ohio

Advisory Board: Skeptics on TM

2009-03-16T23:11:00.008-04:00

Jonathan Shear, PhD: founding editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Affiliated Associate Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University

Peter Scharf, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit, Department of Classics, Brown University

David Haight, PhD: Professor of Philosophy; Chairman, Dept. of Philosophy, Plymouth State University

Patrick Pomfrey, PsyD: Clinical and Forensic Psychologist, Asheville, NC

Bridget Harwell, PhD: Clinical Psychologist, Cleveland, Ohio

Jonathan Shear, PhD

2009-03-16T21:36:00.001-04:00

Jonathan Shear received a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics summa cum laude from Brandeis University, and was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D.

While a Fulbright Scholar in Karl Popper’s Philosophy of Science Department at the London School of Economics, Dr. Shear became interested in Eastern accounts of mind not ordinarily discussed by Western philosophers and psychologists. This led to examination of how Eastern experiential procedures could provide an expanded empirical base for our Western theories of mind, knowledge and values, as well as regular practice of such procedures themselves. The significance of such procedures and the experiences they produce has remained the focus of Professor Shear's work for nearly forty years. He is author of "The Inner Dimension: Philosophy and the Experience of Consciousness" (Peter Lang), coeditor of "The View from Within: First-Person Methodologies" (Imprint Academic), coeditor of "Models of the Self" (Imprint Academic), and editor of "Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem" (MIT). Professor Shear is also a founding Editor of the peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary Journal of Consciousness Studies.

He is an internationally known expert on meditation experiences, publishing and lecturing widely throughout India, China and the West.

Professor Shear is an Affiliated Associate Professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he has taught Philosophy for the past 19 years.

Top researchers criticize new meditation study:

2009-03-15T05:40:00.007-04:00

Did a major, well-controlled scientific study find
that meditation has no proven clinical benefits?

July 24, 2007

A controversial new government-funded report, which found that meditation does not improve health, is methodologically flawed, incomplete, and should be retracted.

“Meditation Practices for Health: State of the Research” was a health technology assessment report conducted at the University of Alberta and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the NIH-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The report was released earlier this month.

Professor Harald Walach of the University of Northampton and School of Social Sciences and the Samueli Institute for Information Biology in England reviewed the paper before its release and strongly urged the authors to withhold publication. “When I looked carefully into the details of the study, the whole analytical strategy looked rather haphazard and ad hoc” Walach said.

Robert Schneider, M.D., F.A.C.C., is one of the leading researchers on the health effects of meditation in the nation. Dr. Schneider has been the recipient of more than $22 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health over the past 20 years for his research on the effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique and natural medicine on cardiovascular disease. He says that relevant findings were excluded from the report, including peer-reviewed studies on the effects of this meditation technique on hypertension, cardiovascular disease, myocardial ischemia, atherosclerosis, changes to physiology, and improvements to mental and physical health.

Dr. Schneider cited two studies published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 2005, which demonstrated that individuals with high blood pressure who were randomly assigned to TM groups had a 30% lower risk for mortality than controls. These studies should have been included in the AHRQ report, Dr. Schneider said, but were inexplicably excluded. In addition, 75 published studies were overlooked, even though these were sent to the authors by one of the reviewers.

Dr. Schneider said the AHRQ report incorrectly analyzed studies and incorrectly rated the quality of the studies while applying statistical methods poorly, arbitrarily, and unsystematically. The report also included errors in collecting data from research studies, in recording data from papers, and in classifying studies. Several peer-reviewers pointed out major errors and inadequacies in the report prior to publication. However, these critiques by outside reviewers were largely ignored. (For critiques of the report, see http://www.mum.edu/pdf/inmp_pressrelease.pdf)

Dr. Schneider also cited a study published in the American Medical Association’s journal Archives of Internal Medicine in 2006 — one year after the AHRQ review ended in 2005 — which confirmed that the Transcendental Meditation technique lowers high blood pressure in heart disease patients. The study was conducted at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and was funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Pseudoscience and Victor Stenger’s Quantum Gods

2009-03-14T05:57:00.006-04:00

Mistaken, Misinformed and Misleading

David Scharf

Department of Physics

Maharishi University of Management

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”—Albert Einstein

Abstract:

Quantum spirituality—the idea that some aspect of consciousness plays a fundamental role in the universe and that advanced physics should be interpreted as having to some extent already incorporated this principle—has had distinguished representation among both physicists and philosophers. It has generated an upsurge of grassroots enthusiasm because of the widespread sense that science and spirituality, rather than being fundamentally separate or even opposed, are in fact deeply connected and mutually reinforcing. Victor Stenger’s purpose in writing Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness is to “debunk” this idea—but attention to the details shows that it is actually Stenger’s arguments that need the debunking.

Stenger—a retired physicist who is leveraging his scientific background to try to discredit anything and everything that smacks of spirituality—doesn’t respect his intellectual opponents enough to get their positions right; in some instances he appears to deliberately misrepresent their views; and, most important, his own reasoning is characterized by unremitting carelessness. Moreover, there is a method to his carelessness—it enables him to systematically avoid addressing the tough arguments of his opponents. Hence we find him frequently setting up a straw man by misrepresenting the debate as a simple matter of science and reason versus superstition. Once having defined this as the issue, all he needs to do is assume the attitude of an outraged scientist and heap on the ridicule. But if he had done his homework and taken the trouble to really understand the science and logic supporting quantum spirituality, he would have discovered that it is harder to dismiss than he had imagined. Indeed, the more carefully—and yes, critically—one considers the issues, the more one finds quantum spirituality to be eminently worthy of serious consideration, as a plausible and measured approach to the most long-standing and intractable questions at the basis of science.

In my view, quantum spirituality will prove to represent a phase transition in the history of science of immense proportions. In this context Stenger’s books, and those of like-minded debunkers, represent a futile rear-guard action, intended to forestall what will come to be seen as the inexorable progress of science toward a more profound understanding of natural law.

Debunking the debunkers

With the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, consciousness and matter were assigned to radically different spheres. Mathematical physics pursued the investigation of matter as far as it could go without invoking consciousness or spirituality, while God and soul were assigned to the religious sphere. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this uneasy truce was disturbed by the advent of psychology as a scientific discipline, which reintroduced questions about the relationship between science and religion that had been dormant since the overthrow of the geocentric worldview. But with the introduction of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the assumption that physics can proceed without addressing consciousness has been called into question at an even more fundamental level.

Quantum spirituality—the idea that some aspect of consciousness plays a fundamental role in the universe and that advanced physics should be interpreted as having to some extent already incorporated this principle—has had distinguished representation among both physicists and philosophers, including many of the founders of quantum theory itself. Quantum spirituality has generated an upsurge of grassroots enthusiasm precisely because of the widespread sense that the uneasy relationship between science and spirituality has been based on a misconception, and that science and spirituality, rather than being fundamentally separate or even opposed, are in fact deeply connected and mutually reinforcing. Victor Stenger’s purpose in writing Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness is to “debunk” this idea as much as possible. In his view it is “the result of misunderstanding and, in some cases, intentional misrepresentation” (p. 18) of what science really says and means.[i]

Stenger believes that he is bringing a scientific outlook and much needed critical thinking to the debate, and he encourages his readers to persevere in reading his book “since science and the ability to think critically, inside or outside science, can be learned only by diligent effort” (p.18). However, as we will soon see, it is actually Stenger’s arguments that need the debunking. Even the British philosopher of physics Gordon McCabe, himself not particularly receptive to quantum spirituality, remarks about Quantum Gods that “there seems little evidence that Stenger has a knowledge of philosophy, or the philosophy of science. As a consequence, he commits the most obvious and egregious of errors” (McCabe, 2009).

In my view, quantum spirituality will prove to represent a historical phase transition of immense proportions. In this context I see Stenger’s books, and those of like-minded debunkers, as a futile rear-guard action, intended to forestall what will come to be seen as the inexorable progress of science toward a more profound understanding of natural law. One major problem with trying to keep consciousness and spirituality outside the domain of physics is that physics can’t responsibly accept the idea that anything is outside its domain. If something affects physical processes, physics is going to assign variables and operators, and start to model the interactions with equations. In this sense, the domain of physics is infinitely expandable. The old dichotomy between natural and supernatural phenomena, for example, is being superseded. From this perspective, even God’s interventions would not be understood as a violation of natural law; they would embody a deeper level of natural law, perhaps, but physics would still want to understand and model the operative principles.

There are two broad hypotheses about how consciousness should be integrated into the domain of physics. The first is that consciousness is to be understood as a localized product of brain processes. This appears to be what Stenger has in mind when he confidently asserts, “No empirical evidence supports the notion that mind is anything other than the product of purely material forces.” (p. 262) This approach has been the perspective of materialist philosophies of mind for a long time; but these have generated longstanding and apparently insoluble skeptical problems—such as the brain-in-a-vat premise on which the popular movie The Matrix was based—suggesting that this whole approach may be flawed. Incidentally, one need not look far for empirical evidence that mind is something other “than the product of purely material forces.” The inexplicable existence of consciousness and the cognitive autonomy inherent in moral responsibility and rational thought prima facie provides such empirical evidence. Stenger gives no argument whatever for why we should discount this evidence from everyday experience. Probably he means that neuroscience may someday provide an exhaustive account of mind and consciousness, and it is incumbent on anyone, who doubts neuroscience’s boundless capacity, to provide evidence to the contrary. But the distinguished philosopher of mind, Hilary Putnam, would consider Stenger to be over-confident:

Saying “Science may someday find a way to reduce consciousness (or reference, or whatever) to physics” is, here and now, saying that science may someday do we know-not-what we-know-not-how. And from the fact that those words may in the future come to have a sense we will understand, it no more follows that they now express anything we can understand than it follows from the fact that I may someday learn to play the violin that I can now play the violin” (Putnam, 1999, p. 173).

The second hypothesis is that consciousness and spirituality enter into physics at a more fundamental level of natural law and, indeed, if there is to be a reduction, it will be the material world that will prove to be a product of consciousness. This is the theme proposed by physicists and other researchers who ascribe to the model embodied in quantum spirituality. From this perspective, the reason that quantum spirituality generates such intense hostility in some commentators is not because it is an unscientific idea, but precisely because it would represent a scientific revolution of such enormous magnitude. Its acceptance would destabilize the worldview of those for whom the materialistic paradigm has become a de facto belief system—a faith-based secular religion. This would explain the degree of hostility displayed by Victor Stenger in Quantum Gods and by Michael Shermer, the Scientific American editor who wrote the foreword.

As a physicist and philosopher of physics, naturally I look for scholarship and thoughtful analysis in writings about important foundational and scientific material; but in this book I was severely disappointed. Stenger is a retired physicist who has decided to leverage his scientific background in order to discredit anything and everything that smacks of spirituality or religion. Certainly there are clear-thinking atheists and materialists who have made valuable contributions to the debates regarding mind and its place in nature. And, although I ultimately don’t agree with their positions, I can appreciate the carefulness of their analysis—and my own thinking is clarified and enriched as a result of reading their work. But Stenger’s book is not like that. As we will see, his writing is polemical rather than conscientious; he doesn’t have enough respect for his intellectual opponents to get their positions right; in some instances he appears to deliberately misrepresent their views; and, most important, his own reasoning is characterized by carelessness throughout the book.

Stenger has published eight recent books in this vein, and his previous one, God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, was number 21 on the New York Times bestseller list. His books generally get enthusiastic reviews by the “new atheist” crowd, including such like-minded writers as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Michael Shermer. Shermer’s foreword establishes the polemical tone for their book with its provocative title, “Quantum Flapdoodle and Other Flummery.” This foreword refers to “quantum flapdoodle” or “flapdoodlists” four times in four pages, with “New Age nuttiness,” “airy fairy deity” and “pseudoscience” thrown in, to make sure we get the point.[ii]

With this inauspicious beginning, the book takes the reader on a grand tour of science and spirituality, taking on not only “quantum spirituality” and “quantum theology” but also more traditional topics such as the argument from intelligent design and free will, not to mention the problem of evil and suffering, which has been vigorously debated for millennia. Stenger has a chapter devoted to debunking psychic phenomena,[iii] and he even takes a few swipes at alternative medicine. He ends with a chapter laying out his own conclusions about the implications of science for spiritual and philosophical questions, which he characterizes as “nothingism,” according to which, “The universe is truly comprehensible as a purely material system. We can fit all observations to a model of elementary particles … that move around in an empty void—just as the Greek atomists’ conjectures from thousands of years ago …” (p.239).

Stenger takes special aim at the two recent, popular films, What the Bleep Do We Know and The Secret, and particularly at the featured scientists in those films, including Fred Alan Wolf, Stuart Hameroff, Jeffrey Satinover, Amit Goswami and John Hagelin. He devotes a full chapter to assailing not only Hagelin but also Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation organization and Maharishi University of Management. In Stenger’s view, “Popular films and books over the past generation have promoted the notion that modern physics and particularly quantum mechanics have revealed a connection between human consciousness and reality that is purported to provide a scientific basis for a spiritual component to the universe…. However, none of these claims stand up under critical scrutiny …” (p.242). As we will soon see, however, the problem is not that Stenger’s scrutiny is overly critical but that, on the contrary, he is not nearly critical or careful enough.

In the next sections we will analyze Quantum Gods from two points of view, one negative and the other positive. First, we will ask: Is Stenger’s book a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience? Debunkers love this word. Pseudoscience claims the prestige and authority of science but lacks the careful attention to detail and rigorous method characteristic of real science. Second, and more important, although Stenger’s treatment of quantum spirituality is unremittingly slapdash, he does touch on important issues concerning science and spirituality that deserve proper development. We will take this opportunity to do what Stenger ought to have done, namely, explain why serious-minded people think quantum spirituality is important and why it presents a profound and plausible alternative to the atheist/materialist option. Even if one ultimately disagrees with quantum spirituality, scientific method requires an accurate presentation of the ideas and a careful consideration of the best reasons for their adoption.

In the following pages, we will look at Stenger’s misrepresentation of a number of the important themes underlying quantum spirituality, including:

The powerful idea that there is a fundamental aspect of consciousness that is scientifically primary, and how this differs from the silly idea of individual solipsism.
The manner in which key scientific theorists, such as Isaac Newton, attempted to integrate science and spirituality.
The idea that a fundamental component of intelligence is non-computational, meaning neither deterministic nor random.
What reductive materialism means and why it is difficult to reconcile with advanced physics.
Why quantum measurement and quantum entanglement may provide a better framework than classical physics for understanding the physics of consciousness.

In addition, we will examine Stenger’s ham-handed criticisms of the views of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and quantum physicist John Hagelin. Finally, we will conclude with an evaluation of Stenger’s version of materialist metaphysics, which he characterizes as nothingism, and we will show that there is substantially less to nothingism than Stenger imagines.

Why is Stenger so careless?

Stenger begins his critique of quantum spirituality with an overly simplistic statement of the theme of What the Bleep Do We Know!?:

The theme is simply stated: Quantum mechanics teaches us that we make our own reality. As we will see, this theme is central to what I call quantum spirituality, going back to the 1970s to an era that was called the New Age. (p.35)

This statement is simplistic because, to begin with, quantum mechanics doesn’t teach philosophy, although it affords conceptual tools that may provide a richer framework for understanding and modeling the nature of consciousness and spirituality. Second, the we in “we make our own reality” refers to the idea that consciousness is the fundamental principle of reality; it needs to be emphasized that this is not the solipsistic idea that there are no natural laws and that we, as private individuals, can immediately have anything we want merely by wishing. And, third, the idea that consciousness is the fundamental principle of reality goes back farther than the 1970s.

Consider Stenger’s report on his verbal sparring with the respected physicist and Vedanta philosopher Amit Goswami:

I accused Goswami of solipsism, which is the doctrine that the self is the only reality and the world is all made up in our heads. Goswami objected vehemently that this was not at all his position. However, he has said elsewhere that our notion of being separate individuals is an illusion. I still do not see how the existence of one common “self,” the cosmic consciousness in which we all participate that manufactures reality, is any different from the solipsistic self who does the same. (p.39)

The fact that Goswami objected vehemently should have been a clue to Stenger that he needed to work harder to understand his opponent’s viewpoint, and his not doing so is an indication of his unwillingness to take his intellectual opponents seriously. Anyway, is it really so hard to understand the difference between the idea of consciousness as the fundamental reality and the solipsistic idea that “the world is all made up in our heads”? Certainly consciousness is intimately related to “our heads”—the brain and nervous system—this aspect of consciousness is individual, and obviously there are many different and separate individuals. But Goswami is suggesting that consciousness has a deeper level, which is universal, and it is this fundamental level which is at the basis of all reality. Goswami’s viewpoint—which is close to our own—is that this fundamental level of consciousness manifests both as the material world and as many different, conscious individuals. By contrast, solipsism is an unsophisticated view that you might hear at a late night freshman bull-session, where someone will provocatively argue that his own private inner life is all that there is, and everything else—including especially everyone he is debating—is just a figment of his imagination.

By trying to associate Goswami’s sophisticated viewpoint with solipsism, Stenger is setting up a straw man. It’s easier to change the subject and argue against solipsism than it is to address Goswami’s real position. Stenger has a persistent habit of misrepresenting the views of his opponents, as we will see, and this lack of rigor is part of the reason why his book should be characterized as pseudoscience.

The idea that consciousness has a deeper, transcendental level which constitutes the ultimate reality has a long and influential history, especially in the ancient Vedic tradition of India, where it has predominated for millennia, with a resulting rich and comprehensive theoretical framework—together with systematic empirical methods—based on the primacy of consciousness. We will return to this Vedic conception when we discuss Maharishi’s views below, in the context of Stenger’s chapter on them.[iv]

In Western thought the primacy of consciousness has had many distinguished representatives, including Plato, Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Hume, George Berkeley, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Edmund Husserl. In one of the simplest presentations, called idealism, George Berkeley proposed that all material objects exist and interact in consciousness; ultimately they are all ideas in the mind of God. In response, in what must be one of the most famous non-sequiturs in Western philosophy, Samuel Johnson kicked a stone and proclaimed, “I refute [Berkeley] thus!” But, from Berkeley’s point of view, Samuel Johnson, the stone and the laws of nature governing their interaction are all embedded in consciousness; so Johnson simply failed to understand the implications of idealism.

What’s worrisome in the present context is that Stenger also fails to understand the implications, or to consider them in a serious or thoughtful manner:

I will not take seriously the idealist view that there is only spirit. Samuel Johnson quickly refuted that by kicking a rock. The rock kicked back. (p.64)

But why isn’t he taking this seriously, given that the 292 pages of Quantum Gods are entirely devoted to arguing against spirituality and the primacy of consciousness?

Stenger’s carelessness is also evident in his reporting on the distinction between theism, which emphasizes the view of God as personal and actively intervening in the world, versus deism. The aspect of deism that Stenger is most interested in is the view that God “created the universe but left it alone thereafter” (p.16). Stenger mistakenly places Newton in the deist camp, maintaining (p.98) that “according to Newton we live in a clockwork universe with everything predetermined.” Although Newton’s laws of physics are deterministic, only if they are assumed to be universally applicable would this imply a clockwork universe with everything predetermined. And Newton himself explicitly rejected this view.[v] Newton thought that the deterministic laws he had discovered had limited applicability, and that their limitations provided information about the nature of God’s interventions. Throughout the history of science, many of the most important contributors have been profoundly engaged in the harmonizing of science and spirituality. Yet, in his rush to portray the debates about spirituality and religion in terms of a simplistic struggle between science and superstition, Stenger rides roughshod over the historical record.

Stenger’s confusion about Newton’s theism is, sadly, an all-too-typical instance of his superficial treatment of the deepest issues. A more conscientious examination of Newton’s thinking would have discovered that, although Newton did not have the benefit of the 20^th century scientific advances, he was already anticipating key insights of quantum spirituality at least in this respect: Scientific precision—rather than being inimical to spirituality—permits us to make a more exact determination of the nature of the interface between spirituality and the material world. Given that so many of the greatest scientific geniuses took this issue very seriously, if someone like Stenger wants to co-opt science for an anti-spiritual conclusion, it must be on the basis of careful and detailed arguments, because an anti-spiritual conclusion was not at all what these scientists had in mind. But careful argumentation is not what Stenger’s book is about—where possible Stenger will avoid the need for argument by misrepresenting the historical record and, failing that as we will see, he will substitute ridicule for argument. In fact, this formula is so easy to replicate, it is surprising that he has only produced eight books in this vein since 1988![vi]

By the way, Stenger has also misrepresented the deist side of the theism/deism controversy. Although he is hostile to spirituality and religion in all their forms, he is a little more tolerant of his version of deism, because he sees it as a half-way house on the way toward atheism. But his claim that deists “broke openly with Christian teaching” (p.16) is untrue of most deists—Descartes and Leibniz being among the most prominent—who saw themselves as reconciling Christianity and science. Likewise, his attempt to set up a contradiction between the personal God who responds to individual needs and prayers and the deist god who “created the universe but plays no further role in it” (p.27) is simplistic and misleading. The subtleties of the deist doctrine of pre-established harmony have evidently eluded Stenger, where God’s responsiveness to our prayers and his intercession on our behalf were built into the clockwork universe from the beginning. According to pre-established harmony, God anticipated our needs and prayers, and incorporated his responses in the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the creation.[vii]

And it is not just the history of ideas that Stenger misrepresents. Contemporary physicist Roger Penrose has leveraged non-computational mathematics to support his argument for looking to new physics for the physical correlates of mind and consciousness. An important result in mathematics due to Kurt Gödel has been taken to show that mathematical intuition is non-computational—in other words it cannot be modeled by a computer algorithm. From this, Penrose suggests that the physical basis for human intelligence, in general, must involve a level of physics much deeper than the deterministic, mechanistic processes assumed by contemporary neuroscience, for which the brain is essentially just a complex computer. Moreover—and here is where Stenger gets it wrong—non-computational does not mean random. Contemporary computers have pseudo-random number generators built in, and Penrose makes a convincing case that randomness, as for example from a quantum mechanical decay process, “indeed does nothing useful for us; if anything, it would be better to stay with the pseudo-randomness …” (Penrose, 1996, p.26). Randomness does not get at what is distinctive about human intelligence any more than deterministic processes do. Deterministic/random is not a comprehensive dichotomy—non-computational means both non-deterministic and non-random. [viii] These ideas are central to Penrose’s argument, and Stenger ought to have gotten them right.

But Stenger misunderstands and therefore misrepresents Penrose’s argument:

The brain could operate that way, being basically classical and deterministic, but occasionally being jolted by a random quantum event. What is interesting is that the decisions made on [sic] this fashion would be indistinguishable from creative acts or free will. Is that all there is to it? (p.190)

No, that is not all there is to it. Mathematical intuition, and any genuinely creative thought process, evidently—if Penrose is right—involves something more, which cannot be modeled by any combination of deterministic and random processes. Incidentally, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi referred to this something more as creative intelligence and, like Penrose, argued that this principle had to represent the fundamental level of nature’s functioning. As we will see below, Maharishi, together with quantum physicist John Hagelin, came to the conclusion that creative intelligence—representing the deepest level of consciousness—must have its source in the unified field, which quantum physics has recently come to understand in terms of superunification, involving the unification of all of nature’s force and matter fields.

Penrose’s argument is a strong one, and it ought to be accurately presented and addressed, if Stenger is going to dispute Penrose’s conclusion that consciousness will be incorporated into physics at its most fundamental level. Stenger consistently evades the forceful challenges to his materialist dogma, preferring to cast the arguments for the primacy of consciousness in terms of psychic phenomena, for which the evidence is controversial, or miracles, which are considered to be rare and elusive. Then he can set to work debunking, with his characteristic scientistic indignation. Although I think that psychic phenomena and miracles should be researched in a serious manner, Penrose’s argument can be understood to mean that there are plenty of miracles much closer to home, intrinsic to the functioning of intelligence and intelligent intuition. We will take this up again later, when we discuss the theme emphasized by Nobel laureate, Eugene Wigner, regarding the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.

In his review of Quantum Gods, Gordon McCabe answered the question posed in the title to this section—why is Stenger so careless?—as follows:

The principles of scholarship dictate that a professional researcher should be acquainted with all of the relevant literature, yet Stenger, and most of the physicists who write about philosophical subjects, do so with a blithe disregard for this principle. Curious. (McCabe, 2009)

In the next section, we will consider Stenger’s lack of acquaintance with the philosophical literature relating to reduction and emergence, and show how it leads him to misunderstand and to obscure critical issues relating to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Although this discussion involves some dense analysis, I think it is worthwhile to clarify the relevant terminological distinctions because, in so doing, we can better understand why it is reasonable to think that quantum holism involves consciousness and spirituality.

Reduction, Emergence, Wholeness and Consciousness

Stenger’s argument involving the related ideas of reduction and emergence takes aim at holism, the idea that there are important circumstances in which a whole is more than the sum of its parts and that this emergent wholeness may have spiritual implications. But, given the importance for quantum spirituality and even for Stenger’s own worldview (characterized by universal reduction to material particles), his treatment of reduction and emergence is surprisingly muddled. To explain in simple terms, the essential thing about reduction is the idea of nothing over and above and so, for Stenger, this would mean there is nothing over and above material particles and their mechanistic interactions. Frequently cited reductions from classical physics include the temperature of a gas as nothing but the average kinetic energy of its molecules, water as nothing but H₂O, light as nothing but a form of electromagnetic radiation and so forth.

And what about consciousness? Stenger’s commitment to universal reduction to elementary particles implies a reductive view of consciousness. In his view:

The universe is truly comprehensible as a purely material system. We can fit all observations to a model of elementary particles (or perhaps strings or other forms of basic objects) that move around in an empty void—just as the Greek atomists’ conjectures from thousands of years ago …. (p.239)

But consciousness is the phenomenon most resistant to a reductive analysis. Today, most philosophers of mind (even those sympathetic to the materialist perspective) have abandoned a fully reductive approach and believe that, even supposing neuroscience will someday provide an exhaustive account of all neurophysiological processes in the brain, consciousness will remain unaccounted for. In other words, consciousness—what it is like to have subjective experience—seems to be irreducible to neurophysiology. Most contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind acknowledge “the hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1996), according to which the fact of consciousness will remain unexplained even if—and this is a big if—all the functional capacities of the mind could be accounted for in terms of neurophysiological processes. Even Jaegwon Kim, regarded as a leading advocate of a hardcore materialist perspective of mind, has backed away from a fully reductionist approach (Kim, 2005 and 2006).

Given the hard problem of consciousness, Stenger’s reductionist outlook—“We can fit all observations to a model of elementary particles …”—immediately beaks down; moreover, his reductionist project quickly runs into trouble with macroscopic phenomena as well, since these reductions typically invoke consciousness indirectly. To see this, consider the reductive analysis of the temperature of an ideal gas. This is a case that has been extensively discussed in the philosophical literature. In saying that the temperature of a gas reduces to the average kinetic energy of its molecules, part of what is meant is that temperature is not a new or additional property of the gas. In other words, the average kinetic energy—and hence the temperature—would already be implicit in a detailed specification of all the individual molecular kinetic energies. So Stenger’s following assertion seems peculiar, given his reductionist outlook:

Properties of the whole gas such as pressure and temperature are meaningless for a single molecule. The gas can be thought of as a higher level of complexity with … “emergent properties” such as pressure and temperature. (p.158)

The important issue that Stenger is obscuring, here, is that reduction means there are no physical properties of the gas over and above those already inherent in the individual molecules.

To make this clearer, if temperature reduces to the average kinetic energy of a large ensemble of molecules, then there is no property “of the whole gas” other than this average kinetic energy. This is what the reductive analysis of temperature means in this context. And further, on this analysis, the average kinetic energy of the ensemble provides no new information, since the average is a summary of the detailed specification of individual kinetic energies and, as a summary, it contains less information than the detailed specification. The bottom line, for the reductionist, is that this average is not a new physical property over and above the individual kinetic energies. Contrast this reductive analysis of temperature with the irreducibility of consciousness: A detailed specification of the neurons in the brain and their physical processes will still not explain why we have subjective experience—the fact of subjective experience is new information.

Emergence, by contrast to reduction, involves the occurrence of something new in the sense of a property of the whole which is not already implicitly contained in the separately specified states of its independently existing constituent particles. But what kind of property could this be? As explained above, temperature is not a genuinely novel physical property. So, given that Stenger considers temperature to be emergent, in what sense could temperature be understood to involve something new, occurring as a function of wholeness?

Here, Stenger might have benefited from greater familiarity with the philosophical literature, since this issue has been vigorously debated since the foundation of modern science in the seventeenth century, and it gets to the core of the relationship between consciousness and matter. (John Locke’s famous doctrine of secondary qualities represents a traditional way of framing the issue.) Briefly stated, reductionists have typically invoked consciousness, in some form or other, as the basis for what is new and emergent. This enables the reductionist to say that nothing physically exists over and above the particles and their motions, but that something new emerges in the way we perceive, understand or describe the whole ensemble. On this analysis, temperature is a composite idea, with an objective component consisting of material particles and their motions, and a subjective component, involving consciousness. This subjective component has a number of aspects which contribute to our understanding of temperature. One familiar aspect involves our sensations of heat and cold; these sensations—today philosophers refer to them as “qualia”—exist in the mind of the observer and we project them out onto the material world. Consciousness, in this conception, is conceived of as separate from objective reality, although the motions of the particles “out there” causally influence—filtered by our sensory apparatus and nervous system—the qualia that occur in our conscious minds.

Stenger’s concept of “reductive emergence” would correspond to the traditional conception of reduction, outlined above, except that Stenger would emphatically not accept an essential and irreducible role for consciousness in his analysis. But if the property of the whole is not ultimately something subjective—a sensory appearance or qualia, or the meaning we have in mind when we describe an ensemble—depending on the consciousness of the observer, then it would seem to be a real, objective property of the whole. And, if it is, Stenger’s term “reductive emergence” is as oxymoronic as it sounds—positing a real property of the whole (emergence) while at the same time insisting that there is nothing over and above particles (reduction).[ix] Stenger would have been better off to leave emergence out of his self-contradictory conception of “reductive emergence,” since he just means reduction.

Stenger contrasts “holistic emergence”—in which a new property of the whole arises which is not reducible to particles—with “reductive emergence” (reduction). Since he is committed to the view of universal reduction to material particles, Stenger cannot allow that there are any genuine instances of holistic emergence:

The proponents of emergence are not willing to leave it to reductive emergence. They desperately want to find “something there” besides particles, although for the life of me I don’t see what they have against particles. I worked with them all my professional life and found much to like about them … The doctrine that opposes reductive emergence I defined above as holistic emergence. The basic idea is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that at least some emergent principles … have developed the ability to act downward, that is, have the emergent property of top-down causation. (Stenger, pp. 159-160)

Someone might “desperately want to find ‘something there’ besides particles” for the obvious reason that the macroscopic world of common sense, as well as most of science, involves holistic concepts that are not apparently reducible to particles. This implies either (1) genuine holistic emergence or (2) reduction combined with an explanation of holistic appearances (ultimately involving consciousness, as described above). On this second option, temperature does not involve a new physical property; the emergence occurs in relation to the observer. Similar considerations apply to other holistic phenomena, such as the wetness of water, where part of what is meant by “wetness” involves the sensations that liquids typically produce in us. Neither of these two options is compatible with Stenger’s reductive particle metaphysics: (1) is incompatible because it invokes holistic properties irreducible to elementary particles and (2) is incompatible because it gives an essential role to consciousness.[x]

Maybe lack of acquaintance with the relevant philosophical literature is part of why Stenger avoids addressing the relationship between emergence and consciousness. But the idea that wholeness is essentially interwoven with consciousness is not a new or even an especially radical idea—it is at the basis of most of the traditional reductive explanations of macroscopic phenomena, as noted above. Although classical physics assumed the working hypothesis of general reducibility to independently-existing, atom-like particles—consistent with Stenger’s belief system—this is not true of quantum physics. As we will see in the next section, quantum physics is evidently replete with the holistic emergence that Stenger so vehemently eschews. Moreover, Stenger’s efforts to impose a reductionist interpretation on phenomena such as quantum entanglement are irredeemably confused.

Entanglement: what’s the big deal?

According to Abraham Maslow’s familiar quip, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Likewise, if all that science knows is localized particles interacting in terms of mechanistic causation, then our theories of mind are going to try to see mind in these terms and reject or eliminate anything—whether it is religion, spirituality, or even moral responsibility—which doesn’t fit this model. But quantum physics may offer tools that are better suited to a sophisticated model of consciousness and spirituality.

Quantum entanglement presents a problem for materialism precisely because it incorporates a form of holistic emergence. And wholeness, as explained in the previous section, has traditionally been linked to consciousness.[xi]The rejection of holistic emergence is a central feature of Stenger’s materialism; moreover, this rejection has been a long-established tenet of materialism in general. So if the basic laws of quantum physics involve holism and they are interpreted realistically, as characterizing objective reality at its most fundamental level, then this would seem to point in the direction of exactly the kind of spiritual conclusion that Stenger wants to avoid. Given that Stenger is a committed materialist and he understands his materialism in terms of reduction to atom-like particles, one might imagine that he would provide an in-depth analysis of quantum entanglement and explain why it doesn’t undermine his opposition to quantum spirituality. So how should we understand Stenger’s simple-minded dismissal of EPR entanglement?

The EPR experiment results are widely discussed in the literature of quantum spiritualism. Physicists, on the other hand, are underwhelmed. Quantum mechanics has passed yet another empirical test. Ho hum. (p.127)

Ho hum? EPR was the culmination of decades of intense debate between Einstein, defending the classical-particle worldview, and Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and the other leading figures in the development of quantum mechanics. All of them realized that nothing less than our fundamental conception of reality was at stake: does it consist in a reduction to separate, independently existing particles, or is fundamental reality characterized by unanalyzable features of wholeness? The distinguished physicist David Mermin refers to this as the “sublime mystery” of quantum mechanics.

Many of the paradigmatic discussions of entanglement refer to a two-particle system with total spin-0 which, by conservation of angular momentum, constrains each of the constituent particles to have opposite spins—if one is spin-up, the other must be spin-down. Now here is the crucial point: The individual particles are not in a definite spin-state until a measurement is made. It is only at the time of measurement that one of the particles assumes a definite spin in the direction measured—either spin-up or spin-down. This result gets instantly communicated to the other particle and collapses its spin state, which was until then an indeterminate combination of spin-up and spin-down. This nonlocal entanglement between the two particles is precisely the kind of holistic, emergent and top-down kind of phenomenon which many think may contribute to a better framework for understanding consciousness than the classical conception of reduction to particles as separately existing, independently defined bits of matter.

“Entanglement” is Erwin Schrodinger’s elegant and descriptive term, introduced in a 1935 article discussing Einstein’s famous (EPR) argument against quantum mechanics:

When two systems … enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before [as independent systems]. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two [quantum states] have become entangled. (Schrödinger, 1935)

Given that his book is dedicated to refuting the significance of quantum physics for consciousness and spirituality, Stenger devotes surprisingly little attention to entanglement and nonlocality. When he does address it—here he is speaking about the Pauli exclusion principle, which also involves quantum nonlocality—his conclusion is unexpectedly confused:

The Pauli principle naturally emerges when more than one electron is involved, but it is still derived from basic quantum mechanics. It is an example of emergence that is reducible to basic physics, what might be called reductive emergence. (p.157)

The first sentence misses the whole point of the debate. It is precisely because emergence is built into basic quantum mechanics that quantum physics appears be more relevant for modeling and understanding consciousness and spirituality than classical physics has been. The second sentence invokes Stenger’s problematic concept of reductive emergence; but the deeper confusion has to do with an ambiguity in the phrase “reducible to basic physics.” Does he mean (1) reducible to atomistic, materialistic particles? Or does he mean (2) reducible to the basic laws of physics, regardless of what they refer to. Until now he has been talking about reduction to atomistic particles, but entanglement is inconsistent with that view of reality. So he has pulled a switcheroo, without so much as a hint of embarrassment, and is now talking about reduction to “basic quantum mechanics.” But basic quantum mechanics is certainly not about particles in the sense of the Greek atomists. And whether it is about matter, exclusively, is exactly the issue of quantum spirituality![xii]

Stenger not only dismisses the idea that the advances in physics may have relevance for consciousness and spirituality but also seems to overlook the fact that these advances have introduced any significant changes in our worldview at all:

Often one hears that modern physics showed that Newtonian physics was proven wrong by the twin twentieth-century revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics. Nothing can be further from the truth. To this day Newtonian mechanics remains the foundation of physics and the natural sciences that are built upon physics. (p.95)

This statement—about Newtonian mechanics remaining the foundation of physics—would perhaps be OK if it were addressed to a class in mechanical engineering. But it is emphatically not OK when the issues concern the character of fundamental reality.

We are again led to contemplate whether Stenger’s apparent carelessness might be a deliberate part of his argumentative strategy. It enables him to evade the real issues and recast the debate more simplistically, in terms of straw men which are easier for him to knock down. This strategy is very much in evidence in his discussion of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (see below).

What did Maharishi really say?

In his chapter entitled “What the Bleep is the Secret?,” Stenger discusses a number of the scientists who appeared in the recent documentaries on quantum physics and spirituality, including John Hagelin. He twice (p.37 and p.43) quotes Hagelin referring to the primacy of consciousness and its identity with the unified field as understood by quantum physics, but, surprisingly, his introduction of Hagelin says nothing about his being a physicist. Moreover, nowhere in the book does he mention Hagelin’s more than 70 publications in the fields of electroweak unification, grand unification, super-symmetry and cosmology, including a number of papers which have become core references in particle physics.[xiii] Here, in this chapter, Stenger mentions only that Hagelin is a prominent leader in the Transcendental Meditation organization and ran for president on the Natural Law Party ticket in 1992, 1996, and 2000. While this information is true and interesting, by not mentioning Hagelin’s physics background, Stenger is disingenuously prompting the reader to wonder what qualifies Hagelin to speak authoritatively on the significance of the unified field of quantum physics.

But this disingenuousness pales in comparison with the misinformation and deliberate disinformation in his later chapter entitled “The Guru of GUTs.” The chapter is devoted to not only John Hagelin but also to the global Transcendental Meditation organization, Maharishi University of Management, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself—the guru referenced in the chapter title. GUTs refers to grand unified theories, which represent one in a series of steps of integration converging toward a superunified “theory of everything.” The chapter title is itself an indication that we’re in for trouble ahead because, while Maharishi and Hagelin went to great lengths to urge that pure consciousness, the deepest level of mind, is identical to the unified field—the level of superunification—they never associated pure consciousness with the level of grand unified theory.

As a member of the faculty at Maharishi University of Management, and given that I have enormous respect for both Maharishi and John Hagelin, I admittedly have taken Stenger’s disinformation campaign personally. Nevertheless, if you will bear with me, I think that as we sort through the issues, we can arrive at a clear understanding of what Maharishi and Hagelin have actually proposed, how Stenger misrepresents their views, and why.

First, let’s review the facts. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, himself trained in physics, is the founder of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program and is regarded by many (including myself) as the leading scientist of consciousness in our time. Maharishi established Maharishi University of Management (M.U.M.), as well as a number of other universities throughout the world, organized around the principles of Consciousness-Based education, which emphasize the development of the student’s consciousness in the context of traditional academic study. Today, many psychology and cognitive neuroscience academic programs have complemented the standard objective methods for studying consciousness by incorporating phenomenology laboratory programs in which students employ first-person, introspective techniques to explore the inner dimension of subjective experience. Maharishi University of Management’s research in consciousness laboratory program, with its emphasis on the development of higher states of consciousness, was personally structured by Maharishi and is arguably the most advanced and successful phenomenology lab program in the world.

John Hagelin is a Harvard-trained quantum physicist and an acknowledged authority in unified quantum field theories. His prominent role in the development of the highly successful grand unified theory based on the mathematical structure called flipped SU(5) is widely acknowledged,[xiv] and his works include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences. For example, (Ellis, Hagelin, Nanopoulos, Olive and Srednicki, 1984) had a remarkable 589 citations as of mid-2007. Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Hagelin’s derivation of flipped SU(5) is that he based it in on the deeper-level superstring, representing the unified field at the most fundamental level of nature’s functioning. Although predominantly theoretical, this model, as developed by Hagelin and his collaborators, has provided significant support for grand unified theory and, indeed, for superstring theory as well. Grand unification and, especially, superunification on the basis of the superstring are active areas of research at the forefront of theoretical physics and, although they are not yet experimentally verified, many physicists believe that they are too mathematically elegant to be fundamentally wrong. In recognition of his role in these achievements, Hagelin was named winner of the prestigious Kilby International Award in 1992.

As he was recovering from a motor-vehicle accident in 1970, while still in high school, Hagelin had taken the advice of one of his doctors and learned the practice of Transcendental Meditation. He was delighted with his personal results, and became active in the TM movement and, before very long, he found opportunities to study and work closely with Maharishi. Remarkably, during the period (1979-1994) of his most concentrated activity in theoretical physics, Hagelin was also intensively investigating the nature and origin of consciousness, and this work is reflected in his publications on consciousness and the unified field of physics (Hagelin, 1987 and 1989).

After completing his dissertation at Harvard in 1981, with advisors Howard Georgi and Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, Hagelin accepted a post-doctoral research position at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics). Following his year at CERN he pursued his research at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) until 1984, when he moved to Maharishi International University (MIU)[xv] where he established a doctoral program in elementary particle physics with support from the National Science Foundation. One special focus of this doctoral research program was that at the deepest level of reality—the level of the unified field—consciousness and matter are fully integrated. Hagelin’s mentors and colleagues at Harvard, CERN, SLAC and elsewhere took this transition in stride. Glashow remarked, “His papers are outstanding. We read them before he went to MIU and we read them now.” But more importantly for the long-term attitude of the theoretical physics community toward consciousness, nearly every serious researcher in particle physics understood Hagelin’s career move as a statement of his deeply held conviction. And based on their respect for his work, many in theoretical physics have been motivated to at least contemplate the potential significance of consciousness for future progress in physics.

It was during the early 1980s that Hagelin and Maharishi formulated the principle identifying Transcendental Consciousness—the deepest level of inner, subjective experience—with the unified field as it was coming to be understood in terms of mathematical physics. Interestingly, by Hagelin’s own account, the impetus for his derivation of flipped SU(5) from the superstring came from his understanding of consciousness as the fundamental principle of natural law. Indeed, he specifically credits Maharishi’s inspiration as contributing to his discovery: “Maharishi’s interest in exploring the foundations of physics, and in connecting the intelligence of the human mind with the intelligence of nature, gave me the impetus to switch the focus of my research to the most fundamental area of my field. This habit of considering nature from its deepest and most unified level helped me see the significance of Flipped SU(5).”[xvi]

Consistent with this proposed identification, Hagelin has published empirical research substantiating the existence of long-range field effects of consciousness generated through collective meditation (Hagelin et al, 1999). This research suggests that large meditating groups can nonlocally defuse acute societal stress—thereby contributing to the prevention of violence and social conflict, and providing a possible foundation for permanent world peace.[xvii] Over time he has accepted increasing responsibility in the international Transcendental Meditation organization with the aim of advancing the Consciousness-Based programs Maharishi developed. With the accelerating proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, Hagelin feels that there really is an increasing urgency for the scientific community to seriously consider the inherently life-supporting, and theoretically much more powerful, technologies that Maharishi’s programs offer.

Since the primacy of consciousness and its identity with the unified field are so central to the views of both Maharishi and Hagelin, let’s explore these ideas in a little more depth. The various parameters which characterize macroscopic physical reality and which are embodied in classical physics—such as mass and energy, the three spatial dimensions and time, the electric and magnetic fields, and so forth—have all been progressively unified as physics has advanced. This pace of unification has accelerated in the last few decades, leading first to electroweak unification (uniting electromagnetism and the weak force), then to grand unification (incorporating the strong force) and, most recently, to superunification, which incorporates gravity to fulfill Einstein’s dream of uniting the fundamental forces of nature on the basis of a theory of the unified field (see Fig. 1).

Superunification not only combines the four fundamental forces but also uncovers a deep and far-reaching unification underlying bose fields (representing forces) and fermi fields (representing matter). The distinction between force (responsible for action, dynamism, change) and matter (inertia) is basic to our common-sense conception of the material world, and it is certainly basic to classical physics. Even our language is based on the distinction between nouns, representing things and stuff, as opposed to verbs, representing activity and change. So the extent to which superunification involves a departure from our common-sense assumptions about reality can hardly be overstated.

It is in this context that Maharishi, in partnership with Hagelin, proposed that there is also a deep unification underlying the inner dimension (mind and consciousness) and the material world. It is true that our ordinary, waking experience of the world is based on a seemingly fundamental opposition, where the subjective pole of experience (the consciousness of the observer) is set against the objective pole (the external or material world). But Maharishi and Hagelin suggest that the unified field of advanced theoretical physics is actually the same as a unified field of consciousness. Maharishi refers to this fundamental level of consciousness as Transcendental Consciousness, a field of pure intelligence. Based on this proposed unification of Transcendental Consciousness and the unified field of physics, the Transcendental Meditation program is sometimes characterized as the “Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field” (see Fig. 1).

Now, back to Stenger’s disinformation campaign. Maharishi and Hagelin have consistently identified Transcendental Consciousness with the unified field, and have done so in countless lectures and interviews as well as in numerous readily available published materials. For ease of expression, let’s refer to this as the Maharishi-Hagelin identity principle.[xviii] They have never identified Transcendental Consciousness with grand unification, which is a way-station in the progress of advanced physics and not the final goal of a completely unified theory. So Stenger’s consistently and mistakenly linking the Maharishi-Hagelin identity principle with grand unified theories (GUTs) is terribly misleading. Moreover, given the ready availability of both printed and online source materials and given the fact that Stenger has actually quoted Hagelin (p.37) and other TM literature (p.57) referencing the unified field as a field of consciousness or intelligence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Stenger is cynically and deliberately misrepresenting Maharishi and Hagelin.

Why, for example, does he tell us that, “His [Maharishi’s] ear caught the catchy term ‘grand unification’ and pretty soon flyers were appearing in which the cosmic field of consciousness, with which TM supposedly put you in contact, was associated with the grand unified field” (p.60). We challenge Stenger to show evidence that any such flyer ever existed that linked grand unification with TM practice. Moreover, Maharishi never even discussed the early GUT called “minimal SU(5)” in any public lecture, and he certainly never associated the TM program with minimal SU(5). But Stenger is undeterred: “The problem was, minimal SU(5) was falsifiable” (p.60), and he goes on to outline the experimental evidence which discredited SU(5). But, he assures us, “The demise of minimal SU(5) did not cause GUTs to disappear from TM literature” (p.60).[xix]

So why on earth would Stenger want to link Maharishi to SU(5)? It’s an association Stenger made up out of whole cloth. But, since SU(5) is a discredited theory, a reader who doesn’t know any better might get the impression that Maharishi’s ideas are tied to discredited science. And, in fact, this is just the impression he gave the hapless New Scientist editor Amanda Gefter. Thus she confidently declared in her enthusiastic—“with Stenger in charge … we are on sure ground”— review of Quantum Gods:

Maharishi claimed that transcendental meditation gave practitioners access to the "quantum field of cosmic consciousness". This, he said, was identical to SU(5), the model physicists were then investigating in their search for a grand unified theory. Sadly for cosmic consciousness, real experiments later falsified SU(5).

Nice zinger, Amanda, but the falsification of SU(5) has nothing to do with Maharishi. With Stenger in charge, the spread of misinformation is hard to keep up with! (For some reason, both Stenger and Gefter seem unwilling to honor the Transcendental Meditation trademark—it should be capitalized.) Although Gefter didn’t pick up on this, Stenger does finally move on from SU(5) to flipped SU(5). Whew! That’s a relief.

But we’re no sooner out of the frying pan then we’re into the fire. His first sentence on flipped SU(5) starts out OK (p.61): “One particularly interesting GUT that appeared in the late 1980s was called flipped SU(5).” But then Stenger gets petty again: “TM literature would have you think it was (1) primarily the work of Hagelin and (2) a highly successful GUT fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a unified field theory.” He quotes Hagelin’s website:

He [Dr. Hagelin] is also responsible for the development of a highly successful Grand Unified Field Theory based on the Superstring.

And follows up with this comment: “The earliest reference to flipped SU(5) that I could find is a 1982 singly authored paper by Stephen Barr. A 1984 paper lists three authors, not including Hagelin. Hagelin is one of four coauthors of a 1987 paper.”[xx] Does Stenger really want to challenge the significance of Hagelin’s contribution to flipped SU(5)? This is way over Stenger’s head and out of his league. Firstly, as to the fundamental significance of the theory, flipped SU(5) is unquestionably the most successful GUT, because it:

1. Is fully consistent with all experimental data (unlike minimal SU(5), for example);

2. Is free from a severe technical problem, known variously as the “doublet-triplet splitting problem,” the “fine-tuning problem,” or the “gauge hierarchy problem” that plagues all other GUTs;

3. Makes successful predictions for particle masses, including nearly massless neutrinos and the correct bottom quark to taon mass ratio, in the context of string-derived flipped SU(5);

4. Is the only GUT that appears to be consistent with superstring superunification.

None of these essential features were discovered in the early explorations of flipped SU(5), prior to Hagelin’s contribution. One extra point to bear in mind is that Hagelin’s flipped SU(5) theory is supersymmetric. This is a major transformation of the theory, and obviously not considered in Barr's original exploration, which was before supersymmetry became prominent. Stenger’s couple of hours of internet searching does not qualify as sound historical method and in no way undermines the authority embodied in Hagelin’s extensive, and highly-regarded, publication record.

What could Stenger’s motivation be for nitpicking about the degree of Hagelin’s responsibility for flipped SU(5)? Well, on a little reflection it’s really quite simple. In evaluating a far-reaching set of proposals, such as those embodied in quantum spirituality, we naturally will want to consider the sources. Who are the scientists speaking for quantum spirituality and what are their credentials? The more reputable they are, the more we will be inclined to take their ideas seriously. So it serves Stenger’s ends to try to diminish the stature of his intellectual adversaries—thus his motivation is pretty straightforward, but it’s not very edifying.

Before concluding this disgraceful chapter, Stenger takes several jabs at the Transcendental Meditation program. While conceding that “studies in Fairfield and elsewhere indicated that meditation has some marginally beneficial medical effects such as lowering blood pressure,”[xxi][xxii] (pp. 56-57). In reporting on the Transcendental Meditation course, Stenger writes: he assures us that “Independent experiments at Harvard and elsewhere indicate that almost any relaxation method[s] … work equally well”

TM training begins with a free lecture on the “benefits” of the technique, complete with scientific-looking charts of the body’s physical response. (p. 57)

Why the sneer quotes around benefits, and why “scientific-looking” charts? The benefits of TM practice are real and well documented, and the charts accurately summarize published research—they are scientific charts.

Stenger also mocks the idea of enlightenment, scoffing that:

Exactly what constituted the promised enlightenment seemed to change from year to year, as Maharishi meditated privately on the question at the beginning of each year. For example, 1970 was the Year of Scientific Research, 1973 the Year of the World Plan, 1978 the Year of Invincibility to Every Nation, and so on. (pp. 57-8)

At the beginning of each year, Maharishi would refocus the activity of the international Transcendental Meditation organization, but this had nothing to do with what he meant by enlightenment. In fact, Maharishi was quite consistent and precise about what constitutes enlightenment, or higher states of consciousness. He organized conscious experiences based on a taxonomy of seven states of consciousness, including four higher states (see Figure 2). With continued practice, Transcendental Consciousness becomes stabilized in the awareness and is no longer exclusively experienced in the sheltered setting of eyes-closed meditation. A process of evolution occurs, typically over a period of years, during which Transcendental Consciousness becomes integrated with the ordinary states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Phenomenologically, these integrated states provide a more stable and expanded sense of Self—and research indicates that these integrated states provide the associated psychological benefits of increasing maturity and self-actualization. Maharishi characterized the second higher state as Cosmic Consciousness. The third higher state is called God Consciousness, which is characterized by increasingly refined perception, to the point where one grows to perceive and appreciate the more subtle levels of the objective world, including—it is said—the intelligence underlying and supporting all that there is. The fourth, and highest state, is called Unity Consciousness, or Brahman Consciousness. In Unity Consciousness, all things are perceived and understood in terms of the unbounded, infinite status of one’s own Self. All differences and distinctions are perceived as superficial manifestations of an underlying field of unity and wholeness. And if Maharishi and Hagelin are right, this is none other than the unified field as understood by quantum physics. The entire taxonomy, including the three ordinary states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep, is depicted in Figure 2 (not shown).

Moreover, there is an abundance of high-quality, secondary literature about what enlightenment means in the context of Maharishi’s teaching. Expanding on the suggestions of numerous leading psychologists—such as Carl Jung, Victor Frankl and Abraham Maslow—psychologist Charles Alexander’s research showed how higher states, as delineated by Maharishi, provide a quality of life that is verifiably richer in meaning and self-actualization.[xxiii]

At this point one might ask: What exactly is Stenger getting at with his unfounded and misleading remark that “what constituted the promised enlightenment seemed to change from year to year?” If he wanted to suggest that there aren’t any objective measures of what constitutes enlightenment, then why didn’t he just come out and say that? In any case, if he had done his homework Stenger would have learned that, in fact, there are significant objective measures corresponding to not only Transcendental Consciousness, but the enduring higher states of consciousness as well.

In recent years, research documenting the correlation between transcendental experience and alpha EEG coherence (and most recently, alpha zero-lag phase synchrony[xxiv]) has provided important objective documentation of first-person reports of transcendental experience. Research on subjects who regularly experience Transcendental Consciousness—with its associated alpha EEG coherence—shows a high degree of correlation between EEG coherence and numerous variables, indicating cognitive, intellectual and creative development as well as high levels of psychological and physiological health.

Moreover, Fred Travis and Alarik Arenander have investigated the experience of long-term TM meditators, reporting the co-existence of transcendental experience along with waking and sleeping, as predicted for the three highest states of consciousness. In an important study, published in 2002, subjects’ first person reports correlated quantitatively with a set of EEG measures, both during meditation and during both simple and more challenging, choice-dependent tasks (Travis, Tecce, Arenander and Wallace, 2002). Choice contingent negative variation (CNV) measures for the long-term meditators, as compared to control groups, indicated a more efficient style of neurological functioning. A composite z-score was calculated, for each subject, which combined EEG coherence and amplitude readings with CNV measures.

The study compared three groups of subjects, differentiated according to self-reported integration of transcendental and waking (as well as sleep) states: The Rare and Occasional integration groups served as controls for the Continuous integration group. These three groups define the horizontal axis in Figure 3. The vertical axis provides a quantitative scale for the summed z-scores for the EEG measures evaluated. Each data point represents a subject. The regression line through these points suggests that transformations in cortical functioning correspond to increasing integration of the transcendent and waking states and may, therefore, represent an integration scale. This integration scale provides a quantitative, objective measure of higher states of consciousness—enlightenment.[xxv]

A recurring question has been, why does Stenger so systematically misrepresent the positions of those with whom he disagrees? Is it a simple matter of not having done his homework? In his chapter on Maharishi, Hagelin and the TM program, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that some of the misrepresentation is deliberate.

Much ado about Nothingism

Stenger devotes considerable attention to arguing that there is no evidence of miracles and that, therefore, everything in the world can be explained by science, without supposing that there is an intelligence intervening in the natural world. But many thoughtful people believe that science itself is a miracle, and that broad scientific themes—such as the orderliness in nature and the existence of laws of nature which we have the ability to comprehend—point to the fundamental nature of consciousness and even to a creative intelligence at the basis of the natural order. Nothingism is Stenger’s attempt to provide a materialist/atheist answer, based on (1) a speculative, scientific-sounding narrative of how the cosmos came out of a state of maximum disorder in the big bang, and (2) an amateurish contribution to the philosophy of science proposing that the laws of nature are not really laws at all in the sense of constraining the behavior of matter. But Stenger’s reasoning is deeply problematic as we will soon see.

Before advancing these critiques I would like to mention one kind of criticism that we are not directing at Stenger. We are not maintaining—as some would—that Stenger’s attempt to interpret the implications of science for deeper philosophical questions is automatically illegitimate because science has nothing to say about these deeper issues. We think that it does, but that the conclusions to be drawn are not the ones that Stenger hopes to draw. In any case, it is noteworthy that in a book whose first words are “quantum flapdoodle,” Stenger shows no hint of embarrassment in drawing radically speculative conclusions for nothingness. His sense of outrage is selectively directed at those who suggest that science—especially quantum physics—may have profound spiritual implications. Where is the skepticism, the self-criticism, the demand for rigorous standards of reasoning when pursuing his thesis that intelligence and consciousness are not fundamental features of reality? In other words, his outrage is based on a double standard and is not even-handedly aimed at speculation, beyond what current science can strictly verify. It is the conclusion—quantum spirituality—that he finds so problematic. He is not really interested in the arguments of his intellectual opponents at all—which is why he doesn’t take the trouble to represent them accurately—suggesting that his outrage is that of a religious (atheism/materialism) fundamentalist.

Did the universe originate in maximum disorder?

Order suggests intelligence, and the orderliness in nature that is at the basis of science is often taken to indicate that intelligence exists at the most fundamental level of nature’s functioning. But what if disorder, rather than order, is the basic cosmological principle and has been since the big bang? This is precisely what Stenger has in mind when he confidently asserts that, “our universe … begins in a state of maximum disorder, or total chaos” (p. 248). Why does he believe this? Modern quantum cosmology theorizes that the universe exploded from a Planck-sized volume—which is to say a very small but finite volume. But from this understanding he overreaches, concluding that “it is a region of maximum entropy” (p.249). And again, “… we have seen that modern cosmology strongly suggests that the universe within which we reside began in a state of total disorder” (p.252). His argument is based on the dubious premise that the Planck-sized volume which is the source of the big bang is a black hole:

A sphere with a radius equal to the Planck length is a black hole, so its entropy is maximum. Thus, the universe starts out as a black hole with maximum entropy. (Stenger, p.249)

But respected string theorist Brian Greene flatly contradicts this conclusion: “The ultimate source of order, of low entropy, must be the big bang itself.” (Greene, 2004, p.173, Italics in the original.) Greene explains:

In its earliest moments, rather than being filled with gargantuan containers of entropy such as black holes, as we would expect from probabilistic considerations, for some reason the nascent universe was filled with a hot, uniform, gaseous mixture of hydrogen and helium. Although this configuration has high entropy when densities are so low that we can ignore gravity, the situation is otherwise when gravity can’t be ignored; then such a uniform gas has extremely low entropy. In comparison with black holes, the diffuse, nearly uniform gas was in an extraordinarily low-entropy state. Ever since, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the overall entropy of the universe has been gradually getting higher and higher; the overall, net amount of disorder has been gradually increasing. (Greene, pp.173-174)

If Greene is right, what would this do to Stenger’s argument against an intelligent creator? The logic is simple: if Stenger believes that ultra-high entropy at the big bang would be evidence against an intelligent creator, then obviously—if the big bang was in fact characterized by ultra-low entropy—he ought to believe that this would constitute evidence for an intelligent creator.

What kind of law doesn’t constrain behavior?

Einstein observed that "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." From the perspective of the materialist, there is no explanation for the law-like behavior of the material world or for our ability to understand and model this behavior with our scientific laws, especially our most fundamental laws, the laws of mathematical physics. These laws evidently connect our cognitive faculties with the way the material world is constrained to behave—but why should the material world be constrained to behave in a law-like manner? Moreover, why should our minds be tuned to this law-like behavior? Physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner was even more explicit than Einstein:

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here … [or] two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.

If Stenger is to succeed in co-opting science for the anti-spiritual camp, he must have an answer to Einstein and Wigner.[xxvi]

Moreover, Stenger is worried about the very idea of physical laws: if there are laws governing the behavior of matter, this might suggest a lawgiver. With these considerations in mind, he hastens to assure us, “…the laws of physics, which are regarded as the most basic of the laws of nature, are not restrictions on the behavior of matter but rather restrictions on what physicists can do when they invent mathematical models to describe the observed behavior of matter” (p.253).

But this is amateurish philosophy of science: When we look up the weather report for tomorrow, we aren’t interested in finding out how meteorologists are constrained to think about the weather—we want to know what the material world is likely to rain down on us! If we ponder what Stenger is saying here, the implications are astonishing and must be completely unacceptable to any scientifically oriented person.

Why is Stenger’s assertion—that laws of nature tell us nothing about how the physical world is going to behave—unacceptable? To make it vivid, consider my mother, who is a little nervous about flying. Suppose she wants reassurance that the aeronautics engineers who designed the plane understood and applied the laws of physics, so she can be reasonably sure that the plane will take off, fly and land safely. Now Stenger tells her that the laws of physics constrain the way those engineers think, but they actually don’t tell us anything about the behavior of matter! Is that going to make her want to get on the plane? Of course the laws of nature constrain the behavior of matter and, what’s more, this behavior is law-like and orderly—if it were chaotic, we could have no reasonable expectations of anything, and where would that leave science?

Moreover, Stenger evidently believes there is no mystery involving our ability to comprehend the laws of nature because, given the empirical data and considerations of coordinate-independence (what he characterizes as “point-of-view invariance”), the laws of physics have to be the way they are. But this is more shoddy philosophy of science. As Gordon McCabe explains:

When one asks the question, 'Why does the universe possess the laws of physics that we observe it to possess, and not some other possible laws?', one has in mind, as an alternative to our own world of empirical data, other sets of empirical data satisfying different laws. To argue that the laws of physics are the way they are, because the empirical data and coordinate-independence has constrained them to be such, is to misunderstand the problem at hand. (McCabe, 2009)

Traditional atheism/materialism argues that we don’t need an explanation for why the universe possesses the laws of physics we observe—any set of laws would be equally likely or unlikely—and it’s just an arbitrary matter of fact that the universe is the way it is. While this argument ultimately doesn’t work, it is interesting and at least prima facie intelligible. It doesn’t work because, among other reasons, a compelling rebuttal is inherent in the fact that we can comprehend the laws of nature and the orderliness implicit in them.[xxvii] Stenger’s scientific-sounding ramblings do nothing to undermine the force of these considerations based on the comprehensibility of the laws of nature. And if Stenger had exercised an ounce of the skepticism he claims to have, he would himself have realized that nothingism contributes nothing to the debate beyond the principles of traditional atheism/materialism.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, what should we say about Quantum Gods? Would it be too severe to classify it as pseudoscience? Stenger categorizes himself as one of the “new atheists” but, based on the foregoing analysis, “village atheist” might be more apt. The eminent contemporary philosopher, Hilary Putnam, invented the term “village atheist” to depict a cynical writer who will seem sophisticated only to the unlearned and provincial. Moreover, Stenger’s writing is through and through scientistic, meaning it invokes the authority of science to support arguments and conclusions which are not scientific at all. And isn’t this what Stenger and the other self-styled “debunkers” mean when they characterize an opponent’s writing as pseudoscientific?

There’s nothing wrong with vigorous debate; indeed that is an essential part of the scientific method. But debating requires understanding and addressing the positions of one’s adversaries. Stenger and the other new atheists love to invoke the legacy of the heroes of science—Galileo for example—courageously speaking truth to power by confronting the religious authorities of their time. What they are overlooking is that, for some of today’s intellectual elites, materialism and atheism are the entrenched religious dogma of our time. Bashing quantum spirituality certainly requires no courage whatever!

A fundamental and recurring shortcoming of Quantum Gods has to do with the fact that Stenger really doesn’t think the point-of-view of his intellectual adversaries is worth taking the trouble to understand and get right. In order to properly evaluate Quantum Gods it is important to realize that Stenger is not trying to contribute to the debate—he is trying to shut off debate. He is setting a belligerent tenor, intended to put anyone on the defensive who dares to suggest that quantum spirituality might deserve thoughtful consideration. Indeed, at least two science magazine editors—Michael Shermer and Amanda Gefter—have readily adopted Stenger’s tone and, insofar as they can influence the editorial policies of their journals, they will see to it that no articles taking these issues seriously see the light of day. In the history of science this is the way a prevailing paradigm can obstruct scientific progress, hanging on long after it has served any useful intellectual purpose. These are the dynamics underlying the hostile tone that pervades Quantum Gods.

Throughout this review article we have documented the many instances in which Stenger systematically misrepresented the positions of his intellectual opponents and, instead of addressing the tough arguments head on, he changed the subject by setting up a straw man which was easier for him to attack. Hence we find him frequently reverting to his preferred way of characterizing the debate as a simple matter of science versus superstition. Once having defined this as the issue, all he needs to do is assume the attitude of an outraged scientist and heap on the ridicule.

The real reason Stenger and like-minded debunkers consistently fail to address the tough arguments head-on is because those arguments, if forthrightly addressed, don’t yield to facile resolution. If he had done his homework and gotten his opponents’ positions right, he would have discovered that it is harder to dismiss quantum spirituality than he had imagined. Indeed, the more carefully—and yes, critically—one considers the issues, the more one finds quantum spirituality to be eminently worthy of serious consideration, as a plausible and measured approach to the most long-standing and intractable questions at the basis of science.

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^®Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi University of Management, and Consciousness-Based are registered or common-law trademarks licensed to Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation and used under sublicense or with permission.

[i] All Stenger references are to Quantum Gods, (Stenger, 2009).

[ii] Shermer, who like Stenger considers himself to be a professional skeptic, invoked the “quantum flapdoodle” epithet in his Scientific American critique of What the Bleep, entitled “Quantum Quackery” (Shermer, 2005). He particularly targets the Hameroff-Penrose model of quantum consciousness. Hameroff’s response, “Hackery/Quackery in Scientific American,” addresses Shermer’s objections, and concludes with the advice to “lighten up!” Thus Hameroff writes, “Whatthebleep? is entertainment. Lighten up! The early animations of Jules Verne’s moon landings were crude by later standards, but planted the seed of a wonderful idea in popular culture.” (www.quantumconsciousness.org/hackery.htm. This is a link to Stuart Hameroff’s pages.) Evidently, Shermer hasn’t taken Hameroff’s advice.

[iii] For a balanced discussion of psychic phenomena, see Alcock, Freeman, and Burns (2003).

[iv] An analogy frequently used by Maharishi to illustrate his Vedic conception of consciousness invokes the simple image of waves on the ocean. The ocean represents universal consciousness and individuals who appear to be separate and distinct on the surface are, like the waves, integrated at the deeper levels. Jonathan Shear extends this analogy by noting that, while the weather for hundreds of miles around is dependent on the ocean in the vicinity, it is not due to any single wave. The latter would be a metaphor for "solipsism", but not the former. Accordingly, it is universal consciousness that creates reality; it is not we, as individuals, who create reality. It is important to note, however, that according to Maharishi we can become more integrated with the universal aspect of our consciousness—we can become more enlightened—and this will allow us greater support from the laws of nature than an individual can ordinarily expect to have. Given Stenger’s materialistic bent, it is not surprising that he would be antithetical to Maharishi’s conception of enlightenment; but unfortunately, he does not so much critique Maharishi’s conception as jeer at it, as we will see.

[v] For example, according to Newton’s calculations, the planetary orbits are inherently unstable and divine intervention is necessary in order to keep the planets in their orbits. Newton proposed that God periodically intervenes by sending a comet through the solar system in order to adjust the planetary orbits as needed! The fact that Newton’s calculations were subsequently corrected by Laplace does not affect the philosophical point that Newton himself thought that something more than mechanical clockwork was involved in the functioning of our universe. The implications of this example for theology are discussed in (Lindberg and Numbers, 2008, p.83 ff). Newton himself regarded science as providing explicit support for theology: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being….” Principia Mathematica Book 3 (1687).

[vi] Stenger has a ninth book now available for pre-order on Amazon, entitled The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.

[vii] Philosopher Ezio Vailati explains Leibniz’s understanding of divine providence in the context of deism:Leibniz also reproaches Newton for claiming that things need correction by extraordinary divine concourse in the world’s machine. He claims that divine providence is not eliminated but confirmed by the fact that in the world’s machine everything occurs by preestablished design without the need of any correction, since it entails that God has foreseen and predetermined everything.” (www.siue.edu/~evailat/lz-cl.html . This is a link to Ezio Vailati's pages. He's a Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University) “

[viii] There is a long tradition in ethics and the philosophy of mind that freedom is an essential characteristic of mind. If our thought and action were determined by external constraints then we would not be morally responsible for our bad behavior and, likewise, we would not be responsible for whether or not our thinking is logical and coherent. If our minds were dependent on deterministic physical processes, these would seem to be external constraints of the objectionable kind. Materialism has long had to contend with these objections and has never found an adequate response. Moreover—and this is the key point for Stenger’s misunderstanding of Penrose—freedom does not mean randomness. If our thought and action were determined by random processes it would still not be free in any way that would support moral responsibility or intellectual coherence. Evidently, freedom means freedom from any external constraints, whether these are deterministic or random. See (Scharf, 2009) for an extensive analysis of this issue. In this context, one can appreciate the insightfulness of Maharishi’s proposal that, at its deepest level, consciousness is self-referral, which implies that it is not dependent on anything external.

[ix] Timothy O’Conner and Hong Yu Wong, writing for the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/) distinguish “epistemological emergence” from “ontological emergence.” Ontological emergence would involve irreducible physical properties of the whole, and would correspond to what Stenger is referring to as “holistic emergence.” Epistemological emergence has to do with our holistic conception of ensembles, and the epistemological aspect of epistemological emergence has to do with the meaning we ascribe to our descriptions of ensembles—how we understand and think about those ensembles. Hence, although epistemological emergence is compatible with reduction, it ultimately involves consciousness and mind. Stenger’s conception of “reductive emergence” seems to be an untenable blurring of epistemological and ontological emergence.

Thus consider Stenger’s last sentence in this passage:

Summarizing, in the case of reductive emergence we have new principles appearing as systems become more complex. These principles do not apply at the lower level of particle interactions. Yet they are fully reducible to particle mechanics and nothing more. (p. 159)

If he escapes conceptual incoherence by invoking consciousness as the receptacle for qualia, he cannot then say that the emergent principles “are fully reducible to particle mechanics and nothing more.” Likewise, he cannot legitimately conclude that “Emergence is just a name for the evolution of complexity out of simplicity, no doubt a notable phenomenon and little doubt that it arises purely from particles of matter” (p. 161, emphasis added). Given the irreducibility of consciousness discussed previously in terms of the “hard problem,” which Stenger completely ignores, there is no validity to his claim that emergence arises purely from particles of matter.

[x] In this discussion of emergence—including what emerges and for whom it emerges—I’ve emphasized the sharing of qualia/appearances between consciousness and the external world, because this is the customary way of framing the problem of macroscopic reality. But similar considerations apply to relational mathematical properties, such as equality and inequality. Take synchrony—equality of a pattern of behavior in time—for example. Two particles might be vibrating in synchrony, where their synchrony could be characterized as an emergent property arising from the individual vibratory patterns of the two particles. Is the mathematical relation—the equality—a holistic property of the physical particles, something in the consciousness of the scientist describing the phenomenon, or an abstract property which interfaces the observer and the observed? Further exploration of these questions from the philosophy of mathematics is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is interesting to note that the ambiguity regarding mathematical relations parallels the ambiguity inherent in qualia.

These same issues, concerning the subject/object ambiguity inherent in holistic phenomena, are embedded in Niels Bohr’s famous complementarity principle. Although he initially developed complementarity to help account for the wave/particle duality, Bohr regarded the complementarity between subject and object as the most fundamental expression of the principle. This is exemplified by his well-known “Blind Man and the Stick” analogy: Suppose a blind man uses a stick to orient himself in his environment. When he holds the stick loosely, he regards the stick as an external object—a part of his environment in which he needs to orient himself. But, if he holds it firmly, he regards the stick as an extended part of himself, giving him information about his environment. Whether the distinction between the blind man and his environment begins at one end of his stick or the other is arbitrary. This subject/object ambiguity, of the blind man’s stick, is a metaphor for the subject/object ambiguity inherent in the world as we ordinarily experience it.

We began this paper with a review of the radical demarcation between consciousness and matter that dominated the classical worldview (since at least the time of Rene Descartes). The complementarity principle embodied Bohr’s recognition that this classical demarcation was an overly simplistic idealization, and one that has proven unsuitable for the increasing precision and refinement of quantum physics. The intertwining of consciousness and matter is at the basis of the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics and is essential to understanding Bohr’s thinking about the problem of quantum measurement. These issues in relation to Bohr’s complementarity principle are sorted out in a thorough and insightful manner by Henry Folse (1985): The Philosophy of Niels Bohr: The Framework of Complementarity.

[xi] This linkage can be challenged, of course, but it has considerable prima facie plausibility, and not just because traditionally materialists have favored a reductive/atomistic view of reality. At higher levels of wholeness and complexity, life, intelligence and purpose arise, suggesting that consciousness is associated with increasingly integrated and holistic levels or organization. Moreover, consciousness seems to be distinctively characterized by wholeness. Thus, perception is characterized by integrated, Gestalt experience, and we think and understand by subsuming particular instances under increasingly abstract and general principles. Immanuel Kant famously articulated the doctrine of the unity of consciousness and, in contemporary philosophy, Bayne and Chalmers (2003) emphasized the central role of subsumption in consciousness. Stenger appears to acknowledge this point, which is why he links his materialism with reduction to atomistic particles. But then he should have been more concerned about the wholeness implicit in entanglement and other quantum phenomena.

[xii] In technical terms, Stenger has switched from talking about ontological reduction (reduction to atom-like particles) to talking about law reduction (involving derivation from basic quantum mechanics). These are not equivalent, since whether the basic laws of quantum mechanics incorporate aspects of wholeness—and whether these holistic features imply consciousness and spirituality—is precisely the issue.

[xiii] In the context of a later chapter, Stenger acknowledges that Hagelin is a “respected physicist” but, as we will see, he couldn’t bring himself to leave it at that!

[xiv] Flipped SU(5) had been contemplated by Stephen Barr and by Dmitri Nanopoulos, but the enduring “gauge hierarchy problem,” among other issues, had prevented its being given serious consideration. Hagelin’s derivation provided a set of uncomplicated formulas that resolved this problem by basing flipped SU(5) on the deeper-level superstring. After Hagelin had worked out his formulation he faxed his results to his erstwhile collaborator, Dmitri Nanopoulos, and enthusiastically scrawled on the top of the fax, “Isn’t this the prettiest GUT you’ve ever seen?” This derivation was first presented in Antoniadis, Ellis, Hagelin and Nanopoulos (1987) and in more detail in Campbell, Ellis, Hagelin, Nanopoulos, and Ticciatti (1987), and its implications worked out in numerous subsequent papers with these and other collaborators. Over the next several years, the four principle collaborators, Hagelin, John Ellis (head of the theory division at CERN), Nanopoulos and Ignatios Antoniadis, met together for several intensive conferences to work out the implications of the theory.

[xv] Maharishi International University was established in 1971. In 1995 MIU officially became Maharishi University of Management.

[xvi] Quoted in (Dickie, 1992).

[xvii] This effect, called the Maharishi Effect, has been recorded in peer-reviewed research since the early 1970s. At least sixty papers substantiate the effects of individuals or groups practicing the Transcendental Meditation or advanced TM programs on conflict-related variables or other social indicators of the larger society’s quality of life. See http://www.truthabouttm.org/documentFiles/20.doc for a summary of this research. Hagelin argues that the Maharishi Effect represents substantial evidence for the proposed identity of the unified field and the deepest level of consciousness.

[xviii] See, for example, (Hagelin, 1998), especially chapter 3, and (Oates, 2002) for good, readable introductions. (Hagelin, 1987) is a classic statement of the Maharishi-Hagelin identity principle, but not light reading. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1984), is a compilation of press reports from the early-1980’s when Maharishi first explicitly associated Transcendental Consciousness with the unified field of physics and the Transcendental Meditation program was presented as the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field. Maharishi designated 1984 the “Year of Unified Field Based Civilization,” as the organizing theme for the global Transcendental Meditation organization. For online source materials, www.tm.org and www.mum.edu would be the best places to start.

[xix] Stenger gives no references for his claim that Maharishi associated the TM program with grand unified theory in general, or with SU(5) in particular. At first I thought that he must have gotten this idea from Geoff Gilpin and mistakenly attributed it to Maharishi. Geoff Gilpin is a disgruntled former student of Maharishi International University, who has recently written a book (Gilpin, 2006) expressing his opinions of Maharishi and the Transcendental Meditation organization. Stenger cites Gilpin’s book which he says he “relied on extensively for parts of this chapter [his ‘Guru of GUTs’ chapter]” (p.56).

But Gilpin (2006) never makes the claim, in his own voice, that Maharishi associated the TM program with GUT, although he quotes Stenger as telling him:

There are a lot of theories of Grand Unification. The simplest one, the one that Maharishi was promoting, made a very specific prediction—that the proton would decay. People set up experiments all around the world and everybody expected to find proton decay, but they didn’t find it. So that Grand Unified theory, the one in Maharishi’s ads, turned out to be false. I found that very amusing. (Stenger, as quoted in Gilpin, 2006, p. 187)

What is very amusing is that, while Stenger cites Gilpin as his authority on Maharishi and the TM program, it was apparently Stenger himself who was authoritatively attributing a TM-GUT connection to Maharishi. In other words, Stenger didn’t get this mistaken and misleading idea from Gilpin, he just made it up out of thin air! So Stenger cites Gilpin as his reference for his GUTs chapter, and Gilpin cites Stenger, and neither of them know what they are talking about.

[xx] Stenger appears to be disputing the phrase “responsible for,” interpreting this as an unfounded claim for priority and suggesting that his sleuthing has unearthed the real discovery of flipped SU(5) in Stephen Barr’s 1982 paper. But Stenger needn’t have worked so hard to rectify the historical record! Stephen Barr’s paper is properly referenced in the 1987 paper coauthored by Hagelin: (Antoniadis, Ellis, Hagelin, and Nanopoulos, 1987). Moreover, if he had read the title of this paper—“Supersymmetric Flipped SU(5) Revitalized”—Stenger would have known that Hagelin’s claim was to have revitalized flipped SU(5). The idea had been considered and shelved by the theoretical physics community until Hagelin’s initial derivation built on the superstring. This—together with the subsequent years-long intensive effort of Hagelin and his collaborators—developed flipped SU(5) into the most promising grand unified theory, which it is to this day. See fn. 14 for more history of flipped SU(5).

[xxi] Marginal indeed. In work done at Harvard University, as early as 1970, Robert Keith Wallace found that Transcendental Consciousness is associated with a characteristic set of physiological parameters indicating a fourth major state of consciousness, distinct from waking, dreaming and deep sleep (Wallace 1970, 1995). Since then, more than 600 published research studies, conducted at over 200 independent research institutions in 35 countries, have documented the distinctive physiological correlates and beneficial results of practicing the Transcendental Meditation program. In addition to Wallace, some of the most active researchers have included David Orme-Johnson, Robert Schneider, Charles Alexander, Fred Travis, Ken Walton, Michael Dillbeck, Ken Cavanaugh and Sanford Nidich. For good summaries of the TM research, see: Orme-Johnson (1995), www.tm.org/research and www.mum.edu/research.

For a report on recent research evaluating the effect of the TM program on reducing blood pressure, see Transcendental Meditation More Effective in Reducing High Blood Pressure Compared to Other Stress Reduction Programs. Two recent meta-analyses by Rainforth, et al. and Anderson, et al. document the unique effectiveness of the Transcendental Meditation program for reducing high blood pressure. Rainforth, et al. (2007) shows the TM program is more effective than other stress reduction programs in reducing blood pressure and Anderson, et al. (2008) shows that the TM program is more effective than relaxation or health education controls in reducing blood pressure.

[xxii] For a good discussion of this equivalence claim see www.truthabouttm.org/truth/Research/ComparisonofTechniques/index.cfm. See also Orme-Johnson and Walton (1998) for a summary of the evidence against the conclusion that all meditation and relaxation approaches to preventing or reversing stress are the same.

[xxiii] Alexander emphasized that higher states of consciousness are developmentally higher, in the same way that the more advanced levels of a maturity scale, such as Jean Piaget’s, naturally provide increasingly more accurate and coherent experiences and understanding of the world. In their jointly edited book, Higher Stages of Human Development, Charles Alexander and Ellen Langer posed the central question, “What is the endpoint or highest possible state of human development?” (Alexander and Langer, 1990). Why is this question important? Alexander explains, “How one conceives of the highest state or endpoint of human development is critical, for it contains one’s perception of the direction, possibilities, and mechanisms of human growth” (Alexander and Alexander, 2000, p.191). Alexander and his associates documented the evidence for a developmental scale that continues well beyond formal operations to the highest levels of enlightenment. Their research supported the thesis that psychic development, although ordinarily arrested prior to reaching these higher states, can be released by means of transcendental experiences to continue its evolution. Alexander was convinced of the naturalness and universality of our innate tendency to evolve on the basis of transcendental experience. The underlying theme of Alexander’s research was to test the premises that there is an innate human drive toward growth, development and evolution; that transcendental experience can remove physiological and psychological obstacles to the fulfillment of this natural tendency; and that the end-state of this evolutionary process involves the ability to maintain transcendental experience, not as a temporary, “peak” experience, but as a full-time reality. For good overviews of Alexander’s work, see David Orme-Johnson (2000) and Victoria Alexander (2005).

[xxiv] Hebert et al. (2005). Zero phase-lag synchrony is especially interesting from the perspective of quantum neuroscience, because brain-wave synchrony of nonlocal regions of the cortex is hard to explain on the basis of classical mechanisms.

[xxv] The work of Travis, Arenander and their collaborators builds on earlier work documenting the physiological correlates of Cosmic Consciousness. Mason and Alexander et al. (1997) showed that long-term practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation program reporting witnessing sleep show the signature of Transcendental Consciousness (alpha/theta waves) superimposed on the signature of deep sleep (delta waves).

[xxvi] Historically, arguments for a unified “deep structure” (Shear, 1990), underlying both consciousness and matter, have been advanced on the basis of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physical theory. Shear develops and explains the rationale for the unity and identity of the deep structure of knowledge and the deep structure of the objective world, tracing this perennial idea through its recurrence in both Western science and philosophy as well as Eastern meditative traditions. See also Gorini (1997) for a recent argument by a mathematician in support of this thesis.

[xxvii] If the laws of nature were really arbitrary, then the laws governing our intellectual processes—including our scientific method—would also be arbitrary, and science as a meaningful and credible enterprise would be undermined. See (Scharf, 2009) for a more extensive discussion.

Are all meditation techniques the same? New Study

2009-01-20T19:42:00.000-05:00

Different practices often produce different results

As doctors increasingly prescribe meditation to patients for stress-related disorders, scientists are gaining a better understanding of how different techniques from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions produce different results.

A new paper published in Consciousness and Cognition discusses three categories to organize and better understand meditation:

Focused attention—concentrating on an object or emotion;
Open monitoring—being mindful of one’s breath or thoughts;
Automatic self-transcending—meditations that transcend their own activity—a new category introduced by the authors.

Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG.

“The idea is that meditation is, in a sense, a ‘cognitive task,’ and EEG frequencies are known for different tasks,” said Fred Travis, Ph.D., co-author, and Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management.

Focused attention, characterized by beta/gamma activity, included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist (loving kindness and compassion), Buddhist (Zen and Diamond Way), and Chinese (Qigong) traditions.

Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist (Mindfulness, and ZaZen), Chinese (Qigong), and Vedic (Sahaja Yoga) traditions.

Automatic self-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations from Vedic (Transcendental Meditation) and Chinese (Qigong) traditions.

Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects.

“Meditations differ in both their ingredients and their effects, just as medicines do. Lumping them all together as “essentially the same” is simply a mistake,” said Jonathan Shear, Ph.D., co-author, professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the author of several books and publications on meditation.

“Explicit differences between meditation techniques need to be respected when researching physiological patterns or clinical outcomes of meditation practices,” said Dr. Travis. “If they are averaged together, then the resulting phenomenological, physiological, and clinical profiles cannot be meaningfully interpreted.”

The Myth Of The Relaxation Response

2008-09-09T15:39:00.001-04:00

by David Orme-Johnson, Ph.D.
Reprinted from Truth About TM

Abstract
Although relaxation and meditation techniques have been hypothesized to produce the so-called relaxation response, a review of the literature finds that the acute physiological changes that occur during most techniques are not significantly different from uninstructed rest, sitting eyes closed. Compared to rest, some techniques produce specific acute changes resulting from their specific methodologies, such as reduced muscle tension in muscle relaxation techniques, reduced respiration according to the well known orienting response in techniques that require focused attention, and reflexive entrainment of the heart rate with the breath for techniques that control respiration.

The relaxation response was originally modeled on the changes produced by the Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) technique, but some changes that occur during TM, such as increased cardiac output, skin conductance, and plasma adrenaline, are in the opposite direction of the relaxation response, and many other changes, such as increased cerebral blood flow and EEG coherence, are unpredicted by the relaxation response. With regard to clinical outcomes, randomized clinical trials that controlled for expectation, placebo, and other design features, as well as meta-analyses and reviews of over 790 studies, provide strong evidence that different techniques are not equivalent and they have specific effects. For example, it appears that muscular disorders are best treated with muscularly oriented methods, while autonomic dysfunction such as hypertension and migraine headaches are more effectively treated with techniques that target the autonomic nervous system. The Transcendental Meditation technique appears to be the most effective treatment overall for a broad range of stress-related disorders, including hypertension, anxiety, substance abuse, and mental health.

Introduction
Herbert Benson and colleagues proposed that different meditation and relaxation techniques with a wide range of methodologies and goals produce in common a "relaxation response", that is, decreased sympathetic nervous system activity, opposite to the "fight or flight' response, and that the medical, psychological, and behavioral effects of these different techniques are therefore equivalent. 1-5 This review examines all relevant documents found in Medline and the psychology literature using the search words "relaxation response", and all studies found comparing different relaxation and meditation techniques, including 11 meta-analyses (including three that were synthesized into a later one) and 33 reviews (including reviews covered by later reviews), all in all synthesizing approximately 790 studies. Part I covers acute physiological changes that occur during the various techniques, and Part II covers their medical and other short and long-term benefits.

Part I: Acute Effects
The relaxation response was modeled after the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM): "The studies of Transcendental Meditation suggested the existence of a physiological response which could be elicited by other techniques" (p. 115). 6 Wallace and colleagues found that TM decreased O2 consumption, respiratory rate, heart rate, muscle tension, and blood pressure and increased skin resistance and EEG alpha waves to a greater extent than uninstructed rest while just sitting with eyes closed. 7-9 These are basically a list of the changes said to constitute the relaxation response.1-3

Techniques specifically mentioned as producing the relaxation response include Progressive Relaxation, Hypnosis, Cotention (concentration on one thing exclusively as opposed to Ditention or ordinary wakefulness in which attention shifts from object to object), Shavasan (a yoga posture lying still, face up), Autogenic Training, Sentic Cycles (a self-induced emotional experience), Zen, Zazen, Yoga, Mindfulness, the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM), and various types of meditative prayer from Eastern and Western traditions.1, 3-5 In addition, Benson and colleagues created their own technique, which has been widely referred to in the literature as the "Benson technique". 10-12

The Benson technique
The first study of the Benson technique (BT) found a 10% reduction in O2 consumption during a 12-minute period relative to an equivalent period of unstructured eyes closed resting. 6 This is 60% less than the reduction of 16% for TM in the same amount of time 7, 8 using comparable subjects (undergraduates of both sexes, mean age of 24 years) and methodologies (mouth piece or mask with a Beckman gas analyzer). In the TM study, the baseline level of O2 consumption was 246.8 ml/min and decreased to 206.5 ml/min after 12 minutes (interpolated from the 10 and 20 minute measurement). 7 For BT, the change went from 251.4 ml/min during rest to 225.4 ml/min. The level of O2 consumption was thus 8.4% lower during TM than during BT (t(23)=2.05, p<.06, trend), and the level of CO2 elimination was 173.9 ml/min during TM compared to 214.1 ml/min for the BT, a significant 18.7% difference (t(23)=2.56, p=.02). An independent study by Cork and Cox of the Stress Research unit of Nottingham University, England, instructed subjects who "listened to taped relaxation instructions taken from Beary and Benson and then practiced the technique" (p. 102). 11 They found: "The heart speeds up during inspiration and then slows down during expiration, thereby producing sinus arrhythmia"(p. 105)11 Other than producing sinus arrhythmia, which is a well known effect of controlling breathing,13 Cork and Cox found that BT did not produce changes in blood pressure and heart rate different from the baseline condition and control condition. In a second study comparing BT to resting, they report: "However, these [reductions on blood pressure, pulse, and mood] occurred both when subjects were practicing Benson's technique and when they were simply resting quietly. There were, therefore, no differential effects of the two procedures on psychophysiological state" (p. 107).11 They further note: "Pollack and Zeiner (1979) 14 found no significant differences in the psychophysiological effect of Benson's technique, uninstructed relaxation, and sitting quietly . The only procedure causing any significant change was sitting quietly which led to the greatest reductions in heart rate" (p. 110). 11 Recently, Benson and colleagues report reduced frontal beta EEG activity during BT, but no significant changes for any other frequency band or scalp location. 15 This is different from the original specification of the relaxation response, which included increased alpha waves, 1 and it is different from the physiology of the TM technique in which alpha and theta increase.7-9, 16, 17 Moreover, beta activity has been observed to increase in some phases of the TM technique.16 Progressive relaxation
Edelman (1970) reported two studies indicating that the psychophysiological effects of progressive relaxation were no different from three control conditions: suggestion of relaxation, instruction for skeletal movement (taken from the relaxation instructions), and continuous semi-classical music.18

Hypnosis
Hypnotic suggestion ‘to relax’ or ‘to sleep’ does not reduce metabolic rate or produce relaxation to a greater extent than baseline level during sitting eyes closed prior to the suggestion. 19-21 Benson and colleagues have argued that the baseline was already a state of relaxation due to hypnotic induction, 1 but research shows that there is nothing special about the physiology of the ‘hypnotic trance’ or ‘hypnotic sleep.’ 19-23

Autogenic Training
Galois of the Centre Hospitalier Saint-Philibert in Lomme, France, compared autogenic training (AT),24 TM, and uninstructed rest (C) in 30 normal subjects, mean age 27. 25 Spontaneous skin resistance responses decreased during both TM and AT compared to C. However, respiration rate decreased more during TM than AT or C, and TM had more respiratory suspensions than the other two groups, without hypercapnia or hyperpnea, indicating a natural state of deep rest. Also, spontaneous skin resistance responses, respiration rate, and reaction time, which were similar between groups before the practice, were all significantly lower after the practice for TM than the other two groups.

Cotention
Cotention has been shown to reduce respiration rate, but no studies are cited showing that it affects any of the other parameters of the 'relaxation response.' 1 Moreover, the orienting response can account for the slowing of breathing during focusing. During the orienting response, initially the breath slows down, and then continues at a slower rate than before the orienting process.26, 27

Shavasan
Shavasan is a yoga posture of lying still, face up. Dhanaraj and Singh of the University of Alberta, Canada, compared Shavasan with TM and found that TM produced significantly greater reductions in O2 consumption, and tidal volume. 28

Yoga, Zen
Many of the early studies on meditation were on traditional Yoga and Zen meditation techniques, which do appear to produce a generalized reduction in sympathetic nervous system activity, 29-34 as Wallace has pointed out. 7 However, Wallace also noted that there were important differences in techniques, e.g., the non-habituation of the EEG alpha blocking response in Zen monks compared to loss of the alpha blocking in some of the yogis. 7, 29, 30 These studies were on very few subject, sometimes just one, and most studies did not have control groups. Moreover, the subjects were Yoga experts and Zen masters of ten to twenty years practice, following a religious way of life, and their generalization to the Western lifestyle is questionable.

Mindfulness Meditation
Two studies, one on pain and the other on psychosomatic complaints, utilized mindfulness meditation to elicit the relaxation response. 35, 36 In the context of chronic pain, mindfulness means “detached observation of the pain experience,” and the technique involves putting attention onto the pain area. 37 This literature search found no physiological evidence that mindfulness meditation elicits the relaxation response.

Transcendental Meditation technique
A meta-analysis of 32 studies comparing TM and ordinary eyes closed resting showed that TM is different from rest in some, but not all, ways that the relaxation response would predict. 38 Respiration rate and plasma lactate decrease and basal skin resistance increases, but heart rate, the most commonly measured index of the relaxation response, did not change more during TM than rest. Another index of sympathetic arousal, spontaneous skin resistance responses, also did not discriminate TM from rest. In addition, blood pressure does not change acutely during the TM technique in normal subjects, 7-9 whereas blood pressure reduction is said to be one the parameters of the relaxation response. 1

This meta-analysis also found during the pre TM or rest baseline that practitioners of TM had lower levels of heart rate, respiration rate, plasma lactate, and spontaneous skin resistance responses than rest controls, indicating that the reductions during the practice were not due to regression to the mean. 38

Since the effects of the relaxation response were originally modeled after the TM technique, 4, 6 it is important to note that some of the physiological changes during TM, such as increased cardiac output, 39 increased plasma adrenaline in long-term TM practitioners (despite decreased heart rate), 40 and increased cerebral blood flow39, 41 are in the opposite direction of the relaxation response. Other changes during TM are simply not predicted by the relaxation response, such as decreased hepatic and renal blood flow, 39 decreased tissue metabolism, 42 modulation of red cell metabolism, 43 increased prolactin, 44 increased serotonin metabolite, 45-47 short- and long-term changes in pituitary hormone levels, indicative of increased stability and sensitivity in endocrine control systems (TSH, GH, and prolactin), 48 increased plasma phenylalanine, 49 increased salivary electrolytes and protein and decreased salivary pH, 50 high voltage theta bursts, 8, 16, 51 EEG beta synchrony during some periods of meditation, 16 increased alpha induction in response to stimulation, 52 increased hemispheric laterality during task, 53 shorter latency and higher amplitude visual and auditory evoked potentials, 54-58 changes in brain stem evoked potentials, 59 faster recovery of the paired Hoffman reflex, 60 EEG coherence and synchrony in the alpha and theta bands, 16, 61-65 and a fivefold increase in plasma arginine vasopressin elevation. 66 See reviews by Jevning and colleagues 67 and Alexander and colleagues. 68

Studies have shown that TM is not a single state, but is a dynamic process with 'inward and outward strokes' of meditation. 69-72 In his original studies on the physiology of TM, Wallace presented individual data and pointed to a variety of patterns that occur. 69 Wallace showed that basal skin resistance and other parameters often rise and fall several times during the practice, corresponding to the meditator's current physical and psychological condition. During the ‘inward stroke’ of meditation the mind settles inward towards a state of complete inner silence, which is called transcendental consciousness or pure consciousness by the ancient Vedic tradition.73 Patanjali's Yoga Sutras describe it as "the state of least excitation of consciousness" (1.2). 74 The ‘outward stroke’ of meditation corresponds to increased mental activity and metabolic activity resulting from normalization of imbalances in the system. 72

Even the "inward stroke" of meditation is not adequately described by the relaxation response. Many scholars have noted that experiences of transcendental consciousness are universal, found in all cultures, in both religious and secular settings, although their interpretation varies according to the cultural contexts. 73, 75-81 For example, one meditator says of his first experience of the TM technique: "I began to drift down into deeper and deeper levels of relaxation, as if I were sinking into my chair. Then for some time, perhaps a minute or a few minutes, I experienced a silent, inner state of no thoughts, just pure awareness and nothing else; then again I became aware of my surroundings. It left me with a deep sense of ease, inner renewal and happiness" (p. 334). 77 TM practitioners variously describe their personal experiences of transcendental consciousness as: "unbounded awareness," "enormously great calm and peace," "timelessness," "blissful awareness," "a balanced state of fulfillment that just is" (pp. 1571-1576). 82

Since Benson and colleagues refer to experiences of transcendental consciousness gleaned from the popular literature as evidence of the relaxation response, 1, 4, 5 it is important to note that the psychophysiology of transcendental consciousness is not adequately described by the relaxation response. Whereas during transcendental consciousness respiration rate is abruptly reduced by 40% or even suspended for up to a minute without compensatory breathing afterwards, 70-72, 82 skin conductance, an unambiguous marker of sympathetic nervous system activity, increases at the onset of the experience. 72 Other changes not predicted by the relaxation response include increased EEG power and coherence in the 6-10 Hz band, with large individual differences in peak frequencies and scalp locations. 64, 72

Meditative Prayer
Transcendental consciousness is the goal of some traditional meditation techniques, and the subjective descriptions of it from these traditions sound very similar to experiences of transcendental consciousness reported by TM meditators and from other secular sources. 79, 80, 83 William James, "the father of American psychology," collected these experiences and attempted to classify them, 75 but as yet objective evidence demonstrating their physiological effects is lacking.

In principle, however, religious or secular techniques that involve concentration or contemplation can not produce transcendental consciousness, because contemplation on the meaning of something or concentration on a single object of attention only create more mental activity, which is counterproductive to achieving inner silence. It is unlikely that relaxation techniques derived in clinical settings with the goal of relaxing the patient from an abnormally stressed and agitated state to a more or less ‘normal’ level of stress would produce transcendental consciousness, and no reports of this were found in the literature on the relaxation response or the Benson technique.

Part II: Comparisons of the Medical, Behavioral, and
Psychological Effects of Different Techniques

Soon after the relaxation response was proposed, Davidson and Schwartz proposed an alternative hypothesis that different meditation and relaxation techniques have specific effects: cognitive effects for cognitively oriented methods, autonomic effects for autonomically oriented methods. 84 Lehrer of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey and colleagues published a qualitative review of 175 studies and 25 reviews that strongly supports the hypothesis of heterogeneous effects. 85 They found that electromyographic (EMG) biofeedback reduces muscle tension, whereas blood pressure biofeedback may modify blood pressure, and finger-temperature biofeedback may change peripheral circulation. Different techniques that target the same bodily system may have different effects on that system. Progressive muscle relaxation leads to generalized muscle relaxation, whereas for most people EMG biofeedback reduces tension only in the muscles to which feedback training is applied. Muscle relaxation and EMG biofeedback have smaller autonomic effects than finger temperature biofeedback and autogenic training, which involves visualizing pleasant past experiences. Autogenic training appears to have generalized autonomic effects that differ from the specific autonomic effects of biofeedback on heart rate, skin resistance, or blood pressure.

The cognitive activity required by autogenic training and hypnosis both involve suggestion, which is different from the activity required by meditation and cognitively-oriented techniques. The effects of EMG biofeedback on reducing stress through reducing muscle tension differ from those of the TM technique, which appears more effective at reversing endocrine changes due to chronic stress. 86 Lehrer and colleagues conclude that predominantly muscular disorders are best treated with muscularly oriented methods, while autonomic dysfunction such as hypertension and migraine headaches are more effectively treated with techniques that target the autonomic nervous system. Anxiety and phobias may be most effectively treated with methods that have both strong behavioral and cognitive components. Whether or not these generalizations are upheld by future research, there is now ample evidence that different techniques have specific effects and are not equivalent.

A meta-analysis by Hyman of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York and colleagues of 48 studies on the effects of relaxation training and clinical symptoms found that effect sizes (standard deviation units) ranged ten fold, from .1 (very weak effect) to 1.11 (strong effect) and they state: "All treatments included in the analysis except Benson's relaxation technique demonstrated evidence of effectiveness" (p. 216) 10

Relaxation therapy and hypertension
Hypertension has been the most studied of stress-related disorders that the relaxation response is proposed to help. Yet meta-analyses have consistently shown that relaxation, hypnosis, and many meditation and stress management techniques do not have an effect on reducing blood pressure in hypertensive patients when design issues such as number of baseline measurements, familiarity with the measurement environment, and expectancy or placebo are taken into account. 87, 88 Benson is reported to have responded by saying that the relaxation response is effective for patients whose initial blood pressure is highest or whose hypertension is clearly linked to mental stress. 89

However, the meta-analysis by Jacobs of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and colleagues took pre treatment pressure into account, as well as placebo, the number of baseline visits and the patients' familiarity with the clinical environment where blood pressure was measured. Relaxation therapy had little effect on reducing blood pressure that could not be accounted for by regression towards the mean, habituation, and placebo. In addition, techniques that are supposed to produce the relaxation response did particularly poorly. 88 With regard to mental stress, there is no clear indication that mentally stressed hypertensive patients will respond effectively to relaxation. Whereas some studies have found an association between pre-treatment anxiety levels and response to behavioral treatment, 90, 91 other studies found that lower levels of anxiety and hostility were associated with better treatment response. 88, 92, 93

A more recent randomized clinical trial of 127 elderly African Americans, compared TM, Progressive Relaxation (PR), and a diet exercise control (DE), 94, 95 matching groups on expectation of positive outcomes and keeping antihypertensive medication constant. Baseline measurements were taken over four visits, and program structure, time with the teacher, teacher motivation, subjects' evaluation of teacher's effectiveness, and other design features were equivalent between groups. In three months, TM reduced blood pressure by 10.7/6.4 mm Hg (comparable to anti-hypertensive medication), significantly more than PR or DE. PR also produced significant reductions compared to DE, but only half the reduction of the TM technique, supporting the view that different techniques have heterogeneous effects.

The study also found that TM was effective in reducing blood pressure in high and low risk groups on six measures of hypertension risk: psychosocial stress, obesity, alcohol use, physical inactivity, dietary sodium-potassium ratio, and a composite measure, 96 which is not in accord with Benson's assertion that the relaxation response works only (or works best) for patients with high stress levels.

Another random assignment study of blood pressure in the elderly that controlled for program structure and expectation fostering features found that TM produced significantly greater reductions in blood pressure than either the Benson technique (repetition of a well know phrase with a passive attitude towards thoughts) or mindfulness meditation. TM also produced a number of other positive benefits compared to the other two techniques, including increased longevity, increased cognitive flexibility, improvements in self-reported measures of behavioral flexibility and aging, and a greater sense of well-being and improved mental health. 97

Five and 15 year follow-up studies of these two randomized clinical blood pressure trials, respectively, found that TM significantly reduced cardiovascular and all-cause mortality compared to progressive relaxation, mindfulness meditation, the Benson technique, or a diet-exercise education program. 96, 98 TM subjects also had reduced Medicaid payments compared to subjects receiving progressive relaxation or the diet-exercise education program, 99 supporting previous research that TM reduces medical utilization and costs. 99-101

One possible mechanism by which TM reduces cardiovascular disease is that it appears to reduce lipid peroxide levels, controlling for smoking, fat intake, or vitamin supplementation, since oxidative stress (free radical activity) contributes to atheroscelerosis and aging. 102

Troubling Matters
Irwin Tessman of Purdue University and Jack Tessman of Tufts University found a number of discrepancies between Benson's claims for the relaxation response and the published data. In his book The Power and Biology of Belief , Benson cites a study on conception that he co-authored: "Thirty-six percent of women with unexpected infertility became pregnant within six months of completing the program [of the relaxation response]." The Tessman's found: "Unfortunately, perusal of the cited paper 103 reveals that there was no evidence that the relaxation response improved the conception rate, as the authors are careful to point out" (p. 369). 104 Finding a useful control, the Tessmans estimated that the fertility rate of women before they received the behavioral treatment "was at least equal to and possibly higher than the rate after treatment began" (p. 369).

In another example, the Tessmans wrote: "Another reported benefit of the relaxation response is that 'Patients who had open heart surgery had fewer postoperative arrhythmias and less anxiety following surgery.' However, the original study 105 demonstrated no significant evidence of benefits" (p. 369). 104

Five months later, in response to an article on the relaxation response appearing in Time magazine, 106 the Tessmans wrote a letter to Science . 107 In the Time article, Benson was quoted as saying that the relaxation response is clinically beneficial for insomnia, infertility, and chronic pain, e.g., "34% of chronic pain sufferers reduce their use of pain killing drugs." Looking into the original research, the Tessmans found: "Concerning insomnia, the relevant paper explicitly states that it is not possible to say whether the relaxation response contributes to therapy, because a multifactor approach was used. In a separate study involving small numbers of patients (10 test versus 10 control) and labeled as 'preliminary,' evidence of a small contribution of the relaxation response is made problematic by large standard errors of the means. Concerning infertility, the relevant paper disavows Benson's claim. Concerning chronic pain, again the relevant paper explicitly states that it is not possible to say whether the relaxation response contributes to therapy because they used a multifactor approach. And nothing at all is said about any reduction in the use of pain killing drugs." 107

In his letter of response, Benson wrote: "A lay magazine such as Time cannot always publish comments with the attention to detail that one would like." (p. 1694). 108 But he did not address the discrepancies between the published statements in his popular book and the published research reports, several which he co-authored. He writes in his letter: "It is the data published in the peer reviewed journals that I stand by" 108 and he quotes a list of results which appeared in a brochure for a continuing medical education seminar on "Spirituality and Healing" in Medicine II stating that the relaxation response is "an effective therapy for a number of diseases that include hypertension, cardiac rhythm irregularities, many forms of chronic pain, insomnia, infertility, the symptoms of cancer and AIDS, premenstrual syndrome, anxiety, and mild and moderate depression." 108 Benson writes of this list: "I also stand by these statements." But the Tessmans found that claims that the relaxation response is "an effective therapy" is simply not supported for infertility, cardiac rhythm irregularities, insomnia, and chronic pain. The meta-analyses reviewed above also invalidate hypertension.

With regard to chronic pain, Benson replies in his letter that an NIH Technology Assessment Conference concluded: "A number of well-defined behavioral and relaxation interventions now exist and are effective in the treatment of chronic pain and insomnia." 108 However, the Benson technique was not among the techniques found to work for chronic pain and insomnia. I was the reviewer for meditation techniques for that conference, 109 and I found three studies on the Benson technique. A study on pain after skin surgery did not find any differences from controls on a pain-rating scale, blood pressure, a symptoms index, or state-trait anxiety. The experimental subjects subjectively reported being helped, but details are not given in the paper on how this was measured. Moreover, experimental subjects received more local anesthetic than controls, which may have influenced their reports. 110 Similar results were found in a study using the Benson technique in combination with other relaxation techniques for post-operative distress in cholecystemy patients. This study did not find any changes in perceived pain intensity, abdominal EMG, or use of anesthetics, but patients did report being less distressed compared to controls receiving standard post-operative instructions. 111 A study of laboratory induced pain found that the Benson technique and controls sitting with eyes closed “engaging in any pleasant mental activity” did not differ from each other on pain sensitivity. This study concluded that there were no unique effects of Benson’s technique on pain compared to just ordinary sitting eyes closed. 112

With regard to premenstrual syndrome, the relevant study can only be viewed as very preliminary evidence, 113 because out of the initial 107 subjects, the study ended up with only 16 subjects in the relaxation response group, and change was found on only one of five measures. In addition, only seven "high severity subjects" improved relative to controls on some retrospective measures, and the authors suggest: "Such a differential effect of initial severity is most likely explained by a floor effect, because women with less severe symptoms have less opportunity for improvement than do women with relatively severe symptoms" (p. 653). However, the study had already eliminated 30 subjects because they did not meet a high enough threshold symptom severity to be included.

Regarding anxiety, a meta-analysis of 146 meditation and relaxation studies by Eppley of Stanford University and colleagues found that the Benson technique did no better than a placebo in reducing anxiety and that TM produced a significantly greater reduction in trait anxiety than other meditation or relaxation techniques, controlling for type of population, age, gender, quality of experimental design, duration and hours of treatment, pretest anxiety, demand characteristics, experimenter attitude, type of publication, and attrition. 12 A criticism of this meta-analysis argued that the TM subjects practiced the technique more frequently than the other groups (p. 235), 114 but Table 3 of the meta-analysis showed that there was no correlation between frequency of practice and effect size for all relaxation techniques or for other meditation techniques. In addition, for studies of other meditations in which the subjects practiced their techniques with the same frequency as did the TM subjects, the effect size was only .24, compared to .7 for TM (Table 1).

Meta-analyses on Substance Abuse and Mental Health
A meta-analysis of 198 studies on drug, alcohol, and tobacco consumption, covering subjects ranging from the general population to incarcerated drug offenders, compared relaxation techniques, therapeutic probation, pharmacological intervention, educational programs, and unconventional treatments (e.g., acupuncture), and TM. 115 TM studies showed substantially larger effect sizes in reducing consumption than other programs and showed that abstinence was maintained longer, controlling for research design strength and duration of practice.

A carefully controlled random assignment study of relapse prevention following alcoholism treatment in 'skid row alcoholics' found that 65% of the TM group and 55% of the EMG biofeedback group were completely abstinent after 18 months compared to 25 % abstinent for those receiving routine therapy or neurotherapy. 116 A wide range of evidence indicates that the physiological mechanism by which the TM technique affects substance abuse is normalization of the neurochemical imbalances. 47

A meta-analysis of 51 studies and 404 independent outcomes on positive and negative affect compared the Benson technique with meditation techniques (e.g.. Zen and TM), and found that TM consistently produced greater effect sizes when compared with other techniques. 117 Another meta-analysis of 42 independent outcomes found that the statistical effect size produced by TM on optimal psychological health (self-actualization) was three times larger than that produced by other forms of meditation and relaxation, controlling for duration of intervention and strength of experimental design. 118 A random assignment study of 83 black college students found that both TM and progressive relaxation significantly increased overall mental health and reduced anxiety compared to a cognitive-behavioral stategies group, and that TM showed greater reductions in neoroticism and increases in EEG coherence than the other groups. 65

Discussion
This review found that the physiological changes produced by different meditation and relaxation techniques are not accurately described by the relaxation response.11, 14, 18-23, 25, 28 The relaxation response was modeled on the changes produced by the Transcendental Meditation technique, 1-3, 6 yet some of the changes during TM are in the opposite direction of the relaxation response, 39-41, 72 while other changes are not predicted by it. 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 59, 119, 120 Random assignment studies, meta-analyses and comprehensive reviews provide strong evidence that different meditation and relaxation techniques are not equivalent and that they have specific effects that are closely tied to their specific methodologies. 12, 38, 67, 68, 84, 85, 87, 88, 94-98, 115-118

This is not the first review to find evidence for the relaxation response lacking. In the 1980's the Chief of Medicine of Boston's Beth Hospital assembled an outside committee to evaluate Benson's work. Review panel member Bob Rose, a psychoendocrinologist, formerly on the editorial board of Psychosomatic Medicine, and currently director of health programs at the MacArthur Foundation said: "Herb has claimed to do the very basic kinds of biological research that document the psychobiogical mechanisms underlying the relaxation response, but it turns out that when you look very carefully that he hasn't done that"(p. 358). 89 In their letter to Science reviewed earlier, Irwin and Jack Tessman state: "We see Benson as a publicizer of therapeutic claims that appear not to be supported by the data." 107

Consequences
Over 4 million copies of the popular book on the relaxation response has been sold. 89 It is widely quoted in most textbooks and articles on meditation and relaxation techniques, and is often used as an interpretive framework of the medical benefits of different techniques. A search of the recent literature found that it is being used to explain the effects of progressive muscle relaxation, 121-123 hypnosis, 124, 125 biofeedback, 126, 127 shavasan yoga, 123 and the Broota technique. 123 This practice is not only an explanatory fiction, it inhibits useful research on the true mechanisms of these techniques. On the other hand, the practice of using the demonstrated effectiveness of different technique, such as TM or mindfulness meditation, 1-5, 35 as evidence for validity of the relaxation response is grossly misleading.

One can not assume that just because one technique has been shown to have a particular effect that all will have that effect. Nor does it follow that just because one or several techniques are shown not to be effective that all techniques are not effective. 128 For example, in 1992 a major NIH hypertension study of 2100 subjects did not find that relaxation (not including TM) was effective, whereas weight and sodium reduction were. Consequently, no relaxation technique was included in the larger phase II of the Trials for Hypertension Prevention. 89 More care in discriminating techniques that are effective from those that are not might have resulted in another outcome, that is, uncovering useful methods of preventing hypertension rather than discarding the whole notion of treating hypertension through stress reduction.

Relaxation therapies are now taught in 60% of medical schools, 89 with no distinction between those that work and those that do not, resulting in loss of cost effectiveness as well as promoting the unnecessary continuation of human suffering that could have been relieved by the application of effective technologies.

Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge librarian Jim Bates for all his help in obtaining reprints, and my wife, Dr. Rhoda Orme-Johnson, for her editorial assistance.

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