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TranceNet: Checking & Initiation

Personal Checking Notes

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Three Days Checking Notes
Overview & Comments on the Notes

First Time Published Anywhere! Three Days Checking Notes are the outline for the follow-up course to TM instruction. They were dictated on Teacher Training Course, Phase III (TTCIII) to prospective initiators. Future initiators essentially memorized the "notes."

This text was contributed by an anonymous donor who became a TM teacher in the 70s. They may differ somewhat from earlier and later TTCIII courses.

Some general points:

• The constant use of forms is unique to the TM movement. Among eastern spiritual groups, a personal relationship with one's teacher is the norm. Critics speculate they serve control functions.
• Questions are so general the meditator must say "yes" to at least one or two, giving the TM initiator a chance to offer praise.
• Suggestions abound that TM is easier and superior to other meditations. Most initiates find TM pleasant -- the first great proof that TM "works" and, by false extension, others do not.

• The group and individual checking procedures as well as steps of initiation eerily echo Western hypnotists' classic "Flowers method."

• The structure of Three Nights is deliberate. As soon as possible the initiator begins group trance induction. Then he or she launches into TM indoctrination.
• Most often, the various circles and check marks initiators made on forms were only meant to impress and had no meaning.
• The discussion of experiences is simply a check list to catch the new meditator in a mistake. "Aha," says the teacher, "TM works only if you do it right."

• Another technique is reframing everyday experience as significant and unique to TM.
• Many notice the frequent use of nonfalsifiable tautology. Whether an experience is good or bad, it is "proof" TM works.
• The Maharishi appears to mislead new TMers about sleep. Many long-term meditators report feeling chronic tiredness.
• Dismissing intellectual insight and emotional experience is an important theme of the Three Days Checking Notes.
• The Maharishi insists there are no TM side effects. Yet Western research finds many people experience side effects from any form of relaxation -- from Relaxation Induced Anxiety Syndrome.
• Pseudo-scientific explanations abound in the TM movement.

• The initiator's demand not to discuss the mantra or experiences is TMers' first brush with "information control." The demands for secrecy grow over the years.

• Lists of rules presage the control the TM movement will later attempt to exert.

• Lifton's principle, "doctrine over person" pervades TM theory.

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Children's Initiation

Details on how TM teachers initiated children as young as 3 years old into the "walking word of wisdom" -- literally verbal japa of Hindu diety names.

Some court records from Kropinski talk about signs of autistic behavior among some MIU children. Also the "German Study" found that ""....Some children who began the practice of T.M. at an early age, were diagnosed as having developed autistic behavior."

To our knowledge this material has never before been published anywhere.

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