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| 3 1 What Are Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements? On a jumbo jet filled with meditators headed for Switzerland, I awakened to the sound of a stewardess’s voice. “I have been instructed to wake you twenty minutes before breakfast so you have time to concentrate,” she softly intoned over the PA system. Some of us chuckled quietly at her choice of words. Our guru, Maharishi, told us never to use the word “concentrate ” for “meditate.” But this was 1973, before the word “meditation” had seeped into the international vocabulary. It was a foreign concept to our Swiss stewardess who was only following instructions. Around me I heard people shifting in their seats as they attempted to take a meditation posture in these cramped quarters. Then, slowly, a tangible stillness began to fill the plane as all of its passengers slipped into meditation. We were one of three such jets headed for the same ultimate destination— the tiny town of Vittel, France, where we would be spending the next three months learning to become teachers of Transcendental Meditation. We were the youngest of the three groups and would be housed in a separate hotel. However, when Maharishi arrived toward the end of the three months, we would all gather together in one place to listen to him speak and to meditate with him. I remember the feeling on that plane in 1973. We were part of something big, something that was going to change the world. We were going to teach thousands of people to meditate, and they would surely then become inspired to teach others, and soon the whole world would be practicing Transcendental Meditation. Transcendental Meditation, or TM, is one example of a Hindu-inspired meditation movement. Although Maharishi, TM’s founder, never referred to his system as “Hindu,” it certainly displays some easily recognizable Hindu elements. The people on this jet practiced meditation using a mantra (a sound that has special religious significance to Hindus), the breakfast they 4 | Background ate was vegetarian, and they all believed they were about to take a giant step forward in their own evolution toward “enlightenment,” or as Hindus would call it, moksha; that is, liberation from the cycle of rebirth on the earthly plane of existence. Many carried in their suitcases a copy of Maharishi’s commentary on the Bhavagad-Gita, a popular Hindu scripture. While all of these elements point to the Hindu religious tradition, we were not Hindus. There is a qualitative difference between people who have been raised in a tradition in which the rituals, the foods, the prayers, and the ethics are second nature, and people who have incorporated only parts of a tradition into their religious style. This is why I use the term “Hinduinspired ” rather than “Hindu” to describe Transcendental Meditation and similar movements. While the religion of Hindu-inspired meditation movements certainly wears some of the garb of Hinduism, Western traditions of individualism and rationalism also influence the style and ethos of these movements. HIMMs comprise a new cultural and religious phenomenon that arose in America around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and which burgeoned in the 1960s. They continue to be a strong cultural force to the present, and, while individual HIMMs come and go, the phenomenon shows no sign of abating. HIMMs are indeed global in scope, but their characteristics vary depending on the cultural context in which they occur. This book examines HIMMs in an American context, the worldview on which they have had a strong influence, and which became obvious to me when I heard my eighty-one-year-old mother-in-law exclaim her “good karma” upon finding a parking space directly in front of her Episcopal church. I was even more certain of their impact on American culture when, attending my mother’s Baptist church, the minister announced that it was “time for meditation ,” and asked us to close our eyes as a cello soloist set the tone for our inward journey. Of course, meditation has always been a part of some Christian denominations , with Roman Catholicism having a particularly strong contemplative tradition. In fact, some Catholics have created their own amalgamations of Hinduism and Christianity. Bede Griffiths (also known as Dayananda), a Benedictine monk, established a Hindu-Christian ashram in Tamil Nadu called Shantinavam and wrote books relating Hinduism to Christianity, such as Vedanta and the Christian Faith (1973). Since Griffiths’s death in 1993, other monks have continued to carry forward his...

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