Transcending Stress with Solitude

 Imagine your mind as a vast ocean. The surface is filled with roaring currents, crashing waves, and the occasional sailor. This is our everyday mind, the mind that drives us through the working hours filled with physiological stress and anxiety. This mind makes decisions for us at every turn, because it is always on the forefront of our consciousness. Now imagine sinking, sinking beneath the waves and the current, free of weight, free of thought, and free of self. The deeper you go, the more you can explore the depths of your own, unique mind. The answer on how to escape the surface waters into the calming depths of your consciousness; meditation. The particular meditation we will be discussing in this paper is known as Transcendental Meditation. TM is a mantra-based meditation, practiced for 20 minutes, two times a day. In the early 1960s, Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, taught by Guru Dev, brought his Transcendental Meditation practice to the US. Until the 2000s, Yogi taught TM to thousands of people across the world, and it is estimated that 5 million people have studied his methods (rueters.com). Another important figure to mention is David Lynch, creator of the TV show Twin Peaks, and director of Dune (1984). Through the David Lynch Foundation for Conciousness-Based Education and World Peace, celebrities have joined the movement to deliver the practice of TM across the world to those that are willing to listen. Over the years, many actors, comedians, and musicians of the like have garnered appreciation for TM, often citing it as a factor for their success. It is studied that TM helps to alleviate stress, anxiety, and PTSD, while also attributing to alleviating medical factors such as high blood pressure. This essay will discuss the ideas of “pure-consciousness”, the notion of TM in schools, the effects TM has on PTSD, the allure of celebrities, additional mediation practices such as mindfulness, and humanity’s focus on mental health.

 Meditation is often observed for the clinical benefits of its practice. However, it is equally important to understand the conceptual effects that meditation has on our mind. Transcendental Meditation allows us to transcend the cognitive plane, and this is known as pure consciousness. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi described pure consciousness as this, “The state of Being is one of pure consciousness, completely out of the field of relativity; there is no world of the senses or of objects, no trace of sensory activity, no trace of mental activity. There is no trinity of thinker, thinking process and thought, doer, process of doing and action; experiencer, process of experiencing and object of experience. The state of transcendental Unity of life, or pure consciousness, is completely free from all trace of duality” (Travis). In our wake, our mind is cognitively thinking, and we are aware of ourselves and our sensory environment. In sleep, we have no thoughts, and no self awareness. While dreaming, our thoughts run rampant, yet our self awareness is not present. When we have no thoughts, yet self-awareness, this is pure consciousness. This is the state of being that TM guides to experience. The experience of oneness, being, and focus.

 The current wave of Transcendental Meditation has focused on the potential of TM in the school setting. Although deemed “religious by nature”, TM certainly has a positive effect on the attention span of our new aged students. With the influx of information and mis-information easily accessible from our smartphones, the students of the technological generation have much less of an attention span than students from 20 years ago. Smartphone users swipe, click, exit, and share at a rate that is not necessarily beneficial to learning, but more so to sharing ideals. This is an important distinction because the environment around us shapes our ideals and what we believe in, and what the technological age has done is present cause after cause that is open for people to join the bandwagon. These ideas arrange our thoughts in a way that makes our mind jumbled, unable to focus on a particular topic, and unable to fully believe in a cause. In order to truly believe in something, we must understand it as well.  To combat this face-value belief, Transcendental Meditation is used to streamline the thoughts in our brain, so that the desired, more understood thoughts of the individual come into the foreground. This translates to the classroom because students have more focus and attention on what they find important, which is advancing in education. This is supported by a small survey by teachers in Maharishi Vidya Mandir Schools of Assam, India, where children were surveyed who meditated and did not meditate. It was revealed those who did meditate were more responsive, attentive, and receptive than their counterparts. Although this is a small sample size, this supports the potential benefits meditation can have in the classroom. No matter the age, teachers have a difficult time garnering their student’s focus. On some occasions it’s because the student doesn’t care, because they’re distracted, or simply both. Whatever the case may be, meditation as a whole has the potential to benefit the focus of the students in the classroom. This will lead to less stress and anxiety, among other psychological factors, which will be discussed further in the following paragraph.

 Mental health is something to be taken seriously, and all research should be considered when attempting to understand what it means to have a challenging mental health problem and how to support those who do. This paragraph will focus on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, prominently in veterans. Amongst the battlefield are treacheries to the human psyche that are not meant to be experienced. It is estimated that 30% of Vietnam War veterans have had PTSD in their lifetime. This goes to show the demand for assistance that veterans should be available to. A study by Robert E. Herron and Brian Rees used baseline PTSD testing of veterans and compared it to those who half-participated in TM and those who fully practiced TM two times a day. The results were substantial in that the PTSD test results declined, more significantly in the veterans that fully practiced. This study supports that TM has a positive effect on mental health, and can be routinely utilized to improve the well-being of veterans that return with PTSD. This is an important notion because meditation is used to improve the overall well-being of our mental state. There is no mal-intent, which is difficult to avoid as for most good there is something devious hidden behind the curtains. Meditation is for the good of the people and for the use of everyone, even those we consider being more well-off than the ordinary man.

 TM became a global movement with assistance from the allure of celebrities. Perhaps the largest proponent of the TM movement occurred when John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr of the Beatles took a trip to India to practice TM with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The plan was to spend a few months with the Maharishi in the foothills of the Himalayas. According to Rolling Stone, “They meditated for much of the day, and listened to Maharishi lecture about reincarnation and consciousness”. This spiritual expedition had been well journalized and documented, thus carrying over the energy of the counterculture 60s well into the 70s. Other well known celebrities attribute TM to their success and fortune; this list includes Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres, Russel Brand, and Clint Eastwood. At the David Lynch Foundation seminar in 2013, Jerry Seinfeld spoke on TM for a brief 10 minutes. He outlined that he’d been practicing TM for 41 years, although admitting he’d been doing it incorrectly for 30 of them by only practicing TM once a day. On the set of his cultural hit sit-com series Seinfeld, while everyone was on lunch, he would practice TM. This, Jerry Seinfeld says, is what got him through writing, acting, and producing the 9 season, 20 episode per on network television. This mere 20 minutes of lunch gave Seinfeld the boost every single day that a human needs. After all, it is difficult just being a human. It is difficult to live everyday, even though we are blessed with the privilege of life. Our culture works so diligently in order to make our life easier. This is the pursuit of happiness, and if TM is on this path, then don’t be afraid to stop and observe it for a while.

 Transcendental Meditation is not the singular correct way to meditate and practice mindfulness. Meditation can be anything from listening to music swallowed in the abyss of your headphones, going on lengthy walks at dawn, or sitting up on a high perch and observing the scenery before you. What these modes have in common is the appreciation for the existence that is in your perceptual frame. When listening to music, you focus your hearing sensory abilities in order to lock yourself in a room of wave-induced creativity. When on a walk, your brain is quiet, yet aware of your surroundings. When looking out upon the scenery in front of you, you appreciate and realize that you exist the same as the mountains, hills and ocean, seemingly lost in a web in which you don’t control. This state of belonging to one cosmic state is considered mindfulness. The wind that runs across your cheek, the sand that cakes itself between your toes, and the waft of smoked wood under the fire. This is mindfulness. Upon closing your eyes and letting your thoughts roll on through and out your mind, anyone can experience this. Here’s how; first, find a comfortable place to sit, and close your eyes. Focus on your breathing, observe the air entering then subsequently exiting the lungs. Next is to imagine yourself where you are sitting, as if a big brother camera was positioned in your room. Notice the sounds, the warmth, the cold, everything you are feeling on and around your body. Keep zooming out from this perspective and see just how far you can observe, all within the confines of your own head. This is mindfulness, and it helps focus and relieve stress that we all attempt to alleviate.

 Although meditation can be attested to many of its benefits, there are people that believe meditation just, “isn’t for them”. It’s difficult to understand what this actually means because it is impossible to switch minds with another and see what they’re thinking and/or experiencing whilst meditating. What could be offered is three words, “just try it”. Try to sit down for 20 minutes in a room with minimal distractions, and focus on one thing. Whether that is your breathing or a familiar mantra, this point of focus will funnel your perception and rework your traffic-jammed highway of thought. If you see no results, it’s because you haven’t had any, yet. Accepting your fate of being unable to meditate is a sign of a comfortable, stable mind. Said person does not have the inclination to look beyond the layers of consciousness and explore the infinity that is within each and everyone of us. The very notion of meditation is for the good of humanity, for the world, for the universe in its entirety. No one is being harmed in your 20 minutes of solitude, and this should not be taken for granted. Even if you strive not to harm anyone at all times, which is immensely commendable, this notion still applies to you. The most important person not being harmed in these 20 minutes is yourself.

 The mind is the most complex thing in the entire universe. It senses, learns, plans, and it loves. The mind also contains hatred, greed, pride, prejudice, and power. Such emotions are eternally riveting for the pale blue dot in the Milky Way Galaxy to hold. On this rock amidst the chaos of warring egos it is difficult to find peace and solitude. This calmness and solidarity in the depths of one’s own mind is what meditation offers. Meditation offers a filter to be removed that perceives the world as grimey and fear-mongered. Through meditation we can observe the oneness we share with nature and the people we come across, whether it’s a loved one or someone we pass by on the street. Throughout this essay we learned about transcending the material plane into a state called “pure-consciousness”. This ethereal state is described as absence of thought, yet present self-awareness. It is different from dream-state and waking hours, where our thoughts are running like a conveyor belt throughout the day. We learned about the potential benefits Transcendental Meditation has in the classroom. In a world where distractions lay only as far as a jean pocket, the focus needed to maintain a classroom can be accessed through meditation. Another beneficiary of meditation is veterans with PTSD. The abhorrent sights and stressful atmosphere of war and the military is often a simple equation; trauma plus the sensitive mind equals post traumatic stress. Those with PTSD, not only veterans, have the potential to experience the long-term benefits that meditation offers. The allure that celebrities have on the meditation movement was also discussed. Most notably, while the lingering effects of counterculture were prevalent, The Beatles traveled to India to stay with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For 2 months, the group stayed on the Maharishi’s grounds in India and meditated, while also listening to Yogi speak about reincarnation and the cosmic consciousness. The trip was documented by photographers and immediately westernized the Transcendental Meditation movement in the West. We discussed mindfulness meditation, where one becomes aware of the natural environment around them by focusing their senses. It is an intrinsic way to view your reality from the outside-in. When we judge the reality before us, it is because our ego has speckled our perception. When practicing mindfulness meditation, we see the world before us as it really is. Last, a rebuttal was offered to those who believe they don’t fit in with the idea of meditation. This is where the importance of an open mind comes in, for placing yourself in a mold of you won’t do something just because that’s not who you are is quite incarcerating. For a human race that will go to the ends of this earth to protect our freedom, one must be able to be free from the self, also known as the ego. As idealistic and 1960s counterculture this sounds, there is a simple way to remove hate from the world, and that is to love. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi often said, “Life is bliss. Man is born to enjoy. Within everyone is an unlimited reservoir of energy, intelligence, and happiness”. We often question why life must be so complex, but in truth, it’s quite simple. The point of life is to live. The definition of life entails that we die someday. Therefore, we must enjoy life as much as we can. We must experience as much as we can, including hardships. The power to create a reality for our own is inside of us. This is no metaphoric, god-like power. There is no form of synapse in our brain that combines with the all-knowing consciousness of divinity. It’s meditation. What meditation brings is awareness, clarity, and focus. By focusing on the truth in the reality before us, the truth being our sensory awareness, we discover how simple life is. Most of all, we focus on what is important, and what that means to the individual is entirely subjective.

Works Cited

Bayes-Fleming, Nicole, et al. “Getting Started with Mindfulness.” Mindful, 10 Mar. 2021, https://www.mindful.org/meditation/mindfulness-getting-started/.

Goswame, Gayatree, and Amlan Kumar Dey. “Effect of transcendental meditation on classroom management in Maharishi organisation with special reference to Maharishi Vidya Mandir Schools.” The Clarion, 1 February 2017, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 60-63, https://web-p-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.saddleback.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=4489fa2a-1093-4865-93d6-d89b32187c87%40redis.

Herron, E. Robert, and Brian Rees. “The Transcendental Meditation Program’s Impact on the Symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder of Veterans: An Uncontrolled Pilot Study.” Military Medicine, 1 January 2018, Vol. 183, pp 144-150, https://web-a-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.saddleback.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=6&sid=dd305672-df4f-4ea8-a5c2-3249d8b3b38c%40sdc-v-sessmgr01

Hoffman, Claire. “How the Beatles in India Changed America.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 25 June 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-the-beatles-in-india-changed-america-201531/.

Laughlin, Corinna. “Transcendental meditation’s tipping point: the allure of celebrity on the American spiritual marketplace”. Popular Communication, 1 April 2020, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 108-120, https://web-a-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.saddleback.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=17&sid=4363027a-7fec-4f82-8976-a71f055f2bf3%40sdc-v-sessmgr01. Accessed 24 November 2021.

Travis, Frederick. “Transcendental experiences during meditation practice”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1 January 2014, pp. 1-8, https://web-a-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.saddleback.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=7&sid=56edf7ff-d193-4502-9a90-b050a434dc01%40sessionmgr4008. Accessed 24 November 2021.
“Va.gov: Veterans Affairs.” How Common Is PTSD in Veterans?, 24 July 2018, https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/common/common_veterans.asp.