Turbulence Persists At KS Peace Capital
File under: The Siddhi of PR
The good Christian folks of Smith Center, Kansas are still put off by the idea of being at ground-zero of the new peace era, in the new peace capital of the new peace world, where waves of "coherence" will bring peace to all mankind. This quaint yet completely unrealistic scenario is all the result of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's grandiose vision of ushering in the Golden Age, in direct competition with Kalki Bhagavan, Adi Da, Sai Baba and probably a 100,000 other wackjobs on this planet, although the old Madharishi seems to be pulling way out in front at this point.
The mayor of Smith Center is cool with it – smelling boom times just around the corner:
Boyum held out the possibility of an economic boost for the town: "Our intention is to funnel as much finances and work through the local community as we can. We all are consumers and will bring resources into the county."What red-blooded American can argue with that? It's benevolent capitialism!
And TM™ has just been shown to cure heart disease!
The study found that patients who used TM™ had “improved blood pressure and insulin resistance components of the metabolic syndrome as well as cardiac autonomic nervous system tone compared with a control group receiving health education. These results suggest that TM™ may modulate the physiological response to stress and improve CHD risk factors, which may be a novel therapeutic target for the treatment of CHD.”What they don't want you to know is that any concentrative meditation practice would do the same exact thing. For this study, TM™ was put up against a "series of health lectures." What you won't ever see is TM™ put up against Vipassana, Zen practice or anything that could be called a relaxation technique. That's a race in which they know they can do no better than a tie.
posted by guruphiliac @ 11:57 PM
2 Comments:
Couple of points:
1) there was only 1 TM researcher involved in the study along with several non-TM researchers.
2) there HAVE been other studies on blood pressure and other health-related measures where other relaxation/meditation techniques have been compared with TM, where the researchers were proponents of several different kinds of meditation techniques.
3) the referenced study was just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the sister publications of JAMA. If you think that JAMA is going to publish a TM study without a LOT of scruitiny concerning its design and who did it, you're stupid. Period.
It still stands that there are many meditation techniques that would be at least as effective as TM™, and it's quite possible that there are more effective means than TM™ for stress reduction.
TM™ is nothing more than a horrendously overpriced yet exceedingly simple mantra technique. I've said it before: the Madharishi is selling salt water by the ocean. Good thing for him there's a sucker born every minute, eh?
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