Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - founder of Transcendental Meditation. (in the ‘60’s he became known as the spiritual guru to the Beatles, whom as I understand it parted ways in conflict)
One day while channel surfing we came upon this visage. ‘You know who that is?’ asked our four-year-old son. ‘God.’ The worldwide T.M organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee they promise through meditation to be able to walk you through walls, to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. By thinking in unison they have, they say, diminished the crime rate in Washington, D.C., and caused the collapse of the Soveit Union, among other secular miracles. Not one smattering of real evidence has been offered for any such claims. T.M sells folk medicine, runs trading companies, medical clinics, and ‘research’ universities, and has unsuccessfully entered politics. In its oddly charismatic leader, its promise of community, and the offer of magical powers in exchange for money and fervent belief, it is typical of many pseudosciences marketed for sacerdotal export. - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, Science as A Candle in the Dark
I find this kind of stuff so interesting. I won’t deny some of the powers of meditation because I have experienced great improvements in my own life from it but… this? Is Sagan too harsh? I don’t know but as a fellow scientist, I find things like this hard to grasp. Is that my limitation though? Because I am a scientist? But then again, Sagan also poses in this book the question of, “How can you tell when someone is only imagining?” I’m not posting this as an “attack” on Mahesh, just happened to be the example I grabbed from the book.
