Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Meditation (TM) refers to a meditation technique with a specific form of mantra and to the organizations within the Transcendental Meditation movement. The movement claims to have around 40,000 teachers of its technique that has reached over five million people throughout the world (cf. TM official Homepages 2015). However, the number of its formal members remains uncertain.

The movement started in 1955 with Mahesh Prasad Varma who adopted the name of Maharishi. At the end of 1957, he founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in Madras. In the 1960s, celebrities such as the Beatles boosted the movement’s popularity. That popularity helped to incorporate the technique in some schools, universities, corporations, and prison programs in the USA and several other countries, especially during the decade of the 1970s. The movement carries some aspects of the new religious movements rooted historically and culturally in Hinduism and has the bases of its theoretical...