This is an excerpt from Alistair Shearer’s book The Story of Yoga (Penguin Viking, 2020).
Mind-yoga was likewise soon to be presented as a quasi-medical therapy, a process best exemplified by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s simple technique of Transcendental Meditation. When he left India to begin his worldwide teaching mission in the late 1950s, Maharishi couched his message in largely spiritual terms, a traditional vocabulary that included Hindu deities, kundalini and chakras, reincarnation, God, karma and enlightenment. However, such riches were disregarded by some of his pupils in light of their immediate medical needs. Landing in California in 1959, like the earlier generations of Vedantists before him, Maharishi established himself in Los Angeles. Soon after one of his first public talks, he was shocked by an article in a local paper that praised Transcendental Meditation as a natural cure for insomnia. As he commented bemusedly: ‘I have come to awaken the people and all they want to do is go to sleep! This seems to be a strange country, values are different here…’
In Britain, some journalists were surprised by his irrepressible happiness and dubbed him ‘the giggling guru’. Others looked on him as a charming oddity, a monkish idealist, well-meaning but out of touch with modern life, as evinced by the opening words of one of his first talks in London: ‘My vision in the world is spiritual regeneration, to regenerate every man, everywhere in the world, into the values of spirit. The values of the spirit are pure consciousness, Absolute bliss’.
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Alistair Shearer
The Story of Yoga
Penguin Viking, 2020
The press was unresponsive to such an ambitious mission, but, as in America, did label the meditation a ‘non-medicinal tranquiliser’. No doubt disappointed by the media’s shallow approach, the yogi will surely have noted what they focused on. By the time of his talk to an audience of heirs to the European Enlightenment in Cambridge later the same year, Maharishi had begun to temper his public presentation:
“We belong to the realistic age of science. Let us be sure that all we strive for and achieve remains realistic. Our age of scientific unfoldment does not give credence to anything shrouded in the garb of mysticism. Let us realise the Absolute Being through a scientific and systematic method of achievement whose every achievement will be supplemented by the personal experience.”
In the modern world, then, the nervous system of a meditator was to serve as his own personal laboratory in which to conduct experiments in the expansion of consciousness. That Maharishi was tapping into a widespread need was evident the following Spring when 5,000 members of the public came to hear him speak at the Albert Hall in what was called ‘The First World Assembly of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement’. Here, again, the white-robed monk, introduced as ‘coming from the Valley of the Saints, Himalayas’ skilfully walked the tightrope between sacred and secular. Working hard to accumulate evidence of the quantifiable benefits of interiority, he invited 4,000 doctors to come and hear him at a medical presentation in London. Four turned up. Undaunted, during the following decade he continued to push to gather scientific interest and get investigative studies done wherever he could. These would not prove anything about meditation of course, nor even explain how it worked, but they could certainly catalogue bodily correlates of the mental practice. In this way, sensible physical data could perhaps be used to indicate that something interesting lay beyond them. There is a saying in India that an elephant needs two sets of teeth: one to display and one to chew with. In 1967, Maharishi explained his use of this strategy to a teacher training course held in his Rishikesh ashram:
“Transcendental Meditation is a very natural and systematic, scientific procedure for the Holy Spirit to dawn on man. When we say Holy Spirit to dawn on man, in the ordinary sense it seems to be an absolutely emotional thing. Nothing to do with any scientific value. But when we say Transcendental Meditation opens the awareness to the transcendental, unbounded area of life, it sounds scientific… it is just a matter of expression, the phenomenon is the same… we formulate our expression in the current language. The content is the same. Nothing is new. That proverb, ‘Nothing is new under the sun’.The reality is the same, the Holy Spirit is the same…”
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Scientific Studies
At the beginning of the 1970s, the policy paid off when the first results on Transcendental Meditation were published, with articles in The Lancet and Scientific American showing that a twenty-minute sitting practising the technique resulted in a marked drop in breath rate along with some reduction in the rate of metabolism. The results of such deep rest were both pleasurable and beneficial for the practitioner and led to a profound sense of well-being and consequent relief of stress. Many more peer-reviewed scientific studies were to follow, showing subtle but profound changes in brain function and a wide range of benign effects in all areas of life.
In the forty-five years since, experiments have continued at an impressive rate. Over 600 papers have been published on the physical, psychological and social effects of this particular type of meditation; a rate of more than one a month. In 2012, one of these showed that regular practice reduced by 48% the risk of heart attack, stroke and death in people with heart disease; Californian research published in the autumn of 2014 showed that AIDS sufferers who meditated were also getting sick less frequently, were less fatigued and more energised, as well as being less stressed, anxious and depressed. Transcendental Meditation, along with the Buddhist vipassana method, remains the most tested of all the meditation techniques and the results generally appear solid and impressive.
Given the wealth of available data now accumulated, one might wonder why Transcendental Meditation has not been more widely adopted by those charged with looking after our medical and psychological welfare; a report issued by the NHS in September 2017, stated that one in every three sick notes issued by doctors cites stress and anxiety. For some in the medico-scientific establishment, however, much of the research on all types of meditation, despite its volume, has remained problematic, even pseudo-scientific. Good science is hard to do; it requires, apart from anything else, asking a clear question of nature and then setting experiments up in such a way as to get a clear answer. The researcher who already has the answer in mind and unconsciously projects their beliefs into the experiment may ignore or side-line data that does not fit their deduction. At their worst, such investigations become what the American physicist Richard Feynman has called ‘cargo cult science’, i.e. research which has the outward appearance of genuine science but lacks the necessary substance, rigour and critical spirit. From a scientific point of view, which is what government agencies must work on, anecdotal evidence, however abundant, will not suffice. And so, studies on meditation continue to accumulate, and the discussion goes on
Alistair Shearer is a writer and cultural historian specialising in India.