Roots of TM: The Transcendental Meditation of Guru Dev & Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Great book on early TM history. It is interesting and a good fast read

As a former TM teacher and follower of Maharishi this book sort of tied a lot of hazy ideas I had and filled in some blanks..Great for other teachers of TM and for just about any serious seeker

This tome by Paul Mason is truly a remarkable book of great depth and tremendous compassion.It is like taking a retreat in the 1960’s directly with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as your guide. The book definitely shows the very roots of TM and the significance and power of the TM technique itself.Indeed in the very first few pages of the book you get a wonderful overview, in Maharishi’s own words, on the TM methodology itself. For someone like me who was initiated into my sitting mantra by my fantastic and late Aunt Initiator Effie Neville in 1976 it was like taking a shower in a cool stream. It reawakened in me the whole approach of effortlessness and naturalism that is at the very root of TM. Immediately upon absorbing the words that Paul relayed I found my meditation progressing at a much deeper level than before. These first few pages would be worth ten times the price of the book alone they were that valuable!As if this wasn’t enough the book touches on the greatness, majesty and compassion of the late Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath Swami Brahmanand (better known as “Guru Dev”). The book shows just what type of devoted devotee Maharishi was to Guru Dev and that his love of Guru Dev motivated his entire effort at spreading the “TM technique”. Mr. Mason shows that Maharishi’s whole being and life was devoted to distilling the truth as espoused by Guru Dev and not just his “own” cobbled together theories.In this way the author subtly address Maharishi’s various detractors with aplomb. Those who frequently claim that “Maharishi just made up the TM technique as some kind of pop meditation technique which is designed to lure the uniformed and to enrich his own personal fortune.“ That by showing the deep spiritual connection that Maharishi had with Guru Dev and that he could have hardly started such activities without other authorized devotees of Guru Dev knowing precisely what Maharishi was teaching.Through Mr. Mason’s exposition we gain an appreciation of the deep power of Guru Dev in a way that finds him very approachable but still awe inspiring. In this way Mr. Mason, without interjecting his own interpretations, skillfully distills from the very words of Guru Dev and Maharishi their deep and unbounded love for all of humanity.I was and am so moved by this book and cannot recommend it highly enough for any devotee of Maharishi, TM or even a practitioner of Buddhist Mindfulness, for there is something for all in this book that is sure to enrich your life and spiritual practice.

Transcendental Meditation is a relatively new (50 years or so) take on an ancient practice for seekers throughout the world. I began meditating in 1972 at a Buddhist Temple in Bangkok, Thailand. The following year, back in the States (Bennington, Vermont to be precise) I learned TM. Though I have continued meditating since then, I never understood “the roots”, traditions, history and legacy of not just the practice itself, but of the individuals behind the movement. I have spent a lifetime looking for a book like this which explains the history and roots of TM and how it became a technique easily known by, and accessible to everyone. There will be a time when this book will be required reading in every graduate level class in comparative religion, sociology, music and art history, advertising, propaganda and world politics. Author Paul Mason has made a career of painstakingly researching every aspect of the development of TM, the biographies of the leaders of the movement, and the arcane and sometimes strange aspects of how TM came to be “TM” and not an obscure yoga technique in the foothills of the Himalayas available to a few pilgrims. Mason (not a TM evangelist by any means) is an irreverent, nevertheless respectful author, who lets the reader make their own decision about the development of this movement (which dovetailed historically with the human potential movement and the British Rock Invasion in America).

I know that some readers take exception with the author for taking so much material from other books. But I salute the author for doing the time consuming research to produce a very comprehensive collection of writings on Guru Dev and the origins of TM. here are a number of profound spiritual secrets in this book, that are not available in any other book on the same subject. I am grateful to have found it.

Paul Mason has once again given us a wonderfully objective account of yet another aspect of Mahesh and this time the emergence of TM. It would appear from Paul’s objective study of this fascinating subject that Mahesh was a sincere devotee of his teacher, but bringing the East to the West proved far more formidable than Mahesh may have anticipated!In India of the 40s and 50s, as perhaps is still the case today, there was no such concept as a difference, let alone separation, of church and state — one of the West’s pillars of the social norm. It seems doubtful that in the early days of Mahesh’s self-imposed “mission” he could tell the difference between religious and secular teaching.This is my estimation of what happened given the very clear facts Paul presents — Mahesh was at pains to transform his (to us) religious understanding into what must have seemed to him and possibly his Hindu counterparts like a profane, even sacrilegious watering down of the precious teachings of the tradition to which he had committed himself so many years earlier.Hence, we might easily suspect TM of being a religion, a religious teaching in our Western way of thinking. That Mahesh endeavored to mask or translate this into the language of Western materialism does not, I think, succeed in disguising his objective of bringing the spirituality of his teacher to the West.Only time can determine the nature of Mahesh's success or failure as the West and East continue to change in both separate and convergent ways.

Great book for those who want to know how it all began. And to learn a bit more on Guru Dev.