Tempest over TM

Last Oct. 12,25 high school students waited in the Union, N.J., office of the Transcendental Meditation movement. One by one they entered a room and reverently knelt before a candlelit altar holding a picture of the late Guru Dev, Hindu holy man and predecessor of TM Leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Each student brought fruit and flowers to be placed on the altar by Teacher Janet Aaron, who then recited a Sanskrit puja (hymn of worship)* and whispered each student's mantra, the secret word that must be repeated to aid meditation.

Those undergoing this standard TM initiation ceremony were enrolled in a course that TM employee Aaron taught for credit at Columbia High in Maplewood, N.J. Last week the Maplewood course and those in four other New Jersey public schools were under sharp attack. A nationwide Coalition for Religious Integrity announced plans to file a federal lawsuit to stop the classes, offered by the schools under a $40,000 grant in HEW funds made through the New Jersey Department of Education. The coalition argues that TM is a form of Hinduism and that the program therefore violates the First Amendment requirement of church-state separation.

The new anti-TM alliance represents various interests: Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonsectarian watchdog on First Amendment issues; the Berkeley (Calif.) Christian Coalition, a group that grew out of the Jesus Movement and does research to combat TM, Scientology and other new cults; and a number of Protestant and Catholic taxpayers in New Jersey.

The coalition buttressed its claims by releasing a heavily documented booklet by John E. Patton, a Roman Catholic attorney who lives in Maplewood. As Patton paints it, TM was going nowhere till the Maharishi in 1967-68 decided to "camouflage" it as a secular "science" in order to qualify for taxpayer funds and reach a wider following. Since then TM has become the McDonald's of meditation, attracting hundreds of thousands of initiates.

Patton says that TM literature replaces God with the phrase "Creative Intelligence," which he claims is a synonym for Hinduism's pantheistic deity. Brooks Alexander, a former TM meditator turned evangelist with the Berkeley group, explains that TM novices are not indoctrinated outright in Hinduism, as they might be in Judaism or Christianity. Rather, they are gradually conditioned to accept a Hindu world view, after which many move into a deeper involvement through meditation. Meanwhile, two prominent Protestants in Iowa, where the movement's Maharishi International University is located, have argued in the liberal Christian Century that TM is too religious to be taught in public schools.

TMers insist that all this is much ado about nearly nothing. Robert Kory, who runs the New Jersey project for TM, explains that the mantras are just "meaningless" sounds, that the puja simply reminds the teacher of the highest ideals of his profession, and that the deities it invokes are only "the forces of nature." In Fairfield, Iowa, Seymour Migdal, dean of the faculty at the Maharishi University, is confident that TM will survive court scrutiny. Says he: "It doesn't require faith, and it doesn't require worship."

* Excerpt: "Guru in the glory of the personified transcendental fulness of Brahman, to him, to Shri Guru Dev, adorned with glory, I bow down."

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