Is Transcendental Meditation a Scam?Jerry Seinfeld and David Lynch versus Andy Kaufman and Steve Jobs
It’s easier to judge a group by the people they’ve kicked out. For example, nearly everything we know about Scientology is based on secrets leaked by dissatisfied members. How do we apply that to Transcendental Meditation?
Andy Kaufman and Steve Jobs were both kicked out of TM for being too disruptive. That’s an easy enough thing to believe. There is a well-documented history of both of these famous individuals of being difficult pills of personalities to swallow. We’d expect them to be kicked out of practically any institution, be it a boy scout troop or a 9–5 job.
Where it counts as a strike against TM is the fact that people come to TM specifically for peace of mind. Quieting angry, difficult minds is exactly what they’re supposed to do! In fact, for many celebrities, such as Jerry Seinfeld and David Lynch, they did just that. These are happy customers. David Lynch in particular is more than just a happy customer. He’s a loud and outspoken advocate for TM, pushing for their expensive services to be subsidized by public funds, etc…
What we see in Kaufman and Jobs that TM can’t deal with is rebellion — the constant trial and questioning nature that leads to convention-breaking creativity, rather than the quiet, monotonous repetition of themes. (David Lynch has essentially been making the same movie of Blue Velvet over and over again, and Seinfeld’s brand of observational comedy is almost Foxworthian in its formula. One wonders if Jeff Foxworthy is also a TM practitioner — to do the same joke over and over would certainly require a meditative patience)
For the David Lynches and Jerry Seinfelds of the world, TM is not a scam — it does exactly what they need. But for the Andy Kaufman and Steve Jobs of the world, it is a heart-breaking promise of peace when what they got was suffocation and a cult-of-conformity. Kaufman indulged in other Eastern traditions and Jobs ultimately found solace in Zen Buddhism. Both succumbed to cancer. In Jobs’ case, a faith in Western medicine would have certainly served him better.
There’s now a trend among business types to embrace meditation and other Eastern practices as a way to maximize their productivity, and why not? To have the peace of mind to optimize well-worn patterns of meaningless labor is as valuable to the Silicon Valley plutocrat as it is to the low-born laborer in an untouchable caste. Both seek to find ways to cope with the economics of suffering as they are, rather than to find ways to upend and transform the system. To the Kaufmans and Jobs of the world, however, TM is the worst kind of scam, because it helps facilitate the very thing that they rebel against.
