Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [58]
The absolute dependence on the superior wisdom and "reasons" of the Maharishi, as expressed by Rabinoff, is chillingly similar to the rationalizations of other cult devotees. It is a phenomenon to think about seriously and long.
MIU president Dr. R. K. Wallace says that we must look at the "overall effect," not just any one claim made for TM, and that if we examine the somewhat cloudy aspect of an individual's personal improvement, we will see the value of TM. Okay, Dr. Wallace, but if you ask us to adopt this system of evaluation, you must agree to abandon your insistence on scientific proof for various aspects of TM, for these do not stand inspection. No have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too position is allowed.
Mike West of Cardiff University has seen through the fog to the central point. "I think I find it difficult to acquaint the superstructure of meditation and the organization that teaches meditation with the concept of meditation itself, which is a very simple, innocent concept... I don't think that meditation needs to be sold, and I don't think a huge organization is necessary to sell it." I'll go a step further, as an individual lay observer. When I was a kid my mom used to tell me that the best way to get in tune with the world was to go into a quiet room and put my feet up for a few minutes. No mystic words, no looking into my belly button, just relaxing awhile and taking it easy. It worked then, and it works now.
The point I make—and Hyman forced this very issue when he confronted Rabinoff—is this: The TMers flood us with very complicated and tedious documents involving EEG records, hormone changes, perceptual alterations, and so on that allegedly show what is experienced by those who are said to be "undergoing the TM sidhi experience," but they offer not one shred of evidence that the guy ever gets up into the air, that a photon of light passes through his body during the invisibility trick, that he knows a single fact of any kind that wasn't previously available to him without the "all-knowing" stunt, or that he can walk through anything more substantial than a paper bag when he is doing the "walking-through-walls" idiocy. If these things are being done, show us! Just once. Wherever you want. Any time you want. But show us, and stop beating about with fancy evasions. Perhaps yogi Ram Daas, another strange promulgator of transcendental wonders, has the perfect cop-out that the Maharishi should adopt. In writing of miracles like astral projection, levitation, and mind reading, he answers questions with, "That's illusion, too. Forget about it. Don't think about it. Don't use it. Don't do it. Don't worry about it." Brilliant. Obviously a great thinker.
Concludes Dr. Ray Hyman, in his report, "It is all too easy to view Dr. Rabinoff as some self-deluded misfit. But, I suspect, he typifies most of us in the way we cope with the stresses of life and the search for the Answer to Big Questions about the Meaning of It All. Once an individual, especially a fairly bright one, latches onto a belief system that offers comfort and universal answers, then nature has provided him with innumerable mechanisms to avoid facing up to discomforting challenges to that belief. Rabinoff's ways of avoiding facing up to both the inconsistencies and the immoral features of the miracle aspects of the sidhis program are just more obvious than most."
For more than a year I have tried to elicit a simple answer from David Jacobs, spokesman for the International Center for Scientific Research at MIU. I have been sent endless reams of scientific papers that go on and on about supposed reactions to the wondrous feelings that subjects express. The papers are filled with hundreds of measurements and observations. They tell of fantastic instrumentation and complex metering of almost every function of the bodies of subjects who "feel" they are experiencing the levitation sidhi, but they all