I address this message to the following: TM practitioners and friends of same; those who want to avoid involvement in this cult and wish to protect friends and family; and most of all, to bystanders of common sense who may, unwittingly, help these evil thieves by sincerely but ignorantly failing to become informed and take a stand against this. "I don't do it but I admit it may be useful and I have nothing against it" is in some ways the worst possible stance to take, given that coming from a reasonable but uninformed person it could lead someone to do one of the worst possible things: become a trance abuser, and be infected by meditation-induced psychosis, a terrible disease that may have contributed to Brian's problems. Given the involvement of both the Beatles and Beach Boys with this cult, a reasonable and objective discussion of its merits is obviously relevant in any milieu devoted to either group, or great music in general.

However, don't take my word on this matter; I am not a professional psychologist, just a musical and critical genius;-). Go to http://www.trancenet.org (a Lycos best %5 of the web site) and read for yourself the opinions of objective psychologists and former mediatators, presented by a nonprofit organization (TM is a $3.5 billion dollar business). Read the accounts of reputable people, former authors of TM-related books, former teachers and movement superstars, and the judgement of the German Supreme Court... which must, almost by definition, contain intelligent and educated reasonable people by current cultural standards. You will get chills. The percentage of people who experience negative side effects ranges between the sixties and seventies depending on category. All such research is by reputable practitioners associated with non-cultist institutions, and the underlying data is always accessible to the public... in contrast to what TM cultist "research" "studies have shown."

On the face of it, the organization's entire premise is ludicrous. Were it possible for everyone to simply repeat a nonsense word in their head for some period of time each day in order to achieve personal enlightenment and banish crime, such a method would have become pervasive long ago due to the simple pressure of market forces. Contrast it with basic literacy, the ability to read and write. This clearly desirable skill long ago became part of every educational institution and system in the entire world, because the methods used to effect it produce the results indicated. If TM worked, it would have been incorporated into standard kindergarten curricula ages ago, for basic practical reasons. That it is a cult instead, which charges money and operates outside the norms of this society, is a dead nuts predictor of the fact that it cannot deliver the goods.

Why is it so bad, you may ask, and how do you know? It is bad, because repeating a word in a foreign language in your head and going into a trance state as a result is a practice that damages the mind, the way leaving the screen of your computer in a static white-noise loop would damage its ability to accurately render color/motion images. The rational portion of the brain is disengaged and put into a loop, while you are still awake, with results that are proven to cause several lasting psychological symptoms. Making this a lifelong task, not something that one does for a time and then graduates from, exacerbates the damage and defies logic. One does not, for example, study the alphabet in kindergarten, then throughout high school and grammar school and college. Any legitimate educational program allows you to master material on one level and then move on to something completely different.

This is not to speak against all relaxation techniques, or against all types of meditation. If, for example, I were to temporarily assign in some educational situation that a child or whoever meditate on the concept of "humility," assuming that the person is an English speaker of sufficient vocabulary to grasp this concept, we are now in a reasonable realm and dealing with a completely different kettle of fish. The entire mind is engaged, various branches of thought are opened up. One can, and I am making up random reasonable examples here, think about people one has met who were humble; consider if one is arrogant, and if so why and what to do about it; use humor and think what a person named Hugh Mility might look or be like; reflect on what humility might really be, if it has a purpose, if adopting a humble "pose" is simply a form of self-deception and arrogance, and so on.

And in any reasonable situation, this practice would stop and go into the beentheredonethat category, and the student or child or whomever would go on to other things: contemplating other ideas in their native language, with their entire understanding; or have no assignments at all (let's call that recess, study hall, free reading time or whatever); or work the "problem" from a completely different angle (analgous to moving into art class, or physical education or whatever).

Lastly, do not accept what I say about this, nor reject it. It deserves careful consideration with the entire mind, and should be confirmed or disproven wherever possible by reasonable, common sense information from objective and reliable sources. The current cultural standards that would apply to scientific research on any other subject, or to journalism, are more than adequate for this particular situation; there is no magic here, no free pass for the spirit realm. If it looks, smells, and feels like a dead herring, you can rest assured that it isn't a duck. And you should not eat it.

Thank you all for your time and attention. Class dismissed, you may all go to lunch;-) Remember that there is no free one.