History & overview · every faith gets one
Twenty minutes, twice a day, with a sound that is only yours.
The technique Maharishi Mahesh Yogi began teaching in 1955 and carried out of India at the end of the decade: a mantra given privately by a trained teacher, used silently for twenty minutes twice a day, sitting with the eyes closed and doing nothing about the thoughts that come. The organisation presents it as a technique rather than a religion and has funded several hundred studies of it. A United States appeals court held in 1979 that the version taught in New Jersey public schools was religious for constitutional purposes.
Why it is filed this way
The organisation says Transcendental Meditation is a technique and not a religion, and teaches it in schools, prisons and companies on that basis. In Malnak v. Yogi the Third Circuit affirmed in 1979 that the Science of Creative Intelligence course, with its Sanskrit initiation ceremony, was religious for Establishment Clause purposes and could not be taught in New Jersey public schools. Both statements are on the record. The row carries it as a movement because it has a founder, a lineage claim, an initiation and an organisation — not because the court settled the question.
Maharishi died on 5 February 2008. The teaching organisation continues under national foundations and the technique is still taught by certified teachers.
The founding
Maharishi served Swami Brahmananda Saraswati — Guru Dev, Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math — until the latter's death in 1953, then spent two years in the hills at Uttarkashi. He began teaching publicly in 1955, announced the Spiritual Regeneration Movement at Madras at the end of 1957, and took it to the United States in 1959.
Its founding is bound to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — 1958 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A field of pure consciousness underneath the ordinary mind, reachable without believing anything.
The divine. The practice names no god and asks nothing of the meditator's beliefs. The initiation ceremony — the puja — is performed in Sanskrit by the teacher and honours the tradition's line of masters; the organisation calls it a formality of thanks, and the 1979 Malnak ruling treated it as religious. Both descriptions are of the same ceremony..
Death and after. Not taught. The organisation is silent on it and says so..